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From the :
“The Justice Department gave a boost Tuesday to online real estate brokers — and potentially their clients — by forcing new industry policies that give Internet-based agents access to home listings they were previously denied.”
Supposedly, this was done to make the playing field level for smaller and/or online real estate brokerages. However, the opposite may occur.
From
The National Association of Realtors has allowed local associations to withhold listing information from online realtors whose mega sites tend to outperform local realtors’ sites in some search results. Search engine optimization specialists have been aware for years that the hyperoptimized real estate vertical is one of the most highly competitive search markets.
The consumer may or may not benefit from the settlement, considering that local realtors offer opportunities for face-to-face discussions that online forms and search tools simply cannot provide. The fact that local realtors have little to no search visibility in some critical search terms may imply that the Justice Department has in fact created an unfair business advantage for an already overwhelmingly powerful industry group.
Local realtors just don’t have the resources to compete with the mega sites, and the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit fails to take this imbalance of search positioning resources into consideration. From a search perspective, the Justice Department’s action may have the exact opposite result of its original intent in that it may very well limit the competition. After all, most searchers will never look beyond the first ten results shown to them and major search engines have no incentive to show the best results for queries where they are already showing acceptable results.
On the surface, the NRA is being required to treat online brokers as if they are local brokers by granting them full access to local brokerage shared databases. The search engines already treat online brokers the same way, and the reviewing court might very well take the view that consumers’ best interests are not being served well by restricting online brokers’ access to data (which they apparently make little or no contribution to themselves).
It has been my perception for a while now that the ones that may have the “unfair advantage” may be the online real estate firm, well-funded, working with venture capital and well-versed in search engine optimization and online marketing. This ruling may give them even more of a leg-up and further erode the full-service bricks-and-mortar real estate brokerage.
Authorities said today they found two handguns with the badly decomposed bodies of five family members who were discovered in a home in a wealthy, gated Orange County community over the holiday weekend.
The house where the family was found was worth about $1.7 million, according to the real estate Web site Zillow.com.
It appears that Zillow’s becoming the official reference site for property values in the
By all appearances, is the chief executive of a flourishing mortgage bank in Garden City, issuing more than $33 million in home loans to buyers across Nassau and Suffolk counties over the past four years.
A closer look at his lending practices, however, reveals that many of these loans relied on faulty appraisals and exaggerated loan applications, leaving behind angry homeowners who are struggling to pay mortgages on overpriced homes.
Aaron Wilder, CEO of HTFC and a mortgage investor, gave a deposition to Robert Bodzin, a lawyer from GMAC Bank. In February, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno declared the deposition a “spectacular failure”, ordered Wider to give a new deposition, and fined Wider and his lawyer $29K.
GMAC Bank has filed a lawsuit against HTFC alleging that the company sold loans that were not property underwritten.
ROBERT BODZIN: My question is: Where are you currently employed?
AARON WIDER: I’m not. I work for free
BODZIN: Okay. You’re not employed by HTFC Corporation?
WIDER: No, I own HTFC Corporation.
BODZIN: Okay. And what do the initials HTFC mean?
WIDER: Hit That Fuckin’ Clown.
From The Wall Street Journal “”
Throughout the deposition, Robreno said, Wider “sought to intimidate opposing counsel by maintaining a persistently hostile demeanor, employing uncivil insults, and using profuse vulgarity.”
In one passage, GMAC’s lawyer, Robert B. Bodzin of Kleinbard Bell & Brecker in Philadelphia, asked Wider to open a file so that Bodzin could ask questions about certain documents.
According to the transcript, as quoted in Robreno’s opinion, Wider erupted, saying: “‘I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Isn’t the law wonderful?’”
In another passage, Bodzin said: “We’re going to adjourn this deposition if this happens again because you are offending every single person.”
According to Robreno’s opinion, Wider responded: “‘Don’t speak for anybody in here except yourself fuck face.’”
When Bodzin said he was speaking for himself and the court reporter, Wider said: “‘If she had a problem with me she would say something. She knows it’s [not] directed toward her. It’s directed to you because you’re a piece of shit and a piece of garbage and I’m the only person in your life that is fucking up your world and I enjoy it.’”
Robreno said the transcript showed that Wider “used the word ‘fuck’ and variants thereof no less than 73 times.”
from the WSJ blog
from Law.com
I was able to attend a presentation yesterday by , VP of data & Analytics at , and the man behind their He gave a speech to the Real Estate Roundtable at the Rainier Club where he discussed in freakish detail.
Though this kind of information is not known to be rocket science, Stan is, indeed, some sort of , and brings a level of depth to the subject heretofore unplumbed by researchers.
I was the guest of , previously known as CFO & VP of Marketing Zillow, but whose true claim-to-fame is that he’s the new (yes!) . (I’m merely the local ” and can only look at his national platform with jealousy and awe.)
The presentation was at , founded in 1888 as an exclusive private gentleman’s club. According to , no ladies were allowed at the time it was founded (nor anyone not of European ancestry nor Protestant religion.) But the now non-discriminatory club is currently a “vibrant, thriving institution whose membership comprises civic leaders of both sexes and all races.”
I’m organizing a luncheon there on September 18th, for the 10th anniversary of , the first and largest encyclopedia of community history created expressly for the Internet by Walt Crowley, Marie McCaffrey, Paul Dorpat, and various other. If you are interested in local history, I urge you to sign up for their or It’s a great way to keep up on local history and current events, and then you’ll also be one of the first to find out about the luncheon as, when tickets go on sale, it’s sure to be a sell-out! You can sit at my table.