Sellsius launches (global?) listing service
April 30, 2007 at 9:07 am | In sellsius | 2 Comments
“We hope to be more than a listing/advertising service. Certainly members can list & advertise any type of property on the site. Those who are involved in real estate need & want more than that, we think. They need & want a place to exchange information, ask questions, learn & help others, & themselves, be better at what they do. They want to go to a place they can trust to be fair with them & give them value. There are any number of advertising & listing sites & if people could afford it, they would use every one to reach as many potential buyers as possible. We believe they can use our website as well to help them. We will use our brand to promote our members, their business and their listings.
We are NOT an advertising based model, we are member subscription based. We prefer to NOT use an advertising model because we think it might make us beholden to advertisers & influence how things are done to meet their demands, wants & needs. (This is not to imply that’s what all advertising based sites are doing) We want to answer only to our members & please them.
Only time will tell if consumers & real estate professionals find the sellsius real estate community valuable.”
Joseph Ferrara; Sep 18th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Portsmouth’s new stadium
April 30, 2007 at 8:03 am | In design, development, planning, portsmouth | 1 CommentA day after the death of legendary English footballer (and former Pompey coach) Alan Ball, Portsmouth FC (aka Pompey) announced plans for a new stadium and residential development comprising 1,500 apartments in the cities docklands area.
The design by famed architects Herzog & de Meuron – the award winning team behind Beijing’s Olympic stadium – will be to submitted by Portsmouth City Council for planning approval later this year, with construction expected to start in 2008 and last for three years.
The development is backed by Sellar Property Group, the company behind London’s Shard of Glass, which has yet to break ground for development.
[images via Dazeen.com]
The waterfront development will create a superb 36,000 all-seater stadium, over 1m sq ft of apartments together with a mixture of complementary leisure uses, including restaurants and cafes, and a 1.5 acre new public realm.
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The club and Sellar are forming a joint venture company in which both Fratton Park and the new waterfront development will be held, enabling appropriate development finance to be secured to complete the overall project. The creation of the residential and commercial elements of both schemes will contribute to the development.
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Planning applications for the proposed development will be submitted in the autumn, following consultation with stakeholders. Subject to receipt of the necessary consents, work could get underway by Summer 2008, and construction of the new stadium the following year. It is anticipated that Pompey will be playing in the new stadium by 2011.
NO PUBLIC PARKING
The proposed scheme is in the great tradition of English football stadia that have historically formed an integral part of their communities and social urban fabric. Location of the new stadium remains within the city of Portsmouth where more than three-quarters of the club’s fan base lives.
To this end the development’s sustainability and green credentials are underlined by the stadium’s location which will ensure the majority of supporters arrive by public transport. Apart from parking for club officials, players and VIPs, there will be no public parking as part of the scheme. However there will be sufficient parking to satisfy the demands of the residential element of the scheme.
Trump to invest in Romania???
April 26, 2007 at 1:09 pm | In donald trump, east-europe, europe, investment, romania | Leave a Comment
According to reports, he’s looking to “invest” 1 bln euro in Romania via the “Chamber of Real Estate Trade and the Association of Real Estate Investors”
Bloodhound on Fox
April 26, 2007 at 8:44 am | In bloodhound, zillow | 4 CommentsGreg “Bloodhound” Swann CEO of Arizona’s BloodhoundRealty.com and founder of the influential Bloodhound Blog, was on Fox news yesterday discussing the Zillow controversy. Greg compared Zillow to WebMD, stating: “if you understand the difference between going to WebMD.com and going to the doctor, then you understand the difference between going to Zillow.com and going to an appraiser”.
Greg’s statement may indeed be correct – at the moment – but the truth is that Zillow is gaining more and more credibility in the marketplace and among consumers, (the Fox anchorman described Zillow as “addictive”), so perhaps in a few short years, people may not assume Greg’s WebMD distinction. Witness for example Google’s metaphoric rise from geek toy in 99 to indispensable tool today, (not to mention GOOG’s share price and value).
Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s co-founder and President released a statement yesterday addressing the issue; stating in part that zestimates are not appraisals and “you won’t be able to use it in place of an appraisal“.
Says who?
If I as a consumer want to use a zestimate as an appraisal can Zillow or anybody else realistically stop me? And if my bank or lender wants to accept the zestimate as an appraisal, who’s gonna stop them? After all an appraisal under any other name (zestimate, AVM etc) is still an appraisal, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as an evaluation or estimate, hence leading to the term “zestimate”.
