There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
This is the second half of the Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, including my presentation and the question and answer session. The sun had started to go down, so the light in the room was a little better. Cathleen built the slides you’ll see in the video. I had handed out a bookmark to the people who came, and your very own virtual copy of that is shown above.
To get to the punch line, of course.
Continuing our celebration of BloodhoundBlog’s first birthday, we take up this very serious question:
Who is funnier, Russell Shaw or Kris Berg?
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is the first half of the video from the Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference. Jay Thompson is featured here, making his presentation on the marketing power of real estate weblogging. The light in the room was not our friend, so Jay spends much of the film in silhouette.
BloodhoundBlog is celebrating its first birthday this coming Friday, so I wanted to take a little time to highlight some of the best work we’ve done over the last twelve months.
There is a limit to how much primary reporting a real estate weblog can do. The webloggers are each stuck in one spot, for one thing, plus we all have day jobs.
But if we choose to, we can do exemplary work at evaluating new product releases. We’re end-users of the products we report on, so we already know what we like, what we don’t like, and what we wish were different. In our own particular case, BloodhoundBlog contributors like Brian Brady tend to go over new products in exhaustive detail, wringing out every conceivable facet and implication. We’re eager to know what the vendor thinks we’ll find in a new tool, but we’re even more avid to unearth the capabilities their software engineers had not foreseen.
So: Watch us work. Here are some of the breaking news posts we have generated over the last year:
Michael Cook’s post on Private Equity investing was picked up as a related-info link by The Wall Street Journal Online. We’ve been linked from a lot of interesting places, but I think this is the new high-water mark…
Technorati Tags: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing
This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
State rethinks crackdown on online home appraisals
The move by the Arizona Board of Appraisal and Attorney General Terry Goddard to prosecute Zillow.com, and potentially other Internet-based home valuation services, may be at an end.
Last June and November, the board ordered Zillow to cease and desist offering its free “Zestimates” in Arizona. The Attorney General’s Office followed up with a letter of its own, threatening prosecution. No other Automated Valuation Model was targeted.
Arizona Senate Bill 1291 was drafted earlier this year to fortify the board’s argument, redefining “appraisal” to mean any opinion of value, not just a paid evaluation contracted from a professional appraiser.
Rep. Michelle Reagan initiated the process of amending the legislation to permit AVMs to operate in Arizona. Her amended version passed the House and was subsequently further amended in a joint House-Senate conference committee.
The Senate voted Monday night to approve the amended version of SB 1291. Among the amendments was an exemption for free Web-based AVMs from regulation under the state’s appraiser licensing laws. The House approved the amended language Tuesday.
As the Web site LittlePinkHouses.com notes, the amendments also undid other changes that had been sought in the bill. The composition of the Board of Appraisal will not be changed to include a majority of professional appraisers and the legal definition of an appraisal will conform to a common-sense understanding of the term.
As originally drafted, the bill would have outlawed virtually any estimation of value, possibly even including the casual conversations of neighbors. This is the amended definition of an appraisal:
“A person who produces a statement that is provided to any other person concerning the estimated value of real property through an Internet Website, automated valuation or other software program or other means of comparative market analysis and who discloses that the estimate is not an appraisal.”
This language absolves not just Zillow but also real estate licensees producing Broker Price Opinions for lenders and, presumably, other methods of evaluating homes.
The amended bill awaits only the signature of Gov. Janet Napalitano to become law.
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Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, making his presentation on real estate weblogging at today’s Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference. Jay was fantastic, with one practical demonstration after another of the power of weblogging. Jonathan Dalton added some great insights from the sidelines, and the incomparable Dave Smith made the trek up from Tucson. I’ll have more tomorrow, along with video of Jay’s presentation and mine. In the meantime, Staging Arizona Real Estate has a report on the event.
More: Jay Thompson, Jonathan Dalton, Shailesh Ghimire.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
In commemoration of the Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, BloodhoundBlog today launches Real Estate Weblogging 101, a book-in-weblog-form about weblogging for real estate professionals.
The book is built as a WordPress weblog because it seemed foolish to me to write about a deep-linking medium without deep linking. Even so, I believe this is the first time WordPress has been used to publish a book. It seems plausible to me that dead trees are a dead letter, so this won’t be the last book “printed” in an on-line content management system.
In large measure, content for Real Estate Weblogging 101 comes from BloodhoundBlog posts written over the course of the last year by Greg Swann, Teri Lussier, Kris Berg, Brian Brady and Allen Butler. Because the book is written using the “Pages” feature of WordPress, it is built with revisability and extensibility in mind. We anticipate adding appropriate articles to the book as they become available.
