Blog

Welcome to the new Sawbuck site! We’re excited to bring you a bigger, better site loaded with features to make the home buying and selling process easier and more convenient for you. We've worked hard over the last six months to bring the new site to life and prepare it for nationwide expansion.
If you haven't checked out the new site, go on and have a look. During the design process, our goal was simple: make it more intuitive, more consistent, and more efficient. Here are some highlights from the new site that we know you’ll love:

• News Feed: live market activity within search results – new listings, price changes, contracts and sales – much like Facebook's status updates. Sawbuck is the only company that does this.
• More views: see homes in a list, gallery or map view with an outline of the search area. When zoomed out in map view, close-together homes are grouped to represent more than one listing; and nearby areas show the number of matching listings, giving an accurate preview of homes for sale in other areas.
• Market Guide: an overall look at the local housing market, including total listings, new listings, price reductions, days on market, months of inventory, median sales price, contracts and total sales; filter by property type and number of bedrooms.
• Market Health Score: Sawbuck's unique score combines metrics for inventory, change in median sales price, "pull-through" (percentage of contracts that close) and "equilibrium" (the balance between new listings, price reductions, contracts and sales); compare the market health of any city, zip code or neighborhood in Sawbuck's coverage areas.
• Instant Updates: easily track cities, zip codes, neighborhoods or individual listings with email alerts or a custom RSS feed.
• My Sawbuck: a snapshot of rated listings, most recently viewed listings, saved and recent searches, and mini-market guides for favorite areas; quick link to setup home tours of your favorite listings.

One thing hasn't changed and never will. Sawbuck remains your one-stop shop for the most beneficial and convenient way to buy and sell a home. We make it simple to work with the best while saving you the most.

Once you've checked out the new site, let us know what you think. We want to make sure we are satisfying your real estate needs and keeping you happy!

We've gone Hollywood!

We are excited to start branching out into new cities and are looking forward to helping customers in the Southern California region.

We are geared up to offer home buyers and sellers in Los Angeles County, Orange County and the Inland Empire the greatest MLS data, top-notch real estate agents and the best mortgage and closing cost deal. We also just launched our new site so Southern Californians can now enjoy all of our previous benefits, plus all of the helpful features of our new site.

Stay tuned for future city launches. We have major expansion plans for the remainder of 2009!

Well, for starters, we would not offer this guarantee if we weren't confident that you won't be able to find a better one out there. And if you are that determined to prove us wrong, go ahead and do some research. If you come up with a better deal, we'll pay you $1,000. Guaranteed.

After the research that we did, we found out that the average Sawbuck rate was .41% better than the national average, as reported in the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. In other words, on a $400,000 mortgage, that's a savings of $101 per month and $36,360 over the life of the loan.

We also checked out the 2008 Bankrate Closing Costs Study and quickly realized that closing costs paid by Sawbuck Customers were often thousands of dollars better than the average. To be more specific, on a $500,000 purchase, the typical Sawbuck customer paid $3753 less than the average revealed in the study. How can we do this?

• We only partner with industry leaders, such as Bank of America and First American, already known for their low rates and quality service
• We NEVER ask our mortgage and settlement partners to share profits with us. This is unlike most real estate brokers, who try to profit from their customers' mortgages and settlements, which drives up rates and costs
• We pre-negotiate reduced fees for our customers
• We subsidize every deal, putting our money into the pot at closing
• The result is an unbeatable combination of mortgage rate and closing costs – guaranteed.

For more details, check out our Savings Guarantee page.

Unfortunately, I think I jinxed the US Senate's recent attempt to add an amendment to the stimulus bill that would have increased the homebuyer tax credit to $15,000 (read my previous post).  The final version that made it through both houses ended up with a first time homebuyer credit of $8,000.  While not what the Senate had hoped for, it is still a very meaningful credit and, unlike the current incentive in place, it does not have to be repaid.

