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Carnival of real estate

The hecticness of this week prevented me from doing more than a cursory post about this week’s carnival. Now it’s time for me to sit back and enjoy reading the winning entries…

• This week’s top pick was San Diego-based Brian Brady’s The Six Stages of the Long-Term Real Estate Play. One of the neat features of the Carnival is the chance to get introduced to other bloggers, and I’m glad to make Brian’s acquaintance this way. His post insightfully notes that the earlier you make a bet on a potential real estate growth spot, the higher your upside as the area goes from “bucolic” to “funky” to “quaint” to “charming” to “growing” to “home.”
• Michael Price writes on how the web is driving transparency in this business, and notes that those who find this a threat to their business are probably right.
• Unable to resist the temptation to write yet again about Zillow (and to submit another Zillow post!), I lucked out and made it to the list with my post on Zillow’s new features. And yes, “lucked out” is the correct phrase because apparently my placement in the top 10, in competition with two other bloggers who wrote about Zillow (including Greg Swann himself) was decided by a coin toss.
• Seattle’s Gerhard Ade explains that while technology makes it easier to list and locate properties, it does not make it easier to buy and sell them.
• The Sellsius boys handed the microphone to Evan Kane, who explained the grief he got when he listed a property for $1 as a way of attracting attention to it. Creativity is indeed frowned on in this business…but my big question is whether the standard listing contract in his area obliges the seller to pay the commission if the agent is able to produce a living buyer who puts in a legitimate full price offer — even if the seller rejects the offer.
• Toby Boyce, speaking again through his canine mouthpiece, explains that too much information can, indeed, be…too much information. In the Internet age, it’s easy for buyers to get overloaded with data, opinions, and commentary. Part of a good agent’s job is enabling his client to make sense of it all.
• Jonathan Dalton writes that he is skeptical that Zillow’s latest move is indeed going to be as disruptive as some fear.
• The Tomato guest blogger Elizabeth Weintraub, a wired agent if there ever was one, lists what she believes clients expect from an agent. It’s a great list, though I would probably have switched around the order of “Honesty and Trustworthiness” and “Immediate Access/Response.”
• John Henderson advises agents not to take it personally when sellers complain that their home isn’t selling.
• Blogging evangelist, bodybuilder, and former Texas Bikini Team member Mary McKnight gives some more salient advice about writing a blog that gets attention.
• A carnival without a top-ten Bloodhound entry just doesn’t seem right — especially if the entry’s only sin of commenting on Zillow is one in which I also indulged — but thank goodness the coin toss merely relegated Greg Swann’s entry to the bottom of the list, not into the Recycle Bin. Greg’s analysis of Zillow’s recent moves is lengthy, insightful, well-written, and thought-provoking and generated numerous comments and link-backs. On a separate, unrelated note, today we learned that Greg is an Agorist, a onetime Mac programmer, a Latin-phile, and a writer (we suspected as much)…and that he deeply loves his wife.

Congrats to all, and thanks again to Matt Heaton at Active Rain for pulling this all together.

Tags: Carnival of real estate, Real estate, Zillow

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