What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/zillow-realtor-listing-war

by justhw • 11 years ago

251 180 11 years ago

xacaxulu• 11 years ago

It doesn't seem surprising that Zillow is pump-and-dumping in an already extremely bubbly market.

toomuchtodo5• 11 years ago

While you didn't provide any evidence, I agree with you. The housing market didn't "rebound" per se; investors soaked up all of the distressed inventory while previous owners fled to rentals. This masked the underlying fundamentals of the real estate market.

In some markets (SF, Texas), you have a lot of foreign (read: Chinese) money flowing in fleeing less than favorable jurisdictions. That should hold prices up there (as well as the other obvious reasons SF pricing will be held high; Texas is a new phenomenon).

Other markets though are (in my opinion) being held up by extremely low mortgage rates (<4%), and as soon as the Fed starts their march upward, you're going to see home prices come down. This doesn't even begin to address Boomers who are going to want to downsize to unlock their equity for retirement, flooding the market.

uptown• 11 years ago

I think xacaxulu was referring to Zillow, the company - not the housing market.

cwilkes2• 11 years ago

What annoys me about Zillow is that their "number of days on Zillow" is totally bogus. A house down the street was on the market for 2 months (at a highly inflated value). Time on Zillow? 2 weeks.

Maybe the time on Zillow is based on repricing or taking it off the market and putting it back on? Either way if you were looking for homes unless you kept track of an individual house you wouldn't be any wiser.

Also amusingly the house was a tear down, so the Zestimate was based on the old crappy house. Which I'm sure the builders loved -- it was half the price of the newly built home.

jonathankoren• 11 years ago

Well you're not buying the house to be built. You're buying the land and the crappy house. By your logic, you'd be paying for the new house twice. Once you when you pay the builders, and again when you just throw money at the seller of the tear down.

cwilkes2• 11 years ago

What I meant was that the sellers of house didn't like potential buyers saying "Your house is only worth half of that according to Zillow"

Of course this is an extreme example, I'm not sure how much people use Zestimates when negotiating the price of a house.

jonknee2• 11 years ago

It's also possible the Zillow listing didn't happen at the same time the home went on the market. It may have been on Realtor.com for 6 weeks before going onto Zillow.

Simulacra5• 11 years ago

I had this problem a lot. I really wish Zillow allowed you to block houses from your search, regardless of price changes, relistings, etc. I came across the same lot of sad, crappy, and overpriced homes over and over, because Zillow kept erroneously marking them as "just listed!"

ohitsdom5• 11 years ago

Zillow does have a "hide" feature, which I used extensively when house-hunting this year.

saidajigumi• 11 years ago

Mods: the title of this HN post is not the title of the linked article, which at this writing is the somewhat less clickbaity "What Zillow Doesn’t Want You To Know". In fact, the c&d part, while important, could almost be seen as a distraction from the larger issues of MLS listing access discussed in the article.

sambe• 11 years ago

What do you mean? The current title is factual, the actual title is clickbaity.

leroy_masochist• 11 years ago

The title may be clickbaity but it's true, and it's the biggest takeaway I'd have gathered from the post had I found it through other means.

jonknee2• 11 years ago

I like the HN title better, "What Zillow Doesn’t Want You To Know" is the definition of click-bait (it doesn't let you know what they don't want you to know!).

Simulacra5• 11 years ago

True, this is true, and technically against the rules. Post Title and Article Title must agree. The poster must be popular or someone affiliated with the mods, else they would've had their posting rights revoked by now.

dang4• 11 years ago

Post Title and Article Title must agree

No, the rule is "Please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkabit." That "unless" is critical. I wish we had some linguistic superglue to keep the two clauses stuck together—they always fall apart in shipping and the first bit is the only one people remember.

The poster must be popular or someone affiliated with the mods, else they would've had their posting rights revoked by now.

Don't assume omniscience! We miss things. Also, we don't revoke posting rights because of titles unless people break the rules a lot.

justhw• 11 years ago

I'm not popular nor affiliated with HN. I was actually linked to the article from PG's tweet https://twitter.com/paulg/status/651289253742161920.

The actual post's title was click-baity and the tweet title too long to submit to HN, so I truncated it.

dang4• 11 years ago

Ok, we reverted to the original title plus a representative phrase from the article.

Submitted title was "Zillow using cease-and-desists to kill posts about their listings". I don't think it broke the rule—more likely the submitter was trying to follow the rule by rewording something linkbaity. But since people don't agree about this we've taken another shot.

zorpner• 11 years ago

Ok, we reverted to the original title plus a representative phrase from the article.

