Realty Thoughts » Realty News

Bank of America to Modify $100 Billion in loans in 2009

Michael Anderson — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:11:17 +0000

With the increasing downward spiral of the economy and resulting record unemployment rate, many homeowners face foreclosure in their near future. In the past, most banks wouldn’t lift a finger to help troubled homeowners, and if they did, it typically wasn’t until they were already behind on their mortgage. With the high cost banks must shell out due to foreclosure they are now changing their tune. According to The Real Estate Bloggers Bank of America plans to proactively modify 630,000 loans totaling $100 billion. Now homeowners who are seriously delinquent “AND” those likely to become seriously delinquent will have the opportunity to receive this new streamlined loan modification.

The question to ask is why did it take a financial crisis for banks to proactively help homeowners stay in their homes when signs of trouble were in the forecast? There are many stories out there of homeowners reaching out to lenders to get help when they saw trouble coming, to no avail. “If your not late, we can’t help you” was the previous mantra. I wonder if these new types of policies will continue once the financial crisis subsides. I guess we can wait and see…

Delicious for Real Estate: Dwellicious

Michael Anderson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:27:13 +0000

A few weeks back Mashable featured a new start-up by the name of Dwellicious. Apparently this new service will work very similar to that of Delicious ( a social bookmarking site), but optimized for the real estate niche. According to Mashable Dwellicious is optimized to work with the following: Century21, Coldwellbanker, Frontdoor.com, Har.com, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Redfin, Remax, Rentals.com, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow. No mentions of eppraisal.com or Hoodeo just yet, but we shall have to do something about that.

In the article the author seems sure Dwellicious’ future is in the hands of the real estate agents. I can see why with the dynamic updates on property listings. An agent could very well begin to bookmark prospective properties for clients and the changes over time are automatically updated letting them keep track of price changes, new photos, etc. This will make a great additional service where they can share their bookmarks with any clients in their area.

“I can’t get the price down for the home you want now, but I will monitor it for you and you can check the status of this home via my Dwellicious bookmark. Here is the link…”

Dwellicious is due to launch on January 7th 2009 at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York City.

What to do when you’re out of business cards

Michael Anderson — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:20:59 +0000

As a real estate professional your main focus in business has to be people. Converting those people into clients can be a tedious process which heavily weighs on trust and reputation. In the past the main avenue for getting new leads and networking was handing out business cards whenever possible. With the increase of social networks and the Web 2.0 culture, real estate pros must engage people where they frequent – the web.

So I guess you’re wondering what this has to do with business cards? There’s a neat tool I want to share that encompasses both worlds of live interaction and social networking online. It’s called a dropcard, and it allows you to give people you meet your business card via text message or over the web. Not only does it allow you to give your contact and business information, it also enables you to connect with these new contacts via the various social networks you have a presence in. I didn’t mention the awesome functionality that’s built into this process to integrate contacts directly into the iPhone, but I will have to save that for a future post…

New home listing site launches (with rebates)

Damian Scott — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:03:21 +0000

Last week LotandHome.com launched a new listing site focused on new homes and lots, but with a twist. Anyone can register with the site and get a “Rebate Voucher.” Bring the voucher to the builder and get a “cash back equaling 1% of the purchase price”. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea (who doesn’t like $1k coupons ).
From the Press Release:
“Completely non-competitive LotandHome offers benefits to the buyer, the homebuilder and the real estate agent. Homes sold through LotandHome.com carry a three percent commission from the participating builders. The new homebuyer receives a 1% cash rebate, 1% goes into national advertising for the website and 1% is allocated toward operational expenses and profits.”

[I'll] BeatYouThere.com

Damian Scott — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:35:25 +0000

A new real estate listing site called BeatYouThere.com launched yesterday (inman) and it’s adding a social twist. BeatYouThere users can search for other users (buyers, sellers, investors, etc), rate other users, comment on properties (and users), and connect with friends. It’s a novel idea, however while navigating the site I found some of the social aspects/comments/etc buried and the other social features haven’t officially launched yet (marked coming soon).

More StreetViews

Damian Scott — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:29:07 +0000

Another StreetView Launch:
Today, RealEstate.com launches property searches with integrated StreetView (from Inman).

Choices:
If you are developing a Real Estate 2.0 site then you have a hard choice ahead. Do you integrate Google’s StreetView or Microsoft’s Birds EyeView? Hey, at least we have choices.

It’s all about the view.

Damian Scott — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:28:06 +0000

Product Launches:
Last week, Trulia was the first to announced the integration of Google’s Street View (FOREM). Today, DotHomes also announces the integration of Google’s Street View (see below).

“DotHomes.com (DotHomes), the real estate search engine, today announced that it has implemented Google’s Street View to its US listings. This application adds to the already extensive list of real estate search functions including videos, maps, and aerial views, which home buyers can use to facilitate their real estate search. The “Street” button can be found below each individual property listing alongside other search functions such as Save, Add Video, Aerial and Map.” -Release

What are you guys doing?

Damian Scott — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:30:46 +0000

Question: What are you guys doing? We haven’t heard much from eppraisal/realtythoughts in a while.

Answer: Other than visiting real estate Agents across the U.S., we have been working on tweaking our technology and getting ready for the launch of hoodeo (www.hoodeo.com).

Question: Hold up, what’s hoodeo?

Answer: Right now, I can’t say much other than it uses the eppraisal engine in a very unique way. It is surprisingly simple and some would call it “revolutionary”.

Note, the splash page is up and we will be announcing updates over the next few weeks.

Fo Quizzle?

Damian Scott — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:15:44 +0000

This past weekend Quicken launched Quizzle.com as “a place that gives you simple understanding of your home and money.” Basically, they have incorporated your credit score from Experian, a custom home value estimate, mortgage info, and other tools into a web 2.0 style interface.

However, Quizzle goes a bit further and calculates an overall “Quizzle Score”, which represents how well you are doing financially. It seems like an interesting concept, but the signup process is a little too much for me.

The Year of the Listing

Damian Scott — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:47:04 +0000

There are quite a few new real estate listing sites popping up; it seems like this year is becoming the year of the listings. And it’s an all out race to get the most listings and the most visitors.

There are sites that:
-get listings from broker feeds
-use spiders to crawl listing sites
-invite consumers/realtors to post listings
-use IDX to syndicate listings
-use some combination of the above

It has reached a point where the general search experience is becoming eerily similar. This considered, I was surprised when I got an email about the upcoming today’s U.S launch of DotHomes (www.dothomes.com). While the site is very popular in foreign countries (e.g. South Africa, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), I was a bit skeptical about the launch of another listing engine in the U.S.

So, I talked to Douglas de Jager (co-founder of dothomes) to see what’s unique/different about dothomes’ market approach. During the call he demonstrated dothome’s vertical search engine and querying interface. And I must say that I was very impressed with the ease of use and the powerful search functionality.

On other sites, you can search listings by city and state and filter the results using pre-configured criteria (i.e. price, bed rooms, etc). However, dothomes allows for intelligent searches that includes keywords and keyword phrases. For example, you can do a search for “Ocean view in miami” or find homes near “Microsoft Redmond.” You can even apply price filters directly from the search box. Try this search: “open house in houston for 250k to 2m”

Ohh and dothomes has indexed and launches today with over 1 million listings.