Archive for the 'zillow' Category
Apparently Zillow Wants All The Cake
August 11th, 2008 Categories: zillow
Maybe my thinking is a little selfish, but if I were a participating mortgage professional in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace I wouldn’t be pleased to see is an ad like this on the home page:
Not saying that there shouldn’t be advertisements, but if I’m taking the time to fill consumer quotes within their community, I don’t want to see this type of generalized, ambiguous, borderline misleading advertising from another lender usurping my time and participation…and it doesn’t coincide with Zillows process of:
Get Custom Mortgage Quotes
1. Create a Loan Request
You are anonymous to lenders — no name, phone, or SSN required
2. Receive Quotes
Get personalized mortgage quotes from confirmed lenders
3. Contact the Lender Review quotes, profiles, and ratings. Then you contact them, they don’t call you.
Click through on ING’s advertisement and they immediately want name, address, SS# etc:
-
If you’re gonna talk it, you should walk it and make others who want to play walk with you…Just Sayin…and David likes this stuff 
Photo courtesy of Agent Genius and Kristal Kraft…
Sphere: Related ContentZillow Mortgage Marketplace, Cultivating a Better Crop
May 21st, 2008 Categories: Mortgage News, Tranparent mortgage pricing, zillow
Since launching last month, Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace has grown quite respectably. They’re already adding features as a result of listening to members of their community.
According to Nate Moch from the Zillow Blog:
Since launching Zillow Mortgage Marketplace a little over a month ago, we’ve received all sorts of recommendations and feedback from our users. We have been busy fixing a few things since then, but we’ve also recently added features the our lender community has asked for. We appreciate the great suggestions we’ve received and hope the new offerings we added will be useful tools for the 2,000+ lenders in the marketplace.
The improvements: a Quote Pre-fill, Loan Quote Flags, and Lender Leaderboard attempt to address some of the inefficiencies within the community, specifically the latency and accuracy of information from participating lenders and consumers.
Quote Pre-fill reduces redundant data entry for the mortgage professional making the act of filling multiple, similar consumer quote requests more efficient.
Loan Quote Flags allows the professional community to police itself from traditional mortgage gamesmanship by reporting obvious grievous actions.
Lender Leaderboard ranks professionals by the number and quality of reviews they’ve received.
The big Z has also begun to offer some nice intuitive calculators…
All in all, a positive direction for the community, though probably still not enough to increase the viability of the Marketplace to a point of an acceptable client pull through rate ratio, for the upper end professionals.
Zillow still has to markedly improve on a couple areas before they become a viable community for anonymous, transparent lending a.k.a. Mortgage 2.0:
Decreasing and normalizing the latency in information exchange between the consumer and professional. ‘Vanilla quotes’ come back within an hour, but quote requests that deviate from the conforming norm take substantially longer or go unaddressed. Both time frames are far from ideal.
‘Accurately and efficiently quoting a myriad a loan scenarios’ is an oxymoron. With the market changing daily as far as product availability, a professional who’s not diligent in their research may misquote unintentionally and get flagged even though they were genuine in their actions.
Zillow is still completely beholden to their professional community to provide the most critical information, rate and price, in a truly transparent fashion.
IMHO the big Z is addressing this dynamic one step too late in the infochain-link:
Wholesale Market-Professional-Zillow-Consumer
Ideally:
Wholesale Market-Zillow-Professional-Consumer
would be far more effective, alas far more difficult to pull off…
Today Zillow is still closer to Bankrate 2.0 than Mortgage 2.0 (I’m throwing 2.0’s around here) but they’re trying hard and getting better, taking continued important steps to ultimately getting it right…
Sphere: Related ContentZillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp of an Anonymous Transparent Credit and Personal Information eXchange Between Mortgage Professionals and Consumer?
April 5th, 2008 Categories: Business Models, Mortgage News, zillow
There’s been a storm of activity in and around Zillows mortgage community (ZMC) since they launched a mere 72 hours ago. Based on David Gibbons’ claim that Zillow has received over 4500 ‘leads’ in their first 48 hours, consumer interest is definitely there. Reading Zillows blog, they’ve done their research and are delivering what the consumer wants: an anonymous, transparent vehicle to receive mortgage quotes.
