Zillow will begin buying and selling homes using agents

Zillow will begin buying and selling homes using agents
The real estate tech giant is expanding Instant Offers to Phoenix and getting into the iBuyer business, going head-to-head with Opendoor and its own partner OfferPad
BYJOTHAM ​SEDERSTROM Staff Writer TODAY 1:08 P.M.
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Zillow executive Errol Samuelson announced a major new business initiative for the real estate tech giant in an exclusive video interview with Inman on Thursday: Zillow will finally expand its Zillow Instant Offers program to Phoenix and begin buying and selling homes with its own money there and in Las Vegas, putting it in direct competition with iBuyers like Opendoor and OfferPad — the latter of whom Zillow also partners with on Instant Offers.

Zillow Instant Offers, which launched last year in Orlando and Las Vegas initially, lets prospective homesellers visit the Zillow website to receive an offer on their home from iBuyer investors, including companies such as OfferPad, as well as a professional home valuation and comparative market analysis (CMA) from a licensed real estate agent. The home seller can then choose to take the instant offer from the investor and receive all cash for their home, likely at a reduced rate, or list their home on the open market with an agent and potentially get a higher sale price.

Zillow interview with Inman from Mo Moghari on Vimeo.

Zillow’s new enterprise — offering to buy homes outright and resell them, using handpicked local real estate agents who are already participating in Zillow’s separate Premier Agent program to represent Zillow in both its purchase of homes and its re-sale of them — will launch within weeks, according to Samuelson, Zillow’s Chief Industry Development Officer.

“Just like before, when a potential home seller says I’d like to get an investment offer for my home, we will provide an offer and alongside that we will again provide a [comparative market analysis] from one of our Premier Agents,” Samuelson told Inman. “Now, in the event that the home seller decides they wish to go for the instant offer, we’ll be working with a local agent at a local brokerage in the market to represent us as the buyer of the home and we will also recommend that the seller work with the local agent,” Samuelson added. “In fact, we’ll introduce the seller to one of our Premier Agent customers.”

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Samuelson declined to say how many home sellers in Orlando and Las Vegas had visited Zillow Instant Offers to request one in the 10 months since the program originally launched, but did provide some ratios that are likely to reassure real estate agents: one third of the sellers who requested an Instant Offer went ahead and sold their home, but 90 percent of them chose to list with a human agent rather than taking an instant cash offer from an institutional investor.

Samuelson said these stats highlighted how Instant Offers is a powerful lead-generation tool for agents.

Zillow will partner with West USA in Phoenix and Coldwell Banker Premier Realty in Las Vegas as they roll out the new iBuyer program over the next several weeks. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Arizona & Nevada will team with Zillow in both markets, Samuelson said. Zillow spokespeople said that homes re-sold by Zillow itself would be clearly labeled. A Zillow spokesperson also provided the following graphic used to illustrate how Instant Offers and its new program will work:

Graphic outlining Zillow’s new Instant Offers expansion. Credit: Zillow

Zillow employees declined to elaborate on how much money the company will spend buying homes through its new iBuyer platform. Nor did Samuelson specify how much it would pay out in agent commissions for the homes it buys and re-sells. Samuelson said that while Premier Agents would not be charged to participate in the new Instant Offers expansion, home sellers would be charged a fee, though he resisted quoting any numbers.

“The fee, we’re experimenting, so this is early days,” Samuelson said. “We have an idea of what those fees are going to look like, but those could change as we continue to explore and experiment.”

In his interview with Inman, Samuelson repeatedly emphasized that what separated Zillow from other competing iBuyers was its focus on keeping agents at the center of the transaction. However, both Opendoor and OfferPad also say they will work with seller’s agent. Zillow’s advantage may lie in its Premier Agent program, which last year generated $760 million in advertising.

