Real Estate Agents

Redfin, the discount real estate broker with a bitchin' website and a CEO who goes on 60 Minutes to rail against the industry, has soft-launched an up-sell - and in my opinion business-model-saving - Redfin Select service.

Given Redfin's history, I had to check the date of the Redfin blog post to make sure it wasn't dated April 1. Although Glenn Kelman hinted in a comment here a couple weeks ago that something was coming.

Select is simply a way to let home buyers opt for some hand-holding on as many home tours as they'd like. They pay a little more and get a little more service. Redfin usually refunds two-thirds of the home buyer's commission. For people who opt for Select, they'll get 50% of the commission refunded.

Still a good option for buyers who want to save some cash, but Redfin makes 50% more per transaction. This is huge step towards making Redfin a viable company. Kudos to Glenn and team.

BTW - I mentioned in my December post of 2008 Predictions for the RE.net that Redfin was going to have to make this move. (I've hit two of those so far. We'll see if Rich Barton promotes himself out of Zillow before year's end...) Here's what I said about the Redfin business model at the time:

I've grown less sanguine about the Redfin business model this year. Champion of the discounters, Redfin's gotta scale its revenue. CEO Glenn Kelman posted some of his business metrics on Guy Kawasaki's blog (which took some serious cojones, so kudos to Glenn for stepping up.) In that post, one thing is clear: he needs to marshal Redfin to $100 million in revenue, fast. If you assume that Redfin clears ~$5000 on it's discount home sales transactions, that means they have to scale to 20,000 home sales in the next couple years. In this market.

Glenn also pointed out that they have more people driving around in the field than they originally planned. (i.e. the model scales less efficiently.) But if you introduce premium services and can bring your average-revenue-per-deal closer to $10,000, that's a much more achievable target. Not surprisingly, this was also the path that Zip Realty took several years ago.

In short, it's a smart move. And it's not surprising, because Kelman seems to be no fool. Good for their clients and good for them.

Slightly more critical (natch) coverage at BHB

I'm a big fan of the technologies shaking up the real estate industry. Though my perspective differs from the simple-minded view that agents simply make too much money and that technology will only cut the 6% commission to the bone. In fact, I've written previously that innovations in real estate may indeed help agents to charge a premium, to meet a particular need for a home seller -- if they want to sell fast or get a certain price, for example. Further, I've suggested that Redfin can save their business if they admit that some clients want a great internet home buying experience and are willing to pay a premium for a premium service.

Today Prashant Gopal at BusinessWeek has an article citing how these premium relationships are happening, even in this crazy bad market.

... [Seller] McCarty decided a year ago to give real estate agents an added incentive to guide buyers [to his] house about 20 miles outside of Minneapolis. He agreed to pay his agent an 8% commission, which would be split (55%/45%) with the agent representing the buyer.

...

"I wanted more agents to show the property," said McCarty "I was willing to take a little bit more of a hit and pay a higher percentage"

...

Frank D'Angelo, the broker for EXIT Realty Executive who represented McCarty, says he offers customers a transparent, tiered system of payment. For 6%, sellers get the typical menu of services. Sellers who agree to pay 7% get additional benefits, including a guarantee that if the home isn't sold within 39 days, he'll return up to $10,000 of his commission (2% of the sales price). For 8%, buyers also get free home-staging and a "media blitz" of advertisements.

Great stuff. The 6% should be fluid depending on your goals. Discountability is good, if that's what your clients want. Just remember that, especially in a lousy market, some are willing to pay a premium to move a home quickly.

A Look at Minneapolis Real Estate Trends

Just for kicks, let's look at the real estate data for the Minneapolis region to see if McCarty got a good deal. First lets look at the price trends for the Twin Cities.

McCarty's house was priced at about $325,000 solidly in the Second Quartile of homes in the Minneapolis region. What about the Days on Market for homes in that price range?

For homes priced around $300,000 to $400,000 in Minneapolis, the Second Quartile, homes are on the market for 3 - 5 months. McCarty's place went under contract in one. Based on that data, I'd say he got a deal!

Note: We haven't opened the Minneapolis MSA on our free research page yet,
but we're about to, so call us if you want the research report for
anything in the Twin Cities area.UPDATE: Our Minneapolis Real Estate Report is available now.

I generally try not to stray too far from the real estate topic at hand on this blog, but I want to call your attention this morning to an article by Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired Magazine among other literary accomplishments). Kelly's the rare "futurist" who deserves the title.