It combines the clickbait of the original title with a specific industry term that people will have to look up separately! I genuinely don't understand how you could think that this is a better title for this post.

rgbrgb7• 11 years ago

One point that this analysis misses is that there's often a significant delay between the time a property hits the market (lists on MLS) and the time it hits aggregators like Zillow [0]. If you're looking at week old listings in hot markets like LA and SF, then you're looking at a batch of inventory that has already been picked through by savvier buyers.

For this reason, we always recommend that our buyers use a brokerage-quality data feed like ours [1] or Redfin's to monitor for new listings. If you have a reliable data feed and check what's new once a day, then you never miss out on the best properties -- much less stressful than clicking and re-clicking tiny icons on a map.

[0] http://www.inman.com/2014/02/14/los-angeles-claw-is-first-ml... [1]: https://www.openlistings.com/setup

matthewmcg• 11 years ago

Right, in our market and for our home search, Redfin was as fast as the broker's feed and the other sites were delayed several days. We went under contract on our house after seeing it on Redfin and before the listing even showed up on Zillow.

acveilleux• 11 years ago

That first link threw two interstitial ads at me back to back. The only thing more egregious they could have done would have been to make one of them an auto-play video.

debacle2• 11 years ago

Truth be told, if you're looking at day old listings on the MLS you're looking at a batch of inventory that has already been picked through by savvier buyers.

rgbrgb7• 11 years ago

Sure, but typically offers have 3 day expirations so you'll still have a window to go see the home and get an offer in if you like it. That said, the advice stands even if you're checking more than once a day -- only look at the new stuff (sort by listing date), and don't stress :).

MikeKusold• 11 years ago

When I was looking for a condo this past summer, I used RedFin. Since RedFin ties into MSLs (basically a list that all realtors use), I knew about listing before my agent could email me about them.

I highly recommend it, even if you have a non-RedFin agent.

ohitsdom5• 11 years ago

Zillow used to tie into MLSs but their access was cut in most areas (as described in the article) due to a dispute. Used to be an awesome resource, now it's a ghost town.

Would think it's only a matter of time before realtor.com shuts down similar sites like RedFin.

sharkweek• 11 years ago

Redfin is a brokerage and thus has full access to the MLS. I'm not sure anyone can shut off Redfin's access so easily because of this?

kelukelugames3• 11 years ago

I worked at Redfin. MLS is an agreement between all of the brokerages to share their listings. As long as Redfin has a real estate office in the region then they will have access to the local MLS.

On the other hand, Zillow requires agents to manually upload listings.

This is why Zillow is nationwide and Redfin is limited to a (growing) list of cities.

troisx2• 11 years ago

Realtor.com is more like Redfin in that it's owned by a third party, but it does have the blessing of Realtors to get all of the MLS information.

drewmeyers244• 11 years ago

"realtor.com shuts down similar sites like RedFin"

Realtor.com cannot shut down redfin

encoderer5• 11 years ago

I think you're misinformed. They used to get listings via list hub. But their new owner Rupert Murdoch chose to freeze out Zillow. Now z has forged direct mls deals for most of the markets. I'm curious where you're looking that it's a ghost town?

Realtor.com has no leverage over anybody.

viral007• 11 years ago

MLS --> Multiple Listing Service

pbreit• 11 years ago

I like how they speculate that where Zillow has more listings that it could be because Zillow has database or data scrubbing problems and not the other way around.

Pinatubo• 11 years ago

Realtor.com has access to the actual MLS, while Zillow does not.

Simulacra5• 11 years ago

When I was searching for a house I used 5 or so apps to do so. I found that Zillow had many, many listings that were very old, but were placed up top and the dates changed to make it look like it was just listed. However, checking the actual data for that listing shows that it was not pulled from the market and relisted, it was just Zillow constantly boosting really crappy houses that had been on the site for a long time.

In short, trust none of them, use multiple services, and keep looking constnatly. I found my house through my agents MLS system, which was about the time it showed up on the aggregates.

ycitera• 11 years ago

Another advice is to go drive around the neighborhood that you are targeting and find by-owner listings and such...

jpmattia2• 11 years ago

In short, trust none of them

To amplify: I don't think it's any accident that the 2005 housing fiasco happened in this industry. Terrible pricing information (gaps + timeliness), as well as terrible conflicts of interest (buyers brokers are incentivitized to make the buyer pay as much as possible) make me wonder how much longer these dinosaurs are going to continue to operate the same way.

zo1• 11 years ago

"make me wonder how much longer these dinosaurs are going to continue to operate the same way."

As long as the regulations are in place that protect them from market competition and innovation.

