Funny enough, something very similar to this was the impetus for me starting Estately. Early on, we had a bunch of wild spatial queries that would let you even filter by distance to specific transit line stops: http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/near_tra...

When we ran stats on what searches people were actually doing, we found that very few consumers actually used these kinds of filters. We found we had a small and passionate audience for specific geo features and a much larger audience for "great site to search for and learn about homes." It took me way to long to come to terms with this. We still have walkscore search and distance from a neighborhood, school or address search even though they are very little used.

Why wasn't it popular? My guess is it's 80% because the market was small and 20% because we didn't present them right.

The thing about real estate - especially in the current market - is there just are few enough homes for sale that meet your price / proximity to work / school / bedrooms criteria that most people want to just glance at all of them and rule them in or out. Additionally, most people start with a bunch of "rules," then they bend one, change their mind on another and finally compromise on the last one.

The typical home search starts so clean, but dissolves over time as you tour houses, learn more about what you do and don't like and find something that works.

It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it's likely that agents aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Building them tools that allow them to make better recommendations to their clients or to find better buyers might be something really interesting.

For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".

So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?

We monitor Estately's feeds very closely. When we do head-to-head testing, we're ahead of Redfin with updates over 50% of the time.

I'll email you for follow up. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

To answer your question about Zillow, Trulia and Redfin: Zillow and Trulia are media portals; Redfin is a brokerage, started by software entrepreneurs but with our own real estate agents to represent people buying or selling a home.

As a brokerage, Redfin has complete access to the local Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) used by brokerages and their agents to list homes and record sales. In addition to MLS listings, Redfin shows for-sale-by-owner listings, foreclosures, and new-construction listings, but most of the listings on our site come from MLSs.

There are hundreds of local MLSs, each with different data publication rules, but nearly all MLSs only accept as members brokerages willing to contribute their own listings to the MLS database. As a result, Redfin has the most complete and most timely listing data of any major real estate app or website, but only covers about half the U.S.

Zillow and Trulia get some listing data through services that syndicate a selection of listings from the MLS and some by asking real estate agents to upload their listings. A variety of studies, sponsored by Realtor.com, ZipRealty and Redfin, have shown that Redfin and other MLS-powered sites have significantly more agent-listed homes than the portals; Redfin also gets data much sooner, both to show new listings and to recognize when old listings have been sold.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/on-big-real-estate-...

Hope this helps to answer your question! Best, Glenn

No association, just a huge fan.

A few years ago, I shopped for a home in an area that Redfin serviced. The data they had and the way the presented it made it easy to find the house we wanted, and figure out what we would be comfortable paying for it.

A few weeks ago we closed on a house in a non-Redfin serviced area. The shopping experience was night and day. Here, none of the local MLS databases, or Zillow or Truila, list things like past purchase prices, and even generally hide past listing prices. I'm not sure if that has to do with local regulations here (ID) vs. the last place we tried to buy a house (CA), or if it's something specific to Redfin.

Either way, buying a house in a non-Redfin service area involved quite a few extra trips to the local courthouse, and made me really appreciate the data it offers.

Yes, this is typically because of realtor and MLS database regulations.

And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their databases up to the public. Travel agents, for instance, used to be the only ones who could search the SABRE database (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_%28computer_system%29), which made it valuable to work with an agent when making your travel plans. Then in the '80s the company behind SABRE started opening it up to the public, first via services like CompuServe and AOL, and then later via the Web. Suddenly travelers didn't need a travel agent anymore; they could get the same booking data right from their computer. And travel agencies as a business sector promptly collapsed (http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/).

For this reason, the real estate agents have little desire to see MLS data show up in publicly-accessible services like Zillow. The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay -- which lets the agents preserve their status as the people you have to talk to if you want the freshest data.

The best listings on Zillow already sold, months ago.

The big hole in Zillow and Trulia is listings under contract. A listing goes "pending" (under contract), the MLS knows about it right away. Which is why people see Redfin updated quickly -- because as said elsewhere, Redfin displays data from the MLS.

