TLDR; If I build a CRM for home buyers to help with the home buying process, would you pay to use it?
The idea would be to either automatically scrape Zillow/Trulia for listings in a certain area then parse the data and do a bunch of validation on it and/or allow the users to paste the url of a listing and import its data via web scraping as well.
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The details
During the pandemic, like many people, my wife and I toyed with the idea of buying a home. I found the process quite cumbersome and a time sink.
When we started to look at different homes, it quickly got out of hand.
For each property we had to: - remember when we went to the open houses - who the real estate agent was that we talked to - what we liked about each property - where it was located compared to other points of interest - how long it would take to commute from there to both our workplaces - how it compared to previous properties we saw earlier(number of bathrooms, bedrooms, land size, parking spaces…) - calculate the potential loan repayments for each property and see if we could actually afford them based on our down payment and so on… - keep track of potential renovations to do on each property - create stand alone folders of pictures of each property and label them properly
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First step: The free browser extension
To ease the burden a bit , I quickly created an extension that calculates your home loan repayments on the go while browsing real estate listings.
I don’t know about you but seeing on a listing that a particular property will cost approximately for example $650 per week helps me better understand if I can afford it instead of simply seeing a number like $450000.
It works on https://realestate.com.au , https://domain.com.au, https://zillow.com and https://trulia.com
You can get it for Chrome here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-estate-buddy/idhhfoemdabklbkdabbodgbahfedfljp
Or for Firefox here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/real-estate-buddy/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
This helped a lot as we could now browse listings and see how each property would affect our budget should we choose to buy it.
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The potential features of the CRM
(this is a non exclusive list, some already exist as part of the MVP I created for myself but others don’t)
- be able to quickly import data from the listings - be able to tag each property with custom tags - be able to add comments to properties - be able to calculate commute times from certain points of interest or workplaces - add pictures to listings and have the ability to label the pictures - be able to compare two properties’ features - apply custom validation rules to each property (for example, the property should cost no more than 5 times gross yearly salary) - keep track when the property was seen, who the agent was, if the price is negotiable and so forth
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The MVP
I have built most of the functionality as an MVP for myself and I use it to monitor certain suburbs back in Australia to see how the system performs. It's very rough around the edges so it will probably take about two months(while working full time at my day job) to polish it enough to release it to users and fix up all the bugs and make the UI visually appealing.
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The team (me)
My website is at http://www.yannhulot.com. I am a French-Australian software developer currently living in Stockholm.
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I am looking for any feedback and comments. Please don’t hold anything back. Also if this idea ends up being worth pursuing, I would be looking for a co-founder, so if you are interested, please let me know in the comments.
After people reply (if they reply) to this thing, you will have learned nothing about whether people would actually pay for it. Go and learn that fact in actual viable ways.
In any case, most property portals already have widgets showing estimates of monthly payments. And if they don't and this is a useful feature they'll just add it. Some have features to save properties, etc. (Looks like realestate.com.au is very similar to the main one here in the UK, rightmove.co.uk, and they also seem to have a "renovation estimator")
Overall, I think this is a important thing to consider: The features that are not too difficult to implement and integrate in those major property portals, and they will be available for free. So I think the question is not whether the idea has a market (it has one) but whether an independent, paid-for product is viable. If there are none that might tell you something...
So yes, good idea - but you are not first to market so you might want to find out the full landscape in this arena. Also, at least in the USA, buyer's agents are free - you do not need to pay for this, nor for the agent who handles everything for you.
The traditional way it was done (at least here in Italy):
1) due diligence (with your bank and a few others for comparison) to understand the costs of a mortgage, its duration and the monthly or bi-yearly repayment, this results in a sheet of paper with lines telling you in (say) 20,000 Euro's steps what the rate will be.
2) due diligence with your accountant about the tax credits that a given repayment may allow, as well in case of renovation you may (or may not) be eligible for a 50% or 65% tax rebate in 10 years
3) due diligence (with friends that did the same lately, sometimes with professionals) about the approximate range of costs for renovation (this usually results in anything between 600 and 1200 Euro/sqm depending on the amount of renovation needed)
4) due diligence with a notary about the costs of transferring property (taxes+fees)
5) due diligence with the estate agent to determine their fees (typically 2-3% of the amount paid).
At this point you sum:
1) amount you have ready in cash for downpayment (let's say 100,000, 75% max of total cash you have, or you need to have 135,000 cash to count 100,000)
2)amount that the bank is willing to lend you (and that you expect to be able to repay in 15-20-25 years, let's say another 100,000)
3) you have now an hypothetical budget of 200,000 (this is the money you can afford to give to the seller), to which you add notary and taxes (between 8,000 and 20,000) the estate agents fees (6,000) and some 5,000 more for moving and some other expenses connected to the moving, and you are going to spend roughly 10%-15% more, between 220,000 and 230,000, if the house is "perfect" and needs NO renovations, otherwise you detract the assumed costs for renovation, using the higher cost, 1,200 Euro/sqm, if on the local market the houses cost is 4,000 Euro/sqm, the size of the house you can afford is 50 square meters, amd you are within your budget of 200,000, if the house needs renovation you need to pay it no more than 140,000 to stay within budget.
Then you take a sheet of paper and on it you write:
the name of the agent and its contacts
the asking price
the status of the house (need for renovation, changes, etc.)
the address
the date of visit
your first impressions on the house
optionally you pin to this sheet of paper a few photos you took on your visit
These latter can be done (as it is usually done since - say - 30 years) on a simple spreadsheet.
A the end of your search for a new house you will have how many? 5, 10 or maybe 20 of such sheets (or spreadsheets), anyway a small number that you can (print and) spread on a table to view/review/compare to make a choice.
Your app will be (at least for Italy, or however any country where the tax code and procedures for buying a house are complex):
1) incorrect in the calculation of the mortgage (unless you have access to many banks conditions/contracts) this could be 5% but up to 10% error
2) incorrect in the amount of taxes and fees to be paid (unless you implement also tax software) there could easily be a 100% or more error in this
3) incorrect in the amount due to the estate agent (unless you can connect to the estate agent fees structure)
4) incorrect in the costs for renovations (unless you have access to valid prioces/costs in the specific area) this could be a 50% error, besides the possible access to tax rebates
5) most probably correct in commute times (which will be the same ones you can get from google maps or similar)
I can see no particular advantages (that I would pay money for) but - worse than that - I personally would not trust your app to make accurate calculations, and when you buy a house it is a lot of money, often the whole amount of savings of a family and a substantial part of their future spending for 15-20-25 years, even a 10% error on the total could be affecting the future of the family.
I mean, I like the n "price comparison" sites for household items, but those are 10-100-1000 Euro, even if there are mistakes and you come out choosing an item that costs 1200 Euro instead of 1000, it doesn't make a change, choosing a house that will cost in total 240,000 Euro instead of 200,000 may instead be a big issue.