BuyerMLS Has Arrived (at Times Square)

There have been so many milestones lately for this little start-up that could. First, we made it the final rounds of the prestigious Realogy Innovation Summit competition and now we're proud to share that a Times Square news crawl has BuyerMLS showing up on its screens. We've been piloting our product for the past two years, making sure that it worked well and adding upgrades like a BuyerList, heat maps, and a patent-pending matching system so now it's time to spread the word. Times Square, you're a dream come true.

BuyerMLS is honored to be featured in the Wall Street Journal.

CEO Chuck Williams said "The real estate industry is thinking ahead by evaluating the adoption of emerging technologies, such as business intelligence and the application of matching algorithms. BuyerMLS is at the forefront of this exciting and relevant movement. By leveraging our proprietary enterprise system to help instantly match qualified and screened buyers with sellers, we provide a streamlined and highly efficient home buying and selling process for real estate agents unlike any other marketplace solution."

Full article HERE

BuyerMLS Featured in Yahoo Finance News

BuyerMLS Named Finalist at Exclusive Realogy FWD Innovation Summit

Innovative Company Recognized for its Unique and Valuable Application to Bring Next-Generation Solutions to Real Estate Professionals

PHILADELPHIA, June 21, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- BuyerMLS, the next generation lead matching system for real estate professionals, joined a select group of innovative companies to meet with Realogy executives and brokers to help define real estate's future at the Realogy FWD Innovation Summit held on June 18, 2013. Realogy is the global leader and industry-dominating real estate franchisor and operator, with a 26% industry market share and a $7 billion market capitalization.

For the full release, please click HERE

BuyerMLS Honored At Realogy FWD Innovation Summit

Yesterday BuyerMLS got to be one of the cool kids and attend the Realogy FWD Innovation Summit where companies with gamechanging technology products were invited to present their wares to a room of industry leaders. Not only was BuyerMLS one of the fifteen companies selected from a pool of almost one hundred applicants, we were also voted a finalist in the competition for a $25,000 cash prize. It was a tough contest since the winner was a group called Floored that specializes in a 3D modeling software (which virtually recreates the physical space of interiors). We're considering ourselves lucky to be one of the runners-up. Here's a few recaps from the big day:

Sotheby's International Realty: Highlights from the Realogy FWD Innovation Summit

Inman: Floored voted best real estate tech startup at Realogy summit

Realogy: Official overview of the event

The Tipping Point For Buying Versus Renting

Some have said we are living in the middle of Generation Renter (mostly because people are having a hard time coming up with enough cash for a downpayment) but with interest rates so low it is better to buy a house now if at all possible. But how much would rates have to rise in order for renting to become a cheaper proposition than buying? Trulia has crunched their numbers and have come up with the answer: roughly 10%. While it does depend on the market—for San Jose, California rates would only have to rise above 5.2% to make renting a better option—there would still have to be a considerable rise to make buying a more expensive commitment than renting (just on paper, of course). Click over to read their exact methodology and to see the list of cities with the highest and lowest tipping points for mortgage rates.

A Narrow Focus Helps Real-Estate Agents

Today's WSJ runs an interesting piece on a rarely covered topic: agent productivity. The author, Sanette Tanaka, states: A new study suggests real-estate agents do something that might go against their grain: think small. Agents who concentrate on a small, specialized area sell homes for 1.21% more than agents who list homes in a large area, says Bennie Waller, professor of finance and real estate at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. Homeowners with pricier homes stand to gain even more. Properties above the median sale price sold for 1.71% more when listed by an agent with a small territory, according to a study last year on listing area and real-estate sales." Get the FULL ARTICLE here

Low Inventory Gets Another Wallop

There have been a few hints that the curse of low inventory is beginning to ease but today brings the strongest sign ever: fewer people are underwater on their mortgages. The total number of 'underwater' mortgages is now under ten million, or just under 20% overall. This is down from 25% at the end of 2011, so it is a step in right direction to get owners to put their houses on the market. This is based on a new report released by CoreLogic that was reported in the Wall Street Journal today but it doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. Even though homeowners are seeing an increase in equity, there is still a large proportion with less than 20% equity in their homes so the margins may still be too tight to motivate them to list. So, the silver lining is getting thicker but we're still going to have a sluggish market for at least the near future and possibly longer.

Jonathan Miller Discusses Million Dollar Ghost Towns

It's hard to believe that someone would spend millions of dollars on a home that they leave sitting empty, yet these 'million dollar ghost towns' are starting to pop up in several pockets of the world, including along the East Coast of the US. BuyerMLS insider Jonathan Miller spoke on Huffington Post Live about this new phenomenon saying, "What we're seeing is the very wealthy have higher exposure to taxes, higher constraints on the businesses that they own. So they're looking to invest to preserve the capital that they have and one of the ways that they're doing it is investing in real estate. Ironically, we're seeing a lot of that in the US....and it is being seen as a solid, safe investment." Watch the full interview for a deeper exploration of the impact these high-end purchases have for real estate market as a whole.

Are you focusing on your Hot Dog?

Always ensure your resources are focused on the epicenter or your “core" and you can outsource whatever is non-core but needed.

A recent tweet by @spencerrascoff about "Sunsetting" product features that are rarely used got me thinking and then Spencer posted a follow-up comment that I thought was equally insightful and inspired this blog post.