Sites like Trulia and Zillow also get data from MLS, sometimes directly, usually indirectly thru other data access deals. And they also purchase access to a lot of public record databases, things like that.

So when a house goes pending, these sites don't see that until it closes and becomes a public record, unless the agent themselves updates the listing on the site.

Most this is explained elsewhere in this discussion, I just wanted to make the point, though, that scraping isn't part of the process. I'm sure it was early on, but those days are long gone.

From what I've seen and heard, Zillow's data isn't just delayed by a week; it can be years out of date, and grossly inaccurate as well. Both buyers and sellers are very mislead about property values based on Zillow because they see the last sale price and Zillow's estimate of the current value. Zillow has no idea about the local market conditions though, so it can over or under estimate the current value by a huge percentage.

Zillow also uses property tax valuations. The towns in and around my area have gone through a couple of re-evaluations in the past five years, and one thing I've learned is that the local governments value houses quite a bit below market value, for political reasons: owners can appeal the valuation, but only if the valuation is some percentage over market value. So instead they consistently value the houses below market value, and charge a higher tax rate to keep the revenue the same. Most people think they're getting away with something because the valuation is lower than they believe their house is worth, and the handful of people who realize what's going on can't do anything because they don't meet the qualifications for appealing.

Anyway, Zillow uses those low valuations as part of their estimate, so buyers coming into the area who are using Zillow instead of a Realtor have no idea how much houses are actually worth around here, and they waste everyone's time arguing about prices and by making low-ball offers that have no chance of being accepted. Realtors hate having their time wasted, because they work on pure commission. So they hate Zillow.

As far as Realtors wanting to keep MLS data to themselves so they don't go the way of travel agents, I think it's more complex than that. For one thing, it's the MLS people that are keeping the data secret, not the Realtors. The Realtors have to pay for access to MLS, which would stop if the MLS data were public. That could put a lot of money back into Realtor's pockets. This is significant, because it's up-front money: the Realtor has to pay for MLS whether they have any closings and earn any commissions or not. It's a fixed cost of business, which hurts when you don't have any guaranteed income.

Also, Realtors bring a lot more value to the game than travel agents did, at least since the early days of the travel industry. Realtors aren't just facilitating searching the MLS; they're managing the entire multi-month process of buying or selling a home. On the buying side that includes locating suitable areas, managing access to properties for viewing, advising on property value and market conditions, negotiating the offer, helping with inspections, helping to navigate the pitfalls between attorney review and closing (often including helping with a mortgage), and being there with you at the closing. On the selling side there's most of that, plus getting the house prepared for sale, taking good photographs and writing the advertising, holding open houses including the critical Realtor-only open house that shows all of the other Realtors (and, by proxy, all of their clients) your home, and helping you to deal with inspection issues that come up and your final move-out.

It's a harsh business to be in, with a huge amount of work for a paycheck that may or may not ever come, and opportunity costs from clients you can't work with when you're tied up managing the deals that your existing clients are working through. Making the MLS data public wouldn't change any of that; instead it would mislead buyers and sellers into thinking they can do it on their own, with no idea about the quagmire they're walking into.

Let me put it another way: if you're sued, or put on trial for a crime, you have every right to represent yourself in court. But that's almost always a really bad idea because you're not a professional lawyer, and when you're in court you want someone who does this kind of thing for a living, instead of someone (you) who's never/rarely done it before.

In terms of the MLS, at least in California, which has the largest one, it's run by Realtors(tm) for Realtors(tm). The board members are Realtors(tm); so are the "34 REALTOR® Associations" that are the MLS's customers. You can see crmls.org for more details.

In terms of attorneys, at least you can pay them by the hour. In the SF bay area, where house prices can be 10x-15x the national average, why should a Realtor(tm) be paid 10x-15x as much for doing approximately the same amount of work? Haircuts, which require approximately as much skill on the part of the service provider, don't cost 15x as much here. Also the more you spend, the more the Realtor(tm) gets paid; this precisely misaligns incentives.

