core & streeteasy team up - shark jumping official

Well, after being simply blown away by the brilliance, prescient insights, and disarming authenticity and charm of Mr. Osher on "Selling NY," I can understand why anyone would be thrilled to partner with him and his company.

"it’s about service now.”

Really? From a broker? That I've got to see.

And I'm pretty sure I have shoes older than Michael . . .

"....blown away by the brilliance, prescient insights, and disarming authenticity and charm of Mr. Osher...."

Thanks for the laugh of the day! :)

kylewest; you beat me to it. I'm still laughing.

THe shark jumping began when SE added "upper Carnegie Hill" as a Manhattan neighborhood for 5th Ave from 96th street to 110th. Utterly, totally, and completely fake.

kylewest is always great for advice and when he zings it rings!

MLS in Manhattan ends all this, it's very simple, no need to reinvent the wheel...

I'll keep an open mind about the service, but it will have to be pretty good to top Buyfolio.com.

Streeteasy is full of useless data that means nothing. They have been trying to quantify and look at real estate movement like its the stock market. Real estate is mainly an emotional purchase, if they put this data on investment or income producing property it would make more sense. But these are Homes people, a place where you live and Sleep and Raise your families or enjoy your single life. I never walked around with a client and they said "you know this neighborhoods median price is down 1.7% this month and the median price per sf is 800$ how is this seller asking 900 per foot". Based on how many sales? and what did sell that month? If this has ever happened I can tell its a misinformed streeteasy user/abuser. Real Estate is really local in NYC, its value changes block to block and building to building. Streeteasy should stick with the suburbs and stop scraping old data from sites and feeding steak to these babies.

For the SE Core move, i think its a great PR move...good job Core...

Angeloz
The market still needs brokers who can close deals, Streeteasy won't harm that.
But if all you offer as a broker is similar to what a travel agent used to.....yes I can see why there can be some anger at the spector of seeing the birth of the real estate version of Orbitz, Expedia, or Priceline....

truthskr10, I never said SE is replacing brokers or they are taking away business, that will never happen. I like listing sites, Nytimes has been doing it for years, before streeteasy there was city crybs, listings mania and ten thousand other real estate listing sites. Its not new. I just think there is a lot of useless data on SE that the average buyer shouldnt be concerned about. Real Estate is not the stock market. It doesnt move that quick and you cannot get an accurate scope of the market by only looking at one months data and old listings.

Your focusing on a few elements.
Streeteasy offers tremendous comping abilities. It helped me buy my place for nearly 30% below what the seller paid in peak 2007.
particularly with the readily available in building comps.
It helped me negotiate by seeing the property had less than 5 parties saving the listing when the average is 15/20. That told me there were no other bidders.
In large buildings it showed me how units were for sale at once in the same building.

NY Times offered no such thing. In fact if the NY Times had half a brain, they could have saved their wretched rag and bought SE. Morons.

And this site should be invaluable to brokers if they learn how to use it right or have the mental ability to do so.

edit...In large building it showed me how MANY units were........

Bottom line-

most brokers are incompetent.

"I just think there is a lot of useless data on SE that the average buyer shouldnt be concerned about"
SE is adding more transparency to the RE market and will make it more competitive.

the the incompetent brokers may be the next shine boy

truth, I agree with you on NYtimes, they should have bought it, but then it would be 5 times the price to be a member.
I'm with you in that I think it could be helpful and a great starting point for some buyers, however I also think buying a property below what someone paid in 2007 is more on the sellers need to sell right away and not so much your creative searching and negotiating skills. Although Im sure it helped. Did you actually tell the seller that only 5 people saved his property?
As brokers, we do use the site, it can be good for a quick comp or finding quick closed sales data. Of course it has been great for advertising. However any half way decent agency uses a system that far surpasses all the building data and information given on streeteasy. I know we do, and when i do a comps on closed sales, I still have to go to acris because there is a lot not on streeteasy and I found many inaccuracies.

