Archive for the ‘Real Estate News’ Category
Virgin Home Loan Financing - Be the Bank
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008The Virgin Group, a conglomerate of separately owned companies that use the Virgin brand, is getting into the Peer 2 Peer lending market. They recently released a loan program that can help your loved one buy a home. Nothing like the awkward silence at Dinner. "Um, Jimmy, you are 6 months ...
Landmark Communications to Sell Weather Channel to NBC
Sunday, July 6th, 2008In January we wrote that Landmark Communications was looking to sell their assets. Landmark owns The Weather Channel and runs Dominion Enterprises which owns sites like ForRent.com, Homes.com, CorporateHousing.com and many other sites. Landmark announced on Sunday that they will sell The Weather Channel Cos. to a consortium of NBC Universal ...
Iggys House Down for the Count
Saturday, June 28th, 2008It appears Iggys House is no longer online. The site has been down for many days. Their sister companies BuySideRealty and BuySideMortgage also seem to be down. Iggys House provided sellers with a free MSL listing service and the ability to post the property on their site for free. These free ...
An Overview of the Phoenix Rental Market
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008I recently ran across Trulia Market Trends and wanted to take a look at the Phoenix real estate market and compare it to the Phoenix rental market. According to Trulia, the average sales price for homes in Phoenix has seen a 22.2% decrease in the price of a home from Nov ...
10 Fastest Growing Real Estate Markets
Sunday, May 11th, 2008CNNMoney just released their report of the 10 fastest growing real estate markets. And here they are: McAllen, Texas 12-month forecast: 4% Median home price: $109,000 One year price change: 2.1% Five year price change: 23.3% Change in foreclosure rate: 23% Rochester, N.Y. 12-month forecast: 2.7% Median home price: $121,000 One year price change: 3.4% Five year price change: 20.1% Change in foreclosure ...
Googol and Google - Zillo and Zillow
Thursday, March 6th, 2008When Larry and Sergey of Google were trying to come up with a name for the company, they thought they were spelling Googol ( 1 googol = 1.0 × 10 to the power of 100) correctly when they spelled it Google. This misspelling was a good thing for the company since ...
“Flip This House” TV Star Armando Montelongo and Jail Time?
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008I have never seen the show "Flip this House" on A&E but one of the stars, Armando Montelongo faces up to 2 years in jail if he is convicted of not paying the appraiser. On you tube you can learn how to make money the "montelongo" way. One advice though. Pay ...
Foreclosure’s Hurting and Helping Property Management
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008There are about 2 million homeowners that hold $600 billion of subprime adjustable-rate mortgage loans, known as ARMs, that are due to reset at much higher amounts during the next eight months We are constantly speaking with property managers throughout the United States and we asked them how the foreclosure situation ...
Dominion Enterprises Looking to Sell
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Dominion Enterprises, the owner of sites like ForRent.com, Homes.com, CorporateHousing.com and many other sites, announced that they may be looking to sell. They have hired J.P Morgan and Lehman to help in the process if they decide to sell. In September 2006, Dominion Enterprises was established following a division of assets ...
Yahoo / Microsoft Deal and Real Estate Search
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008I have had some time to chew on the Yahoo / Microsoft deal a little bit. Google has their own concerns but I wanted to break this down more from a consumer and business decision at the real estate vertical level. From a real estate vertical, would the Yahoo / ...
What will save the Newspaper Industry?
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008Answer. Fire your entire board and replace them with individuals who are internet experts. Marc Andreessen's post on the New York Times says it all. Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's [The New York Times] business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with ...
Power of the “Long Tail” - Real Estate Sites, Music, Keywords, and Leads
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Did you know that if you were to post your real estate property on the top 10 real estate sites you would only be reaching 24.1% of the market?* According to Hitwise.com, the top 10 real estate sites combined reach 24.1% of the market. These are sites like Realtor.com, Move.com, Zillow.com, ...
Markets with the Lowest and Highest Vacancy Rates
Monday, December 31st, 2007Every year, Marcus and Millichap releases a report on how they think the rental market will be for that year. In the beginning of 2007 they released a report on the status of the Apartment and Rental industry for 2007. They predicted many things and one was the lowest and highest ...
Rentomatic Launching Soon
Saturday, December 29th, 2007Rentomatic, which is owned by iiProperty, will be launching shortly according to Pat Kitano's blog, I've spoken to Allison Atsiknoudas, iiProperty's CEO numerous times and she impresses me with both her knowledge of technology and the rental market. Rentomatic, will be targeted to small- and mid-sized landlords, property managers and ...
Top 10 Real Estate 2008 Predictions
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007I am not very good at predicting the future and don't have access to the Wisdom of Crowds data, but here is an attempt to predict the future of the real estate industry for 2008. The real estate web2.0 lingo will die and someone will try to make up new lingo ...