Like I mentioned previously, some lenders in the UK – including SPML and Preferred – already accept AVM’s from Hometrack and other companies as legitimate appraisals (or valuations as they’re called in the UK), and the market here is growing. I’m not sure what the market is like in the US and North America, but it’s will most certainly evolve in that direction.
The case against Zillow reminds me of the Napster trials a few years ago. The music industry got pissed at Napster and their primitave p2p networking system, which they were eventually able to shut down. But that didn’t stop the rise of p2p music and video distribution, and no matter what the Arizona Board of Appraisals and others think, they can’t stop the rise of companies like Zillow impacting and potentially dominating the market; that’s just the power of the internet.
It’s time to get with it.
Moveme making moves
April 26, 2007 at 8:43 am | In moveme.com, technology | Leave a Comment
Moveme.com a newly launched service that claims to contain “absolutely everything you need to move home in one place”; announced yesterday its principle venture backer as Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com; as well as venture firm Advent Venture Partners and seed investors The Accelerator Group, according to Mike Butcher’s newly launched tbites blog
Nestoria teams with Real Estate TV
April 25, 2007 at 9:11 pm | In media, nestoria, search | 2 CommentsNestoria’s co-branded search program is taking off, the latest partner being none other than Real Estate TV. The co-branded search program has linked with mainly alternative media organizations so far, including Rat and Mouse, Londonist and HouseReview. Nestoria’s search aggregation has come under criticism for crawling established search portals, but recently, their search results appear to be generating more results from generic estate agents.
The war against Zillow.com
April 24, 2007 at 7:49 am | In legal, zillow | 5 CommentsIt had to happen sooner or later; The Arizona Board of Appraisal recently sent two cease and desist letters to Zillow.com , ordering them to stop offering its free “zestimate” service in the state; however, Arizona state representative Michele Reagan intervened on their behalf stating in a press release that:
Arizona homeowners can still access their “zestimates” with the preliminary approval Monday of a bill that bars the Arizona Board of Appraisal from torpedoing online businesses that provide property value estimates.
An amendment sponsored by Rep. Michele Reagan to SB1291 allows web sites to offer free opinions regarding the value of real estate if it is not an actual appraisal. The bill impacts most notably Zillow.com, which provides free estimates of a property’s value.
“Zillow.com provides a valuable resource for Arizonans and an unelected board’s desire to hamper consumers’ efforts to get as much information as possible makes no sense,” Reagan, chairwoman of the House Commerce Committee, said. “Instead of protecting Arizonans, the Board of Appraisal wants to stifle access to valuable market information.”
The bill received initial approval Monday and is expected to get a vote on the House floor this week. The bill then goes back to the Senate for final consideration.
So Zillow, for now can still operate legally in Arizona, and the website has a strong defense against the Appraisal board, because the information they aggregate on the website is already publicly available. Where Zillow breaks new ground is that they package all of the information “in one place for everyone to see, for free.”
For years, people have been talking over backyard fences, in the grocery store lines, and in coffee shops about homes — whether they’re for sale or being remodeled or they’re just plain interesting. We’re laying the groundwork for the Zillow community — where homeowners, buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals become a vital part of the conversation about homes. [http://www.zillow.com/corp/TheBigIdea.htm]
David Gibbons, a Zillow communications officer further clarified their position in a comment on the Freakanomics blog last week:
Zillow is definitely not offering an appraisal. Zestimates are a starting point for researching house values, not the final word. I’ve actually spoken with homeowners whose Zestimate prompted them to get an appraisal. We have appraisers advertising on our site.
As Greg Swann rightly points out, what the board in Arizona is really doing is looking to protect the jobs of their members (i.e the appraisers). From the boards website, it obviously costs money to become a member or gain a license, so there is certainly a strong economic incentive for the boards actions.
Here in the UK, services such as Hometrack and UK Valuation offer a similar “comparable” service such as Zillow. The difference is that these comparable valuations are now being accepted by some lenders as legitimate. UK consumers no longer have to seek RICS qualified appraisers in some circumstances. In fact the AVM business model played a prominent role in Rightmove’s HIPs business strategy last year.
