5 ms·

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

by themartorana 12y ago

stevekinney 12y ago
I guess there is still Realtor.com, but I'm not sure how popular the site is.
- chrisan 12y ago
  Having just gone through a move in the midwest, we used realtor.com as the primary search site. Too many times we found Zillow/Trulia information to be inaccurate, either missing listings or just wrong data for bedrooms/sqft. Realtor.com was very kludgy but it was leaps better than the local MLS website even if well below the UX of Trulia/Zillow Both the listing agent of my old home and my buying agent in the new state asked for Trulia reviews when the process was over /1-random-data-point
azsromej 12y ago
There's Redfin
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- poopsintub 12y ago
  I imagine it would be relatively easy for them to operate as actual brokers also. I wonder what has stopped them.
  - skalaka 12y ago
    That's the thing... it's not as easy as you'd think. There are a lot of barriers put up to protect the industry. In many ways, innovation should have put Realtor's out of business like they did Travel Agents. The difference, Travel Agents didn't have a powerful lobby group like NAR.
    - igravious 12y ago
      Question: the internet has been a boon for shaking up entrenched incumbents. What happens when the internet gentrifies? Will we have even more hideous incumbents with no new tech on the horizon to generate a disruption event?
  - aj37 12y ago
    Brokers are subject to regulation which limits what they can do. For instance, they can't receive kickbacks from mortgage providers
NDizzle 12y ago
Redfin, but they don't do anything outside of the big cities. (Redfin doesn't service my area, for example - while I used Trulia to look at the school boundary markers and occasionally to look at houses.) Zillow's site is crap compared to Trulia. Hopefully they acknowledge that and bring Zillow's data onto Trulia's stack.
- Eiriksmal 12y ago
  Ugh, amen! Zillow's interface is horrendous, both from a user and programmatic/scraping standpoint. I've been relying on Trulia for ease of pointing queries at their results pages, so fingers crossed that some of Trulia's sanity trickles into the Zillow site. That article makes it seem doubtful that this will do anything other than beef up Zillow's stack with Trulia's data, though. =/
- jscheel 12y ago
  I've had trouble with Trulia's image serving for the past several months. It seems like their images just take forever to load, to the point that I switched back to Zillow.
  - roobeast 12y ago
    Can I ask where you are located generally and was this on mobile or desktop/laptop?
    - jscheel 12y ago
      I am in the southeast US, and it happened on both mobile and desktop. It got especially bad a few months ago (give or take).
krschultz 12y ago
Real Estate agents. Craigslist to some extent. Generally speaking the biggest competitor to any innovate website is the status quo and apathy. Every startup I have ever been in had a harder fight against people that were reluctant to move to better technology than against our direct competitors.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Presumably, realtor MLS isn't so much as a "competitor" to Zill/ulia so much as the dominating incumbent. 88% --- eighty eight percent --- of home sales (presumably: owner-occupied single-family residence sales) were done using licensed real estate agents in 2013. A staggering amount of money is funneled through that profession, which as I understand it exercises guild-like control over the MLS databases.
rubyn00bie 12y ago
Yes there is, but it hasn't gotten any HN love... :( it's called Househappy.org. To really understand why it's different takes some knowledge of the industry. The biggest difference, the contact information on the listing is actually the broker who listed it! And it's free for anyone to post. Oh... And it's the easiest to use! At least I think so :-D Note: I work for Househappy
- themartorana 12y ago
  I would have guessed the "Note" part. Gonna check it out!
- smackfu 12y ago
  What's the advantage over Zillow? It seems to have less properties. The contact info doesn't really matter to me much, since I will almost surely have a buyer's agent who will just look the MLS data up.
  - rubyn00bie 12y ago
    Your agent will appreciate us then... As they'll get leads for listing your house instead of being sold to who paid for the best ad placement. As well, we have some of the highest data integrity in the business and are continuously trying to make it better... And less properties, we're working on that too! After all we're a bit over a year old! Give is time!
nilkn 12y ago
Direct sources. Here in Houston, nobody uses Zillow because their data is not reliably up-to-date. The city has a custom solution: har.com. It's not as pretty, but it's what all the realtors in the city actually use.
- bane 12y ago
  Yeah, here in the D.C. area, nobody's using Zillow for much either since the "Zestimates" are pretty wildly off of actual market value and even in between homes in the same area. For example, it puts my house at about $50k under my next-door neighbor's house, despite my home being larger, with more upgrades (about $100k worth), with one more bedroom and an additional full bathroom. The identical house to mine, a block over, is $30k more than mine, but still $20k under the neighbor's home. A home another block away, similar to my neighbor's, but slightly smaller is actually on the market for $2k more than theirs. Another house, identical to mine, half a block over in a different direction is Zestimated at almost $90k more than mine. And a similar house down the road is on the market for $75 more than mine. My neighbors, directly behind me, have a model one size smaller than mine, and have done a tremendous amount of work on their home. Custom landscaping, high-end playground for their kids, fences, completely remodeled basement, and one more bedroom than my house, Zillow puts it at $10k under mine. So within, basically 2.5 blocks, in a cookie cutter suburb, we have almost $100k variance, with Zestimates at least $50k under market prices in some cases, and $50k over in others, and smaller homes Zestimating to be worth more than larger homes next door. Believe it or not this is an improvement from a couple years ago, but no reputable agent in my area uses Zillow for anything. Trulia, by way of comparison, puts my house at $20k more than Zillow and flips the relationship of small/big houses so they make slightly more sense pricewise. Redfin seems to be the closest.
  - carlmcqueen 12y ago
    Very similar here in the city of Saint Louis, Mo, but I don't really blame them. The change in house prices block by block in many places can go from 20-30K to 300K to 800K depending on whether the block has been restored or are old burned out 100 year homes. Also, crime levels can change quite a bit in a one mile radius.
hammock 12y ago
There's Realtor.com, which is actually the better app vs. these two, since it is directly tied into the MLS database. There's also redfin.