This week he published Better Than Free. The article captures succinctly, why in a world of free and freely copyable information, Altos Research just had another record month in sales.

In fact, Kelly's concepts also capture why our most successful real estate agent clients, in a world of commoditizers and discounters, command a premium, even in this crazy market.

When everything is free on the interwebs, what is it that people really want to pay for? Kelly identifies 8 generatives: uncopyable values generated or cultivated from within. Here's a snippet, do yourself a favor and read the whole article.

Immediacy: Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset.

Personalization: A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room -- as if it were preformed in your room -- you may be willing to pay a lot.

Interpretation: As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. [The listings? Free. The right neighborhood and home for you? ...]

It turns out while we weren't nearly so articulate about the process, these generatives have been the Altos DNA from day 1. How do we get you great information in real-time, and not just data, but analysis, personalized for you, and leverage-able into your business?

Anyway, to all our clients, readers, subscribers, partners: thanks for being with us. Rock on.

At the NAR conference in Las Vegas, I did an interview with Joel Burslem from Inman News. The video is up today on InmanTV.

The video uses a sweet player from WellcomeMat.

This post is written by our client John Keith a real estate broker in Boston, Massachusetts. We first met John when Scott sat next to him at the opening keynote of the Inman Connect conference in San Francisco this summer. At the time, we were just opening up our coverage in Boston and John jumped at the chance to work with us. We're glad he did.

John's blog is excellent. He's been very effective integrating the Altos market analytics information into his posts. So we asked him to write a post for us about how he uses the Altos Research services in his business, his blog, and with his clients.

John also generously included an endorsement, which I'm more than happy to include here. Note: I've done a tiny little bit of editing, and I added the images. Everythig else comes directly from John. Enjoy:

About John Keith

I am a Boston real estate agent. I have a blog devoted to Boston Real Estate, at bostonreb.com.

My blog has a main page with daily updates of news and information about the Boston real estate market. In addition, on this page, visitors can search through all the condos and single-family homes listed for sale in our local Multiple Listing Service. Also, visitors may click through to pages of information I have written that are of specific interest to buyers, sellers, investors, etc.

I signed-up as an Altos Research client several months ago. I thought it would be a great way to provide another much-needed service to my site's visitors. More importantly, I figured it would make me be seen as an "expert" on the Boston real estate market. Therefore, visitors would be more likely to inquire about using me as their real estate agent, increasing my business (and my revenue).

After being an Altos Research client for several months, I have seen very positive results and can say I'm very happy I have made the investment.

How I Leverage Altos Research in My Blog and Business
Now that I have access to them, I've tried a couple different ways of using the reports and graphs.

Right now, I have it set up so that there is one main graph on my blog's main page, for the city of Boston as a whole. It updates automatically, once each week's reports are finalized at Altos (every Monday evening).

I also have a link on my blog's main page directing visitors to another page where they can download any of the Altos weekly market reports (I subscribe to eleven Boston ZIP codes).

This past week, I added separate neighborhood-specific pages to my blog. [ed: here's The Fenway, for example.] These pages have blog entries devoted to each major Boston neighborhood. The idea is, visitors to my site will start on the main blog page, then click through to read more about specific neighborhoods.

I have an AltosChart on each of these neighborhood- specific pages, set up to show market data just for that neighborhood, by ZIP code. Probably some time in the near future, I'll be adding a link on these pages to each neighborhood's Altos market report (using each neighborhood's ZIP code).

I'm also about to set up an MLS search, preset by neighborhood, showing just listings in that specific neighborhood.

I expect this to have great results. The majority of visitors will continue to begin their visit on my main page, but then they will want to visit the page focused on just their neighborhood(s) of interest. By having the MLS search and AltosCharts on each neighborhood's page, I'm providing visitors with useful information.

How Strong the Call-To-Action?
It's an open question as to how much information and data to provide to everyone - whether or not to have the Altos Research reports available to everyone, or whether I should force visitors to contact me for access to the reports (a "call to action", it's called).

Certainly, by making people contact me, I'm creating a two-way relationship - it encourages communication, which, hopefully, would lead to new business.

However, I also believe in making as much information as possible available to as many people as possible.

Most people visit my website multiple times, over a period of days, weeks, and/or months prior to contacting me to be their real estate agent. They already know me quite well from my blog, before they make an inquiry. So, there may be little to lose by having the reports readily available to the casual visitor.

