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Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

dealbook.nytimes.com

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Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#31

Post by carlmcqueen »

bane wrote: post #25
nilkn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct sources. Here in Houston, nobody uses Zillow because their data is not reliably up-to-date. The city has a custom solution: har.com. It's not as pretty, but it's what all the realtors in the city actually use.

Yeah, here in the D.C. area, nobody's using Zillow for much either since the "Zestimates" are pretty wildly off of actual market value and even in between homes in the same area. For example, it puts my house at about $50k under my next-door neighbor's house, despite my home being larger, with more upgrades (about $100k worth), with one more bedroom and an additional full bathroom. The identical house to mine, a bloc…

Very similar here in the city of Saint Louis, Mo, but I don't really blame them.

The change in house prices block by block in many places can go from 20-30K to 300K to 800K depending on whether the block has been restored or are old burned out 100 year homes. Also, crime levels can change quite a bit in a one mile radius.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#32

Post by IgorPartola »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #22
IgorPartola wrote: post #12

Having bought real estate, I can say that Zillow/Trulia are both a blessing and a curse. They are great in that you can see what's been listed for a while, scan a map, and generally put a pretty interface on house searches. This I imagine is their great advantage. I also found my mortgage company through Zillow's mortgage rate search. Their big disadvantage is that their records are not updated as fast as the convent…

they provide a hugely invaluable service What is that service? I'm not being snarky; I'm genuinely curious, as the structure of the industry (and fee level) is significantly different than where I'm from. I don't get why you need a real estate agent to help you buy.

They know real estate the way most people do not. The analogy here would be trying to write a giant enterprise piece of software you plan on supporting for the next 10-30 years without the benefit of any experience as a developer.

On a practical level, they can generally guide you through the very intense process of lining everything up to buy a property (this process takes months, and a whole lot of phone calls and paperwork). They know prices, and can tell you what something is worth. They can spot problems with the property before you get a (very expensive) inspector on site. They help you negotiate and buffer you from the seller and the seller's agent. This is particularly valuable since a good deal can go bad because personalities clash. They help you find professionals to work with (attorney, bank, inspector, etc.) if you want them to (all of these are up to you, but if it's all the same to you, then they generally have good suggestions).

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#34

Post by chatmasta »

smackfu wrote: post #27
chatmasta wrote: post #23

I interned for Redfin last summer. This is a really interesting space, and most people don't realize that Zillow/Trulia are operating drastically different businesses from Redfin. Some background: The US real estate industry is broken up into regions (e.g. SF bay area, Orange County, Lake Tahoe, etc.). In order for a brokerage [1] to operate in a region, it needs to employ agents specifically licensed in that region,…

Isn't the MLS run by the real estate agents that RedFin is trying to disrupt? >They depend on real estate agents manually inputting their listings into the Zillow/Trulia platforms Are you sure that Zillow isn't just scraping the MLS data from broker sites?

> Isn't the MLS run by the real estate agents that RedFin is trying to disrupt?

Redfin is disrupting the brokerage model of paying agents price-based commission. As far as I can tell, they are happy to use the existing MLS for listing data, and then put a nice interface on top of it.

> Are you sure that Zillow isn't just scraping the MLS data from broker sites?

Oh, I'm sure they are. But they can't reasonably do this for 100% of regions, and have 100% coverage. My point about the coverage differentiator of Redfin is that in the regions Redfin serves, it has 100% coverage. Zillow claims to serve nationwide, but does not have 100% coverage nationwide.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#35

Post by bane »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #22
IgorPartola wrote: post #12

Having bought real estate, I can say that Zillow/Trulia are both a blessing and a curse. They are great in that you can see what's been listed for a while, scan a map, and generally put a pretty interface on house searches. This I imagine is their great advantage. I also found my mortgage company through Zillow's mortgage rate search. Their big disadvantage is that their records are not updated as fast as the convent…

they provide a hugely invaluable service What is that service? I'm not being snarky; I'm genuinely curious, as the structure of the industry (and fee level) is significantly different than where I'm from. I don't get why you need a real estate agent to help you buy.

