Probably Not – In Reply to Tepilo Ending Need for Estate Agents

Sticking comment here as can’t be arsed with yet another signup or login just to comment.

Let me start of with I’m not coming out to defend the Estate Agency industry as a whole.  Much of their reputation is well deserved there are a great many sharks.  However there are also plenty of super well trained, nice, kind, informed and helpful agents too.  Just like any industry I guess.

Today Mike Butcher has a guest post up on the Telegraph’s website entitled “Does Sarah Beeny’s free property website herald the end for estate agents?”

Well simply the answer is no it won’t.

The whole FSBO (for sale by owner) model is well understood in America, Australia and NZ where a homeowner takes control of the whole marketing and negotiation process in selling their home.

The system works for a percentage but the last research I saw this was something like < 10% of all FSBO resulting in sale.

The reasons are simple.  Most people are not trained in marketing and in English based cultures haggling (negotiating) is a skill long forgotten.  For anyone in the UK the latest adverts by MoneySupermarket.com starring comedian Omid Djalili even mention the “cringe gland” being prevalent in the English where haggling is concerned.

The problem for many is that, quite rightly, their house is not a property it is a home. Somewhere they are emotionally tied to and when it comes to the business of selling a home removing that emotion is critical.

Why?  Well for a start the biggest killer in selling a property is price.  Too high and no one will even view the place, or at least if they do they will most likely be disappointed having expected it to have been better than it is – after all it is priced in a higher bracket with better properties.  Too low and most people will avoid it thinking there is something wrong.  Pricing is key.

Without training or at least access to decent quality comparable sales data it is really hard for a homeowner to get the pricing right.  Sure there are valuers or surveyors but they cost money and the whole point of FSBO is to avoid cost, right?

The second part to removing emotion from the process problem lays in mentally detaching oneself from the home and treating it as a commodity to be sold.  Trust me on this, it’s hard.  And without that detachment even the simplest of selling tools such as presenting the home for sale is a tricky task.  Home prep is not about clean and tidy, it’s so much more. Sure clean and tidy matters but it’s more about creating a space which prospective buyers can visualise as being their own not yours.   Try removing all personal effects, photo’s, pictures, that lovely family heirloom brass plate from the wall and living in the space for a while.  Your home stops being your home.  It’s hard.

And so back to Beeny’s new website, Tepilo.  I’ve seen a number of these “market your own home and save on fees” sites along with magazines, papers and even shops come and go over the last 10 years.  Sure this one has a “celebrity” name behind it.  Sure people are becoming ever better equipped with internet based resources for pricing, marketing and finding property.  But…

An estate agent does this for a job often 7 days a week. The good ones are formally trained (and where available qualified) and armed to the teeth with better information, better skills, more time.

There are amateur mechanics out there who will tinker with their cars.  I don’t.  Sure I could learn a few skills but when it comes down to the safety of my family I’m the first to throw the work to a local garage.  It’s no different in the internet space.  Anyone can get a copy of Dreamweaver or Frontpage (they still do that?) and knock up a website – will it be any good?  Maybe.  Could a professional have done a better job, probably.

Finally every agent understands fees are a sticking point when competing for business.  You can always try to haggle just don’t forget they haggle for a living.  More importantly find yourself an agent who can offer you more value in using their services than they cost, they should be able to prove their track record on this so just ask.

Screencast of Models, Ownership and Privacy

Okay here is a screencast of my presentation from the recent BEUC Forum on Consumer Privacy.  It has taken longer than hoped to get up and running (call me a luddite – I’m just not a video person and so learning new tools has been a steep old learning curve).  BTW sorry for the slightly iffy sound quality (inc the slightly monotone narration), a super snotty cold is never going to help.

Proper thanks must go to the masses of wonderful people who make their photographs available under Creative Commons (especially those good enough to allow commercial use) without whom this just would have been a non-starter with stock art websites charging way beyond my means.  That and really I needed to hammer the CC license thing home – you’ll see why.

On the subject of Creative Commons, this screencast is available for you to take away, use & redistribute (yup even for commercial stuff) at will as long as it doesn’t get edited, attribution is given and all the licenses of embedded works respected (i.e. no nicking bits of other people’s stuff).

So to all those whose works I have used, here’s credit where it is due:

For anyone needing/wanting you can also download the presentation in 3GP format (approx 7mb) for your mobile/iPod here.

Should You Validate Your Twitter Following?

