My call today with Homes.com - The Good, the Bad, and no ugly20304
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 WGANStandard Member Los Angeles |
Home3D private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Since hearing about CoStar's acquisition of Matterport and their already ownership of Homes.com, I've wondered how these platforms and interests would intersect and the impact it would have on us. Now I have some answers today after a 1-hour call with a very helpful gentleman at Homes.com. According to what I was told, Homes.com has hired lots of photographers (my guess is young starting-out types) as employees. They are being equipped with MP cameras and trained in the basic execution of scanning a home. They are sent out by Homes.com to scan homes - FOR FREE. Don't reach for the cyanide yet. There is also good news. In fact, this very process is good news. Homes.com is doing a lot of things right, something I can't say for Zillow and other aggregation sites. Let me list them. 1) Whereas Zillow takes money from agents and then tries to make it look like THEY are the go-to source for a listing, while burying the real listing agent's name in small type way down the page, Homes.com prominently, and honestly, displays the REAL listing agent's name and info, prominently, connected with each listing. Kudos. Honesty isn't so commonplace in America today, so let's give them a pat on the back. 2) Homes.com is tied directly to the MLS and sweeps in constantly to deliver up-to-the-minute data on their site. This isn't unique, but they're doing it, which is the right thing to do. 3) Homes.com invites every agent to register in their directory with full contact information, photo, link to their website, and a personal description of services. This is FREE TO ALL AGENTS. This is designed to offer buyers a way to find an agent active in their area. Kudos again. Homes.com takes their MLS sweep and aligns it with all agents registered so their actual, truthful, activity is represented, good or bad. Agents are NOT able to alter this information. 3) Homes.com also offers, naturally, a "paid" level for agents to subscribe to. This doesn't change the agents' listings in the directory. However, what it does is pay for internet promotion of their activity, their listings, online, to boost the agents' visibility in the real world. This is way better (read: more honest) that Zillow's taking agents' money to make it look like someone else's listing is theirs. 4) So you wonder, how much does an agent pay for the Premium service? Kudos again! It's based on the number of transactions an agent has closed in the past 5 years! I say kudos, because this means a new agent starting out pays the lowest cost to get Premium promotion and a busy-busy agent, rolling in dough from commissions, pays the most! Can you imagine a bus bench company charging a tiny fee to promote a beginner and the big-time agent charged a lot? I think it's great that Homes.com tries to "level the playing field". 5) So, what about those FREE Matterport scans? Every time a Premium agent takes on a new listing, Homes.com sends out one of their employee MP scanners to capture the house. It's included in that paid subscription. Is that bad? I say NO! and here's why. 6) That Matterport model for the new listing (drum roll...) ONLY APPEARS ON HOMES.COM. It will never and cannot be placed on the MLS or any other aggregation service. The MP URL to the tour is hidden on Homes.com and the tour is hosted on Matterport servers controlled now by CoStar / Homes.com. Homes.com is leveraging their ownership of Matterport to make Homes.com the go-to site for all buyers. Brilliant! Remember that NAR for years has run surveys that 85% of all buyers WISH there was a virtual tour for every listing. Homes.com is working to deliver this! 7) So why is that GOOD for all of us? Imagine the day that virtual tours are as "necessary" for home sales as are standard photographs. That's where Homes.com is taking us. In time, 25% of all listings on Homes.com will have MP tours. Then it will be 50%, eventually 75%. More and more of that "85% of all buyers" will be going 1st to Homes.com, not Zillow, not Redfin, not Realtor.com. Homes.com is going to kill the others aggregators. And as Homes.com climbs up and dethrones Zillow, home sellers are going to take notice that virtual tours are essential. If you were selling your home, wouldn't you insist on a virtual tour, knowing that 85% of buyers expect to see them? 8) Remember that Homes.com MP tours will only appear on their platform. Until such time as Homes.com corrals 75% of all online searches, agents have to deal with the fact that these virtual tours only appear on Homes.com. If you were a seller, do you want a tour only on one platform or on all of them? We still have a lot of work to do, and also what Homes.com is doing (providing some free MP tours) will only further the education of home sellers that virtual tours are the new thing, necessary. 9) And last, Homes.com is dropping loads of cash on TV advertising, and some of that advertising is specifically mentioning MP tours as a benefit of their platform over Zillow, etc. This will only increase public awareness. Homes.com only has MP teams operative in about 1/3 of the country so far. It takes time to roll this out. But it's happening, so the day is coming that virtual tours are a requirement. 10) Even IF Homes.com completely kills the competition AND every agent signs up for Premium account so every home has a MP tour for free, these will still be very basic, indoors only, tours. Not a tour like these pictured below. We'll be living in a world where MP tours are so common you need something special to stand out, like Indoor-Outdoor tours with Guided Tour, Tags, Stories, all the bells and whistles. And that you'll still have to come to us for.   11) Last point. This is a world where virtual tours become so ubiquitous that they will also be more essential for cities like Hampton, and even a cemetery like Hillside. I tell people that virtual tours today are like the internet in 1990, just at the beginning. Time will tell, but I stand by that claim.   |
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 WGANStandard Member Osaka, Japan |
Meidansha private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @home3d Thank you for your (once again) in-depth review. The real estate situation in Japan is very different to the US but this is good information to know. A player like homes.com would be welcome here. More than anything, Matterport has made little attempt to break into the real estate market here and a new parent company forcing the local Matterport office to realign their objectives with real estate would be welcome. |