Each week, I upload all the updated reports (by neighborhood and city-wide) to my servers. I receive reports for eleven ZIP codes, which covers the majority of the "downtown Boston" market.

There are actually 29 ZIP codes in the city of Boston, and I've considered getting reports for each of them. I would like to be "complete", even though I don't handle real estate sales in the other neighborhoods. This would increase traffic to my site, which would increase my exposure to potential clients and make me seen as the expert in ALL of Boston.

Measuring My Return on Investment
I think the cost of the reports is easily justified. First, I enjoy reading the reports, myself. It presents data in ways I don't collect, myself. As well, it provides useful information to my existing clients. And, it provides useful information to potential clients.

Again, it makes me become known as an "expert" in Boston real estate - as the primary source for data and information on the Boston real estate market.

As of now, only a couple of other Boston real estate agents offer the Altos Research reports, which is fine by me, but I expect more agents to begin offering the reports to clients, which will increase competition. I'm glad I'm doing it, first.

Client, friend, and indefatigable blogger Kevin Boer has a really slick map mashup of our AltosCharts housing price charts for the Bay Area, using our price quartile data. Kevin uses Zeesource and the result is prettier than our own map mashup (though ours covers all our markets and has a zoom-in-to-the-zip-codes feature.)

Our AltosCharts service is up for the Most Innovative Technology award at the Inman Connect conference this week. It's partners like Kevin that really illustrate the power of using market analytics to inform. We're proud to count him as a client. I'm not sure how the winners are selected for these awards, but maybe fans of Kevin's work will stuff the ballot box for us.

And while I'm patting myself on the back, here are a couple of other Altos clients that use AltosCharts really well to bring value to their readers, and boost their own marketing return:

The Harper Team in the East Bay

Pat Kapowich in Sunnyvale

SeattleHome.com

(BTW - I don't mean to exclude any other clients and your sites. There are too many to mention. Feel free to add your site to the comments of this blog if you want to show off your AltosCharts work. I'll work up a post highlighting other sites soon.)

The fabulous blog fest, the Carnival of Real Estate, finds its way to our humble home today. While we came up short on working out a clever theme (Summer Solstice? 4th of July? Yankees vs. Giants? Gay Pride Parade?) for judging this week's mound of entries, we decided at least to categorize them. Of the many, many dozens of entries, these are the four categories into which real estate writing has seemed to self-organize. We'll highlight the best of each group.

Category	Description
Consumer Real Estate	Advice, lists and insights for home buyers and sellers, borrowers, and searchers
Real Estate Professionals	Thoughts and opinions on the state of the industry, realtors, and the latest industry news
Real Estate Technology	As always, lots of opinions and advice on blogging. This week a bunch of photography related posts. Technology that's changing our business
Greg Swann*	With his three blogs (which basically follow the above categories), dozens of contributors, each with their own excellent blogs, Greg has created an orbit all his own.

First the Technology Category, and our favorite post of the week. Some important thoughts that everyone in this business should be aware of.

1. Jim Cronin at the Real Estate Tomato tackles a deeply nuanced topic that has far reaching implications across the Internet in general. The question of the day in real estate is, Can you blog about other brokers' listings? This innocent little industry-insider topic challenges the legal implications of copyright, the changing nature of competition, and freedom of information. And, if you don't talk to your kids about copyright, who will? Jim tackles the myriad issues admirably, and leaves the mic open for lots of further discussion. Interesting times indeed.

Other cool posts on technology in real estate this week:

1. Cecelia Hutchings on Athol's RE Agent in CT. What consumers want in listings photos and how to take them. Marvelous insights in this post.
2. Also on the photography topic, Aaron Dickinson explains HDR photography and making your listings photos rock. for cheap.
3. Back on the blogging topic, Mary at RSS Pieces talks about when to worry about duplicate blog content and when not to. I recently spoke with Google's Matt Cutts on the topic. His point is "if you're not actively trying to deceive Google or your readers, you're probably not going to be penalized."

