The San Diego Home Blog

We don’t need no stinkin’ beta test!

I’m still on the rampage. That’s because my MLS is broken.

There is a popular saying that goes something like, “143% of home buyers start their search on the Internet.” Well, if you currently have your home listed for sale in San Diego, I wouldn’t be calling the moving truck any time soon.

In a comment on my last rant, the tech savvy and ever eloquent Galen Ward wrote the following:

Tempo5 sounds like a can of suck. Add the fact that their IDX went down for 5+ days and you can imagine why no one was answering the phones.

Now, being one who appreciates artful prose, I was focused on the “can of suck” part. I missed the forest for the tree stumps. Actually, I had suspected  a couple of days ago that if I couldn’t access listing date in my own MLS system, the IDX (data exchange) feeds to other sites might be compromised. I made a quick trip to my own web site search feature and saw that the data looked fine: No funky entry fields, a populated map, and so forth. How naive am I? (That was rhetorical, so let’s move on, please).

It was this morning, nine exciting, fun-filled days after the big coming out party of Tempo5, that the words a buyer client uttered yesterday starting reverberating in my dense skull. “There haven’t been any new listings in a week.” Now, at the time, I thought she made this statement much like my children say, “There is nothing to eat in this house,” meaning, “There is nothing that interests me.” Au contraire. What she meant was there haven’t been any new listings showing up on the sites she uses for her search — None, nada, zip.

In my unofficial survey this morning, I confirmed that no home listed since D-Day appears on Trulia, Realtor.com, Prudential’s web site, or even my own web site with the most-awesome search feature compliments of Diverse Solutions. I found a few newer listings on a site which shall remain nameless (it starts with an “R” and ends in “edfin”), but I ran out of steam before I confirmed their offering was complete.

What does this mean? Well, for starters, Zillow should start a full-on promotional blitz of Tempo5 nationwide in order to solidify their global dominance. Because I can (and do) manually enter our listings there, my sellers are represented. Ditto Craigslist, and the half-dozen or so random sites which are fed my property flyers via Postlets. If your data is coming straight out of Sandicor, however, you (and my clients) are screwed.

Sandicor, if you are listening, please fix my MLS! I am frustrated, my appraisers are frustrated, and my clients are getting p*ssed off. If it is the IDX recipient who is responsible for making some changes to properly process your newly formatted feed, then work with them! You might think that you have bigger fish to fry than assist third-party for-profit sites get our data right, but even Realtor.com is effected. Remember them? They are the site promoted as the “Realtor’s” site, the one to whom I pay (insert very big four-digit number) a year for the privilege of “enhancing” my listings. Just having my listings represented would be an enhancement this week.

photo credit: JasonJT

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The announcement came Monday and, as always, I had to let the pot stew for a bit. We all know that the beef gets more tender the longer you cook it.

Redfin, those freakishly hip fellows who promised to stand traditional real estate on its head, just got a little more, well, traditional. Recognizing that those darn buyers refuse to be entirely clinical when spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, they just refuse to let go of that silly emotional baggage, Redfin is now at least open to the idea of doing a little more… for a little more, of course. Dang, this business of selling homes is more complicated than we thought!

Redfin is now offering a premium home-buying service, which lets our clients tour homes to their heart’s content. The name of the service is Redfin Select.

Why not? The USDA has been using this tiered method of grading the quality of their meat for years. Select, alas, is inferior to Choice and Prime, but it beats the socks off Cutter and Canner.

About the tours:

• Redfin tours are up to two hours each. You can see as many as five or six homes, depending on your route.
• Tours are available seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. We’ll get you on a tour within 48 hours of your request, often sooner.
• Redfin offers rush-hour tours, 40-minutes each, Monday through Thursday 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., for when you need to see one or two homes quickly.
• You can schedule up to two tours per week.

photo credit: John Edwards 2008 

This offering for the more special clients (special as in a serious drain on the old resources) will sadly only be available in the Seattle market initially.

…we’re only taking 20 clients at first, so we can be sure to have enough tours to go around for everybody, even on short notice.

And until we can rent a bigger bus.

I could have a field day with this one, but I suspect our five readers care very little about the wacky goings-on at the Redfin think tank. Let me just say that if the buyer of one of our recent listings had used this system for the home that sold in one day with multiple offers, he would be back on the cattle car next week (but only during the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. and with 48 hour’s notice and not more than twice, assuming he was able to “get the forms” from his field agent in time).

I do find it amusing that it took a mere 2 years and over $20 million of venture capital for the self-proclaimed champions of buyers’ rights to figure out that people want to see houses before they purchase. What’s next? A program where a buyer can request a field agent who, if not exactly familiar with the neighborhoods in which they are interested, can at least find it with a compass and a note pinned to their collar? Now, that would be special!