_delirium• 11 years ago

Do you mean the 2007-08 housing crash, or something else in 2005? If the 2008 one, it had a lot more to do with the financial side than the actual real-estate side, so changes in the real-estate sales process aren't likely to fix that problem. The "primary" dollar value involved in housing-price declines was significant but not really enough to cause an economy-destabilizing financial crisis. But the primary price declines in actual real-estate were multiplied many times over because the mortgages were all piled into heavily leveraged securities, priced based on risk models that turned out to be very inaccurate. That caused a crisis that ultimately involved dollar amounts greater than the total value of all the involved real estate.

A loose analogy: if you buy stock with 100:1 leverage, and the stock price declines 10%, you lose 1000% of your original investment. The big problem here wasn't really the 10% decline in stock values (significant but not catastrophic), rather the fact that you had 100:1 leveraged exposure.

Simulacra5• 11 years ago

Very good point.

at-fates-hands• 11 years ago

I had the same problem this summer.

I was working with an agent and I told him I saw several houses I wanted to look at on Zillow. Sent him the list and all but one was sold. He said the listings were in some cases as much as 6 months old.

After that, he just plugged me into the MLS listings directly and then every time a new house would show up, I'd know about it and could email him if I wanted to see it or not.

I totally agree about not trusting 3rd party apps. MLS, unfortunately is the only reliable source I know of.

Simulacra5• 11 years ago

My area (Atlanta) is a very hot market. I found my house on Cinco de Mayo, emailed my agent, and we were looking at it that afternoon. By 9 AM the next morning the owners had accepted our offer. The house had not been on the market 24 hours. If I had not jumped on that house the moment it hit The MLS system, I would not be sitting in the backyard enjoying it right now. :-)

patja• 11 years ago

Looking at the C&D letter, it seems that Zillow is saying any use of their site for commercial use is prohibited. Wouldn't that cover traditional print journalists doing a similar story, or any story that made use of information gleaned from Zillow?

Why didn't Bloomberg receive a C&D for this story which says "Bloomberg used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Zillow Group Inc. and Bankrate.com to quantify how much more money millennials would need to earn each year to afford a home in the largest U.S. cities." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/these-are-...

I guess nobody except the EFF really wants to take on this type of fight.

declan• 11 years ago

[a] Journalists using Zillow's site would likely be viewed as personal or editorial use, not commercial use.

[b] Bloomberg probably worked with Zillow.

[c] I'm not sure EFF would be interested in this. It's pretty standard TOS language, and when EFF did get involved in the Craigslist/Padmapper case, it was (correctly) interested in stomping on idiotic CFAA theories of liability and the exclusive license point. If Zillow tried to strongarm journalists, that would be a different story, but they have not done so as far as I know.

Background: I was a journalist before founding https://recent.io/ and would often get approached by companies like Zillow to write about what their data showed.

ohitsdom5• 11 years ago

So as not to violate Zillow.com’s terms of service we have done so manually (hence the limited number of cities).

Can sites have a legally enforceable terms of service that ban automated access? I understand if the automated traffic is high and impacts server performance and cost, but they can ban it even if it's limited? I understand sites need to protect their servers, but if it's publicly accessible and the traffic is reasonable, I'm surprised it's legally enforceable to ban it. And as shown by this blog post, it still can be done manually so the ban isn't very effective.

tyre• 11 years ago

Yes. Sites can ban traffic for any reason they choose. You're using their servers and they have the right to determine how those servers are accessed.

They don't need a specific "right" to control their servers. Likewise, users on the internet have no "right" to access anything.

paulgb• 11 years ago

Likewise, users on the internet have no "right" to access anything

Yes, they have a right to block you, but that doesn't imply that a terms of service which prohibits automated access is legally enforceable. A TOS is not a contract so you can't put whatever you want in there and expect a court to honor it. To my knowledge US courts have not decided ohitsdom's question, but I could be wrong.

However, if the site makes an attempt to block you from automatic access (even an IP block) and you circumvent it, you're in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. See Craigslist v. 3Taps. (disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer)

jrochkind12• 11 years ago

I'm not sure sites can sue journalists for investigating them. Or rather, I don't think they will win. In the U.S., anyone can file a suit against anyone, merited or not, of course. Sometimes in cases like this defendents can get damages from plaintifs under anti-SLAPP laws. But it's still gonna be a long road to get there, if your opponent has the bucks for it and you don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

rconti2• 11 years ago

A better question: Can they back up a Cease and Desist on a blog post based on data you've already gathered, through automated access that may have broken the TOU?

staunch• 11 years ago

I lost all faith in Zillow when I realized their estimate was just a number based on their guess at a price per square foot times the square footage...

