Seattle Housing Buzz

I had the opportunity to speak with Lennox Scott, CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate, this morning. He did confirm that the NWMLS will stop it’s feed to Realtor.com. However, he did reiterate, that John L. Scott will continue to feed it’s listings to Realtor.com on its own. It’ll will cost John L. Scott more to do so on it’s own, but Lennox Scott believes this is a tremendous benefit for John L. Scott sellers.

While the poll below provides an indication that most local buyers do not use Realtor.com for home searches, I believe most relocation clients do. People moving to the Puget Sound area from out-of-state may not be aware of the local real estate websites such as johnlscott.com or windermere.com and may use Realtor.com as an initial search site.

Excel Properties recently joined the John L. Scott family as an independent office and is now known as John L. Scott Greenlake, serving north Seattle.

The Greenlake office is located at the north end of the lake at 7850 East Green Lake Drive North.

Another online real estate company has surfaced in the Pacific Northwest. Ezdigs.com is fairly similar to Redfin but will focus on King and South Snohomish Counties.

On the buyer’s side, Ezdigs.com will retain 1% (of the purchase price) and rebate the remainder to the buyer. The buyer will need to do their own research and view homes on their own, though it seems they will make the arrangement on the buyer’s behalf, something Redfin doesn’t seem to do.

On the seller’s side, it’s essentially a 4% listing company. Ezdigs.com will list for 1% and recommend a 3% selling office commission to the buyer’s broker.

Even a virtual online real estate company needs a physical location to call home. Seattle-based Redfin recently opened an office in San Francisco, currently housing three real estate agents and three software engineers. The office is located at 604 Mission Street.

Zillow is now introducing it’s open API to add Zillow functionality to individual (agent?) websites. Considering Zillow’s information is at best, controversial in it’s accuracy, one wonders. And, the information is coming from the MLS’ which are owned by the companies/associations Zillow is likely to market too.

At any rate, Zillow has “encouraged” companies to innovate and zillowrize. Not long after Zillow launched, John L. Scott added similar functionality - MLS sold data, comparable sales, bird’s eye view map, etc.

Seattle Times is reporting Zillow received $25 million in it’s second round of financing, raising a total of $57 million.

With the additional funding, the company plans to add at least 40 employees to its staff of 118. Rascoff would not say what development projects the company was working on.

“We are being a little bit tight-lipped about what’s coming next with respect to the product, but we are constantly trying to improve the quality of the underlying data,” he said.

Nothing new this week, but I did post an article on pre-construction investing at the Seattle Condos and Lofts blog. Take a look at it and let me know what you think.

Vulcan and John L. Scott finally issued their official press release this week about John L. Scott handling sales for Vulcan’s current projects - Veer Lofts, Enso, The Martin and Rollin Street Flats. Not quite sure why it took so long considering it was included in the information packets Vulcan handed out at their preview event back on June 17th.

Coldwell Banker Bain introduced a near indentical search function as John L. Scott (same developer). One thing I like about theirs it that users can filter by # of cars and # of stories.

Been playing the points game at ActiveRain and I’ve fallen to third featured agent in Washington. Another JLS agent is listed as the #1 featured agent in Washington, mostly because of some fluffy blog postings.

This past weekend was the annual Seattle LGBT Pride Parade. For the first time in the event’s history, it was moved to downtown Seattle. The route on 4th Avenue went from the Westlake Center to the Seattle Center, passing right in front our office on 4th Avenue where we threw a party for clients and neighbors. An estimated 200,000 people lined the streets and attended the festival at the Seattle Center. This was also the first year that John L. Scott hosted a booth at the festival, joining Prudential, C21 & Wells Fargo.

Ok, perhaps a bit more subdued, but John L. Scott has been quietly adding more features on it’s website to empower sellers and buyers alike. Here’s a little break down.

Several months ago, utilizing Real Tech’s search technology, John L. Scott incorporated an interactive map search. This feature allowed buyers to zoom in to a specific area on a map of Washington, Idaho or Oregon. The map would identify all available homes on the map with a little house icon. Buyer’s could zoom into a specific area by using the cursor to draw a box around the area they’re interested in.

About a month ago, John L. Scott upped the ante by being among the first real estate companies to incorporate Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping technology. It’s similar to the interactive map but adds multiple angle satellite images, called High-Definition Home Search. Users can look at 45 degree angles of the property from North, South, East and West viewpoints.

There is one major difference in searching, at least from the website user’s perspective. The new mapping search doesn’t enable the cursor to draw a box around an specific area on the map. Instead, viewers need to zoom in using the “+” button and re-centering the map to get to their desired search parameter. A little inconvienient.

About a week after introducing the High-Definition Home Search, John L. Scott then made sold data available. This move empowers buyers and sellers alike to make smart decisions by accessing up-to-date sold data from the Northwest MLS. Unlike other sites that use data from county records (updates months after a home has sold), the NWMLS data is real time.

Finally, John L. Scott provides potential home buyers (seller’s will benefit from this info, too), Community Details. This feature provides information about housing inventory, market stability, weather, population and economic demographics, school information, nearby services and businesses, and home sale activity data. This is a very cool tool.

Community Characteristics:

School Information:

Home Sale Activity Report:

John L. Scott has bucked the trend of the stuffy traditional full-service brokerages by empowering consumers with the information they need to make quality buying and/or selling decisions. And, while these tools are useful, they merely supplement the services of a good real estate agent. Professional agents have added benefits by providing expert knowledge of the market (many specialize in geographic areas or housing types), understanding the nuances of real estate contracts and negotiations, and analyzing buying or selling strategies based on their clients needs and requirements.

Per an article in the Seattle P-I, Redfin has obtained an additional $8 million in funding to expand into the Bay Area (San Francisco, San Jose and East Bay communities). Click here to read the full article.

Redfin is a discount broker engaged in listing and selling homes, currently limited to Seattle and the Eastside. On the listing side, there hasn’t been a lot of movement, mostly because they are utilizing the standard model. However, they will be introducing a flat-fee model which will presumably increase their listings.

On the selling side (representing buyers), they’re doing well. When I reviewed their sales several months ago and compared it to today, it’s picked up. Redfin rebates a large portion of their commission to the buyer. The catch is, the buyer needs to do all the preliminary work and view homes on their own. Redfin does not show buyers any properties. The Redfin buyer’s agent only steps in when the buyer is ready to submit an offer. Redfin admits this is a niche approach, and for experienced buyers, it might not be a bad way to go.

When Redfin launched it’s website back in 2004 it was really cool with it’s satellite imaging of available properties. Since then other companies have introduced similar technology. Locally, John L. Scott has incorporated Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology into it’s search engine giving buyers a “bird’s eye” view of the property from several directions.