Home Equity Paradox

February 7, 2007

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: [...]

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Faces to Names

February 7, 2007

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 [...]

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Real Estate Agent Bubble

November 28, 2006

[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: [...]

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Buy Side Reviews

November 10, 2006

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 [...]

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Our New Search Bar

November 2, 2006

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 [...]

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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

October 30, 2006

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.

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What Would You Say You Do Every Day?

October 20, 2006

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 [...]

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RealEstateVoices Launched

September 27, 2006

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 [...]

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Homethinking Index

September 21, 2006

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 [...]

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Farewell Address

September 21, 2006

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 [...]

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