Last week a home search site, RealSeekr.com, came onto the scene. The main difference between this and a number of similar sites is RealSeekr was designed by real estate agents so presumably they’ve kept what we as a group tend to like and tossed what we don’t like in creating this platform.

Will anyone find this site while searching for homes? Maybe. Maybe not. But I put together a profile and I’ve started to add my listings, just in case, because you never know for certain.

Syndicating Phoenix Real Estate Listings

One of the challenges RealSeekr faces, in my opinion, is that listings have to be added to the system manually. There’s no IDX feed coming from Phoenix into the system and, since the site’s fairly new, there are no syndication agreements in place.

It’s not a question of laziness; I’m happy to invest the time if it means one of my listings is going to sell. It’s a matter of age and stress - I can’t seem to remember all of the different places where a home can be listed, at least not in a day and age when there are new sites debuting monthly.

Syndication helps.

All of my listings have been entered on RealBird.com, which then powers the map on the “My Listings” page here on AllPhoenixRealEstate.com. I could use a map from Diverse Solutions, but I’ve had RealBird’s map on longer and so it stays.

RealBird syndicates listings entered. So let’s take my new short sale listing at 7873 W. Redfield in Peoria. I entered the information on RealBird. And within a couple of hours the same data already has been entered on Zillow, Oodle, Trulia, Edgeio and CLRSearch.

Will buyers look at all of those sites? Probably not. Do I want my home there in the off chance that a buyer does find it on a small listing portal? Absolutely.

Return on Investment

It’s a question of the return on investment. All is takes for me to enter a listing into the Point-2-Agent National Listing Service (which also syndicates) or RealBird or Zillow or Trulia or anywhere else is a few minutes of my time. And given the uncertain return through most of those sites, the ROI - a possible sale in exchange for some of my time - is with the investment.

Not so with print. There is a very, very uncertain return with print advertising (aside from the certainty that it will be low to nonexistent.) But print costs real dollars. And as a businessman I’m not going to burn real dollars unless I know there’s an absolute return coming at the end of the day. Wishful thinking doesn’t cut it.

The same goes for the glossy real estate magazines about which I’ve written previously. Is it in the realm of possibility that someone will pick up a real estate magazine, fall in love with a photograph and buy the house I have listed? Sure, it’s possible. But the remote possibility doesn’t justify the exorbitant expense.

Throwing money at the marketing of a listing isn’t going to help the sale if the dollars are being spent foolishly. Glossy magazines are all about the agent - not your house.

Who’s Marketing What?

All real estate agents leverage listings to their own benefit to some degree. That’s why we have name riders with our phone numbers, why we plaster our own mugs on print flyers (for those unenlightened souls burning through our rain forests in the name of a remote chance of selling a home) and why we have open houses (not me, but others.)

Print ads aren’t about you - they’re about the agent trying to show their seller all of the hard work they’re doing in trying to sell the house, while they’re taking the calls on the side and trying to turn those folks into buyers - for your home or, more likely, another.

One local agent boasts about custom signs “that stop traffic” - even if that traffic is on a seldom-driven street in the middle of a subdivision where only the residents travel on a daily basis. Prominently displayed at the top of the sign is the brokerage’s motto.

Who does that benefit? You or the broker trying to secure additional listings? Will that custom sign cause more people to drive down that road? Or does the number of people that happen to drive past and take the time to stop still pale compared to the number of people who are seeing the same listing every day on line?

Where are marketing dollar better allocated - trying to attract the attention of the few whose sole qualification is driving past the house or picking up a real estate magazine or glancing at the newspaper classifieds as they wrap that fish - or trying to attract the eyes of the thousands of folks looking online at any given moment?

Seems pretty simple from here.  So simple, even a silly beagle can understand it.

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The Phoenix real estate listings you see on this site and many others all are powered by something called IDX - Internet Data Exchange. Depending on the IDX provider an agent or brokerage chooses, the level of information you will see on these IDX searches can vary widely.

For instance, I used to use Success Web Systems for my IDX searches. When you looked for additional details on a property the options were limited. For instance, you wouldn’t learn the actual square footage of a property - just a range. Want to know details about the laundry room - inside, outside, whether appliances were included? Sorry.

Diverse Solutions provides a considerably higher level of information, which is one of the reasons why I made the switch a month or so ago. (Another reason was the map-based search, which is far less clunky than the old-fashioned data entry model.)

But even DS doesn’t have everything … and it’s not their fault.

Not every field on an MLS sheet is included into the IDX field. Most noticeably missing at the moment here in the Phoenix real estate market is the “Miscellaneous” category, which includes filters for both short sales and bank owned homes.

I’ve finagled a bank owned home search for my office’s listings. But those are just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s on the market.

Every day on Trulia Voices, in my own Inbox and elsewhere I hear consumers asking the question - what’s the best way for us to get a list of bank owned homes?

More than 10 percent of the homes in ARMLS are bank owned, REO properties. These are what you want to see. I know this. Diverse Solutions knows this. But we can’t deliver it to you, not until the ARMLS board of directors releases the Miscellaneous field.

One side note … for all the debate over the impact of the Department of Justice’s settlement with the National Association of REALTORS and the many who are trumpeting that listings information now will flow freely … well, it won’t. At least no more so than it has to date.

