real/diaBlog - boldly saying what others won't about Real Estate

The Power of Google Reader - 500+ Articles a Day

During a typical day I will browse the headlines of 500-800 stories in my Google Reader.  I skim the headlines for articles, posts or stories about 4 or 5 different areas of interest:

1. Finance and Economics - I used to be a financial analyst, investment banker and ran a brokerage firm for a number of years.  The stories I usually pick up are about areas of the economy and financial information as it affects real estate.
2. Communication - Lately I have been focusing on stories about Social Media, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook specifically.
3. Real Estate - National stories about builders, trends, brokerages, foreclosures as well as local real estate information here in the Washington DC area.
4. Bicycling - I ride a bike for excercise, to save money and to maybe save a tree or two.

In Google Reader I will share all the stories I feel are important enough that others should read if they are concerned or interested in the same things I am.  Of the 500+ headlines I skim, I read about 20-30 stories a day and share about 3 or 4 on a typical day.  This takes about 2 hours each day.  So if you subscribe to my reader you will in essence have done pretty much the same amount of reading as I have, only it has taken you only a couple minutes to do the same thing. 

If you want to follow along you can bookmark Tony's Google Reader Page.  You can also go to Google Reader and add me to your list of people to follow.  My email address is tonyarko at gmail. 

Realdiablog as Seen by Wordle

FranklyMLS Better than Matrix Wireless

Frank LLosa of Frankly Realty has built a search site that is better than the search site that the MRIS makes agents use to access the MLS.  The reason it is better is very simple - his search site is simple and fast and gives you what you need.  The Matrix Wireless system is complicated, slow, ackward and is less comprehensive than Frank's site.

FranklyMLS.com is the name of the site and it is lightning fast. 

Realtor.com vs Zillow vs Trulia - Back To Real Estate 2.0 Basics

With all the recent talk about subprime mortgages, foreclosures and government bail outs, the days of comparing Zillow with Trulia with Realtor.com seem to be gone. That's why we'd like to revisit those discussions from the angle of "what's been going on with these three since we lasted talked about them?". Well, here are some graphs from Compete.com comparing the three sites in terms of people count, visits and rank.

People Count -the number of people visiting the site:

Since November 2006, Realtor.com has increased their people count by 10.8 percent; Zillow by 17.4 percent; Trulia by 191.3 percent. Though Realtor.com is still the king of the people count with 5.7M people coming through last month, it has lost significant ground in the latter part of 2007. This is not good news for the giant because, while they were losing ground, Zillow was relatively flat overall and Trulia continued to grow.

Pages Per Visit - the number of pages an average person views on a visit to each site:

Since November 2006, Realtor.com has decreased their pages per visit by 22.6 percent; Zillow has increased by 15.5 percent; Trulia by 151.4 percent. Realtor.com currently has the most pages per visit, but lost significant ground between March and November. Realtor.com actually ranked second below Trulia between July and the middle of September. But then Trulia took a nose dive beginning in September, plateauing in the beginning of October allowing Realtor.com to stay at the top spot. Zillow basically went sideways.

Does this mean that people are finding the content on Trulia more valuable and appealing than Realtor.com or Zillow? Does it mean that Trulia offers information that is no found on Realtor.com (e.g. Trulia Voices)? What caused Trulia's nose dive in September? What can Zillow do to increase their pages per visit?

Average Stay - the number of minutes an average visitor spends on each site during each visit

Since November 2006, the average stay on Realtor.com has gone down 17.1 percent; Zillow down 18.6 percent; Trulia's visitors have increased their average stay by 8.6 percent. You'll notice though Trulia nearly quadrupled their pages per visit between November 2006 and August 2007, those same people only increased their average stay by about 25 percent. It seems like the pages seemed interesting to people at first (hence the increased pages per visit), but the pages didn't keep them there very long for whatever reason.

