Zillow

Many moons and several bad hair styles ago, I wrote about the fun that could be had Playing Zillow. Today, Zillow went from fun to a downright rip-roaring time with the introduction of the Zillow Professional Directory.

From Zillow’s press release today:

The Zillow Professional Directory helps consumers interested in buying, selling or conducting home renovations, to find and connect with a local professional to fit their needs.

This is a great concept. What’s not to like? In order to encourage agents and other industry professionals to participate in the site, and to reward those who help feed the data base, they have created the Directory. It is a hierarchical listing of agents by region. Sure, you can search by name, but the default sort is by number of active listings on Zillow and by level of “contributions.” For instance, Steve and I are shown as having five listings on Zillow. This number appears embarrassingly moderate at first blush, at first blush that is until you realize that one is temporarily withdrawn and two others are pending. Oh, well. I am no longer hair-on-fire motivated to keep my postings current. Going from a five to a two would absolutely kill my rankings.

As for the contributions, a quite impressive 476 in our case, these don’t represent past listings, but instead every entry we have ever made for every listing we have ever posted. Each photo, for instance, counts as one contribution. These can add up quickly if you post a lot of photos, as we do.  (If you are shopping for professional at this moment, I probably shouldn’t have told you this. Never mind. I am a BIG contributor! Let’s just leave it at that.)

So, I ran over to Zillow to bask in my glory as a Scripps Ranch Neighborhood Specialist, an “All-Star” as Zillow likes to call me. But I immediately encountered a little problem. It seems that a certain lazy, lazy agent never had gotten around to completing her profile. I suppose I was just too busy worrying about promoting my client’s homes. Realizing that this kind of thinking gets me nowhere in the eyes of the new directory, I edited my profile to promote my areas of expertise to all those in need of my professional services at this moment.

Now (drum roll), I will use the illustrative method in demonstrating that Zillow’s new brainchild is Ztupid.

A search for a Scripps Ranch, San Diego agent gave me this:

Number one is an agent team who works in Temecula which, if you are new to these parts, is in another county. Coming in at the number two spot we have a versatile agent team from, you guessed it, Temecula. Granted, Temecula is only a 45 minute drive (and a different MLS system), but they must be putting some miles on the ol’ Lexus! Here, from their profile, are the areas they serve:

Riverside County, Los Angeles County, and San Mateo! OK, you make it to San Mateo in a day, but you would definitely want to stop for lunch.

Keep in mind, this isn’t sour grapes. After all, they have more listings, more years in the business and far more contributions. I still managed to eke out fifth place. But this got me thinking. While it’s hard to break into the San Diego field, there are some areas ripe for the pickin’. And, apparently, we aren’t restricted to cities we have actually visited. So, with a simple series of key strokes, I was able to OWN Kodiak, Alaska. (Allow me to apologize in advance to Art. Your top spot will soon be restored, even though you don’t live anywhere near Kodiak.)

Then I remembered the time I replaced our kitchen faucet. Plumbing’s not so hard, so search for a plumber in all of San Diego, and I am there to help!

Silly as this sounds, lots of agents are doing it — because they can. So, to my Boise Blog friend Phil Hoover, who’s number five in Boise now? And to the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson, I may be on Gilbert’s Page Two, but I didn’t see you when I looked up. Besides, when you need a Gilbert plumber, who are you going to call?

(Note to my friends at Zillow: I will correct my profile soon, but so many others won’t, I suspect. Oh, and you might want to delete the user “I.M. Burr” who currently holds the number two agent spot for Kodiak, Alaska. He’s not real.)

This Zillow Pillow Justice video, bagged from Agent Genius, is hysterically funny and well worth the just under two minutes of your life it will cost you. Thanks, Lani!

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.

Okay, this is way-cool. My favorite geek, Drew Meyers, shared his latest tech toy on the Geek Estate Blog.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how I might apply the embeddable spreadsheet feature of Google’s EditGrid, but I have this primal need to try everything at least once. Drew, being the good company man he is, would much rather I share Zillow’s first quarter market report for San Diego. I just may do that soon, but today I will instead share a little project in which we have been knee-deep for the past month.

At a recent Scripps Ranch Community Planning Group meeting, the chair suggested that it would be nice to have a comprehensive list of homeowners associations (HOAs) and management companies for the many neighborhoods comprising Scripps Ranch. His thought was that in the event of future emergencies (think fires), a single go-to resource for contact information would be helpful. So, with the help of our underpaid (as in, “not paid”) high school intern, Jeremy Haywood, we set about compiling the information. The result is the following spreadsheet, presented in two pages. The first indicates whether or not each neighborhood has an HOA and/or Mello Roos assessment, and the second lists the HOA management companies and phone numbers.

We (that would be the “royal we,” think “Jeremy”) are almost finished mapping this information using GoogleMaps. Knowing that you are all now tingly with anticipation, rest assured we will be sharing the visual version of our spreadsheet when it is finished. In the meantime, I am off to think up something else I can put in an embeddable spreadsheet that is not Zillow’s first quarter market report. I just love messin’ with Drew.

… which may grow up to be full-blown posts some day. 

This is the problem…

…with having my listings submitted on my behalf.

From the company web site and on ours, this is the same home. If we agree that buyers want information, how is the buyer better served by redirecting them to a site with less information than more? And how is the seller better served in the process?

I know, I know. It is impractical to feed tens of thousands of listings while allowing a redirect to tens of thousands of different agent sites. Still, it is something that continues to trouble me, not in the “global warming” sense nor in the “Look at the price of gas!” sense, but it bugs me nonetheless.

This is the problem…

…with third-party search sites which rely on indiviual feeds (for instance Trulia, Zillow, and now Front Door) rather than IDX arrangements with the MLS providers (for instance, Redfin, Realtor.com, and even SanDiegoCastles.com).

