Well, as it turns out, this blogging thing is tougher than I thought. As a professional journalist who also blogs as part of his job, I was under the mistaken impression that maintaining my own blog on a two topics I love -- technology and real estate and technology would be a breeze. Not so -- as my recent post history would attest. The biggest challenge, obviously, is finding the time each day to sit down and do your thing.
Well, in the interests of turning over a new leaf, I'm using my latest freelance assignment for the Boston Globe -- to document the fast evolving world of R.E. blogging -- as a kind of self education. I've already spoken to some of the best in the business -- Teresa Boardman over at St. Paul Real Estate blog, and John Keith of Boston Real Estate. Both have been very generous sharing their tips about what it takes to be a successful R.E. blogger, and also on how their blogging has led to big changes in their thinking about the R.E. industry. Not to give too much away (the Globe story will run this week and I'll link to it then), but my sense is that R.E. blogging is just the latest crack in the wall that has protected the mega firms like Coldwell Banker and Prudential from being overrun by hoardes of independent agents.
I'm still looking for thoughts/feedback. If you're an agent out there and you're blogging (or thinking about it), let me know your thoughts -- what's worked? What hasn't? How long did it take to get things running? What was the response of your boss/manager? What's the next big thing? Should the profession be doing more to educate up and coming agents about blogging and how to use the Internet?
I also hope to put together a top ten tips for a successful r.e. blog. I've got some things already (blog well and often, pictures help, don't use your blog to push properties, be yourself), but I'm open to more.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
It's the data, stupid.
As I said, I recently wrapped up reporting on an article that is now running in the Boston Sunday Globe. The piece started -- back in January -- as a look at Zillow's Make Me Move feature, which at that point had been out there for a few weeks and attracted a few hundred Boston area home owners. As I worked with my editor at the Globe on the story, however, the focus broadened to include Zillow's cousins -- Trulia, Redfin and especially a new site: Cyberhomes.com.
So what did I learn?
First of all, that data is truly the coin of the realm when it comes to Web-based real estate sites. Cool graphics and nifty map integrations are great, but these days Java and AJAX programming is a commodity. Cyberhomes CIO Marty Frame told me that his developers were able to build their site in around four months (which may explain the fact that the site didn't support Firefox in its first iteration). At the end of the day, visitors to your site are fickle and what's going to stick them to you is the depth and quality of the data you offer about their house, their neighbor's house, or the town where they live or want to live.
As my article makes clear, Zillow's Make Me Move is just a means to an end to get this kind of rich property data -- photos, improvements, additions, walk-through videos, whatever. The site that can aggregate that data and combine it in novel ways with the least effort and at the lowest cost is the site that will draw eyeballs -- nifty haircuts notwithstanding.
The second realization I had was that, at the end of the day, none of these Web sites -- Zillow, Cyberhomes, sitetobenamedlater.com can stand on their own for long. What are they, after all, but slick facades on the sausage factory that is the home selling and buying process in this country? Sure, we could dream that user friendly Web sites might some day disaggregate realtors from the home buying process, and turn the entire industry into a FSBO version of eBay, with informed buyers and sellers interacting on nearly level ground. Folks like Tom Russell, a wired and savvy homeowner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who I interviewed for the Globe, certainly imagined this kind of environment to be preferable to the old route of calling an agent and sticking a sign in your yard - -especially if, at the end of the day, you're holding on to an extra %3 to %5 in commission costs. The reality is that we're not anywhere near that place. Zillow netted 12,000 Make Me Move prices in the first month, then took another two plus months to double that figure. Hardly a run away success. To this day, Make me Move homes and home listings are still just 1/10 of one percent of the 70,000,000 homes Zillow claims to track, while Zillow is trumpeting zany haircuts as a recruiting tool -- which may be like the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jumping the Shark (shaving the shark, anyone?).