What you see on nearly all listings sites is a portion of the information about a home. Some are more complete than others - thanks to the switch, I think the information here is about as complete as you can find for the Phoenix market. But you’re never seeing absolutely all of the available information about a home.

Fortunately, very few attempt to purchase real estate without getting their feet on the ground in the area in which they’re buying. Some still do, but they’re fairly few and far between. Which is a good thing in my opinion.

I’m waiting for the bank owned field to be released. Once it does, I’ll make those listings available to you as quickly as humanly possible.

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Tags: Phoenix Foreclosures, General Real Estate, MLS by Jonathan Dalton
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Sometimes, you just have to shake your head.

Admittedly, I’d never read Jeff Jarvis’ blog before and probably won’t read it again - it’s little different than the “all real estate agents” suck routine you can get in a dozen other places.

But there’s one line from his post yesterday celebrating the settlement of the Department of Justice’s case against the National Association of REALTORS that has left me shaking my head:

Kiss your 6 percent commission good-bye, Ms. Agent! Competition is on the way.

Let’s get the standard disclaimer out of the way - there is no standard commission rate across the real estate industry. All commissions are negotiable though each agent and each brokerage is able to set their own rules - we all have the right to work for what we feel we earn, plain and simple.

Actually … let’s not run away from the standard disclaimer so quickly because the truth is the key to understanding competition in the real estate industry.

There is no standard commission. Every agent is allowed to charge whatever they choose. And because of this, there are a wide variety of business models at work. There are web sites who will provide an MLS listing for a flat rate. And there are agents who are willing to work at a number of different percentages all the way down the line.

Does this sound like a lack of competition?

One of my good friends here recently left his brokerage and hung his own shingle. Another is working his way in that direction.

Does this sound like a lack of competition.

Though NAR wasn’t required to admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, that doesn’t change the fact that the powers-that-be made a stupid decision once upon a time (and others along the way) in trying to limit the flow of MLS information.

(I’ve called out similarly moronic decisions made by local boards as well.)

And there still are some who believe the MLS is a public entity and anyone should be able to list their homes for sale … just like anyone with a car for sale has the ability to post their automobile on Ford’s website. (Oh wait … we can’t do that, can we?)

Anyone can sell stock they hold but they can’t list that individual stock for sale on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ unless they go through an NYSE member institution or a NASDAQ market maker. In eight years at Schwab I never saw a NASDAQ stock come up on the Bloomberg terminal with “Bob Smith, Pierre South Dakota” as the seller.

Why? Because the NYSE and NASDAQ are not public exchanges, in as much as they are not open for everyone to utilize their listing services. The same can be said for the MLS.

What are the obstacles that must be overcome in order to have MLS access?

• Attend real estate school
• Pass the state real estate exam
• Pay your board membership (since locally the boards operate the MLS)

And here’s a basic reality … many of the 40,000 agents in the Phoenix real estate market hold their licenses solely for their own investments. They don’t work with buyers. They don’t work with sellers. They work strictly for themselves.

People seem to spend a lot of time fretting about real estate commissions, which is odd only because there seem to be more pressing economic issues these days. You know, like $4 a gallon gasoline, rising food prices and the like.

When there’s news and movement on those fronts, then you’ll have my attention.

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We’re experimenting with tables today … if this doesn’t look good, we’ll go back to the maps. Just want to make sure everyone’s still paying attention.

Inventory continued to fall over the last week - we stand at just over 38,000 single-family detached homes for sale in Maricopa County. Sales in the Phoenix real estate market over the preceding 30 days edged higher to 3,984 for an absorption rate of 9.56 months.

Queen Creek remains the fasted moving market in the Phoenix area with an absorption rate of just 5.06 months; if no new inventory came to the market in Queen Creek, all of the homes currently for sale would be sold within five months at the current pace.

Tempe’s a close second this week with 5.41 months of inventory. When I first started tracking these numbers two years ago Tempe was the Valley’s last remaining sellers’ market, at least for single family detached homes. The reason? There’s no competition from new builds in Tempe. The city’s been built out for more than 20 years.

All of the below data is from the Arizona Regional MLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. And if you prefer maps over the chart, or vice versa, let me know.

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As has become the custom the last month, this one’s going to be a two-parter. Full report for all of the cities in the Valley will come later this afternoon.

Today’s big story? Bank owned homes are moving and moving fast … there were 1,131 closed sales of REO homes in the Phoenix real estate market over the past 30 days. Match that against current inventory of 4,256 bank owned homes and you have an absorption rate of 3.76 months.

Put another way, if nothing else came to the market, all of the bank owned homes would be sold in less than four months’ time.

Of course, bank owned homes are coming to the market all the time. REO inventory has not dropped appreciably since I started tracking the numbers separately a couple months ago. But the sales have been accelerating, staving off the assumed wave of destruction that was to hit the market when as foreclosures increased.

It still could happen if the buyers disappear but these days the opposite is taking place - buyers who have sat on the sideline waiting for homes to become affordable again are finding that has happened. You only need to know where to look.

Back with more later …

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Tags: Canadian Buyers, Phoenix Foreclosures, Phoenix Inventory, Phoenix Market, General Real Estate by Jonathan Dalton
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