Shopping for real estate on the Web should soon get easier--and potentially cheaper--for home buyers.
The Justice Department on Tuesday said that it has reached a settlement with the National Association of Realtors that will require the trade association to provide Web-based brokers with equal access to home listings. Previously, online brokers were blocked from accessing more than 800 multiple listings services (MLS) nationwide that were linked to NAR, putting them at a natural disadvantage to traditional brokers.
Online brokers typically charge less commission on the sale of a new home than a traditional broker's average 6 percent. For that reason, traditional brokers have long fought the growing influence of the Internet on the home-shopping process.
As part of the new agreement, which still must be approved by the court, the NAR must enact policy among members that ensures fair and equal treatment of online brokers. Brokers participating in an NAR-affiliated listing service will not be allowed to withhold listings from brokers who serve customers online.
"When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates," Deborah Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the antitrust division, said in a statement.
If approved, the 10-year settlement agreement will end a 3-year-old lawsuit filed by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. The suit and the agreement were filed in a U.S. district court in Chicago, where the NAR is headquartered. The final settlement, which does not hold the NAR liable for any past action, will likely be approved by July after a 60-day comment period.
Google Maps now shows real estate listings.
(Credit: Google)Zillow, watch out.
Google Maps now can show real estate listings, presenting pushpins that show houses for sale.
To show real estate results, click "Show search options," then select "Real Estate" from the drop-down list. The Web site then shows a list of properties for sale on the left tied to pushpins on the map on the right.
Search results can be refined by specifying price range or number of bedrooms and bathrooms. In addition, there's a text mode that will be more familiar to the classified ad crowd. (Huh? Text mode for a mapping site? There's still a small map visible.)
I can't help but be reminded of one of the first really interesting uses I encountered of Google Maps, a mashup by that showed Craigslist real-estate listings overlaid on Google Maps. At the time, back in 2005, Google hadn't released its maps programming interface, but times have changed. Not only is the API public, but the programmer behind the service, Paul Rademacher left DreamWorks Animation and joined Google.
(Via Google Maps Mania)
Trulia builds a Google Street View into its real estate search results in areas where it's available, letting people check the neighborhood of a property for sale.
(Credit: Trulia)Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.
The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.
It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly handy, and Google worked with Trulia to integrate the feature, the search giant said.
Real estate site Zillow is set to launch on Thursday a service that will let borrowers get quotes anonymously and lenders get leads for free.
People applying for home loans online now have to supply personal information to get quotes. Their information is often sold to other marketers, their credit rating can get harmed from so many credit checks, and the rates are usually higher than initially advertised.
Zillow's Mortgage Marketplace aims to solve those problems. Borrowers fill out detailed loan request forms but do not provide any personally identifiable information. When customized quotes are available, the borrowers get e-mail alerts and can choose which quote and lender they want.
Zillow vets the lenders so only reputable ones can offer quotes and any lender can view competing quotes, but only lenders that have registered on Zillow can submit quotes. The quotes must use a standardized form that discloses all fees and Zillow estimates the taxes, insurance, and monthly payments, making comparison shopping easier.
There also is a rating system for borrowers to provide feedback on specific lenders. Zillow's marketplace lets the borrowers and lenders find each other, but does not participate beyond that in the transaction.
I asked Spencer Rascoff, chief financial officer and vice president of marketing for Zillow, how the ad-supported site plans to weather an online ad slowdown that already seems to be curbing spending by online lenders.
He responded that "big banks are increasing their spending during the downturn because they see it as an opportunity to gain share as the small guys go under."
In addition, a mortgage marketplace will do well not despite, but because of the suffering home sales market, according to Rascoff.
"There will be fewer new purchases but it's a good time for new refinancing tools," he says, because rates are low and adjustable-rate mortgages will be reset and need to be refinanced.
Zillow Mortgage Marketplace lets borrowers compare quotes from different lenders side by side.
(Credit: Zillow)Not much news has circulated about former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle since he left the Internet company in 2001 in the midst of the dot-com bust. He had a brief stint as interim CEO of social network Friendster in the ensuing years, but now Koogle is trying his hand at real estate development. His luxury Mexican beach villas, of which there are seven, are now on sale for $6.2 million each, according to a statement Monday from his company El Banco.
Koogle isn't the first Internet executive to eschew virtual investments for ones in real estate. Jim Clark, founder of Web browser pioneer Netscape and workstation company Silicon Graphics, left Silicon Valley after the first Internet heyday to develop condos and rental properties in Florida. In an interview in 2003 with Business Week, Clark said he had "gone back to making money the old fashioned way."
Former Google software engineer Ray Sidney also recently started a sustainable real estate venture called Big George Ventures. With about 100 acres of land in Carson Valley, Nev., Sidney aims to build affordable, eco-friendly single and multifamily homes in the next few years.
Similarly, Koogle has built housing on 100 acres of land, but his four-bedroom beach villas are much higher end. The development is near Punta de Mita, Mexico, about 45 minutes from Puerto Vallarta, and the villas "offer expansive views of the Bay of Banderas, Marietas Islands, Sierra Madre Mountains," and the white-sand beaches, according to the company. Two of the seven villas are built, but all of them are for sale.
Eventually, Koogle and his wife Pam (a partner in the venture) plan to build a boutique hotel called Las Banderas del Banco, which will include a spa, cooking school, and about 75 guest suites.
Like Clark, Koogle seems to be drawn to the tangible investment.
"Having worked on great technology brands for much of my career, building something as tangible as a luxury real estate development is terrifically satisfying. My love of design, training as an engineer, and history as a businessman have all come into play in developing El Banco," Koogle said in a statement.
