Tasty Real Estate

cnn money asks why are you paying 6%?, and has a cautionary tale about becoming a real estate professional. give them both a look. and here is an article by jon stossel that i found that is entertaining. here’s a snip:

Limited-service “discount” brokers also threaten brokers’ 6 percent commissions. They offer services at lower rates, like a flat fee of $250 to host a two-hour open house or $499 to review the contract paperwork.
So traditional brokers have won “minimum service” laws in many states that force discount brokers to offer more services — and thereby force consumers to pay higher fees.
When I confronted David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, about that, he said, “Not everyone is providing the adequate amount of services to protect the consumer.”
Excuse me, but if I want a Realtor to protect my interests, I’ll hire one. I didn’t hire them to protect me from concluding I don’t need their services. If I think I’m better off selling my home with less help than they want to sell me, that should be my choice.

the real estate blog squad has a few posts up today covering the main themes (well at least the real themes, as opposed to the official ones) over at the convention across the bay. two posts stand out as emblematic of the challenges being faced by the industry (and arguably not being faced by the NAR). jon strum’s post subtitled “the sun rises in the east” encapsulates pretty well the state of denial that many in the business choose to live in:

And yet when a member of the audience asked that panel about a site like Trulia, that really does break through old paradigms and delivers a new consumer experience, Mr. Wright sniffs that , “…it’s an interesting service that has legs…” Of course, the next thing he points out is that the listing information on Trulia isn’t really their information to disemminate.

and there is a piece on there written by the property grunt that has an interesting analysis of what implications all these state minimum service laws (legislation introduced to “protect” the consumer by restricting the ability of discount brokers to offer a menu of services). he sees it all ending as a class action suit not unlike the one faced by big tobacco.

You Better Believe It

Originally uploaded by merges.

this is pretty cool. i am testing out posting to tasty real estate through our flickr interface (we use them for our photo hosting). i did a search for the tag “real estate” and came up with this beauty of signage from the toronto area. this realtor may not be the tastiest, but apparently he is the “sweetest”. a little something for you to enjoy this halloween.

the NAR is in the bay area this weekend for their annual meeting. although the official word out of san francisco is that the focus will not be on the department of justice’s antitrust investigations into the real estate industry, you can bet that it will surely be a hot topic of conversation.
there are a number of good articles out there covering the conference and the controversy. information on the internet wants to be free. especially when the incentive for someone selling a home is unquestionably to get the listing of their property in front of as many eyeballs as possible. fighting technology isn’t good for consumers or for the industry. media coverage of the fight is not favorable; newsweek recently called the real estate industry a “cartel”.
in the end, fighting the internet isn’t good for agents and brokers. they need to recognize the innovations occuring in the business and find new ways to be competitive, rather than having a trade organization interfere and lobby against new business models, making the inevitable change more painful by having done so. j. bruce mcdonald from the justice department is right:

“One of the competitively threatening things about Web-based suppliers in any industry is that they can reach more customers more quickly and save costs, and that may translate into cutting price. All those things are attractive.
“The way we go about obtaining goods and services on the Web is threatening to brick-and-mortar business models.”

the brick and mortar business models won’t disappear completely. but i think they are in for some very real changes. the best thing for the industry and consumers alike is to get on with the changes, think creatively, and continue to provide whatever quality services are demanded by buyers and sellers.

we started a new sister site today, clayton living, all about clayton california, about a 45 minute drive from berkeley. it’s where dave used to live, and he has a few places on the market there. we’re going to try to approach the site in a similar way to tasty real estate, but given that the two communities are quite different, with different local interests, and even different climates, we figured we would just break off a new site to address clayton specifically.

we took a look at another place in albany last week, a test run for further video open house walkthroughs. we are still ironing out the details of getting a bunch of these produced and up here, but in the mean time will post what we can. the idea is to keep them pretty objective, and not try to “sell” properties. i think we are ALL a little tired of being sold stuff, and would prefer to just see what is there and draw our own conclusions.

We shot a couple more properties at the end of last week, here is an interesting smaller place that surprised us. We started off thinking we would be much more critical of the property, but it really seems like a nice starter home.

You may safely skip reading this if you are not interested terribly in the mechanics of our experimentation with setting up this website. So the moving of things around continues here at Tasty Real Estate. We added ourselves to the feedburner directory, so if you use that service to keep track of your blog subscriptions, add us please! We also set up an account over on flickr to share photos of the properties we visit, and added a little teaser for the photos over on the sidebar. (You can view a little slideshow of one of our properties in Clayton right now). We put some information about the newest listings in Berkeley over in the sidebar as well, and in the next few days we will be adding more listings from places like craigslist, to cover those properties that aren’t being picked up by Trulia. We certainly are just getting started, but if you’ve dropped by this early in our development, please take advantage of our subscription feeds in your favorite reader or “my yahoo”, or if you haven’t started using these tools, check back often over the coming weeks and see what we have to offer!

Tonight I was looking around, and tried some searches on google for real estate in Berkeley, to see who would pop up first on the list. Of course it is one of our goals to eventually BE on that front page, so I was interested to see who the “competition” is. Apparently it is some link farm that will put a link to your site for $39 a month. No thanks! The proliferation of spam sites like this are making it more difficult to find good quality information; paying into their game just gives them more economic incentive, and makes it more difficult for the rest of us to find real professionals out there writing about what they do.

There are definitely a bunch of new cool resources now online to help people research property. the best ones we’ve seen so far are trulia, housing maps, and last weeks newcomer, home pages, brought to us by the folks at HouseValues Inc., a stock that we have just put into our portfolio watchlist.
We were surfing around and reading some blogs today and came across a fairly insightful post from Jeff Hoffman. He quite accurately points out that the real estate industry is about to undergo some monumental changes as the result of online “for sale” databases and mapping technologies, and the dramatic increase in information available to buyers and sellers. But we agree with the conclusion that he reaches about these changes:

Gone are the days of real estate agents being the exclusive providers of such detailed information. As the client becomes more educated, the relationship between the client and the real estate agent will move more towards the real estate agent taking on a larger role of an advisor instead of a disseminator of housing information.
This will provide more protectionism for the client as they will no longer have to solely rely upon the real estate agent when it comes to gathering “intelligence” about the housing market. Make no mistake; having data is different than being able to properly interpret that data. It’s foolish to think that a consumer could analyze housing information as well as a professional real estate agent. But having access to the information will offer a greater assurance that the client will have ample opportunity to protect their interests.