BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 47 of 60)

August 24, 2007

Oh, good grief, not another one! “Stealth” real estate start-up is long on promises, short on details

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If Groucho Marx were to come back to us as a hen, aghast but still sardonic, what would he (she?) do? Peck around in the dirt, no doubt.

Comes next a “stealth” start-up called roost.com, which promises “to fundamentally change how customers find & move into their next home.”

When words mean almost anything they mean almost nothing, but “fundamentally” ought to mean a lot. For this promise to come true, I’m thinking people will need to find their homes by divination and move into them by teleportation. Realty may yet disappoint.

But: Mortgage woes be damned, the world does seem to be crawling with doofuses with dough. If you’re facing foreclosure, come up with a scam by which millions of insomniacs will search for homes they can’t afford in towns they don’t live in while exposing themselves — no, not to children — nor even to aghast, sardonic hens — but to thousands of pay-per-impression ads. Where before you were a deadbeat, 90+ days late, now you can be a Web 2.0 real estate entrepreneur, a stylish flash in an already over-crowded pan.

Goofy logo? Check. Jaw-dropping offices? Check. Radical chic media cachet? Check. The only thing missing from the “real estate space” is practical experience selling houses…

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August 21, 2007

Google’s new embedable map says, “Buy this house on Friday!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

And now for some bazillion-dollar arm–twisting in behalf of a forthcoming listing:


View Larger Map

I wanted this from my sullen teenager a year ago, but he’s been busy trying to portray the subtle distinctions between indifference, ennui and anomie — it ain’t easy! In any case, let me feed this from a DB file and I’m done with Zee Maps, too.

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August 17, 2007

When Russell Shaw Speaks – You Should Listen

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Fellow BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw is a fountain of practical real estate knowledge… so when Mr. Shaw recommended a Xerox Phaser color printer to us – I took him up on the offer.

The street price for this particular printer is $1100, so I had to think hard about this purchase. There are so many other things that I could spend a thousand bucks on… but after all – it was a highly recommended purchase by Russell.

After checking out Ebay, I found a seller with a few of these printers brand new in stock at a [gasp] shockingly low price. So… I jumped on it.

The printer arrived a few days later (all 60 pounds of it) and it installed very easily. It’s nice having a network printer, for a change. I can send it a print job from any of my computers without worrying about a particular computer being on.

The prints are great – regular magazine quality… all nice and glossy.

The next day, I went to print some flyers and – nothing. No power lights, no indicators, nothing. I checked Xerox’s website to follow their troubleshooting guide… but to no avail. It would appear that I now had a rather large paperweight.

So I called Xerox, and they were nice as they could be. They contacted the local service representative and he came out the next day to install a new power supply. When you buy one of these printers, you get a full year of on-site service including parts and labor… a nice benefit. Russell advises us to purchase the extended warranty, as well.

Well I am tickled with this purchase… and I would like to publicly thank Mr. Shaw for his recommendation.

Now if any of you might be thinking about following Russell’s advice, perhaps I can save you a few dollars. Here’s another one from the same seller on Ebay for $599 (or $629 with Buy It Now.)

http://tinyurl.com/2z5qbo

You can thank me after you thank Russell. 🙂

August 17, 2007

Growing pains: BloodhoundBlog is moving to a more-robust server

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.

In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.

Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.

I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.

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August 14, 2007

Pimp My Posts (with Word Press Plugins)

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

Okay, so I wanted to say “pimp my blog” but that doesn’t make for an alliteration within a title…

I recently found an awesome resource regarding Word Press plugins which should be helpful to a great majority of RE.net bloggers. The following information is from a July article on Mashable.com. Enjoy!

———-

404 Notifier – Gives you a log of all your 404 errors so you can see why your readers are ending up on broken pages.

Admin Dropdown Menus – Make your crowded admin panel menus neat and orderly by turning them into dropdown menus.

Admin Panel Comment Reply – Adds a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of the admin area.

Ajax Spell Checker – Uses a combination of dictionaries to check your posts.

Auto-hyperlink URLs – Gives you several options for having URLs automatically turn in to hyperlinks.

