A bitter fight among the three partners has been brewing all year. Two of the three associations of realtors, NSDCAR and PSAR, want to join the efforts of CRMLS and their 80,000+ agents and help create a statewide MLS.
Why join forces with CRMLS?
Their MLS listings have more/better features.
Their consumer-facing website is superior.
Agents can have their listings uploaded to Zillow automatically.
They have the size and power to fight Zillow if needed.
But the third partner, the Greater San Diego Association of Realtors, doesn’t want to join up with CRMLS, and instead wants to create their own consumer-facing portal. Earlier this year they filed a lawsuit against NSDCAR and PSAR in order to gain full access to Sandicor’s listing data.
It’s a mess.
Like with most divorces, the people involved decide to part ways, rather than to keep bickering when there are fundamental differences in place.
What will the dissolution of Sandicor mean for consumers and agents?
There might be some uncertainty about having reliable access to the MLS over the next 6-12 months. For now, the plan is to keep Sandicor up and running while a data-share agreement is implemented with CRMLS, which will give agents access to a second MLS.
As long as SDAR cooperates with that effort, everything should be fine.
However, the SDAR lawsuit is likely to linger. According to their complaint, they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building their own consumer-facing website, only to be denied access to MLS data.
The courts are being asked to find a solution.
The biggest problem – which was solved by the creation of Sandicor in 1991 – is to have all of the San Diego County MLS data in one place. If Sandicor is dissolved, and SDAR won’t join CRMLS, then SDAR will be left to create their own MLS. Agents will have to go back to joining two associations, and working two different MLS systems, which isn’t the ideal solution.
What would I do if I were the judge?
I’d dissolve Sandicor, make SDAR join CRMLS, and then give them the data feed to create their own consumer-facing portal.
It might sound too simple, but in the long run, it is what’s needed.
One fear is that the access to the database of sold properties gets interrupted. If that happened, agents would be forced to find their comps at Zillow – wouldn’t that be a fine kettle of fish!
But we would survive. Agents would migrate to the CRMLS – the only alternative solution – and within six months we would have a new database of sold comps. Today there are over 300 active San Diego listings in CRMLS, so it is already happening.
I commend Raylene Brundage and other leaders for taking this dramatic step. It will probably get messier over the next few months, but in the long-term, agents want and need one solid, reliable MLS with a collective voice that is powerful enough to take on the outside disrupters.
Buying and selling homes is a big deal for the consumers. They deserve to have the option of hiring agents who can guide them through the process in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible.
Having a robust statewide MLS with a voice will help agents do just that.
It’s that time of the year – the 2017 forecasts are starting to roll out!
Zillow has been conservative about our local markets. For the most part, the actual appreciation of the Zillow Home Value Index has been higher than their forecasts over the last two years.
Their local forecasts for 2017 are all lower than their 2016 guesses, and what they are predicting could also be described as ‘Flatsville’. If their local forecasts of +0.9% to +2.2% come true, it would mean that several sellers would end up selling for less than they could have gotten in 2016.
Are we ready for that yet?
Local ZHVI-Appreciation Forecasts
Town
2015 Forecast/Actual
2016 Forecast/Actual
2017 Forecast
Carlsbad
+2.7%/+4.8%
+1.9%/+3.8%
+1.3%
Carmel Valley
+0.3%/+5.4%
+1.4%/+1.9%
+0.9%
Del Mar
+5.5%/+1.1%
+1.4%/+2.6%
+1.1%
Encinitas
+0.6%/+8.3%
+2.4%/+6.3%
+2.2%
La Jolla
+2.7%/+6.6%
+2.3%/+6.1%
+2.1%
RSF
+0.4%/+11.1%
+3.7%/-0.5%
+1.9%
San Diego
+1.7%/+6.4%
+2.1%/+4.0%
+1.7%
Solana Beach
+2.7%/+6.4%
+2.2%/+2.6%
+1.4%
The Zillow data changes slightly, depending on where you look on their website, and whether you use town names or zip codes. Here is the LINK to find others.
