Brint Wahlberg

Some days Web 2.0 is female dog, haha.

Realtor.com just released on their site that you can pull house values, nice! Oh wait, you click on a state and a little pop-up bubble tells you the average sales price for the whole state, well that doesn't help.

A few months back I met with a Realtor.com rep, and from our discussion it sounded like setting up Realtor.com on doing a Zillow/CyberHomes/Trulia type of system was just still a little TOO controversial, the excuse was that Realtor.com should invite people to call agents to engage in direct discussion. I understand that, however guess what happens when people don't get the full answer they're looking for right away when researching online? They go somewhere else. Until Realtor.com can spit out a value much like Zillow it will never be able to compete, because people looking online want instant results.

Ok so then the argument comes up, that would steal one of our services away that we the agent provide. Actually it wouldn't, you know why? People will still call you, and guess what? You won't have to do such an in-depth CMA!! You can get to providing them much more worthy services such as staging, showing advice, marketing plans, etc.

I do presentations for our local Realtor's association on websites, and while Realtor.com is the single largest traffic site on the web, our competitors as a single group (Trulia, Zillow, Dothomes, AOL, Yahoo) blow Realtor.com and it's entire Move.com network out of the water in monthly traffic figures by millions of visitors.

That spins onto another topic that personally upsets me, agent ranking sites. There isn't a single one that's run by NAR or any level of Realtor association, so what happens? 3rd party companies come in, get filled up with negative posts that you cannot challenge and are out there forever. Realtors seemed to take a hands-off approach because they don't want to hurt anybodies feelings and now they're finding their names stuck on websites with a 1 out 5 rating calling them a slime-ball and there's not a thing they can do about it.

Web 2.0 is passing us by, online consumers want interactive sites with instant results, yet our association in general seems to be stuck in past, insisting that it's best if consumers wait until "we" call them back or email them back. Sigh....

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/114665

NOTHING! Glad I'm paying a flat fee for it, or that other people in my office are paying as much as $0.99 after they send more than 200 in one month.

For some of us, this type of information is useless, however for me this is upsetting because I text A LOT, and I mean 2,000+ times a month a lot. On a common work day I'll send 60 - 80 texts, and while many are to buddies and my wife, there's also a bunch to fellow agents, lenders, and clients. Many of us have embraced the amazing functionality of texting, where we can confirm appointments, pass along quick updates, and simply keep in touch when needed. During a CE class or longer meeting I can text clients or agents without having to to step out of the room, it's an incredibly useful tool.

I see the mention of price fixing lawsuits now, good.

However it gets me to thinking about Realtor service, here I am complaining about being charged for a service that costs my cell phone company nothing at all to preform. Meanwhile the same thing is happening in our profession, I hear or read about consumers not being happy with Realtor service because a bunch of what they believe they're being charged for is info/services they can get for free, usually online. The Realtor value proposition is shifting people, and many of us are failing to see that.

I hear this statement a lot, "We need to get back to what we used to do, these consumers don't know what they're doing, it's a scary world out there and we're the only ones that can help. I used to ____________ (action that a 1980's / 1990's power broker used to do a lot) and it worked, we just don't do that anymore!"

Uh-huh, that's because it doesn't work anymore. There is such a huge monumental shift afoot within the Realtor community it's scaring a lot of people, heck I'm scared by it too. The modern consumer doesn't want us to withhold information, they don't want to be held in the dark, they also want to feel involved and informed in the entire process, they want it all online, and they want to be able to blog/chat/discuss/tweet/complain/rate everything they go through.

Consumers want instant information, they don't want to call an agent and hear, "I'll have to get back to you with that." That's why sites like Zillow (See recent blog post on Zillow conspiracy), Trulia, Cyberhomes and others have hopped in to provide instant valuations, or instant home searches, etc. Meanwhile associations and Realtors refuse to come together to have Realtor.com provide instant values, or collect consumer feedback.

Divided we fall, and 3rd party non-Realtor owned companies jump in. Wow... this kinda spun a long way off from text messaging, I'll shut up for now, but look for continued thoughts on where I believe our collective body of Realtors should be shifting to.

I always try to keep my clients and blog readers as informed as possible, and with a full year on the books I thought I'd go back and take a look at the Western Montana market in some general terms so we can see how things have been. All of this data I retrieved from the Missoula Organization of Realtors. So, off we go!

First off, the meat and potatoes, residential sales, which is single family detached, townhomes, condos, and modular homes.

City of Missoula:

- 928 Sales (down from 1284 in 2007, a 28% decrease)

- Median Sales Price, $215,000 (down from $218,000 in 2007, a 1.4% decrease)

- Average Sales Price, $246,628 (up from 246,538 in 2007, less than 1% increase)

- Average Days on Market, 117 (up from 116 days in 2007, less than 1% increase)

General thoughts: Volume is down, but that is expected, with less loan programs, and fears of national trends a slow-down was practically unavoidable. The good news is that values have essentially not dropped, people are still paying similar prices for homes, and homeowners are retaining value.

Greater Western Montana region:

- 1760 Sales (down from 2554 in 2007, a 31% decrease)

- Median Sales Price, $215,000 (down from $222,000 in 2007, a 3.5% decrease)

- Average Sales Price, $260,499 (down from $275,074 in 2007, a 5.3% decrease)

- Average Days on Market, 148 (up from 138 in 2007, a 7.3% increase)

General Thoughts: The out-lying areas in Western Montana have been hit much harder by this slow down. The high gas prices through the year were a major factor, suddenly the thought of driving 20-40 miles to Missoula 5 to 6 times a week isn't as popular when it's costing over $60 to fill your gas tank each time.

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Now lets take a look at all bare land which can include lots in subdivisions too.