>>>I'm with you in that I think it could be helpful

Which is it? is useless or helpful?

"I Think buying a property below what someone paid in 2007 is more on the sellers need to sell right away and not so much your creative searching and negotiating skills."

It depends on the market!!! It has nothing to do with negotiating skills(although it certainly helps with that new market information). Again, SE is making the RE market more transparent.

"Although Im sure it helped"

is it useless or helpful?

'Did you actually tell the seller that only 5 people saved his property?"

What do you think? or do you think?

However any half way decent agency uses a system that far surpasses all the building data and information given on streeteasy. I know we do?

Yes, but it you are not a RE broker and are a buyer you don't! That's the power of SE

Can we get back to CORE? Much more fun than whatever this is devolving into...

Why on earth would I tell the seller that?
So seller/broker finds out what he did wrong and fixes it so I can compete with more buyers????
And I said less than 5. It was actually 2. And I was one!
No, I was firm and had a strict time limit on my offer.

What system are you talking about? OLR? Haa. That's why my broker friends would come to me and ask me to do comp work for them....from Streeteasy, because I know my way around the site and OLR was awful.

In fact, it's likely OLR will have to start sourcing Streeteasy.

You'll find most problems with acris related info are inaccuracies on acris, not SE.

Ive been dealing with NYC brokers for over 15 years. Not until Streeteasy was there a way for regular people to call out brokers on their lies until now.

And it was best 2/3 years ago when brokers were still living in 1999 and didnt know a thing about SE.

"Oh this property just came on the rental market and will be gone in a week." Really? My info shows it's been on the market 3 months and you've reduced the price once and the last broker reduced it twice." Borker;"oh yes, maybe Im thinking of the one on 18th street." whoooops

>> Real Estate is not the stock market. It doesnt move that quick and you cannot get an accurate scope of the market by only looking at one months data and old listings.

they were talking about the RE market, not the Stock market

you understand that right?

Most firms are using outdated real estate systems that are program based (meaning Windows only) when they should be web based and available everywhere. This is an incredibly intelligent move on Core's part, and I wouldn't be surprised if other firms (if not all, eventually) did the same thing. I'm sure Core paid for some sort of exclusivity, but that is when StreetEasy will get wise and then hire reps that will tailor the StreetEasy experience to each firm and create 'apps' of sorts that are exclusive to a firm.

The silly thing is that StreetEasy is either wildly incapable of adapting to its clients needs, or has a team of programers that aren't up to the task. StreetEasy, for everything that it is, is about 40% of what it could be.

Truth, I like that it can weed out the bad idiot brokers, It actually helps my business a lot. Do you really think streeteasy is more accurate than city records? How many searches do you do a day? I find way more inaccurate on streeteasy because all they are doing is scraping data from the cities database and scraping listings off brokers websites. Its a scape not a feed. Big Difference.

One comment said it best "MLS in Manhattan ends all this, it's very simple, no need to reinvent the wheel..."

"Can we get back to CORE? Much more fun than whatever this is devolving into..."

The moment when Selling NY jumped the shark was when we spent the entire episode watching Mr. Osher looking for a house to rent for a week in the summer. On the other hand, it was a nice reprieve from watching the brokers not sell anything for an entire other episode.

The other thing that was my favorite. No matter the neighborhood, no matter the building, no matter how ugly / crappy / tiny the listing, every single place was introduced as a "spectacular apt in the premier building in the XYZ, one of the best neighborhoods in the city".

Angeloz, I think the broker community has fought tooth-and-nail to keep MLS or any other system with decent transparency out of the hand of your customers. As a result, SE took control of the market. Idiocy on the part of the broker community, but typical of the lack of an attitude of "serve the consumer first, everything else will follow".

While SE is not perfect, it is much better than anything else consumers have access to. In many ways, it's probably better than the systems you have. I'm pretty sure if the brokerage community handed the data they collectively had to SE, then SE would eat your systems' lunch. I'm also pretty sure that the brokerage community did nothing to help SE collect the data it aggregated in the early days. If I recall correctly, it started out by scraping web sites because no doubt the brokerage community did not give it access to something better.

go find your shine box angelo.. you 're going to need it

Talk to LICComent, he'll hook you up w/ a high chair at Grand Central.