One last statistic that some may find interesting is regarding the overall rank of each of the three sites:

• Realtor.com is still the top ranking site at 181, but is down 34 percent over the last 12 months
• Zillow ranks number 850 and is down 50 percent over the last 12 months
• Trulia is the lowest ranking site at 1,216, but is up 72 percent over the last 12 months

Each of the three graphs and this last statistic above tells a different story and perhaps, they all combine to tell one overall story.

What do you think?

Related Articles:

Warning Zillow Investors - You Should Give Your Money To Trulia

List of Listing Sites

Warning Zillow Investors - You Should Give Your Money to Trulia

It was just announced that Zillow received another $30,000,000 in funding to go along with the $57,000,000 they have already received in two previous rounds of investing.  According to the article, the money will be used to accelerate the offerings from Zillow to homeowners and real estate professionals.

I'm not sure what analysis the investors used to determine Zillow was worthy of additional funding but I can tell you they probably didn't talk to any real estate professionals, they probably didn't do a random check of the zillow zestimate to check for accuracy and they didn't compare site traffic growth of zillow to their main competitor, trulia. 

If they had here is what they would found:

As the marketplace leader here in Loudoun County Virginia, a county with a per capita household income level that is 2nd in the entire United States, I have listed and sold close to 200 properties in the last 4 years.  In that time I have consulted with over 500 homeowners on the value of their houses and have been inside well over 2000 homes in that same time period.  I can tell you that without a doubt, zillow's method for valuing a home is a complete joke.  In fact, I don't think they have even tried to fix the algorithms used to create their zestimates since they rolled them out.  Last November I wrote a post comparing the AVM websites and their results.  Zillow was a featured site and they valued the subject property at $482,684.  At the time their estimate was too high by about $65,000 or 15.5%. 

In the last 10 months, the market has gone nowhere but down.  The last sale in my neighborhood of the exact same model as the subject property, with the exact same features, backing to the exact same trees was $389,000 on July 31st, 2007.  Another home on the next street over, same model, same features, sold for $425,000 in April.  There has been a trend downward in the past year and these two sales illustrate that.

So what does Zillow say the house is now worth?  $528,788!!  What kind of algorithm are they using, or what kind of data are they gathering that could INCREASE the value of a townhome $46,104 when in reality the price of the home went down $15,000+?  How is that possible?  And why would someone give $30 Million to a company that is making these ridiculous calculations and holding them out to the general public as a valuation?  It is obvious that they have given up trying to make their zestimates accurate and are focusing their efforts in other areas.  I say this because there is so much inaccuracy in the data (they change the subject property from a townhouse to a single family home) abondonment could be the only explanation. 

But maybe their new features are generating traffic and page views and keeping people on their site longer and the zestimate is just a tool to get them to the site.  Let's see. 

In this graph, it shows that the overall traffic over the last twelve months has gone up a whopping 1.8%.  Compare this to Trulia's traffic growth rate in the last year of 301.6% and it is just a matter of time before Zillow gets passed.  I'm not sure the Zillow investors saw these numbers before they made their $30,000,000 bet but maybe they are looking at how long visitors are staying on the site.  Maybe Zillow is increasing the length of time and page visits of their visitors through superior features.  Let's take a look.

Once again, this graph shows zillows pages/visit has increased 1.1% in the last year while Trulia's has grown by 334%.  Whooops.  Maybe the investors were looking at length of time per visit.  Maybe the information on each page of zillow is so comprehensive they can only absorb 10 pages of information in the time it takes a Trulia visitor to look at 25 pages.  Let's see.

I almost found a statistic that showed zillow as the better investment.  But it turns out that the average stay of a trulia visitor has been longer since April.

In my previous life I was a financial analyst for a mergers and acquisition firm and an investment banking firm.  I can tell you that this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of zillow and it doesn't take into account factors that outsiders are not privy to.  Maybe they have another killer application in the pipeline.  But as a representative of both of their target audiences, homeowners and real estate professionals, I can tell you that my money is on Trulia.

Update:  Joel over at FoREM just published this post about the same topic.