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

stevekinney 12y ago

I guess there is still Realtor.com, but I'm not sure how popular the site is.

chrisan 12y ago
Having just gone through a move in the midwest, we used realtor.com as the primary search site. Too many times we found Zillow/Trulia information to be inaccurate, either missing listings or just wrong data for bedrooms/sqft. Realtor.com was very kludgy but it was leaps better than the local MLS website even if well below the UX of Trulia/Zillow Both the listing agent of my old home and my buying agent in the new state asked for Trulia reviews when the process was over /1-random-data-point

azsromej 12y ago

There's Redfin

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

poopsintub 12y ago
I imagine it would be relatively easy for them to operate as actual brokers also. I wonder what has stopped them.
- skalaka 12y ago
  That's the thing... it's not as easy as you'd think. There are a lot of barriers put up to protect the industry. In many ways, innovation should have put Realtor's out of business like they did Travel Agents. The difference, Travel Agents didn't have a powerful lobby group like NAR.
  - igravious 12y ago
    Question: the internet has been a boon for shaking up entrenched incumbents. What happens when the internet gentrifies? Will we have even more hideous incumbents with no new tech on the horizon to generate a disruption event?
- aj37 12y ago
  Brokers are subject to regulation which limits what they can do. For instance, they can't receive kickbacks from mortgage providers

NDizzle 12y ago

Redfin, but they don't do anything outside of the big cities. (Redfin doesn't service my area, for example - while I used Trulia to look at the school boundary markers and occasionally to look at houses.) Zillow's site is crap compared to Trulia. Hopefully they acknowledge that and bring Zillow's data onto Trulia's stack.

