New HAR.com: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Drumroll, please. The new HAR.com website was released today by the Houston Association of Realtors as a Valentine's Day gift for everyone to enjoy. The way I see it, this gift will be like a romantic trip to Paris for some and like a pack of tube socks for others.
The Good
Finally, HAR.com enters the 21st century by introducing social networking and bookmarking capability to their site. Although, way overdue, this addition will give Houston home listings more exposure as people share homes they like on social networking sites like Facebook or as they Digg around.
The ability to browse Open Houses is no new feature on HAR.com. However, in my view, the improved Open House search represents a movement from an utterly useless feature, to one that could help draw prospective buyers to open houses by means of eye pleasing map searches and such. Any real estate agent involved in Houston Real Estate that does open houses to any extent will be thankful for this feature.
Finally, the Most Popular feature is a welcome addition that will allow buyers to look at some of the most actively viewed listings on the market and at the same time allow some sellers to brag that their home is among the most viewed listings in the whole city.
I think overall, the design is much easier on the eyes than that thing they called a website prior to this launch.
The Bad
As I feared, the Houston Association of Realtors seems somewhat confused as to what is its purpose for existence. Somewhere, it must have gotten lost in translation that this association is financed through dues paid by its agent members. In return for our dues, the association is to try and help its members through training, support and yes, even business. In looking at the new HAR.com, one gets the distinct feeling that it is trying to become another real estate search company like Zillow and Trulia fighting for website hits. Let me get into specifics.
The NEW foreclosure search allows consumers to search specifically through foreclosures and limit their search to new listings. In appearance, this is a good thing, correct? Wrong. In reality, consumers looking for foreclosures are going to find what they want and then request information from the real estate agents that are listing these properties. The problem with that is twofold: First, agents representing banks in selling their foreclosure properties are doing just that: Representing BANKS! Their fiduciary duty is to get as much for those properties as possible and that's not always in the best interest of the consumer since a large percentage of bank foreclosures are not necessarily good deals. Second, due to the demanding task of dealing with such a large number of foreclosure listings, some foreclosure agents that I deal with on a daily basis have a hard time keeping up with regular customer inquiries.
The Ugly
By far, the feature that will outrage most real estate agents, is the new Search Recent Home Sales feature. Since the beginning of this profession, agents have had to their disposal, tools that enabled them to exclusively look through prior sales in the neighborhood and help the home seller determine an appropriate sales price for their home. This feature does not entirely take that away since home values are given in ranges of 30,000 (i.e from 90,000 to 120,000). But by the same token, why offer a feature that is both useless to the consumer (deals are made and lost within $30,000) and hurts your "constituency" at the same time?
Our hope is that this is ultimately a good first draft and like one, it will get the necessary dose of editing it needs.
If you have seen the new HAR.com, I would love to have your feedback and opinions.
Great write up Erion. I "love" how har.com is trying to do CMA's but are failing at it.
What are they trying to do make REALTORS useless?
Posted by: loren nason | February 15, 2008 at 12:26 PM