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Congrats on the sale! You could argue that "Zillow is going about this all wrong" if their goal was trying to improve the process of buying and selling homes o
by rgbrgb 11y ago
Congrats on the sale!
You could argue that "Zillow is going about this all wrong" if their goal was trying to improve the process of buying and selling homes or if they were trying to make it more affordable to buy a home. What you have to realize is that they have a business that's working very well within the real estate status quo: agents pay them money for ads to get leads, agents who are able to convert leads make a ton from commission, the cycle continues. A public company with an established business model (that prints money!) is not going to pivot and suddenly compete with their well-paying customers.
However, I totally agree that there's a huge opportunity to improve the buying/selling experience and lower transaction costs. My team is working extremely hard on that problem.
Edit: I should note that Zillow has done tremendous work on improving the home shopping process and I'm definitely not trying to knock them on that. They and their competitors have brought the shopping process online and given consumers access to listing info that was previously only available to agents. The actual offer/transaction (the buy button) is the extremely complicated piece we're trying to tackle. It just so happens that in tackling that piece and becoming a brokerage, we get access to a high quality broker-only data feed.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bcg1 11y agoYou make excellent points. I guess what I meant was that Zillow's model _should be_ to improve the process and to make it cheaper. Maybe 6%-7% commission is still appropriate for high-end properties that only have a limited pool of potential buyers (that's not my world, I don't really know) but for average homes in 2015, it is an anachronism left over from a time when buyers and sellers couldn't do a lot of the legwork themselves online. Its not hard to see that there is a ton of money to be made closing that gap. Just perused your website and from what I read your company certainly seems to have the right idea. As it happens our buyer did end up having an agent and we paid that agent a 3% commission, so from what I read your system definitely could have worked in our transaction and saved our buyer some dough. The $300 we paid the agent to get us into the MLS truly paid off though... we saved literally thousands. Looking back I could pay triple that and it would be a no-brainer. Just something to consider - toss in some boilerplate forms or instruction guides or whatever and it could be a great product with excellent margins. I bet theres a bunch of tech savvy go getter millenials that would get licensed to do the local work necessary. Anyhow, I'm really glad to see someone doing what you're doing, best of luck to you... I truly hope you win
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoIs 6-7% really the norm in the USA its 1 or 2 % in the UK if so damm that is a market that needs disrupting.
- MagnumOpus 11y agoYes, and yes.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoOne of the presidential candidates should have I will deregulate the Relator cartel as one of his/her manifesto key items.
- jacobr1 11y ago3% for the buyer's agent, 3% for the seller's agent
- rgbrgb 11y agoReally appreciate the kind words. We'll do our best!