By Dustin
Zillow is an online real estate estimator that uses various data sources to determine the value of a home. Today they added the ability to list your home directly on the site. This is an area of the real estate business that is going to show tremendous growth in the future as online sales start to push out traditional methods of buying and selling real estate. I see a big change in this space with regards to Realtors. It’s entirely possible with the ease of online listing that more and more people will save the traditional commissions and save money by going the online route.
Unfortunately, as with many technologies, these changes will take longer to propagate to more rural counties likes ours. Zillow has almost no entries for a local town.
By Dustin
One of the issues that owners of a construction business (actually, any business) faces is summed up in the question, “Why would someone hire me to build their home?”, (Or “Why would someone buy one of my homes?”, if you build spec homes like we do here.)
“Why would someone hire me to build their home?”
Our hardest customer to acquire is the uneducated customer. In Missouri, home builders aren’t licensed, and most towns who do license builders require nothing but payment of a fee. No guarantees of knowledge, workmanship, or honesty come with the license. This means that any Joe Blow who has watched a few episodes of This Old House can become a “builder”. The problem with this two-fold. 
- These guys can produce poor quality work, further harming the reputation of contractor’s in general.
- Customers who shop on price alone are often fooled by these builders. The burden of education is placed on those of us who take pride in our trade.
There is a lot involved with building a house properly. This extra work means extra cost. Now, don’t get me wrong, in many cases, the efficiency that we can bring to the table more than offsets these costs but they’re still costs to consider.
By Dustin
Fine Homebuilding has an excellent article about the ins and outs of different housewraps on the market. Unfortunately the article (except for a small preview) is only available in the printed magazine.
Making Sense of Housewraps
By Dustin
Hi, my name is Dustin Wyatt, owner of Wyatt Homes. My goal for this website is to not only try to sell you my homes, but to try and create an open dialog about what we provide. I’d like for you to get a glimpse at everything we do to try and provide a quality product.
For a glimpse at our stock homes take a look in the “pages” section on the right-hand side of the screen. There I’ll share with you the ideas behind each home.
Right now it’s kind of sparse, but over the coming weeks the amount of content will continue to grow.
Unfortunately, as with many technologies, these changes will take longer to propagate to more rural counties likes ours. Zillow has almost no entries for a local town.