>The moment when Selling NY jumped the shark was when we spent the entire episode watching Mr. Osher looking for a house to rent for a week in the summer.

Yes

My guess is if they had a forum at expedia 10 years ago, there probably would have been some travel agents on there telling everyone how it was never going to work.

After extensive interaction with brokers I have come to the conclusion they are unethical and ungoverned. They lie lie lie or just pretend not to know the answer to a question to avoid lying, They pretend to be privy to information that can now be found on SE for a price and then even lie about that in order to get a higher sale price. It is a middleman business and we need to get them out and make a real estate purchase similar to buying a car. CORE IS NO DIFFERENT and them "partnering" with SE makes me think the fox is in the hen house, Regardless sites like SE will hopefully lead to the demise of the likes of Corcoran, Halstead....

THe shark jumping began when SE added "upper Carnegie Hill" as a Manhattan neighborhood for 5th Ave from 96th street to 110th. Utterly, totally, and completely fake.

-----OMG, they still do not have one for alphabet city, but they made one for there?!?!?

>>spyridonsophie

I couldn't agree more. Just read the post from some of the brokers on this site.

my quick read said it's meaningless--a way brokers can send notes, fwd listings, make appts with clients??

who cares?? if anything core mat be shoots itself in the dick--clients of theirs, with no knowledge of SE, will be led to the site and see that their broker is an expensive impediment to their getting a decent deal

The brokers are all in cahoots on this site and cover each other when a buyer posts something negative. I know we will see them all looking for new jobs in the future.
A buyer/seller does not need a middleman to buy/sell a co-op, condo...just look at this most recent contract signing.

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/628770-coop-320-west-end-avenue-upper-west-side-new-york

Hooray for the buyer and seller and hope we see many more of these deals on SE!!!!!!!

The FSBO ad says "BUYERS BROKERS WELCOME (and will receive a 3% commission)". Once this closes, give the buyer or seller a call and ask whether the buyer had a broker.

>>spyridonsophie

It does concern me that SE is teaming up with Core. When push comes to shoeve, this guy Osher is still a broker. Will we be able to trust the integrtiy of SE now that they are in cohoots with a broker?
I read a stupid quote from the guy this morning.

The new buisness replacing the brokers will integrate taking pictures, designing the layout and staging the apartment for the sell. Spyrido link is a primary example of professional work. Who are the current pohotographer/staging companies and how much do they charge?

I dont know if any of you noticed, but 95% of the listings on streeteasy are broker listings, how are brokers going out of business because of streeteasy? We run streeteasy and they are in business because of the brokers spending advertising dollars. Oh an when you go direct to a sales office, you are talking to brokers who just represent the seller. marketing companies are just brokers who focus on new development. Brooks2, you should of stayed in school then maybe you would be busy doing real work instead of wasting your life of streeteasy forums all day.

since you introduced the subject of schooling, didn't you mean "should 'have' stayed in school"?

you got me wb...lol

"We run streeteasy and they are in business because of the brokers spending advertising dollars."

You no more "run streeteasy" than FTD runs Google. What both Google and SE understand is that providing transparent info to people is job #1, and good thing will follow. You lose the people by catering to BS from your advertisers, you lose everything.

google and streeteasy shouldnt even be mentioned in the same breath...I agree transparency is good for everyone. Now when you log into streeteasy, who is paying for the big banner across the top page? who is paying to be featured listing on the frontpage? the streeteasy forum is FREE, they dont make money with these discussions. Every ad is a broker ad, it not my fault brokers run NYC real estate and if anyone wants a successful real estate website they need the broker community to participate. What would happen if every broker pulled their listings from streeteasy? you would have nothing to talk about and streeteasy would be out of business.

and where do you think google gets it money?

and while you're at it---tell us which broker wants to pull its listings from SE first and why?

