Getting the Price Right On Home Value Sites

Anyone can research the potential resale value or sales history of their home -- or their neighbor's -- by plugging in the address on Internet sites like Cyberhomes.com, RealEstateABC.com and Zillow.com.

However, while all three allow house hunters to price or compare properties they may be interested in, and potential sellers to get guidance in setting an asking price, the sites aren't always 100% accurate.

Zillow's calculation of a home's value -- a "Zestimate" -- should be a "starting point," says Amy Bohutinsky, Zillow's director of communications.

All these sites utilize at least some public information, so in regions where housing data is not complete or up to date, these sites' calculations may fall short.

"In some places, we don't have enough information to complete a Zestimate," Ms. Bohutinsky says. According to Zillow, of the 70 million homes in their database, the site has Zestimates for 52 million of them, or approximately 74%.

Likewise, Cyberhomes has data on more than 100 million property records across the U.S., and RealEstateABC has property information for more than 60 million U.S. homes.

To counter these issues, Cyberhomes, RealEstateABC and Zillow invite consumers to update property data. On Zillow, anyone can view changes to a home's profile, so the site may be useful to sellers who want to market their properties. Zillow has several measures in place to restrict non-homeowners from editing other people's property profiles. "Any user can flag content for review by Zillow's customer service team," Ms. Bohutinsky says.

Any consumer can adjust a home's details on Cyberhomes and RealEstateABC, but the revised profiles are available only to the person who made the changes. As a result, these sites can be used by anyone who wants to factor in how multiple variables may affect the price a particular property may get on the market.

To get the most out of these sites, use these steps to update home profiles and price estimates:

Cyberhomes.com

Type your home's address to get to the property's highlights page. To adjust the home's estimated worth, click "Refine Value" and add the number of bedrooms/bathrooms, square feet, etc.

To factor fixes or remodels into a property's estimated value, click on the plus sign to the left of "Home Improvements." Select a project from the pull-down menu, type in the date it was completed and its total cost. Hit "Add" to factor in the changes. Repeat for additional home improvements and click "Apply changes & continue."

To further refine the site's estimate of a property's value, select similar nearby homes. To do so, hit "Choose Comparable Home Sales." Click on the properties most like the home in question and hit "Apply changes & continue."

Choose "Adjust Market/Home Conditions" to rate the property's lot size, view, privacy and other features on a scale ranging from "Worse" to "Same" to "Better," and to describe the local real-estate market as "Slow," "Average" or "Hot."

Click "Update" for a new calculation of the home's worth.

The information you supply will be used to create a new estimation of the property's value, which will be listed under "Your Changes" on the search results page, and isn't made public. "It is a clipboard just for you to use," explains Marty Frame, senior vice president and chief information officer of Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions. While homeowners may want an updated measure of their residence's worth, not all want that estimation to be public, say to a neighbor or tax assessor, he explains. "There is a real reluctance of people to come online and give up their private information," he says.

RealEstateABC.com

If RealEstateABC has calculated an "ABC Value" for your home, you can adjust it by clicking on the "Adjust Value" tab in the table to the left of the map. (If there is no ABC Value for your property, your changes will have no effect.) Rate the residence's interior, exterior, lot size, view and privacy/noise on a scale from "worst in group," to "average" to "best in group." For example, if you think the house is under par for a certain quality -- say, perhaps it's on a busy street -- slide the slider to the left.

Again, only if the home has an ABC Value assigned to it, you can fix or add property characteristics (e.g., number of bedrooms or bathrooms) by clicking on the edit button for that feature and entering the correct information.

To further refine the site's calculation of the property's worth, select homes that are a close match in value from the provided list of addresses. After making your choices, click "Done" to save.

The new ABC Value is available only to you and is not permanently kept on the site. RealEstateABC doesn't make these new calculations publicly available because of the "subjectivity" involved in estimating a home's value, says Michael Dodge, general manager of the home and real-estate division of Internet Brands. "What is valuable to one seller or buyer isn't valuable to another," he explains. Homeowners can use ABC values to set a selling price, while house hunters can utilize them to compare various properties they may be interested in, he says. "A buyer can go out and look at a few different homes and adjust [the scales] according to what they observed in a particular house," he says.