Three years from now, the vast majority of buyers and sellers will still look to traditional agents to find property and broker sales for them, even if they're using Web sites to narrow their options and direct their steps to open houses. This, of course, isn't news to executives at any of these startup firms. In just the last week we've seen Trulia come in from the rain by teaming up Realogy to offer home listings. And with something like $60 million in VC, but few ways to generate revenue beyond online advertising, it's hard to imagine many paths to profitability for Zillow's investors that don't involve some high-multiple hookup with a larger entity -- Google, which is already melding Google Base to real estate services, or Yahoo (desperate to get its mojo back) or Microsoft (sitting on a mound of cash and keen to be a spoiler to any deal with Google).
So what are these cool new sites good for? Lots of things, according to Marty Frame of Cyberhomes -- provided you've already got a lot of products lined up to sell through them. Frame, who spent years as CTO at Realtor.com before moving over to Fidelity National Information Services to be CIO of Cyberhomes, was one of the more astute observers of the Real Estate 2.0 scene that I spoke with. When I asked him the "Big Question" -- how do any of these sites make money? His response was as fast as it was eye opening: They don't, in and of themselves. As he explained it, Cyberhomes is a cool, free service that tells potential home buyers and sellers a lot about properties and the communities they're located in. It also tells its corporate masters, Fidelity Information Services, and Fidelity National Financial, an awful lot about people who may be interested in their products.
"Ultimately our goal is that, by being useful to consumers on an anonymous basis, we can provide access to products they're looking for at the lowest cost basis," Frame said. "We provide home ownership services that home owners need. (Cyberhomes) allows us to make ourselves useful in terms of the decision process owners are engaged in. Then, based on their use, we can work through our partners to make them an offer that's appropriate to what they're trying to encounter."
In the end, seeing a huge industry incumbent like Fidelity start to put the pieces together like that behind a slick front end like Cyberhomes.com can't be good news for Zillow and the countless startups that are jockeying to be the 800 lb. gorilla of the online real estate market. Because, basically, Fidelity already is an 800 lb. gorilla: sole owner of a massive database of property, appraisal and market data for nearly every property in the U.S., issuer of 1/3 of all title insurance policies, owner of extensive property analytics and automated property appraisal IP that is already in use by industry professionals.
In the next twelve months, big data aggregators like Fidelity will be taking the gloves off and tuning up (or buying up) some of the nascent sites we've all been writing about with new features that really go deep into that data. That'll be a good thing for consumers -- providing better access to more reliable data and more accurate appraisals and research tools. It probably won't be good thing for those investors who saw the makings of a real estate revolution in Web 2.0 startups like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin.
So what did I learn?
First of all, that data is truly the coin of the realm when it comes to Web-based real estate sites. Cool graphics and nifty map integrations are great, but these days Java and AJAX programming is a commodity. Cyberhomes CIO Marty Frame told me that his developers were able to build their site in around four months (which may explain the fact that the site didn't support Firefox in its first iteration). At the end of the day, visitors to your site are fickle and what's going to stick them to you is the depth and quality of the data you offer about their house, their neighbor's house, or the town where they live or want to live.
As my article makes clear, Zillow's Make Me Move is just a means to an end to get this kind of rich property data -- photos, improvements, additions, walk-through videos, whatever. The site that can aggregate that data and combine it in novel ways with the least effort and at the lowest cost is the site that will draw eyeballs -- nifty haircuts notwithstanding.
The second realization I had was that, at the end of the day, none of these Web sites -- Zillow, Cyberhomes, sitetobenamedlater.com can stand on their own for long. What are they, after all, but slick facades on the sausage factory that is the home selling and buying process in this country? Sure, we could dream that user friendly Web sites might some day disaggregate realtors from the home buying process, and turn the entire industry into a FSBO version of eBay, with informed buyers and sellers interacting on nearly level ground. Folks like Tom Russell, a wired and savvy homeowner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who I interviewed for the Globe, certainly imagined this kind of environment to be preferable to the old route of calling an agent and sticking a sign in your yard - -especially if, at the end of the day, you're holding on to an extra %3 to %5 in commission costs. The reality is that we're not anywhere near that place. Zillow netted 12,000 Make Me Move prices in the first month, then took another two plus months to double that figure. Hardly a run away success. To this day, Make me Move homes and home listings are still just 1/10 of one percent of the 70,000,000 homes Zillow claims to track, while Zillow is trumpeting zany haircuts as a recruiting tool -- which may be like the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jumping the Shark (shaving the shark, anyone?).
