I…ummmm...Love a PARADE…

Parade magazine really should stick to the meaningless celebrity gossip it does so well. When it attacks more substantive topics it tends to grind them up and spit them out as hyperbole mixed with non sequiturs masked as studied analysis. Thus they treat, say, the war in Iraq with the same seriousness as Anna Nicole's weight at the time of her death: 178. "Ah, but she may have been on a diet because a bottle of Slim-Fast was found by her bed." Thanks. I can rest easily now.

Today, then, came the breaking news that, nationally, the real estate market belongs to buyers. [No. REALLY???] It DID allow the Pacific Northwest as an exception, but painted mostly a dire picture, the same dire picture you've heard from other mainstream news outlets for the last year. Like ghost stories around a campfire, various versions of apocalypse apparently sell. As if AGW weren't enough.

Reminder: Don't listen to it. Not only is real estate local, it can be singular. What's happening in Phoenix is not what's happening in the Portland Metro area; is not what's happening in Lake Oswego; is not what's happening in Westlake; is not what's happening in Brighton; is not what's happening with, say, a 3300 sf Chafee in terrific shape and perfectly priced. National trends are interesting in the proper context; but trying to extrapolate them to specific situations can be dangerously misleading.

And speaking of misleading: I've defended Zillow in the past and I still defend the right of all people interested to access their site. But it remains a parlor game, and anyone who takes it as anything more is facing delusion and therapy.

PARADE and Zillow, though, have apparently reached an agreement: PARADE drives people to its own web site where, using Zillow's engine, offers this:

What's Your Home Worth?

Find out at Parade.com. Use our free real estate calculators from Zillow.com to determine the current value of your home – and your neighbor's.

See any caveat? No. "Determine the current value of your home". Period.

Look. It's not that I think most people are too dumb to get it, or that any marginally intelligent agent or appraiser can't answer "But Zillow says it's worth $500,000!" with "Well, Zillow assumes you have a roof."

What bothers me is this is likely to give additional impetus to the doofuses at the Arizona Board of Appraisal and those like them. [PARADE is what passes as deep source material for many politicians as they write laws.] If that happens, it's Zillow's own fault for either A) not demanding editorial rights; or B) having editorial rights and not exercising them. Parade doesn't care: they're just trying to get as many hits as possible so someday they can rely on the web to offset the perfectly awful color reproduction in their magazine.

And for the record: Zillow's claim to the wonder of algorithms is that a "majority" – that can be 51%, but I think they say 75% - of their estimates fall within 10% of the selling price. First, anything in this market 10% over priced isn't getting any showings, but more importantly that means, on a $500,000 home, the price could be either $450,000 or $550,000, a $100,000 swing. And those are the good ones!

Anyone want to buy or sell a home based on that information?

Free the Market! Free the Market!

I read Bloodhound Blog frequently. Mostly inside real estate for those connected to the profession, it's still fascinating reading for anyone interested in what may lie ahead in the buying and selling of homes.

It has many excellent contributors, but is run by Greg Swann, principal broker of Bloodhound Realty in Phoenix. Greg's a terrific writer, writes, I believe, a weekly column for the Arizona Republic, and knows the business thoroughly. But what keeps me coming back is his passion for the free market, which is almost always defined as what's best for you, the customer. That means he's more interested in making agents better agents as opposed to better salespeople, and that he occasionally has to go against the protectionist orthodoxy that can invade our industry and your rights as consumers of our services.

Thus yesterday this was posted. Briefly, from the Arizona Republic:

An Arizona regulatory board has ordered Zillow.com to stop offering its online estimates of home values.

The Arizona Board of Appraisal has issued two cease and desist letters to the popular real estate Web site, claiming Zillow needs an appraiser license to offer its "zestimates" in Arizona.

"It is the board's feeling that (Zillow) is providing an appraisal," said Deborah Pearson, Board of Appraisal executive director.

Granted it's Arizona, not Oregon; granted it's obtuse on so many levels it approaches parody; and granted it has almost no chance of getting anywhere: it's as if the American Library Association issued a cease and desist to Google.

But it's symptomatic of how industries in general, and ours in particular, react to innovation that's perceived as competition: Gather the lobby, circle the wagons, and regulate that competition out of existence. Greg says it well:

This is Rotarian Socialism in action. The so-called regulatory body serves at the beck and call of the putatively-regulated industry. They have no hope of doing anything but making themselves look ridiculous in public, but they have to answer to their allegedly regulated masters no matter what.

Zillow does what it does very, very well. It's decidedly not entirely accurate, but it admits that up front.

What it does do is make me better at my job. Almost every client – both buyers and sellers – with whom I've worked knows the site, and has used it. I have to be better at justifying any comp I do.

One last thing: Bloodhound believes – as do I – that good agents are worth every penny they charge, and then some. The business is changing, and rather than shrink from competition and new ideas, we can thrive on them.

We have to.