Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

About that Zillow SNL skit

I’m sure if you are like me you got this video forwarded to you a hundred times. The skit is funny and like all good satire, spot on. Even down to the real estate agent (do you think RE/MAX paid for that placement?)

But what got me thinking was the daunting task CoStar and others have to supplant Zillow. Zillow had already crossed over and became a verb (the word “zillow” is googled more than “real estate”) And now the pandemic has made Zillow part of our culture.

Jeff Goldbum is not going to save you.

ClimateCheck.com offers reports to tell how Climate Change will affect your home.

ClimateCheck calculates climate change risk for homeowners

“With every day that passes, climate change becomes more of an imminent threat to our livelihoods. This year, and nearly every other year in recent memory, wildfires have ravaged the West Coast while hurricanes have wreaked havoc across the Gulf Coast. But even as environmental concerns increase, it’s hard for homeowners to accurately and easily determine if their property is at risk.


An online platform launched on Wednesday called ClimateCheck aims to change that by taking the guesswork out of climate threats for homeowners by allowing instant access to a property’s vulnerability to environmental impacts related to climate change. “

One of those ideas, you think somebody would have already launched since it’s so obvious. I was able to order the full report and surprised by the amount of data, over 30 pages worth. The PDF report pages are nicely laid out with easy to understand data visualizations.

I think consumers are going to love this and can see it become some sort of standard report being offered when you are purchasing a home.

Fear and why iBuyers Offers and Zestimates belong in your CMAs

Jay Thompson, writing on Inman News, Why iBuyers and Zestimates belong in your CMAs 

“Greg Robertson, W+R Studios co-founder, was attacked, called clueless, and challenged as to whether he had any industry experience (yes, almost three decades worth.) IBuyers, also highlighted in the headline, got one mention. Nothing else in the survey report was discussed. A few commenters waded into the fray showing understanding of why they at least look at Zestimates and sometimes mention them in listing presentations. The vast majority of commenters sounded off on the evils of Zillow and the Zestimate.”

I will say I am “clueless” about many, many things. My wife will tell you as much.

Sorry this post is a little long, but I think it touches on a lot of issues (not to mention a shameless plug for my company ????).

Jay, as you may know, is a former broker (The Phoenix Real Estate Guy) and worked at Zillow in Industry Relations for some time. His article is in response to an article published on Inman News about W+R Studios’ announcement of the results of their inaugural survey, 2020 Best Practices of CMAs and Listing Presentations.

Here’s more from Jay…

“No one, including Zillow, W+R Studios or me, is saying the Zestimate should be used as a comparable in your CMA. Of course it shouldn’t be, that’s not its intent or purpose. But to ignore it is to ignore something your clients are looking at and wondering about. Address it upfront, leave out your personal feelings about Zillow, and put any objections to rest early in the process. The listing presentation is the ideal time to address it with sellers, and the CMA is the perfect place to have it on record. “

Emphasis mine

Cloud CMA pioneered ways of including Zestimates to compare against actual sold prices from the MLS data as part of a Cloud CMA report. This has since been copied by other vendors. I was surprised by the amount of push-back we got when we introduced it. Many MLS organizations (after pushback from their members) made us turn the report page off by default, or in some cases, turned off altogether. But every time I sat down, one on one, with a broker or MLS executive and showed them how the report page worked, they understood, “wow this is great, agents are going to love it.”

This happens all the time. Many agents and brokers just hear/read “Zestimate” or “iBuyer” and begin to see red.

As we can see in the survey results and the comments on the article there is still a lot of fear out there. And as Mr. Hurbert once wrote, “fear, is the mind-killer”.

Flash forward to a little less than a year ago when W+R Studios introduced a way of including iBuyer Offers (with Opendoor) in Cloud CMA. We were met with the same type of fear and got a lot of push back and false claims.

“You’re going to put agents out of business!”
“Shame on you Cloud CMA!”

And those were the polite ones. I took these comments hard. We put many of our partner MLS organizations in a tough spot. They began to get calls from their members that “Cloud CMA was sending our CMAs to Opendoor!” (not true). The misinformation got so bad we had to create a document refuting some of the most outrages claims.

But we held firm because we knew, to paraphrase Jay, the listing presentation is an ideal time to address iBuyer Offers, and the CMA is a perfect place to have it on record.

Dan and I are always looking for new ways to innovate, and we are willing to take risks and keep our customers ahead of the curve. Even if these ideas seem crazy or counter-intuitive at the time.

The main thing that got us through the periods I wrote about above was, in the end, our customers (MLS organizations, brokers, and agents) trusted us.

In a recent “Friday Flash” blog post, titled “What are you saying” Brian Boero, CEO of 100watt wrote:

“Honestly, I am glad we have arrived at a point where there are no more red lines to transgress. I used to get revved up about this stuff too. Now, Zillow buys, owns and sells homes, Realtor.com charges referral fees, and yet good agents, teams and brokers continue to do their thing. “

Unlike Brian, I don’t think we are there yet. We still need to get over our fear of these new (old?) models, which as Rob Hahn and I discuss in recent Industry Relations podcast point out, keep turning more and more towards agent inclusion. We need to focus our energy on more positive things. We have a lot more to worry about than Zestimates and iBuyers.