"What would happen if every broker pulled their listings from streeteasy? you would have nothing to talk about and streeteasy would be out of business."

Or maybe every broker would be fired by their clients who would then post directly to streeteasy or with another enterprising broker who jumped in to serve them with the ad: "the only broker listing with streeteasy." If the brokerage community could get rid of SE that easily it would have already. There will still be brokers but the business model is being challenged. My bet is each one will eventually have to choose whether to adapt or find new work.

columbia & malthus, my point was that streeteasy needs the broker advertising money, and the brokers love streeteasy exposure. I dont see this relationship ending anytime soon.

I agree with malthus. Let the sellers bypass the brokers and post directly their real estate on streeteasy. See my example where owner posted an apartment for sale directly intro SE and contract signed within days.

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/628770-coop-320-west-end-avenue-upper-west-side-new-york

everything takes time. streeteasy was one of the big first steps. note amazon, ebooks, etc.

columbiacounty, always on the bleeding edge. First to have a heater in his outhouse.

It took a while for brick-and-mortar bookstores to implode after the arrival of Amazon. Ditto paper books after the introduction of e-books. Only time (and figuring out the right biz model) will tell.

I am not sure this is the same at all. We still have stockbrokers even with Schwab, and human bank tellers 16 years after online banking and 30 years after ATMs.

I think that we will have FEWER brokers, and those who are left will have to, like travel agents, adapt, but we won't have wholesale destruction like tower records.

>>jason10006

I agree with jason. We will always have RE brokers. There will always be a need. But, there will be a lot less. The dumb, sleezy, unethical ones will be long gone.

ie, j homes

"What would happen if every broker pulled their listings from streeteasy? you would have nothing to talk about and streeteasy would be out of business."

I'm not saying brokers are useless, and I have no problem paying fees. However, you are clueless as to "brokers pulling their listings". I know you showed up here just last week, but years ago when SE started, it was just scraping brokers' websites. It was put together without the help of a single brokerage firm. Now if PDE pulls their SE feed tomorrow and takes down its web presence to avoid being scraped, well I bet that will be the happiest day ever at Corcoran.

"I know you showed up here just last week, but years ago when SE started, it was just scraping brokers' websites."

thanks for the history lesson. I asked that question to prove that very point. Brokers need streeteasy just as much as streeteasy needs the brokers. They scraped all that data to pull in the consumers, once you have traffic, then good pricing , the brokers come to spend advertising money. Very clever move on streeteasy, more like a hijack...But the Point being SE NEEDS THE BROKERS LISTINGS, and now THEY PAY THEIR BILLS w BROKER AD MONEY!!..some people on this forum act like SE is a FSBO site and the brokers are invading.
Thanks for paying those fees inonada...

"Very clever move on streeteasy, more like a hijack."

What exactly was hijacked?

"But the Point being SE NEEDS THE BROKERS LISTINGS, and now THEY PAY THEIR BILLS w BROKER AD MONEY!!"

The point being that those brokers need customers paying their fees so that they can pay ad money to Streeteasy. You act as if the customer is an unimportant part of the equation, just a horse to be bartered. Streeteasy put their needs as the top priority. Which is why they have a business worth many millions.

hijacked? they stole listings from every brokers website in the beginning...oh sorry they scraped listings...then they stole market share from NYtimes and such once they received the traffic they banked on. Do you think streeteasy is a non-profit doing the work for the consumer on behalf of their good will? They are for profit ask Shaun Osher. They came into this wanting transparency, that was the pitch, but how will they make money and stay alive? ADVERTISING MONEY!!! that was the whole plan from the beginning. I dont see any other ads on SE other than broker ads and banners. Ask Michael Smith who his top client is..I bet its not inonada..

"they stole listings from every brokers website in the beginning"

You really are clueless. They no more stole listings than Google steals web pages by linking to them. They indexed all brokers' listings in one place, with links to the original. I am sure if you like, you can put a noindex meta-tag on your listings and both Streeteasy and Google will respect your desire to not be included in outside indexing.

