Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it's anecdotal, but most realtors I have met actively dislike Trulia/Zillow/etc
I personally actively dislike Trulia/Zillow. More scams there than on Craigslist even.
What kind of scams?
Finding the perfect house using open data
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#52Finding unaffordable neighborhoods, more like.
ikr. Three problems about this article.
First, he better be rich if he’s serious about living in these zones.
Second, his data analysis is blowing past a multitude of equally livable, more affordable PDX neighborhoods.
Third, within his zones are actual unlivable subzones (nobody wants to live in actual-downtown-portland).
Impressive analysis, but he'd be better served by living for a month in a PDX AirBnB and learning his way around the city.
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing that the book was written by a man who failed to communicate that (rather obvious) idea to the employees of the multi-billion dollar company he owned and directly managed.
He had the financial incentive to not make that happen, namely to lock people onto IE/Windows and direct them out of AOL and into a 1990's MSN walled garden. If anything, Gates the futurist vs Gates the businessperson shows us that, regardless of what the pro-lassiez faire types say, most often corporations left unfettered don't product the best results, but only results that directly benefit themselves and that ofte…
Can't PM, it's spelled laissez-faire.
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing that the book was written by a man who failed to communicate that (rather obvious) idea to the employees of the multi-billion dollar company he owned and directly managed.
He had the financial incentive to not make that happen, namely to lock people onto IE/Windows and direct them out of AOL and into a 1990's MSN walled garden. If anything, Gates the futurist vs Gates the businessperson shows us that, regardless of what the pro-lassiez faire types say, most often corporations left unfettered don't product the best results, but only results that directly benefit themselves and that ofte…
Corporations left unfettered are no longer corporations.
This isn't just semantics. An unfettered corporation no longer has the benefits of government either. I'm thinking of things like subsidies, added regulation that raises barriers of entry and limited liability.
> regardless of what the pro-lassiez faire types say
Not all pro laissez-faire types are strict utilitarians. Most that I know tend to appeal to ethics in addition to a freed market's utility.
> but only results that directly benefit themselves
That doesn't make any sense. Microsoft has surely provided benefits to a great number of people. Perhaps you'd argue that Microsoft benefited more in certain transactions, but that's an entirely different claim (and it doesn't imply that others didn't benefit at all).
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's right, because they generally have their own proprietary source of data ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service ), which is a big part of the appeal of working with a realtor -- they learn of new listings faster than you can by relying on public, "open source" data. And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their database…
I'm married to a Realtor, so I've had plenty of direct access to the local MLS system, and also I've overheard many conversations between my wife and her clients about Zillow. From what I've seen and heard, Zillow's data isn't just delayed by a week; it can be years out of date, and grossly inaccurate as well. Both buyers and sellers are very mislead about property values based on Zillow because they see the last sal…
I don't buy this. In the UK, there is usually only a single agent (acting for the seller) rather than two, and total commissions are _much_ lower than the 6% which I understand is standard in the US.
Furthermore, commissions are negotiable, and the market for estate agents (what you call realtors) is competitive.
There's nothing different about buyers/sellers needs that's fundamentally different in the USA. The high level (and lack of variance) in commissions has some reason. I'm not familiar enough to know whether it's some legislative/regulatory thing, or just historical (path dependence). However, I find it hard to imagine that realtors are adding 60k value to a 1m sale transaction.
Anecdote: I had a friend who studied to get a realtor's licence in Canada, just so that they could avoid commissions on their own purchases.
