Home Buying Archive

Fool.co.uk, the UK division of The Motley Fool, has paid us for a review of their Mortgage Centre.

Spurred by community activist groups complaining to the FTC, Erick Schonfeld writes today on The Next Net blog:

Zillow’s strategy seems to be to offer real estate porn to middle-aged homeowners. (”Ooh, look how much my house is worth!”). But as more people begin to realize that the underlying data on the site cannot be trusted, the backlash won’t be limited to just community activists.

You knew it was only a matter of time before Google started making real use of all those real estate listings in Google Base. Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 reports today:

As anticipated, Google is now in the real-estate listings business.  If you do a regular search for "real estate" or other similar keywords on Google, two new search boxes will pop down allowing you to refine your search by loaction or listing type ("for rent" or "for sale").  Then you get taken to a Google Base page with the listings plotted on a Google Map (see above).

A recent article on CNNMoney.com stated that, “Experts say jump in cancelled orders for new homes is latest sign of how investors inflated the real estate market recently, and how the market is due for a downturn.” It really troubles me to see them use the word “investors” in that context. Here’s why.

As an investor, I used to buy, sell and rehab properties. I began small but soon got up to the point where I had over 10 properties at any given time that were in acquisition mode, rehab or on the market. I sold everything by owner and I usually turned a property within 30 days of completed rehab.

The work was beginning to overwhelm me, though. I knew that to grow my business I needed to outsource something. Having someone else market and sell the property was the most painless thing to let go of, and I also knew what I was doing from a transaction standpoint so I could easily monitor the contract’s progress, etc., so I hired a real estate agent from a major brand who, on paper, looked like she was the perfect fit for what I needed.

Man, was I wrong.

Ilyce Glink gives her answer to a question over on Inman.com today. Ilyce has “no idea what the seller of this property is doing,” but offers up some possibilities. She misses one very likely one, though.