Seattle Housing Buzz

Today, John L. Scott Real Estate launched an new search feature allowing users to pinpoint searches to a specific neighborhood or even a city block. The new feature is called the “Neighborhood Wizard” and works by allowing users to use a polygon tool to draw their own search parameters.

Based on Microsoft’s polygon tool technology, John L. Scott is the first real estate company to utilize this feature.

John L. Scott was the first real estate company to incorporate Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology and provide sold listing data directly to the public, leading the real estate industry as one of the most forward thinking, innovative companies.

Using the new search feature

1. Start by visiting John L. Scott’s redesigned home page and click on a state:

2. Using the mouse, hover the rectangular box over the desired area to zoom to that location:

3. Above the map search screen the new “Neighborhood Wizard” button appears (You can also recenter or zoom into a specific area). Upon clicking the button, the mouse will change to a crosshairs (”+”) and instructions will appear:

4. Close Up of the “Neighborhood Wizard” button:

5. Click on a starting point and drag the mouse to begin drawing the desired search area. Click on the mouse to add a new point and continue:

6. To complete the drawing area, return and click on the point of origin (the blue dot) or click on the “Done” button”:

7. The results will automatically appear on the map when the shape is complete. You can also use the zoom in / out and scrolling options.

8. You can also refine your search future by utilizing filters on the left side of the map:

Then, view listing information by clicking on the “View property details” link.
This is a great way to narrow a search to a specific neighborhood, block or condo building, thus only showing the available properties you’re interested in.

Tags: John L Scott

Quietly, real estate in Western Washington will be less visible. On April 23rd, the Northwest MLS, a listing service representing companies in 19 counties, will stop uploading its property listings to Realtor.com.

Realtor.com is perhaps the closest thing we have to a national listing database. It’s supported by the hundreds of local MLS’ who provide their listing data to Realtor.com.

So, what does this mean for the average home seller? Less visibility and potentially fewer buyers.

What does this mean for the average home buyer? Well, if you’re already in Washington, it probably has very little impact. Most ‘local’ buyers most likely already use the big company websites such as johnlscott.com or windermere.com to facilitate their online searches.

The move by the NWMLS will impact out-of-state buyers and those looking to relocate to the area the most.

However, individual companies may decide to upload their own listings to Realtor.com. As of April 23, John L. Scott will the be largest real estate company in Washington to provide property listings on Realtor.com. Interestingly, Windermere has long chosen to keep their listings off of Realtor.com.

Our friend to the north will be introducing a new online community called Livium - Real Estate as God Intended. Livium says it’s “a real estate marketing services provider”.

Livium will provide agents an interactive online community to showcase listings, position themselves as neighborhood experts by contributing to the site and interact with other members and potential buyers and sellers.

A group called the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) has filed a complaint with the FTC against Seattle-based Zillow over the accuracy of Zillow’s zestimates. The NCRC infers that the zestimates are dangerous information that mislead the public.

David Berenbaum, of the NCRC mentioned that “many in the appraisal industry have said to us that it is almost an open joke the information on this Web site.” The NCRC is aligned with a group of appraisers & lenders, perhaps threatened by AVMs. Interestingly, lender appraisals are almost always the same or very close to the selling price of a property.

Granted, Zillow isn’t the most accurate, but that’s not a secret. Zillow even admits only 73% of Seattle area valuations are within 10% of selling price. But unlike other agents who would have Zillow’s head on a platter, I say, so what? Ask 5 real estate agents to for a home valuation report, you’ll get 5 different pricing opinions. Though, an agent may have an opportunity to view the property and consider intangibles that an automated valuation model (AVM) is not able to do. The fact is, Zillow just provides another opinion. And, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Read more:
John Cook’s PI article & blog post
Sellsius’ Zillow Zapped with FTC
Columbus Best Blog’s Complaint to FTC consumers Zillowed?
Real Estate 2.X’s Trouble for Zillow
Roberta Murphy’s Zillow gets Zinged
Three Oceans A modest proposal … amen!

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.

Marlow @ 360digest.com reports that the NWMLS will suspend it’s feed to Realtor.com when the current contract ends in next Spring.

Probably not a big deal. In speaking with the general public and my own clients, no one ever mentions using Realtor.com to view listings. In the Seattle area, company websites such as Windermere.com, JohnLScott.com and Remax.com probably get the lion’s share of user home searches.

Plus, many alternative websites are fast becoming highly visited sites to search for home such as - Trulia, Oodle, Propsmart and edgeio to name a few.

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.

No sense reinventing the wheel…just head on over to Marlow’s 360 Digest regarding Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s recent field trip to hallowed-halls of Washington DC. Kelman spoke at a hearing before the US House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity on the “Changing Real Estate Market” (ie attacking the privately owned MLS’).

The prepared statments can be found on the subcommittee’s website.

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.

How I spent my July 4th weekend.

My websites and blogs have been generating considerable visitor traffic, as least from an agent’s point of view, but very few leads. I thought part of it was content and part of it was the “look” of my primary website - www.LivingNorthwest.com. Not to mentioned the fact that I had my face plastered on every page. So, I thought of a complete redesign.

In looking over the best real estate web designers out there and contemplating the costs, I decided to hunker down and do some of my own coding. I’m certainly not a developer or designer, but I’m not a novice either having worked in e-commerce web development for five years. So, I decided to learn CSS and do a “make-over” on my tables and navigation links. I did the tables in CSS since Firefox doesn’t display HTML tables nicely. And, that always bothered me since I don’t use IE.

Anyway, I think turned out ok. I also cleaned up the home page and moved my mug to just the “About” page. I added a few more content pages based on the search terms people used in Google that landed them on my site, as well as making it easier to get to those content from any page.

I’ve also been contemplating getting rid of the adsense stuff at the bottom. As they’re hidden, no one see’s or clicks on them. Plus, I have to keep filtering out the competition.

On the very plus side, the SEO guide, tips and info I learned from Real Estate Webmasters and a couple of other sites have paid off fantastically. For most of my main keywords I’m on the first page of Google’s organic results, some on the 2nd page. And on one search term, I’m a little miffed that my ActiveRain profile returned #5 while my website returned #6. Most of this occurred after Google’s Big Daddy update. As a result the number of visitors have gone up 50% in the past couple months and I was able to suspend my adwords campaign.