Author: Greg Swann (page 121 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Twenty-five nominees. I confess that it’s faster for me on Sunday if I’m not too picky, but this week saw a surplus of very good posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Please don’t spam the voting. I accept that there can be differing moral standards on scamming social media, but only one of those standards applies here. If you email 300 of your closest friends, telling them to vote for you, I will ignore all your votes. We’re interested in what is popular among people who participate here, not how popular you are with your buddies. That doesn’t even seem to me to be a complicated idea, but I’m explicating it nevertheless.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

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“Todd Carpenter — Interest rates MBS, 10 year notes, the long bond, and why I couldn’t care less“,
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“Geno Petro — Racoons Racoons in the Trash“,
“Steve Belt — Trulia Voices From Trulia Voices: Is central Phoenix an African American area of town?“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Trulia Voices What Did My Mom Say About Cows Giving Away Milk?“,
“Jeff Brown — Brian Brady The Difference a Lender Can Make — Real Estate Investment Savvy“,
“Eileen Tefft — Thanksgiving A Thanksgiving Real Estate Story“,
“Dan Melson — Housing mess How to Avoid A Repeat of the Housing Market Mess“,
“Jay Thompson — Business card Experimental Business Card #1“,
“Rhonda Porter — LO compensation Let’s Do Away with Loan Origination Compensation“,
“Gary Elwood — RE blogging Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog“,
“Kris Berg — Lake Arrowhead WTF – The Lake Arrowhead Home Blog“,
“Morgan Brown — Option ARM An Open Eulogy to the Option ARM“,
“Krista Baker — Targeted messages Reader Q&A: How To Write Your Message from Your Prospect’s Perspective“,
“Dan Green — Mortgage rates Pre-Qualify Your Loan Officer By Asking: \”Where Do Mortgage Rates Come From?\”“,
“Dan Green — Bloggers video Oh, The Bloggers You’ll Meet, The People You’ll Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My thought is that Michael Wurzer of the FBS blog doesn’t do anything badly. Certainly his weblog is ripe with first-rate content. Michael is this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal with Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem:

You see, whether it’s in an MLS or a social network, the value is in having the data together or aggregated. Yet, once you aggregate the data, in an MLS system or Facebook or wherever, the immediate question is how you can get it back out to be used elsewhere, by other applications, because choice is desired and the aggregation stifles choice.

This is a non-trivial problem. The ideal answer is in the web itself. As Tim O’Reilly puts it, “Small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the web, in its current form, doesn’t address all the concerns, because yet to be defined are permission or privacy or identity schemes. In other words, who owns the data, who can access it, and what can they do with it when they do access it? The answers to these questions so far have been defined by silos, like MLS systems and social networks, but we’re now seeing that isn’t the long-term answer, rather standards are.

In the real estate space, one part of the solution is to have a broad and deep agreement (standard) on the minimum data necessary to constitute a listing. This is close to reality with the RETS payloads. Equally necessary, however, is a standard for defining who can access the listing and the terms of use for doing so. The first attempts at some terms of use in the real estate space led to the lawsuit against the NAR by the DOJ, which necessarily but unfortunately has caused the conversation to grind to a halt as the status quo is sought to be preserved. But the work on these terms of use needs to continue, either to resolve the litigation or end-run it.

Ideally, the terms of use should be dictated by the owner of the data on an individual basis. Again, “small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the challenge is gaining broad enough Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eighteen nominees this week. I had a bunch of posts from Active Rain, and, while I didn’t pick any this week for the short list, I’d like to encourage y’all to continue to enter. There is some good stuff over there that I would not see otherwise.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

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“Robert Ashby — YSP Is Yield Spread Premium Good or Bad for Consumers?“,
“Steve and Kris Berg — Six months The Six Month Solution – Our New Deal“,
“Morgan Brown — Credit mess Top 10 Ways to Navigate the Credit Mess“,
“Brian Brady — Compensation How to Pay Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals For Their Advice“,
“Todd Carpenter — Keyword SEO Key word SEO is at best, a hedged bet.“,
“Doug Quance — Stay home We Can Just Stay Home And Go Broke“,
“Jay Thompson — Short sale The Short Sale From Hell“,
“Justin Smith — Active Rain How I Sold My ActiveRain Profile for $6,750.00“,
“Todd Carpenter — YSP Forget YSP, let’s just do away with Mortgage Brokers“,
“Tim Kane — YSP Let Brokers charge what they want. Do away with YSP.“,
“Kris Berg — Vista A New Operating Environment“,
“Geno Petro — Feng Shui Feng Shui… It’s All Chinese Math To Me“,
“Jeff Kempe — Bossy visionaries Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market“,
“Brian Brady — Federal banks HR 3915: Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR Working from within the NAR”
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