Tasty Real Estate

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.

One thing we have noticed is that there are very few video tours of houses online. We’re not sure exactly why, (maybe because it’s a lot of work?) but our goal with this website is to get the best quality information to buyers and sellers, and in that interest we are going to make an effort to create these videos and get them to you. Please let us know any thoughts or suggestions you might have by clicking on the comments button below! UPDATE: We have a short slide show on this property as well.
For our inaugural video, we have David giving us a tour of this beautiful 3,602 sq. ft., 5 bed 3 bath home in Clayton. (Dave didn’t know we were going to shoot vid that day, next time he says he’ll wear LONG PANTS!)