Author: admin

By Susanne Dwyer

Forty-one.

That’s the amount of times listing data may be entered through the course of one real estate transaction, estimates Upstream™ CEO Alex Lange. That’s 41 instances in which data may become incomplete or incorrect, posing a challenge difficult to surmount as technology advances.

The result for brokerages has been a classic (and chronic) case of “too many hands in the pot”—a game of telephone, becoming more and more inconsistent as it’s passed among portals, platforms and vendors.

The crux of the matter, according to Lange, is lack of control.

“Brokers over time feel they’ve lost control of where their data asset is going,” said Lange at RISMedia’s CEO Exchange, held at the Harvard Club of New York City on Sept. 13 and 14. The sold-out gathering, which brought together 250 of the nation’s leading real estate brokers and influencers, was marked by several noteworthy sessions, including an update from Lange on Upstream. The initiative, set into motion by The Realty Alliance and Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (and later, others), is intended to reset the data infrastructure, assigning control back to brokers.

“[With Upstream, brokers] have the ability to not only pick the targets—who’s going to get the data—but they can also determine what data they get, and they can determine the frequency in which they get it,” Lange told attendees. “The brokers are in control.”

Two of Upstream’s board members, Cary Sylvester and Mark McLaughlin, joined Lange in the update, offering perspective for brokerages small and large.

“Data is data. It should be stored once,” said Sylvester, vice president of Industry Development for Keller Williams Realty International. “Why are we competing for access to our own information?”

“Upstream will effectively be our ‘brain,’” said McLaughlin, CEO of Pacific Union International, recounting his technology team’s proposal for a similar system. “We control the distribution to everything, everywhere. It’s a fantastic new technology, and I can’t see any downside to it.”

The update addressed the prevailing misconception about the platform: is it a national MLS?

“Upstream is designed to work in conjunction with an MLS—it has almost no ability to ever try to be an MLS, and we specifically state we will never compete with an MLS,” emphasized Lange.

“We can all be on it. I can share a folder with Craig [Cheatham, member of Upstream’s Executive Committee], share a field with Cary, share multiple files across multiple entries, and rescind that permission at any time,” Lange added, likening the platform to Google Drive. “Upstream is just a platform—no one at Upstream can see the data, touch the data, or control the data.”

“The problem is that we need to get [the data] in one place and feed the entire ecosystem,” Sylvester explained. “Do we want to change the MLS structure today? No. How do we feed that ecosystem so that it can evolve and change? That’s what we’re looking for with Upstream, and why we’re so passionate about it.”

The initiative is gaining traction as it moves through development, with five MLSs and a sampling of brokerages currently …read more

From:: Real Estate News

By Susanne Dwyer

From 10,000 feet, the U.S. housing market has been nothing if not predictable in 2016 – inventory has been down, home values have grown at a remarkably steady pace and sellers have largely been sitting pretty. None of these trends shifted meaningfully in August, though there are a precious few signs emerging that hint at potential changes on the horizon.

For the 49th month in a row, the median U.S. home value rose year-over-year in August, to a Zillow Home Value Index of $188,100, up 0.4 percent from July and 5.1 percent from August 2015, according to Zillow’s August Real Estate Market Report. In each month thus far in 2016, annual home value growth has been no slower than 5 percent per year, and no faster than 5.2 percent – a notable stretch of consistency.

This year’s stability in U.S. home value appreciation continues a trend that began roughly two years ago. Throughout much of 2015, home values grew in a similarly narrow range, between 4.4 percent and 4.7 percent annual growth, before accelerating into the 5 percent range at the end of last year – where it has largely stayed since. This long period of steady annual home value growth almost looks like an anomaly when seen next to the sometimes wild up and down swings experienced nationwide over the past two decades.

A potential answer for why the market has been so stable of late, as it happens so often in real estate, could boil down to location, location, location. As we’ve often said, the U.S. housing market is really nothing more than a collection of dozens of local markets, each behaving differently and with their own unique fundamentals. Some once red-hot markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, have cooled considerably this year. Home values in the five-county San Francisco metro were growing at an 11.7 percent annual pace as recently as January; as of August, the pace had slowed to 6 percent. In the San Jose metro – the heart of Silicon Valley – annual home value appreciation slowed from 11.1 percent growth in January to 5.8 percent in August.

At the same time, home value growth in other markets – particularly in the booming Pacific Northwest – has picked up the pace. In the Seattle metro, annual home value growth has accelerated from a 10.4 percent annual pace in January to 11.3 percent in August. Just to the south, in Portland, annual home value growth has picked up from a 13.2 percent pace at the beginning of the year to 14.8 percent currently.

In 267 of the 516 total metro areas analyzed in August, home value growth has accelerated compared to January. Home value growth was slower in August compared to January in 249 markets. This relatively even distribution of markets where home value growth has picked up steam over the course of the year, and where it has trailed off, stands in marked contrast to the boom and bust years. Then, most markets largely moved in lockstep driven by …read more

From:: Finance and Economy

A new report from Nationwide shows the healthiest and least healthy metros in the U.S. by comparing factors such as employment, demographics, mortgage market and home prices. Despite the affordability crisis, 25% of metros were very healthy markets in the second quarter. …read more

From:: Real Estate Wire

After rising, falling, and rising again in the wake of the implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule, the time to close a mortgage loan appears to finally be settling into a new normal – about a month and a half. …read more

From:: Real Estate Wire