The Real Estate Truth

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• Too much mustard on the hot dog??

  The amount of IT talent working in the real estate industry has skyrocked in the last 24 months as new highly funded and highly talented teams have launched sites like zillow.com and trulia.com . They have launched so many new and hip property research tools it makes your head spin. But has the real estate tech crowd become feature rich and benefit poor? Every day I see incredibly cool features that I want to integrate on CataListHomes.com, but are they really useful to the consumer, or just eye candy? Consider this graph of the average price for Manhattan Beach Real Estate on from Zillow.com. Well the average price is about $400,000 higher. In fact, less than 7% of the active listings are priced below the Zillow average price. Trulia.com has a graph to illustrate if the home is priced correctly as well. Heat maps, mashups, and slick ajax are all great. We applaud all those who have invested millions of dollars so consumers can get more educated and make better decisions. When it comes time to find that dream home, good broker websites like catalisthomes.com, ziprealty.com ,etc are the ones with the most accurate housing data as our source is the MLS. Many of the new web 2.0 sites are great, but rarely have more than 50% of the available inventory. So enjoy these sites, but when you want to know what is for sale in real-time keep using our home search tools. The accuracy rate of CataList Homes to the MLS is over 96%. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Jul 20 2007, 05:01 PM by mdavin with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Michael Davin, real estate

• Is Century 21 in touch with today's home buyers?

  I saw this ad on TV a while ago, then found it on YouTube. I guess buyers have two choices: Get access to the MLS, view properties at your leisure, work with experienced local CataList agents through close of escrow, receive 50% of the buyer agent commissoin, or give up the $10,000 rebate ($800k avg home) just so a traditional agent can see the excited look in your eye! You should see the look in the Century 21 agents' eyes when they see a fat $22,000 payday coming their way...and you thought you were excited!! Keep up the consumers-are-stupid-and-need-us approach to advertising: you are doing us all a huge favor by exposing the fact that you don't need a traditional agent anymore. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Jun 20 2007, 04:01 PM by mdavin with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Commission Debate, Technology, Michael Davin

• The CataList Community Begins

  Although CataList Homes has run a blog for a year, and participated in many online discussion groups, we felt the time was right to put our community front and center. We intend to create a dialog between consumers seeking the truth, and the current real estate industry members who oppose changes to long-standing traditions of controlled data and commission structure. The theme of this community is honesty and transparency. By showing the views of our management, our consumers, and even our opponents, we hope to expose the truth and highlight the hidden agendas of the "Commission Preservation Society." The community will consist of two blogs, one covering industry issues, technology, our business model, commission rates, etc. The second will provide local market content for those seeking relevant local knowledge and market facts. Additionally, we will support a forum board to promote questions and answers for many pertinent topics for both consumers and agents. CataList Stories will contain video interviews of CataList customers explaining their situation and success with our company. Thanks for visiting and we hope to build a brutally honest place to find solutions, and at times take a light-hearted view of our industry. . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Jun 18 2007, 03:00 PM by mdavin with | with no comments Filed under: Blogging, Commission Debate, Technology, Michael Davin