I just hope the industry can take the advice of what a wise old hippie once said…

“You gotta let that shit go, man. Let it go.”

Behind Opendoor’s layoffs

I think I’ve told this story before, but I attended a Proptech CEO Summit a couple of years ago put on by Pete Flint and Paul Levine. One of the speakers was Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin. During his interview, he commented that Opendoor was the first company he thought cared about operating margins as much as Redfin.

Opendoor’s culture is one of frugality. You have to deeply care about your margins if you are in the iBuyer market because, at this stage of the game, they are razor-thin. They even have a saying at Opendoor, “We eat BIPS for breakfast”. BIPs meaning basis points (BPS), meaning 1/100th of 1%. That’s the increments Opendoor lives in. Every little expense matters.

Flash forward a couple of years and I wasn’t surprised that Redfin had partnered with Opendoor.

Last week when I read the news about the Redfin layoffs I tweeted this.

A few people on Twitter thought I was referring to other brokerages or franchisors. But, knowing how similar Redfin and Opendoor operate my first thought was Opendoor. Cuts are coming, and they are going to be deep.

Haters are gonna hate. Just as many people were crowing that Redfin’s model of employee agents doesn’t work, many are already calling the death of iBuying. Pay no attention to the haters, they are wrong. What is happening now is unprecedented.

Mr. Kelman and Mr. Wu are fighting for the survival of their companies and sometimes that means you have to make tough decisions, you have to focus, and give it everything you got.

That’s what happens when you are in the arena.

What is homeownership?

I think my friends in organized real estate have to start paying attention to how companies are evolving the definition of “homeownership”. Below is a video of a presentation given by Adena Hefets, CEO of Divvy Homes at an event held by Andreessen Horowitz.

“We believe the industry is very binary. You either rent a home, or dive in to the deep end and get a mortgage. There is no in-between.”

Adena Hefets, CEO of Divvy Homes

If you have been listening to my podcast Listing Bits you know I’ve been tracking Divvy Homes and Adena for a while now and am super intrigued.

Where’s the pony?

Walk with me…

July 2006

Fortress, a Private Equity (PE) firm, buys Nationstar Mortgage, LLC.

2008 – 2010ish

The Great Recession

July 2011

Zillow goes Public

May 2014

Nationstar acquires Real Estate Digital (red) in 2014, under its sub division Solutionstar. See what happen there?

July 2014

Zillow announces it will acquire Trulia.

May 2015

Solutionstar re-launches as the unpronounceable name “XOME” in May 2015. With Nationstar CEO saying “We expect to revolutionize real estate.”

July 2017

Softbank acquires Fortress (owners of Nationstar and XOME)

Redfin “Amazon of real estate” announces IPO, eventually raising $138M

December 2017

Softbank invests $450M in Compass, a “a technology-driven real estate platform.” Sound familiar?

Okay, so it seems the whole “Amazon of” “tech-driven” “reimagine real estate” brokerage of the future is hot right now, white hot.

So I see a few scenarios here playing out. Seems Compass has the branding figured out but, sofar unproven tech. XOME does a lot of the backend “services” bundling. Maybe Softbank, owners/investors of both Compass and XOME, reach the same conclusion that the dual investors of Zillow and Trulia reached back in 2014, “why are they two separate companies?”.

And don’t forget Opendoor, co-founded by former Trulian Eric Wu, or as I like to call him Head of Product Development of Zillow and Redfin (see Instant Offers and Redfin Now). They raised $210M back in December of 2016. What’s their next move?

My “Black Swan” Prediction (nod to the Notorious R.O.B.)

As part of Zillow’s “multi-brand strategy”, they buy fellow Seattle company, Redfin. Boom, now they are a brokerage, which a everyone knows is the sixth sign of the real estate apocalypse.

But, even after all this, I still don’t see the $450 million dollar pony.

Real Estate Tech is Hot!

The article from TechCrunch by Joanna Glasner mentioned in Paul’s tweet does a good job of putting in to perspective whey so much capital is being put in to our industry. A few interesting tidbits…

“Rising interest in real estate deals comes amid a period of generally rising property and rental prices, as well as cultural and demographic shifts that are altering longstanding patterns of household formation. There’s also a sense among investors that real estate, despite being the world’s largest asset class, has historically been slow to embrace change.”

You think?

“Sure, there have already been some multi-billion-dollar businesses like Zillow and Redfin that brought online, mobile and data analysis capabilities to the industry. But real estate VCs believe that it’s still very early innings.

“still very early innings”

“Real estate investments can deliver big returns, too. After a string of lackluster technology IPOs, tech-focused real estate brokerage Redfin reversed the trend with big first-day gains and sustained aftermarket performance. Zillow, which went public in 2011, has also been a big hit with investors, maintaining a market cap of more than $7 billion despite a history of steep losses.

For those looking for liquidity, it’s also worth noting that the real estate industry knows a thing or two about generating returns. After all, before it was co-opted by venture capitalists, the word exit usually applied to real estate.”

Love that last sentence.

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