Figures don’t lie, but liars figure
Homes are uniquely personal; money is uniquely impersonal. People are emotional; markets are heartless. When they come together — as in buying a house, or renting an apartment — the superego and id duel it out.
One of us has got to lose
Brokers know that the key to a buyer’s wallet is his heart, not his head; and buyers equally know that if they view through the eyes of love, they will overpay. So buyers always want to know before they look, and with the internet, they can do something about it, as illustrated by this New York Times article:
A FEW years ago, people advertising homes on the Internet were racing to employ the latest gimmicks: 360-degree photographs to show off spacious living rooms, mortgage calculators to pinpoint monthly carrying costs, even videos of agents to talk about a home’s attributes.
The house Nancy and I currently occupy owes much to that technology, for it was listed via a 360 walkthrough. Long before
By cutting search costs, the internet widens markets even as it educates (and therefore empowers) consumers. So that’s good, but the Web’s greatest use is in information, and the purest information is in numbers.
Today, companies and brokers are focusing less on toys and are offering something more straightforward: numbers. This detailed information — be it local home values, neighborhood amenities or broader market conditions — is part of a trend to attract consumers by offering data they cannot find easily elsewhere, or could once get only from real estate agents.
Numbers are one of humanity’s great inventions [Or discoveries; one can argue that mathematics exists independent of reality –Ed.], for they allow straight-up paired comparison.
Who’s better, Hamilton or Jackson?
Judge them not by their profiles.
Maisha Cannon, who recently sold her home in
Ms. Cannon, a 29-year-old recruiter for the University of Southern California, said Mr. Rode had accessed the data through a new tool for brokers called Market Snapshot — which was an improvement over traditional packets of comparable properties that other brokers provide.
A sample market snapshot
“The chart and graphs were all in the e-mail,” she said. “Someone else might send you a general e-mail and a spiel.”
Do signs point to Yes?
Spiel, from the German for game — an apt description of the broker’s tactics.
All I can see are my guys, not the opponent’s guys!
When she interviewed agents to decide with whom to list the property, she used the information from Mr. Rode to see if the other agents were on target. Ultimately, she listed the property with Mr. Rode, and the sale price tracked with the data he sent her.
Data lets the customer interview the expert on even terms; for customers who suffer from the only-once phenomenon, this can be the Sword of Achilles to find the righteous woman.
Offering packages of detailed data is becoming a new method for brokers to build their clientele and a way for general Web sites to feed consumers’ interests. Last month, the search engine Yahoo entered a partnership with a nonprofit site named Greatschools.net to offer buyers detailed data to compare schools.
“In the past, people would, say, send a pumpkin at Thanksgiving or send a calendar,” said Errol Samuelson, president of Top Producer Systems, the company that produces Market Snapshot as a division of Move.com, which owns several large real estate and housing sites like Realtor.com. “Our perspective is, if you provide real information instead of another refrigerator magnet, you set up the foundation for a relationship.”
Ignorance is a hazardous substance
Of course, the explosion of detailed real estate data online has produced confusion as well.
For example, with the popular house valuation Web sites — including Zillow.com and Trulia.com — the results on values for a half-million-dollar house can range from $400,000 to more than $600,000.
That’s just a Hubble-telescope problem — focus comes with use. More data, better estimates.
Perception floating in space, waiting to be pointed the right way
Even if an innovative product is imperfect, it beats Nothing, so the only reliable trump to bad data is better data:
After the start of Zillow.com, a handful of sites cropped up offering similar services.
Within a month, even the giant Realtor.com, which in recent years had not offered the sale prices of comparable listings online, had a new feature on its front page that gave consumers a starting point to assess their property values.
Once information is cracked, you cannot uncrack it.
How you gonna keep ‘em from opening wider?
“If you tell a house seller that a home value is preordained, the home seller is not going to seek someone to get the best price,” said [Allan Dalton, president and chief executive of Realtor.com]. “We represent both the homes and the professional. At the end of the day, people need to have expert advice.”
Numbers are not reality; numbers are the idealization of reality. In the real world, there is always a place for judgment. But though you get a diagnosis from your doctor, he starts by looking at X-rays.
We’re trying to find out what you’re thinking
This approach differs from that of sites like Zillow.com, whose goal is to attract an audience for its information and to sell advertising on the basis of the size of that audience.
Within a few months of its opening, however, Zillow attracted some unwelcome attention. In October, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit consumer group in
A ridiculous complaint, in my view, akin to suing McDonalds because you spill hot coffee on yourself. Oh wait …
And it’ll make you jumpy too
“We’re a starting point,” said the spokeswoman, Amanda Hoffman. “We’re not a crystal ball. It’s the Internet. You sort of have to take everything you read on the Internet with a grain of salt.”
Beyond the growth of home valuation sites, companies and individual real estate brokers are developing other methods to win customers with information online.
Back we come to the value of information; it lets you distinguish the specialist from the quack.
I’ve had a basic medical training
When Barbara G. Cox trains real estate brokers, she says, she encourages them to go beyond listings and use the Web to position themselves as specialists. For example, a specialist in horse properties can use a site to demonstrate knowledge about stabling, feeding and grooming.
“I’m telling them, in positioning, you have to distinguish yourself,” said Ms. Cox, co-author of “Internet Marketing in Real Estate” (Prentice Hall, 2000) and instructor of a course in real estate technology at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif.
Beyond factual information, there is also personal information — and markets, after all, are simply the sum total of all the information, including people’s opinions:
One man, one vote
As an extension of pure data about communities, Realtor.com is planning to add some consumer opinion, a feature that follows somewhat in the style of online retailers like Amazon.com.
For certain vendors, user-driven is terrific: it’s free, it’s direct, and it’s libel-proof, since the vendor isn’t saying it, another customer is.
He conceded, of course, that public opinion could be tricky to manage in a high-stakes sales environment. He said that site administrators planned to allow residents to make recommendations — but that the site would employ editors to keep watch.
“It won’t be the wild, wild West,” he said.
Heading for the sunshine, living in the wild, wild west
No? Just ask Wikipedia.
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