Attorneys also have a far higher degree of legal obligation to you than a Realtor(tm) does. Check out the standard real estate contract, which is designed primarily to eliminate any legal responsibility on the part of the Realtor(tm), and only secondarily to conduct the actual house transaction.

Also it's rather silly to compare the amount of knowledge required to represent someone in court vs. show a house. To be a real estate agent in California, you have to spend 18 days taking three simultaneous correspondence courses. One of which can be "Computer Applications in Real Estate," which will teach you such difficult-to-master skills as "setting up e-mails," "using digital cameras," and "designing a power point presentation." Tests are T/F and multiple choice. I am not making this up: http://www.accreditedcareers.com/ca_info.pdf

Here's part of Assignment #1 (representing almost 10% of your final grade!): 1. Search Online for 5 Internet Service Providers and make a list with the URL next to the ISP name and list the price of each. 2. Search Online and find 5 different Online Vendors of computer hardware and make a list with the URL next to the Vendors name. 3. Search Online and find 5 Computer Software Vendors and make a list with the URL next to the Vendors name. 4. Using your URL go to http://www.dre.ca.gov find the latest Real Estate bulletin and just send the URL address to the bulletin on the list. 5. Download Yahoo Messenger and Install program. Using Yahoo Messenger Application set up a username and messenger account and send a request to ca_ares_course@yahoo.com to join your buddies. (this will also allow chat to the instructor)

It's true that Realtors(tm) can provide some value, for instance when they have deep knowledge of the local area. But whenever I've spoken at Realtor(tm) conferences -- a few times at Inman Connect in SF -- I've outraged the audience by telling them they'll be disintermediated as surely as their travel agent brethren, and describing how it will happen. My only regret is that it's taking so long.

If anyone is working on a startup to dislodge the Realtor(tm) effective monopoly[1], let me know.

[1] The DOJ sued the National Association of Realtors(tm) in 2005 for antitrust violations during the antitrust-averse Bush administration. Unfortunately the case was settled in 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/business/28realty.html?_r=...

I've certainly considered the possibility of going without a realtor when the time comes, but multiple people whose opinion I respect have claimed that a realtor was worth it. So your comment piqued my interest. In search of more information, I decided to check out patrick.net.

Umm. What? Here's what I see:

* Money is a form of social control and most Americans are debt slaves

* Midieval spikes thwart London homeless from sleeping in apartment doorways

* Michael Moore in cat fight with wife over divorce settlement

* Photo of US at Night

* "Go and rape women" Why do we just stand by?

* God bless the free market!

* ...

I mean, really? I understand that this is probably some dynamically generated list of hot threads from a message board, but if your goal is to convince someone that maybe realtors aren't necessary (a pretty mind-bending claim for most people, I imagine), then you have provided a source that inspires exactly zero credibility. I'd suggest you stop linking people to it.

I had expected to see some material on how one would achieve tasks that a realtor would normally perform for you. I can at least understand how this open data stuff would help replace the realtor's job of finding houses for you, but what about all the legal mumbo jumbo? I know almost nothing about it, but I know it exists. So how would I tackle it? Is there anything else that a realtor generally does that I'll have to do myself?

Put another way, even if there's an 0.9 probability that the advice there is wrong, buying a house is nevertheless the most significant purchase of your life for most people. It's also a very illiquid purchase, meaning it's difficult to sell and you need it to appreciate ~7% just to make back what you paid (that's because of Realtor(tm) commissions). You owe it to yourself to seek out a different opinion even if there's only a 0.1 probability it's accurate.

Edit with an addendum: My goal is not necessarily to get people to avoid Realtors(tm). This is not yet possible given the state of the market; I made some effort in that direction and was unsuccessful when I bought a single-family home on the SF peninsula. Instead, it's to get folks to realize that especially in coastal markets, they are likely not worth it, have minimal mandated training, and do not necessarily have your best interests in mind. In the long run, what I'd like to do is encourage HN readers to come up with ways to make real estate transactions more efficient. Some Realtors(tm) with deep knowledge will probably stay in the industry; most others will end up doing something more productive with their lives.