"Ask Michael Smith who his top client is..I bet its not inonada.."

Ask Larry Page what his top priority is. I guarantee you it isn't the advertisers. It is the end users.

"Do you think streeteasy is a non-profit doing the work for the consumer on behalf of their good will?"

You seem to think providing the best experience and service to the end-user and profit are mutually exclusive. I think the way to maximize profit is by best serving the end-user. Sure, you'll hustle a few buck playing your games and pretending you're king. But that isn't where the big bucks are.

Guess what's #1 on Google's corporate philosophy list of 10 things:

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don‘t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html

its both inonda, the end users bring in the paying clients. Ofcourse they need their buyer tools to be good and their customer is priority, it has to be because their clients (brokers) need to see their site is being used by buyers and gaining traffic to continue to spend ad money. As far as stealing, its stolen if i dont give you permission to use it. SE was nothing like a google search, it wasnt a simple index,you need to get real here and do your homework on all the litigation that was done during this time on the issue of scraping data and internet IP. In the end it was like a mixtape DJ playing my song without permission but i got free promotion off of it and finally I end up paying the DJ to continue to play my records because he built such a large fanbase playing them.

You need to realize that their whole plan on making money was from the broker community, thats why they are doing broker services now, just like olr and real plus. Yes they love their customers, its top priority, because it brings them more real estate clients.

and no doubt you believe the sun circles the earth.

Here's what you originally said:

"We run streeteasy and they are in business because of the brokers spending advertising dollars."

I'm glad you now understand that they are in business because of the end users. SE changed the game because they made end users their top priority. Advertising dollars simply follow the end user. Always have, always will.

That is why them & Google get mentioned in the same breath by me. Obviously, the scope of SE is much smaller. But still the same idea: good technology focused on giving the end user what they want.

"As far as stealing, its stolen if i dont give you permission to use it. SE was nothing like a google search, it wasnt a simple index,you need to get real here and do your homework on all the litigation that was done during this time on the issue of scraping data and internet IP."

OK, you tell me. What litigation was there against SE? What was its conclusion? Did anyone ever even ask that SE not index their listings?

I am entertained by your notion of someone "stealing your listings". Those listings are advertisements for your clients. You know, the ones paying you for marketing their apts. Here comes someone increasing the exposure of those ads you're running on behalf of a paying client. And you say "stealing", never mind you dubious legal position. Because all you can see is your turf. Who cares about the client? Nice.

"1. Focus on the user and all else will follow."

inonada-

I think you hit it on the head when you called him clueless. You should have stopped there.

Can you (not angeloz specifically) not imagine how Streeteasy can or will change the biz model for the residential resale industry in NYC? This reminds me of fall '95, when my fellow tech-y housemates laughed off my musings as to whether it'd be worth it to register domain names like shoes.com. Hmm.

As it stands, the dollar that is being fought for here is the commission. Everything else is how people (e.g. brokers) spend that commission to earn their commission. As a potential seller in NYC, I am paying 6% to the brokerage community to broadcast my listing to as many people in the target market as possible at a price that will attract interest and to sell that property to an interested party. In boom times, the latter can be ignored. SE can serve the first purpose very, very well. Dump the insider access. Imagine if it provided all the historical sales data for a building in an easy to view format, with all the apartments listed. Add another widget for a putative seller to do a fast FSBO to sell the apt. The trickier part is to attract a huge part of the buying population who rely exclusively on a broker to present them listings. One reason is that SE still doesn't have a search function that is granular enough to capture those buyers. For instance, say I'm interested in a full-service doorman building on RSD, views very important, generous 5-room layout or 6, with well-maintained common areas (more "white glove" than not). Board not too stuffy. That search doesn't exist - which is where buyers' brokers today provide their service. But just because I can't imagine a way to do this doesn't mean that it can't exist in the future.

