Archive for the 'Real Estate Technology' Category
Conforming Wholesale Mortgage Rates for 6/16/08
June 16th, 2008 Categories: Mortgage News, Real Estate Technology, Tranparent mortgage pricing, Yield Spread Premiums
Originally posted on www.ratespeed.com/blog…
All subsequent daily conforming wholesale interest rate pricing posts, other schwag, definitions, etc. may be found over there…
What you see above is a screen shot from a results page generated by RateSpeed at 1:41pm on 6/15/08.
The risk based credit, financial and property criteria used to generate the above quote is as follows:
Purchase, Primary Residence, Single Family Residence, Fully Documented income, Debt to Income <39%, Loan To Value <80%, $400k Loan Amount, 700 FICO score.
Don’t believe what you see? Try it out yourself.
Shortly, RateSpeed will be enrolling 25 mortgage professionals as beta testers. Are you a mortgage professional looking to differentiate yourself in the market? Stay tuned to find out how you can be one of the early adopters in the transparent mortgage revolution.
Defining the fields and columns above:
Conf 30 Yr Fixed.
This is the term of the mortgage program. In this case the program is a traditional conforming 30 year fixed mortgage product.
Rate.
This is the interest rate of the loan.
APR, in this alpha rendition, will only account for the Broker/Banker Fee. Traditionally it will (and should) include all closing costs. IMO APR is confusing and manipulatable.
Loan Amount.Self explanatory, the dollar amount of the mortgage.
Monthly Payment.
How much you would pay the mortgage provider each month. Includes principle and interest.
Price.
This is the % cost or rebate that the given interest rate yields in the wholesale market. The Loan Amount is multiplied against the Price to equal the dollar ($) amount in cost or YSP credit.
YSP Credit.
RateSpeed is about choice and displays five levels of Price, one Price below Par (a Par rate is the lowest interest rate a borrower qualifies for, given by the wholesale lender) and four above Par. The higher Rate one chooses above Par the more YSP Credit (or cash rebate) the consumer may receive and apply toward closing costs (Broker/Banker Fee and 3rd Party fees, i.e. appraisal, title, escrow, home inspection etc). An interest rate below Par will cost a consumer to acquire, often times called ‘buying down’ an interest rate.
In the above 30 Yr Fixed, $400k Loan Amount example:
6.25% would yield $1084.00 in cash from the wholesale lender to the consumer to be applied toward closing costs.
6.625% would yield $5844.00 in cash from the wholesale lender to the consumer to be applied toward closing costs. The first $2000 would pay the Broker/Banker fee and the rest may be applied toward 3rd party closing costs (in this scenario).
Broker/Banker Fee.
This is the (negotiable) flat fee the mortgage professional is charging to close this loan. It is completely up to the mortgage professional what this fee ultimately is, RateSpeed does not mandate what a mortgage professional can charge.
$2000 is what we chose to represent as the Broker/Banker fee in this example and should not be interpreted as what all licensed mortgage professionals may charge who offer RateSpeed to their clients. The fee may be more or less, completely dependent on the mortgage professional, but always disclosed up-front.
Net Cost.
Net Cost = Broker/Banker Fee minus (plus) YSP Credit (cost).
Using the same qualifying information, compare and contrast the rates and pricing you see above to other mortgage websites and similar applications and you will quickly see the difference between a transparent mortgage professional who offers RateSpeed and those who don’t…unabated access to real time, best-case wholesale mortgage rates and pricing.RateSpeed: Enabling mortgage consumers and professionals to make smarter decisions with better information.
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Sphere: Related ContentReal Time Paradigm Shifting in The Real Estate and Mortgage Industries
March 11th, 2008 Categories: 4realz, Active Rain, Business Models, Incredible Agent, Real Estate Technology, Social Networking, Trulia, third party destination sites, zillow
Real Time Paradigm Shifting in The Real Estate and Mortgage Industries
Very few will argue that we are in the midst of an historical era of change, largely leaving the Industrial Age heading steadfast and firmly into The Age of Information.
Transitions between era’s have traditionally taken anywhere from 100,000,000,000 to 100 years, with each succeeding ‘period’, ‘time, or ‘age’ shrinking rapidly compared to the prior by a factor of ~10.
If the above is true then it’s not contrived to think that we may be passing through multiple periods of relative historical significance during our own life, whereas prior such ‘times’ have lasted for >10 generations. This is a remarkable reflection if you really consider it. Change is happening at a far faster pace than any of us are used to because it can.
