There’s a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is “instant buying” or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But… Read More
I have been writing about the real estate startup Opendoor for many years here on the blog. Another promising startup in this space is Knock, and today it was announced that they just raised a $400 million Series B round (led by Foundry Group). They share… Read More
The Toronto Real Estate Board (Canada’s largest real estate board) and the Competition Bureau have been fighting for years over whether TREB’s housing market sales data, including realtor commissions, should be publicly available online. The Competition Bureau, as well as many forward thinking realtors, believe… Read More
A new “transparent offer platform” called Haus has just launched in California to serve the residential real estate market. The way it works is that all offers are submitted online. And once an offer has been confirmed, it – along with all of its terms –… Read More
I’ve written about Opendoor.com a few times. As far as I can tell, they are the furthest ahead in terms of disrupting the residential real estate market. So I like to follow them quite closely. They’ve recently launched some new features, so I figured it… Read More
https://500px.com/embed.js If you’ve ever bought a property, you might be familiar with something called “multiple representation.” It’s when one real estate agent represents both the seller and the buyer for a particular transaction. It may also be called “dual agency.” The reason this can happen is because,… Read More
If you ask most people, they’ll tell you that real estate agents will never ever disappear. Despite the internet, mobile phones, social networks, and companies (here in Canada) such as comFree and PropertyGuys, the bulk of the market still employs an agent when it comes… Read More
Back when the commercial internet first started to take off it was uncommon to use your real name online. Instead people relied on usernames and other pseudynoms to represent themselves. I honestly can’t remember what I used in those days, but I’m sure it was… Read More
The Globe and Mail ran a piece this morning called, The Realtors of Oz: Bidding wars are unnecessarily sleazy. For anyone who has recently tried to buy a house in Toronto, you’ll know that multiple offer scenarios, also known as “bidding wars”, are a fairly common… Read More
This past Sunday I was over at my father’s place for dinner and we were talking about the high transaction costs associated with buying and selling homes. That is, we weren’t talking about the high price of homes in Toronto, we were only talking about… Read More
