The Real Estate Truth

So Cal Foreclosure Auction Event Set March 15th

2008-03-08T14:54:00Z

CataList Homes and DoveBid will hold a home auction event March 15th at the Pomona Fairplex at 10am with registration begining at 8:30am. 75 homes are up for sale in this one day event which will also be web cast on DoveBid.com. This is the most sophisticated real estate auction to be held with live internet bidding competing against bidders in the ballroom. Additionally, we are offering full broker cooperation and each home is listed on the Multiple Listing Service powering Realtor.com and most major brokerage sites.

Homes are open for inspection March 8 and 9 from 10am to 4pm. These homes must be sold! View our auction section of the website for full details.

DoveBid and CataList Homes form home auction partnership

2008-02-07T09:16:00Z

DoveBid, Inc., one of the world’s largest capital asset auction firms, and CataList Homes, a California based alternative real estate brokerage company, have announced a home auction partnership geared to sell lender-owned foreclosure properties in addition to new home development closeouts for builders.

This alliance reunites DoveBid Chairman Ross Dove with Grubb & Ellis founder Hal Ellis, who now serves as CataList Homes’ CEO. In 1992, The Ross Dove Company (now DoveBid) and Grubb & Ellis Company held the largest one day real estate auction ever held on behalf of the FDIC in 1992 where over $400,000,000 worth of real estate was sold in one day. The team sold over $1.2 billion in real estate at auction during the early 1990s.

“The auction sales method always surfaces in challenging real estate markets when buyers sit on the sidelines waiting for prices to decline,” says Hal Ellis. “With lender-owned foreclosures surging and new home sales slumping, the traditional sales channels alone are not sufficient to move the inventory fast enough given the huge market risk and holding cost to hold these homes for extended time periods. Since we worked with Ross Dove in handling over $1 billion dollars worth of real estate sales at auction, it was a natural partnership, especially with DoveBid's international presence and highly sophisticated technology that none of the real estate auction firms can offer.”

DoveBid, with the great majority of the Fortune 500 and financial institutions as its clientele, brings a tradition of technological leadership in the auction industry to the partnership with its webcast auction ability and powerful online auction engine. This benefits sellers by maximizing the universe of potential bidders and therefore their total dollar return, while simultaneously benefiting bidders by increasing the convenience of bidding. “Running a sophisticated ballroom auction with live worldwide bidding online is a complicated process that gives our clients the best methods to achieve top value for the homes,” says Ross Dove, Chairman of DoveBid, Inc. We partnered with CataList Homes because we wanted a technology savvy broker partner who can market our auction assets in the local Multiple Listing Service to gain access to owner-user buyers who typically pay more for properties than investors.”

The auction alliance has four foreclosure auctions scheduled for California, Nevada, and Arizona with a national program slated for mid 2008. The company is also slated to run auction events for homebuilders on an as needed basis.

The company is also slated to run auction events for homebuilders on an as needed basisDoveBid.com recently announced a merger with London UK based GoIndustry which makes the new entity a global auction powerhouse with over 600 employees, half of which are international. With a declining dollar, the group is poised to reach foreign home buyers who are clearly eyeballing US real estate investment opportunities

About CataList Homes, Inc.

Change to our Buyer Rebate Program

2007-09-19T07:27:00Z

Effective September 16th, CataList Homes will be changing our buyer commission rebate from 50% to 20%. This change reflects our belief that in a slow market, with a lot of inventory, buyers need more help identifyng the right home to purchase and more data to justify the home's value. Although the internet allows buyers to research and identify homes for sale, in reality, our consumers wanted more service and support viewing homes than the original rebate model provided. With overwhelming consumer feedback, we concluded that home buyers want their agent to work harder to help them find the best home at the best price, and rebates were secondary. In order to provide a complete full-service approach to buyers, we have changed the rebate to reflect the increased work load placed on our local agents.

Our competitors offering even less service and higher rebates are completing very few deals in the market which further influenced our decision.

The 50% rebate will be honored for current clients who have previously registered with us. In addition, for consumers that have already identified a home to purchase on their own and just need offer and closing support, we will offer a 50% rebate with prior management approval.

CataList will maintain its goal of reducing transaction costs and providing excellent ethical service.

Company launches a new database mash up showing active and pending home listings which are bank owned.

2007-08-21T23:12:00Z

Responding to overwelming demand CataList Homes has just launched a new technology that allows consumers to flag bank owned listings. A copy of our press release is below:

LOS ANGELES, CA – August 25^th, 2007 – CataList Homes, a California based alternative brokerage company, has launched a new technology which allows home buyers to search for bank owned foreclosures which are listed for sale in the Multiple Listing Service (“MLS”). The firm knows of no other website differentiating bank owned listings from private party listings.

“In today’s tough real estate environment, home buyers (outside of the upper-end markets) are looking to buy homes ‘on-sale’ not ‘for sale.’ Buyers are sitting on the sidelines waiting for buying opportunities,” says Michael Davin, Co-founder of CataList Homes. ”We have had tremendous demand by consumers wanting to search and view just the bank owned listings on the market. When we found no such site existed, we built the technology ourselves.”

Contrary to popular belief, almost no lenders sell foreclosed residential properties directly to consumers. “Banks also want top dollar and almost exclusively list their homes with a broker who than puts these properties in the local Multiple Listing Service. By comparing the homes which are active and pending sale on the MLS with a database of properties owned by the lender, CataList Homes can flag these listings as bank owned,” Davin continues.