From an introductory article to the book:
This is a book about real estate weblogging, but it seems absurd to write about weblogging in the form of a book. The Dan Rathers of the world will finally admit that the old media are obsolete on the day after the last paper-boy dies of old age. The internet is a linked world, and to write about an internet phenomenon without linking is absurd. And the internet is an infinitely revisable world, so to give up the power of instant, infinite revisions seems foolish. Unless you print it out at home, you can’t take this book with you to the beach. But what you can do is pursue all of the supporting links until your understanding of real estate weblogging approaches perfection — where perfection is understood to be a blindingly moving target.
The wonderful thing about a book in the form of a weblog is that you can help make it better, too. Just as Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs helped Dan Rather discover this strange new world — no matter how much he might rather didn’t — you can set me right when you find me in error — and Read more
First: YouTube on board. We’ll continue to do our listing videos in NTSC video. Anything less stinks in a broadband world. But we’ll do YouTube versions, too, for all the mobile phone vendors who will leap on this bandwagon.
Second: The natives are restless:
June 29 is the day many gear-heads have marked on their calendars as iDay, the release of what independent analyst Richard Doherty calls “the most eagerly awaited consumer technology device of the last 20 years.”
Since January, when it was first announced, the iPhone has captivated consumers, Wall Street investors and the media as the right product at the right time.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has positioned it as the most advanced meeting of the Internet and wireless technology, with an iPod thrown in for good measure. And it looks really cool, and unlike any phone before it.
For Apple, the release of the iPhone promises to effectively double the company’s revenue within just a few years, based on the worldwide thirst for cellphones. For consumers, the trick is going to be nabbing one of the early iPhones on opening day before stock sells out.
The iPhone is being sold only at Apple’s 200 retail stores, Apple’s website and nearly 1,800 AT&T (formerly Cingular) stores beginning at 6 p.m. local time across the country. AT&T says it will close its stores at 4:30 p.m. and reopen at 6 p.m. Apple would not comment on its plans. No pre-orders are being accepted. Fans are expected to camp out in front of stores for days.
Jobs has projected sales of 10 million iPhones within the first 18 months — worth more than $5 billion retail. Neither AT&T nor Apple will say how many phones initially will be shipped to stores. Doherty expects 1 million units to be available in the first wave. He predicts stores will be sold out by the time they close on June 29.
Third: What else you can do if you intend, like us, to sit on the sidelines for a while.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
From Worse Than Failure, a coder’s redoubt:
Donniel Thomas writes “Javascript isn’t for the weak of heart or those short of patience. What works in one browser may not function properly, or result in a nasty JS error in another (*cough*IE*cough). Which is why I can understand what this programmer meant.”
The following screenshot is from the homepage of Zillow.com, which is one of the most popular and AJAX-y Real-Estate sites on the web. And, as of this writing, the coder’s plea still remains …
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
…is up at RE Agent in CT. Forgot to mention it yesterday. My apologies.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
To all appearances, the attempt to criminalize Zillow.com’s Zestimations of Arizona real property will be all over when the fat lady signs. Not sings, signs. Arizona Senate Bill 1291, as amended to suffer Automated Valuation Models gladly, passed it’s final reading tonight. The amended bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 28-2. All that remains to be done is for Governor Janet Napalitano to sign the bill into law and things can… continue pretty much as they have all along.
Of late it seemed the legislature might recess without taking up the Zillow amendment, potentially exposing Attorney General Terry Goddard to the embarrassment of having to enforce his own and the Board of Appraisal’s idiotic interpretation of standing law. For all that I’m glad to see better sense prevail, that spectacle would have been amusing to watch.
In any case, assuming Napalitano doesn’t find some previously-unsuspected third foot to shoot herself in, this silly little drama should be over shortly.
Further notice: My details are a little off here, but Cathy Jager at Little Pink Houses has the straight dope.
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Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
Reminding you that Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and I will be speaking the Phoenix Area Active Rain Gathering and First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, to be held on Thursday, June 21st, at 3pm.
The event is being put together by Shailesh Ghimire of CTX Mortgage. Visit Arizona Mortgage Guru for more details.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Via TechCrunch, here’s a new category for the taxonomy: Home Remodeling/Refurbishing/Restoration. The idea had occurred to me, but I wasn’t sure the category even exists in weblog form. Refurber, the site cited by TechCrunch, is not a weblog. Even so, it is the rarest of things in Web 2.0, a social networking web site that motivates return visits.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