A properties historical "Zestimate" changes if you update the current square footage. Whatajoke!

nkozyra• 11 years ago

I somehow doubt it's that simplistic, though I imagine price/sqft is a heavy factor. And it should be, really. If you can find sales in the neighborhood and compute their price/sqft, there should be some relationship, modifiable by other features (pool, central air, etc.)

Case in point, my house's Zestimate comes out to $105/sqft, and my neighbor's comes in at $100/sqft. A neighbor without a pool's house comes in at $96/sqft. That would indicate that their "guess" is where the magic is - a price per square foot is computed based on factors that are not readily apparent.

encoderer5• 11 years ago

It's most certainly not that simple. Valuation models have been around a long time and none are that simple. Perhaps it considers updates to be corrections to incorrect data. In which case recalculating the history seems reasonable to me

justinzollars2• 11 years ago

As a recent home buyer, I found Zillow information to be at least one week out of date. In most cities, that probably isn't a big deal; however in the San Francisco Bay area I found the site pretty useless because all of the homes I was interested in, I was unable to see because they were usually off the market, pending or very late in the process where I was unable to visit the home.

I ended up using a Sotheby's owned site, with accurate data.

Additionally, their Zillow Estimate information is at least 20% low in SF, even by admission of their own analysis: http://www.zillow.com/zestimate/#acc

The benefit I should mention is that I met a great Realtor through their ads, which he admitted to spending thousands of dollars on per month on.

beambot• 11 years ago

To be fair... in a lot of SFBA locales, homes are selling for 20% over list anyway. So even sellers (and agents) are having a hard time pricing the demand.

justinzollars2• 11 years ago

my realtor was able to estimate the price better than Zillow, I feel like they need a better machine learning model to accommodate different markets. (Denver, SF and Ohio are very different places)

batbomb• 11 years ago

Realtors are often encouraging sellers to list below market rate to encourage bidding wars. When you have to go through several of these before you can get into a house, it causes quite a frenzy in people. This isn't the norm across the country.

In other markets, realtors usually have clients list houses above market value with the expectation the sellers will come down.

rgbrgb7• 11 years ago

I think that's a quirk of how this type of auction pricing works more than anything. If everything in the area is going for 20% over asking, then posting a listing for what you actually think it's going to go for will make it look 20% more expensive than comparable properties, so you may get less offers. So there's this strange feedback loop that happens in local pricing, magnifying the list vs sold price disparity.

kelukelugames3• 11 years ago

Redfin is not even listed. Snubbed.

blue11• 11 years ago

Personally, I've always found Redfin so much better than Zillow in the areas that are covered by Redfin (better data, better UI, overall better user experience). Having lived only in such areas for more than 10 years, I was surprised a few years ago to discover that Zillow was the industry leader.

jasode• 11 years ago

FYI: To add some color to the article, here's more information about the different relationships of MLS with Zillow and Redfin from a former Redfin intern (posted July 28, 2014):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096912

arenaninja• 11 years ago

That's a very interesting read. So that means that in my market (Houston, TX), Redfin actually has all the listings? I wasn't aware of that. har.com usually has 100% coverage and some nifty features, but the mobile app is pretty awful

CodyReichert2• 11 years ago

In a very simplified nutshell - yes. HAR is the MLS in Houston, and Redfin is a brokerage in Houston. That allows Redfin to sign an agreement with HAR to access their listing data and show it publicly. HAR will have 100% of listings from participating brokerages (non-participating brokers are a very, very small percentage). Now, as long as Redfin follows some rules they'll have no problem keeping up to date listings (after all, getting them directly from the MLS is the best source you'll get).

Zillow, on the other hand, has an agreement with some MLS's, but for the most part they rely on alternative methods of getting listing data. The only reason that have any (IMO) is because they have consumers looking for property there - which gives the Realtor incentive to upload/update their listings. So as everyone else is saying, Zillow can fall out of date - whereas Redfin can actually get penalized for being out of date.

alyx• 11 years ago

Anybody know of any good sources of MLS data for programmatic consumption (even if not free)?

JustSomeNobody2• 11 years ago

I bet Zillow would love to know, too!

bgutierrez• 11 years ago

Yep. If it were easy to have the MLS data, they would have it. (Disclaimer: work for Trulia/Zillow on exactly this problem.)

troisx2• 11 years ago

You could try Listhub, but they charge. Any other source would most likely not be legally obtained.

imroot2• 11 years ago

Listhub has its own problems -- specifically when MLS'es update data, Listhub has to ensure that all of the applications that use its data are updating their information as well. Listhub is also one HUGE xml file that is a pain in the ass to process. (We explored with a python based parser that chunked the file up into smaller listings and then imported that into Elasticsearch; but ultimately gave up and resorted into a C based parser that threw everything into MongoDB.