A fact worth reiterating about Zillow before addressing the wants and needs of the other half of this community, the mortgage professionals, is that Zillow is an advertising and media company. Advertising and media companies are keenly interested in the demographical nature of their traffic, the more refined this data is the more valuable it becomes to their paying customers: 3rd Party Advertisers.
By collecting and ‘cookie’ing’ the web-browser of (almost) anonymous members relatively succinct financial and credit information, Zillow is aggregating some very valuable data for sale, just not to mortgage originators. Advertisers will pay a premium to appear in front of people who represent they can afford and are likely buyers of their products. Very well thought out by the brass in Seattle.
Mortgage originators on the other hand seem to be less than enamoured with Zillows offering for reasons identified in my last post…they will likely have to farm through a mountain of rate voyeurs to find a client. Some well respected Mo-Pro’s feel that consumers should be held accountable to a degree of transparency as well. I’m a staunch advocate in transparency for the mortgage industry (read my very first post from 19 months ago, not the best written piece but I’ve left it unedited for effect) and agree the sword must cut both ways in order for a ‘transparent marketplace’ to work. Both sides must open the Kimono.
The dilemma with transparency has traditionally been: ‘How can one be transparent without being taken advantage of?’ For too long consumers have been forced to strip in front of a consortium mortgage originators, ZMC switches this around, making Mo-Pro’s disrobe first, and they don’t like it.
Things have obviously changed, so here we are today pointing fingers, losing business and otherwise trying to figure out the best way to make a business a successful one out of the business that’s left.
For their own clever benefit, ZMC is turning the transparency buzz into advertising dollars. If ZMC does nothing else, it increases traffic to their domain. They’re pleasing the consumer and pissing off the top notch Mo-Pro in the process. This may work for awhile but it would appear to be a matter of time before the good Mo-Pros turn their head to ZMC because the lead pool is deemed a dead pool, even though it has all the attributes of viable transparent marketplace for consumers and originators to conduct good business. As stated, Mo-Pros simply don’t have the capacity to work within ZMC very effectively, yet.
An ideal form of transparency, one that serves both consumer and professional, is akin to being naked with a bag on your head. You get to see all the goods but can’t put a face to the…well, you get it.
Take the time to read Mortgage 2.X and the concept called C2B (Consumer to Business) marketing. The company that was tooling with this concept is now out of business but was ahead of it’s time. In 2003, during a time when mortgage (and interest) rates (in general) were plumeting, transparency wasn’t even a thought because Mo-Pros could charge four points and lower a consumers interest rate by 2%.
So here’s where the novel idea comes in, for all I know Zillow may have already considered what I’m about to suggest, if they haven’t…I’m not in a position to do anything with the thought and someone might as well…
The consumer transparency theory…
In order to enter the ZMC a Mo-Po must submit some verifiable information to prove they are viable. Coupled with the promise of anonymity, the dynamic is very alluring to a consumer.
Zillow can require something similar of consumers. Offer two levels of consumer participation, the current low barrier level and an ‘authenticated’ designation.
Upon enrollment into ZMC from the consumer side, validate their credit score by having them acquire their ’score only’ from the repository of choice, all three offer this service for free to the consumer. This is often the biggest unknown from a consumer standpoint, I can’t tell you how many times someone’s self-estimated vs actual credit scores were off by over 100 points. I’ve had people tell me they’ve had credit scores ranging from “one hundred fifty, I think” to “one thousand something”. Zillow wouldn’t be privy to a members social security number under this scenario either, the information goes straight to the repository, score returns, consumer fwd’s repository doc (minus ss#) to Z…
Have consumers send over signed verifications of income, assets, type of employment et al (could all be done electronically). Although these aren’t meant to replace the docs what a mo-pro will require in any way (see Zestimate), the docs would foster a stronger commitment level and code of coduct enforcement policy by consumers.
The prevailing thought here is Zillow could substantially firm up the quality of consumer information to the community and still insure their anonymity. From a business model position this would be a brilliant move for Zillow as they could then represent the same to both mortgage originators and advertisers.
Quality mo-pro’s would flock to the marketplace to serve this quality of ‘lead’, consumers would be incentivized to provide the information based on the increased likelihood of attention an ‘authenticated lead’ and (most importantly to Z) advertisers could be compelled to spend more $$ for uber-high quality consumer financial and credit demographic placed ads. There is an opportunity here for Zillow to become the trusted marketplace to begin a mortgage transaction and make a lot of $$ in the process while holding to their current business model.