BTW - I upvoted you, although my perspective is pretty much opposite to yours :)
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm married to a Realtor, so I've had plenty of direct access to the local MLS system, and also I've overheard many conversations between my wife and her clients about Zillow. From what I've seen and heard, Zillow's data isn't just delayed by a week; it can be years out of date, and grossly inaccurate as well. Both buyers and sellers are very mislead about property values based on Zillow because they see the last sal…
Folks here should check out http://patrick.net/ , run by a SF bay area programmer, for an opposing view on the necessity and desirability of Realtors(tm). In terms of the MLS, at least in California, which has the largest one, it's run by Realtors(tm) for Realtors(tm). The board members are Realtors(tm); so are the "34 REALTOR® Associations" that are the MLS's customers. You can see crmls.org for more details. In ter…
I really liked your comment. It's insightful and provided a perspective I hadn't really heard before. This is important, because I'm gearing up to buy my first house in about 2 years or so. The thought of working with a realtor has been somewhat terrifying, if only because I believe competence is rare generally. And the incentive inverse has always been a bit of a put off too.
I've certainly considered the possibility of going without a realtor when the time comes, but multiple people whose opinion I respect have claimed that a realtor was worth it. So your comment piqued my interest. In search of more information, I decided to check out patrick.net.
Umm. What? Here's what I see:
* Money is a form of social control and most Americans are debt slaves
* Midieval spikes thwart London homeless from sleeping in apartment doorways
* Michael Moore in cat fight with wife over divorce settlement
* Photo of US at Night
* "Go and rape women" Why do we just stand by?
* God bless the free market!
* ...
I mean, really? I understand that this is probably some dynamically generated list of hot threads from a message board, but if your goal is to convince someone that maybe realtors aren't necessary (a pretty mind-bending claim for most people, I imagine), then you have provided a source that inspires exactly zero credibility. I'd suggest you stop linking people to it.
I had expected to see some material on how one would achieve tasks that a realtor would normally perform for you. I can at least understand how this open data stuff would help replace the realtor's job of finding houses for you, but what about all the legal mumbo jumbo? I know almost nothing about it, but I know it exists. So how would I tackle it? Is there anything else that a realtor generally does that I'll have to do myself?
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#57I work in online real estate, and this is exactly the kind of thing we love to do when it comes to utilizing data. How can we take X, Y and Z data points and generate something useful? Taking into account crime reports, graffiti reports, available parking spaces, etc, can all help you decide whether this place is good or not. The requirements here are kinda strange (proximity to a grocery store? not crime rates or an…
I'm in the midst of a pretty similar house-hunt to this guy here in Denver. I currently live Downtown and love it. I'm not willing to move outside of the city, so we're focusing on a proper house in one of the city-center neighborhoods. Proximity to a grocery store is absolutely at the top of my list. I like to buy my food as fresh as possible and generally only buy for the meal I'm cooking that night. So having not…
I bet walkable fresh correlates pretty well with lower crime (especially within an urban context, but I would expect it to work even when you ignore development patterns/density).
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#58This is awesome. I love analysis like this. Funny enough, something very similar to this was the impetus for me starting Estately. Early on, we had a bunch of wild spatial queries that would let you even filter by distance to specific transit line stops: http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/near_tra... When we ran stats on what searches people were actually doing, we found that very few consumers actua…
Did you ever try to give people the option to filter by school district or school district ranking?
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#59I was worried about commute times from three different points when looking for a house, so I wrote a quick and dirty little ruby script to hit the Google Driving Directions API. It tiles across the area you specify and spits out a kml file that can be loaded into google earth and lets you see which areas fit your parameters (https://github.com/chrisamiller/commute-times).
There's lots of room for improvement in the code, but it's in the same vein as what this guy did and helped us quite a bit.
Re: Finding the perfect house using open data
#60The "moneyball" move is buying land right before the mass transit extension is completed and the neighborhood develops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX_Orange_Line But this is a really fun article on how to use open-source GIS tools to do something practical, which is something I've wanted to delve into for a while— I'll try it later tonight, thanks!
Yeah, Governor Christie's brother likes that strategy. "Governor Christie's brother invested in real estate near new PATH station in Harrison" http://www.northjersey.com/news/governor-christie-s-brother-...
It's only problematic when you're doing it before the extension is public.
Likewise, property on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has been cheap lately, because blasting out subway stations is unpleasant. But a new subway coming to an area that was recently relatively far from one means property values are shooting up.