House Swapping Version 2.0
How To Make Swapping Work
We’ve come a long way in the two or so years since the emerging of swapping on the internet. Through extensive media coverage, I must think a larger percentage of the population, or at least home owners and sellers with their eyes open for such stories, are aware of swapping. However, the results haven’t proved as promising. Sure, there are a few anecdotes of swaps that have taken place. These more often than not, took place on Craigslist, with several on Domuswap and Onlinehousetrading. I am not aware of any other successes.
The lack of numbers for swapping, compared to the overall size of the market, are staggering. There are about 4 million or so homes listed in the US. At best, swap listings number in the tens of thousands. At its peak, Domuswap contained about 6000 listings. OnlineHouseTrading claims about 60,000 listings but I question what percentage of those are actual paid, active listings and not just one abandoned once the need to pay becomes apparent. In any case, these numbers are just a drop in the bucket.
As I said almost two years ago in various interviews, successful swapping is a game of numbers, large ones. We need large numbers of listings to make successful swaps given the low probability of any two properties being a suitable match. This reasoning, of course, implies that most people that try swapping will be unsuccessful. I believe this is true, unless the numbers become really large. By large, I mean, every house listed and even those that aren’t listed. We need to know what EVERY homeowner, those selling or potentially selling, would be willing to swap for. That is the end game for swapping and what we are trying to do.
Over the past several months, I have become more and more convinced that the only way for swapping to be successful is for it to be embraced by the large, national Real Estate companies, like Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and ReMax. These organizations can very likely facilitate swaps entire within their domain of lists. The advantage here is having a Realtor on either side of the deal to shepherd the process along. While I might like the looks of a potential swap in another state, I am unlikely to take a plane trip on a longshot of a possibility. However, it there was a Realtor on the other end, who could be my eyes and ears on the ground, so to speak, I might proceed down that path. I don’t have all the answers as to how to make something like this work, but I know that this is where to start. I am still dumbfounded that none of the national Realtors I mentioned have embraced swapping, given the large number of unsold homes, and potential commissions, sitting in their inventory. Anyone listening out there?
The lack of numbers for swapping, compared to the overall size of the market, are staggering. There are about 4 million or so homes listed in the US. At best, swap listings number in the tens of thousands. At its peak, Domuswap contained about 6000 listings. OnlineHouseTrading claims about 60,000 listings but I question what percentage of those are actual paid, active listings and not just one abandoned once the need to pay becomes apparent. In any case, these numbers are just a drop in the bucket.
As I said almost two years ago in various interviews, successful swapping is a game of numbers, large ones. We need large numbers of listings to make successful swaps given the low probability of any two properties being a suitable match. This reasoning, of course, implies that most people that try swapping will be unsuccessful. I believe this is true, unless the numbers become really large. By large, I mean, every house listed and even those that aren’t listed. We need to know what EVERY homeowner, those selling or potentially selling, would be willing to swap for. That is the end game for swapping and what we are trying to do.
Over the past several months, I have become more and more convinced that the only way for swapping to be successful is for it to be embraced by the large, national Real Estate companies, like Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and ReMax. These organizations can very likely facilitate swaps entire within their domain of lists. The advantage here is having a Realtor on either side of the deal to shepherd the process along. While I might like the looks of a potential swap in another state, I am unlikely to take a plane trip on a longshot of a possibility. However, it there was a Realtor on the other end, who could be my eyes and ears on the ground, so to speak, I might proceed down that path. I don’t have all the answers as to how to make something like this work, but I know that this is where to start. I am still dumbfounded that none of the national Realtors I mentioned have embraced swapping, given the large number of unsold homes, and potential commissions, sitting in their inventory. Anyone listening out there?
Comment
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Comment by ross vagnieres on February 1, 2009 at 8:22pm
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I agree that swapping is important and will grow as a percent of home sales. AND I agree that all the big realtors will include swapping in thier intranet systems. I have been calling the big ones like remax, and Centry21 and they actually have posted my home as a swap, in an email to all the brokers in the office intranet.
So they know what we are talking about. They ALL say the same thing "oh yes, I have done swaps before, but the chances are very slim. But in depressions, people are not looking for a dream home, they just want to move to get a better job so they can survive. Fear is a bigger emotion than greed.
Why not contact the Natl Realtors Association? Lets go to some events they put together like the national home building show? Say David, if you are a good speaker, sign up to give presentations on swapping? Title " Home swapping, the newest greatest solution to poor home selling markets" I cant think of a better way to talk directly to the top executives at these companies.
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Comment by David Moskowitz on January 18, 2009 at 7:36pm -
GoSwap,
Thanks for the post. I have no intention of deleting any opinions expressed on this site. At least someone is reading this stuff.
Onlinehousetrading appears to make most of their listings available to registered users only. That is their perogative. Domuswap went the other direction (as did your site) in making everything browseable and searchable, giving the listings better Google exposure.
Maybe they have links specific for spiders, I am not sure, but it seems silly to index pages for search engines only, and not for users who hit the home page. I can't answer that, and again, it doesn't really matter. I think the correct approach is to make all the listings visible.
Also, as I 've said in one of my other posts, I've talked to Daniel Westbrook and I have only good things to say about him. He just has a different business model than us and I wish all of you the best of luck on all the sites.
I still remain disappointed in the Realtors' response to house trading, which is for the most part exactly as you said.