Theoretically, this would create a quality of mutualism and transparency not available in any other online mortgage community. From an advertisers standpoint, one would think they wouldn’t mind paying to promote their products and services in front of such refined, targeted eyeballs.
For fundamentally the same reasons mo-pros can’t effectively service ZMC today, they would have a tough time servicing this Zutopian marketplace as well. Most mo-pro shops are not equipped for volume based loan production, thus cannot afford to charge less per transaction. Typical mortgage industry business and commission split models make the economics of only charging $2000 in broker/banker fees impractical…this another thread for another post, although the topic has been covered previously on this site.
Zillow could be on the cusp of something special…an anonymous transparent credit and personal information eXchange between mortgage professionals and consumer, to create a highly trusted mortgage transaction community…and they could make a lot of money doing it without charging for ‘the good leads’…
Sphere: Related ContentZillow Launches Mortgage Community. The Consumer is Ready, But is The Mortgage Professional?
April 3rd, 2008 Categories: zillow
Zillow formally launched their mortgage community today. David Gibbons was kind enough to give me the grand tour yesterday…my general opinion is that this is a big step in the right direction for a broken mortgage industry.
Stating the obvious…what Zillow has created is a community for mortgage professionals (Mo-Pro), a community that requires said participating professionals be of a certain grain of salt, checking their state licensing information as well as a social security number for a cursory level personal background check. These two stop-gaps insure a baseline quality standard and validate the community as (more) trusted and viable for a consumer as opposed to them walking into the many lender traps that currently exist on the web.
Zillow does not aggregate consumer data to then sell them as leads to the mortgage hounds. Thank God (Yahweh, Jehovah, Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus, et al). Joel has the best remedy for this ad nauseam dinosaur age practice made sickeningly popular by LowerMyBills, LendingTree et al…if he can drag them behind the shed, I’ll pull the trigger. Because of their well funded and non-conflicting business model as an advertising and media company, Zillow can afford to do this and should be properly recognized for staying outside of this black box.
Rating the mortgage professional based on service and rate/price quote accuracy is another positive aspect, a stop-gap to cap bait and switch and other traditional Mo-Pro smarmy marketing strategies.
Anonymity. Love it and consumers will too. However, consumer anonymity can and will cause participating Mo-Pro’s to chase their tail as rate voyeurs flood the system. It will be interesting to see what the client conversion ratio is. How many ‘leads’ will it take a Mo-Pro to respond too before they convert to a dedicated and paying client? Is it 10-1, 20-1, 100-1? While the ‘leads’ may be free, they will be cost heavy using the metric of time.
Consumers are notorious voyeurs. I’m one of them. I submitted my anonymous info to Zillow today and received 3 quotes in less than an hour. The info I provided was extremely attractive and easy to qualify:
692 FICO, $390k loan amount, 76% LTV, Full-Doc, low debt to income ratio, plenty of liquid assets…in other words a straight up automatically underwritten conforming loan scenario.
The responses I got (all 30 Yr Fixed Interest Only products) varied from 5.5% with ~$4900 in lender fees to 5.75% with ~$6200 in lender fees. The lowest quote came from a major bank, the highest quote came from a broker.
The three Mo-Pro’s that responded took one look at my info and undoubtedly shot over quotes without thinking twice within < 3 minutes. Not alot of time invested for nothing in return. No harm no foul.
So my questions are as follows:
How many scenarios as easy (and far more difficult) as mine will a mortgage professional have to spend time on to pull an actual client?
If this quote to client ratio is too high, will top notch professionals continue to troll Zillow’s community in hopes of fishing out a real deal?
If this ratio is too high, and the scenario is more difficult to place, how much real time will a professional spend taking the time to qualify and price the situation correctly?
If the anonymous scenarios are more complicated than my submission, which they assuredly will be, how will consumers respond to the resulting latency in information exchange?
Im going to pause here (for today) and end with stating that Zillow’s mortgage community is a (very) positive step in the right direction, but it needs something else…latent information can be perceived as misinformation.
Mortgage professionals are not equipped to handle what Zillow is throwing at them, not yet.
Also See:
Real 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 Content