Three years from now, the vast majority of buyers and sellers will still look to traditional agents to find property and broker sales for them, even if they're using Web sites to narrow their options and direct their steps to open houses. This, of course, isn't news to executives at any of these startup firms. In just the last week we've seen Trulia come in from the rain by teaming up Realogy to offer home listings. And with something like $60 million in VC, but few ways to generate revenue beyond online advertising, it's hard to imagine many paths to profitability for Zillow's investors that don't involve some high-multiple hookup with a larger entity -- Google, which is already melding Google Base to real estate services, or Yahoo (desperate to get its mojo back) or Microsoft (sitting on a mound of cash and keen to be a spoiler to any deal with Google).
So what are these cool new sites good for? Lots of things, according to Marty Frame of Cyberhomes -- provided you've already got a lot of products lined up to sell through them. Frame, who spent years as CTO at Realtor.com before moving over to Fidelity National Information Services to be CIO of Cyberhomes, was one of the more astute observers of the Real Estate 2.0 scene that I spoke with. When I asked him the "Big Question" -- how do any of these sites make money? His response was as fast as it was eye opening: They don't, in and of themselves. As he explained it, Cyberhomes is a cool, free service that tells potential home buyers and sellers a lot about properties and the communities they're located in. It also tells its corporate masters, Fidelity Information Services, and Fidelity National Financial, an awful lot about people who may be interested in their products.
"Ultimately our goal is that, by being useful to consumers on an anonymous basis, we can provide access to products they're looking for at the lowest cost basis," Frame said. "We provide home ownership services that home owners need. (Cyberhomes) allows us to make ourselves useful in terms of the decision process owners are engaged in. Then, based on their use, we can work through our partners to make them an offer that's appropriate to what they're trying to encounter."
In the end, seeing a huge industry incumbent like Fidelity start to put the pieces together like that behind a slick front end like Cyberhomes.com can't be good news for Zillow and the countless startups that are jockeying to be the 800 lb. gorilla of the online real estate market. Because, basically, Fidelity already is an 800 lb. gorilla: sole owner of a massive database of property, appraisal and market data for nearly every property in the U.S., issuer of 1/3 of all title insurance policies, owner of extensive property analytics and automated property appraisal IP that is already in use by industry professionals.
In the next twelve months, big data aggregators like Fidelity will be taking the gloves off and tuning up (or buying up) some of the nascent sites we've all been writing about with new features that really go deep into that data. That'll be a good thing for consumers -- providing better access to more reliable data and more accurate appraisals and research tools. It probably won't be good thing for those investors who saw the makings of a real estate revolution in Web 2.0 startups like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin.
Boston Globe on the online appraisal game
So I've got a story in today's Boston Sunday Globe about the difficulty many Web sites are having determining accurate home values, and on some of the different approaches sites like Zillow, Cyberhomes and My-Currency are taking to solve the problem. It's not a perfect, but worth a read for no other reason than its look at the seminal problem of inaccurate property data, and how that effects the ability of all these sites to offer reliable estimates of home value. There's also a quote in there from Joel Burslem of FutureofRealEstateMarketing.com (thanks, Joel), Marty Frame, CIO of Cyberhomes.com and Karim Tahawi of My-Currency.
Reporting and writing this article also got me thinking about what a thorny problem the "rich data" thing is for all these sites, and how that might ultimately determine who are the winners and losers in this fast-changing Web real estate market.
More to come on that...
Reporting and writing this article also got me thinking about what a thorny problem the "rich data" thing is for all these sites, and how that might ultimately determine who are the winners and losers in this fast-changing Web real estate market.
More to come on that...
Saturday, March 3, 2007
S&L 2.0?
The New York Times has two stories this weekend that should be red flags to anyone who thinks that the mortgage industry isn't staring into a large, swirling abyss in the form of shaky loans in the subprime lending market, and that it might take more than market forces to fix the problem.
