…is one-stop shopping for news and views from the Inman Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Forty links and counting.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Real Estate (page 262 of 266)
Yet another dumb tool, LeadAlarm, this one cited by the Inman blog.
The basic functionality Realtors should already be doing with server-side programming or just with rules from an email client. The “gee whiz” voice technology is a bug, not a feature: Voice is a lousy way to deliver data originating in a form. Another three dollar egg for desperate, gullible Realtors…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
I read about realPING on the Zillow.com weblog’s coverage of Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. I never think about something until I do. This morning Cathy mentioned the idea of having something on our web pages that would induce prospects to contact us. We have a big phone number on the BloodhoundRealty.com website, but she was looking for something at once sexier and more hi-tech. I did my best not to think about this all day, and then, when my thoughts should have lightly turned to thoughts of slumber, I saw the realPING page.
This is really dumb technology. I never know for sure how much other people understand of software, but I can reverse engineer just about anything I see running — in the abstract, anyway. Understanding an algorithm is a lot easier than replicating it — unless it’s something really dumb like realPING.
I just wrote the basic functionality. The “Get Tracking!” button in the sidebar took longer to make than did GetTracking.php. All I have right now is the basic paging function, not the on-and-off for business hours business, but that’s simple to mimic, also. What I have is a clean-room perfect clone, reverse engineered solely from the descriptive promotional material made available on realPING’s home page. (I didn’t even drill down to sub-pages.)
Here’s my offer:
I will make my PHP files for this function available to you as PromoWare: You put me in your blogroll and the software is yours. No cost, no further obligation, no contracts, no monthly fees, no salesman will call. However: You hold your own hand for installation and support.
To take advantage of this offer, you need two things:
- The site this runs from must have PHP installed on it with the mail functions turned on
- You need a mobile phone or other device that can receive email or epages sent as email from PHP
Ninety percent of everybody reading this will have both of these things, but if you don’t know, the person you check with is the one who should do the installation and support hand-holding.
I wish I had more time to write software. The other Read more
Citing an article from the Boston Globe, the Real Estate Investing For Real bog insists that:
There should be a system where anyone, real estate agents, FSBOs, etc., can list or search for properties.
Great news! Such a tool exists. It’s called the classified section of the newspaper. Not so cheap to list, but searching costs around half-a-buck. Even better, CraigsList.com is free in most markets.
The good news is, the writer already has what he wants — in vast abundance: CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera. The bad news is, the writer already has what he wants — vastly abundant free or nearly-free listing portals, each of which has its own data structure and feed format. The geniuses who are bringing us all this cleverly-designed white noise don’t actually understand the problems the MLS was created to solve: open listings and the difficulty of coordinating cooperation among agents from different brokerages. So what do we find on CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera? Open listings and no provision for coordinating cooperation among agents. O!, Brave New World, simultaneously disintermediated and reambiguated. It’s hard to regard this as an improvement.
What the writer really wants is something very much like the MLS, but without exclusive membership, without the mandatory unilateral offer of compensation and without the intellectual property rights of listing brokers. You could say he wants to eat his cake and still have it, but the sad part is, he just might get his wish. Even as loose as we are about internet businesses, I’m pretty sure the Feds would regard such a thing arising privately as collusion. But if the Feds ram it down our throats instead…
The cure for what the writer thinks ails us might be a lot worse than the disease.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Zillow.com cannot tell the truth about home values, so it is releasing an Application Programmer Interface to spread its misinformation far and wide.
Who do they hope to enlist with their API? Working Realtors, the people who know best that Zillow.com’s property evaluations are necessarily and unavoidably false.
Could the strategy work? Hide and watch.
Here’s a better question: Could this be the fifth column of a triumphalist Web 2.0, where obvious falsehoods are so widely propagated as to be accepted as truth?
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Snipped from the speech Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman made yesterday to a Congressional subcommittee:
that we must register our users
He said a lot more than this, of course, and you might go read it all. But much of what he said sounded to me like complaints that Redfin has been expected to hew to the same real estate laws as every other brokerage in Washington or California. The quoted matter in particular, “that we must register our users”, sounds as if Kelman is objecting to even the most minimal interpretation of procuring cause. Too late, we learn the unhappy consequences of not teaching The Little Red Hen in the schools…
Marlow Harris at 360Digest.com has much, much more.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
You don’t have to be completely impervious to facts to write for the Arizona Republic, but it helps:
To counteract slow equity build-up, borrowers might want to couple a 40-year term with a biweekly payment schedule, which results in the equivalent of one extra monthly mortgage payment yearly. A biweekly schedule can cut a 40-year term to about 29 years, Rogers said, allowing for faster equity increases and less interest paid over time.
Or you could just move every three to five years, like everyone else.
Update: Another ninny:
But the loan comes with a big asterisk. Non-conforming loans — essentially those for more than $417,000 on single-family homes this year — are amortized over 40 years but must be paid off with a balloon payment at the end of 30 years.
Not only are not going to move for 40 years, you’re not even going to refinance for the first 30 years.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Zillow.com got itself a ton of new venture capital yesterday, so today seems like a fine time to deconstruct its praxis.
When Zillow was brand new, Catherine Reagor, the dippy local real estate reporter for the Arizona Republic wrote:
Want a reality check? Go to zillow.com, a new Web site with a program that calculates a home’s value for free. It values several Valley homes for tens of thousands less than the price listed on them.
At the time, I said this in response:
If you want to know what your house is worth, do not go to Zillow.com, which delivers completely useless estimates of value for free. Even Net Value Central, a tool used by professionals, lags the market by a month or more. The only way to price a house is to work as rigorously as possible from current and recently-sold listings for extremely similar properties. If you price your house to sell from sources like zillow.com, you will give thousands of dollars away. If you rely on zillow.com to tell you how much to offer on a home, you will see it sold to someone else.