Eiriksmal 12y ago
Ugh, amen! Zillow's interface is horrendous, both from a user and programmatic/scraping standpoint. I've been relying on Trulia for ease of pointing queries at their results pages, so fingers crossed that some of Trulia's sanity trickles into the Zillow site. That article makes it seem doubtful that this will do anything other than beef up Zillow's stack with Trulia's data, though. =/
jscheel 12y ago
I've had trouble with Trulia's image serving for the past several months. It seems like their images just take forever to load, to the point that I switched back to Zillow.
- roobeast 12y ago
  Can I ask where you are located generally and was this on mobile or desktop/laptop?
  - jscheel 12y ago
    I am in the southeast US, and it happened on both mobile and desktop. It got especially bad a few months ago (give or take).

krschultz 12y ago

Real Estate agents. Craigslist to some extent. Generally speaking the biggest competitor to any innovate website is the status quo and apathy. Every startup I have ever been in had a harder fight against people that were reluctant to move to better technology than against our direct competitors.

tptacek 12y ago
Presumably, realtor MLS isn't so much as a "competitor" to Zill/ulia so much as the dominating incumbent. 88% --- eighty eight percent --- of home sales (presumably: owner-occupied single-family residence sales) were done using licensed real estate agents in 2013. A staggering amount of money is funneled through that profession, which as I understand it exercises guild-like control over the MLS databases.

rubyn00bie 12y ago

Yes there is, but it hasn't gotten any HN love... :( it's called Househappy.org. To really understand why it's different takes some knowledge of the industry. The biggest difference, the contact information on the listing is actually the broker who listed it! And it's free for anyone to post. Oh... And it's the easiest to use! At least I think so :-D Note: I work for Househappy

themartorana 12y ago
I would have guessed the "Note" part. Gonna check it out!
smackfu 12y ago
What's the advantage over Zillow? It seems to have less properties. The contact info doesn't really matter to me much, since I will almost surely have a buyer's agent who will just look the MLS data up.
- rubyn00bie 12y ago
  Your agent will appreciate us then... As they'll get leads for listing your house instead of being sold to who paid for the best ad placement. As well, we have some of the highest data integrity in the business and are continuously trying to make it better... And less properties, we're working on that too! After all we're a bit over a year old! Give is time!

nilkn 12y ago

Direct sources. Here in Houston, nobody uses Zillow because their data is not reliably up-to-date. The city has a custom solution: har.com. It's not as pretty, but it's what all the realtors in the city actually use.

bane 12y ago
Yeah, here in the D.C. area, nobody's using Zillow for much either since the "Zestimates" are pretty wildly off of actual market value and even in between homes in the same area. For example, it puts my house at about $50k under my next-door neighbor's house, despite my home being larger, with more upgrades (about $100k worth), with one more bedroom and an additional full bathroom. The identical house to mine, a block over, is $30k more than mine, but still $20k under the neighbor's home. A home another block away, similar to my neighbor's, but slightly smaller is actually on the market for $2k more than theirs. Another house, identical to mine, half a block over in a different direction is Zestimated at almost $90k more than mine. And a similar house down the road is on the market for $75 more than mine. My neighbors, directly behind me, have a model one size smaller than mine, and have done a tremendous amount of work on their home. Custom landscaping, high-end playground for their kids, fences, completely remodeled basement, and one more bedroom than my house, Zillow puts it at $10k under mine. So within, basically 2.5 blocks, in a cookie cutter suburb, we have almost $100k variance, with Zestimates at least $50k under market prices in some cases, and $50k over in others, and smaller homes Zestimating to be worth more than larger homes next door. Believe it or not this is an improvement from a couple years ago, but no reputable agent in my area uses Zillow for anything. Trulia, by way of comparison, puts my house at $20k more than Zillow and flips the relationship of small/big houses so they make slightly more sense pricewise. Redfin seems to be the closest.
- carlmcqueen 12y ago
  Very similar here in the city of Saint Louis, Mo, but I don't really blame them. The change in house prices block by block in many places can go from 20-30K to 300K to 800K depending on whether the block has been restored or are old burned out 100 year homes. Also, crime levels can change quite a bit in a one mile radius.

hammock 12y ago

There's Realtor.com, which is actually the better app vs. these two, since it is directly tied into the MLS database. There's also redfin.