‘The Times’ change so fast they now call it Real Time (as in the time before real time was fake time, or something like that).
Change is also something that does not feel natural thus most don’t adapt to it well, especially over very short periods of time. Over 10,000 years? Sure. Over 5 years? Maybe. 6 Months? What just happened..?
People within a society affected by change can be generally classified as:
• Innovators
• Adapters
• Adopters
• Laggards
• Haters
The Moral: Business is moving, evolving, changing faster than ever. Real estate and mortgage used to resist such rapid change, today embracement is necessary for survival.
It’s pretty well accepted that in the Information Age, withholding information for money has diminishing value.
It took real estate and mortgage (to a greater degree) longer to understand this, which is evidenced by the initial industry aversion to sites like Zillow et al (Innovators). Many agents understand that wider distribution of their inventory is in fact a good thing (Adapters and Adopters); placing ones product in a place where there are a lot of potential buyers is likely to increases the chances of selling that product. Other agents are just now realizing and acting on the same (Laggards).
New technologies start big then get smaller and better.
Zillow launched in February of 2006 offering tools and services that draw in consumers and feed participating professionals using intuitive user interfaces (UI’s). Trulia evokes similar qualities; single site with all the tools (and the list goes on). To one extent or another Zillow, Trulia et al have exponentially improved the real estate Search experience over the past two years. They’ve blazed a wonderful path.
They’ve also raised and spent capital that exceeds some Nations GDP to foster a technological paradigm shift towards information transparency coupled with uber-intuitive UI’s with regards to real estate listings, a map and other relevant local data (also called a mash-up).
Today the same tech driven mash-up UI’s that drive gobs of traffic to the Zillows and Trulias of the world are available and affordable to individual real estate professionals (rePros) at pennies on the dollar.
Different Agenda’s
Zillow and Trulia are advertising/media websites. Their business models depend primarily on traffic so advertising may be sold for a premium and each have numerous vehicles for an agent to spend their money on.
They’re kind enough to offer tools (widgets) that add a coolness factor to an agents individual site and create social conversation forums to leverage participating agents experience/knowledge for the community as a whole. But make no mistake; they depend on the traffic a rePros personal knowledge and information draws to embolden their respective brands. Every tool provided is inherently designed to increase their traffic first, yours second.
Other real estate Search sites like Roost will re-skin, redisplay and replace your current ugly IDX then charge you for the privilege of the traffic they direct back to your site. This is certainly a better alternative to what’s been available in the IDX market and more importantly another step towards blending technology seamlessly with an individual rePro’s Brand…yet not quite ‘there’.
In most every case, a top level domain real estate Search portal seeks to profit from advertising and by building their Brand first, yours second.
Roost claims that they ‘Support Your Brand’:
- Your brand is prominently displayed at the top of the search results
- You receive a virtual card with your contact information and links to your listings
- You receive your own URL on Roost
Claim #3, receiving your own URL on Roost, isn’t the highest and best way to support your brand. This also leads to a similar experience outlined above where a consumer is bedazzled with one slick UI, only to eventually fall into a foreign place called your website.
Roosts business model message:
- Performance-based and transparent
- Pay only for the clicks you receive to your own site
- Target people in specific geography (town, zip code, etc)
- Buy only as much traffic as you want in any given month.
- Your Roost dashboard will make it easy to manage your spend and track performance.
Very Googleicious…carefull, if you don’t keep the traffic tank monetized, it’s possible to be the Star one minute and invisible the next.
Where is there?
When consumers begin their quest for a home, they’re after one thing: listings—all of them. Trulia, Zillow, Roost et al face a perpetual problem with the ‘available to in-house listings ratio’. Big players in this space like Realogy and Prudential are picking sides, contributing listings to one site or another. Some agents choose to contribute their listings while the vast majority do not. This leaves consumers with a choice between bad and worse: Try and search all the listings with inferior tools, or perform cutting-edge searches on ~20-30% of the listings available in a given area. Thats not an acceptable ratio in my book. Pretty soon we’ll have an aggregator of the aggregators, and so on.
It seems ironic though, with all these brokers now lining up in different camps to feed their listings to the big consumer search destinations on the Internet, that it’s ultimately the consumer that suffers from these alliances being formed.
