Home equity loans have been an increasingly popular option as real estate values have risen.

But unlike stocks, home equity loans require interest to be paid. In effect, you are doubling down on your home’s value.

Mike from Altos Research points to a fascinating company called Rex & Co that lets you do the opposite: Lock in your home’s gains and sell a slice of ownership in your home. In effect, you sell a share of your house.
As Mike points out, this will be successful if:

• Property prices fall.
• Property prices increase a little bit, but you use the money to pay off expensive mortgage debt.
• You have some other investment opportunity available now, that will appreciate at a greater rate than real estate.

But not work out if property prices rise strongly. That is not really the point. Rather having the option of ‘hedging’ or lowering your financial exposure to your home is a fantastic step forward for consumers.

Rising from the blog dead, I thought I would just say thanks to all the great folks I met at the Inman Connect show last month in New York – especially a lot of the bloggers we have come to know and love. Both to put a face to a name and to chew the proverbial industry chat.

Speaking of faces to names, if you’ve ever wondered what I (Niki Scevak) look or sound like, Sean over at Trulia was kind enough to invite me to an interview.

You can view the video here.

[Via this week's carnival of real estate] Silicon Valley Blogger posts on the number of agents in Silicon Valley. And specifically his dry cleaning guy getting into the real estate game.

The statistic: 16,000 homes sold this year so far in Silicon Valley, 26,000 agents.

The math to get to $21k is a little wrong: he assumes half are active but not that there are two agents involved in a single transaction (i.e. one representing buyer, one representing seller), that is they are more likely grossing $42,000. But his point around the splits to the brokerage and associated fees are spot on.

Half the agents being active might be generous. We took a look at the market activity in Hawaii recently and found that 87% of agents were not representing a home owner on the sell side in September. If we generously assume there is another 13% out there helping the buy side (usually agents help home owners buy and sell so we’d assume the ones representing home sellers are doing most of the buy side representation as well but being generous), then roughly three out of four people would be inactive, not one in two.

In the stock market, the saying goes ‘when your shoe shine boy is offering stock tips, it’s time to get out’. Perhaps the same is true in real estate when you dry cleaner is entering the game?

One feature that quite a number of our users have asked for is to review a real estate agent through the lens of a home buyer, given that our first review template was heavily skewed toward the perspective of the home seller.

We listened and wait no more! Now when you go to fill out a review you nominate whether you bought or sold a house with that particular Real Estate Agent:

Then when you go to fill out the review we have specific questions related to your experience as a home buyer.

Enjoy and do let us know if there is anything we can do to improve!

When we redesigned our home page, we took the valuable feedback people had on board. One comment was that there shouldn’t be two search boxes on the front page because it was too confusing.

We agreed and went about redesigning the page into a more flexible and user friendly way. The result is an experience we derived from Google’s local search that incorporates two search boxes – the left as your search criteria and the right as the location.

Now if you want to search for an agent, simply click on the agent sub tab and enter the name of the agent in the left box and the location in the right. Like this:

The location part is also optional. If you leave it blank the query will still work.

If you are looking to search via a map, enter in an address in the left search box, marked address and then the city and state into the right. Like this:

That will take you to the map based search.

And if you just want to browse a location, enter it in to the second search box like so:

And away you go. If you’d like to help us improve even further, leave any comments you might have on this post.

Greg over at Blueroof has an excellent post on what he thinks differentiates good Realtors from bad ones. The concrete points around marketing and commission negotiation should be written down by any home seller as advice when looking for a Realtor and alarm bells to look for in those conversations.

One of the strange byproducts of the rise in housing pricing in the last 5-10 years has been the explosion of employment in the real estate industry. Indeed, the NAR, the official body, says that its membership has risen from three quarters of a million in 2000 to 1.3 million last year. But are all of those agents working? How disproportionate is the workload?

We decided to explore that question and more, using Hawaii as our test bed of data. There are around 10,000 agents in Hawaii. And at the moment, there are roughly 6,500 properties for sale across the four islands. And over the month of September and the first few weeks of October, around 9,242 properties came on the market, according to our estimates.

So rather neatly, every Realtor is representing roughly one home. Sound like an easy job? One to one service at its best?

The averages hide the truth because so many agents are not active. In fact, after monitoring the marketplace over the month of September and the first few weeks of October we can see that just 1,354 Realtors are selling properties. Which means that 8,791 are not, or roughly 87% of the Realtors in Hawaii!

The 1,354 active agents represent about seven properties, on average, at any one time. Just 72 agents have more than 15 properties on the market, suggesting that all of these 1,354 agents work with a roughly similar load before the customer service starts to be pressured by too many listings.

The make up of the real estate market place was the very reason we began Homethinking. To us, using a Realtor was never an ‘if’ question but always a ‘who’ one. Data like the above continues to prove that theory. And also the reason why we are trying our best to point Hawaii home owners to at least the 1,354 who are active and hopefully the best 10-20 in their particular area.

We’re proud to unveil today RealEstatevoices, a social news site for real estate related stories. Social what? Simply, RealEstateVoices allows you to submit your favorite real-estate related articles, whether they be from a newspaper or a blog, and then other users vote on how interesting those stories are. The most popular ones make it to the front page.

The end result is a site that features the most interesting stories of the day. As an example of how you can add interesting content to your site, we’ve added a feed of the top 5 stories of the day to the left hand side of this blog.

Social news sites were pioneered by the likes of Digg and Reddit for technology news. While those sites are growing like crazy, there is no similar forum for real estate related news. We hope RealEstateVoices can be that forum.

We launched the site mainly to give authors a platform to promote their great work, and for us, as readers, to filter through the news that matters.

Be sure to register and start voting and submitting on stories now and then let us know where we can improve or if you have any suggestions for future improvements.

As you can see by the newly-added Stats ticker at the top of each page, we’ve been adding hundreds of thousands of listings every month now and are on track to have about two thirds of the nationals real estate covered soon and our goal of 85% by the end of the year is nearing (there is a theoretical limit to what we can do because some states like Texas don’t have real estate transactions as public record).

Lucky for you, most do. In recent weeks we’ve added comprehensive coverage of Hawaii, such that every Realtor’s current activity should now be showing. Similarly, Utah and Wisconsin, are also comprehensively covered.

You should see the relevance of search results begin to really increase in those states and more. If you’d like us to prioritize your state, just let us know in the comments.

In most exciting news, we’re almost done digesting the biggest state of all: Florida! Not quite but the majority of activity is now showing up on the site. Onwards and upwards!

Dearest readers,

It is my sad duty to inform you that I will no longer be posting to this blog. As of this week, I’ll be moving to another company, and so my antics (and internship) here at the Homethinking blog are at an end. I’ve definitely learned a lot from all of you, and if you’re reading this, I’ll assume that I wasn’t a total bore myself . So thanks to the people who supported my blogging efforts, and to any loyal readers (you know who you are) who I’ve picked up over the last couple of months. I hope you all continue to read and enjoy this blog, and wish you all the best!

Much Thanks,
Tony Floriani

[Ed's Note: And many thanks to you Tony, you showed a fresh approach to thinking and enlivened our blog so that now we have something to carry on. You'll also see some of the fruits of Tony's internship next week: stay tuned!]