It looks like Washington is finally going to do something significant to support the housing market. Last night the Senate passed an amendment to be included in the economic stimulus bill that would give all homebuyers over the next year a $15,000 tax credit. This is a vast improvement from the current credit, which gives first-time homebuyers a credit of $7500 that must be repaid over a 15 year period, effectively making it an interest free loan. The new amendment, sponsored by Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), has a few minor caveats – e.g. primary residences only – but by and large it’s as good as it appears. Uncle Sam is truly paying you to buy a home. The effect on the housing market could be substantial, as the new tax credit gives prospective homebuyers a reason to jump off the fence and get into a home.

Being out at Inman Connect last week, I had far more time than usual to think about the big picture—what are we doing? How is it different? What’s wrong with the current system? Several themes emerged from this thinking, and I don’t have time for all of them right now. So I will start with one...

Online real estate directs consumers toward less-good agents.

Think of the pool of local real estate agents as a pyramid, with the best agents at the top. They are experienced, knowledgeable, professional, and businesslike; they are an active part of a local community of other top agents. If you were the ultimate real estate insider, these are the agents with whom you would work.

They actually do help you sell homes for more, buy better homes for less and solve problems when they inevitably arise. In short, they really do all the things NAR says every Realtor does.

At the bottom are the opposite kind of agents: newbies, part-timers, outdated old-timers, low-volume, slow-volume, no-volume. Basically, they’ve got a license. Over 2.77 million people in the U.S. do—what are the chances that any particular one of them is really good at their job?

In between is everyone else—OK, average, and pretty-good agents who do their job and move buyers, sellers and homes through the system.

So there’s your pyramid, probably similar to that of any other field or occupation. Take doctors or architects or IT guys and the breakdown works the same way (though the ease of entry to real estate caused the bottom of our pyramid to swell between 2002 and 2006). In all cases, it’s pretty obvious who you want to work with, right? The question is just how you identify and find them.

Last month, Sawbuck was named a finalist for an Inman Innovator Award for Most Innovative Brokerage. Inman News is the leading voice in real estate news, and the awards are given out annually at their Inman Connect conference in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, the winners in our category were gigantic brokers Remax and Coldwell Banker.

As you would think, we were really excited to be nominated. We're just getting started in this business, having launched only five months ago, and serving just one market so far (our home market of Washington, DC). Though we have big plans, and feel great about our consumer-friendly model of making buying or selling easier and less expensive, we didn't expect to really be on Inman's radar at this stage of the game.

But on Friday, a strange thing happened...we won!

The awards are the last order of business on the last day of the conference, and Most Innovative Brokerage is the very first category. I was sitting in a special little section at the front with the other finalists and stood up when they read our company names. When they announced the winner, to my surprise, our logo popped onto the giant screens and our name was called. I hopped up a few steps, shook Brad Inman's hand and walked away with a petite, but very nice (and dense) trophy of crystal and marble.

I was quite sure we were not going to win, so it was a most pleasant surprise. The representatives of the other finalists were super-gracious, and many people came up afterwards to congratulate me/us. Afterwards, I made sure to thank the folks from Inman, and let them know we would work hard over the next year to make sure they didn't regret their choice.

Hopefully, this unexpected award will help us as we grow, move into new markets and attract new agents and customers. While we're just getting started, we're onto something.

I spent the last four days in San Francisco at Inman Connect 2008, the leading real estate-meets-technology conference of the year. For a down year for the real estate industry, it certainly seemed crowded to me (through it was my first time, so I don't have a benchmark). While the sample might be somewhat skewed, it sounded like many brokers and agents were using this downturn to redirect traditional advertising dollars online. So maybe that helps explain the turnout.

There was a lot said about blogging, both by agents for consumers and among those in the real estate and technology industries. This obviously served as a reminder that I my blogging has been woefully infrequent of late. So I'm going to try harder.