If I’m trying to search for a house in Portland, I still have to have to go to multiple destinations (Frontdoor has X, Zillow has Y, Trulia has X & Y but no Z) just to get an accurate picture of the complete inventory available on the market.
Either way and any way, this would be another big win for Trulia, but as Joel notes, Michael agrees, (and I’ve said before), it is note self-evident that at the end of the day, the consumer wins with broker-fed listing sites.
While penning and researching this post, I came across the above snippets and couldn’t agree more: A viable solution could be a website that hosts robust Search UI’s and engages social networking as well as SEO strategies under a rePros personally owned and controlled domain.
BlueRoof360.com is about as close to ‘there’ as I’ve seen. The only aspect that I question (and this is being very nit-picky) is the platform that they are using…is it proprietary or open source? In other words, can I snap pieces in and out? If I don’t like the property search UI, can I swap it out with a better one? Can I add plug-ins and other features vis-à-vis Wordpress? Realivent and Incredible Agent deserve mentions here as well.
As a rePro on the Listing side of the relationship, if you are going to ‘give’ your listings to the Zillows of the world, your personal website had better be on par with the site that the link came from, otherwise that ‘link’ will likely leave your site and go back to more beautiful and userfriendly pastures.
As a rePro on the Buyers side of a potential relationship, a website with real time information and a solid property Search UI is mandatory for future survival.
RePro’s can offer consumers via their personal websites a vital claim that the big players will always chase: 100% of the information located within a local MLS’ database. Days on market, sold data, and a glut of other valuable information to consumers that currently is not available on the big players sites can be displayed on a licensed pro’s site. Regardless if one person (consumer or professional) thinks that such info is important or not is irrelevant. Someone does, it’s the long tail consumerism that dominates the current and future markets terrain. In any case, the more information you make accessible the larger your potential audience. Redfin gets this, they offer their agents and consumers best of breed technology and information.
In case it’s not evident i’ll point out that consumers are getting smarter about how the real estate industry internally works due to this new real time access to information phenomenon thingy. Better to be deemed transparent and open rather than a shifty salesperson.
To keep in line with change in real time, the best strategy is a likely mash-up of all of the above, sprinkled with a little bit of this and that.
- License great looking, highly functional, scalable technology to display your products through, and seamlessly build your brand. Keep in mind that you get what you pay for, don’t go for the cheapest solution by any means.
- Push and maintain your listings with the big aggregators: Trulia, Zillow, Google Base etc for the exposure.
- Blog incessantly about topics that are local to your listings. Need a blog and the proper education to go along with one? Check out The Tomato.
- Participate in Social Networks, optimize your Social Networking Optimization. Participate in conversations on ActiveRain, update your professional profile on LinkedIn, create a group on Facebook.
- Seek to learn: Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens…Attend some of the current seminars like 4RealzED, BHBU, and if you’ve got some extra coin, Inman Connect. I’ve personally been to three Connects, registered for Dustins preso in Orange County on April 17th, and plan to attend BHBU schedule permitting.
- Prepare to change, upgrade and sharpen your tools often. Today’s rage is tomorrow’s fizzle, stay razor while you shine.
Also See:
Sphere: Related ContentJust Write Relevant, Compelling Articles About Real Estate and/or Mortgage and You Won’t Have to Worry About Page Rank and SEO
March 1st, 2008 Categories: Real Estate Technology, SEO Tips, Social Networking
Hat tip to Todd at Blog Fiesta for pointing out that Google reshuffled the Page Rank deck. This post started as a comment and question for Todd, then it got to be really long, then I decided to make it a post.
For anyone who finds themselves struggling to generate new content (bloggers block), this is a great way to push through the plateau–taking a comment into a new post.
My comment/question:
Hey Todd…
Question:
Can you explain what Page Rank means in tangible terms? As in, what are the demonstrated differences and/or advantages between a site that is a PR4 and one thats a PR5 (and 6 or 7 for that matter).
In your experience, are proper SEO tactics (whatever they are) and Page Rank closely affiliated?
Then I got to thinking (although I’d still like to hear Todd’s answer)…It doesn’t seem that PR has much to do w/ SEO.
I don’t follow status-quo SEOnomics advice but my site is a PR5, has been for the past few Google PR shuffles. A PR5 supposedly requires some hard core, intense SEO-Fu to achieve…except I don’t practice SEO-Fu. The one time I did, I got the beat down.