"There is no hard and fast rule about how much usage is so little that it's time to kill a feature. At Zillow, it depends on usage data but it also depends, to a large degree, on how much maintenance is required for that feature, and what the opportunity cost is from a Dev standpoint. i.e., what else should that team optimally be working on"

Spencer is absolutely dead on when talking “opportunity cost” as a decision factor. Internal resources are precious and should ultimately be focused on your epicenter or your “core". Anything ‘non-core but needed’ can be outsourced. Anything ‘non-core and not necessary’ should be “pruned” or eliminated.

How do you determine what’s “core”?  Start at the epicenter. I like the "hot dog stand" analogy in the book "Rework" by the founders of 37Signals. It helps me limit scope creep and ensures everything we develop, is focused on our core. 

"If you’re opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary. The way to find your epicenter is to ask yourself this question “If I took this away, would what I’m selling, still exist?” A hot dog stand isn’t a hot dog stand without the hot dogs. You can take away the onions, the relish, (the soda, etc) … you simply cannot have a hot dog stand without any hot dogs."

When I worked at GE, I made the tough decision to sell-off a very profitable business segment ("segment"), because it was not core to our business.  The fact that the segment was highly profitable was actually irrelevant.  In mind, there were two major decision factors:

1. Non-core weakened our business. Any time we had to discuss or allocate resources across our business and to this "segment", it meant we were taking away resources from our own "core" businesses.  It meant we were spending less time and money making our core products, better. 
2. It wasn't fair to the non-core segment either.  When I visited the HQ of this segment in 2007, I saw the evolution of their products in their showroom.  There were four versions of one product lined up against the wall.  In front of each product was a placard that read the date the product was released: in order they read something like: "1985", "1991", "1996", and "1999".   In the roughly seven years GE owned the segment, there was no significant investment into the segments main product line, effectively "starving" the segment.  This in turn hurt the segment's customer-base and sales team culture, and ultimately sales numbers.

It is imperative to constantly ask yourself, are we focusing on the core.  Are you dedicating your precious resources to develop a better napkin? better ketchup? or are you focusing on the hot dog in your stand?  First figure out what your core is and then make sure you're focusing your resources at being the best, at your "core".  You want to be known for having the best ________ (fill in the blank)  Personally I want to be known as having the best darn 'buyer data' around.  This is my "hot dog".  When people think of “buyers”, “buyer data”, and the demand-side of real estate, I want them to think of BuyerMLS. So with every decision, I'm asking our team, how does this help us improve our "core".

And so, a good question to ask yourself:   "Are you focusing your resources on the hot dog in your hot dog stand?" 

 

The Real Reason Housing Is Making A Comeback

If you ask just about anyone why housing has turned around in the last year or two they will mostly likely say it is primarily because interest rates are so low. But that isn't the only reason. Investors are another. Not necessarily the small time house flippers we see every night on home renovation shows, but the large companies that are buying up homes by the dozen in financially depressed areas. A recent New York Times article spells it out clearly:

Nationwide, 68 percent of the damaged homes sold in April [2013] went to investors, and only 19 percent to first-time home buyers, according to Campbell HousingPulse.

One company, the Blackstone Group, has bought 26,000 homes in nine states and is either renting them out or holding onto them as-is to sell when prices rise. This begets questions about whether or not this current housing 'recovery' is going to be sustainable and if big companies are going to do anything to keep their thousands of homes in good condition. Wit headquarters several states away these behemoth owners bring a whole new meaning to the phrase 'absentee landlords'. Might we see a whole new crop of teardowns in five to ten years? Click over to read the full article for even more statistics about this quiet trend that just might become a force to be reckoned with. 

World Chasing U.S. Yield With 25% Deal Jump: Real Estate

This pertains more to commercial, but it shows the value of American real estate to non-US buyers.  From Bloomberg comes this update:

"Singaporeans, South Koreans, Israelis and Norwegians are accelerating purchases of U.S. real estate as a growing economy and rebounding prices lure yield-hungry buyers from overseas. International investors made $7.97 billion in U.S. commercial-property purchases this year through April, a 25 percent jump from the same time in 2012, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc. Their $27.5 billion in deals in all of last year was almost six times the $4.7 billion low in 2009, the research firm said."

For more click here


While we're in the Bloomberg space, check out this informative video from BuyerMLS Advisor and Investor, Jonathan Miller on the state of the US Housing market.

With Today's Model Even A Motivated Buyer Can Miss Your Listing

There may be an inventory shortage but that doesn't mean every house for sale is going to stand out. Any major market still has dozens of homes hitting the MLS almost every day and buyers can be too busy to look at each listing closely enough to decide if it is worth visiting in person. This Marketplace article sums it up well with the following quote from a real estate agent, "[Buyers] are leading their own life, they’re trying to sell their house, they’re raising their kids. They have the attention span of a gnat. If there’s one thing that pulls their emotional attention away from that house, we’ve lost them. We have five to seven minutes to win them over. And basically all we’re trying to keep them from doing is saying ‘no.' "

It is time to use a new model. The short attention span and time crunch phenomena are nothing new, but what if instead of spending time visiting a house that isn't going to be a good fit an agent spent about ten minutes creating a BuyerProfile that spelled out exactly what a buyer needed in a home? Instead of focusing on listing properties, the industry needs to shift toward listing people and what they want. That way when they do go visit houses they know going in it at least fits their most important requirements.