Two new online real estate companies that snuck by me

Crazy busy this week. Not much time for blogging (or eating, or showering...).

But real quick: Here are a couple interesting online real estate sites that launched recently that I somehow missed despite a fair amount of media coverage outside our industry. 

Home-Account

Home-Account is self-described as "Your key to always having your best mortgage." The site allows users to determine whether or not they are getting the best deal on their mortgage by submitting detailed information on their current loan, tolerance for risk, and larger financial picture.

Home-Account is different from most other mortgage-related sites in two ways:

First, the resolve for the consumer is not a hailstorm of offers from mortgage originators (think LendingTree or Zillow Mortgage Marketplace). Instead, they are presented with various mortgage products along with the the level of savings they personally stand to realize. Home-Account also displays loans the user might be able to get if they take certain steps to improve their credit score (which is provided as part of the profile process). Users are also alerted when loan conditions move to a point where action (e.g., a refi) may be warranted -- something like an email listing alert for mortgages

Second, consumers will pay for this service. $9.95 per month to be exact. I like that.

What I don't like is the site's very confusing interface and dialed-to-11 design. It needs improvement.

Nonetheless, Home Account is a welcome addition to the sparsely populated online mortgage landscape. 

RentWiki

RentWiki was launched late last year by Jamie Gallo, who ran Realestate.com for Primedia before it sold the site to IAC.

RentWiki bills its offering as "Social rental search," which it achieves by pairing apartment listings with neighborhood profiles, user-submitted reviews and a nice Twitter integration that captures the ambient online noise about a given neighborhood.

Online rentals is a crowed space. And neighborhood sites haven't exactly been a home run. But RentWiki is nicely executed and offers plenty of cues for anyone looking to create an interesting search experience.

Back to work!

-- Brian Boero

60 Minutes on real estate, act two

Last night, millions of Americans got to watch 60-minutes' latest installment on the real estate market.

The segment centered on Stockton, California - ground zero for the foreclosure epidemic, where 4,200 homes  either sit in default or foreclosure. That number was accentuated by ForeclosureRadar.com CEO Sean O'Toole, who illustrated the foreclosure landscape though a city map littered with red and blue dots. According to O'Toole, "The red dots indicate which homes are bank owned, the dark blue dots indicate which homes are being auctioned and the light blue indicate which homes are now in default". He expects many more red and blue dots to appear on his map over the coming months [Disclosure, ForeclosureRadar is a 1000watt client].

Homes are now being auctioned like cattle as homeowners, unable or unwilling to deal with the problem, are  abandoning their homes as if they were bad marriages.

It's hard to watch this unfold and not find yourself feeling weary trying to figure out if this could have been averted. Homeowners, at least the few that were interviewed, just seemed downright ignorant and irresponsible. They appeared unaware, perhaps willfully, of what an ARM is and unaware of how buying a half-million dollar home with no money down on middle class wages could ever pencil --- unless, of  course, home prices just continued to soar at 22% a year ... forever.   

The good news for Realtors is there were no fingers pointed towards real estate agents, nor did the segment attempt to cast them as party to the debacle. But it did manage to cast an eye on one local agent who leads  a twice daily Merry Prankster-like bus tour of foreclosed properties. I admire his creativity, but he came off looking like a vulture picking at the scraps of the housing carcass. More subtle and professional methods to handle this are in order.

If this segment did anything, it highlighted the critical, desperate, dire need for honorable, trustworthy, professionals to step up and really start representing.

- Davison

The End

“…and in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” – Lennon/McCartney

As the tectonic shift in the housing market grinds beneath our nervous feet, this lyric spins in a loop -- the soundtrack to what was, what is and what soon will be in our industry.

Karma

I don’t wear Birkenstocks, or snack on brown rice with mushrooms, chard and fresh tofu. There’s no haze of Nag Champa or cloud of bong smoke wafting in my den. 

But I do believe that in the end, you simply reap what you sow. It is the law of the land.

Our industry has sown quite a field these past ten years. Its boundaries envelop banks worldwide and the fate of hundreds of thousands of consumers who find themselves foreclosed upon and forsaken by their trusted advisors.  

I don’t mean to gloss this over or simplify the matter. It’s just the best I can do short of publishing a book detailing each seed we planted to bring about this blighted harvest. And I don’t want to do that. I want to find the silver lining – the thing to which we might look forward during the tough times ahead.

Quiet celebration

What’s happening was bound to happen, and really, folks, needs to happen. Let’s not fret over those inside the business who will exit. Truthfully, they need to go. They’re the coal hiding the gems inside: The best agents. The best brokerages. The best lenders.

My sympathy is saved for the thousands of moms and dads, immigrants and working stiffs now facing the reality that “the dream of homeownership” was oversold.  

Maybe, for those of us who care about the real estate industry, this can be a time of quiet celebration. It’s the end of the old, the ordinary, the questionable and the compromised and the beginning of something new: an industry that lives up to the trust of its clients.

Let us celebrate:

The end of real estate as the career of first and last resort.

The end of referring young clients with aspirations bigger than their savings accounts to guys who can get them a 0% down, interest-only, 2-year ARM.

The end of writing loans for people with no jobs. 

The end of advising sellers to buy a home before they’ve sold their existing home.

The end of getting away with unleashing an under trained sales force to cut their teeth on the most important transaction of peoples’ lives.

The professionalism of the agents and brokers who remain after this reckoning.

The web 2.0 flowering that will make the transaction better for both the industry and its customers.

The healthy airing of grievances about the industry’s most egregious lapses.

The love you make

The love is what comes next. The good stuff that’s already starting to emerge despite the news. It will come by way of an unspoken apology of change. The love will bring about an industry that’s transparent. True. Simple. Real. Honest. Social. And smaller.

I see it coming in the eyes of a broker friend who tells me he’s mandating service standards that could drive many from his stable. In the blog posts of agents that speak candidly to their clients about what’s going on. In the wisdom of the pros that bear scars from earlier shakeouts that kept them from losing their head in the run up to this one.

It might take a quarter, a year, maybe two. Who knows when, really, but it’s coming for sure.  

So I’m perched on the hill looking out toward the horizon, waiting for the new real estate business about to unfold.  

Zestimating the future value of home value applications

I ran several value estimates of my home a couple mornings ago after reading yet another mind numbing story on the fallout of the credit crisis in the USA Today. I am not planning to sell but I am trying to determine the fate of online home value applications.

Just take a look at the results:

Zillow: $754,280
Cyberhomes: $624,910
Coldwell Banker: A range of $585,000 to $715,613

So here we have a $200,000+ spread.

Before composing this blog I contacted three respectable agents I know and asked them each for a Realstimate - you know, a well informed, thoughtful measure of my home's value. Their ranges went between $850,000 and 1.1 million.

In total, I now have a $500,000 range of opinion.

Considering how all these applications use past home sales as part of their special estimating sauce, it is entirely possible that they are now worthless applications given the seesawing interest rates and dearth of qualified buyers creating significant homes price reductions all over the USA.

I welcome folks from of each of these firms to weigh in here and honestly address the precarious viability of their platforms and their inability to account for a volatile market where even seasoned Realtors can't do any better than a $200,000 spread.

-- Davison