“The majority of active listings in troubled markets are not going to sell, as it seems many home owners are very reluctant to make the necessary price adjustments required to stimulate an offer. However, the institutional bank owner must, at some point, price the home at the new market level and that is why consumers want to focus on these listings.”

Other websites such as RealtyTrac.com and Foreclosure.com provide paid subscriptions to search for foreclosures, but most of the homes are not on the active market for sale. With the debate raging between the statistical accuracy of the true number of foreclosures, this data is now center stage in a growing political hot potato.

CataList Homes will be tracking its own set of statistics focusing on bank owned homes active and pending on the market, and the percentage of the overall market of the bank owned properties. For the media, CataList Homes will make available real time interactive maps plotting the bank owned homes to illustrate the regions most affected, and compiling custom statistics on the sales activity of bank owned listings.

The mortgage meltdown threatens US economy

2007-08-10T04:25:00Z

So Wall Street has seen the Dow lose 1000 points due to the chaos in the mortgage business. Banks are sending us notices that buyer prequalification notices dated in June and July may not be honored. Heavy down payments are now required...what does all this mean???

There is a major international credit crunch which is causing lenders to be unable to sell their loans to the secondary market. This means that thousands of mortgage professionals will be out of business, and home buyers will find getting a loan very tough unless they have lots of cash or great credit. It also means prices will continue to slide in weak markets that were heavily dependent on loose credit during the rapid run up in prices in 2002-2005.

Whenever we see an inverted yield curve (short term rates higher than long term rates), trouble soon follows. For those selling in San Diego, Orange County, and the Inland Empire, get your home sold now or risk further market erosion in market value. If your home is not selling, and you aren't willing to drop another 5%, take it off the market....its going to be a while until prices rebound.

Upper end markets like Westside, Pasadena, and the South Bay have been imune to the lending crisis because those buyers typically have large down payments and supply is short. We expect those markets to soften, but be spared the painful erosion of equity that will be seen in the slower markets. If the real estate industry triggers a massive economic slow down, all bets are off. Look for the Fed to step in once some of the ugly data comes out soon.

What Those "Create Wealth" Gurus Won't Tell You About Foreclosures

2007-07-25T22:05:00Z

Couple of notable stories this morning on the front page of the LA Times' business section. The first was a piece on foreclosures in the state of California hitting a 10-year record high, and in the second article, the Times covered mortgage giant Countrywide's announcement yesterday that "a growing number of customers once considered to be good credit risks were having trouble making their mortgage payments." Hmm, smells like a financial market normalizing to me, after years of over-appreciation in the once red hot California housing market.

Our co-founder Mike Davin was quoted in the article on foreclosures. The thing is, is this really any surprise to anybody? Financial markets are cyclical, yet every 10 years, people inevitably get caught up and overconfident when things are on an upswing and despondent when the market comes back down to normal.

When applied with a little patience and know-how, real estate as an investment vehicle can be a viable, long-term, and stable strategy despite the circuitous dips and turns that the market will take. Yet witness the haphazard foreclosure "seminars" that crop up every 5-years coinciding with stories of the market's impending demise.

Quick, get-rich schemes are as old as the day is long, and these "create wealth" seminars through real estate and foreclosures are almost always quick on promises and extremely lacking in actual substance. They play to people's basest instincts to achieve grand results with minimal effort.

There are no easy ways to acquire wealth. Real estate investing is serious business that requires patience and a kind of discipline that you won't just wake up with one morning because you attended a weekend seminar, read some pamphlets on how to snap up foreclosures in a heartbeat, and finished a book.

Keep these things in mind when contemplating entering the current REO fray:

1) Once a home hits the foreclosure stage, it's usually too little, too late for the opportunistic home buyer.

2) The market in foreclosure-heavy locations is likely to go down another 10% so why be an investor in these areas?

3) If you want to buy a home for your family, the best bet is to search for bank-owned listings that are currently on the market. They are usually the best-priced homes with the most motivated owners. Buying a home at auction comes with a huge risk including no title insurance, no bank financing, no prior inspection, and liability for hidden IRS liens.

4) If you are selling a home, you better be competitive with the similar bank-owned listings or your house will not sell. If you are planning on selling in six months, why wait when you know more and more homes will be put on the market at rock bottom prices?

A brilliant Realtor Parody--Great work Ted Truitt

2007-07-21T00:15:00Z

The industry is thin skinned when it comes to critism of ethics, so congrats to the Virginia Association of Realtors for creating a great site reminding its agents not to be like Ted

For good clean fun, visit this site and enjoy....and don't hire an agent with a white suit!

Too much mustard on the hot dog??

2007-07-21T00:01:00Z

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%.

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

2007-06-20T23:01:00Z

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.

KCAL TV's (LA channel 9) consumer reporter Alan Mendelson stops by CataList

2007-06-20T22:52:00Z

Alan Mendelson, KCAL-9's former, long-time 'best deals' consumer reporter stopped by our office last week and filmed this informative 3-minute segment, which aired last Sunday. Check it out.

Frustrated by sky high real estate commissions?

2007-06-19T00:02:00Z

With the heated debate about real estate commissions hitting a new level with the recent 60 Minutes story on alternative real estate, we thought we would dust off this great TV commercial we aired back in 2001! Although Redfin gets a lot of press, CataList Homes was the original west coast voice of reason when we launched over six years ago. This was shot on location at the Tejon Ranch an hour north of Valencia, CA with the cooperation of a beautiful sunset and an amazing, very well-trained horse. The spot aired in select So-Cal markets during the summer and fall of 2001 but is still very current and reflective of many people's feelings about commissions.

The CataList Community Begins

2007-06-18T22:00:00Z

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.