Zillow.com

Homeowners can "claim" their house or property on Zillow.com and update information for Zillow's users (and potential buyers) to see about their property, such as the number of bedrooms and square footage, and note recent remodels or important details about the home. "It is something we recommend any seller to do," says Ms. Bohutinsky, Zillow's director of communications. Homeowners can advertise their home for free on Zillow or suggest a "Make Me Move" price (a dollar amount that might convince a homeowner who isn't selling to move), so updating one's home facts on Zillow is potentially important for those reasons. At least 600,000 U.S. homeowners have claimed and edited the profiles on their properties, Ms. Bohutinsky says. For homes for which Zillow has a "Zestimate" (an estimation of the residence's market value, based on public data) adding additional details about a home will create an "owner's estimate," or a new calculation of that property's worth. Such estimates run side-by-side with Zestimates, but later this year, the site will incorporate homeowner-added information into the Zestimates, Ms. Bohutinsky says.

To claim a home and create a new estimate, enter in an address, click "Claim Your Home" and register with the site by choosing the legal name of the property's owner from a list of randomly generated ones and agree to a virtual affidavit.

To proceed, go to your home's details page, click on the address and hit "Edit Facts." Adding information to a property's profile is as simple as typing in the new data and saving.

By Lauren Baier Kim

Ms. Kim is a senior editor at RealEstateJournal.com.

Email your comments to lauren.kim@wsj.com.

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Selling a House? Commissions Are Now More Negotiable

The real-estate madness of the past several years had one side effect that may benefit today's sellers: It created a glut of real-estate agents.

"There are a lot of people out there who have been attracted to the possibility of getting 6% of what are now very high sale prices," says Lawrence White, an economics professor at the New York University Stern School of Business.

Consider this: The National Association of Realtors had 1.36 million members in 2006, when 7.5 million new and existing homes were sold. Back in 2000, the association had half as many members, 767,000, to share in 6.5 million home sales. (To be sure, not all real-estate agents have Realtor certification. The total number of licensed real-estate agents may be twice the number of Realtors, according to the association.)

Now, as more brokers compete for sales in a slowing real-estate market, savvy homeowners can save thousands by negotiating their commissions.

"Commissions are becoming more negotiable than used to be the case," Mr. White says. He chalks it up to several factors, including more competition from discount and a-la-carte brokers, who offer less comprehensive services than full-service brokers, but charge discounted sales commissions or offer buyers rebates upon closing. And then there's more consumer awareness of the market. Thanks to Web sites like Zillow.com, anyone with an Internet connection can find out what homes are for sale or recently sold in a given area.

The 6% Illusion

In theory, of course, broker commissions are always negotiable. Setting up fixed commission rates has, in fact, been considered illegal since a 1950s Supreme Court ruling. But real-estate brokers certainly don't want you to know that. "The owners of the large firms want everyone to think the broker fee is 6%," says Jay Michael, a Realtor and founder of Estate Property Group, a boutique real-estate firm in Chicago. That firm, while a full-service brokerage, negotiates its fees with its clients, typically charging 4.5% to 5.5%.

For sellers, there are a number of ways to help successfully negotiate the fee your broker charges:

Use leverage. If you're selling your home and buying a new one at the same time, ask your broker if he'll offer a lower commission in exchange for using his services on both transactions. And the same goes for selling an "in demand" property: If your house is in a good school district and you know it will sell quickly, ask your broker for a commission reduction.

Go with a smaller firm. The smaller a company is, the less red tape your real-estate agent has to go through in order to get permission to discount his or her fee, Mr. Michael says. That's because the broker's firm typically takes half of his or her commission.

Consider the alternatives. If one broker refuses to negotiate, remember there are thousands of others out there. Some, like discount-brokerage Foxtons, based in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, offer full-range services at a fixed 4% rate. The savings, according to Les Newlands, a senior vice president at Foxtons, come from lower overhead expenses, as the firm's brokers have virtual offices.

