The red team has a new gimmick.
It is another home-value estimator, but unlike Zillow, you can plug in your own comps and come up with a customized estimate.
It does resemble reality by allowing sellers to use their favorite highest comps, and discard the low ones.
http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/05/price-your-home-like-an-agent-would.html
It is a fun toy, but it won’t have any impact on the market. Buyers aren’t going to care about the seller’s tweaked estimate of value, and to offset, they will generate their own lower version.
The R-team is in position to dominate the real estate world because they are operating alone in the space. They could expedite the process by employing great salespeople – otherwise they will just be like the rest, hoping to win on quantity, instead of quality.
The agents who should be nervous are those that have little or nothing to offer other than being able to fill in the blanks on the standardized forms.
The R-team offers the do-it-yourself real-estate online buffet, and their team of transaction specialists who can process your order and kick back a spiff if it closes.
But they don’t do what I do – offer specific strategies for winning, and quality opinions and advice. But I’m in the minority – most agents don’t do anything more than the R-team, so consumers figure they might as well give the business to the Rs and get the kickback.
But for order takers to sell any of the highly-desired properties in this market is a miracle.
Want proof?
Search R’s website by zip code, and check their ‘Offer Insights”. They lose a lot, and they don’t have a presence in the high-end areas. This is where the great salespeople are the dominant force – in bidding wars, and around the high-end areas.
However, if you are building a brokerage, you have to go the quantity route. The top salespeople want high splits so the profits are thin. But can you come up with enough gimmicks to overcome the inefficiencies of the average agents?
P.S. If you check 92011, the first offer insight is my listing on Manzanita – I took a chance on a R agent when most would have taken the slightly lower cash offer. Why? Because I met the buyers myself, and had a good enough feel for them that I thought they could endure. Sure enough, they survived an appraisal that was $36,000 below the sales price. No other listing agent would have done that.