City of Missoula

- 106 Sales (down from 198 in 2007, a 46.5% decrease)

- Median Sales Price, $100,000 (up from $74,950 in 2007, a 34.2% increase)

- Average Sales Price, $156,076 (up from $127,015 in 2007, a 22.8% increase)

- Average Days on Market, 252 (up from 212 in 2007, a 19% increase)

General Thoughts: A big hit in volume, however values increased. The large volume slowdown is most likely due to the larger slow-down in new construction, and banks tightening their rules and regulations on how many "spec" homes builders can have at one time.

Greater Western Montana Region:

- 452 Sales (down from 829 in 2007, a 45.5% decrease)

- Median Sales Price, $109,900 (up from $100,000 in 2007, a 9.9% increase)

- Average Sales Price, $203,047 (up from $161,954 in 2007, a 25.4% increase)

- Average Days on Market, 246 (up from 224 in 2007, a 9.8% increase)

General Thoughts: We see the similar hit in the volume slow down here, sales prices go up as well. The reason we see higher sales prices is that once outside of Missoula a lot of the land parcels are going to be much larger in size, or may have recreational features such as live water.

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Next up, Multi-Family, which is Duplex/Tri-plex/4-plex/and beyond

Due to the lack of data, I did not break this apart from Missoula and Greater Western Montana

- 50 sales (down from 89 in 2007, a 44% decrease)

- Median Sales Price, $237,750 (down from $249,900 in 2007, a 4.7% decrease)

- Average Sales Price, $316,639 (up from 302,537 in 2007, a 4.7% increase)

- Average Days on Market, 171 (up from 136 in 2007, a 25.7% increase)

General Thoughts: A little twist is thrown at us here, a slight decrease in Median, a slight increase in average. Looking through the data in 2008 there were a few more large ticket sales, which boosted the average, add in the fewer amounts of sales and the Median is prone to slip a bit. Again we see a big drop-off, probably because of the much tougher loan qualification rules for multi-family units.

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Overall: We're down in volume, which makes things tougher for everyone. Missoula is weathering the storm much better than the rest of the western side of the state, probably due to a stronger economy, and that many people over the last few years have been moving back into town instead of moving out into the countryside. The best news that I see in this is that generally speaking, people are not losing money in their homes, which probably explains the lack of foreclosures and short-sales we see in our market.

I saw another blog on this and it got me to wondering... forgive me for this broken and somewhat long post, but I'm starting to wonder if our good buddies at Zillow are trying to do what they can to stir up more of a media frenzy.

I'm in Montana, which does not disclose sales data as public information so Zillow, Trulia, Cyberhomes, etc are sometimes horribly off-target. I keep an eye on the sites to see what they're projecting for values, and I found it real interesting that within the same week Zillow was featured on an AP newswire story about Americans losing $2 trillion in home values the value of my house suddenly dropped 20% without explanation, no new comps or anything. As an agent, I know better, especially in my market which has only had it's median value drop $1,000 this whole year.

I'll post my original thoughts on the Zillow press release when it came out below, I made this blog post on my website back in December:

EDIT: Check my follow up question below too!

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Zillow.com - here to scare the crap out of you

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/15/real_estate/underwater_borrowers_near_12million/?postversion=2008121504

Thanks Zillow! Ok seriously, this is news that we've all been hearing about for quite some time, and now Zillow is putting numbers to it, which is very staggering.

In some markets we're seeing that people are getting killed by decreasing sales prices, they're probably not only losing gained equity, but also some of the initial investment that they put down on the house. That's scary.

Here in Montana, we're not seeing the massive "lost value" in homes, our median has held steady at $220k for quite some time now, and last I checked our average sales price has dipped by about $8,000. Also, don't believe Zillow here in Montana, we're a non-disclosure state which means that sales data is not public record.

Zillow does it's best to make a good guess in Montana, sometimes it's close! About 10 months ago when I sold my house on the west end of town I sold it for just about $228k, Zillow at the time said it was worth $219k. Now in doing another check Zillow tells me the house is worth $192k - which would be way lower than any other house selling out there. Also I checked my parents house that's in the university area, Zillow thinks that the house is worth about $333k. There's been a few sales right across the street from my parents and those averaged out to around $475k. So.... looks like Zillow's off, by a bunch.

In Montana check with a Realtor who has MLS access for value researches, we can do that, Zillow can't.

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Follow up question: Thanks for all of the responses! I'm curious to see if any of you have brokerages or associations that battle online mis-information, or are you just out there to wage the war yourselves? Would you like to see your brokerage, or local association take a more progressive role in providing accurate information?

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/05/autos/hyundai_assurance/index.htm?postversion=2009010513

So... Hyundai will buy back your car if you lose your job, I saw this ad on TV yesterday watching the playoffs. Apparently they found this method works much better than incentives or rebates that we see companies like GM offering. Also, it's not a new thing, they've been doing this with success in Canada for 8 years now.

I wonder, will we see some of our major banks or companies that still have some sort of liquidity consider a program like this? Certain markets I think would need to be excluded, however this could be an interesting incentive to offer.

Can this work?

There's differences, for example Hyundai can just put the car back on the lot, but a bank will have to take on another house to sell. Which usually means that if the house comes back up for sale it won't sell for the same price, and the bank takes a loss. Would the government get involved with this and guaruntee the difference? They've offered something like this already I believe in regards to commercial paper and have plans in the making for people that are behind on their loans too. I think it's safe to say regardless your political party affiliation that the incoming leadership will be much more inclined to do something along these lines.

I'd love to hear others thoughts, I don't see a working solution, unless the federal government gets involved. If the government gets involved I see it being more of a mess than a solution, however what if it helps get parts of our nation on the road to recovery?