Further Reading: Trulia Leaps Ahead To Become One of the Top 3 Trafic Drivers To Real Estate Companies Nationwide - AOL Money and Finance

What Happened to Postlets?

My marketing manager just informed me that Postlets.com is not working.  It seems this has happened before back in February.  I don't want to jump to conclusions and say they have gone out of business without knowing.  I did several searches and nothing came up regarding their website being down.

If anyone has an idea of what is going on, could you fill the rest of us in.  Maybe Joel at FoREM knows something or Pat at Transparentre or someone over at Inman.

UPDATE

Postlets is back up this morning.  Guess it was a temporary glitch.

Google Real Estate Beta Site Update

Since posting "Zillow, Trulia and now...Google?", we've run across some more information about Google's secret beta property search project. Avi from Promediacorp and Shimon Sandler ran across the beta site and revealed the info the public. Even though Google has since removed the site from public view, there are some screenshots still floating around.

(For more screenshots, click here)

Look out Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, brokerage firms and the industry in general. Not many companies have more programmers or deeper pockets than Google. Nor do many companies have the guts Google has to challenge the status quo.

Question(s)...Will agents and brokers pull their keyword search dollars out of Google and dump them into Yahoo, MSN and others and how much revenue will Google loose because of it? Where will Google make up the revenue?

According To Zillow, Homeowners Have No Privacy

To further add to the Zillow controversy, I came across a post by Teresa Boardman on the St. Paul Real Estate Blog sharing an email conversation between a homeowner in California and David Gibbons from Zillow that will make many homeowners in America cringe. The home owner requested that their home be removed from Zillow.com and here is Zillow's response:

"We don't delete addresses from Zillow once we've collected the house's public record. Why? Well, you can think of Zillow as a national directory of homes -- we're committed to providing consumers with as complete a directory as possible. Thank you for claiming your house!"

Not only will your home's information become public on Zillow, but now your conversations and the comments of others may become public information as well. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Just think of the possibilities - Zillow is the new free Haines Directory; easier collection of data by mass marketers, local businesses, etc; more of your personal information on the web; comments left behind by angry neighbors, sellers, buyers, etc; and the list goes on...

Thank you Zillow for looking out for your own best interests rather than those of homeowners.

Zillow Retreats??

It turns out that Zillow's newest feature "Tell Us a Home's For Sale", caused so much controversy that they decided to turn it off.  A post by Jonathan Washburn at Active Rain generated over 70 responses in a little less than a day and a lot of them were negative.  They pointed out possible rules violations and the implications for agents who abused the new tool.  Read through the comments to see how agents responded. 

Several posts on real estate blogs also look at the implications of the new Zillow, but from a couple of different angles.  Check out Sellsius and FoREM. 

Once again, Zillow has managed to create a hailstorm of publicity in the "blogosphere".  Do you think their latest upgrades and the ensuing storm are calculated or accidental?

CORRECTION:

Zillow did not turn off their "Tell Us a Home's for Sale".  They just hide it so well it is difficult to find.  Instead of a link to the feature, you have to know the address of the house listed.  Then you need to hunt for the icon that takes you to the page where you enter the price.  Not that hiding it makes it any less controversial.  Maybe they should turn if off before someone gets hurt.

Zillow, Trulia and now...Google?

Although Zillow and Trulia are becoming heavier hitters by the day, in the world of listing sites, Google may be positioning itself in the same league. Google left a vague and intereting post on their blog yesterday that seems to hint that they're up to something big. After all, the online listing site business is growing by leaps and bounds and the potential for adverstising revenue is huge. This is right up Google's alley.

If you've been using or watching the housing section on Google Base, you would have noticed that they're making many improvements and changes as of late. Google has also been tweaking their MyMaps feature to add to the appeal of Google Base and further help it compete against Zillow, Trulia and others.

Much like Trulia did earlier this year, Google has also been in talks with brokers to capture listings, but they've done that and everything else in a cloak of secrecy. They don't generally talk much about what they're up to, so for them to post that in their blog is rather interesting. We'll have to wait and see though I doubt we'll have to wait long.