(You can prove all this to your own satisfaction, if you like. Most of Ms. Reagor’s mistakes seem to come from falling in love with ideas she doesn’t check out. Here she tells us that she ran Zillow.com on live listings and found it came in much lower than the listed prices. How did it do against sold listings? She didn’t check, but you can. Run Zillow.com on the sold homes documented in your local section of the Republic. You’ll see that, time after time, Zillow.com is substantially under real-life market results. It’s a useless toy, which Ms. Reagor might have discovered on her own had she bothered to test it properly.)
Just lately, I needled the Zillowites a little more:
All right, here’s the deal with Zillow.com:
I decide I’m going to buy you a pair of designer jeans, nothing but the best for you. I know that fit is important, so I go to three of your best friends to get their sizes. Not yours, theirs. I strike Read more
. . . except when it isn’t.
We had a terrific storm in North Central Phoenix last night. This house — listed for sale, alas, but not by us — lost a very old tree.
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None of this is new to me — except for the parts that are.
I’ve been writing on the nets since before there were nets. Since BBS systems — I ran two of them at different times of my life. Since CompuServe was a time-share system called MicroNet that charged $3.00 an hour for half-duplex transmission at 300 baud.
(Think about that! “Baud” is Bits of Audio Data. My first modem had an acoustic coupler that attached to a phone receiver and transmitted data with actual, annoyingly audible sound. It raced along at 300 bits per second, which sounds slow but is actually about half-again faster than a really fast typist. The connection through which I am by now continuously enthralled is only about 10,000 times faster than that.)
I’ve been writing on the nets since the time when you would log on, suck down everything you wanted to look at as fast as you could, read and respond off-line, then log back on to blast back your own contributions without wasting a second. I’ve been writing on the nets since waiting up for the “off-peak” hours represented a substantial savings.
The funny things is, when the technology was that grossly inadequate, that obscenely expensive, I was writing maybe 8,000 words a day, seven days a week. And as lousy as everything was, it was a whole lot better than working on a 900 pound IBM Selectric typewriter.
I can barely believe the things I did in those days. With my trusty soldering gun, I built myself a little NULL modem that I could configure on the fly, so I could liberate access wherever I found a temporarily mute dumb terminal. I was young and possessed at the time of a multi-faceted morality, and I tended to think of electrical power and underutilized bandwidth as mine to appropriate.
I wrote through generation after generation of computer hardware and network topography, avidly connecting machines that were never meant to be connected and connecting my own computers to a topology that was still called Arpanet when I first started playing with it.
I worked in Usenet for years, and I Read more
Seth Godin on Long Tail search term analytics. Identifying strong Long Tail keywords much minimizes your competition per prospect. I think buying the Pay Per Click terms on the keywords you identify would increase your click rate: The organic hit says that you have valid content, while the Pay Per Click hit says that you are really in business, two mutually-reinforcing marketing messages.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Searchlight Crusade is hosting this week’s Carnival of Real Estate. BloodhoundBlog is featured, insisting that there is always room at the top, and we are lucky to be among such an august company. Everything is worth reading, but two posts stand out for me: Spotlight Realty’s practical example of the risk of letting an unscrupulous agent “buy” your listing by promising you a higher price than the market warrants. And The Reality of Real Estate weighs in on a weighty topic: How exclusive employment agreements can be a disservice to the client.
On the latter point, here is language we routinely use on our Buyer Broker Agreements:
This agreement will be terminated without recourse upon written notice by either party.
“Either party” means I get to fire them if I want to, too (and I have done this). “Without recourse” means clients don’t get to fire me and then sue me. I don’t know that that clause will hold up in court, but it’s worth a shot. We use slightly different language on listing contracts, to make it plain that you don’t get to fire us when we’re already under contract (and, of course, practically speaking, as a matter of agency I cannot fire any client when doing so would be to the client’s detriment; a ship’s captain cannot resign under weigh). But, recalling that everything we do is marketing, granting clients the power to jump ship, if they feel they must, is a very effective way of winning their hearts and minds. If you love your clients, set them free…
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The Real Estate Bloggers have a post on using YouTube video to sell homes:
As more people are using high speed bandwidth, the smart real estate agents are using tools such as YouTube to put listings on the internet. This McKinney, Texas real estate agent put together a 40 second teaser video that gives potential buyers a view of this golf course home.
I don’t hate the idea, in general, but I have specific caveats. First, the cited video isn’t really a video, it’s Ken Burns-style panning and zooming on still photos. Second, the house doesn’t seem to me to warrant a big send-up. An Ugly Step Sister with her own Fairy Godmother is still an Ugly Step Sister. Third, and much worse, YouTube.com‘s video quality is… much worse. For now, at least, a first-quality virtual tour — or better-quality video — seems like a better choice.
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Money is the gift that keeps on giving in the Valley of the Sun:
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This morning’s Arizona Republic has a little featurette on a housing bubble weblog in Gilbert. It’s called the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog, but I think would it be more sonorous if it were to be named the “Housing Doom Housing Bubble Housing Blog” or even the “Housing Doom Housing Bubble Housing Blog Housing.” After all, soon enough there will be no housing, according to the BubbleHeads. That notwithstanding, the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog insists that, “The housing bubble is getting ready to burst.” That sounds like an ascription of purpose to me, and I’m left wondering why the housing bubble doesn’t take itself down to the Doc-in-the-Box to have itself lanced. I mean, who wants bubble pus all over the carpet?
For what it’s worth, the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog is not as amazingly daft as some other BubbleBlogs. But so close to home… And in Gilbert no less, perennially the fastest growing small city in America… Think about it: How do you go about seeing faces in clouds in a place where there are no clouds?
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