Next the Professionals group. Two really great posts, each tackling a different angle on the nuances of being a real estate professional and marketing real estate these days:

1. In typically impassioned Bloodhound Blog style, Greg Swann tackles Real Estate Licensing, and why it's bad for the business. Read this article. The license, no matter what training it requires, is fundamentally anti-intelligence, anti-experience, anti-due diligence. The license not only deludes consumers into thinking that all agents are the same, it permits newly-minted licensees plausibly to make that very stupid claim.
2. Can you name your listing? If Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki were in the real estate business, they'd have written this post. And it would have gotten 10,000 readers. Instead, Kimberly Wester has it tucked away on Active Rain and you few hundred Blog Carnival readers will benefit. In Silicon Valley, marketing wisdom says, to name a market is to own it. Kimberly points out that naming your listing helps you understand it's strengths and market it better to buyers. Good stuff.

Finally the Consumer Category. Always full of advice, most of it good, the Consumer category does not fail this week. Two posts in particular focus on the consumer implications of the wrenching changes currently happening for regular folks who just want to buy or sell their homes:

1. On the buy-side, Brian Brady shows us important changes in lending laws. In 2007 lenders will be required to report cash-out refinance transactions. This little change is going to result in very different lender behavior. Look out.
2. On the sell-side, Larry in Cocoa Beach has two properties on the banks of denial river for you. Overpricing properties in a cooling market. Ouch.
   

Bonus! Other fun articles to peruse:

• Cliff Jacobson brings us the list of real estate cliches.
• Kris Berg on the collapse of traditional newspaper business and the cat-husband dynamic.
• Jay Thompson explores blogging for clients. The Sellsius boys want to know who does it best.
• Erik Hersman looks into real estate web traffic, finds it flat. Which means all the growth is going to the individual sites like those contributors to the Carnival of Real Estate. Rock on.

The Carnival takes a July 4th holiday next week. It returns at ValleyMarket.com in two weeks.

*just kidding about judging Greg's own category. Not kidding about the significance of his presence in this biz.

The teams at Active Rain and Inman News have put together Project Blogger--a contest pairing experienced real estate bloggers as coaches with apprentices as the newbies develop their blog and their business. It's a 14 week (!) contest culminating at the Inman Connect conference in August. The winner gets a million bucks and Howie Mandel's tie. Or something. This week, they've graciously invited me contribute ridiculous hours to judge the contest. [disclosure: I'm friends with many of the coaches on these teams. Some of them are business partners of Altos Research. Still others actively refer new business to our firm. And contestant Kelly Kilpatrick has signed up as a subscriber to the Altos Research services. So I'm about as independent as an East German figure skating judge with a bag of HGH. But I'll try.]

Here's my judging criteria:

1. Blogging is like a big networking party, online. You have to be engaging, and ultimately, you're participating to build your business. You just don't want your conversation partner to feel like he's being sold. Nobody likes being pounced on. Bottom line: points for style here folks.
   
2. Like networking, the more you reach out, the more you get back. I found all of the blogs I judged this week to be starved of outbound links. Blogging is about being found on the internet. Keywords matter. Links matter and you get by giving. Further, link bait matters. I awarded points for content linkability as well as readability.
   
3. I gave a few points for technology & well executed features, deducted points for bugs.
4. Finally - some points for gotta go for shear quantity. Your traffic will be directly proportional to the amount of posts. Black Kettle over here certainly understands the occasional low ebb of creativity, but this is a contest, so bring your A Game.

With that in mind, here are this week's winners for Project Blogger:

1. Kevin Tomlinson with Ardell: Kevin in Miami gets credit for the single best post of the week - Don't want to close on your pre-construction condo? It's funny (can't afford your new Miami condo? Pawn your Rolex!), timely, and structured as good link-bait. People are googling this topic as we speak. Advice for Kevin: Link out to other blogs (lawyers, lenders, economists) anyone with something to say on the topic. Provides more resources for your readers and gives those bloggers reason to link back to you. Develop this into a series of 10 or more posts. Kevin got dinged a little for a bit of low volume.
2. Jackie Colson Miller and Jim Cronin: Get rid of that sound track now! Any tech-y feature that locks my browser even for 5 seconds is a definite no-no. But the content show promise with the tax and international angles. I also like how you've leveraged Active Rain with half-posts that point to your main site.
   