The home I linked to above is in escrow, has been, actually, for 17 days. It is still displayed on Trulia, but at least the savvy shopper with a keen eye for the fine print will eventually find the little “pending” descriptor somewhere along the way. On Zillow, this home is shown as For Sale with 42 days on Zillow, as is another listing of ours which shows 6 days on Zillow yet was sold prior to entry in our MLS and was therefore active for approximately the one nanosecond it took me to enter the data and push the “change status” button. I find it amusing that the property description for the latter active offering says “Sold prior to MLS input.”

There is clearly still an ongoing feed problem, a problem I have been fighting since January. As I recently admitted, I have all but given up on trying to control where our listings are being displayed, how, and by whom, but I do care that they get it right. Note to Zillow: If you are going to accept feeds, please do some periodic auditing to confirm that they are indeed being regularly updated. Incorrect or inconsistent feeds compromise the integrity of the data and may eventually compromise the integrity of your site. When our latest listing goes live next week, I would like to think (as would my clients) that you will get the memo.

This is the problem…

… with trying to take advantage of people. The fourth and latest in my string of extortion letters arrived this morning.

krisberg.com was previously priced at $457, but as part of a very limited marketing test, I’ve decided to discount our inventory of domain names for just 24 hours. How big a discount? Up to $250. That’s a huge savings. But, you do have to act right away though… because this offer is only good for the next 24 hours.

I feel a Blue Light Special coming on.

This is the problem…

… with beer. As reported in the San Diego Union Tribune this week:

The more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher - a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

And I haven’t even been drinking.

Have a great weekend!

Pay attention to your dreams - God’s angels often speak directly to our hearts when we are asleep.  Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

So it was that God’s angels decided it was time to have a chat with me about Zestimates last night. It could be argued that dreaming about Zillow is rather warped, a silent cry for help, yet if Google had been crawling my REM state for any period of time, let me assure you that I would not rank high for keywords beginning with a “Z.” Overflowing laundry hamper, mean clowns, and George Clooney - well, that’s another story. For those, I am dominating Page 1 of the dream search results.

Somewhere around 2:00 am, my angels stopped by to remind me how many times in the past month we have found ourselves sitting at an otherwise sane family’s kitchen table staring down the barrel of their Zestimate. The modern day listing appointment is not nearly as much fun, or as predictable, as the listing appointment of yore (”yore” being 2003). Let’s compare and contrast.

Yore

Seller: I want to sell my house.
Agent: Let me tell you why I am the best choice! (Agent proceeds to share awards, letters of reference, a picture taken with the Real Estate Company President at this year’s office Christmas party held in the Ritz Grand Ballroom and another taken with Leonard Nimoy at the 1997 Comic-Con, and a marketing plan consisting of a promise to keep the flyer box mostly stocked. Seller listens intently.)
Seller: How much is my home worth?
Agent: Whatever you want or need it to be worth!
Seller: My cousin Louis just got his license and will list my house for free. Will you do it for $1.95?
Agent: Fees are negotiable!

Yore Plus Five Years

Seller: I want to sell my house.
Agent: Let me tell you why I am the best choice! (Agent proceeds to share awards, letters of reference, a picture taken with the Real Estate Company President at this year’s office Christmas party held in the parking lot of Dunkin’ Donuts and another taken with Craig Newmark at the Inman Connect conference, and a marketing plan consisting of a promise to completely empty their own Roth IRA during the duration of the 12-month listing. Seller, meanwhile, busies himself with more interesting and pressing activities, such as sewing the button back on his peacoat and basting his turkey. When agent’s lips stop moving, Seller puts down his People magazine and proceeds.)
Seller: My home is worth this much (waving Zestimate high over head with the same authority as did Moses when showing off his Commandments).
Agent: No, it’s not.
Seller: Yes, it is.
Agent: No, it’s not.
Seller: We will use Louis.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so unfunny - and true. We try to explain that Zestimates are impersonal and often flawed, and we try to explain that they are sorta, kinda, ballpark numbers which, while entertaining, are not science or gospel. Blah, blah, blah.

So, my dream sequence inspired me to take a quick comparative look at the Zestimates versus sale prices of homes sold in Scripps Ranch since the February 1, 2008. First, keep in mind that out of a detached housing inventory of approximately 8,000 homes in the San Diego 92131 zip code, only twelve recordings are reported by our Sandicor Multiple Listing Service for this period. Of these twelve homes, three were new construction with no Zestimate available. Here is what I found:

Granted, this is a very small sample, but I think we can safely make a couple of observations. First, in every case, the Zestimate was higher than the actual sale price. Second, in many cases the Zestimate wasn’t just a little higher, but a whole bunch optimistic. On average, Zillow blew their estimate of value by approximately 9%.

In Zillow’s defense, buried in the site is the admission that Zestimates are accurate on average within 7.2% in the San Diego metro area. They also admit to the Zestimate’s limitations:

It is not an appraisal. It is a starting point in determining a home’s value. The Zestimate is pulled from data; your real estate agent or appraiser physically inspects the home and takes special features, location, and market conditions into account. Variations in price also occur because of negotiating factors, closing costs, and timing of closing.

But, this language is anything but front and center on their site. The reality, I suppose, is that even if they placed this disclaimer on their landing page in 72-point font, many sellers would miss the message. Why listen to all that talk about averages when my home is anything but average?

It is fun to look up your own Zestimate. Changes to this number over time can indeed provide insight into your local market trends. But when it comes time to price your home for sale and set realistic expectations of value, it is imperative that you study the data provided by your agent and reach an unemotional, reasoned conclusion. Even your cousin Louis knows this.

Or you can dare to dream.