SE's Achilles heel is that there is nothing that can't be duplicated by another website with a few million dollars & some programmers to start ripping some data. It needs to be more than that.

I dont think the manhattan residential market is as wideley observed as we think it is. I think SE has a niche following taht probably wont leave for a while. myself included.

You're missing my point. It doesn't matter if it's widely observed. The question is how to go after the market - if SE can provide a useful tool to the actual buying community, it can cut into broker fees.

"SE's Achilles heel is that there is nothing that can't be duplicated by another website with a few million dollars & some programmers to start ripping some data. It needs to be more than that."

Easier said than done. Programmers are not commodities equally interchangeable at tasks. To put together a site like this takes talent. See NYTimes for an example of more dollars spent with vastly inferior results.

That's coz the people with the bucks suck at identifying crack programmers & the people who tell them what to do don't know what needs to be done.

I think SE is already affecting the broker fee. Think of Keith's business model that has shaved 2%, to the benefit of both Keith and his clients. Enabled by SE: without the ability to offload the search-for-apts task, the model would not be viable. Lots of wasted time spent by a third party (the broker) looking at listings and trying to filter in the head of another person.

Right, but why isn't it affecting ALL broker's fees yet?

1) Needs to find a way to communicate what a buyer's broker can. In the niche market I observe the most, I am probably as good as any buyer's broker out there (minus intimate knowledge of boards, but I can guess). Most people today don't want to do what Keith's clients do.

2) As to the programmer problem - what are the chances if you launch 10 websites with enough seed money that one can't eclipse SE?

"That's coz the people with the bucks suck at identifying crack programmers & the people who tell them what to do don't know what needs to be done."

As I said, easier said than done. The other problem here is that it's too small a market for a second competent player to want to enter. One competent player is already fixing the brokenness of the industry. Good money, targetted at a limited market where the competition had a weak offering / was non-existent. A second player has the same limited market, but with a strong competent player already established. Why bother? The talent / money will want to expend their efforts elsewhere.

SE provides a valuable service to its end users and broker community. very difficult to fund (other than family & friends) a business model with a goal of duplicating SE. what's the point? market is already fairly small and model doesn't seem to be able to scale beyond nyc.

Because isn't the ultimate goal to displace the broker community? Agree that the advertising $ is chump change.

but, if that's the goal, then where's the revenue?

Displace should be replace.

CC: is the market that small? What's your estimate of brokerage revenues for residential resales in Manhattan?

If it came to selling my place, my estimate is that the target market is under 100 buyers. Is there a way to not pay 6% when it comes to communicating my desire to sell?

agreed. but not at 6%. opportunity for small company with (very) private financing. presumably, that's SE. venture investors typically want some kind of wild pie in the sky upside---can't see what that could be unless there is a way to expand beyond nyc. even putting aside the fact that MLS exists in all other markets, how much brand value does SE bring to Chicago, LA etc?

believe it or not, Facebook could be a contender in the future as they continue to roll out their hyper local capabilities. as another poster pointed out, there will be opportunities for small service providers to enter as well.

another item in broker's favor is the strange phenomena about not paying until the property is sold, ie. i imagine that many, many sellers would be reluctant to spend $10 K up front with no guarantees vs. $50-$60K at close only.

Manhattan has about $500M in sales commissions. Add in rentals, Hamptons, etc. and you have a $1B market you're trying to capture a fraction from. Maybe $100M is capturable pie-in-the-sky. Fine market, not one worth competing for with a competent established player.

why would you want to copy SE in the first place? #1, content is key and the data that makes up the content is not the easiest to get access to and is exposed to data integrity breaches that require engineering. If data is inaccurate, who would bother with the site? SE did a wonderful job fixing data integrity, and was the first to understand that there was no one stop shop for Manhattan RE that had full listings histories, sales prices, etc.. They solved that problem when the brokerage industry was hell bent on not sharing their data - which is why SE had to scrape in the beginning and now they get direct feeds. And Ill mention that brokers are really upset that they no longer have a competitive advantage from data availability, because in many occasions, SE gets a feed update faster than the RLS can process it and share it with REBNY members. #2, nobody else was willing and able to spend the money and engineer such a platform...the only other choice back in 2006 was nytimes.com, and that data had its issues and the user experience was nothing like SE. SE took advantage of mistakes by the brokerage industry, period. Now the industry knows it, but what can they do? Copy SE? Cmon now. For what? You cant overtake SE now by mimicking functionality. The only way is to innovate. Create. Engineer new tools. Which leaves us wondering if that can be done.

