o’neill media

This is a great site that let’s you get the value of your house immediately, Zillow.com pulls comps from the area and shows you an approximation of your homes worth (the data seems a little off) but a great concept nonetheless, I hope they keep improving on this. I think the Internet (the great equalizer) should have made some kind of a dent in the commissions that real estate brokers are gauging people for. The key to their success is access to the MLS, they keep the access to that thing so tight that regular people never know what’s available unless they have a broker to do a simple search for them. I’ll say one thing, I’ve never worked with a broker that was worth a quarter of what they were paid. Maybe there are a lot of great ones out there, I have never met them.

My solution, I am giving my million dollar idea away here. Make an open-source platform for real estate listings. Craigslist has done a great job, and people are getting adequate principal-to-principal sales through it. But let’s develop an open-source platform that does all this stuff where sellers and brokers can list properties for free, and buyers and brokers can look for properties in an easy manner. Craigslist can definitely do this, but will need to alter their UI significantly.

I just bought the domain name oslistings.com, and plan to use it. Well, I actually probably never will, but I’ve got it in my bag of tricks for later. I want, and would be, relieved if someone would just do it first.