Edgeio Assets Goes to LookSmart
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007LookSmart, the company that powers CPC for many sites has acquired the assets of Edgeio for $280,000. LookSmart is a publicly traded company that had their stock trading at over $300 a share in 2000. Now, the stock is trading at $3 and has a market cap of $68 million. The other ...
Frontdoor.com Powered by HGTV
Sunday, December 16th, 2007I originally saw this post on TheRealEstateBloggers. Frontdoor.com has launched and it looks like it is taking aim at Zillow and Trulia to be a place for owners to research and find properties for sale. The Scripts Network which owns frontdoor and other sites like DIY, HGTV, Food Network, Bizrate, ...
Redfin on Today Show and uses Science to Sell Homes
Sunday, December 16th, 2007Redfin was recently on the Today Show where Meredith interviews Glenn Kelman. You can view the video here. Redfin also launched The Real Estate Scientist, a program to develop data-driven best practices for buying and selling homes. Seven Tactics for Selling Your Home You can read the full report Seven Tactics ...
Who wants to be a MicroCeleb?
Friday, December 14th, 2007I read the Transparentre blog often and Pat's most recent post is about micro celebrities and Glenn Kelman of Redfin. Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group. This usually occurs in the technical and finance world but is becoming much more ...
When a CEO Buys a Mansion, Short the Stock
Friday, November 23rd, 2007I thought this was a rather interesting study on CEOs and real estate. Originally on the iPienso blog: A new paper by Crocker Liu and David Yermack, ‘Where Are the Shareholder’ Mansions? CEOs’ Home Purchases, Stock Sales and Subsequent Company Performance.” Key finding: When a CEO buys real estate, future company performance ...
The Long Tail and Targeted Websites
Friday, November 23rd, 2007There is a great post written by Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners that I wanted to summarize: Ad Networks: Why it’s better than ever to be a targeted content site 1) The longtail is getting longer (Compete data shows a 77 percent increase over the last 5 years of ...
Real Estate News Year to Date
Wednesday, November 21st, 20072007 so far has been a so so year for real estate start-ups and acquisitions. Below is an aggregation of the top stories for real estate in 2007: January: MyCurrency let's "Wisdom of Crowds" predict real estate market February: Primedia Aquires RentalHouses.com for $8.5 Million. March: Whitefence raises $14 million Hotpads raises $2.3 million Oodle raises $11 million ...
Real Estate Outlook: 2007 - 2012
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007Borrell and Associates released their real estate outlook for 2007 - 2012. While total ad spending on real estate has declined 3 percent this year, spending on the online segment has grown 25.8 percent, hitting $2.6 billion. We are projecting online real estate advertising to grow at a somewhat slower rate ...
Simi Valley Housing Market
Monday, November 19th, 2007I spent the weekend in Simi Valley California with my family. I spent my first 18 years there and saw the city grow to over 150,000 people. The most recent 2000 Census data had total rental properties at 8,151 with a 3.8 % vacancy rate. 22% of the occupied housing units ...
Total Vacant Units Hits 17.9 Million
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007According to the latest Census bureau data the total inventory for vacant units including rental units, vacation homes, and properties not for sale or rent hit 17.9 million ending September 2008. This is up 7.8% from a year ago.
Internet Brands Set for $45 Million IPO
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007Internet Brands, the company who has been on an acquisition shopping spree and most recently acquired ApartmentRatings.com and thatrentalsite.com just filed to raise $45 million in an IPO. Since 2004 they have acquired 55 internet related sites. The company lost $2.4 million for the first 9 months of 2007 ...
Top 10 Best Places for Real Estate Investing Deals
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007Forbes.com released their list of the top cities to invest in. Here is their list: 1) Fort Worth Texas Median home sales price: $156,500 Price change from 2006: 1.7% Expected home turnover in 2008: 6.03% Turnover ranking: 5 2) Kansas City, Missouri Median home sales price: $157,700 Price change from 2006: -0.7% Expected home turnover in 2008: 6.21% 3) Houston, ...
Rent.com and Single Family Homes
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007Rent.com is supposedly launching a single family home rental website to compete with the likes of rentalhomesplus, rentvine, rentals.com, mynewplace and others. They are no longer accepting postings on rent.com of 20 units or less and are most likely going to launch the new site early in 2008. What does this ...
Pat Kitano on the Active Rain Fiasco
Monday, October 1st, 2007Pat Kitano of transparentre a blog on the transparency of real estate wrote a great article Entitled "What Active Rain should do Now." Active Rain's Challenges 1) AR owns the bloggers, who owns the content? 2) Developing the proforma revenue model 3) AR needs to augment their relatively puny consumer traffic 4) Management ...
