WatchThe Patrick.net home page now asks potential buyers to say what zip code and price they're interested in, so that sellers can email them the address and description of one specific property for sale in that zip code. It's the exact opposite of the traditional real estate advertising model, where a seller lists a house. We have buyers listing prices instead.
I tried this before, but I was asking way too much detail from buyers, so it was really hard to match up with relevant sellers. And I was asking too much money from sellers to contact individual buyers.
So this time around:
1. Buyers will specify only the zip code and price they want, nothing else.
2. Patrick.net will mass email every buyer in that zip code who can pay the price a seller is asking, on behalf of the seller, for 46 cents per email. The reply-to address will be set to the seller. That way, The buyer's email address is hidden from the seller unless the buyer replies. Each email will also have an unsubscribe link for that zip code.
One goal here is to put buyers and sellers in direct email contact, so they can avoid realtors and both come out ahead.
Try it out. It's right at the top of the http://patrick.net/ home page.
Suggestions appreciated.
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You find me a SFH in the peninsula that needs work and is around $300sq/ft you let me know.
Oh, and in a decent neighborhood (schools irrelevant) and not in EPA.
Also, if you you see a pig flying, you also let me know.
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SFace says
Thanks for the encouragement.
zzyzzx says
I know, but zip codes are relatively small easily indexed areas of similar populations. I can't think of a better way to do it, can you?
robertoaribas says
Well, duh. No agent ever wants buyers and sellers to directly talk to each other. They get their commission by getting in the way and preventing direct communication.
donjumpsuit says
Please give it a shot! Just enter $300K and some peninsula zip codes and you're done. Not a lot of work on your part and maybe you can go around the realtors.
How else can I improve this? I can't let the buyers enter details beyond price and zip code until I have a zillion buyers signed up.
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I'd like to try it. Can't kill me. There are no good deals on the MLS, and going direct to a seller might work.
Can I search by cities or counties? As an investor I'd be more interested in a good deal rather than a specific zip code. Can I search by land?
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Laguna Beach, CA
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I'd try this service (if I wasn't already a new home owner).
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I like it and think this can work. Can't be worse than using a realtor. Btw. realtors in the bay area have picked up the strategy again to tell their clients that it's absolutely necessary to overbid if they want to have any chance of getting the place. I have followed a couple of listings in SF and quite a few sold significantly below asking price.
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Is this something like a lead selling concept?
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This could be a great deal for sellers. $46.00 for a 100 leads is a bargain. Sure most of the leads will be "lookie loos" but you just need to sell once.
Success will lie in getting enough buyers and sellers to sign up.
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Raw says
Well, the idea here is that the sellers search for you. Kind of inverted from the usual situation of you searching for properties. If there is a seller who has property in your zip code and at or below your price, you'll get an email.
Here's a list of the buyers signed up so far:
http://patrick.net/housing/buyers.php
FortWayne says
Sort of, but not exactly because the buyers don't have to reply.
It's more like sellers being able to directly advertise to buyers who have already expressed an interest in their zip code and price level.
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Patrick says
There are lots of zip codes I'd be interested in. I would need to punch them in one at a time? Won't cities be easier if the volume of interested parties is still low at this time?
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Patrick says
Ok Ok, I will go along.
However, I have about 20 zipcodes that interest me, entering them one at a time seems like I am going to populate your database with redundancies. Is that how you want to do it?
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donjumpsuit says
Oh also, I am only interested in Single Family Homes. How about a dropdown box for that. Because my price range could be extremely desirable for a apartment, but that's not something that interests me.
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Raw says
OK, I will let people put in a whole "city, state" to express interest in every zip code in a city. Give me a day.
Also, when someone enters one zip code, I'm going to have it suggest all the adjacent zip codes, which they can then just click to add any of them.
donjumpsuit says
Yes, if you're really interested in 20 zip codes, then they are not redundant.
KarlRoveIsScum says
Can you send me a screen shot, or post the screen shot here? Looks OK in my browser, but I know different browsers do things differently.
donjumpsuit says
Yes, I plan to let buyers be more specific eventually, but at first I want to keep really general to see if I can get any matching sellers at all.
Thanks for your suggestions! Please post more suggestions.
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Also, please pretend you're a seller and start to go through that side, but just don't pay. Can't hurt anything.
Maybe doing that will help people see what I'm trying to do and trigger ways to make it more useful and user-friendly.
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Hi,
maybe include a school district choice. For example, someone might want Los Gatos, which is 2 or 3 zips, but only LG schools, not Campbell or Union. Or Saratoga with Saratoga or Cupt schools. or West SJ with Cupt schools only.
However I can see that this would be very manual to set up. Within California you might be able to scrape the school district listings from the API website but I'm not sure about other states.
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Patrick says
You know exactly what will happen.