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Opendoor, which has amassed $320 million in funding since launching four years ago, is in the process of raising an additional $200 million that would value the company at $2 billion, according to a reports in March. The additional funding, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal last month, would allow the rapidly growing iBuyer to purchase homes in the six metropolitan markets it currently serves — including in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Armed with $260 million, OfferPad is also active in the Phoenix, Orlando, and Las Vegas metropolitan areas (as well as the metro areas of Dallas Fort-Worth, San Antonio, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham).

In a report by the investment banking firm Evercore released last year, analysts forecasted growing enthusiasm on Wall Street for iBuyers, who use new technology to make quick offers on homes and often close within days through reduced friction in the negotiating process.

“We believe that investors should familiarize themselves with this new business model, as these iBuyers are likely to garner increased attention over the next few years,” according to the report, issued in June. “If successful, these iBuyers could improve liquidity in the housing market by reducing friction costs, and drive increased housing turnover (existing home sales).”

Zillow recently has been riding on a wave of positive financial gains, tallying a $10.5 billion market cap in March for the first time since going public in 2011. Following a strong fourth quarter in which the operator of Trulia and StreetEasy posted a record $1 billion in annual revenues, some analysts indicated that in order to grow apace Zillow would need to innovate.

The entry into the housing markets in Phoenix and Las Vegas also coincides with the planned integration this month of the Premier Agent app with Zillow’s transaction management portal, dotloop. Analysts have said that the company could be banking on a lead conversion model that would potentially drive up ROI by accurately measuring agents’ conversion rates.

“In terms of proving out conversion rates — not just getting them, but proving out — it’s all about getting dotloop integrated into the Premier Agent app,” Ron Josey, an internet analyst with JMP Securities, told Inman last month. “Then they can actually say ‘Oh, okay, this is how many leads I got from Zillow and this is how many I actually closed in a month’ and that will help to prove out the value that Zillow is providing to agents.”

Email Jotham Sederstrom

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FOR LEASE – Available June 1, 2018
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Area	Vanderbilt / Hillsboro Village
Property Type	Townhouse Condo
Monthly Rate	$3000
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Bedrooms	3
Baths	3.5
Square Footage	1809
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Length of Lease	12 Months
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Comments	Walk to Vanderbilt & Hillsboro Village. Granite countertops, oak hardwood floors
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1714 A Porter Rd Nashville 37206 – FOR LEASE

FOR LEASE – Available April 3, 2018
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Area	East Nashville
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Nashville-area homes sales essentially flat in June

Eric Snyder Managing Editor Nashville Business Journal

Nashville-area homes sales were essentially flat in June, according to new data from the Greater Nashville Realtors. Prices, however, are close to reaching a new milestone.

There were 3,887 homes sold last month, up 0.4 percent from June 2016.

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In a news release, Greater Nashville Realtors President Scott Troxel called the flat sales “no surprise given the current disparity between supply and demand in the market.”

Single-family homes sold in June for a median price of $293,753, up from $260,148 a year ago. Condo units sold for a median price of $199,350, up from $186,495.

The median single-family sales price in Nashville in May of this year was $279,142. If the median sales price goes up by a similar amount during July, that would push it beyond the $300,000 mark. For comparison, Nashville’s median sales price hit $200,000 for the first time in June of 2013.

There were 3,914 properties under contract at the end of June, compared with 3,863 pending sales a year ago. The total inventory of available homes, condos and lots at the end of June stood at 8,842, compared to 9,865 a year ago.

The Nashville-area ended the second quarter with 11,155 closings, up 2.8 percent from a year ago, making it the strongest second-quarter on record for the market.

“The last time our market performed this well in the second quarter was 2006, with 11,046 closings,” Troxel said. “We’re a few units short of being ahead of midyear 2006, but with half a year left for sales, I suspect we’ll come close to the 2006 record of more than 40,000 annual closings.”

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Is your MLS doomed?

NEW YORK — First things first. The multiple listing service (MLS) itself is not doomed.

But yours might be.

That’s according to panelists at the Inman Connect New York conference Wednesday in a session titled “Are the MLSs Doomed?”

‘Don’t be too happy yet’

Some attendees erupted into applause when moderator Brian Boero of brand, marketing and design agency 1000watt declared his confidence in the survival of the MLS right off the bat.