First up is news of trouble at Yet Another Subprime Lendor. Of course, we've been hearing about problems in the subprime market for months now, ever since the Fed started raising interest rates, putting the pinch on homeowners with exotic ARMs and other creative financing arrangements. Hell, there's even a whole blog just for people curious about imploding subprime lenders. Up to now, most of these firms have been bit players: Silver State Mortgage, Eagle First, Ivanhoe. This time, however, its one of the big fish that may be caught in a net of bad loans. According to the Times, Federal prosecutors and securities regulators are investigating stock sales and accounting errors at New Century Financial Corporation, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and the largest subprime (or, as they call it "non prime") lender in the U.S. Concerns about New Century emerged in early February, after the company warned that it would need to restate earnings for three quarters. New Century's troubles deepened later in the month, after it said it was the subject of an investigation by NYSE into some fortuitously timed options sales by leading executives.
According to the Times, New Century's fate now seems to rest in the hands of Wall St. lenders, since the delay in filing its quarterly earnings has but around $17billion in credit lines in jeapordy. New Century will have to convince its Wall St. lenders to grant it waivers to avoid a cash crunch that would almost certainly sink the company, a la Enron. That kind of backing is doubtful, if New Century's business plan is really as murky as this post suggests (link courtesy of the Implodometer).
The second red flag comes from Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson, one of the most astute business writers around. As she notes in her column for tomorrow's Sunday Times (subscription required), Wall Street's efforts to discount the troubles at New Century and other lenders as a problem that's limited to the subprime lending market don't add up.
First up is news of trouble at Yet Another Subprime Lendor. Of course, we've been hearing about problems in the subprime market for months now, ever since the Fed started raising interest rates, putting the pinch on homeowners with exotic ARMs and other creative financing arrangements. Hell, there's even a whole blog just for people curious about imploding subprime lenders. Up to now, most of these firms have been bit players: Silver State Mortgage, Eagle First, Ivanhoe. This time, however, its one of the big fish that may be caught in a net of bad loans. According to the Times, Federal prosecutors and securities regulators are investigating stock sales and accounting errors at New Century Financial Corporation, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and the largest subprime (or, as they call it "non prime") lender in the U.S. Concerns about New Century emerged in early February, after the company warned that it would need to restate earnings for three quarters. New Century's troubles deepened later in the month, after it said it was the subject of an investigation by NYSE into some fortuitously timed options sales by leading executives.
According to the Times, New Century's fate now seems to rest in the hands of Wall St. lenders, since the delay in filing its quarterly earnings has but around $17billion in credit lines in jeapordy. New Century will have to convince its Wall St. lenders to grant it waivers to avoid a cash crunch that would almost certainly sink the company, a la Enron. That kind of backing is doubtful, if New Century's business plan is really as murky as this post suggests (link courtesy of the Implodometer).
The second red flag comes from Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson, one of the most astute business writers around. As she notes in her column for tomorrow's Sunday Times (subscription required), Wall Street's efforts to discount the troubles at New Century and other lenders as a problem that's limited to the subprime lending market don't add up.
The troubles disclosed last week at Countrywide Financial and American Home Mortgage Investment show that the credit crunch that is bringing down lenders like Silver State and New Century are beginning to seep into the mid tier lending market, too. According to Morgenson, American Home Mortgage said 8.13 percent of its loans held for salewere non-accruing, compared to 0.43 percent in 2005.
Morgenson also wonders whether to believe lenders' numbers for the percentage of defaulting mortgages, noting that lenders often go to great lengths to create "workout" plans that avoid foreclosing on homeowners. In theory that's a good thing --except when it's clear from the start that the homeowner in question won't be able to follow the workout plan or recover their footing enough to get right with the lender. In that case, lenient repayment schemes just constitute a form of welfare for unworthy borrowers who plan to declare bankruptcy, but are gaming the system in the meantime -- in one case, to continue to make payments on a Mercedes Benz that were in access of the mortgage payments the borrower was foregoing. :-<
The picture that's emerging from all these stories is of a mortgage industry that is based more on fantasy than reality, and that is sadly in need of reform and, in some cases, of closer scrutiny from regulators before the U.S. economy faces a 21st century version of the S&L crisis of the late 1980s (cost, ~ $150 billion) that helped sink the U.S. economy into a recession and, by the way, brought a booming real estate market to its knees.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Zillow: watch the people who are watching you
Zillow blog brings us news that Zillow.com is raising the already high level of real-estate induced navel gazing with a new feature that adds a page view count to every property record on the site. Yes, now you too can watch the people who are watching your home on Zillow.
