RealEstate.com Gold Rush

There is a lot of buzz on AR about RealEstate.com. The guys are actively selling the ownership of a whole city. Sounds enticing.

So, I am on RealEstate.com.

I type “Daytona Beach”. Then in property type I pick “Condo/ Townhouse”

18 results. 5 of those are condo-hotels, which is a very different animal.

4 are not in Daytona Beach, but in Daytona Beach Shores, and 1 in South Daytona, which is clearly stated in the address.

So far we have 8 out of 18, which are actually in Daytona Beach, and are condos/townhouses.

Daytona MLS shows 225 condos/townhouses in Daytona Beach active today.

Why is such discrepancy? Well, if you scroll all the way down, you will see the disclaimer, “The data relating to real estate for sale on this web site comes in part from the Internet Data Exchange of the Flagler County Association of REALTORS.”

There is no surprise. Daytona Beach is not in Flagler County. It is in Volusia County.

I am trying to understand how the whole notion of buying a city can work and do not see it.

Take Miami as example. There are several municipalities with this name.

There is Miami (returns 804 Mil records on Google), North Miami (259 Mil), Miami Beach (270 Mil), North Miami Beach (133 Mil), Miami Gardens (42.4 Mil). If the price is the same, do I need to continue with my rhetorical question which to buy?

I know that they say the site would be up and running in February, so we need to wait till February. Are we expected to sign for 6 months while the site is not going to be up and running until February?

And what if February is a wish and not a reality, and it would take another couple of months just to launch it, and then another couple of moths to fix the bugs, so, by the time it is up and running, my $894 are gone with doing nothing to me. Are we in research and development of the product? If there are about 8K AR members who buy a city, ML would have paid for the domain already.

Is this what we are here for?

Also, is everything on the Internet a lie nowadays? RealEstate.com would have only one expert for a whole city… Sounds so nice… but show me BS which does not sound nice...

So, now there will be one “expert” for Miami, there will be one “expert” for Manhattan, one “expert” for Los Angeles, one “expert” for Chicago, one “expert” for Atlanta…

Take me, for example. I am in a much smaller place. If I buy a city of Daytona Beach, I become touted as the expert for Daytona Beach. Am I? It is not by the product, and if it were, I would fight for being a condo expert... It is still a pretty serious stretch, but at least closer to the truth than an expert for Daytona Beach.

And who would have chutzpah to call themselves an “expert” for Miami. Even an “expert” for Miami condos?

So, in essence, the “experts” are just people who paid, and their “expertise” having little to do with their knowledge, abilities, as what they got is too big to chew for any mortal.

This is one side. There is another side. What about these small cities and towns, where agents work in several of them. There the opposite may occur, the city they “bought” may not give them back enough. But buying a neighboring city would cost them double… or triple.

I am trying to see the genius behind it… so far I see readiness to start shoveling money….

Do you see the genius? Or a gold rush?