CodyReichert2• 11 years ago

Without having direct access to an MLS (ie, being a brokerage), you're pretty much SOL for getting access to decent listing data.

If you DO have access, and you're looking for a solution to use the MLS data via a more simple API - SimplyRETS (https://simplyrets.com) can help with that :) (Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder).

Past that, ListHub, as another user mentioned, is probably the best bet if you're not a member of an MLS - but it's not free.

garethsprice• 11 years ago

There aren't any. All the regional MLS' are separate entities and make it as annoying/difficult/expensive as possible to access their data programatically. Think having to be a licensed broker, then paying for access to download a daily CSV with all active listings.

Who'd have thought that an industry of middlemen would make it hard to reduce friction in their marketplace...

(Source: building websites with MLS integration for real estate offices)

ericd• 11 years ago

There are, ListHub, unless you don't think it qualifies as a "good" source? We've been happy enough with it, but we're only on the rentals side of things.

drewmeyers244• 11 years ago

See this post I wrote a few years ago: http://geekestateblog.com/real-estate-tech-question-getting-...

Still accurate today.

debacle2• 11 years ago

The MLS system is a disaster. Think Alien 2 levels of mucousy, dark and dank ventilation shafts. Zillow has never not worked really well for all of my uses (shopping, price checking, looking at neighborhoods, etc), and it's done so in a way that no other realty website ever has.

The reality is that realtors have a huge vested interest in making it more difficult to shop for a house and generally rely on information asymmetry in a massive way. Zillow is a massive blow to that barrier and I hope they succeed.

Disclaimer: I've worked for a handful of realtors and with several MLS systems in the past.

JustSomeNobody2• 11 years ago

The article's conclusion left me feeling kinda meh. The article made me feel like it was leading up to something and then "... is destined for an uphill battle.". Well, yeah? Anytime you base your business on someone else's data, you run the risk of the carpet getting yanked out from underneath you.

meritt3• 11 years ago

Zillow has substantially mitigated the loss of Move.com/Realtor.com by forging direct relationships with numerous MLSs since the cutoff in April.

Since January, more than 300 MLSs have signed agreements to send listings directly to Zillow and Trulia, providing their members access to the largest audience of home shoppers on mobile and Web 1.

http://investors.zillowgroup.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID...

The sampling methods used by the author are extremely poor. Miami, FL on Zillow.com and Realtor.com are substantially different areas. Just do a search yourself and look at the map. Realtor appears to be using the metro while Zillow's site defaults to "Miami" only. They need to extract 100% inventory and use exactly the same geofenced boundaries if you want actual 1:1 comparison. Their conclusion may very well be correct but the data sure as hell does not support it.

If you want to criticize Zillow, there are far easier methods than this one. How about that Trulia acquired MarketLeader for $355M (Apr 13), Zillow acquired Trulia for $2.5B (Feb 15), and Zillow just sold MarketLeader for $23M. How much of Trulia's $2.5B pricetag was in recognition of Market Leader's "value"? I'm guessing we'll see at least $200-250M or so drop from Zillow's goodwill ($1.8B as of 6/30/15) on their balance sheet for Q3-15.

smackfu• 11 years ago

The problem is that if the MLS that covers your area didn't make a deal with Zillow, the overall stats don't really matter. Zillow will be useless for house shopping.

uxp2• 11 years ago

I bought a house in Salt Lake City in June. Zillow (and Trulia, etc.) have piss-poor integration in this market, which left our house marked available for weeks after our closing date. I had to chase someone away who was snooping around my back yard 6 weeks after moving in because they thought the home was unoccupied (we hadn't moved in because I was remodeling parts of the basement).

They may provide a better UI than the abysmal MLS sites your agent recommends, but they don't do much more in (as the article suggests) the +60% of markets they don't have listing contracts with.

ramenmeal• 11 years ago

They can still get listings from brokerages.

Shu_snafu2• 11 years ago

BuildZoom just updated their numbers to county vs county comparisons that get around the problem of inconsistent geographical boundaries in some cities.

The story remains.

meritt3• 11 years ago

BuildZoom is utterly incompetent. Take a look at this: http://imgur.com/a/X2ajc

Notice how Baltimore County, MD includes Baltimore + the county on Realtor.com (8,579 properties) and Baltimore County, MD on Zillow does not include the city itself? 4523 vs 8579 is indeed ~52.7%.

However when you include Baltimore, MD on Zillow too? An additioanl +4211 listings.

(4523 + 4211) = 8734 VS 8579.