You'll have a list of buyers, 500K in San Carlos/Belmont, 400K in Fremont, SFH, good condition, good school district and over a period of 2 months, the prospective sellers (which there are not available already) says "hell no". There will be no email, nothing. You've seen the result already. You have no service for the buyer because there will be nothing from the seller.
And as explained previously, seller does not engage on solication situation and lose leverage over 5 stinking percent. Houses that people like, chances are, it runs 100 deep. If I want to sell something, it would be marketed to every interested party possible. If it was an auction, I want 100 people in the room, not 2.
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This is a good idea, though as the saying goes "It never pays to be more than 10 minutes ahead of your time." In a healthy balanced RE market this idea would work well, but with QE& ZIRP propping up prices, it's an artificial seller's market, at least around SF Bay. So, in the current environment, I'm not sure if sellers will pay to e-mail prospective buyers on PatNet of all places. That doesn't make it a bad idea, just the time might be wrong.
BTW, entering both an area code and ZIP code might be a convenient way of either broadening or narrowing, i.e. "either in this ZIP OR in this area code" vs "only addresses that are in this ZIP and are also in this area code."
Also narrowing by SFH vs condo vs TIC/co-op, and sqft.
In response to Roberto's comment about "serious" buyers, the high volume market consists of "motivated sellers" and "serious buyers", i.e. people who want to buy and sell right now. You might reach other niches, people who plan seriously to buy or sell but aren't in a hurry. In other countries (e.g. France) elderly people sell their homes on an installment basis in exchange for lifetime income, famously Jeanne Calment did that and set a world record for longevity at 122. In that niche, flexibility about when to close the sale might be more valuable than getting the "best price" right now.
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San Juan Capistrano, CA
OK, I'm in. Been trying to buy the "traditional" way for over two years...it's a mess out there. How do I go about listing zip and price?
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lisasgarden says
Just enter your desired zip and price on the patrick.net home page! Upper right.
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Saint George, UT
elliemae's website
Hopefully it will work.
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Los Angeles, CA
Good luck. This will fail. Another case of patrick not understanding the actual process of RE sales since he is too moral to try being an agent for 6 months.
1. Its a crazy sellers market they are flooded with opposite traffic 'can i please buy your home please'?
2. Market leads to agents not sellers. Sellers hire agents to do this. Fsbo people just are not out there spending money - they use CL
3. All hope of disenfranchising agents will fail. If it were possible it would have been done by now. The web is not new anymore.
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It's true. This concept is a tough sell. In this market or others.
The only hope, would be to do a blast advertising campaign, so when people typed words into Google, this would be the first website to pop up.
I.E.
"Sell my home", "Sell my home quick", "Sell home without agent"
Unfortunately, every flipper in the land is populating this space. The biggest evidence of this is all the stupid signs you see at freeway off ramps.
The ones that say "Cash for homes quick" or "Forclosure? We can help."
There are people out there who have no clue how to sell their home and want it to be easy. There are also people out there who are embarrassed (hoarders) about their home, or really don't want more than just one or two people to view it.
These people will sacrifice any idea of how much they can actually get in this market for the privacy of just selling quick.
Unfortunately. I doubt these people find this service, or this website.
Unless its jammed down their throat on a TV commercial during Judge Judy or on a big billboard by there house.
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donjumpsuit says
What would get people to share the service with their friends?
The best advertising is word of mouth, and it's free.
I suppose once people get some decent emails from sellers, they will tell friends. But then it's still a chicken and egg problem.
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Only viable plan i see to make large money is what i said before.
Refer buyers from your site to patriks honezt agentz. Take a 25% cut off any transaction and all u do is forward contact info.
I didnt get a 7 figure net worth by fighting the system and niether will you.
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PockyClipsNow says
Disrupting the system is the best possible way to get rich.
I'm up to 161 distinct buyer + zip combinations already. Not bad. I need to do a lot of improvements and advertising though.
Patrick says
OK, that's done now.
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There is zero possibility that spam has anything to do with this service, since I've had no sellers pay anything, and even when they pay, they don't get your email address. The email would come from p@patrick.net with a reply-to of the seller's email address.
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Atlanta, GA
Patrick, you're trying to disrupt a monopoly. A mass-mailer is not going to scratch it. Like Facebook, your strategy should be to first get buyers and sellers to voluntarily list their homes (or what they are in the market for) and then monetize it later.
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But, I am getting buyers to list what they are in the market for.
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Patrick says
For starters - put the data on a separate site. Preferably something far far away from Patrick.net
I say this because any prospective seller/buyer will come to this site, browse around and see batsh*t crazy conspiracy theories about 9/11, 1975 nominal prices, the goobermint is gonna take all our guns, & various other nonsense. Nothing about that says: "this is a serious place that will help me sell/buy a house."
