Brief Thoughts on Google’s Retreat from Real Estate

As I’m sure you all have heard by now, Google has decided to beat a hasty retreat from real estate: In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit … Read more

Brief Thoughts on Google's Retreat from Real Estate

As I’m sure you all have heard by now, Google has decided to beat a hasty retreat from real estate: In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit … Read more

Trulia, Syndication, Confusion

Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia, has written a blogpost about the future of syndication where he raises some important questions about where the real estate industry is headed with distribution of listings: Now that listing syndication has become a mainstream practice and “syndication sites” like Trulia have grown to serve millions of users, an old … Read more

One Step Closer to the Edge…

It appears that the Massachusetts Supreme Court may rule soon on whether transfers of mortgages were properly done in a case called Ibanez. [UPDATE: The Court has ruled; the banks have lost, and we’ve got a problem. More on this later.] The lower court has already ruled (twice) that the foreclosures were invalid because the … Read more

Initial Questions on Alex Perriello's Shared Equity Idea

Alex Perriello, the CEO of Realogy Franchise Group (the parent company of Coldwell Banker, Century 21, ERA, Sotheby’s, and Better Homes & Gardens), who used to be my boss’s boss, has an op/ed in yesterday’s New York Times. In it, he proposes a novel solution to the foreclosure crisis: Fortunately, there is a solution. Rather … Read more

Initial Questions on Alex Perriello’s Shared Equity Idea

Alex Perriello, the CEO of Realogy Franchise Group (the parent company of Coldwell Banker, Century 21, ERA, Sotheby’s, and Better Homes & Gardens), who used to be my boss’s boss, has an op/ed in yesterday’s New York Times. In it, he proposes a novel solution to the foreclosure crisis: Fortunately, there is a solution. Rather … Read more

Foreclosuregate and Systemic Risk

I continue to try and think through the various issues of foreclosuregate. There are a lot of them. And some of them are petrifying. In my last post, I wondered about title issues. In this one, I wanted to sketch out my understanding of the possible problems to the entire global financial system: systemic risk. … Read more

Title Issues in Foreclosuregate

Were I not driving across this great big nation of ours, I would have been far more productive on blogging about foreclosuregate. As it is, I’m fairly limited to writing at various truck stops in a larger work that hopes to lay out all of the issues and what the real estate industry can and … Read more