Seriously BuildZoom. Get your shit together. You are still not comparing the same areas!

bcg12• 11 years ago

Sold my house this summer. My wife listed the house on Zillow and took nice looking pictures and put a good description. We also paid a real estate agent $300 to list our house in the MLS (and we would handle the rest of the sale). Once our listing was in the MLS Zillow brought in the crapified compressed JPEGs from the MLS feed and overwrote our description etc, and locked us out from further edits. Fail.

Zillow is going about this all wrong... their advantage is that they aren't the MLS system, they are the best positioned to be an alternative to the NAR cartel. If anything THEY should have agents in every town who will put your house into the MLS for you for $300, as well as allow enhanced listing on their site at the same time... they might actually make some money that way, and also it would solve their MLS problem. Instead they seem to want to beg the cartel for a seat at the table. Pretty sad.

gdubs• 11 years ago

In the end, do you know whether Zillow or the MLS listing led to the sale?

rdtsc• 11 years ago

NAR is a strong lobby, they will fight tooth and nail to keep their position. Million + realtors are betting their livelihood on having a hold on buying and selling homes, and are not going to let that go easily.

Here is allegedly their letter to the president in 2011 (not related to Zillow but basically how they can throw their weight behind issues):

http://www.ksefocus.com/billdatabase/clientfiles/172/3/1359....

At some point perhaps they might strike a deal work together if they can't' see a way get rid of Zillow.

aggieben6• 11 years ago

There will never be a deal. NAR's prosperity absolutely depends on their exclusive control of market access. Professional licensing is the single reason why this market sucks donkey balls.

This is also why I would heartily support a total deregulation of real-estate-related professional licensing. It simply isn't that complex a task, and it doesn't really require much training to be competent at most transactions - and particularly the one kind of transaction you want to do. Anyone and everyone should be legally allowed to represent someone in selling or buying real estate.

In that world, the NAR continues to exist as a sort of "credibility certification", which I would fully support. But they shouldn't get to use the government to keep competitors out.

toomuchtodo5• 11 years ago

You just listed all the reasons Redfin (https://www.redfin.com) is killing it. Their value proposition is that their agents aren't paid on commission, they're paid on your satisfaction. Their website is also very data-intensive compared to MLS sites (which create information asymmetry between buyers, sellers, and brokers due to how they're setup).

encoderer5• 11 years ago

Otoh, are the very best agents going to work for rf and make less money? Redfin looks like modern KW to me. Most great agents don't want to undersell their own industry. And while there are many markets where a mediocre agent will do, I wouldn't take that chance in sf, la, Nyc, Miami, etc

pnathan• 11 years ago

Redfin is a good setup.

novaleaf2• 11 years ago

i bought a house on redfin (my 2nd house) and if you are willing to put in time to scout out your house, it's a good cash savings. (which, probably you should, since you are going to live in it!)

I ended up touring maybe 15 houses. Reasonably sure that the house we got was the best deal out of them too.

rgbrgb7• 11 years ago

Congrats on the sale!

You could argue that "Zillow is going about this all wrong" if their goal was trying to improve the process of buying and selling homes or if they were trying to make it more affordable to buy a home. What you have to realize is that they have a business that's working very well within the real estate status quo: agents pay them money for ads to get leads, agents who are able to convert leads make a ton from commission, the cycle continues. A public company with an established business model (that prints money!) is not going to pivot and suddenly compete with their well-paying customers.

However, I totally agree that there's a huge opportunity to improve the buying/selling experience and lower transaction costs. My team is working extremely hard on that problem.

Edit: I should note that Zillow has done tremendous work on improving the home shopping process and I'm definitely not trying to knock them on that. They and their competitors have brought the shopping process online and given consumers access to listing info that was previously only available to agents. The actual offer/transaction (the buy button) is the extremely complicated piece we're trying to tackle. It just so happens that in tackling that piece and becoming a brokerage, we get access to a high quality broker-only data feed.

bcg12• 11 years ago

You make excellent points. I guess what I meant was that Zillow's model _should be_ to improve the process and to make it cheaper. Maybe 6%-7% commission is still appropriate for high-end properties that only have a limited pool of potential buyers (that's not my world, I don't really know) but for average homes in 2015, it is an anachronism left over from a time when buyers and sellers couldn't do a lot of the legwork themselves online. Its not hard to see that there is a ton of money to be made closing that gap.

Just perused your website and from what I read your company certainly seems to have the right idea. As it happens our buyer did end up having an agent and we paid that agent a 3% commission, so from what I read your system definitely could have worked in our transaction and saved our buyer some dough. The $300 we paid the agent to get us into the MLS truly paid off though... we saved literally thousands. Looking back I could pay triple that and it would be a no-brainer. Just something to consider - toss in some boilerplate forms or instruction guides or whatever and it could be a great product with excellent margins. I bet theres a bunch of tech savvy go getter millenials that would get licensed to do the local work necessary. Anyhow, I'm really glad to see someone doing what you're doing, best of luck to you... I truly hope you win

takee• 11 years ago

Wait a sec. When you say you paid the realtor $300 to put the listing on MLS, do you mean that you used the realtor only for that service? Or was this in addition to the other services that a typical realtor generally provides?

