Editor’s note: The following excerpts were taken from the Inman News Blog, where you can find daily insights and musings on the U.S. housing market.
Dismal
Goldman Sachs had its first housing conference yesterday and the outlook is not great. Here was a spot survey of the attendees.
What do you think will happen to home prices in 2007? Fifty-two percent predict prices will go down 0-10 percent.
What do you think will happen to new home orders in 2007? Seventy-eight percent predict orders will go down.
At one point in time, this news might have made Wall St. giddy as investors would favor equities over real property, but not anymore. The Street is very very vested in the housing market. For a change, no one is happy about a down housing market.
–Bradley Inman, Inman News
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Realtor.com granted 6-week reprieve
Last month, NWMLS, the MLS for Washington state and parts of Oregon, announced that its agreement with Realtor.com would terminate effective April 22, 2007. At that time, Realtor.com was in the process of sending members information about how they could continue to provide their listing information for publication on their Web site, but many had not received those communications and were not prepared to transition to a direct relationship with Realtor.com.
In order to ensure that members have enough time to make the transition, NWMLS and Realtor.com have agreed to extend the deadline until June 1, 2007. Realtor.com’s Web site (http://feeds.theenterprise.com) has more information about the transition and contains a letter explaining the changes and a copy of the agreement that must be signed if brokers wish to continue to send their listings to Realtor.com on their own.
Washington state’s largest real estate firm, Windermere Real Estate, has never sent its listings to Realtor.com anyway, so the site has been nearly useless in this state, and I expect it to become even more irrelevant as smaller brokers will not have the resources or inclination to enable a direct feed. With such a small percentage of listings available, clients and customers will become frustrated and turn directly to broker sites which feature an IDX feed from the NWMLS instead. Which, ultimately, is what brokers want clients to do anyway.
–Marlow Harris, 360Digest.com
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Web 2.0 Transparency at Its Best: Money and Politics
SAN FRANCISCO — A new nonprofit service based in Berkeley, Calif., has launched a Web site, MAPlight.org, that pulls together information about California lawmakers and money contributions they have received. The site breaks down state bills by interest group and combines bill texts and legislative voting records, supporting and opposing interests for each bill, and campaign contribution data from the Institute on Money in State Politics and the Center for Responsive Politics.
Real estate is among the special interest groups analyzed at the site. Users can see a breakdown of the pass/kill rate of bills supported/opposed by subgroups, including real estate agents and managers, developers, title insurance, mortgage brokers and bankers, and others.
MAPlight.org (MAP = Money And Politics) next month will be expanding the service to include U.S. Congress data and other state legislatures. The site builds on OpenSecrets.org and makes the information easy to search and compare.
–Jessica Swesey, Inman News
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Ten technology trends
1. More is more: traffic, blog posts, leads, community, friends and ratings.
2. Tech as habit: all of the time, real time, twit away.
3. End of IT dependency: learn open source apps yourself.
4. Participate: stop resisting exposure, transparency or presence.
5. Look for commonality in new places; do not hang on affinity.
6. Security and privacy are not primary.
7. Data is FREE, move on and up.
8. Give up more and get more back.
9. Mobile is it, not something else.
10. Feeling fearful? Step aside.
–Bradley Inman, Inman News
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