patrick.net

I was thinking about this. It is key to making this system work.
The question is how would realtors react to it being part of the realtor contract?
Also the realtor could show the house without telling the seller so the seller isn't even aware there are bidders.
Unless there was some way of tracking who is coming and going into the house, maybe a spycam uploading to the cloud immediately every movement induced picture it takes, not giving the realtor time to disable the fuckin thing?

c1561490 says

Maybe that means the sellers agent needs to told that it is his contractual duty to inform all bidders that a bid is invalid until they submit on your site.

What if the site actually works to catch a fraudulent realtor? What could the losing bidders do about it?

Quigley says

What if the site actually works to catch a fraudulent realtor? What could the losing bidders do about it?

The seller would have lost out too, and no doubt a lawsuit would follow.

CBOEtrader says

as well as query existing databases

Which databases and how to get access?

BlueSardine says

The question is how would realtors react to it being part of the realtor contract?

Also the realtor could show the house without telling the seller so the seller isn't even aware there are bidders.

I'm sure realtors would not like it at all, and would strongly advise the seller not to track bids, but not for the real reason: it takes away the realtor's ability to hide bids.

Even if I get the seller to make it part of the realtor contract, the realtor could still simply forget to mention this system to certain bidders and still "lose" or "forget" about those bids. So I think bidders must also have the ability to log their bids even if the realtor does not give them a ticket number or other ID. But that opens the system up to anyone entering any bid. In that case, they would probably have to include contact info for the seller to see.

Could any of this be construed as "practicing real estate without a license"? That's one way they could shut it down. And if I did it with a license, I'm sure I'd quickly lose that license for some bogus reason.

How will you get people to show up to the site?

Patrick, few things:

First, I like the idea, it's a good starting point despite some of the concerns you raised above about people being apprehensive to participate and share financial information.

Next, we should all be aware of the arguments that can be used to explain why the closing price may be less than previously rejected offer, which we sometimes hear from realtors if they are willing to talk:

- The accepted lower offer had more cash and the owner didn't want to worry about the buyer's financing approvals.
- The highest offer was accepted originally, but there was a termite/roofing/structural issue that was found in the inspection. Therefore the price was lowered to keep the buyer and make the sale.
- The seller wanted to sell to a family that they thought would take care of the house as it had sentimental value to the seller.
- The seller has no obligation to accept the higher offer.

I say the above because it's an additional element that makes things harder to prove that fraud was involved. The way to prove it is that you have to have the rejected buyer and the seller corroborate on the story (or price misalignment). Otherwise you have nothing. And connecting those two parties is no easy task given the circumstances.

If there's a potential buyer that showed an offer higher than the published closing price, that's the lead that needs to be investigated. And there lies the challenge for connecting those people to your new site.

Interesting problem and I'm thrilled that there are some capable brains here thinking about it.

Here is what's in our favor. The people thinking about this problem are unquestionably smarter and more capable than the realtors committing the fraud. That tells me that it's only a matter of time before a solution is figured out if the foot remains on the gas pedal.

FortWayne says

How will you get people to show up to the site?

Just this morning in the shower I had the idea that I could simply mail postcards to the address of houses for sale with registration codes.

This would be good advertising, and it would validate the seller's identity to some degree. Of course, by the time I find out that a house is for sale, it's too late for the seller to add to his contract with the realtor, but the seller could still make it known that he wants this kind of disclosure of bids.

BayArea says

The way to prove it is that you have to have the buyer with the rejected offer and the seller corroborate on the story. Otherwise you have nothing.

True, so that's another good reason to contact sellers.

CBOEtrader says

I'd set it up as a facebook page with a chatbot

I don't have a lot of faith that Facebook would fight to keep the chatbot going in the face of realtor pressure. Look how quickly they took down "blasphemous" material in Pakistan: https://patrick.net/1304431/2017-03-28-facebook-complying-with-pakistan-blasphemy-laws-3-bloggers-arrested

@"A Good Realtor" what do you think of this idea?

Why not simply get your own Real Estate license, and then create your own website specializing in Internet Only Auctions for Real Estate sales? There's already Ebay to do this with any type of crap you want to sell. Ebay Motors for specifically autos.

So be an American Capitalist and offer a website as service for what you see is a need /want/desire not currently being offered in the marketplace

@patrick

rando says

FortWayne says

How will you get people to show up to the site?

Just this morning in the shower I had the idea that I could simply mail postcards to the address of houses for sale with registration codes.

Postcards will be very expensive. You could try and advertise on web sites that buyers and sellers of homes frequent. You will end up with a lot of hate mail from realtors, but that would be a sign of success.

errc says

Why not simply get your own Real Estate license

Three reasons:
1. Once you start to play by their rules, you are one of them.
2. Having a license means the license can be revoked as soon as I challenge the powers that be.
3. It might get good publicity to get attacked for not having a license when doing something as simple as recording bids.