But he quickly said, “Don’t be too happy yet.”

“The MLS provides order to a market that is variable, volatile and consists of thousands of independent contractors that all do business somewhat differently but all agree to certain rules and certain norms,” he said.

“But while I don’t think the MLS is doomed, I do think there are persistent and, in some instances, quite serious problems.”

Some brokers and agents feel the MLS space is too fragmented and feudal, Boero said. There are 750 or so MLSs across the country, some big, some small, mostly Realtor association-owned, some broker-owned, some with overlapping geographic boundaries.

Other brokers and agents consider the MLS monopolistic, slow, out of its scope and anticompetitive, Boero said.

“The MLS is not doomed, but virtually every MLS today is doomed,” panelist and real estate consultant Rob Hahn told attendees. Hahn is known as The Notorious R.O.B. on his prominent blog.

He believes there will be 11 or 12 regional MLSs in the future, sometime in the next three to 15 years.

“The current paradigm of association of Realtors-controlled MLS is doomed,” Hahn said.

“The governance sucks. All this political electoral stuff. It just doesn’t work.”

MLSs are “not fast enough, not nimble enough. There are too many. You’re too small. And you’re too poor,” he added.

“Every MLS is run, even if it’s a for-profit entity, like a non-profit.”

That means they focus on cutting costs and not delivering cutting-edge technology to agents and brokers, according to Hahn.

He’d like to see Realtor associations and MLSs get divorced, more MLS consolidations, and have those fewer MLSs charge more money to be able to provide better tools and services.

Panelist Denee Evans, CEO of the Council of Multiple Listing Services (CMLS), doubted that even if MLSs ran at a higher profit margin that they could spend anywhere close to the $200 million that real estate tech giant Zillow Group spends on research and development annually.

“I don’t know that an MLS could get to that point,” she said.

‘Brokers don’t want to worry about MLS issues’

When asked whether Chicagoland MLS Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) would survive, Hahn said, “MRED is fine as long as they do [a] midwest super regional [MLS].”

Panelist and MRED President and CEO Rebecca Jensen agreed with Hahn that there should be about 12 MLSs.

“MLSs are not all built the same way. We definitely have a variance in the level of service,” she said.

“You might have an MLS that is heavy on technology spend, other MLSs’ brokers have said, ‘We don’t need you for that,’” and would prefer the MLS focus on data aggregation, she said.

While Jensen doesn’t see the industry forming a national MLS, she thinks regional MLSs make sense.

Boero asked, “As an MLS CEO of a large MLS, what is your criticism of your industry specifically?”

“What I hear from brokers is that they’re having to worry about MLS issues,” Jensen responded.

“They don’t want to worry about MLS issues, they want to worry about brokerage issues.”

Brokers want MLSs to protect their data and tell them where it’s going, but they don’t want to hear stories about the people running the MLS using it as a competitive weapon, she said.

Hahn added, “I think a big part of broker unhappiness is governance. Harold Crye [of regional brokerage Crye-Leike Realtors] is not going to spend his entire working life going to board meetings of rinky-dink MLSs.”

He said he hadn’t heard a single broker complain about large MLSs like the Houston Association of Realtors MLS (HAR), MRED, or what is now Bright MLS.

It’s those 150-member MLSs that the world does not need or want, according to Hahn.

So how do you get to a dozen MLSs?

“I think the issue is going to be to understand that associations are the problem,” Hahn said.

“The people who are volunteers and leaders of associations, they recognize it.”

They know most members are only there to access the MLS, he said.

“[Associations] have defended the American Dream for one hundred years. How about you let the MLS do the MLS?”

Jensen disagreed with Hahn on that point.

“I don’t think associations are definitely the problem. In some markets they are,” she said.

“We work hand and glove with our associations. It is through our associations that mergers can happen.”

Associations and MLSs would be better off separately, Hahn said.

Right now, most agents that want to do business must join a local Realtor association in order to access the MLS. That means there’s little distinction between agents and Realtors.