AWSOM Pixgallery – Designed to allow artists and webcomic creators to create a portfolio of their artwork.

Batch Categories – Adds a page to the category management, showing all the posts that belong to a category making it easier to add to another category, or when using an import tool from another blog.

Custom Admin Menu – Gives you the power to rename, hide or move just about anything you want in the admin area.

Custom Write Panel – Allows you to customize the “Write” panel of WordPress. Hide things you don’t need such as “Post Password” and add things you feel you may need.

Dashbar – Let admins have admin access while working in the frontend of the blog without having multiple windows open.

Dashboard Editor – Ever wanted to change the Dashboard to be more useful? This is the plugin you need.

DashNote – Adds a post-it note feature to the dashboard to jot down notes to yourself.

Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.

    Domain Mirror

Domain Mirror – Will allow one WordPress install to be accessed from multiple domains and will even change the name and URLs based on the address people access it with.

Download Counter – Counts and tracks the downloads of all Read more

August 9, 2007

In closing… and on hiatus.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

To be fair, Sweet Digs in its current form is innocuous enough. It didn’t begin that way, but that’s where it has landed.

And, to be fair, my mini-eruption this morning had nothing to do with Sweet Digs but everything to do with the role Redfin has assumed of industry hate monger. Take the Forums.

I made reference to a comment posted on the Redfin Forums in which the writer referred to traditional agents as conniving and greedy con artists. I had seen this remark a week ago and the words had been on a slow boil in my brain since. Redfin the Real Estate Company didn’t pen these words, but in effect they did. Their rhetoric from inception has been carefully crafted to incite riot. When I go to an appointment with a buyer or seller, I go intent on demonstrating how I bring more value than my competitors. What I do not do is attempt to elevate my position in their minds by criticizing and demeaning others whom they may be considering.

And, now we have gotten to the bottom of my recent attack on their little locally focused blog, and my sudden unease with even talking about this Redfin stuff at all. I listened to Glenn himself say recently that you should never promote yourself; let others do it, and it becomes viral. Is cancer a virus? By just “putting it out there”, I am giving their business model and their business practices (which I find offensive on many levels) increased exposure and credibility. By lambasting that with which I am in disagreement, I do them one better. I set myself up to be portrayed as that agent living in fear of their “new and better way”, the personification of the old industry guard which has become their poster child for all that is evil in the world.

Traditional agents hate us, traditional agents fear us, traditional agents are pond scum – These are the battle cries of a Redfin trying to get noticed. While they are so obviously wrong on each count, every Redfin rant I post will suggest otherwise to Read more

August 9, 2007

“They are conniving and con artists” – Redfin launches Southern California Sweet Digs

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

And for the record, Redfin, the title was a quote taken from one of your Southern California Forum posters, and it was directed at me, or rather my ilk. I started writing this with every intention of giving you the publicity you asked for, the “don’t promote yourself, let others do it, and it will become viral” marketing which has been your hallmark. I changed my mind.

This morning Redfin issued a press release announcing expansion of the “Online Magazine Formerly Known As”, well, something else.

SEATTLE — August 9, 2007: Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today launched its online real estate magazine, “Sweet Digs,” for Southern California. Home-buyers in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego neighborhoods can read daily, local real estate market information via the Sweet Digs blog or email newsletter.

The new Southern California Sweet Digs will offer as many as 40 candid, saucy and analytical write-ups each week of recent sales, price reductions, open houses and real estate trends in local areas, including Beverly Hills, Irvine, Newport Beach, Ocean Beach and Westwood. Southern California already boasts some of the top real estate blogs, and Sweet Digs complements them with its hyper-local, data-driven format written by real estate fanatics, not agents.

We are talking about real estate fanatics here, as in, people marked by extreme enthusiasm for real estate, not agents, since we all know real estate agents have little interest in real estate. Fanatics, as in people being paid to show extreme enthusiasm for that for which they were paid. One of my first jobs was at Bob’s Big Boy (during the Steel Age). I was fanatical about the Big Boy Combo, but this was in large part due to the fact that the Big Boy cut my paycheck.

Okay, in all fairness, I know what you were trying to say. The newsletter-blog thingy will be written by non-industry professionals. I get that, and I can see an appeal. And, in the name of fairness, I wouldn’t enlist contributors to my Blog who were Redfin disciples.