Maybe eventually I'll have to do that, but sure don't want to start calling myself a realtor yet.

Strategist says

Postcards will be very expensive.

Yes, but if I start with say, just 100 in one area, then I will have a good idea of the site's viability. Ultimately I'd have to advertise like you say.

Patrick, you will be creating a more informed buyer and seller.
More communication between buyers and sellers.
Less control by Realtors, leading to less rip offs.
It will go a long way towards creating a system where the realtor is mostly dealing with the paperwork involved in a transaction, leading to more efficiency and lower costs for the buyers and sellers. The average realtor only does 2 to 4 transactions a year. You can't be an expert in real estate with such little volume. We need a system where a realtor does 2 to 4 transactions a month, gets paid a lot less per transaction, but makes up in volume.

rando says

It might get good publicity to get attacked for not having a license when doing something as simple as recording bids.

I don't see why you would need a real estate license to record bids. If you are not acting as a broker of any sort and just recording data for the record, then your actions should count as freedom of the press. You are simply keeping and publishing records. That does not make you a realtor, but a bookkeeper and publisher.

I agree, but laws are made to protect profits. Call me cynical, but I expect that if I manage to do something that benefits the public instead of realtor profits, they will find some way to call it illegal.

Patrick will find this particularly interesting.

Is my realtor committing fraud? What do I do? | Zillow
https://www.zillow.com/advice-thread/Is-my-realtor-committing-fraud.../584475/
Apr 27, 2015 - I just sold my house using the same realtor I used when I bought it. He was ... I am still relying on this agent to close my current house. April 27 ...

rando says

I agree, but laws are made to protect profits. Call me cynical, but I expect that if I manage to do something that benefits the public instead of realtor profits, they will find some way to call it illegal.

Unfortunate, but true. The solution to that is called The Pacman Defense. You attack your attackers by suing or counter-suing them. They have far more to lose, and you have far more to gain. Just make sure your incorporated first. That places the upper limit on what you can lose as your company's almost non-existent assets.

This too. Lots of stuff on the web about crooked realtors.

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Ethics-Go-Boom-Unscrupulous-real-estate-2895512.php

Yes, some good stories there:

Then there was the real estate agent who bragged to our agent that he had counseled the seller to keep our $3,000 deposit after we pulled out within the first 10-day contingency period, because he does it "all the time and always get[s] away with it." This was the sort of thing we could have gone to court for, but it would have cost about $10,000 in legal fees if we had lost, and the pressures of my personal life made the prospect of a legal battle over $3,000 seem unbearable. Instead, we hired a lawyer, who wrote a letter to the seller, who agreed to give us $1,500.

In the world of real estate, the seller and the buyer are always kept at a distance, and it's difficult to know what information actually gets conveyed.

When the agent announced to the seller (against the lawyer's explicit written instructions not to) that Pera was now working with a lawyer, Pera fired the agent.
"The day after I fired her, I found red nail polish all over my car," she said. Later, Pera learned, from talking to other area real estate agents, that the agent had a reputation for being a "hatchet woman," someone who would push through a sale at all costs.

Her advice for prospective home buyers has the hardened taint of a veteran soldier: "Don't depend on your agent to represent your interest. The agent represents the sale. They want the highest commission possible with the least amount of effort. Go in cynical, and let them know you're watching, and know what they are supposed to be doing.

he also encountered unethical behavior on the part of the selling agent, who demanded an "exclusive listing" -- meaning he would not work with another agent, because he wanted a full 6 percent commission from the sale. After not getting a response to two offers, So approached the seller directly and discovered that the agent, in an effort to drive up the price, had never delivered the earlier offers.

"It's like the vampire guarding the blood bank," said Pera of the Board of Realtors' ethical hearings. But most people seemed too overwhelmed and emotionally undone to continue the fight. "Devastated" was the word that popped up in every account.

And from the Zillow article:

However we had established a relationship that neither of our agents knew about and talked 1-2 times/day about the property.
I called to tell him what my offer was and that it was coming in. We discussed the terms. 2 days later he still had not received it so he called his agent, who apparently had "missed the email".

Got a better name: whatdidyoubid.com

Less negative. Another $11 spent! Burning through my cash. :-)

Updated the original post to reflect the new domain name.

rando says

whatdidyoubid.com

watubid.com

Sounds more trendy.

But will the public be able to type it correctly after hearing it pronounced, once, on the radio?

rando says

But will the public be able to type it correctly after hearing it pronounced, once, on the radio?

flickr, pinterest, grindr, tumblr, blendr, wikipedia, reddit

I think you're good. People will just Google it. Put in keywords with all possible spelling variations.