At the moment, Zillow is free to use and gets its money from advertising. I suspect that what the Arizona board is really scared of is that one day, they’ll start getting paid for their zestimates
The Cloud offers free WiFi
April 24, 2007 at 7:38 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentWifi service The Cloud will provide free Wifi access in association with Nokia, across the City of London and surrounding areas starting today. Not sure if this service only works with Nokia devices only [via Vecosys]
The Inflation Question
April 23, 2007 at 3:59 pm | In bank of england, economy, gordon brown, interest rate | 2 CommentsLast week, the Bank of England announced record inflation rates prompting Mervin King, the central bank’s governor to write a letter to UK chancellor Gordon Brown, explaining why consumer inflation had reached a level that was more that 1 percent higher than the recommended 2% inflation rate.
The letter did not explain why the 2% rate was chosen as safe inflation, since inflation at any rate is , well, still inflation. The question: why at 2% inflation is “good”, but at 3% inflation is “bad” intrigued my mind. I couldn’t get any answers in the FT, Wall Street Journal, or any other financial broadsheet, so I decided to do further investigation into the inflation question to see if I could come across some explanation, forcing me to re-read “The Force of Finance”
Krugman’s occasional recommendation of 2 percent inflation means that money would loose half its value within 35 years – one generation. Why is that good?
asks Brenner
Indeed, in some of his writings for Slate magazine and others, Krugman appears to admit that inflation targeting as a solution/strategy for economic advancement may be fundamentaly flawed, since, by the professors own admission:
The Consumer Price Index overstates inflation. Nobody really knows by how much, but Boskin and company made a guesstimate of 1.1 percent annually. Compounded over decades, this is a huge error.
In Mervin King’s letter to the Chancellor last week, he blamed the record CPI on “a sharp increase in energy prices during the second half of last year” which he feels ” more than offset the fall in petrol prices”. King also blames the record inflation rate on a rise in food prices caused by “bad weather”. This – King states – accounts for one half of the CPI pick up over the past year, which has risen to 3.1% from 1.8% this time last year. King points to this “upside” in inflation, which forced the bank to raise interest rates by 75 basis points over the past couple of months. Most economists are predicting imminent rate rises in light of the inflation figures and to a lesser degree, the strong pound against the dollar.
Although Gordon Brown appears satisfied with this strategy, Kings argument for rate rises is not flawless, because if rising interest rates were the cure against rising inflation, then the interest rate rises in August last year and the “surprise” rate rise this past January should have curbed the inflation rate, but this has not happened.
Furthermore, King is blaming the rise in inflation on energy prices and the weather, all aspects of human life that he has absolutely no control over. So if King and the bank of England have no control over the causes of inflation, how can we realistically expect him to have the cure?
Blockhunter.com ; a property site that works "in reverse"
April 16, 2007 at 2:30 pm | In blockhunter, search, technology | 2 Comments
Andy Martin, CEO of Firetail emailed us last week in response to our mymaps post. Andy wanted to introduce Blockhunter.com his newest project, which he describes as “a property site in reverse.” Blockhunter works “in reverse” because in theory it allows buyers or renters of property to register and post their searches directly on a Google map interface. Sellers and landlords can then log in to Blockhunter to see who is interested in property like the one they’re selling or trying to rent. Then the sellers or landlords can decide which buyers or renters they want to contact after reading their profile, a process they describe as “more like dating”. At present, there is no charge for the service and conceptually in my opinion, Blockhunter is a guaranteed winner; given that it’s mainly a social network for house hunters and property entrepreneurs.
At the moment however, the site is still very buggy. I tried listing a property for sale in Bayswater and got an impressive list of 42 potential buyers, however, when trying to access more details, the site kept prompting me to login, which was a bit of a nuisance. This may turn people off at this stage of development, but I feel quite confident that Andy and his team will be able to work through the bugs, given their impressive client list from previous projects.
Andy felt that it was “interesting” to see mymaps come out, but because Blockhunter has “an interesting twist”, and furthermore, because the project is self-funded, he didn’t have to “write a letter to Benchmark yesterday explaining what just happened to my business plan as a result of mymaps”.
Most if not all of the new property sites are in one way or another aggregating sales information and using standard Google map API for presentation; all-be-it in their own unique and flavorful style. However, Blockhunter is different from all of the other “vertical” property sites in that they’re not really vertical at all; in fact they’re more kinda “horizontal”, which is rather unique from this angle.
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