Moreover, while it is getting better, no seller is going want to engage a prospective patnet buyer given the overall sentiment was once best expressed as:
"I cant wait for prices on the peninsula to crash so I can spit in the faces of those greedy, entitled, FU*KS!!!"
Nothing about this inspires a seller to expect he is going to find realistic buyers via this site.
For alot of us, I suspect patrick.net is our guilty pleasure - our chance to engage in the seedy underworld of peoples feelings & frustrations about the market. Thus, to the extent any patnetters have normal jobs or normal lives, few are going to want to risk any credibility by introducing their normal friends to a site where noise outnumbers signal by a vast margin.
Maybe make it a 1 way filter whereby anyone already on patnet can go to the seller/buyer site, but no one who comes randomly to the seller/buyer site will know that it is affiliated with patrick.net. First impressions matter you know. As my wife used to say to her sis before she went out on a first date - hide the crazy Jules - hide the crazy!!!
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Nampa, ID
I have to agree with Dcon on this 1. That's a big glitch in the business plan. However while housing makes it's gains over the next season or 2 you might be able to change things up where needed and gain some footing.
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Los Angeles, CA
Cdon has this site nailed. Its here for unmoderated venting/nonsense.
Its like the old screw magazine or hustler and 'wants to be respected like playboy' lol
i say embrace it. Offer a service where they can pay to send dogpoo to an agent, or text messages with poo photos or wateva. Lol
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CDon says
If I can come up with enough buyers in some zip code and price range, sellers will pay to advertise directly to them. They may be crazy, but they have stated a price they are willing to pay in a certain zip code, and that's what really matters to sellers.
That, and contacting bunches of such people easily, all at once.
Anyway, this is the only site I have and it has traffic. If I start another site, it will start from zero traffic.
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Pacifica, CA
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I was looking at the postings in that section. I am a little worried that some of them look spammy to me. For example, someone put in multiple million dollar homes desired in Lafayette, LA. If you can't find a house for that money in that city, you are totally and completely lost.
Is there a way to verify the "buyers" to make sure they are least people? Is there anything you can ask a person to sign that verifies that they are not realtors?
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Victorville, CA
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PockyClipsNow says
Huh...and I had you pegged more as a Blueboy reader.
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bg says
Thanks. I don't quite get it though. Why would a realtor pretend to be a buyer? Just to maybe get emails of houses for sale by owner and try to convert the FSBO to being represented by themselves?
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"1. 99% of people who say they are looking aren't serious, or qualified. Even if the contact was cheap, the expected value would be remarkably low."
Maybe that is because they know they can get a realtor to do the work for them. So they ask a bunch of questions and maybe even get driven around some. For free. People who visit Patrick's site will be inherently more engaged. Bottom line about those 99 percent people you mention: you are the problem.
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Scottsdale, AZ
robertoaribas's website
Patrick says
yes, obviously...
SO... your seller gets to pay a $ amount to reach out to one contact at a time... while a seller can list it on zillow.com, trulia.com, craigslist.com etc.... for free, and any buyer in the world can find it. what a deal!
pdg says
patrick.net readers are "inherently more engaged???" hahaha!
do you mean inherently more engaged in thinking they should write offers at 50% of asking price? that prices are going to drop to near zero anytime soon? that there is a tsunami of foreclosure about to crush the market? that buying a home for $80K that rents for $1100 a month is a bad move? that you should wait until interest rates are 50% before you buy?
that kind of engaged? a crowd of worse potential buyer leads doesn't exist anywhere outside of a methadrone clinic!
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chanakya4773 says
We disagree there.
I'm pretty sure sellers are indeed very interested in mass-mailing directly to interested buyers in their zip code and price range.
I'm not working on the selling process here, just a specialized kind of advertising.
I'm up to 402 distinct buyer + zip combinations now!
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I think this is a good idea, though it will be tough to get off the ground.
I think to add value to the sellers (and give better results to buyers) it should include a few minimums SQ FT , Lot size, # Bed rooms .
I know there's no way i would personally consider a house with a small lot, or with less than 4 bed rooms (planning on 2 kids, + a crafting / guest bed room) :)
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You're right that it is hard to get critical mass, but the buyers keep rolling in. I'm up to 417 distinct user + zip combinations now. Just has to keep increasing and eventually I'll get there.
Yes, it would also be nice to let buyers and sellers specify more than zip and price, and when I can get sufficient scale, I'll do that. But for now, I think Twitter-like simplicity is the way to get it rolling.
In fact, I wish I could make it even more simple that it is, but I don't see how.
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What's a better way to organize the list of buyers? This kind of sucks:
http://patrick.net/housing/buyers.php
Should I just put them all on a Google map of the US, with a number in the zip code marker showing the number of buyers in that zip? Then click on marker to get details?
Or is there some other better way to display them?
Suggestions appreciated.