Buyers' Savings

There are savings for buyers, too. Don't be shy to ask the broker for a cut of the commission, especially if you found the listing yourself (not an unlikely scenario these days, as buyers increasingly start their home search online). Just keep in mind that some states prohibit brokers from offering rebates, although their number has decreased in recent years as the Justice Department seeks legal action against such regulations, alleging they restrict competition among brokers.

The 10 states that still have such rebate bans, according to the Justice Department, are Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Oregon.

Fee Competition

Even traditional full-service brokers are starting to realize the need to compete on fees. The average home-sale commission at Realogy, which owns full-service brokerages Corcoran, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby's International Realty, and franchises Century 21, was 2.48% in 2006, according to the company's annual report filing with the SEC. Since two firms typically split the total commission, that suggests the total commission averaged less than 5%.

Realogy's figure has been declining steadily since at least 2002, when the average was 2.63%.

But Diane Saatchi, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, a full-service real-estate brokerage in New York, warns negotiating broker fees can be a mistake if you want your home to sell quickly. Brokers have more incentive to show properties to buyers where their compensation will be greater.

Meanwhile, some full-service brokers say they have always given breaks to clients, regardless of the real-estate market at the time.

"I've done that for family members and for repeat buyers or sellers that have stayed with me over the years," says Susan Moock, a Realtor with Keller Williams Realty in Bucks County, Pa., who has more than 20 years of experience. She says she's often given breaks to her sellers or a credit toward closing costs for her buyers, coming out of her own part of the commission.

By Aleksandra Todorova
From SmartMoney.com

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For Some Americans, Buying Land Is Like Collecting Art and Autos

In 2001, Kentucky native Brad Kelley sold his cigarette manufacturing company Commonwealth Brands Inc. for some $1 billion and promptly went on a shopping spree. He didn't go to Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue -- he set his sights on the range.

Mr. Kelley bought hundreds of thousands of acres of West Texas ranchland. In Florida, he snapped up some 60,000 acres near Sarasota, where he breeds animals such as antelope and anoa, a miniature water buffalo native to Indonesia. Today he is the seventh-largest landowner in the U.S., according to the debut issue of The Land Report, a publication that bills itself as the magazine of the American landowner.

The rich are accumulating open spaces across the U.S. much as they have with vacation homes, automobiles and paintings in the past. As urban areas have grown, some well-off city dwellers have purchased spreads in remote places, thousands of miles from the typical playgrounds of the wealthy.

"It's like rare art," says Jim Taylor, president of Hall & Hall, a Billings, Mont., real-estate firm, that has worked with CNN founder Ted Turner, among other land buyers.

In West Texas, for example, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has acquired several ranches in recent years totaling about 300,000 acres, making him No. 23 on The Land Report's list of the nation's top 100 landowners (Mr. Bezos declined comment for this story).

The push to amass acreage among the rich is part of a broader boom in which Americans outside the agricultural sector have been pouring money into land, pushing up prices. Farm real estate rose 15% in 2006 from 2005 to $1,900 per acre, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The wealth accumulated in the last decade by aging baby boomers has left them looking for places to put their money.

At the same time, in the agricultural stretches of America, the population is aging and the economy is in many cases unable to sustain ranches and farms.

A study published in the journal Society and Natural Resources said between 1990 and 2001 only about a quarter of those who bought parcels of 400 acres or larger in 10 Montana and Wyoming counties were traditional ranchers.

More recently, real-estate brokers say, buyers have been scouring the Great Plains for spreads that offer hunting and fishing, wooed by brokerage outfits spearheaded by retailers such as Orvis Co. and Cabela's Inc.

While the typical land buyer these days is looking for a remote piece of wilderness or ranchland for outdoor sporting activities, or simply to admire the beauty of the landscape, the top landowners tend to be driven by more varied interests.

Mr. Bezos, for example, used his parched land in the far reaches of West Texas last year to test a developmental vehicle for his space-flight company, Blue Origin LLC, while Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of cosmetics and candle company Burt's Bees, has acquired acreage in the northwoods of Maine for conservation.

To be sure, the nation's rich have long owned large tracts of land. But population growth and urban development have made far-flung property more desirable, while advances in transportation and communication have made it more accessible. That, combined with the sort of wealth made by Mr. Bezos of Amazon.com ($4.3 billion, according to Forbes Magazine's 2006 estimate) and the woes of the agricultural economy, has sustained the land boom for the very wealthy.

