Sun 5 Mar 2006
Squeezed?
Posted by Marlow Harris under Real Estate
Today’s Seattle Times has a front page real estate article entitled “Agents Feel Squeezed by New Sites”.
Upon reading the entire article, the headline seems to have nothing to do with the story, but does make a cute tag for the (also unrelated) accompanying illustration. And it does make for “compelling” journalism.
Like other blogs have noted, hits go up when we write about Zillow, so I guess in order to keep my traffic up, I’ll have to do that again.
Zillow is a new real estate portal, now making money by selling advertising. What’s “threatening” about that? Good luck to them.
Redfin is an older real estate brokerage founded in October 2002. The company launched its real estate search site in October 2004 and they raised its first venture capital in September 2005.
They’re a little more “threatening”, but I’d have to say its because of their historical hostility to real estate agents rather than their current business model.
March 5th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I find this amazing! Are you sure they aren’t reporting sales in an abnormal way? I know of a friend of a friend who put in an offer with them and was pleased with the service, but I don’t know if he closed. Not one sale! Incredible!
I don’t think there is a huge pent up demand for their services, so that might explain the slow initial start. They might yet build a business model out of it, though.
Keep up the great sleuthing.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Galen,
Closed sales are reported by the listing office and, as of 10:00AM this morning, there have been no reported closed sales where the selling office was Redfin. As I mentioned, there may be something in escrow right now, but no single-family homes or condo’s sold and closed. Management has been exhuberant on the Redfin blog, but no results as of yet. But I’ll keep checking and post results.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:53 am
Yesterday I was working on financing for a property owned by a client. This gentleman was seven months in arrears on his mortgage. In order to bail out with a sub prime lender his property needed to be worth a certain amount of money for him to qualify.
I tried to help him, but the numbers were coming up short. To my surprise the lender called me to tell me there was no problem with the loan. He had looked up comparable properties on Zillow (sp?) and there was plenty of equity.
Maybe there is an upside?
What I know is that as this fad moves through our industry attorneys will have plenty of business.