> It's also a very illiquid purchase, meaning it's difficult to sell and you need it to appreciate ~7% just to make back what you paid (that's because of Realtor(tm) commissions).

Indeed. Realtor commissions are a huge drag. I do somewhat skip over the part about the importance of a house appreciating in value because I'm not purchasing a house as an investment in which the primary goal is to make money. It's a purchase of a good whose main value to me is its utility as a domicile. A secondary goal is for it to benefit me financially. I acknowledge that this may be an uneducated opinion, but I definitely know what a house means to me, and its financial value isn't terribly high on that list. Perhaps that will change as I learn more over the coming years. (I'm considering building a house too. I get the feeling it would be financially better to start smaller, and then incrementally add to the house as we accrue the necessary capital to do it. I very much intend for my first house to be my primary residence for at least a couple decades.)

You reduce the cost of a mortgage by making a larger down payment, especially if you pay more than 20% in cash. You also want to avoid 'points' (which are just more interest) and to get the lowest interest rate you can. (A very good credit score helps a lot.) If you go for a variable-rate mortgage, read the fine-print very carefully; you want to make sure that the rate can't go up more than a reasonably small amount or more often than a reasonably long period.

You should also consider a lot of the non-purchase costs involved in home ownership. I wish the commissions had been the most significant expense I faced. Remodeling, repairs, improvements, decorating, re-decorating, and general maintenance added up to a large multiple of the commission I paid over ten years. And living in NJ, my property taxes have rising to nearly as much as my mortgage payments after a decade! I had never planned for any of that when considering what I could afford to buy.

From my experience with other people who have thought like this, this is a mistake. One person wanted a 2 story addition, but couldn't afford it - so they put in a 1 story addition, but built the foundation so it could handle 2.

Needless to say they never added that second level even though they had funds - once you've paid for the roof, and the equipment and everything else (i.e. startup costs) adding that second level would have been just a small addition, but doing it now means starting over and the expense is no longer worth it.

Others have done that, but found the interface where the two connect to shift, which is unpleasant. Or the styles don't match.

Instead, build all the rooms you want, with exterior walls and roof, but don't finish the inside - no wires, no drywall, no doors, nothing except insulation, not even windows (when it's time for windows you just cut the exterior and add blocking on the inside). Close that section off from the rest of the house, and then when you have funds, and need, build it out.

The interior costs a significant amount, but the startup costs are much smaller than for exterior.

Note a possible problem: The inspector may object, I don't know.

I don't know anything about your personal financial situation, so this advice may be completely off-base. But perhaps buy a house that's unrenovated but structurally sound and then hire a contractor to renovate it to your specifications? At least if my experience a few years ago was any indication, you'll learn a tremendous amount about permits, appliances, electrical upgrades, fixtures, moulding, doors and windows, insulation, decks, landscaping, and how to manage a complex undertaking that's likely (depending on the size of the house and the geographic area) to run into the six figures and last at least half a year.

Then, a few years later, you can hire an architect and do everything right the second time around. :)

Also if you live in the SF bay area (and I know your profile says you're in Massachusetts), be warned that all the good land is already built on or unavailable for building or vacant and extremely expensive -- as in millions of dollars for just a lot in Portola Valley, Los Altos Hills, or Woodside. There was a discounted property for sale two blocks down from me a few years ago for only $800,000 (!). But there was an active landslide on the property and the town expressed some doubt about whether the owner actually had the legal authority under the deed to subdivide in the first place...

So if you have a liquidity event, you can buy that 800 ft^2 shack in a great location in Palo Alto for $2M, tear it down, and spend another two years and $2M building a nice modern 3,500 ft^2 house (1,000 of that may have to be underground because, well, it's Palo Alto). Otherwise, well, New Hampshire is a nice place to live! :)

Part of the way they keep their costs down is letting you do all the searching and scheduling of visits on their web site, so all the agent has to do is manage the process once you're ready to make an offer. Not that that's so easy: I had a few complications with mine, and I've heard much worse stories.