"You seem to think providing the best experience and service to the end-user and profit are mutually exclusive"

abosulutely not....

"1. Focus on the user and all else will follow."

I 100% agree with their philosophy...

inonada, as far as stealing goes, legal scraping is still being litigated today. I know for a fact SE used more that just scrapes and there were several companies planing a suite against them.

UD: not merely copy, but any competitor would first have to does what SE does and then more.

CC: Interesting thought re: FB.

nyc - exactly thats my point..."and then more". Innovate. That is the hard part. I can tell all of you that the Manhattan broker data is exposed to 100s of unique data integrity issues that require engineering. SE did a great job with this and still we all know there are inaccuracies here. Listings that are off-mkt when they r in contract. listings with wrong days on market. Etc. This is NOT SE's fault although we blame the site and discuss wrong data when we find it..thats fine. Just goes to show you how hard it is to clean up bad data..But Im wondering how this issue can be solved at the core, at the RLS end? Typical MLS's fine agents/firms for violations of data breaches. We dont. We must design a broker sharing system that pushes forward data integrity breaches so that the agent, their manager, and a REBNY employee all get alerts as they occur on a weekly basis. Either the agent fixes, or the manager, if they dont, they get fined and the REBNY employee adjusts status after a follow up with sales manager at REBNY firms office. We all want better data and better tools derived from better data, this is step #1. Its not easy, Ill tell u that. Ive offered my help to the powers that be, Id love to assist, and I do hope I get a call to share the knowledge I picked up from 14+ months of cleaning the raw listings info/listings status database.

Flip side, as a potential buyer (forget those hoary buy v. rent arguments), there are maybe 50-100 properties that I'm interested in.

How do I register my interest and a starting price for negotiations w/o going through a broker? Or is it never worth it for the seller to not advertise the property for sale on the "open" market?

SE could easily add this functionality but i think very few people would want to expose themselves publicly without a vetting intermediary. and, SE needs to be careful in its handling of the broker community. tricky problem.

The buyer angle is less compelling for those reasons and also for the reason that most people need exposure to the market to figure out what their properties are worth.

Mr. Digs -- A floating pronoun? "We all want better data and better tools derived from better data...." We've been talking about this for years, Noah: the powers-that-be do NOT "want better data and better tools derived from better data", or else they would have used those powers to clean up the data the way a real MLS would (as you say).

The fact that (a) there are simple rule-based ways that would go a long way to cleaning up the data (as you say), yet (b) the powers-that-be do not even enforce the current rules, tells me that there is no current interest among the the powers-that-be.

I would think that if there is to be progress it would flow from the experience of the NY Residential / NY1 site. The the powers-that-be would have to perceive that there is a financial and competitive advantage for them to have clean(er) data for them to make the (simple) fixes by rule and penalty. But if they do that, SE will benefit 'for free', won't it?

You know more than anyone, Noah, what it takes to clean the data after the fact. To think that someone other than REBNY would be profit-motivated enough to do what you are doing but for free public consumption is ... nuts. Yet I don't see why REBNY could ever get motivated enough, given the entrenched apparent satisfaction with a system that is only partly (but significantly) broken.

And even if there is a consumer protection law angle that could justify government action, I doubt there is enough government interest or resources to overcome the lobbying effort that would fight for the status quo. Again: status quo is terrible for those of us who do "want better data and better tools derived from better data", but it seems perfectly acceptable to the powers-that-be.