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MeshImages private msg quote post Address this user | |
| I like this statement a lot! Quote: Originally Posted by Home3D So true! Regarding the CoStar acquisition and homes.com I am pretty sure, that they will keep Matterport as an independent company making deals internally and on the market. A product like Matterport needs the market feedback to stay ahead of the competition. Therefore I don´t see any major changes on the horizon except for the contract and pricing situation. Here I could imagine, that they will probably end the situation with multiple contracts (classic vs. new accounts) by bringing a "classic vault" option to the new contracts, where you can move spaces with a reduced monthly hosting fee by paying some kind of one time fee depending on the camera model and maybe depending on size (like the processing fees in the classic account). This would make most customers happy and bring more transparency to their client and market situation. From there they can move on and build a strong product and client network (photographers and businesses) for the future. |
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monnce private msg quote post Address this user | |
Quote:Originally Posted by Home3D I wish we would have those numbers here in Lithuania  |
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 WGAN Fan Club Member Gilroy, California |
Dataventurer private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Thanks for starting this thread! Let's join in the fun!... When I saw the Homes.com article (thanks to Dan, our watchful leader!), my first concern was "How is Homes.com going to display the property media: videos, floorplans, and Zillow 3D Home Tours?" I also checked on SimilarWeb to see what kind of traffic they were showing for Homes.com, back to that in a minute. The initial reply I received from Homes.com was that "Our platform is not designed to support Zillow 3D Home Tours". Dang! I went back and forth with them over a couple of emails seeking to pinpoint if/how they might provide an external media link where a property page would be able to display media that Homes.com didn't support (of particular interest, the Zillow 3D Home Tours, which I include with every media package.) It was tough getting a definitive answer, in fact, after a couple days, I'm still waiting to hear. Just for reference, Realtor.com provides for that kind of external media link by scraping the URL that the agent enters in the "Branded Virtual Tour" media field from our local MLS. That link could be to a property page or video, so I always direct the agent to place the property page link in that field. Redfin is great, they scrape all eight media fields from the MLS and display them down their page for the listing in the Interior section. Zillow is like Realtor.com and provides only ONE exterior link that shows up in their Facts and Features section. They look for it in the Branded Virtual Tour field (and if an agent didn't put the Matterport tour in that field, it won't show up in that link in the Facts and Features section, something which I have witnessed in about 20% of the listings with Matterport tours on my local MLS.) Agents pay for media, but it ain't showing up on Zillow! These are the kinds of details that are not attended to by agents, so it's an area of consulting assistance that is very helpful (and appreciated) when I help guide them through posting their media. Back to Homes.com. At this point, they haven't yet responded to my several emails and phone call to Support to offer a potential solution to adding an external link. We shall watch... I asked about the video link that they display. I was interested if they cached the video on their site or if they pulled it from YouTube or Vimeo so I could understand the view count (which I share each week with my clients who have active listings). Homes.com relays the link request to YouTube, so it's just a pass-through and the view count is incremented on the YouTube page. (I haven't gotten an answer from Redfin on this). Traffic - SimilarWeb is a company that publishes traffic stats. The numbers I saw presented in the article that Dan posted were NOT near the traffic for Realtor.com, the number 2 site for real estate traffic. So maybe the threat is not as pressing as the article seems to present... I have put pursuit of answers from Homes.com lower on my priority list at this point. No use beating a dead horse... I asked about their Agent Membership plan (because I am a Coldwell Banker agent). For agents with very little property sales (like me because I am focusing on offering media services), the monthly charge is $100. For an agent that has sold about a dozen homes in the past 3-4 years, I was quoted $600 per month for membership. I note from the first post here that Homes.com will NOT syndicate a "free" Matterport tour they provide through their Agent Membership program. At this point, the value of that offer is WORTHLESS because Homes.com is not yet a 600-pound gorilla search site, like Zillow. What about the benefit of a virtual tour to showcase the property on Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, Trullia, etc??? An agent who is seeking to fulfill his fiduciary responsibility to sell the house will need to fork out money for a Zillow 3D Tour or a second Matterport tour that won't be restricted to Homes.com I really don't think there will be many agents, the ones who sell 3-4 houses or less per year, who are going to be willing to pay several hundred dollars per month for promotion on a lower-ranking search site. The money they are paying Homes.com is not really going to impact their efforts to SELL THE LISTING with the Matterport tour restriction. The monthly fee would more accurately be classified as "brand building" for the agent's presence on Homes.com. Well, that was fun to be able to share my efforts to get a handle on possibilities provided by the Homes.com platform! |
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 WGAN ForumFounder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @Home3D @Dataventurer @MeshImages @Meidansha Thank you for sharing your insights about CoStar's Homes.com platform. Here are some related WGAN Forum discussions: ✓ WGAN Forum discussions tagged: CoStar | Homes.com ✓ CoStar to hire thousands of Photographers to Shoot Matterport + Photos ✓ What CoStar's Acquisition of Matterport Means for Real Estate Photographers ✓ Matterport to be Acquired by CoStar [Matterport Media Release 22 April 24] Best, Dan |
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