3. Tisza Major-Posner with Drew Meyers: Tisza scores with volume and depth. Question for Tisza:Why are you holding back? Your personality shows through on the Active Rain posts, but seems homogenized out of the posts on Route66 blog. Since your eventual customers will be coming from the latter, isn't that where you want to engage them?
4. Ines Hegedus-Garcia with Paul Chaney: Good looking new design, a great domain name, excellent use of images. But there are still lots of bugs, broken links, etc. It's nice having a sexy town to blog about.
5. Mary Pope-Handy with Frances Flynn Thorsen: Succinct posts keep readability high. Looks like it has a good start on becoming a neighborhood hub. Do they actually allow garage sales in Monte Sereno? Loses points for a funky structure that links across multiple sites unexpectedly.

Some thoughts for the others in the contest:

• London Whitted with Pat Kitano: Take the gloves off man! The promise I see on the commercial front is to go for the professional market, not beginner how-to text. Show me some deal structure, some financing math maybe. There's so much opacity in the commercial real estate market, shed some light.
• Kelly Kilpatrick with Joel Burslem: Kelly, you are at your best when you're ranting. Do more of that.
• Valli Wimberly with Teresa (no 'h') Boardman: We have some clients who are very successful with the impersonal, news-y style blogs. The thing they have in common: volume. Post every day and become the nexus of information for Denver. Otherwise when someone finds you, all they see is something they read in the paper a month ago.
• Julie Ferenzi with Jeff Turner: Julie your best work is socked away on the Active Rain blog. Bring it front and center. The comments about how clients found you are perfect for other potential clients to read and know it's Ok to find you too.
  
• Theresa Lussier with Greg Swan: Theresa, you have pleasantly structured prose, but remember you have 7 seconds to engage a visitor. Punch it up with images (see Ines above) or style.
  
• Madison Hildebran with Dustin Luther: Brotha, I hope you've been busy selling a beach house to Lindsay Lohan, because you haven't been blogging.

The full Project Blogger posts for the week are here.

Joel tracks the action at Inman here.

Lots of Blogosphere fun going on this week at Altos HQ. In today's post we host the Carnival of Real Estate: Consumer Edition. Tomorrow we'll be playing Simon (Paula? The other dude?) on Active Rain's Project Blogger competition of up and coming real estate bloggers.

First for the Altos Research readers who aren't knee deep in real estate blogging: Blog Carnivals are simply a collection of best-posts on a particular topic self-submitted by a group of bloggers. I like the carnival concept because it gives readers get a filtered-for-quality collection of reading each week. As a blogger, carnivals are a great way to get a little publicity for your best work.

We've been participating on and off in the more broad Carnival of Real Estate over the past year or so. (It'll be hosted on this site next month.) Many of the best posts in that collection are folks writing for real estate pros. Lots of blogging about blogging. Great topics but not meaningful to the consumer who just wants to hear more about home buying and selling. Thus the CoRE: Consumer Edition was born.

On to the posts

Top of the Heap

My favorite post this week is from Jay the Phoenix Real Estate Guy. It's a topic close to our hearts here and I find it a valuable exercise for the consumer reader. In What The Heck is a Buyers' Market? Jay explores the common euphemism for the growing levels of homes on the market. Demand is down and supply is up. If you're in the market to buy, you'll have plenty of selection. If you're a seller, well, opportunity is all relative, I suppose. It's a tricky topic because the converse is true too.

Runner up today, with a timely and compelling topic, is from Toby at the Delaware Ohio Real Estate Blog. Increasing foreclosures and what to do about them. Toby points out that everyone loses in the foreclosure process - the borrower, the lender, the community, etc. The Ohio market is facing higher rates of foreclosure than most of the rest of the country, so what should be done? Toby looks at a few options on the table, but misses the one I see as the logical and most productive choice: Do nothing--gotta let the pain work its way through. I've been meaning to rant on the subject for a while, but I'll leave that for another post.

Some other entries worth perusing:

• Michael Emilio dives into the legal arrangements of who represents whom in the real estate transaction. Good stuff. Michael - you should post this topic in some of the real estate wikis flowering out there these days.
• Athol instructs us not to have a heart attack in rural Connecticut.
• Jill (Kathy?) at ShakandJill gives us tips for not creeping out your realtor on open home visits. By the way, that's a good lookin' web site.
• Nigel in Salt Lake City runs through the emotional reasons for why condos can be good for you. I'd love to see the financial side a bit more.
• HotPads tells us to bring a camera and notepad to your open home tour. It's funny how quickly the different properties run together after four hours of home (or appartment) shopping. I'm a spreadsheet guy, personally.

That's all for the Carnival this week. To submit for next week, go here.