Went through some React tutorials and hated its obscurity, ridiculously complex build process, and the fact that "Hello World" creates a megabyte of javascript which the user has to download and parse to see anything at all.

So instead I'm going to do a minimal PHP framework and site, taking some of the ideas from React, like components. I'll make it its own github project.

Dan8267 says

watubid.com

Catchy.

rando says

So instead I'm going to do a minimal PHP framework and site

My advice: base your architecture on AJAX, JSON, the separation of content and presentation, and client-side DHTML. Don't generate HTML. Use static HTML in your pages and then use a framework like Knockout JS or Angular to dynamically manipulate the DOM using a model and bindings when you get back content from the server via an AJAX call. It's simple, easy to code, easy to debug, and cross-browser compliant.

The only server-side code you should need is to accept a JSON-formatted message, call your domain code, and return the result in a JSON-formatted response. That's it. Let the web browser or app do all the presentation.

And quite frankly, PHP sucks. It's an amateurish version of .NET and Java. And you get Tomcat free, and IIS is free for Windows Pro, even older versions of Windows.

@Dan8267 While I can see the attraction of serving JSON and then formatting it in the browser, it seems much more complex than simply generating HTML. OK, I don't get a JSON API for free then, but PHP has a couple of great advantages:

* It is a templating language itself. PHP files are just HTML files with some code in them to do dynamic things.
* It has a very easy learning curve. Most people can pick it up quickly.
* It has proven able to run very large sites, like Facebook and Yahoo.
* It's single threaded, unlike Java, and does not use callbacks for IO, unlike Javascript. Callbacks just muddy the water if you don't really need extreme performance.

React deliberately mixes content and presentation, so you might say the trend is in the other direction these days.

I was thinking of creating small PHP functions to generate HTML components like the header or footer, each one composed of sub-components the way React does. Each component will be labelled with an HTML "id" defined by the name of function that created it and iteration number for that function. So the header would always be id="header_1" for example.

Then each page can open a websocket back to the server, and I can push out replacement or additions to the DOM that way when state changes on the server side, calling the same function that created that fragment of HTML to begin with. That's how I did the instant comments feature on this site.

Why not make a site where real estate is auctioned, and all bid summary are public?

Bid 1
$300,000
appraisal contingency
loan contingency
inspection contingency

Bid 2
320,000 - cash
appraisal contingency
inspection contingency

I don't know if it'll work, just spitballing ideas.

I think that would be great for buyers, but sellers probably don't want it because it might expose lack of interest in their house when the public sees low bids or no bids at all. If sellers give away the info about bids, then they give away some power to manipulate perception.

What would make such a system attractive for sellers? One big advantage is knowing that their realtor is not able to block certain offers.

rando says

While I can see the attraction of serving JSON and then formatting it in the browser, it seems much more complex than simply generating HTML.

It's not. It's much simpler and easier. Here's an example of what the code for a loop would look like in Knockout JS. You don't have to do any formatting. Just use CSS as you normally would in a static HTML page.

Your model is just a JavaScript object. You populate that object by copying the data returned from the AJAX calls.

Using Fiddler or some other tool, you can see the exact content flowing from the client to the server and back. It makes debugging very easy.

rando says

PHP files are just HTML files with some code in them to do dynamic things.

It's server-side dynamic HTML. Essentially no different from JSP or ASP .NET except having an inferior implementation.

rando says

* It has a very easy learning curve. Most people can pick it up quickly.

The same can be said of JQuery, Knockout, and Angular. And you're going to want to use at least JQuery anyway.

rando says

It has proven able to run very large sites, like Facebook and Yahoo.

Ditto for JQuery, Knockout, and Angular. There is nothing you can do with server-side DHTML that cannot be done at least as easily, if not far more easily, with client-side DHTML. This didn't use to be true which is why server-side DHTML was invented. However, there are many things you can do with client-side DHTML that you cannot do with server-side DHTML.

rando says

It's single threaded, unlike Java, and does not use callbacks for IO, unlike Javascript.

JavaScript is single threaded, that crappy worker thread feature put aside. As such JavaScript frameworks like JQuery, Knockout, and Angular are also single-threaded. You won't do any multithreaded code, and don't need to.

rando says

Callbacks just muddy the water if you don't really need extreme performance.