My agent had just moved from the east coast, and I've lived in SF for several years, so I was more familiar with local market conditions than he was and I didn't get any value from that. But it was my first real estate purchase and I didn't know much about how the general process worked, so that was very useful to me.

But this article is really good. http://patrick.net/housing/crash1.html

As far as I'm concerned the only value agents provide is unlocking doors at houses you want to view. (Source: I've bought 3 houses with three different agents.)

Feel free to email me if you want to chat, I'm sure there are some great start up ideas in the space.

If your agents haven't done anything for you but unlock doors, then you haven't had good agents. Like any other profession, there's a huge range in quality and competence, and finding a good agent requires some research and probably recommendations from past clients.

But for a buyer wanting to do his own research, and having lived in the area for a long time, they simply couldn't add any value besides unlocking doors, and filling out a stock form to make offers.

For what it's worth, I agree 100% with you when it comes to rental agents. They do almost nothing besides provide a listing in MLS. But buyer and seller agents should be doing a lot more.

About the only thing the buyer's agent did that was useful was cart away some household debris away in his truck after closing. It had been left behind in the garage. It probably would have cost me $40 to have someone do the same.

They came to the closing and told jokes :-)

What else should they have done after the offer was accepted?

My mistake initially was to try to attack both sides of the realtor(tm) mix: seller and buyer brokers. I was clearly taking the seller side out. But I was willing to work with buyers' brokers if they found me. But I wanted to twist the commission scheme, as a flat rate doesn't make much sense. (e.g., an incremental $100K is huge for me but very little for them.) So I tried to create a stairstep where if they came in below ask, the broker would get paid .5%, and if they were 100K above ask they would get 3.5%. Needless to say, this failed. I had many brokers tell me they would refuse to bring clients to see my place, DESPITE their fiduciary duty to do so.

In the end, I offered 2.5% commission to buyers brokers (the standard in my area). I also listed it on the MLS using a shady site where you can pay to $150 bucks to a broker to list it on the MLS. Finally, I scraped the websites of 3 major brokerages in my area and did a mailing list to 100 brokers with the subject line of ADDDRESS X, 2.5% Buyer Commission. (100 brokers in 4 square miles. Should tell you something.) Had a 60% open rate and a 50% clickthrough rate. Lots of appointments right away.

I endeded up getting 9 offers and having a 2 step auction. I of course netted out what I would have to pay to brokers, so folks without brokers had an automatic 2.5% advantage. I ended up selling without a broker on either side. 3 weeks from first listing on Zillow to contract signed.

So yes - it's definitely possible to work without brokers if you're willing to do a little work, you're confident in your pricing skills, and you're in a hot area. As I said to my wife, each individual showing we did saved us about $2K!

Furthermore, commissions are negotiable, and the market for estate agents (what you call realtors) is competitive.

There's nothing different about buyers/sellers needs that's fundamentally different in the USA. The high level (and lack of variance) in commissions has some reason. I'm not familiar enough to know whether it's some legislative/regulatory thing, or just historical (path dependence). However, I find it hard to imagine that realtors are adding 60k value to a 1m sale transaction.

Anecdote: I had a friend who studied to get a realtor's licence in Canada, just so that they could avoid commissions on their own purchases.

BTW - I upvoted you, although my perspective is pretty much opposite to yours :)

In New Jersey, commissions are typically 5% to 6%, depending on the level of service the agent representing the seller performs. My wife charges 6%, and spends a lot of her own money on cleaning the house, moving extraneous furnishings out to de-clutter the house, moving her own furnishings in to stage (decorate) the house, and providing boxes and other packing materials to help the seller move out.

There are no-frills agents in NJ as well; at least there used to be. They were paid a salary by their broker, and the broker charged a very low commission, 1%-2%. These agents provided NO services that weren't absolutely necessary to the transaction. I don't think these agents are around anymore.

About that commission: in NJ there are generally always two agents, one for the seller and one for the buyer, and they split the commission. Sometimes, one of my wife's buyers would make an offer on a house of one of her sellers. Generally she would reduce the commission to 4% in that case; she's still doing more work than she would representing just one side of the transaction, but less than she'd have to do when there is another agent involved. (There are strict rules regarding this situation to avoid conflicts of interest, btw.)