When we first stuck our toe into the blog waters back in October of 2005, the Real Estate blogging community was a bit sparse. We humbly tried to add our voice and help raise a community. It wasn't much later, however, that we discovered some New Yorkers at a blog called Sellsius that outclassed us on every dimension in the blogosphere. Prolific and creative and witty and opinionated. Since then, we've met Rudy and Joe and prodded numerous times, "What the hell is Sellsius actually going to do?" Well today the world (finally) knows.

SellsiusRealEstate.com launches today as the Enhanced Real Estate Classifieds site.

Joe and Rudy have been building this project for a long time. In that time a TON of competition has emerged. But Sellsius has one thing going for them that the others don't: These guys know real estate. In this hyper-competitive space, that could be the x-factor that pays off. Here's why:

Current generic classifieds sites include Craigslist, Oodle, Vast, among many others. Zillow and Trulia have their property listings too of course. This group represents well over $100 million in venture capital and a truly impressive passle of entrepreneurs. (For evidence of the latter, see Vast founder Naval Ravikant's magnificent VentureHacks blog.) Of that bunch, only Trulia is really usable for real estate searching. Craigslist is is optimal for apartments and other random projects, but it's second rate for real estate purchases.

Conventional Silicon Valley wisdom says build the most massive database first and the people and their needs will follow. For a house hunt, though, that approach may not solve my problem. When I search for homes for sale in say, Sunnyvale, California, I do NOT want to see 34,000 properties with the "best match" being in San Jose. Ugh.

So despite all the rivers of money flowing into these firms, there is clearly opportunity for Sellsius.

The "Enhanced" part of Sellsius' classifieds is that they have developed not generically for the world nor just for homes for sale, but for the real estate ecosphere. Sellsius brings understanding of all the participants, from architects, to appraisers, to mold removal that you can't find in any of the existing sites. You might be able to find a mold guy on Craigslist, but who knows what you might come up with. The "Niche Search" feature on Sellsius has real promise.

The biggest hurdle for Sellsius will be filling the database. They've come to market with a compelling framework, but it's still a bit empty. The conventional wisdom became convention for a reason. If users try it and find nothing there, they may not come back. Sellsius charges a fee so the hurdle is even higher than other sites. The firm is riding on the boundless energy and massive personal network of Joe and Rudy, if anyone has the reach to build their advertisers to a critical mass, these guys do. (Remember Craigslist was empty once too...) But that's the key, guys. Maybe you can team with a Vast and put a decent front-end on their big list of properties.

How ever you do it, I'm looking forward to seeing the project grow and morph and solve some real problems for people.

This may come as a surprise to many of our readers, but this spring is shaping up to be a pretty hot market in the Bay Area (especially the Peninsula, with the more desirable spots in the East Bay and South Bay trailing, not far behind). We have plenty of anecdotal evidence coming in from our Realtor clients and friends: multiple offers, three-day sales cycles, etc.

So the question is, where in the stats can one turn to measure this transition? Obviously we see the price charts start to march upward with greater demand. But that's not enough, because prices are influenced by lots of exogenous factors and may lag the actual demand a bit. So we decided to explore a different measurement: Days on Market. In a cool market, many properties sit around for a long time. We watched Days on Market climb upward all last year. Now however, if lot of homes are selling quickly with multiple offers, we should see that fact immediately in the Days on Market indicator.

Specifically, when watching a transition from cool to hot, we should see median DoM drop first while the mean DoM stays high. (Remember that median implies half the homes on the market are on for less that this number. And mean is the average of all properties, so a handful of homes that have been for sale for, say, 12 months keeps the average high.)

For example, our client Bart Marchioni recently sold a place in Willow Glen San Jose in 7 days when the average home has been on the market for over 100 days! Good, fresh properties come available and get sold right away, but the stale ones are still sitting around. That's your transition.

So we dove into the Bay Area housing market data to see where the hottest markets are emerging. We looked for zip codes with greater than 15 single family homes for sale, then we looked for those with the greatest percentage difference between the median days on market and the average DoM. What we found confirms what we're hearing from clients are the hottest markets. Here are the 10 hottest Bay Area housing markets ranked by percent difference in median and mean days on market:

City (click any city name for the free research page)	Zip	Median Price	Median Time on Market (approx)*	Mean Time on Market (approx)*
San Jose	95130	$810,000	newly listed