You are right, that I am trying to do something about the housing market, perhaps as a selfish homeowner, but moreso as this is a major root of the current ecomomic crisis in the US and therefore worldwide, I still believe that swapping can make a small dent in the situation.
Thanks for listening.
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Comment by GoSwap.org on January 18, 2009 at 5:09am -
"To be fair, not all pages of a site are going to be indexed by Google, particularly if they are behind a login page."
Does this then mean Google is indexing some of their pages behind the login and not the rest of the pages...? I think you are giving them too much credit. BTW, good webmeisters have long figured out ways to make the pages "visible" to search engines and index pages behind the login.
Dave, you might be one of very few people genuinely trying to help the housing situation. Now about realtors. Most realtors I talked to have two things on their minds when on the subject of house swapping:
1. How do they get paid; and
2. They always seam to lean to "oh, this is too much work for us to find a match", not to mention their "needle in the haystag" expression. Remember that very first article on www.thestreet.com on house trading? The only comment from a realtor was that "this is like finding a needle in a haystag."
I understand realtors' "need" to be paid, but what do they actually do to help the housing situation, which by the way they "helped" to create? They have been paid enough and well in advance during the housing boom times. If we could only imagine that most homeowners have 5% or more of realtor's commission tied up in our homes, that we are still paying mortgage interest on... I am sure that everyone remembers their cliché phrases like "real estate never goes down", or "buy low now, sell high later", and their no down payment promotional efforts that indirectly created the bubble. I myself rarely actually used their services, always sold FSBO, but was always amazed how easy most people part with their money shielding out thousands for agent services.
Has anyone seen any new tricks of the trade from them, other then the normal service of listing the house in MLS and waiting until it sells?
The only tricks I've seen are from the Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors (NAR) David Lereah, who managed to publish two very peculiar books, titles and timing of which speak for themselves: Are You Missing The Real Estate Boom? in Feb 2005, and Why The Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust in Feb 2006:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lereah#Publications
Mr. Wesbrook appears to be no exception, as being a realtor, his site only cares to go as far as collecting $$$ per listing and then actually hides the listing from any potential visitors, until they pay as well. Most people cannot see this catch until it's too late and they already paid.
My only comment to sellers in this market is: people, wake up, if you are now going to help your own housing situation, hardly anyone will, certainly not realtors based on their track record so far.
I am very sorry to hijack your blogpost, Dave, feel free to delete my posts here.
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Comment by David Moskowitz on January 17, 2009 at 8:04am
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Thanks for the comment.
To be fair, not all pages of a site are going to be indexed by Google, particularly if they are behind a login page.
However, when I had an account on onlinehousetrading, for my property, I got very few matches, compared to the hundreds I had on Domuswap.
Not that any of this really matters. Onlinehousetrading does an excellent job publicizing house swapping and are certainly the biggest advertisers on google in this area.
Now to get Century 21 and ReMax to do the same.
Dave
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Comment by GoSwap.org on January 15, 2009 at 12:13am
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I actually have nothing against the competition in general because it propels innovation, but when WSJ has printed this bogus statistics just because someone said so... I got a little suspicious.
"OnlineHouseTrading claims about 60,000 listings but I question what percentage of those are actual paid, active listings and not just one abandoned..." If you counted all your abandoned listings, I'll bet Domuswap would even have a higher number, but what good are uncompleted listings?
A simple Google or Yahoo test of how many pages approximately a given website has indexed disproves their number: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fonlinehousetrading.com&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=seo-rd-se&bwmf=d
This shows that Onlinehousetrading has about 1/5th of the number of total pages including listings they claim. Even our site has more pages: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fgoswap.org&fr=sfp&bwmf=d
The second test involves simple common sense: according to our own statistics, less than 5% of all site visitors actually decide to place a FREE listing on GoSwap.org (which I am sure is in the ballpark with Domuswap as well). Well, even if we took the same ratio of 5% and their claimed number of 60,000 listings, their site must have received about 1.2 million visitors during the same period of about 1 year, which is completely untrue as evidenced by compete.com and all the other traffic statistics readily available.
Just think about it, if Domuswap and GoSwap.org are mentioned as free sites in the same articles as Onlinehousetrading, why would people prefer and choose to pay the $19 when there are plenty of other free sites? And why would anyone place their listing on Onlinehousetrading site that does not even show listings to site visitors, unless visitors pay to see someone's listing? This defeats the purpose of advertising if you ask me.
Perhaps this explains some of their tactics...
Here's the reply from one of the reporters whom I asked the same questions, the reporter wrote:
"Unfortunately, I had no way to see
a list of people enrolled at onlinehousetrading.com so I verified
through other articles with correlating numbers to what Mr. Westbrook
told me. Everything matched up. Mr. Westbrook also told me that the
50,000 are people who have paid and may have a property to list, but
have not yet listed it."
So people just pay and not even list...? Common, they could have come up with a better pitch....
Lastly, a while back I counted and compared the number of listings they had for 2 cities with Domuswap numbers for the same area and you actually had more listings.
The problem of today's press is that once a lie gets printed by a "credible" source, such as WSJ in this case, other smaller newspapers treat it as fact.
I have since revised the saying "believe none of what you hear and half of what you read" to "...and NONE of what you read".
Anyway, did not mean to brag, just wanted to set some records strait.
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