The Realtor problem

“At some point Realtors are going to get tired of being painted with a broad brush,” Hahn said.

“The no. 1 problem of the working Realtor today is the agent on the other side” who is likely a “card-carrying, dues-paying Realtor,” he added.

This isn’t him saying this, Hahn said — it’s the National Association of Realtors through its DANGER Report.

The no. 1 threat to the real estate industry is “masses of marginal agents destroy reputation,” according to the report.

But as valuable as the report is, it’s a report, not action, Boero pointed out.

“I’ve been coming to the Inman conference since 1997 and every year there’s a session like this where we wring our hands” and nothing changes, he said.

But Jensen responded, “That might have been true a couple of years ago but I heard a statistic that there were over 100 MLS consolidations last year. That’s a lot.”

Delivering excellence and efficiencies

CMLS’s Evans said she thought MLS consolidation overall was a good thing in that it can help MLSs “deliver excellence” and “efficiency of scale.”

But she stressed that MLSs should be talking with brokers and agents about what they need and delivering that.

“We all have the same goal,” she said.

Moreover, even if the number of MLSs were to go down to 12 super regionals, those MLSs will have service centers across the country, similar to the electrical grid, she said.

“There will be some consolidation of resources. Limiting the number of bureaucracies … would definitely be a good thing,” she said.

Boero polled the audience, asking how many think there should be 12 super regional MLSs. About a third of hands went up.

He asked how many think everything is fine the way it is. No one did.

Jensen said she expects there will be fewer MLSs five years from now because of consolidation.

“Even if that doesn’t happen, … MLSs can work together on shared services, shared standards, shared licensing agreements,” she said.

Boero summed up the panel in this way: “The MLS is not doomed. [But] many MLSs are doomed because consolidation is gaining steam.”

Email Andrea V. Brambila. 

 

Redfin to fund mortgages for buyer customers

High-tech brokerage’s latest bid to streamline the homebuying process

by Teke Wiggin Staff Write

• Redfin will launch a lending arm in Texas later this year.
• The brokerage hopes to integrate this mortgage shop into its existing brokerage and title businesses to a level that’s unmatched in the industry.
• Redfin will try to do this by employing a shared technology platform for the businesses, compensation based partly on customer satisfaction, and an exclusive focus on Redfin customers.

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No matter how talented a real estate agent might be, she sometimes may watch helplessly as a loan officer screws the pooch.

After years of research and development, Redfin will soon try to change that. In a major step for the hybrid brokerage, Redfin is launching a mortgage-banking arm to lend directly to homebuyers who work with Redfin agents — a move that highlights a strategy some brokerages are using to streamline the real estate transaction.

Redfin Mortgage

Redfin wants to stitch the new lending unit into its existing brokerage and title businesses to a level unmatched by other multi-service real estate companies. The goal is to provide a digital process with better service, faster closings and lower fees by employing a shared technology platform, compensation based partly on customer satisfaction and an exclusive focus on Redfin buyer clients.

“The reasoning behind it is we’ve really struggled to digitize the entire closing and deliver the service we’re proud of when we have to play a telephone game with so many third parties,” said CEO Glenn Kelman. “If you … build a platform where the lender, the real estate agent, and the title officer can all work together, you just get a much more efficient process that should allow us to offer lower fees to consumers [and] better service.”

Redfin Mortgage “took us a while to get the money and the time” to build, Kelman said. The brokerage has sunk a sizable large share of its funding, which has totaled $166 million, into the project.

Where will it operate, and how will it work?

Redfin will begin offering mortgages to Redfin customers in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio sometime in the first half of this year.

Led by Jason Bateman, former executive president of mortgage operations at U.S. banking franchise BBVA Compass, Redfin’s mortgage shop will act as a “correspondent lender” (not a mortgage brokerage), directly funding conventional loans with credit from financial institutions and then selling the loans to investors.