About that $1m transaction: yes, the overall commission is $60k. The two agents split that, so they get $30k. Except they don't; their brokerages take almost a third, so they get about $22k. That's gross income; federal, state, and employment taxes take another third... down to about $14500 now. That's the net income for 3-5 months work, and it has to cover the out-of-pocket business expenses for the items I described earlier to properly market the home.

Your friend couldn't do what he did in NJ. Getting a license in NJ isn't difficult if you're reasonably intelligent, but that's not enough to do business as an agent. You need to "hang your license" with a brokerage, which means signing a deal that will generally require you to pay monthly office fees and a chunk of your commissions, with varying rules about how to handle commissions on your own sales and purchases. (Typically waived for your primary home, and not waived on investment properties.) There's also the second agent involved in most transactions; they're going to get their commission even if you don't take one, so at most you're going to save 2.5%-3%.

- it's hard to believe it's 3-5 months' work to sell a home (unless you mean duration rather than effort)

- why does the 'brokerage' get so much? What value do they add, or is it just like taxi medallions?

- yes, we all have to pay taxes

- why do the no-frills brokers no longer exist? I've read elsewhere that full-service agents refused to steer their buyers to homes on offer by discount agents (to the detriments of the buyers they purported to represent)

- why do realtors need licensing anyway?

Nothing you've said suggests that the 6% is the result of a competitive market. Again, the strongest evidence is the large difference in commissions vs. those in other developed markets.

The brokerage gets a big chunk because they're running an office for all of the agents: they need to rent property (usually in a prime location), build out the office space, and pay all of the costs for running that space. My wife's office has grown from 30 agents to over 100 in the past 4 years or so, and has needed to take over two neighboring spaces in the building it occupies.

Different brokerages have different policies; some charge a fixed monthly fee and take a lower cut of commissions, some charge no monthly fee and take a bigger cut of commissions. Most have a 'cap' on the brokerages cut, so that if you do well in the spring and pay out your cap, the brokerage won't take any cut from you for the rest of the year.

Taxes: yes, we all do pay taxes, but most of us only think about our after-tax net income rather than our pre-tax gross income, because the taxes come out before any money goes into our pockets. So people forget that those commissions are gross rather than net when they compare what the agent is getting to their own earnings.

I think the no-frills brokers don't exist anymore because their service was awful. "You get what you pay for" may not always work for full-rate agents because they may not be very good, but "You're not getting what you don't pay for" definitely applies to the no-frills agents.

A full-service buyers agent gets paid out of the commission that the seller pays to the listing agent. If the listing agent is a no-frills discount agent charging 2%, then the full-service agent might get 1% rather than the 3% they would otherwise get. They have fixed costs that aren't covered by that rate, and can't afford to provide their buyers with the level service they want to provide for those homes. But there's more to it than the money: shepherding a deal through from offer to closing requires a lot of work and a lot of coordination between the agents, and the discount agents just don't care to spend any time on that. It's extremely frustrating for the full-service agent to work with a discount agent who's not paying attention, and that causes a higher risk of the deal falling through or having long delays which can impact the buyer's sale of the home they're moving out of. So guiding buyers away from homes listed by discount agents can be in their best interest. (For Sale By Owner homes are also higher risk, often worse, for the same reasons.)

Realtors need licensing because there are strict laws and ethical codes that they must adhere to; there is a high risk of being sued when there is any hint of improper behavior. Agents sue each other, agents sue brokerages, brokerages sue each other, and buyers and sellers sue everyone. The licensing is there to make sure agents know what all of the rules are and the importance of following them. (By the way, insurance for all of this litigation is one of the big fixed costs for being an agent.)

And those rules don't work in the slightest. Both agents have incentive to increase the cost of the house, but really the buyers agent should help reduce that cost.