Page counters now appear at the bottom of a home's details page and display the number of times your home has been viewed during the month, and since Zillow launched in Feb. of 06.
Even though I haven't taken the plunge with a Zillow Make Me Move price, or posted my home for sale, I felt a twinge of disappointment that my house wasn't the eyeball magnet I imagined it might be.
In the month of February, so far, just one person has looked it up on Zillow (that would be *ahem* me). A total of 39 people have viewed it in the last year -- I'm guessing 30 of them are me, plus a smattering of nosy friends (don't worry, I've Zillowed their houses too). Compare that with almost 300,000 lookups for my town and 13 million for Middlesex county in Massachusetts, where I live.
Actually, the penetration of Zillow is pretty astounding. A company spokesman told me that in the Boston area, around 80 percent of all homes have been looked up at least once --an astounding figure, given the relatively small user base that Zillow has.
Still, the number of page views your home gets tells you hardly anything about how "hot" your property is and, I worry, may be a kind of empty statistic that some homeowners are likely to interpret, wrongly, as signaling a lack of interest in their property -- especially if its for sale. At the very least, its simplistic to think that potential buyer interest in a property maps neatly to the kind of metrics (like page views, or click throughs) that Web based companies and publications have traditionally used to measure their success.
Page counters now appear at the bottom of a home's details page and display the number of times your home has been viewed during the month, and since Zillow launched in Feb. of 06.
Even though I haven't taken the plunge with a Zillow Make Me Move price, or posted my home for sale, I felt a twinge of disappointment that my house wasn't the eyeball magnet I imagined it might be.
In the month of February, so far, just one person has looked it up on Zillow (that would be *ahem* me). A total of 39 people have viewed it in the last year -- I'm guessing 30 of them are me, plus a smattering of nosy friends (don't worry, I've Zillowed their houses too). Compare that with almost 300,000 lookups for my town and 13 million for Middlesex county in Massachusetts, where I live.
Actually, the penetration of Zillow is pretty astounding. A company spokesman told me that in the Boston area, around 80 percent of all homes have been looked up at least once --an astounding figure, given the relatively small user base that Zillow has.
Still, the number of page views your home gets tells you hardly anything about how "hot" your property is and, I worry, may be a kind of empty statistic that some homeowners are likely to interpret, wrongly, as signaling a lack of interest in their property -- especially if its for sale. At the very least, its simplistic to think that potential buyer interest in a property maps neatly to the kind of metrics (like page views, or click throughs) that Web based companies and publications have traditionally used to measure their success.
Monday, February 19, 2007
I'm your realtor. Please be my friend!
If you ask me, there's a certain amount of magical thinking in the Web real estate space these days, which may mean that we're warming up for a March, 2000-esque bubble burst. Anecdotally, you read folks like Brad, over at Inman blog, saying that he's seeing a volume of business plans being foisted on him by startups is "comparable to 2000." There are other harbingers as well, like the abundance of patently hare-brained sites trying to get buzz going around well-thumbed over ideas, like online property listings.
Take, for example, NeighborhoodNetwork.com, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-focused site that bills itself as a "revolutionary Realtor sponsored network that enables homeowners to maximize their return on investment in their single largest asset...their home." Maximize it how? It's not really clear yet -- Neighborhoodnetwork.com hasn't filled in its Mission or FAQ pages. However, the idea appears to be that you, the homeowner, working through a broker, massage your home's MLS information and post pictures of your house. So, basically, we're talking about slide shows to accompany MLS listings? And that's new because....?
I guess the new bit is supposed to be this quasi-social networking concept of "neighborhood news" that homeowners can add. I can't see the page because, well, I don't own a home in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but I'm presuming this is all about agents mining the brainshare of area homeowners so they provide you with the local "context" about home listings that's the secret sauce in so many R.E. 2.0 business plans.