If you click through to the YouTube version, you’ll see other school-bus home documentaries. The difference is that Zillow brings the glossy high-production to the film-making, and adds another unique clip to their diverse video library:
Zillow has been taking it to us for ten years, in spite of regular discussion about how something needs to be done.
Our NSDCAR president moderated the MLS Symposium today, and with good intention – let’s inform/frighten the agents about the Zillow attack, and suggest that something needs to happen.
There are thousands of realtors, but only 150 or so were at the meeting.
No real solutions were offered, so here are mine:
Settle the lawsuit with SDAR, even if it means giving them the data.
Terminate Sandicor, and let’s join CRMLS.
Hope the Broker Public Portal can beat Zillow.
The MLS run by CRMLS is a vastly superior to the Sandicor version, and we should change immediately. But because the SD Association of Realtors is suing over data access, let’s break off and join CRMLS on our own. Brokers can join any association – let’s go with the one that is the biggest and most progressive.
Zillow is the latest to suggest that the ‘market’ might be slowing.
But looking at their own graph, it looks like the monthly percent change begins to decline every year at the end of summer. The second graph also shows that sales are at a new peak – if it fell off a bit we should still be fine.
But all that matters is what readers glean from the headlines and a quick scan.
Maybe it’s just a seasonal thing. This guy was spewing doomer talk in 2014!
Zillow expects existing home sales to fall 1.9 percent in July from June, to 5.46 million units at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR), ending a string of four consecutive monthly gains.
New home sales should fall 6.65 percent to 553,000 units (SAAR) after a stronger than expected June.
Given the recent string of home sales beating forecasts, we view risks to the upside and would not be surprised if results are slightly stronger than we expect.
Thus far, it has been a pretty sweet ‘16 for home sales. But according to our July home sales forecast, the party looks like it could be coming to an end, at least temporarily and especially for sales of existing homes that must eventually face the harsh reality of tight inventory and rising prices.
Despite tight inventory, existing home sales have been surprisingly buoyant lately, beating or meeting expectations in each of the four months from March to June. We expect that streak to end in July. If nothing else, the odds that home sales continue to rise are increasingly dim. Since the series began in February 1999, runs of five months or more of consecutive monthly gains have only occurred five times – and only one of those streaks lasted six consecutive months or more.[1]
Shifting seasonal patterns may be behind some of this apparent resiliency. By some reports, the height of the home shopping season – historically most concentrated during the summer months – shifted earlier this year as buyers sought to get ahead of the competition. But sooner or later, tight supply and rising prices should take their toll.
Our forecast for existing home sales points to a 1.9 percent decline from June to 5.46 million units at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) (figure 1). This would place existing home sales down 0.3 percent compared to a year earlier.
The next time you’re surfing popular real estate listings site Zillow for a new home and stumble across a “Zestimate” — the company’s estimate for a property’s value — you might want to take it with a grain of salt.
In April, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff nabbed a 12,732-square-foot manse in LA’s affluent Brentwood neighborhood for nearly $20 million.
Not only was it one of the priciest homes to sell in the City of Angels at that time, but it was also over $1 million above its Zestimate, according to The Real Deal.
Renovated by architect Ken Ungar, this gated six-bedroom property packs quite a punch, with features including a motor court with a fountain, a study with coffered ceilings, a master suite with a marble fireplace and a theater with stadium seating.
It’s not the only Zestimate snafu linked to a Rascoff deal. In Seattle, where Zillow is based, Rascoff sold his home in February for $1.1 million. That sale price is more than the $331,500 he paid for the property — but roughly 40 percent less than his company’s $1.75 million Zestimate.
A Zillow spokesperson declined comment.
Even before Rascoff’s own numerical disparities, others have challenged the accuracy of Zillow’s Zestimates, which folks can use as bargaining points for striking deals. Rascoff has said they’re a “good starting point,” but that, nationwide, Zestimates can have a 6 percent error rate.
Richard has a new listing in the Stone Canyon gated community high in the hills of San Marcos. We’ve contemplated just being one-story specialists, but there aren’t enough of them coming up for sale!
