121–130 of 172 posts
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Just out of curiosity, do you know how Craigslist sources it's real estate listings? Does it integrate with the MLS or do agents list there separately?
Real Estate agents post their own listings on Craigslist. There are companies who provide the fancy HTML templates you see real estate agents use, but Craigslist doesn't allow automatic posting of listings.
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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.
That's the thing... it's not as easy as you'd think. There are a lot of barriers put up to protect the industry. In many ways, innovation should have put Realtor's out of business like they did Travel Agents. The difference, Travel Agents didn't have a powerful lobby group like NAR.
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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…
Economists have a tendency to overlook data that is difficult to quantify. In the short term, a real estate agent may make more money by rushing a sale, but on a macro level, he does himself a disservice. Real estate agents need to become your friend and engender loyalty so that you'll recommend them and so that you'll use them again when you sell your new house. Every hour spent with a client and every dollar knocke…
Anyway, in my experience, most agents are happy wasting a bunch of time on a sale - having coffee to discuss 'the status' (2 viewings scheduled for next week, the one from last Monday seemed genuine - could have send me a 2 line email. But hey, he could tell funny stories, so I don't mind having coffee); spending 45 minutes on discussing 'the strategy' on how to deal with an offer, ... I never got the impression they cared about a house being a few months longer in their inventory. It filled up their website and office windows, made them big and professional, and as long as their cash flow is OK, anything listed for under a year was OK (much longer than that makes them look weak, of course; also, the market is bad in my area anyway).
I have since reconsidered what I once thought was a plausible argument about real estate agents. Maybe it's sample bias, I don't know, but the ones I dealt with, weren't 'rational actors' in any sense an economist would need them to be to make their models work (and I work with economists and their models a lot).
Trulia was so much better then Zillow -- reminds me of Flipboard buying Zite.
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.
We did structure his fee in a way that he would get more commission if he got a better price for us. We ended up paying him 2x or 3x what he makes on a normal sale, and yet even if we had paid him double from what we did, we still would have made thousands using his services.
(This might seem to be in contrast with my other post in this thread about agents being financially illiterate, but the proposition of 'more money!' was so simple in this case, that it did seem to help. Anything more complex (opportunity cost, time value of money, ...) went over his head.)
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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.
Some agents provide a hugely invaluable service. If I am going to move to a new region, first I pick the area I prefer by renting a few months and learning the reality on the ground, then I grab the best agent based on specialization for that area , not a "generic" one for the whole city. In my experience, the value of the agent is great there. But it lowers drastically if they are just "whole city agents." Experienc…
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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…
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,…
I also am hoping Redfin wins this battle but, in part, for a different reason. The model that Zillow/Trulia work on is rife with scammers. I almost got caught up in one myself on Zillow. And were it not for the bad PR they get that'd be more than happy to allow the scam listings since that only generates more page views for them. Even notifying Zillow of the scam listing wasn't enough to get it removed. I had to keep…
This is really cynical and, honestly, just not true. Last year, for example, we (at Trulia) rolled-out enhanced rental fraud detection that, overnight, took down the number of published rental listings by a significant amount. And many of our metrics -- leads sent, value created for agents/landlords -- are functions of our listing count. We didn't remove these listings -- which nobody had flagged as spam -- because of some murky concept of bad PR. We removed them because we're building a RE platform, we want and need and strive for happy, repeat visitors. And because in the chicken-and-egg of a 2-sided marketplace, the answer at Trulia is clear: the consumer came first. We need happy, engaged consumers, not mindless page views -- banner ads are a small and shrinking share of our total revenue.
It's true that we as an industry -- and now potentially as a combined company -- need to continue to build more sophisticated systems to combat fraud. It's a topic here that gets a lot of discussion and mindshare, and there has been more than one fraud-related innovation to come out of our quarterly hack-weeks.
Just adding some anecdata to the chatter about these sites and the experience of buying a home: I began searching for a house in the East Bay about two years ago, culminating in a purchase in June 2013. The first year or so I was using Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia to track availability, prices and neighborhoods. While I got some good information, it wasn't until I started talking to an agent with about thirty years exp…
The first house we bought my wife and I found on Redfin (we timed the bottom of the market - by luck - and bought in December of 2010) and had a friend who's an agent in SF just help with the paperwork.
The second time we had a Berkeley based agent (we worked with her to sell our house so she got our "buy" work as well) but again found the house ourselves on Redfin. During our 4 month search our agent never got us a lead that wasn't on redfin. Truth be told if we buy again we may go the Redfin route, we really didn't get a ton of value from our agent on the buy side of our transaction. No way I'd sell a house without an agent however.
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,…
I just bought a house in the bay area, I tried multiple times to contact Redfin but never got any response. I ended up using a traditional agent but I was left wondering what is going on over there. Maybe they have more business than they can handle?
I am the Bay Area Manager here at Redfin and wanted to extend my apologies for the lack of service you received. Would you be willing to contact me so that I can further assess the situation you encountered to ensure it does not happen again?
I sincerely appreciate your time and apologize that we let you down.
Kindly, Charmaine Frank Redfin Bay Area Manager charmaine.frank@redfin.com