I am trying to understand how easy it is to go about selling your house on your own using zillow etc, while saving on the sale commission etc that a realtor would have made otherwise.

tacon• 11 years ago

Yes, that is about right for a bare MLS listing and the agent withdraws from the sale. How to find such brokers? Just attend one of your local real estate investor meetings and they will tell you who can help. Such brokers might even be at the meeting.

This started to irritate the brokers in Texas a few years ago, so TAR got the legislature to change the real estate licensing statute to include a line about "minimum professional services". Oddly, that hasn't really slowed down this practice as far as I can see. The shadow broker does need to answer calls from other brokers/agents, as they can get quite testy when they find themselves talking directly to the seller. But they soon hand over the contact and move on.

imroot2• 11 years ago

Getting and keeping real estate listings up to date is a big pain in the ass. There's no standardized residential listing data, and while you might get RETS feeds or data dumps from the MLS nightly, it's still on you to ensure that all of the information is parsed correctly and displayed in accordance to the MLS'es standards (or risk being cut off).

Often, MLSes have terms in their contract that say that regardless of the source, that their information must be the canonical source for information in some cities -- which is a huge problem with dealing with REO'ed (Real Estate Owned) properties and the banks that want to sell them.

I know of a startup that eventually just resorted to scraping realtor.com (and I'm sure that they're still doing it to this day) instead of dealing with the various headaches of managing the contracts with the MLSes and RETS providers.

lfender6445• 11 years ago

aren't they still at risk of displaying mls data in a non-canonical format?

uxp2• 11 years ago

If they're scraping the site, then I'd assume they backed out of their contract for the MLS dumps and thus don't have a contract that says they have to display data in any format.

jerrysievert• 11 years ago

you gave me flashbacks thinking about "RETS", and how many times, it was a XML formatted CSV.

thankfully, someone else was managing the contracts, and we had built a fairly decent feed management system.

i still have nightmares, though.

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

It's a nightmare. I used to work for one of the industry dinosaurs; they have an MLS team that was as large as their development team. They pull data from over 600 MLSes, with different requirements for each. Managing 600 business contacts is a big pain, then there are different data conventions that change without notice. They have had a long-standing arrangement to feed data to Trulia too.

The word is most MLSes use CDNs, so scraping might not be the best way.

jsc123• 11 years ago

which dinosaur?

hoka• 11 years ago

yep, and even something as 'simple' as images is difficult. If an image gets removed from the feed, it typically must be removed from the listing page. Tons of little things like this make the data incredibly prickly.

chrisan• 11 years ago

Supposedly in January there will be a new "standard" so vendors can stop mapping individual MLS fields

http://www.realtor.org/policy/mls-policy/real-estate-transac...

lobster_johnson• 11 years ago

Link doesn't work -- do you have another source?

gshx2• 11 years ago

If Zillow can solve the "problem" of putting all the docs (disclosures, inspections, offer docs, title docs later on, etc) up with the listing along with making a network of handymen (to help out with prettifying a house for sale), most buyers and sellers will be happy to pay them 0.5-1% instead of the seller having to pay the agents 4-5%. There's generally not a whole lot of work in buying or selling a house including agents doing events like open houses and helping with "discovery" and the buyer-seller matching problem. The offer process itself is also quite simple and can be done online. That said, the one benefit of an open house/tour hosted by a neutral party, is that it lets potential buyers easily assess a house without having a biased seller in attendance. This can also be managed and does not really require a real estate agent. Zillow and similar services like Trulia have a fantastic market opportunity in front of them.

w46• 11 years ago

This is all a great idea - but state laws wouldn't permit it (I work in the industry).

Most of the features you described, and the fee structure associated with them, would be in violation of real estate licensing laws. Hence why no one has provided a modern, competitive alternative to real estate brokers: you simply can't under the current regulatory regime. Otherwise, what you've described would almost certainly already exist.

jpmattia2• 11 years ago

This is all a great idea - but state laws wouldn't permit it (I work in the industry).

Uber, AirBnB redux. Provide a service that people want more than one built on cronyism-type relations between entrenched industry and gov't, and the change happens even with the existing law base.

It's not like it's some secret as to how the laws got there in the first place.

