@ sep & Mike Brown
Thank You. Nicely written & very accurate.

For all of those who think online brokerages are going to skyrocket and become the next big thing consider what Mike said above and ask yourself this -
If selling a home is so very simple, then why didn’t For Sale By Owner (FSBO) ever “take off,” or force the traditional real estate model to a grinding stop?

Short answer - Because it does not work (for the most part).

Just because you don’t see all the crap Realtors have to put up with does not mean that they are overpaid. These days even plumbers and auto mechanics can make a good income. You could unclog your own toilet and grease your own automobile moving parts but do you really want to and could you do it as quickly?

In your opinion what is a Realtors time worth? How much should they be paid for selling a home? What’s a fair income for an agent who is on call seven days a week and puts in 60 hours of work a week? Most Realtors don’t make a salary, they only get paid when something sells.

Currently we allow comments on listings & some AVM tools for every home…I guess we will see how fast this goes into action.

And hey, in San Diego, I see houses down about 40% in value from last year, yet I don’t see many realtors lowering their commission rates to help the beleaguered homeowner.

6% commission - deadpool

http://www.realestatejournal.c.....laney.html

Redfin isn’t the first to come up with this.

Kevin (what’s up Kevin?) said it right….”Good luck”. We actually had plans of taking our SF model into other markets, but like Kevin said, each and every single MLS is different. We simply didn’t have the time or capacity to do so. It is a frickin nightmare! I actually didn’t have to pay any fees for our access to the local MLS data, but I believe that to be because I am a member of SFAR and NAR. Like I said, outside companies might have a bit more trouble.

@MM and David #20

It is a long hard battle and the NAR and all of the Realtors will put up a HUGE fight against change. It has been my experience that it is true the travel industry was shaken up, but buying an airline ticket is different than buying a house. You cannot buy a house off of pictures alone (although I did 5 times, but they were investments), and there are too many variables of a transaction that a computer/program likely will never be able to duplicate/replace. You guys are spot on…at least for now.

@djlosch — Crap realtors, of whom there are plenty, are perhaps just “customer service jobs.” The good ones, thankfully, are more akin to other professionals — coders, consultants, attorneys, doctors, etc. Doing a home transaction is considerably more complicated than, say, taking orders at a McDonald’s drive-through. So it’s unlikely the profession will ever be replaced “by a simple database.”

@Mighty Sam — The notion of Realtors withholding listings from the MLS is, in my experience, something like the Lochness Monster — vague hints of being true, but very few actual confirmed sightings. In the good ol’ days when product flew off the shelf in a weekend, a handful of ne’er-do-good’er Realtors would do the old “double-end” trick: “forget” to put a property on the MLS, do open houses anyways, then sucker some unsuspecting buyer into using said Realtor to do both sides of the transaction. 2X commission = 2X $. Now that sales have slowed and homes are taking some actual effort to sell, I rarely if ever see that happening these days. There are still ways of double-ending a deal, but not putting a listing in the MLS is not an easy way of doing so.

also, realty suffers extensively from pro-marketing — the idea that they only list the pros of a property, and never any of the cons. a simple example is washer/dryers in apartments. most places that have it will say it, the places that don’t won’t mention it. the place that leaves it off will sell better than the place that discloses it doesn’t have it. if onliners put in that information, sales will be reduced.

What data are you referring to? Data from the original post about NAR allowing access, or data that sites like Redfin are churning out?

For my local MLS (San Francisco) I had to beg, borrow and steal for over one year to get permission to download and re-transmit MLS data in a different format as a “third party vendor” for my real estate newsletter biz (sfnewsletter). The process was painful! Not painful because they required so much of me, but painful because something so simple as signing a contract and tweaking it to accommodate our modified needs took ages to get through the legal department. Local associations of Realtors guard that information very closely. In the end I prevailed and can now publish sold data in real time to my list of readers, but it will be quite some time before companies that to NAR appear hostile will have access to that same data.

“THE SELLER HAS REQUESTED THE REMOVAL OF 2 COMMENTS FROM THIS THREAD”