I followed someone today on Twitter, a real person in fact I had just had a coffee and a long chat with them.  Nothing new there I agree but within seconds of committing the follow I received a Direct Message from a service called TrueTwit asking me to validate my profile.

The premise of the service is that by asking all new followers to jump through a few basic hoops (captcha’s and such) TrueTwit can validate that the profile belongs to a proper person rather than a spambot.  Seems a smart enough idea providing some provenance but it got me thinking…

1. Do I really care if accounts following me are real people or bots enough to ask new followers to place a barrier to them following me?
2. By not validating oneself as a person how does TrueTwit preclude that account from following other than by simply applying a “block”?
3. Even blocking a profile does not prevent an account on Twitter from @ replying anyway as it is not follow/following dependant.
4. What about those bots I actually want to follow me, those which I use for automated functions?

What would be more useful to me would be the ability to validate those that I wish to follow, or at least selectively.  Of course the problem there would be akin to the first point above, “do I care if you follow me enough to validate myself to you?”

Any thoughts on Twitter or any other SocNet validation usefulness?

eBay’s Nutty UK Pricing Premium

In the US from June 16th one has been able to list 5 items free a month.  Well not entirely free as the offer only extends to the insertion fee itself – a saving of $0.75 is still a saving.  Without further analysis is does look a lot like the offer is actually not that special as there is a flat rate 8.75% success fee on those 5 items and I seem to recall it was previously tiered.

If anyone has a copy of the pre-June 16th fees I’d love to know what they were.

But that’s the US.  I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something.

In the UK that free listings offer is no where to be found on eBay’s site, and to make it worse eBay actually charge:

• tiered insertion fees ranging from zero for < £0.99 items to £1.90 for items over £100 and multi-list items,
• success fees are a flat rate 10% with a maximum of £40.

If I sold a bike for say £200 (c. $300) here’s how the regional pricing works out…

It costs 21% more to sell the same item through eBay in the UK than in US.  Is the US offering less of a service, well you could easily argue a bigger audience should mean more potential bidders so should really command a premium.

But the reality is there is NO difference in the offering from eBay that I can discern other than a 21% premium for living in the UK.

And who said the internet was breaking down international trading borders?

I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something, but…

I’ve talked about eBay’s listing and success fees before on Twitter but having received an email today offering up free listing insertions I thought it best to write down just what eBay are doing with pricing and where I think they are going horribly wrong.

GizaPage – Shame About the T&Cs

Launched today into public beta, GizaPage is hoping to reach the holy grail (in my view) of social network self management, the Social Quarterback – a single place where one can update each and every social network, manage contacts, profiles and all that goodness without having to jump from site to site. It’s a little like chi.mp but with some added, and rather useful functionality. You sign up, add the services you want to use (choose from about 40 or so including all the main SocNets), import contacts and you’re presented with a neat tabbed UI providing access to each service. Great, I’ve been banging on to people I know about having a decent Social Quarterback for a couple of years now and we’ll see if GizaPage can live up to the promise.

BUT

Concern #1 – Sign Up is a Lousy UX Sign up is yet another account creation form. Why no use of OpenID or even Facebook Connect? When will sites learn that having another account for managing sites is not the smart route?

Concern #2 – Onerous T&Cs You know that innocuous little “I accept the terms” check box we all just bypass to get at the goodies. Well, don’t just yet. A few months back Facebook tried to grant themselves a license to do what they wanted with anything you created within their walls. The crowd cried foul and Facebook recanted. Well GizaPage have done it as well. Just look at section 9 of the T&C’s. Lurking in there is subsection 9.3 reading as;

posting User Content to any part of the Website, including any third party service rendered “tabs”, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to GizaPage an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid up, worldwide licence including the right to sublicence, to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose.

Aside from the simple fact that GizaPage is providing merely a conduit for this information to the site of one’s choice (granted a quick and useful conduit) their Privacy Statements make it quite clear they won’t be sharing this content with any one else.

This granting of a license is odd, when actually using GizaPage the creation of content is actually done on the original service site – displayed within a frame. Technically here you are NOT creating your content on GizaPage’s site (you do when editing permissions, over all profile pages and such), so anything you do say against Friendfeed should not fall under their license – in theory at least.

Concern #3 – A Right to Change Terms So why grant themselves a license? Seems harmless enough but also hiding in the T&C’s GizaPage grant themselves a right to change those terms at whim and without notification.

Can anyone else see a problem here?

I’m off for a play with the site BUT I will be careful what content I create for now, at least, until some clarification over these T&Cs is made.