Another discussion of one of my personal shortcomings came from Merlin Mann, the keynote speaker, proprietor of 43folders.com, and proponent of Inbox Zero. In short, he tries to give people (like me, and probably you) who can be overwhelmed by email a way out. He has a fairly simple and specific system to accomplish this, but it only works with a parallel attitude adjustment about what email is and is not. Worth a look.

I attended many sessions; as expected, some were more interesting or useful than others. One packed session was titled "Brokers & MLS vs. Listings Aggregators." Basically, it was a discussion of the merits of listing aggregators like Trulia and Zillow, and whether they were friend or foe of real estate brokers and their MLSs. It could have been really interesting, but while Trulia and some brokers and MLSs who supply them listings data were on the panel, there was really no one on the other side of the issue.

Yesterday, Sawbuck was named as one of five finalists for the Inman News 2008 Innovator Awards in the category of Most Innovative Brokerage. We thought we had a shot at being nominated, but were really excited to see it in print.

Inman is the real estate industry’s leading news organization; the awards will be presented at next month's Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. I'll be out there (I'm a speaker on a panel titled "Building a Brokerage Brand in a Web 2.0 World") to see who wins. My advanced statistical analysis tells me we have a 20% chance of winning, and the competition is stiff (especially from "alternative broker" poster-boy Redfin), so this probably as far as we go. But, as they say at the Oscars (usually with pursed lips), "it's an honor just to be nominated".

If nothing else, this is great validation for what we are doing. We are really trying to do something new, combining the Real Estate 2.0 ethos of free information, powerful online tools, transparency and savings through efficiency with the best of "traditional" real estate -- top local agents who know the neighborhoods and offer great, personal service. It is certainly gratifying to have our industry recognize us; but it's even better when regular people become Sawbuck devotees.

The five year dispute between the Justice Department and the National Association of Realtors is finally, mercifully, over. Predictably, both sides claimed victory, even though it’s hard to remember just what they were fighting about. But while one might assume that the market has moved beyond talk of “opt-outs” and “virtual office web sites,” this week’s settlement will shape the industry for years to come.
 
Real estate has crossed the Rubicon, never to go back.  Now all parties, with the court’s blessing, have sanctioned the rights of innovators and entrepreneurs to create new ways of doing business and accessing MLS listings. In the world of listings ("IDX" to real estate technology insiders), all brokers are now in the same boat -- traditional and alternative, online and bricks-and-mortar. For a given MLS, everyone can display the same listings, with the same level of detail, on their public web site. (Whether they choose to do so is another matter.)

The bigger change comes in new, uniform support for VOWs (Virtual Office Websites, the parts available to registered users). Innovative brokers are now free to provide buyers and sellers online tools and information that match (or exceed) those available to traditional agents at their desk. And now MLSs must make their data available to brokers who want to build a better mousetrap. Ultimately, this is good for everyone -- brokers, agents, buyers and sellers -- even if they don’t yet realize it.

In its news release, the Justice Department predicted that commissions would fall as a result of the settlement.  This assumes that the only new models our industry can create are “discount” models -- more do-it-yourself, less commission. But maybe what consumers want is more for their money, not less for less money? Maybe they like “traditional” local agents and just want to find a new way to work with them? Innovation, on a level playing field, will answer these questions.

At Sawbuck, we created an “alternative” model that preserves commissions and uses traditional local agents (only the best ones), yet gives buyers the information, tools and control they want, plus the financial incentive they require. We did this by attacking the “ancillary services” that have become brokers’ cash cow: mortgage and title.

This model has saved homebuyers thousands of dollars through our negotiated below-market mortgages (with no closing costs) plus our unique no-fee settlement. Our Realtor partners earn full commission, get high-quality buyers and happily pay our referral fee. Yet this consumer-friendly, agent-friendly model was disallowed by NAR’s original VOW policy. That’s why the Justice Department asked us to testify at the planned trial.

Now, we no longer have to put an asterisk in our business plan (*note: business model may become moot at any time). And I’ll bet the surety that comes from this settlement, and the level playing field it establishes, will launch a hundred new business plans.