Ignoring the ham-fisted Java programming and maps integration that gives neighborhoodnetwork.com an eerie "Windows 3.1" feel, why would you do this? Their argument is that Neighborhoodnetwork makes it easier for your house to get "visibility" and to sell, when you're ready to do so. The page's logo "Where market time is all the time" says it all -- rather than endure the torture of anonymity while you live in your home with no plans to sell for, say, 15 or 20 years, you're supposed to strike up a friendship with an agent, then piggy back on their social network, providing a steady stream of photos, updates and neighborhood dirt in the hopes that a "power buyer" swoops in with a great offer? It's kind of a strange take on Zillow's Make Me Move, but without the tidy conceptual packaging that the MMM feature has.
My prediction: three years from now, we'll be writing about the great Web 2.0 crash and the biggest Web 2.0 flops. The picked over body of at least one R.E. 2.0 site will be on the pile (Trulia? Redfin? Zillow?) Alas, a site like NeighborhoodNetwork.com won't get big enough to even be recognized.
Take, for example, NeighborhoodNetwork.com, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-focused site that bills itself as a "revolutionary Realtor sponsored network that enables homeowners to maximize their return on investment in their single largest asset...their home." Maximize it how? It's not really clear yet -- Neighborhoodnetwork.com hasn't filled in its Mission or FAQ pages. However, the idea appears to be that you, the homeowner, working through a broker, massage your home's MLS information and post pictures of your house. So, basically, we're talking about slide shows to accompany MLS listings? And that's new because....?
I guess the new bit is supposed to be this quasi-social networking concept of "neighborhood news" that homeowners can add. I can't see the page because, well, I don't own a home in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but I'm presuming this is all about agents mining the brainshare of area homeowners so they provide you with the local "context" about home listings that's the secret sauce in so many R.E. 2.0 business plans.
Ignoring the ham-fisted Java programming and maps integration that gives neighborhoodnetwork.com an eerie "Windows 3.1" feel, why would you do this? Their argument is that Neighborhoodnetwork makes it easier for your house to get "visibility" and to sell, when you're ready to do so. The page's logo "Where market time is all the time" says it all -- rather than endure the torture of anonymity while you live in your home with no plans to sell for, say, 15 or 20 years, you're supposed to strike up a friendship with an agent, then piggy back on their social network, providing a steady stream of photos, updates and neighborhood dirt in the hopes that a "power buyer" swoops in with a great offer? It's kind of a strange take on Zillow's Make Me Move, but without the tidy conceptual packaging that the MMM feature has.
My prediction: three years from now, we'll be writing about the great Web 2.0 crash and the biggest Web 2.0 flops. The picked over body of at least one R.E. 2.0 site will be on the pile (Trulia? Redfin? Zillow?) Alas, a site like NeighborhoodNetwork.com won't get big enough to even be recognized.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Cyberhomes.com: Premature Betaculation?
It wasn't so long ago that the test runs of software known as "beta releases" were something mysterious, secretive and stealthy -- small releases of unready code internally at a company, or externally to a circle of well known and forgiving reviewers.
Google exploded that notion with their practice of throwing almost every bit of code they manage into huge, public and lengthy beta releases. Why, Blogger, which I'm using to write and publish this spent just shy of four _years_ in "beta," from the time Google bought Blogger in February, 2003, to December, 2006, when the company finally got around to ripping the faded "beta" label off its popular blogging tool.
But while the rules governing what is and isn't a "beta" release may have changed, there are a few tried and true rules that still apply such as the notion that "thine beta shall not make thyself look clueless." As noted first over at FutureofRealEstateMarketing, the folks over Fidelity National Information Services might have failed on that count with their new site/service: cyberhomes.com.
Now you know a domain like that cost some serious change -- so how come their "beta" release didn't support the Firefox Web browser? Very 1999, if I do say so myself. I'm particularly amused by their assertion (below) that they support "Firefox Version 1.5 and up," but that my computer, running Firefox 2.0.0.1 isn't supported. Hey, I'm just an old English major here, but isn't 2.0 bigger than 1.5? To their credit, Cyberhomes.com seems to have corrected the problem in the last hour or so, but you've got to wonder how a major "oops" like checking for (and supporting) the standard Web browser types (and even some non-standard ones -- Flock? Opera?) slipped through an internal review.