Less-than-stellar communication between borrowers, agents, loan officers, title officers and other parties can delay or imperil deals. If a home inspection uncovers a big property defect or an appraisal comes in too low to support an offer, parties must often coordinate a quick response to salvage a transaction.

Some large real estate brokerage companies try to provide an end-to-end service offering by operating mortgage, title services and other “affiliated businesses” in addition to a brokerage business.

But these firms have difficulty synchronizing these units, in part because they use disparate software and agents tend to build close referral relationships with non-affiliated vendors, according Ken Trepeta, president of Real Estate Services Providers Council, a trade association that offers regulatory guidance to real estate companies.

The best of the bunch capture 25 percent to 40 percent of their brokerage customers with their other affiliated businesses, he said.

How Redfin Mortgage is different from a standard affiliated model

Redfin innovates on the affiliated business model primarily in three ways.

First, as with Redfin’s brokerage business, Redfin Mortgage’s loan officers are salaried employees who are paid bonuses based, not only on production, but also customer satisfaction, Kelman said.

This allows Redfin to provide a more consistent level of service and aligns loan officers’ incentives with their customers, he said.

According to Kelman, loan officers will feel more pressure to put the customer first, and they won’t make mistakes in a rush to meet production bonuses.

Second, Redfin’s loan officers will always use the same proprietary transaction platform as Redfin’s real estate agents and title and escrow officers.

Baked into this platform are features that digitize and streamline the underwriting process.

“If you … build a platform where the lender, the real estate agent and the title officer can all work together, you just get a much more efficient process that should allow us to offer lower fees to consumers [and] better service,” Kelman said. “Almost every possible scenario in which a closing could be delayed is one where I think we can be more efficient.”

Third, Redfin Mortgage will focus exclusively on Redfin customers and — at least initially — will not lend to other homebuyers.

Like Redfin agents, Redfin loan officers won’t have to drum up business. They’ll receive all their customers from Redfin, which is able to generate many leads through its popular search site.

The MSA landscape

In recent years, brokerages have scaled back marketing services agreements (MSAs) — which involve collaborative advertising between a brokerage and a separately-owned mortgage lender. They’ve also tweaked or abandoned “joint ventures,” which involve the shared ownership of a mortgage lender by a bank and real estate brokerage.

Through various lawsuits, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has made clear its position that the two schemes can easily violate anti-kickback laws, even if they don’t involve direct kickbacks.

Amid this legal scrutiny, the “affiliated business” business model — where a single company or individual owns several real estate service providers — has emerged as the best way to provide coordinated real estate services with minimal legal risk, Trepeta said.

Toeing the line

To toe the line, Redfin’s mortgage division won’t offer any incentives to Redfin agents for referring customers to Redfin mortgages. Redfin Corporation, Redfin’s brokerage business, will own Redfin Mortgage, but Redfin Mortgage will operate as a separate company, with its own office and loan officers in a new Dallas-based office.

Although Redfin agents may pitch a Redfin mortgage as an affordable and efficient loan option, they’ll also disclose the relationship between Redfin’s brokerage and mortgage businesses upfront. And their compensation model will incentivize loan officers to guide customers away from a Redfin mortgage if better options are available, Kelman said.

“There’s so much pressure on the agent to make the customer happy above all else…that he’ll never stick his neck out to recommend Redfin Mortgage,” he said.

Kelman added that Redfin Mortgage won’t have the best mortgage product for many customers at launch. For example, it might not initially offer “jumbo” mortgages or mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

Competition in the air

Word of Redfin Mortgage comes shortly after Re/Max announced a new mortgage franchise, Motto Mortgage, that Re/Max real estate brokers can use to set up affiliated mortgage brokerages.

Motto Mortgage differs from Redfin Mortgage because the franchise is for mortgage brokerages, not direct lenders. Unlike direct lenders, such as Redfin Mortgage, mortgage brokerages don’t fund loans themselves; they only connect borrowers to loan options.

For this reason, mortgage brokerages cost much less money to set up, making them the ideal way for real estate brokers with limited capital to launch mortgage operations, argues Ward Morrison, president of Motto Mortgage.

