Step Right Up
Welcome – dear readers – to the 43rd edition of the carnival of real estate. This week thirty nine entries flowed into our inbox and of which, five made it through our highly biased opinion filter of excellence.
The mostly-poisonous reaction to a highly-favorable 60-minutes piece on online real estate brokerage startup Redfin permeated throughout a lot of this week’s entries. Broker Bryant provided not only an excellent recount of the coverage but also looked at the root cause as to why Redfin is gaining attention and a solution dear to my heart. Specifically, there are too many agents in the industry which causes a variable level of service and allows a few bad apples to tarnish the reputation of an industry of professionals that are on the whole good. And his solution? Making it harder to become a Realtor and lifting the bar on admission. I couldn’t agree more.
Along the lines of promoting solutions rather than lonely-criticism-without-recommendation, our favorite post of the week came from Athol Kay of RE Agent in CT. Athol proposes that instead of Realtors simply criticizing Zillow’s zestimates, they put their words of attack in context. Every comment around the accuracy of a Zestimate should be accompanied by something like “When I do a CMA I get within 5% of an actual sales price 90% of the timeâ€. As Athol concludes “Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts.â€
Now, back to Redfin. Hot on the heels of the 60 minutes segment, the NWMLS fined the company $50,000 because its “Sweet Digs†property review blog broke a rule barring an agent to “advertise†another agent’s listing without their express permission. Greg Swann, of Bloodhound Blog, had the best analysis of the event, including both a history of the rule’s intent and secondly around the definition of advertising.
Greg points out the rule is a legacy from the times of ’sub-agency’ and effectively prevents a buy-side agent from representing the interests of the home buyer. And then, the extremely long-bowed interpretation that a review of a property is an advertisement. I am not sure what the editorial gatekeepers of media properties around the world would say about that.
Jim Cronin of the Real Estate Tomato kicked off an interesting experiment around collaborative editing. The endeavor hopes to take a look at the mechanics of Real Estate teams – both from a business perspective and a blogging one. The post already has a number of good comments, and be sure to add yours before tomorrow (Tues, 22nd May).
Finally, Peter Comitini of the Corcoran Group has an excellent article on the weird and wonderful world of Manhattan real estate, and specifically on buying an apartment in new condominium projects that are sprouting up along the west side of Manhattan.
Not in New York and thinking about what you’re missing out on? How about a 10% deposit for a floorplan, 2 year wait, higher closing costs and risks? The onerous terms are a by product of surging prices and demand in Manhattan. If we didn’t need more evidence that Manhattan is a world into itself, there’s some more. And a brief shout out to Sean Black of Trulia who is among the happy many about to move into a new condo project in Manhattan.
That’s all from me. Next week’s carnival is hosted by the North Fulton County RE Blog.
Thanks for the nod.
-Athol
Sock Puppet
21 May 07 at 9:55 am
Good job with the carnival this week. It must be difficult going through all the submissions. Thanks for the mention and for the time you gave to put this together
Broker Bryant
21 May 07 at 5:41 pm
ROAR!
21 May 07 at 5:47 pm
I’m honored that my New Development story was included in a short list of very good pieces. Thanks to the crew at Homethinking for doing a great job!
I too posted about the 60 Minutes, Redfin segment You get paid all that money for just 60 Minutes of work?, but my take was about how unbalanced the CBS reporting was. I think BrokerBryant got it right by pointing out that Redfin is not a company standing on it’s own merits. They are trying to build a business by bashing their competitors, not by providing a great service. But they are smart, and very good at defining & controlling the conversation. In much the same way that political hacks run negative advertising to try winning elections. He’s so right that we need to be having a different conversation, about value creation, not percentages points.
And finally a shout out to Noah at UrbanDigs who made the cut too.
Cheers,
Peter
Peter Comitini
21 May 07 at 6:23 pm
[...] [...]
RE Agent in CT » HOWZAT! - I’ll Claim I Won The Carnival of Real Estate
22 May 07 at 12:21 am
@Broker Bryant: Our pleasure and well done once again on cutting through the Redfin clutter and having something constructive to say.
@Peter: That’s certainly true: Redfin are riding the wave of negative perception well. But perhaps the reason 60 minutes were so unbalanced was in their minds, that’s what people wanted to hear. Nothing is really served by the story but it was probably more generally appealing than ‘there are too many agents, perhaps we should look at raising the bar to entry’ as Broker Bryant pointed out.
Niki Scevak
22 May 07 at 7:56 am
Thanks HomeThinking & Thanks to Peter Comitini for the shout out!!
Great to be a part of this great list!
Noah
UrbanDigs
22 May 07 at 9:02 am
Couldn’t agree more Niki. Raising the bar for entry, and better trining for those already drinking at it
There is a negative perception out there about agents that Redfin plays upon quite well; and It’s our job to change that perception. It might just happen one blog at a time.
Peter Comitini
25 May 07 at 9:43 pm
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I couldn’t agree more. There were definitely too many agents in the game, but the current state of the market seems to be taking care of most of the “fly by night” agents.
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