Wrote a post titled ‘The Best Mortgage Blog‘ in September 2007. 72 hours later I searched Google and Yahoo! for ‘The Best Mortgage Blog’ and *bang* #1 on page 1 of the organic results on all three SERP’s. This post resided in top position for this term for quite sometime (I stopped looking in December).
Today, if you type in The Best Mortgage Blog on Google, you cannot find the post, even if you extend the Search to ‘The Best Mortgage Blog xbroker’. Can’t find it via their Blog Search page either (the post is still #1 on Yahoo). So it appears The Google hath punished me. How they flesh this out is beyond me.
I don’t know how they do it, but I believe that Google pays very close attention to how you ‘build your blog’. If you try to implement crafty SEO tactics based on what pundits say will increase your PR, you’re more likely to be penalized (or marginalized) than rewarded. I’m not talking about black hat stuff (sure way to get penalized and even banned from the SERP’s), but rather any strategy thats designed to try and manipulate Google’s mysterious omnipotent algorithmic brain.
From Googles site regarding Page Rank:
Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult.
In other words, don’t even try to figure this out.
My lone SEO practice resides in a plug-in for WordPress: The All-In-One SEO pack, which prods me for keywords, a short description and a title. Thats it. The only time I’m even remotely ‘SEO conscious’ is when choosing a title, trying to pen the verbiage as to how a human may search for the content within a particular post, which may be a back asswards technique for all I know.
Other ‘SEO sins’ committed here, deemed counter intuitive to achieving a higher PR:
- A big blogroll and too many links on my home page (so they claim…)
- I submit some duplicate content to ActiveRain (because I enjoy the feedback from inter-industry professionals) and many Splogs scrape my content, increasing the apparent damaging duplicity.
Just write relevant, compelling articles about real estate and/or mortgage and you won’t have to worry about Page Rank and SEO
So that’s my $.02… improving Page Rank and ‘SEO Strategies’ are often disjointed and other times damaging to one another. But I’m still interested in what anyone else (especially an SEO-Fu artist or Page Rank guru) has to say, cause I’m no expert…
Sphere: Related ContentLack of ‘Make Sense’ Business Models In Real Estate and Mortgage Still a Cause for Concern
February 15th, 2008 Categories: Mortgage News, Real Estate News, Real Estate Technology, XBanker, alternative real estate commission models
When the real estate and mortgage industries realize their traditional business models are now broken, the world will be a better place for all.
Words of advice: Pay more attention to the Loss side of a P&L and the right side of the balance sheet. Too much attention toward generating more revenue and not enough consideration to stopping the internal bleeding is the core of the overall problem…akin to emptying the water from a boat with a hole in the bottom using a (small) bucket.
This problem’s solution is routed in the fact that most professionals within these communities are not astute at running a business. A testament to this statement lies in that many RE and MoPro’s operate as ’sole proprietors’ (or submit as W-2 employee’s) when they should choose a corporate structure more in tune to maximizing income via benefits afforded other corporate structures. Just because one can sell doesn’t mean one can run a business.
The 6% real estate commission model is a horrid example of sound business practice. Economists routinely wonder aloud how this model has stood the test of time (answer: The omnipotent NAR ether/kool-aid). The commission ’split’ model commonly found in the mortgage broker industry (coupled with serious lack of disclosure issues), is far less discussed in open forums, yet just as fundamentally challenged.
It’s evidently apparent what happens in the down part of what are cyclical marketplaces…a mass exodus from the small business world, and thats not good.
I’d like to explore alternative business models that could work for both real estate and mortgage professionals by laying out some succinct recommendations and strategies for 2008, going forward…
I’ll be recruiting some seasoned experience from the world of business to opine via future posts regarding this topic. One of them is an XBanker 
Yahoo!, Zillow and Trulia Talk About Merging Ideas to Create a New Data Standards Format
February 12th, 2008 Categories: Real Estate Technology, Trulia, real estate seacrh, third party destination sites, yahoo, zillow
Yahoo!, Zillow and Trulia Talk About Merging Ideas to Create a New Data Standards Format.
Hooray! The single largest issue that bogs down better real estate Search is the hieroglyphical nature of the data between repositories (MLS’ primarily).
Many times cooperative yields far better results than competitive…but then the id, ego, and/or super-ego goes and gets in the way of things. Galen openly loathes MLS data normalization, so this appears to be a good thing. Looks like these current pillars of real estate Search have put aside their respective psyche’s in attempt to make real estate Search better for everyone.
Sphere: Related Content