Digs,
I agree with you that Se did a great job with their data extraction and buyer tools, but like you said it will always be flawed because all they are doing is rehashing what brokers put up. SE can be manipulated very easily. So it can only be as accurate as the brokers entering the data. Now with the buyers brokers, they can put in any sale they want to claim the buyer side for. Is this transparency?

REBNY is trying to be the MLS for manhattan, but what about MANOR, Realtor for Manhattan? shouldnt they have instilled an true MLS by now? What is going on? it cant just be politics because Realtor is national and they want all the REBNY members. Is rebny this powerful at lobbying?

angeloz--"Streeteasy is full of useless data that means nothing."

humm.. then why are you on it?

not on it for the data...on it to post my listings and be entertained by the discussion boards.

angeloz,

So if I get your latest point, we should not trust SE because brokers might lie?

So we should instead rely on .... wait for it...
brokers?

lol, mal. brokers are human, just like the banking and finance industry (which caused the 2008 crash, not the brokers) some people can be lured to "inflate" their stats to gain more business. Listen, i believe in the golden rule, you lie, you cheat, you wont prosper. You do it right, you will be here in the long run.
Dont rely on Brokers, rely on yourself, do your homework and find a broker who can compliment your style. Not all my buyers use me to send them listings, some just use me for negotiating, others use me to do their due diligence, and some are too busy to do anything so i have to be a full service broker to them. Brokers are service provided to save busy people time. If you have all the time in the world to make 100 phone calls and search SE and the web for hours on end for property, well then good luck to you, maybe you dont need a broker.

>>the banking and finance industry (which caused the 2008 crash, not the brokers)

so brokers did not use peoples emotions to sell properties to people which they could not afford or used ones emotions to convince them to borrow more than they could afford to buy a bigger house or apartment. Didn't you say,"Real estate is mainly an emotional purchase"?

So only the banking and finance industry is to blame. no one else?
that is the one of the biggest cop outs I ever heard. Pass the buck blame it on someone else..
Bottom line-- GREED caused the financial crisis.. that includes everyone that borrowed a little more than they could afford as well as the one that coaxed them into it.. that includes you Angelo. or are you an Angel like your name tries to imply. that is BS!

damn Brooks, you are tough. "GREED caused the financial crisis" I agree with that. I know you dont know me, but if you did, you would know I was one of the few brokers telling people not to buy in 2007 because once the fed didnt lower their funds rate, I saw it was all about to come down. I didnt know it was going to mean Lehman goes bankrupt, but I for sure knew it was risky to buy at that time and i didnt advise it. I saved my clients boatloads. Plus anyone with half a brain knows prices cannot go UP 20-30% a year forever....

I agree with your encouragement to do homework. The basic point being that SE provides the best means yet of doing that homework. Because it has aggregated data not available in any one single place and also provides a forum to which people can go not only to argue but to learn things. People do and will need different services from brokers. I for one, wouldn't outsource my search to anyone. And some of the brokers mentioned above have recognized that and offer different business models to people like me. If I save 20k on a purchase by doing my homework, I'm feeling pretty good and the guy next to me who went full service might be feeling like a dope. What's he going to do next time?

Therein lies the threat. We'll see how it plays out, but history hasn't been kind to those facing technological disintermediation. Ask compaq. Or Borders.

I have my Real Estate License (and,fortunately for me, I have other "credentials" and skills that allow me to only dabble in RE). I have to be-honest, I am not sure who is worse, the clients/customers who only want to waste your time and have you effectively "consult" for free or the other members of the broker community who don't return calls, do a half-assed job of posting their listing, don'y know what they are talking about the overwhelming majority of the time (I could go on, but I will stop here...). Again, I am lucky that I only do this crap when I want...The bottomline is that finding a place to buy (or rent) is hardly complicated (selling is another matter, but its not rocket science either)...If you don't have the time/interest in doing it yourself, find a competent and ethical broker to do it for you and expect to pay for those services (or, leave the person alone). To my fellow RE License holders---see the writing on the wall and get your act together. The public is on to you...