Wed 11 Mar 2009
Virtual Realty: The Online Real Estate Detente
Posted by Marlow Harris under Real Estate, Tech
[3] Comments
How did Seattle become the home for technology companies that want to help you buy or sell … a home? Sure, it’s where Microsoft and Amazon are based, and it’s a well-educated, tech-savvy community, and the University of Washington churns out more than its share of software engineers.
But why real estate?
A lot of really smart people read that real estate was a multi-billion dollar business and they wanted a piece of the pie. They figured that even a tiny slice was probably worth millions.
But what they didn’t understand was that the oft-quoted “multi-billion dollar business” was based on the total value of all of the real estate involved, not how much money one could make from buying or selling it, which was just a small percentage of each sale.
A big miscalculation.
Virtual Realty: The Online Real Estate Detente
March 11th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Love how ZipRealty tried to insert themselves into the story through the comments.
Remind me, what part of Seattle does Zip hail from? And what “continuous innovation” are they adding to the equation?
Me too! Me too!
March 12th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
I am amazed at how many companies want to offer me first page on Google each week! I get calls and emails regularly.
My own take is that there is a mini-bubble building in the SEO world with so-called experts trying to win your business.
Separately, I was thinking lately of how I rarely get a auto-generated home feedback email now. I am guessing that while all these companies want to offer services to Realtors, the Realtors are realizing that home values are much lower now, commissions will be much lower now, and we will have to do more deals than ever.
So, we are pulling way back on the extra technologies and tools that don’t really matter anyway.
March 17th, 2009 at 8:23 am
Well, like Warren Buffet says, there are only a few sectors I understand…its possible the tech savvy folks in Seattle don’t understand real estate investments that well.
On a related note, you can see this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldJUgvguAQg
Its by Peter Vekselman, a real estate investor in my network, who explains how Real Estate Agents can benefit by working with Real Estate Investors in the current economy where investors are more active than retail buyers.