Callbacks in AJAX are also single-threaded. The asynchronicity is not done for performance, but rather responsiveness, and it's real easy to do. But you can make synchronous callbacks at a flip of a switch if you want. Here's an example.

var Hello = (function ()
{
    try
    {
        /** Public functions and state. */
        var pub = {};

        pub.onClickButtonSayHello = function ()
        {
            try
            {
                var message =
                {
                    name: name
                };

                $.ajax
                ({
                    type: "post",
                    url: "/ajax?message=SayHello",
                    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
                    dataType: "json",
                    data: JSON.stringify(message),
                    success: helloOnSuccess,
                    error: helloOnFailure
                });
            }
            catch (ex)
            {
                exceptionHandler.handleException(ex);
            }
        }

        function helloOnSuccess (result)
        {
            try
            {
                model.domain.greeting(result.greeting);
            }
            catch (ex)
            {
                exceptionHandler.handleException(ex);
            }
        }

        function helloOnFailure (xhr, status, error)
        {
            try
            {
                exceptionHandler.handleAjaxError(xhr, status, error);
            }
            catch (ex)
            {
                exceptionHandler.handleException(ex);
            }
        }

        return pub;
    }
    catch (ex)
    {
        exceptionHandler.handleException(ex);
    }
}
());

And this is what your HTML looks like.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <title>Hello World</title>

        <script src="/js2/jquery-2.0.3.min.js"></script>         <!-- http://jquery.com/download/ -->
        <script src="/js2/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>            <!-- http://jqueryui.com/download/#!themeParams=none -->

        <script src="/js2/knockout-3.2.0.js"></script>           <!-- http://knockoutjs.com/downloads/knockout-3.2.0.js -->
        <script src="/js2/knockout.mapping-2.4.1.js"></script>   <!-- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SteveSanderson/knockout.mapping/master/build/output/knockout.mapping-latest.js -->

        <script src="/js/exceptionHandler.js"></script>
        <script src="hello.js"></script>
        <script src="helloPageModel.js"></script>
    </head>

    <body>
        <div>
            <span>Name: </span>
            <input type="text" data-bind="value: model.domain.name" />
        </div>
        <br />

        <input type="button" value="Say hello" onclick="hello.onClickButtonSayHello()" />
         

        <div data-bind="text: model.domain.greeting"></div>
    </body>
</html>

You can make very rich and sophisticated UIs easily with this approach. It gets even better when you start writing your own HTML tags and bindings.

rando says

I was thinking of creating small PHP functions to generate HTML components like the header or footer, each one composed of sub-components the way React does. Each component will be labelled with an HTML "id" defined by the name of function that created it and iteration number for that function. So the header would always be id="header_1" for example.

Way too complicated. Make a Knockout JS control and register a custom tag. Your HTML will look like

<header data-bind="navigationMode: headerModel.navigationMode, loggedInUserId: userModel.userId, displayName: userModel.userDisplayName" />

rando says

I think that would be great for buyers, but sellers probably don't want it because it might expose lack of interest in their house when the public sees low bids or no bids at all. If sellers give away the info about bids, then they give away some power to manipulate perception.

What would make such a system attractive for sellers? One big advantage is knowing that their realtor is not able to block certain offers.

I would think it can create ebayish kind of competition, I haven't seen anyone try that in real estate outside probate auctions. I don't really know if it'll catch on. Just never seen anyone do this.

It looks like such a thing does exist: https://www.auction.com/residential/

Dan, I'll try out knockout.

FortWayne says

rando says

I think that would be great for buyers, but sellers probably don't want it because it might expose lack of interest in their house when the public sees low bids or no bids at all. If sellers give away the info about bids, then they give away some power to manipulate perception.

What would make such a system attractive for sellers? One big advantage is knowing that their realtor is not able to block certain offers.

I would think it can create ebayish kind of competition, I haven't seen anyone try that in real estate outside probate auctions. I don't really know if it'll catch on. Just never seen anyone do this.

I have seen many try auctions in So Cal. I don't see it anymore, so it may not have worked.

rando says

It looks like such a thing does exist: https://www.auction.com/residential/

Until the seller's reserve price is met, Auction.com may counter bid on behalf of the seller. Counter bidding gives buyers and sellers more flexibility to find a mutually agreeable price. Counter bids do not occur after the seller's reserve price is met.

Unless the reserve is public, that's a scam. If the reserve is public, then just start the bidding at the reserve. Auctions that aren't completely honest discourage participation.

Dan8267 says

Auctions that aren't completely honest discourage participation.

Lol, that's the normal state of real estate!

The auctions are already dishonest in ways, like bogus asking prices secret bidding, blocked bids, etc. Anything different would be an improvement.

I've been super-busy developing the beginnings of whatdidyoubid.com over the last two weeks.

Hopefully will have something presentable within a week or so.

@Dan8267 I'm going with node and the new ES6 templating abilities. It's going reasonably well. You can see the source code so far here:

https://github.com/killelea/whatdidyoubid.com

rando says

I've been super-busy developing the beginnings of whatdidyoubid.com over the last two weeks.

Hopefully will have something presentable within a week or so.

Whatever you please identify your goals.
Suggestions of some goals:
Reduce real estate fraud.
Reduce real estate commissions.
Increase fair play for buyers and sellers.

Strategist says

Increase fair play for buyers and sellers.

I love that!