81–90 of 172 posts
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I imagine it would be relatively easy for them to operate as actual brokers also. I wonder what has stopped them.
All real estate news and websites are biased and always suggest you that buying a home is a god think. In the SF bay area, I hear real estate agents speak on the radio. Before recession, they said you should buy a home immediately so that rates may increase....Then during recession they say you should buy a home as rates have fallen to historic lows..for last 1-2 years, whenever you hear...they say the interest rates…
Does that leave any real competition in the space?
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.
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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…
I'm also in the process of buying a home for the first time, and did some search on Trulia/Zillow. It was OK, but the data gets really stale. One home was sold already before it was taken down. I did find out that Houston has a really nice site, har.com that lets you do basically everything Trulia & Zillow does. Realtors have other interface(s) into the same data, which lets them do different things like N sided poly…
All real estate news and websites are biased and always suggest you that buying a home is a god think. In the SF bay area, I hear real estate agents speak on the radio. Before recession, they said you should buy a home immediately so that rates may increase....Then during recession they say you should buy a home as rates have fallen to historic lows..for last 1-2 years, whenever you hear...they say the interest rates…
`god think`
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Why would you use a real estate agent trying to pump the price as high as possible I was surprised to read this, since I thought you'd hinted at exactly the opposite by mentioning Freakonomics. Isn't the Freakonomics argument that an agent is incentivized to instead sell the property as quickly as possible , regardless of the sale price? For instance, accepting an offer that is $10k under the listing price will cost…
chatmasta is talking about the _buyer's_ agent. In the US real estate market, the buyer's agent is typically paid a percentage of the sale price. So the buyer's agent has an incentive to convince the buyer to pay a higher price. They of course also have an incentive to convince the buyer to buy quickly, for the reason you said. Oh, also the _seller_ is typically the party that actually pays the buyer's agent. Yes, th…
Zillow 2013 revenues: $225M, profits: -$12.5M Trulia 2013 revenues: $175M, profits: -$17.8M
You would expect this from the two most innovative companies in the industry. Both companies are leveraging their revenue to grow rapidly. A concern for profits at this point is premature. Trulia was profitable years ago at a vastly smaller revenue number.
I trade stocks as a hobby and I was wondering what I'm missing here. This morning Zillow offered .444 shares of Z for TRLA. Currently (1:50 pm EST) TRLA is trading at only a 0.411 valuation of Z. What's to stop me from shorting Z and buying TRLA to lock in the difference as profit? It seems both have agreed to the 0.444 ratio. Is it a regulatory issue? What else would cause the deal to fail?
2) Shorting isn't free. It will costs money to borrow the stock. You have to borrow it for more than 6 months until the deal closes.
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Why would you use a real estate agent trying to pump the price as high as possible I was surprised to read this, since I thought you'd hinted at exactly the opposite by mentioning Freakonomics. Isn't the Freakonomics argument that an agent is incentivized to instead sell the property as quickly as possible , regardless of the sale price? For instance, accepting an offer that is $10k under the listing price will cost…
Yes, that was the argument in Freakonomics and they're completely right. The real estate market can be extremely receptive to low prices, so if you list your house very low, you're likely to sell it much faster. The bulk of the money the agents make will come from the part of the house that could sell very easily. If a house could sell for $200,000 today, but you have to have it listed six months before it could sell…
This tactic has been used to great effect over the last few years in the area North of San Francisco. I bought a house a year ago, and this was particularly annoying as it made it hard to determine what houses were really available in our price range, since listed prices were often fictional. Brokers suggested coming in $5k to $15k above listed price as an initial bid if others seemed interested, just so you would be taken seriously.
Edit: s/$15k to $15k/$5k to $15k/