The owners of the Dallas-based Land Report LLC, publisher of the magazine, believe the phenomenon merits monthly coverage. With a circulation of 40,000, The Land Report is distributed free to 30,000 of the nation's largest landowners and to some 10,000 industry professionals, such as real-estate brokers.

"There is an enormous niche that was completely underserved," says Eric O'Keefe, the magazine's editor.

But the concentration of land in the hands of a privileged few could yield a backlash. Ms. Quimby, who sold Burt's Bees in 2002 to private equity firm AEA Investors LLC for $177 million (she retained 20% ownership in the company), wants to assemble about 100,000 acres to help realize a decade-old dream among Maine conservationists to create a national park. She says she has amassed 80,000 acres so far.

But some locals in the town of Millinocket were outraged when Ms. Quimby proclaimed that her land would be off-limits to logging, hunting and motorized vehicles, including snowmobiles. Now they sport "Ban Roxanne" T-shirts.

"Our way of life is being threatened," says Jimmy Busque, a member of the Millinocket town council and a steam plant operator at the local paper mill.

No. 100 on The Land Report list, Ms. Quimby agreed to allow a year of hunting and motorized access on her latest purchase, the 25,000-acre Sand Stream Sanctuary, which came last September. But she is unapologetic about her plans for her newly acquired property, much of which she has purchased from logging companies. "I don't have to argue the environmental merits of anything," says Ms. Quimby. "I own it."

The nation's largest private landowner is Ted Turner, whose portfolio includes 15 ranches in seven Western states and a total of about two million acres. Long intrigued by bison and how close the animal came to extinction, Mr. Turner acquired his land over the past 30 years in large part to raise livestock. Today his herd of about 45,000 bison allows most of his ranches to pay for themselves in part through sales of steaks and burgers around the country and Mr. Turner's restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill.

Mr. Turner's latest acquisition came in 2005 in Nebraska, where he bought almost 65,000 acres for about $19 million. Russ Miller, general manager of Turner Enterprises Inc., which manages Mr. Turner's land, says the profound economic and demographic change under way in the Great Plains have enabled Mr. Turner to assemble such a large swath.

Why so much? "It's the only thing that lasts," says Mr. Miller. It's a declaration Mr. Turner has made in the past, echoing the famous line from "Gone With the Wind."

Mr. Kelley, who was raised on a farm, says he amassed about half of his landholdings before selling his cigarette manufacturing company. (The Land Report says he has 789,851 acres, but he puts the total at about 1.2 million acres.) Since 2001 he has redoubled his efforts to build a ranching empire, acquiring cattle operations across the country and breeding hoofstock in conjunction with zoos.

One place of particular interest for Mr. Kelley has been the Big Bend region of Texas, a vast expanse in the state's western corner. In Brewster County, the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, Mr. Kelley owns a total of 429,366 acres, according to the county appraisal office.

"I have an appreciation for land," says Mr. Kelley. "That's sort of where my heart's at."

But Mr. Kelley dismisses the notion that he is a land collector, albeit No. 7 on the list of the nation's top 100. "It's not a hobby," he says. "If you're a hedge fund you buy stocks. If you're a rancher, you buy land."

By Thaddeus Herrick

From The Wall Street Journal Online

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Getting the Words Right: Tips For Writing a Real-Estate Listing

Words can do as much to sell a home as photos. Use the wrong wording, agents say, and even the most photogenic property may lose potential buyers.

But what words work and which don't? It can vary, depending on a home's price and geographical location.

In Manhattan, "light" implies a condo with plenty of sun, one that's on the front side of the building, whereas using "light" to a describe a home within, say, sunny Miami or Southern California, can be redundant. For more expensive, or luxurious houses, bedroom and bathroom counts are far less important than lifestyle features. For first-time buyers, "fixer-upper" isn't always a bad word, especially if the property is in a good neighborhood or school district.

There are, of course, overused terms: "Gourmet kitchen," "luxury bath" and "cozy" (meaning, "small" or "cramped"). Some argue that words like "half bath" connote a lack of features (there's only half a bath) instead of something positive (there's a powder room).