Additionally both agents have incentive to get the deal done, even if it's not financially right (for either party) so they'll tell the seller to reduce the price, and the buyer to increase it, even though they should each really be working in the other direction.

A seller won't accept an offer from a buyer that doesn't have evidence that they can afford what they're offering. The buyer's agent wants the offer to be accepted, so they won't let the buyer offer more than they're pre-approved for (and often somewhat less, to reduce risks that the deal will break down before closing.)

Once the offer is accepted, the bank inspection has to happen, and if the bank determines that the house is not worth as much as the buyer offered, the deal will fall through and neither agent gets paid. So, both agents have an incentive to keep the cost below what they think the bank valuation will be.

So it's really the bank that's in control of property values, not the agents. In a housing bubble that's a bad thing, because the bank is lenient in both pre-approvals and valuations, and agents incentives are to follow the bank upwards. But in the current climate when the banks are cautious and risk-averse I think the incentives are working well, because the banks and agents are countering each other.

As far as what the agents tell the buyer and seller about the price:

- If the house is sitting on the market and no one is making any offers, the price is too high. So yes, the sellers agent will tell the seller to reduce the price, because they want the seller to sell. (Getting the house to sell is the agent's job, after all.) Just sitting and waiting at the same price is bad for the seller, because it makes other agents and buyers think there's something wrong with the house if it has been sitting on the market for a long time with no offers.

- If a house is priced correctly, multiple buyers will want to buy it, and they'll all make offers. The buyer's agent knows that the seller will choose one of the higher offers (though price isn't the only factor), and they want their buyer's offer to be accepted (that's their job), so yes, they will tell the buyer to offer more. My wife will tell her buyers how many other buyers they're competing with that she knows about (agents can't discuss details, but can give vague impressions to help each other out), and that they should offer more than the list price but not so much that they would regret the amount afterwards. In other words "Offer what this house is worth to you, so that you won't wish you had offered more if you don't get it, and that you won't wish you had spent less if you do get it."

I get what you're saying about data accessibility, it seems like Zillow just found a way to hack the restrictions (by becoming a broker).

Whether it's reasonable to act like they own the data is a different question.

Don't get me wrong, when I write those out in English here, they seem absolutely a scam, but the way they are presented as an answer to some of the apartment inquiries, it's not so obvious. Those scumbags are skilled, too, just not in any kind of skill one would want to possess.

But this is a really fun article on how to use open-source GIS tools to do something practical, which is something I've wanted to delve into for a while— I'll try it later tonight, thanks!

"Governor Christie's brother invested in real estate near new PATH station in Harrison"

http://www.northjersey.com/news/governor-christie-s-brother-...

Likewise, property on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has been cheap lately, because blasting out subway stations is unpleasant. But a new subway coming to an area that was recently relatively far from one means property values are shooting up.

Proximity to a grocery store is absolutely at the top of my list. I like to buy my food as fresh as possible and generally only buy for the meal I'm cooking that night. So having not only a grocery store, but a high-quality one, near me is incredibly important. The difference of even a block or two is huge when it comes to something you want to walk to on a very regular basis.

Sure I pay attention to things like the crime rate, but in most cities it's a nearly meaningless stat. The actual chances of being involved in a crime are very low in any neighborhood in my city (and this is true of almost every city in the U.S.). I think this is true of people predisposed to urban living. We're simply willing to tolerate a bit of crime risk in exchange for everything else that goes along with it.

From a technology point of view, I imagine it makes online real-estate very difficult to optimize for. There are so many different priorities that people have that you have to find ways to build general data-mining tools that are still actually usable by most folks. That's a tough challenge, one I don't think anyone has come close to cracking. For instance walk scores seem to be the closest to what I want and they tell you virtually nothing. Don't get me started on how we "rank" schools too:)

Some people are not able to, or do not wish to drive every time they want something to eat. Proximity to a grocery store sounds like a good metric. It's the european model of shopping every day for that days meal, vs the U.S. model of stocking up at Costco.

You're right. I've been working with open data in the Portland area for years now [1][2][3][4] and have a lot of built up internal knowledge of the neighborhoods and locations so I chose not to muddy the map with those things.

