Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Blogging about work: real estate linkage

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Via London Perl Mongers (I seem to get lots of cool stuff from them), Nestoria are offering GPSs as prizes at Yahoo Hack Day for hackers who write stuff using Nestoria’s API. Viva la Web2.0!

Via O’Reilly Radar, Trulia have just released Trulia Hindsight which lets you watch the growth of US cities over time. My inner — OK, outer — history geek is fascinated.

And has anyone else been following the legal dramas with inexpensive Flat fee MLS realtors in the US? Freakonomics blog asks, How much is a realtor really worth?

The whole MLS issue is really interesting to me because we don’t have an MLS here in Australia, and it’s fascinating to see how the industries differ from country to country. I was slightly blown away to discover that in Scotland they don’t even have real estate agents: most properties there are sold through solicitors. Who knew? Lesson learnt: internationalisation goes deeper than you think!

When I bought a house in England, the process was “find listing via estate agent; arrange viewing with estate agent; give offer to estate agent”, followed by “find a solicitor, have solicitor talk to estate agent for details of seller’s solicitor, have bank send huge wodge of cash to solicitor, pick keys up from solicitor”.

This is different from Sweden, where (in general) a single property broker will act as a middleman on behalf of both buyer and seller and take a cut out of the pie.

Ingvar: Hi! Good to see you here!

In Australia, the agent works for the vendor, and the buyer has no agent. The buyer usually enlists the help of a solicitor (and/or other professionals to carry out inspections/surveys, etc) to make sure she doesn’t get screwed over. The vendor’s real estate agent gets a commission, and the buyer’s solicitor just charges a fee.

In Canada, there are two agents, one for the vendor and one for the buyer. They halve the commission, roughly speaking. Each party has a solicitor but the solicitor doesn’t do as much as she would (for the buyer, at least) in Australia. The whole buyers’ agent thing seemed to tie in very well with the MLS system; I presume they evolved together.

I’d guess so. Amusingly enough, I’ve seen both the English (don’t know how it extends to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but it seems to be the same in at least England and Wales) and Swedish system from a buyer’s perspective and (so far) only the Swedish from a seller’s perspective.

Main difference between an estate agent here and in Sweden is that an estate agent in Sweden is legally responsible for compiling (or making sure) there is an accurate information pack for the property and to broker the deal between seller and buyer (the actual contract is signed by the seller and the buyer, the broker isn’t signing; though it’s usually done at the bank or at the broker’s office).

At least in Sweden, it’s been known for people to sell without a broker involved, though that means at least one of the parties need to do some legal legwork to get all title deeds signed over properly (without that, the buy falls through and any and all money exchanged needs to be returned). I think a solicitor is needed here, but I haven’t checked.