Here are tips for writing an effective real-estate listing.

1. Avoid exaggeration. At least 50% of the listings she sees overstate or gloss over home features, which could turn off savvy buyers, says Leslie Lazarus, an agent with DJK Residential in Manhattan who markets condominiums priced from $500,000 to $2.3 million. For example, a listing may refer to a bonus room as a "bedroom" when the room needs a window or emergency exit to be considered a bedroom. Other listings fail to mention key flaws such as the existence of an unrenovated portion of an otherwise up-to-date home.

The most important home facts to mention for an urban listing in a market like Manhattan are lighting, bedroom count, age of the building, building-wide amenities and when renovations to the building most recently took place.

"I can't stress enough how important lighting is in New York," Ms. Lazarus says.

It may be tempting to fudge your home's location, but don't do it, says Ms. Lazarus. In Manhattan real-estate listings, the Upper West Side, a desirable area for many buyers, is often stretched as much as five miles beyond its boundaries by agents eager to bring in prospective buyers.

"Over time people figure it out when there's exaggeration," she says.

2. Be specific. Some real-estate Web sites cap the number of words that can be used in real-estate listings, but that doesn't mean descriptive language or references to a home's unique details should head for the cutting-room floor. Homes that are described with specifics like "granite" and "maple" tend to garner higher sales prices, according to research released in 2005 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Don't just toss in words of praise. Positive, but vague adjectives like "fantastic" and "charming" or "spacious" may have no impact if the home feature those words modify is either already in the listing (a large lot or home's square footage indicate spaciousness) or is left out of the listing, according to NBER. Avoid descriptions that only offer "faint praise," such as "clean" or "quiet." Cleanliness, for instance, should be a given rather than a selling point.

Put buyers first and think about what it is about your home that will appeal to them most. Don't highlight what you like about your property -- it might not correspond with what today's buyers want. This means that sellers and their agents should try to step outside the seller's fondness for the home and think about why other people would enjoy it, says Daniel Levitan, president of Levitan & Associates in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

3. Use the "F" word carefully. The term "fixer" can be a dirty word in real estate, but using the word isn't always bad -- some buyers, namely bargain hunters, first-time buyers and investors, seek these properties. But rather than play to a house's state of disrepair, it's wise to highlight its good points. Every home has something that makes it valuable, says Mr. Levitan. If a house or condo is in need of extreme repair, it could be marketed various ways depending on who might buy it, he says. Use phrases like "redevelopment opportunity" or "zoned for multifamily," or mention a property's large lot if the area is ripe with teardowns or if developers are seeking land zoned for multifamily homes. Mentioning that a property is a bargain within a neighborhood that is home to a sought-after school district or other amenities may put a positive spin on a handyman's special.

4. Pitch lifestyle. Buyers of high-end homes (those in the top 10% of an area's housing prices) want luxury, so when writing a listing for an upscale property, start with the quality of life the home offers, says Paul Boomsma, executive vice president of Luxury Portfolio Fine Property Collection in Chicago. "It's not really about the number of bedrooms or baths with these homes," he says, noting that affluent buyers, especially when spending $5 million or more, know any home they consider will have plenty of space.

Within this market avoid using the word "luxury," especially when applied to the home itself or its bathrooms, since it doesn't convey much. To upscale buyers, "contemporary" may imply that a house has lots of windows and an open floor plan, but, on the flip side, it may also signal that it doesn't offer many walls to display sizeable art collections. Conversely, describing a residence as a "palatial estate on 26 acres" gives a better indication of its size and stature, according to Mr. Boomsma.

Rather than saying that the buyer will love entertaining in the home, mention what the house offers: an indoor kitchen with catering nook, as well as a covered outdoor kitchen and pool house for summertime parties. "We try to stay away from telling people how they'll feel about the property," says Mr. Boomsma. Instead of writing that the buyer will love playing golf at the course across the street, tell them that golfing is available: "Spectacular new contemporary home on oceanfront golf course; resort views."