1: https://github.com/Caged/portlandcrime 2: https://github.com/caged/portland-atlas#examples 3: https://github.com/Caged/portland-census 4: http://labratrevenge.com/pdx

Not sure how freely they distribute this.

The actual scores would have to be looked up one at a time, on per-address basis (e.g. http://www.walkscore.com/score/320-pioneer-way-mountain-view... )

From all this, as well as £s per m^2 of floor space I ordered by the least compromise.

Currently trying to clean it all up and turn it into a webapp to make it useful for anyone else who wants to find property in an area.

I'm about to complete on the purchase of my first house and am really looking forward to it. It's not perfect; but I know for the price, I can't get much better.

If I finish the webapp; I might try and include data such as walking distance to the nearest pub from CAMRAs Good Beer Guide and maybe something similar for restaurants.

I'd just take an address from Craigslist and paste it in to quickly see whether I wanted to live there.

Today I live in one of the "bit dumpy and rough, but OK" neighborhoods.

There's lots of room for improvement in the code, but it's in the same vein as what this guy did and helped us quite a bit.

Finding the perfect school (one of the many steps to find the perfect house) using open data

So, how do I know the district area. I can see the pin. Is that the center? Sorry, I am just getting familiar with this subject in the US.

(Sorry if I missed reading that part)

Does trulia have an API?

Kudos :)

https://www.dwellaware.com/

First, he better be rich if he’s serious about living in these zones.

Second, his data analysis is blowing past a multitude of equally livable, more affordable PDX neighborhoods.

Third, within his zones are actual unlivable subzones (nobody wants to live in actual-downtown-portland).

Impressive analysis, but he'd be better served by living for a month in a PDX AirBnB and learning his way around the city.

Reminds me of Bill Gates book "The Road Ahead" (1st ed, 1995, p. 158) - it's about his vision of a next-gen network that would replace the middle-man beside other innovative things:

  [...] most market places are very inefficient. For 
  instance, if you are trying to find a doctor, lawyer, 
  accountant, or similar professional, or are buying a house,
  information is incomplete and comparisons are difficult 
  to make.
  The information highway will extend the electronic 
  marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between, the 
  universal middleman. Often the only human involved in a 
  transaction will be the actual buyer and seller. All the 
  goods for sale in the world will be available for you to
  examine, compare, and, often, customize. When you want to
  buy something you'll be able to tell your computer to 
  find it for you at the best price offered by any 
  acceptable source or ask your computer to 'haggle' with 
  the computers of various sellers. Information about 
  venders and their products will be available to any 
  computer connected to the highway. Servers distributed 
  worldwide will accept bids, resolve offers into completed 
  transactions, control authentication and security, and 
  handle all other aspects of the marketplace, including 
  the transfer of funds. This will carry us into a new 
  world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which 
  market information will be plentiful and transaction 
  costs low. It will be a shopper's heaven. [...]

If anything, Gates the futurist vs Gates the businessperson shows us that, regardless of what the pro-lassiez faire types say, most often corporations left unfettered don't product the best results, but only results that directly benefit themselves and that often translates into things like vendor lock-in, poor software, poor support, lack of progress.

I mean, does Gates even question why the market for the things he complains about are so inefficient? Its because its full of guys like himself.

This isn't just semantics. An unfettered corporation no longer has the benefits of government either. I'm thinking of things like subsidies, added regulation that raises barriers of entry and limited liability.

> regardless of what the pro-lassiez faire types say

Not all pro laissez-faire types are strict utilitarians. Most that I know tend to appeal to ethics in addition to a freed market's utility.

> but only results that directly benefit themselves

That doesn't make any sense. Microsoft has surely provided benefits to a great number of people. Perhaps you'd argue that Microsoft benefited more in certain transactions, but that's an entirely different claim (and it doesn't imply that others didn't benefit at all).

Utilitarianism is actually an normative moral theory concerned with determining whether an action is right or wrong. Any strict utilitarian would dispute that ethics are in addition to their view rather than a core component :)