Current “Market Conditions” Now Available for Every Listing!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The press sure loves writing about real estate doesn’t it? “Market Booming”, “Real Estate Collapsing”, “Prices Skyrocket”, blah, blah, blah.  But can the information in these news stories really help you make smart decisions if you’re in the market to actually buy or sell a home now?

Unfortunately, the answer is NO, not really.  Even if the information portrayed is accurate (questionable), the problem is that closed sales only reflect activity on properties that went into escrow (under contract), 30 to 180 days ago.  If you find a property for sale now that you want to buy now, what you really want to know is “How hard can I negotiate the price?”  If you are a seller with a home for sale now, you want to know “How hard can I hold out for my price?”

Many years ago, I created a simple indicator of current market “Supply versus Demand” for a location. (in fact we have a Patent Pending approval by the US Patent Office)  By knowing what percentage of the listings for sale now in an area are in escrow (under contract) you get a great idea of whether that area is currently a buyers’ or sellers’ market and to what degree.

For example, if there are 100 homes for sale in Palo Alto, California and 15 are in escrow (under contract) than the percentage in escrow is 15%.  CleanOffer’s opinion is that 15% indicates a “Strong Buyers Market”.  These opinions take into consideration lots of factors including how long it generally takes a property to close escrow once it is under contract.

To get the Market Condition for any listing you view on CleanOffer, simply click the “Market Condition” link under the property photo for that listing. 

You’ll be smarter for it!

What Have We Been Up To?

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Currently the main focus of the engineering team is to bring over our original North Bay users to the same platform that is enjoyed by our San Francisco, Peninsula, and Austin users.  As a result, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been working on is not visible to the larger CleanOffer community. That being said, over the last three weeks we have deployed several small enhancements to the CleanOffer site that do affect all of our users.

Features for both Agents and Clients

 
•     Users now have access to the Market Conditions Report. The report gives a simple to understand overview of the market. You can access the report by clicking on the “Market Condition” link on any Property Detail page. This report have been used by our North Bay users for years, we hope that users in other markets find it useful.
  
 
•     The full-sized original listing photos are available. To see the original photo, click on the photo from the listing detail page. You can browse through all of the full-sized photos by using the left and right arrow keys once a full-sized photo is displayed.
  
 
•     In the “My Favorites” portlet of the briefcase you can now see the current price and status of your saved listing. 
 
•     The “Search History” portlet has been improved to show the type of search that was executed. 
 
•     The time of the last MLS download is now displayed at the bottom of the search result and listing detail page.
   

Features for Agents Only

 
•     The “My Listings” portlet and quick peek have been improved to disable actions that are not applicable to the listing. 
 
•     The “My Clients” quick peek now displays the number of saved searches and my favorites for each client.
   

As always, we are always looking for feedback, so if you have any comments please email them to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).