A year after promising the National Association of Realtors that he would resurrect the Realtors Information Network and bring more eyeballs to the site, RealSelect Chairman and CEO Stuart Wolff had some good news to deliver in the Big Easy.
At the Realtors’ recent annual convention, Wolff said NAR’s home listing Web site, Realtor.com, was bringing in more than 89 million “hits” each month and that 95 percent of viewers were consumers, according to a survey of 100,000 visitors to the site. He also said more than 33 million homes were being viewed each month.
“We promised to bring consumers to the site and we’ve done that,” Wolff said.
He boasted that the Realtor’s Web enterprise is “the most successful vertical market” with 80 percent control of online home listings. But for all the success Realtor.com has had this year, he predicted next year would be more uncertain.
“1998 will be a very competitive year because the financial stakes are so high,” he said. “A lot of very large players will try to knock us out of the box.”
Wolff was given a warm welcome by outgoing NAR President Russell K. Booth, who described the RealSelect chief as an “amazingly quick study” coming as an outsider to the world of real estate. Wolff holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University.
“In my lifetime, I’ve met no one else who’s been a quicker study of the needs of Realtors,” Booth said.
Wolff also told Realtors that more than 1 million consumers were using Realtor.com each month and the most commonly priced home requested was $175,000. Those demographics match the profile of most Internet users, he said.
Wolff said revenues to Realtors increased 65 percent from the second to the third quarter and 345 percent since the first quarter this year, and assured Realtors that aggregated data would be protected.
“Listing data never leaves Realtor.com,” he said.
RealSelect also announced it was launching Classified 2000, which will provide a directory of classified ads to more than 80 leading Internet sites, including Excite, Lycos, Infoseek and WebCrawler.
Kenneth V. Smith
Do-it-yourself mortgages
Monument Mortgage’s senior vice president, Lee Decker, admits he can count the number of daily hits on his company’s recent Web offering on one hand. But that could change. Very soon.
For all the lenders, real estate and Internet content providers partnering up in cyberspace, Monument’s Web site, iQualify, is one of the few that fit in the ground-breaking category.
Scoffing at what some label as “brochure-ware”–technology heavy in content but low in actual service–iQualify lets consumers take over as loan officers and secure widely acceptable approvals for themselves in minutes.
“It’s the most streamlined underwriting that the consumer could get, and it’s independent of any lender,” Decker said. “This should be, over time, an extremely cost-efficient way for consumers to get mortgages.”
The power behind iQualify is Fannie Mae, or Federal National Mortgage Association, which along with Freddie Mac, or Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., created the first automated mortgage approval systems two years ago. For $59, users can access the same power, get a Fannie Mae-quality approval and start shopping for a lender, essentially taking the loan officer out of the loop.
Users can also pull their credit histories, identify factors that would jeopardize their approvals, and get “scrubbed,” Decker says–a lender’s term for the types of borrowers they like.
“It doesn’t set false expectations,” he said.
As a site, iQualify carries a barrel full of security measures to put the online consumer at ease. They include identifiers that rely on users’ Internet IP address, logins and passwords, off-line credit card verification, secure socket layers. All submissions are removed from the servers after 45 days.
Decker admits the site, which took about 18 months to build, isn’t the easiest to access. Browsers older than Explorer 4.0 and Netscape 3.0 will have trouble navigating iQualify’s frames and Java script.
And a temporary setback to note: Although iQualify is a 24-hour site, it’s temporarily limited to several hours during weekdays while Fannie Mae’s system undergoes upgrades. It’s expected to return to full-time shortly.
By then, speed alone should have users clamoring to get in.
Approvals used to take days. Fannie and Freddie sliced it to hours. The iQualify process takes about an 8- to 10-minute round trip.
Warren Lutz
FUN with homes
Bloomberg, the financial news and information service that stock brokers have come to depend on, is apparently getting into the home listing business.
The New York firm’s Web site now offers home listings from around the world. The number of listings is very limited, but the new service shows just how easy the concept of offering viewers a look at home listings can be.
The new service offers no visible way to add your own listing or a clear explanation as to where the listings come from.
The Real Estate Listings page is included in a FUN area of the Bloomberg Web page that has weather, horoscope and trivia as categories. This would indicate that the service is not intended to be a core Bloomberg service, like its global financial news operation.
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