Another week, another real-estate search site. DotHomes has gone live in the United Kingdom and South Africa, and it is now launching in the United States.
(Credit:
DotHomes)
The DotHomes launch and the nationwide launch of the Roost home-buying site last week would seem to bolster the premise of an article in The New York Times finding that real-estate sites are booming despite the drop in home sales.
As Spencer Rascoff, chief financial officer at Zillow.com, put it: "In a down market, buyers, sellers, and agents need more tools."
To buy or not to buy? That is the question.
Regardless of where you stand in that debate, there is no dearth of Web sites to help you research, or just drool.
Joining the growing list of real estate sites is Roost, which was set to launch publicly on Wednesday.
The site differs from most of the more established real estate sites in that it is focused on search and is not supported by advertising. It also touts a comprehensive database and fast results.
Roost has partnered with Multiple Listing Services in 12 different U.S. cities with the goal of attracting prospective home buyers with its large number of listings. When you click on a "more information" link on any listing, it takes you to a real estate broker's site and that company pays for the traffic, which can lead to new customers. Roost creates the sites for the brokers in its network.
You can filter by school district and neighborhood among other criteria, and new results came up very quickly when changing the filters.
Roost displays photos with home listings and links to sites of brokers who pay for the traffic. Searches can be quickly refined for things like price, square footage, and time on the market.
(Credit: Roost)Photos are displayed within the search results. Mousing over the thumbnails pops up windows with larger photos. There is even a way to look at photos from multiple listings simultaneously.
You can plot different homes on a map, along with nearby points of interest such as schools and train stations (the site uses the Google Maps API), e-mail maps to other people, and save searches for later use.
A search for one-bedroom, one-bathroom homes in Irvine, Calif., priced between $600,000 and $900,000 displayed 321 listings out of 956 results. (On Zillow the same search showed 121 listings out of 375. There were 49 results for that search on Terabitz, and Trulia found 189 homes.)
Cities covered in the launch include Boston; Chicago; Dallas; Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Washington, D.C.; and even Boise, Idaho; and Orange County, Calif., but not New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, where the company is based. The number of cities is expected to double by the end of this year, said Roost Chief Executive Alex Chang.
The site does not have all the bells and whistles other sites have--like Zillow and its "zestimates," Trulia and its price and popularity heat map, and Terabitz and its market research. But at least it isn't littered with ads.
Many of the nation's office and retail towers would use one-third less energy by 2012, if they meet goals set today by the Building Owners and Managers Association.
The group unveiled its plan at its annual conference in Manhattan to shrink the carbon emissions of some 9 billion square feet of commercial real estate, using the government's Energy Star benchmarks for energy and water usage. Green-building standards set by the nonprofit-run Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design are more stringent.
Still, this initiative, if successful, would significantly cut the $24 billion spent on energy each year by the commercial building industry, which releases 18 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The move would also likely brighten the market for power-saving gadgets such as motion-sensing light switches and power strips, as well as monitoring software and construction materials.
Although a new generation of sustainable skyscrapers are on the rise in London, Dubai, Chicago and elsewhere, more property owners with eco-friendly, cost-cutting intentions find it easier to renovate existing buildings than to start from scratch.
Imagine you are moving to a new city and you are considering different neighborhoods. If you want to find out if there are any cafes in a neighborhood, where the gas stations and post offices are, if there is a cinema nearby and what the crime is like, you typically have to consult multiple sources.
Not anymore. A new Web site set to launch on Tuesday called Terabitz offers all sorts of information in one place. The site is geared toward people looking for real estate, but it definitely will be helpful for a variety of purposes.
I recently moved to a new neighborhood and had resorted to discovering what's in the area the old-fashioned way--walking around. Now I can literally map out the neighborhood with my own points of interest.
Terabitz enables users to create a custom dashboard related to a particular neighborhood or city. For instance, users can create a mini map with points of interest, a chart showing housing sales, and modules listing homes for sale, middle schools and nearby cafes.
(Credit: Terabitz )The site features a customizable dashboard that lets you drag and drop different information modules with local data such as fast food restaurants, libraries, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, schools and weather. You can also find out what homes in the area sold for recently, calculate mortgage rates, see listings from Craigslist, Trulia, Google and the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) site and even get housing valuations from Zillow.
One click on a tab and your customized data points are displayed on a map. You can take a snapshot of the dashboard to save or e-mail to someone else.
Terabitz Chief Executive Ashfaq Munshi acknowledges that he is entering a crowded field with a real estate Web site, but points out that none of the other sites offers such a variety of local information.
Munshi, who has raised $10 million in capital from the Tudor Ventures, says his now 17-year-old son got the inspiration for the Web site after seeing the first real estate mashup, Housingmaps.com, in 2005. "You might even assert that he hired me to run his company," Munshi joked.
Terabitz enables users to easily create mashups with housing listings from Craigslist, MLS and Google, and combine that with photos and other local information. This mashup shows Page Mill Road on the Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area.
(Credit: Terabitz )
(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)
The information age just got a little older, as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" has been formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More specifically, this is 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, California: the garage where, in 1938, two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company that became known as Hewlett-Packard the next year.
The new historic status is official as of Thursday. (You think it's been Zillowed?)
The house had been built circa 1905 and apparently once housed Palo Alto's first mayor; the garage, however, wasn't built until around 1924--coinciding with the paving of the city's streets to deal with those newfangled contraptions known as "cars." The "HP Garage" was already listed as an historical landmark in the state of California (number 976, if you like numbers). It achieved that status in 1987.
HP bought back the garage, along with the house, in 2000 for a reported $1.7 million (last year, Google did the same thing with the garage that had been home to Larry and Sergey's early start-up days), and in 2005 the HP Garage underwent an extensive renovation.