5. Choose carefully. One area where sellers frequently run into trouble is using comments that could be viewed as "discriminatory" under the Federal Fair Housing Act, or when they make casual claims about the home that may not be true, says Elizabeth Weintraub, a broker associate with Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, Calif. For-sale-by-owner (FSBO) home sellers sometimes use language that either inadvertently makes false claims or is inadvertently discriminatory because the sellers composing their own property description may not be aware of terms that aren't allowed -- typically those that allude to race, religion, sex, handicap, family status or national origin, Ms. Weintraub says.

For instance, Ms. Weintraub says that listings that mention a school district could violate the housing act -- i.e., is the home's location in a particular school district a guarantee that a student could enroll there? Calling wood floors "hardwoods" is a common mistake made by both FSBO sellers and naive agents, she says. Technically, some wood floors, such as fir, are "softwoods."

By Jane Hodges

Ms. Hodges is a a free-lance writer in Seattle.

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.

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Is a Down Payment From In-Laws A Gift, or a Recipe for Disaster?

Twenty-six-year-old Crystal Lopez was uncomfortable accepting a condo in downtown Atlanta as a wedding gift from her fiancé's parents two years ago. But "when people are that generous, it is very hard to say 'thanks, but no thanks,' " the telephone-sales executive says.

Still, she says the down side was clear after the wedding: "The in-laws felt like they could influence the decision making" on matters from the couple's finances to what paintings hung on the walls. One day Ms. Lopez walked into her kitchen to find her husband's grandmother rearranging the cabinets.

Not only did "I feel like I had no financial stake in my marriage, I felt like my in-laws didn't have any confidence in my ability to be a wife," says Ms. Lopez, who recently divorced.

Deciding whether to accept a big financial gift from Mom and Dad when you're in your twenties can be difficult, in part because of uncertainty about strings that may be attached. And the situation is particularly sensitive for couples offered a gift by one set of in-laws or the other.

To head off possible conflicts, "spend lots of time discussing your expectations in advance" of saying yes, suggests Richard Shadick, a psychologist and director of the counseling center at Pace University in New York.

Is It Really a Gift?

One important consideration is to find out if the "gift" really is a gift. Gifts that are laced with strings can quickly become "an employment contract or a curse," says David H. Diesslin, a financial planner in Fort Worth, Texas. For example, a client couple of his asked their child to build an addition in return for the down payment on a home. "They wanted their room to be closer to the grandkids," Mr. Diesslin explains.

Some people may actually mean their "gift" to be more like a loan or even an investment -- giving them a stake in the real estate you are buying or a business you are starting. You obviously need to understand that from the start and weigh the offer accordingly.

If parents think they are making an investment, they may expect a more active role in managing it, say financial planners.

Often the gift is money, and it's important to find out if the gifting parents have ideas about how they'd like you to spend their gift -- and what would disturb them. Perhaps they want to help you pay for the wedding, but not spring for a lavish honeymoon in Fiji.

'Hidden Expectations'

Even if the gift isn't earmarked, "there may be hidden expectations," says Mr. Diesslin. To find that out, ask questions such as: Do you mind if we take this money and use it for a vacation? What about a car? Or come right out and ask them what their expectations are.

If the gift is from your parents, your spouse may be reticent to speak up for fear of appearing ungrateful. So after you find out what the gifting parents expect, the two of you should discuss the matter privately before responding, suggests Dr. Shadick.

If you decide that accepting the offer may create more problems than it would fix, "you might want to just say 'I appreciate your offer but we are going to do this on our own,' " says Judy Heltzel, a financial planner in Salem, Ore.

Another option, to avoid feeling beholden for a large gift and to clarify the relationship, she says, is to agree to accept the money only as a loan that you will repay on a regular schedule with a reasonable rate of interest.

If you are accepting money as a loan or as an investment, you should draft a written agreement, says Jennifer S. Wilkov, the author of financial guide "Dating Your Money."

To set up a schedule of loan payments, you can go online to bankrate.com/brm/popcalc2.asp.

Ms. Wilkov says you might even want a written agreement for a true gift: If the gifting parents have expectations, you can get them in writing and if they don't have expectations, you can get that in writing too.

By Diana Ransom
From The Wall Street Journal Online

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