Last Friday, the House Committee on Oversight and Investigations took the opportunity to grill financial executives about their enormous bonuses, stock sales and salary in the wake of the sub-prime market collapse.

Compensation issues aside for a moment, I’d like to know why no one told John Finnegan, chair of Merrill Lynch’s compensation committee, about the “Red Tie Rule”.

[photo credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times (full story here)]

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I read a lot of real estate related blogs. Most of the information I digest concerns using the internet for self-branding and property marketing.

Every so often though, one of the bloggers lets loose with a great post like this one from Eric Bramlett.

Top 10 Worst Realtor Photos

My favourite?

#5

That’s the guy you want representing you and your family in what will likely be the largest personal financial transaction in your life.

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The RTD has an article and an op/ed piece related to affordable housing in today’s paper.

What happened to affordable housing?
Richmond’s affordable housing market continues to shrink, according a report released today by the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Virginia Local Initiatives Support Corp.

Smarter Growth For Greater Richmond

When I saw the article on the front page of the paper, I had a sense of déjà vu. Wasn’t it almost a year ago that we were talking about this same subject? Oh wait, that’s right. We were.

Exactly one year ago today, the RTD’s Public Square held a discussion on the topic of affordable housing that nearly 300 people attended. John Sarvay wrote about it here.

So John, as our resident expert on afforable housing, what’s happened in the last year? Where are we?

Other affordable housing posts from John Sarvay:

WELCOME TO SUBURBIA (August 27, 2006)
THE WORKFORCE HOUSING CHALLENGE (Nov 4, 2006)

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The marketing team at Rocketts Landing has an ad running in today’s paper that asks the question, “Is your address as cool as you are?”

The ad announces 210 Rock, a collection of one and two bedroom condos and lofts (starting in the mid-200s) at Rocketts Landing.

We stopped by this morning for a quick peek at the ongoing development and found this road sign. I think the marketing team may be advertising the wrong address because I’d much rather have this as my address. Talk about cool!

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One of the rumors coming out of last week’s Real Estate Connect, followed by a confusing press relesase from Realology, was that Prudential was being knocked out of Yahoo! Real Estate as the MLS provider.

As it turns out, Prudential will continue to deliver MLS data to Yahoo! Real Estate while Realology will provide data to a separate classifieds section. Customers will have to choose which group of data they want to search though because unlike an iPhone in a Blendtec, the data won’t blend.

Or rather, someone isn’t allowing it to blend—most likely Prudential.

For whatever reason, Yahoo! wasn’t able to bring their expertise to bear on the online home search problem with this agreement. Customers don’t care whether the house of their dreams was listed in the MLS, posted in the classifieds or is a FSBO. That only matters to brokers and agents.

Michael Wurzer at FBS offers a breakdown of the two business models for online real estate today:

(1) charge the broker or agent for premium positioning
(2) give the listing advertising away and sell advertising to others.

He goes on to conclude that “an MLS portal, devoid of all advertising and premium positioning… not only is consumer-centric but it’s also the least expensive for brokers and agents. The MLS fosters the cooperation necessary to tame the competition enough to allow listing aggregation, which is necessary to serve the consumer.”

I happen to agree with Michael about the model. Listings should be just that - listings. No hype, no premiums, no top homes, no flashing “look at me” ads. None of that matters to a buyer (and none of that should matter to a seller or an agent).

Simply put, a consumer should be able to search for homes for sale in their area that meet their criteria, whether the home is represented by an agent or is a FSBO.

Unfortunately, I don’t see movement on the part of MLS groups to remove the walls they’ve built to provide the best home search on the market. We’re still a long way off from that day and until then, we’re stuck with confusing search models like Yahoo!‘s.

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I’ve enjoyed reading the variety of topics on Marc Andreessen’s blog, blog.pmarca.com.

Today’s post, But what if we bundled the music CDs with the houses… hit a nerve in this real estate junkie.

He posts an excerpt from an AP story about the current housing slump and the slow (or in some cases, hemorrhaging) revenue bleed in the real estate category at many newspapers.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at this quote in the AP story (emphasis mine):

...What’s worrying analysts this time around is that real estate could become the next category of classified advertising — after help-wanted ads — to mark a significant and permanent shift away onto the Internet. The stakes are big for newspapers since classifieds are highly lucrative and make up more than 35 percent of their revenues. ...

Could? Could be the next shift away from the classifieds to online?

In almost all of the 40+ real estate blogs I monitor on a daily basis, Realtors across the country are sounding the death knell of real estate classifieds in print. They all claim (many with numbers to back up their claims) that marketing homes in the newspaper is a waste of their money and time.

According to them, people aren’t finding (or looking for) open houses in the paper—nor are they calling about listings seen in print.

A Realtor on one of the blogs I read claims that as of September 1, the Sacramento Bee will lose a 2 million-dollar annual contract. Several Washington DC area Realtors pulled entirely out of print advertising years ago, moving all of their promotional efforts online to stay in sync with their customers.

So why do so many Realtors continue to advertise in the paper?

Most of the posts I’ve read point to three reasons:

1. Habit. A lot of agents and brokers don’t take the time to evaluate the ROI on advertising.
2. The newspaper does and will continue to offer great exposure for the agent and the broker - personal branding is still insanely important in the industry (experience counts in this business)
3. Homeowners continue to believe that newspaper ads sell homes (despite the building evidence against it)

Any analysts still worrying about newspapers losing real estate revenue are behind the times. It’s already happening.

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