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

Depends on the local regulations, but yes, real estate has gone through quite a bit of regulatory capture. Might be possible to do an end-run via the same mechanisms that allow "for sale by owner".

rgbrgb7• 11 years ago

In most places there's no real estate licensing law against the fee structure in question as long as they registered as a brokerage [0]. As an agent you can discount your fee as much as you want. At Open Listings we're actually operating a very similar deep discount model in California -- you find the home, make an offer on our site [1], then we have a digitally-enhanced agent team for advice, negotiation, and managing the close. The premise is that all of these great listing apps make house hunting (most of the work) accessible to non-Realtors but there's still some useful expertise we can provide in closing the deal, representing our buyer's interests, and making sure all the paperwork is in order.

Update: added sources

[0] http://www.justice.gov/atr/rebates-make-buying-home-less-exp... [1]: https://www.openlistings.com/offers/new

codingdave2• 11 years ago

Sure you can. I can quit claim my house over to you with no regulations impacting me at all.

There are certainly valid reasons not to do so. Not the least of which being that if the person quitting the title claims didn't actually hold a clear title, then no ownership will actually transfer. But if you think that it is illegal to bypass the processes, then you are too caught up in the processes.

codingdave2• 11 years ago

This has been discussed ad nauseum by insiders to the industry for close to 10 years now. Nobody has yet pulled it all together, not for lack of trying, but because of the one major roadblock that you mentioned -- actually going to look at homes. Everything else can be put online, and most of it already is online in one form another, just not always through a single vendor.

I know I'm simply expanding on what you already said, but ... one way or another, you have to go look at a house that you intend to buy. And you don't want the seller there. So you need someone who is trusted by the seller to let you in.

If you can put together a service whereby someone other than real estate agents can do that task, then maybe you could gain traction on everything else.

But I have not talked to anybody who is interested in the work of automating everything else until the problem of physical access to homes is solved, because there isn't money in paperwork. The money in real estate comes from two sources - commissions and mortgages. And most marketing plans depend on reducing commissions, not just redirecting them to a new recipient. So it makes much more business sense to ignore the paperwork that agents normally do, and focus on the mortgage process than the inspection, title, closing process.

After all, that paperwork isn't a pain point for buyers or sellers - they don't do it anyway. The agents do. So the attitude becomes one of, "Who cares if an online service automates the paperwork, when you still needed that agent to open the door? Let the agent go do the paperwork, and at least do some work to earn their stupid commission."

kanzure• 11 years ago

I know I'm simply expanding on what you already said, but ... one way or another, you have to go look at a house that you intend to buy. And you don't want the seller there. So you need someone who is trusted by the seller to let you in.

So... I am not familiar with this problem. But what about drones to fly inside and snap pics?

nickgrosvenor• 11 years ago

Redfin is more accurate than zillow, They list new listings much faster and the interface is better. I'm in LA and redfin is superior.

rhc2104• 11 years ago

Redfin is pretty different from Zillow, since they directly sell homes. So they will have better/faster listings directly from the MLS.

But they only have listings for the regions where they sell homes, so they have nothing for most of the United States.

encoderer5• 11 years ago

Zillow has had direct mls feeds in most markets since the spring.

Edit: most markets by aggregate size. That is, they've signed the largest mls'.

Bartkusa• 11 years ago

Most Americans currently live in areas served by Redfin.

Most of the US is very sparsely populated, so I don't think that's a good measure of coverage. Rural areas and smaller cities deserve service, too, but that'll come with time.

(I'm currently employed by Redfin.)

ryanSrich• 11 years ago

Semi related. In Portland every single house on Zillow was actually already sold. I'm not exactly sure how this works, but it was very annoying. The only app that would show houses that were actually still on the market was Redfin. Has anyone else in a different area experienced this?

cyrillevincey• 11 years ago

Post deleted upon Zillow's request?

borkabrak• 11 years ago

..aand it's gone.

I just got:

"–This post has been temporarily removed at the request of Zillow. We are collaborating with them to write a more complete version of the story, and will have an updated version posted on October 7th.–"

Nothing creepy about that. Certainly doesn't leave me feeling that whatever it is the article said about Zillow apparently hit them pretty close to home.

jbb555• 11 years ago

Yeah this has made me MUCH more interested in what the article said.

zaius• 11 years ago

Archive.org has the original (for the time being) - https://web.archive.org/web/20151006173818/https://www.build...

inanutshellus• 11 years ago

Looks like it has even been taken down from Archive.org!

deraker• 11 years ago

Looks like this article has been taken down by the authors now due to a cease and desist:

http://www.inman.com/2015/10/06/buildzoom-calls-zillow-out-f...

Article is gone from original source too... Obviously nothing to see here folks ;)

elec3647• 11 years ago

Article was taken down. Does anyone have it archived/alternative link?

What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap

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