They bring lots of data and patterns to the table mostly -- because they spend all day every day dealing with it.

- If you tell your agent "I'm looking for a good investment property" they'll be able to tell you why this house on this side of the street is a good investment, and why the house 2 blocks away isn't.

- They can use this data during negotiations. You don't really know what price a home can be bought or sold for, but they can work off of a more educated guess. Should I try to sell my home for $x? or $x*1.25? They'll know how much and why. Should I try to negotiate down when buying or do I need to make a stronger offer? They'll know market conditions and can help you.

- They're familiar with all the oddball paperwork certain kinds of property deals have to work through. Like, are you buying a deprecated farm unit in an independent but not registered municipality that's been rezoned for mixed-use development but you'd like to rezone back to agricultural use? There's a form for that and they just saved you 6 months of back and forth with the state/county/city getting it sorted out.

- They can dig into property history and find out things that you might not know from looking at the property. Like, the foundation was recently rebuilt, or the property has a history of flooding and needs a sump-pump, so you might be looking at $20k in charges to put one in, or you can use it to negotiate down.

- If you are selling, connecting you into the broker network to find a buyer. It's a lot more than just putting something up on the web, a good agent will spend quite a bit of their time hunting down a good buyer for you.

Here's a longer list

http://ohiorealtors.org/consumers/184-tasks-agents-do-for-yo...

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#37

Post by chaosphere2112 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #22
IgorPartola wrote: post #12

Having bought real estate, I can say that Zillow/Trulia are both a blessing and a curse. They are great in that you can see what's been listed for a while, scan a map, and generally put a pretty interface on house searches. This I imagine is their great advantage. I also found my mortgage company through Zillow's mortgage rate search. Their big disadvantage is that their records are not updated as fast as the convent…

they provide a hugely invaluable service What is that service? I'm not being snarky; I'm genuinely curious, as the structure of the industry (and fee level) is significantly different than where I'm from. I don't get why you need a real estate agent to help you buy.

I'm in the process of buying my first home, and it's been hugely helpful to have an agent. Services include:

- Tours of homes; seeing something online and seeing something in person is an impressive difference. Some houses look amazing online and terrible in person, or vice versa. Cannot possibly overstate the value of this.

- Negotiation; he's a professional negotiator, and he has years of experience negotiating in the exact market that we're buying in.

- Documentation; there's a RIDICULOUS amount of paperwork to file, and all I have to do is read/sign it.

- Inspections; he has handymen and inspectors on file, and knows that they're trustworthy.

- Knowledge; he's done this dozens/hundreds of times. He knows about how long things take, he has reasonable estimates of how much things will cost, and he has the patience to answer all of my questions.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#38

Post by andrewtbham »

uptown wrote: post #30
smackfu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the MLS run by the real estate agents that RedFin is trying to disrupt? >They depend on real estate agents manually inputting their listings into the Zillow/Trulia platforms Are you sure that Zillow isn't just scraping the MLS data from broker sites?

Zillow receives feeds from syndication services like ListHub and Point2, as well as direct feeds from MLS's.

that's true. zillow lists their source at the bottom of listings.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#39

Post by bane »

carlmcqueen wrote: post #31
bane wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, here in the D.C. area, nobody's using Zillow for much either since the "Zestimates" are pretty wildly off of actual market value and even in between homes in the same area. For example, it puts my house at about $50k under my next-door neighbor's house, despite my home being larger, with more upgrades (about $100k worth), with one more bedroom and an additional full bathroom. The identical house to mine, a bloc…

Very similar here in the city of Saint Louis, Mo, but I don't really blame them. The change in house prices block by block in many places can go from 20-30K to 300K to 800K depending on whether the block has been restored or are old burned out 100 year homes. Also, crime levels can change quite a bit in a one mile radius.

Yeah, that's interesting. In cities, a couple blocks can be wildly variable. However, in my boring suburb, you probably wouldn't know one part from another 2 miles away. I suspect it's an algorithmic problem, using the same concept for a city in the 'burbs.
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