Email Teke Wiggin.

Upstart brokerage outs commission offers — again

 

‘I’m sure we’ll take flak,’ said Trelora CEO Joshua Hunt

Published 2 hours ago

by Teke Wiggin Staff Writer

Key Takeaways

• In 2015, Colorado low-fee brokerage Trelora briefly published the compensation offered to buyer’s agents by listing brokers, and now the brokerage is doing it again.
• Trelora says it wants to spread awareness that buyer’s agents’ compensation is negotiable.
• To comply with MLS rules, Trelora is only making commission data available to consumers who fill out a non-exclusive, non-binding buyer’s agency agreement online.

Fresh off a funding round, low-fee Colorado brokerage Trelora has started outing commission data — again.

The company is revealing how much compensation listing agents are offering buyer’s agents through the MLS. Registered users can access the data on Trelora’s website.

The move is likely to rankle some in the industry, just as a previous attempt to display the data did in 2015.

“I’m sure we’ll take flak,” said CEO Joshua Hunt. “The industry is scared to death of us.”

Trelora — which charges all buyers a flat fee of $2,500 to $3,000, depending on service level — closed more than 700 transactions through the MLS in 2016, up by around 30 percent from the previous year, according to Hunt.

He added that the brokerage also did “not a shameful number” of deals off the MLS, but declined to disclose the exact number.

By shining a light on commission data, Trelora wants to spread awareness that buyer’s agents’ commissions are negotiable.

“This is a step of educating buyers … that you don’t have to let your buyer’s agent receive 2.5 or 3 percent,” Hunt said.

The last attempt, and what’s different

In 2015, Trelora made waves by publishing commission data on its website for all visitors to see.

But the startup quickly removed the data once the local MLS, REcolorado, sent a cease-and-desist letter. The letter alleged that Trelora had violated rules that govern the internet data exchange (IDX) feeds that local brokers use to display listing data on their websites.

This time, Trelora is only making the data available to consumers who sign a non-binding and non-exclusive buyer’s agency agreement by checking a box and registering a name, email address and phone number on the brokerage’s website.

“The argument was that we couldn’t disclose information to people we were not representing, and so we have built a special terms of service and agreement with the Colorado real estate buyer agency agreement,” he said.

Trelora also “built the database and code in such a way that that we’re honoring the agreement with IDX and REcolorado,” Hunt said.

Trelora has been in close contact with REcolorado, and the MLS is aware of how Trelora is showing commission data, he added.

REcolorado spokeswoman Deborah Shipley told Inman via email that the MLS is “currently reviewing” the commission information on Trelora’s site, and doesn’t currently see a violation of the National Association of Realtors’ “model rules.”

“Over the next several weeks, we will be thoroughly reviewing Trelora’s site to ensure it does indeed adhere to our rules,” she added, to include consulting with NAR and REcolorado’s legal counsel.

Visitors to trelora.com listings see a blacked-out number next to text that sits beneath a property’s asking price. The text reads: “Commission Offered.”

Visitors can click a question mark and sign up to unlock the information.

Users are also encouraged to register beneath a listing’s photo gallery, so they can see how much they would save on commission by using a Trelora agent. The site dangles the hidden information with the come-on “Expose Commissions” tab.

Visitors who register often learn that they will purportedly save tens of thousands of dollars if they buy with Trelora rather than with an agent who collects a listing’s full offer of compensation.

For example, a $1.595 million listing that offers a 2.8 percent commission to buyer’s agents informs registered users that they would save $42,160 by using a Trelora agent (assuming the traditional agent wouldn’t rebate any of the buy-side commission to their client).

By serving up data consumers can’t easily access elsewhere, Trelora expects to attract more prospective buyers to its website, potentially generating new business for the brokerage.

Trelora closed a $4.4 million funding round in mid-December and plans to expand, though Hunt declined to reveal any of the markets in its crosshairs.

Email Teke Wiggin.

Article image credited to wayhome studio / shutterstock.com