I am Mr. Sachs...so I get a real kick out of this reply...
I meant more from a hacker standpoint.
A downfall in the economy is apparently a good time to startup as a previous article showed.
Any way to effectively short against this housing trend with some technology?
The upcoming increase in housing supply could mean some sort of algorithmic housing search could be very useful.
Any other ideas?
Madison, WI has a very active Buy-Owner site (http://www.fsbomadison.com/) that charges a few hundred dollars to list. It gets about 25% of the sales in the area (realtors and MLS have the other 75%). The sale prices end up being a few percentage points lower than realtor sales on average, but there's no sales commissions so it ends up being better for both buyer and seller. Best of all, it's run by one family basically out of their garage!
"The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division today filed a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR), challenging a policy that obstructs real estate brokers who use innovative Internet-based tools to offer better services and lower costs to consumers. The Department said that NAR's policy prevents consumers from receiving the full benefits of competition and threatens to lock in outmoded business models and discourage discounting."
Isn't it interesting to note that in this instance, it does not specify whether the 'consumers' of the broker are considered agents or the actual homebuyers themselves? Most brokers don't deal with the little people (the little people being the homebuyers themselves) . . . they run shops which employ agents who compete with each other (e.g. artificially inflating property valuations).
''A person selling his/her own property - acting as a For Sale By Owner (or FSBO) - cannot put a listing for the home directly into the MLS. ''
So. . . a decent housing search tool aimed at people who want to sell FSBO to people who are not agents themselves and who don't have buyers' agents would probably go over quite well.
The main challenge here would still be that evil Realtor stranglehold . . . keeping the agents away from the FSBOs.
They have quite a number of interesting graphical displays (one are 'heat maps' showing housing prices, granulated at the level of neighborhoods, and another is a visualization of how a city have evolved over time).
I think I may be working with them to figure out how to grab unusual data and pull out all kinds of interesting correlations useful to the public.
I meant more from a hacker standpoint. A downfall in the economy is apparently a good time to startup as a previous article showed.
Any way to effectively short against this housing trend with some technology? The upcoming increase in housing supply could mean some sort of algorithmic housing search could be very useful. Any other ideas?