Amazon TurnKey Competition & Will the Housing Market be Recession Proof in 2020?

Closingtimepodcast.com for the latest news from the real estate world, helpful tips for buyers, sellers and other agents, and all of our previous podcast episodes. Keep up with us on Facebook and Instagram. We also offer home video tours, Realtor branding videos, ariel shots, live streams and more.. closingtimepodcast.com and click on the CMG Real Estate Link..

How to Get a $5,000 Amazon Credit: Buy a House Through Realogy

Over the past year, the decidedly analog business of buying and selling real estate has been upended by a flurry of new money and start-ups trying to usher in a world where homes are bought and sold online. Now, Amazon is creating a partnership that goes in the opposite direction by using its gigantic retail platform to facilitate phone calls with human real estate agents.

On Tuesday, Amazon said that it was working with Realogy, the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage company and owner of Century 21, Coldwell Banker and other brands, to create TurnKey, a service that will help prospective home buyers find real estate agents. To entice customers, Amazon will give buyers up to $5,000 in home services and smart-home gear when they close.

Amazon is now as much a search engine as it is a store, and the deal fits into the company’s effort to capitalize on its status as an online destination by making money on advertising and other services. It’s also a way to encourage people to adopt products like Alexa speakers and Ring doorbells and to promote its list of handymen, furniture assemblers and other home services.

For Realogy, who will pay for those benefits, the partnership is a way of using Amazon to find home buyers and help its brokers separate the closers from the lookie-loos by rebating a portion of its commission, in the form of free Amazon stuff, to anyone who actually buys a house.

Keller Williams and Compass leaders spar (politely) over tech

Keller Williams Realty President Josh Team said Thursday during an Inman Connect panel that his brokerage is investing $1 billion into technology before directing a jab at Compass CEO Robert Reffkin: “Not buying marketshare.”

During a discussion entitled “The Inman Interview: Can Your Technology Compete?” Reffkin touted purportedly unrivaled engineering talent and Compass’ vision of building a first-of-its-kind property search platform. Teamcountered that Keller Williams is already delivering top-shelf technology to its agents.

The two executives never directly disparaged each other’s firms. But they traded some thinly-veiled barbs.

“This isn’t hyperbole or vision,” Team said about Keller Williams’ tech platform, implying that Compass’ is just that. “This is real.”

Keller Williams’ suite of tools combined with its integration of an in-house lender is helping agents guide customers from the time their contact information arrives in a database to the moment they order an appraisal, he said.

NRT CEO compares Compass' agent recruitment to 'shoplifting'

NRT CEO Ryan Gorman compared Compass’ recruitment of agents and efforts to gain market share in competing marketplaces to “shoplifting,” at Inman Connect Las Vegas Thursday morning

NRT’s parent company Realogy is suing Compass over “unfair business practices and illegal schemes to gain market share at all costs.”

“We don’t sue for show,” Gorman told interviewer Clelia Peters, the president of Warburg Realty. “This is the real deal… the industry should take it seriously.”

Gorman encouraged everyone in the audience to read beyond the headlines and take a full look at the lawsuit. He said after reading it, people won’t wonder why Realogy is suing Compass, but rather why it took them so long to do so.

Next recession will come in 2020 — but it won't be due to housing

Half of the real estate economists and experts surveyed by Zillow this week believe that the next recession is coming in 2020, according to the second quarter Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey.

Of the 100 real estate experts surveyed, half said a recession was likely to come in 2020 with 19 percent specifically pinpointing the third quarter of 2020 — which lines up directly with the months leading up to the presidential election. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they believe a recession is likely in 2021, meaning 85 of 100 experts believe a recession is coming in the next two years.

Although experts say housing won’t cause of the recession, the potential slowdown will have an impact. More than half of those surveyed said they expect home buying demand in 2020 to be significantly lower than in 2019, while about a third of those surveyed said they expected it to be about the same.

The combination of slowing demand and an impending recession could be good news for potential buyers in the short-term and cause further slowdowns in overall U.S. home value appreciation going forward.

Home values are currently growing at a 6.1 percent annual p...