I'm talking about an idea that was presented to me by an Encinitas entrepreneur, over on Bloodhound Blog.
If you are in the market for a home, you'll love this idea.
If you're selling, you probably won't. The rub here is that the real
estate brokerage industry has favored sellers (because they pay them)
to the detriment of buyers, for generations. I think that's all about
to change.
An excerpt:
We ignored the demand-side of the trade. Now, when Mao and Ivan tell us to mark those mortgage bonds to the market, we have no reliable pricing service because we can’t see what the demand, property by property, is. We can’t build a pricing model worth trusting because we have no idea about the true demand for the collateral behind the loans. This mortgage-backed securities market collapse goes deeper than the Fed’s unexpected flight from support. It started when a bond fund manager suggested that our nation’s collateral, and confidence, was in jeopardy of being downgraded. This rise in mortgage rates is as much a fear of systemic failure as it is of inflation…
…and it ain’t over yet.
I met a guy last month who thinks he has a solution. It’s so simple it’s silly; an open market, like the NASDAQ, for real estate. Watch offers for houses, in real-time, be accepted or declined. NASDAQ Level Two Quotes go beyond the bid and ask; they show the “size” of the market for those prices. The implementation of that transparency greatly reduced the previous NASDAQ market manipulation, that stymied the individual investor to favor institutions. It isn’t perfect but exposure to that data makes the market operate more efficiently. Apply that model to real estate and you will quickly determine what the “real” market is for a property.