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!]

At Homethinking, there are two ways in which we try to rank Realtors: based on what they have done (through objectively monitoring real estate data) and secondly, what customers have said about the job they did. So what do home owners say about their Realtors? We decided to take a look based on the few thousand reviews consumers have filled out on Homethinking so far this year. In our reviews there are six categories where a Realtor can get up to a 5 star rating, and on average, the Realtors have done very well:

One thing that you might have notice however, is that as a group, they lag slightly behind in one aspect of their business: their web sites.

We’ve found that people rank the effectiveness of the Realtor’s web site consistently lower than the other categories. Despite the fact that real estate advertising is moving rapidly from print space to online, many Realtors still seem to struggle with how to make an effective website (or don’t have a site at all!).

An effective website is not a question of cost. Web hosting has fallen to less than a monthly coffee allowance and free software like those that blogs run on can offer a surprisingly robust way to manage a web sites content. A great example is Derek Rey of San Francisco, who uses blog software as a great compliment to his web site. The cause is more likely the complexity of setup and the daunting nature of the task for those who have not grown up with technology.

So where to go? One great resource for technology suggestions is The Future of Real Estate Marketing and Inman News, who cover the real estate technology space very well.

One thing is for sure though, as the effectiveness of a web site becomes an increasingly important part of the Homeowner’s decision, those without an effective online presence will be left aside for one who does.

More of my weekly favorites!

United States housing bubble - Wikipedia - Thanks to keen observations by Matrix, I found this in-depth explanation of the housing bubble phenomenon that seems to be on everyone’s minds these days.
Beginning the Home Buying Process - Rain City Guide - I can’t believe no one thought of this sooner! I know I’ll be tuning in for more updates on this step-by-step walkthrough of the home-buying process.
Census Data Trends - Zillow Blog - These guys really love their statistics! Great insights about recently released census data.
Is the MLS Totally Clueless? - Trulia Blog - Some very intelligent commentary on finding common ground between FSBO’s and MLS.
Housing Market: Skateboarding Through Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics and Ancedotes - Matrix - When everyone’s got a different story to tell, who can you trust to tell it right?
Real Estate Fatwa - 360 digest - If you’re in the know, you might have realized how tough it can be for a Muslim to work in real estate without being involved in interest-based loans. Here’s how they do it!

At Homethinking, we’re dedicated to helping people find the right Realtor to sell their home with. We think that a good Realtor can provide definite benefits for anyone thinking about selling their most valuable asset. But while we’re of the opinion that real estate professionals are well worth their commissions, not everyone agrees with us. FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) are certainly a valid slice of the market, and so I decided to find out just how many there were. Of course, this wasn’t as easy as it might sound, so I had to settle for stats on currently available FSBOs from one of the largest FSBO sites on the web, ForSaleByOwner.com, coupled with projected census data for 2005.

According to the data I collected on 9/13/06, there are 38,721 properties listed in the United States on ForSaleByOwner.com. The states with highest concentration of FSBOs (in terms of people per FSBO) were:

And the States with the lowest rate of FSBOs in the country were:

There are some caveats with the data. The number of FSBO listings traditionally is 15-20% of the market. According to realtor.com there are 3 million listings with a Realtor representing them. So forsalebyowner.com’s 40,000 are clearly not representative of the whole market. And their sales team might be better in some areas than others causing a skew towards those states where they are better or worse.

But still the question of why a home owner in Michigan is over ten times more likely than his compatriot in Hawaii to go the FSBO route is an intriguing one. Perhaps even more intriguing, California - with Silicon Valley at its heart - features so low on the list. So the technology savvy of its inhabitants, it seems, does not necessarily effect the decision to engage a Realtor when selling their home.

If you’re state isn’t on the list, just leave a comment and we’ll be sure to post it.

-Tony Floriani

The new Carnival of Real Estate is now up at the Real Estate Tomato. We’re not in there this week (we were busy with our relaunch), but there are some fantastic links that everyone should check out. Thanks Tomato, great pics for the top 12!