We also have it as a Coming Soon listing on Zillow.
Even though I’m not a big fan of the practice, I like to try things out at least once a year to see if I can learn anything new.
One of the problems with the Coming Soon listings is that agents don’t have a game plan once the listing hits the internet.
Are they willing to show it prior to MLS input?
Are they willing to sell it prior to MLS input?
Apparently these questions don’t occur to many of the agents employing the Coming Soon strategy, because when I call on them, rarely do they have an answer. They just hope a buyer calls and they can round-trip the deal. The seller deserves better! (we are happy to show while the seller puts the finishing touches on the house)
If you like this one, call Richard Morgan at 619-200-3844.
We just cut our Zillow advertising back to the minimum.
At the beginning of the year, we made the plunge and took on about 18% of the Encinitas territory. We definitely got more calls!
Here are the incoming calls and emails per month – total is 157:
The best realtor-teams nationwide are achieving a 3% to 5% lead conversion, and ours has been less than 1%. Why? Because the consumers who inquired either have an agent and thought they were calling the listing agent for general info, or they were calling on the hottest new mobile-home listing.
But the 1% conversion rate means I talk with 100 people to find one who will buy or sell a house. My conversion rate is close to 100% with people who call from the blog – I am here to help you, and together we get it done! But that is a personalized, dedicated service, not an order-taking real estate factory.
At the last Zillow conference, there was an agent team from Florida that swore by the Z-advertising. They had several junior agents manning the phone banks, and shuffling buyers into houses for $100,000 to $300,000 up and down Florida.
But that’s not Encinitas, and it’s not me.
I’m still a believer in the Zillow platform, because they have the eyeballs – somewhere between 60% and 70% of the real estate traffic.
But they do funky things – for example, they tell the Premier agents that we have the exclusive ability to include 2-minute video tours of our listings only, and they will put those at the top of the search lists. But within 1-2 months, they are letting everyone do a video tour – including for-sale-by-owners. The tours are rinky-dink, so I don’t expect much, but the integrity of the switch-a-roo was terrible. You can’t help but feeling you got hustled…again.
The future of the real estate selling business is whether the consumer will stick with their realtor for life, or be persuaded enough by promises of insider deals and coming soons to switch to a phone-bank agent.
Here is how Spence sees it today – the usual banter:
They don’t have a direct feed from our MLS, but they give themselves the highest 4-star rating for San Diego?
Median error = half the San Diego zestimates are wrong by more than 6.2%
Zillow, the leading real estate information and home-related marketplace, today launches an update to the Zestimate® algorithm, improving accuracy across the country. Today’s update will improve the national median error rate from 8 percent to 6 percenti.
Additionally, the update, which rolls out over the next 24 hours, improves accuracy in 96 of the 100 largest counties in the U.S.
Zillow publishes Zestimates on more than 100 million homes across the country based on 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that examine hundreds of data points on each individual home.
In particular, the change includes a model specifically built to value new construction. It will also allow Zillow to process more home value data faster.
“Homes are a big investment, so if you own one, you’re probably wondering what it’s worth. That’s why we created the Zestimate – to freely give consumers as much information as possible about the housing market and homes, so that they can make smart decisions when buying or selling,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow Group chief analytics officer and creator of the Zestimate. “Since we launched the Zestimate 10 years ago, we have been continually working on making it even better. With the additional statistical models and computing power behind today’s update, we are able to provide consumers even better information about millions of homes, equipping them to make informed decisions when talking with a real estate profession about buying or selling.”
To calculate the Zestimate, Zillow uses data from county and tax assessor records, and direct feeds from hundreds of multiple listing services and brokerages. Additionally, Zillow users have updated home facts on more than 50 million homes, enhancing Zillow’s living database of U.S. homes and adding data unavailable anywhere else.
While Zestimates are a great starting point for determining the value of a home, ultimately a home is worth what someone will pay for it. Zillow encourages home buyers and sellers to work with an experienced local real estate professional to determine and fine tune a home’s best price.
i Half of all Zestimates are within 6 percent of the selling price, and half are off by more than 6 percent.