Cyberhomes appears to be another swing at replicating Zillow.com's success at consolidating property and sales information for residential real estate, with one small difference: Cyberhomes is backed by Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. "a leading provider of core financial institution processing, card issuer and transaction processing services, mortgage loan processing and related information products and outsourcing services to financial institutions, retailers, mortgage lenders and real estate professionals." Can you say "information goldmine"? You bet. As the FIS web site points out "nearly 50 percent of all U.S. residential mortgages are processed using FIS software." So if you've ever wondered where all that data you sent off with your mortgage application goes, now you know!
Besides beefing up my home's value by around $30,000 over Zillow's Zestimate (thanks, Cyberhomes!), this new site has, admittedly, a slick UI with easy access to demographic data for my town and a nice expanding menu of comparable sales. Drill down and they've got some pretty darn cool census and market analysis features built in that may make picking a town to live in less a matter of guess work, not to mention cool graphical data on everything from building permits in the area, to average commute time, unemployment rate, price per square foot -- you name it.
Google exploded that notion with their practice of throwing almost every bit of code they manage into huge, public and lengthy beta releases. Why, Blogger, which I'm using to write and publish this spent just shy of four _years_ in "beta," from the time Google bought Blogger in February, 2003, to December, 2006, when the company finally got around to ripping the faded "beta" label off its popular blogging tool.
But while the rules governing what is and isn't a "beta" release may have changed, there are a few tried and true rules that still apply such as the notion that "thine beta shall not make thyself look clueless." As noted first over at FutureofRealEstateMarketing, the folks over Fidelity National Information Services might have failed on that count with their new site/service: cyberhomes.com.
Now you know a domain like that cost some serious change -- so how come their "beta" release didn't support the Firefox Web browser? Very 1999, if I do say so myself. I'm particularly amused by their assertion (below) that they support "Firefox Version 1.5 and up," but that my computer, running Firefox 2.0.0.1 isn't supported. Hey, I'm just an old English major here, but isn't 2.0 bigger than 1.5? To their credit, Cyberhomes.com seems to have corrected the problem in the last hour or so, but you've got to wonder how a major "oops" like checking for (and supporting) the standard Web browser types (and even some non-standard ones -- Flock? Opera?) slipped through an internal review.Cyberhomes appears to be another swing at replicating Zillow.com's success at consolidating property and sales information for residential real estate, with one small difference: Cyberhomes is backed by Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. "a leading provider of core financial institution processing, card issuer and transaction processing services, mortgage loan processing and related information products and outsourcing services to financial institutions, retailers, mortgage lenders and real estate professionals." Can you say "information goldmine"? You bet. As the FIS web site points out "nearly 50 percent of all U.S. residential mortgages are processed using FIS software." So if you've ever wondered where all that data you sent off with your mortgage application goes, now you know!
Besides beefing up my home's value by around $30,000 over Zillow's Zestimate (thanks, Cyberhomes!), this new site has, admittedly, a slick UI with easy access to demographic data for my town and a nice expanding menu of comparable sales. Drill down and they've got some pretty darn cool census and market analysis features built in that may make picking a town to live in less a matter of guess work, not to mention cool graphical data on everything from building permits in the area, to average commute time, unemployment rate, price per square foot -- you name it.
According to the the Cyberhomes marketing materials, the site's database includes "more than 100 million property, ownership, sales, and mortgage records, covering more than 85% of the United States population."
But like every other R.E. 2.0 site out there, Cyberhomes is pimping for you to give us the skinny on your own house (and your motivation is....?) To quote: "No one knows the neighborhood like you do, so we give you the power to include the things you know are special about your place, your neighborhood, and your community." According to the site, but providing information on your home, you'll get a better idea of "what it could mean in the context of local market conditions. " Whatever that means.
Conclusion: look past the fact that these guys crapped out on the beta launch and give cyberhomes a try. You might like what you see.
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