Sweet Digs launched December 2006 in Seattle and February 2007 in San Francisco to provide Read more

August 8, 2007

Real Estate Bloggers — Why Are You Blogging? What Currency Does Your Banker Accept?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Since BloodhoundBlog isn’t about blogging for its owner’s business — the following doesn’t apply. In fact, Greg seems to abhor even the suggestion this blog might be construed as financially beneficial to him. He wants Bloodhound to be the best place to go when you want real estate information or expertise. His mission is to inform and educate — period. I’m sure there are other blogs who also exist only to distribute valuable information to their readers. This isn’t aimed at them either.

11th commandment

Let’s begin with what everyone who knows me realizes pretty quickly — I’m not a tech guy, and surely not a blogging expert. However, after blogging for a year now, I’ve noticed a few things in the so called blogging world. Wanna be a blogging expert? Just call yourself one. No kiddin’, that’s just about all you need to do.

In my first few months these so-called experts would write blogging commandments as if they’d found them on the third tablet Moses lost on his way down the mountain. You would have thought the 11th commandment was for blogging experts only — hidden in a secret place known only to them. At first I took them seriously. My mistake. My audience started to ask me what was up. What was up? I was listening to the experts, that’s what.

Kris Berg’s post on this subject was spectacularly on point. She then followed it up with the perfect satirical application of what she learned from the experts in San Francisco.

small dinner

Since I’m not in the house side of the business my subjects are……..different. They’re like a full dinner. They involve, at least much of the time, some relatively complex principles and concepts. They can’t be half a small bowl of broth. Uh, usually it’s the principles adding up that make a concept. Duh. Yet, I was constantly feeling like I was being criticized by the experts because my posts were too long. They said I needed to be short and snappy. As Kris quoted the experts: “Readers are scanners…….five paragraphs……max.”

Here’s some exaggerated examples of what they wished I would adhere to. Read more

August 8, 2007

Sun Microsystems draws free pictures of the twenty-first century; to be shown to barbarians to illustrate the path to relevance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s the opposite of an antiquated product in a useless form-factor being hoarded behind a paywall? Sun Microsystems has developed the world’s fastest microprocessor — and is making all of the design details available by Open Source:

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, “Niagara 2” – named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community – whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

The economics of walls and safes and locks and chains is based in fear, hostility, suspicion, anger and doubt. Resources are presumed to be scarce, so if I don’t hoard them with an ugly vigilance, I’ll starve.

The economics of abundance is built on the opposite premises: Openness, candor, an effortless joy that flowers into pure splendor: The only true economic resource is human intelligence, a resource infinite in potential. By sharing with you everything I know, I will enrich us both: You will have the wealth I have created so far, and I will have the wealth you will create from that starting point.

These startling innovations are as new as Socrates, at least, so people can be forgiven for not having learned them after twenty-five centuries’ time. But there are two unhappy consequences to the economics of hoarding. The first is the tax on human dignity that comes from wresting treasure away with a thief’s cunning, hiding it and cowering over it, like the baubles in a raven’s nest, with a stingy, guarded greed. But the second is the vast riches that are foregone by this idea of wealth as trinkets to be withheld, rather than as ideas to be shared and cultivated.

We come back to Cain and Abel. Abel’s wealth is the raven’s wealth, gems and metals, portable and enduring but finite in quantity. Cain’s wealth is the fruit of Read more

August 7, 2007

Greg plays PHP games with ZeeMaps: The story for July in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kris Berg and Jonathan Dalton have been making good use of ZeeMaps to show sales activity in their local market areas.

I’ve been digging this, but at StarPower, I discovered that I am smart and lazy — good at figuring out how to avoid hard work. So: I built a little bot that, in conjunction with our MLS system, will build ZeeMaps of ideas I want to illustrate visually. Here, for example, is MLS activity in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Phoenix for the month of July: Active, Pending, Expired and Cancelled. I have the bot set up to use different colors for Sold, Active With Contingencies and Temporarily Off Market, as well.

We’ll use this for DistinctivePhoenix.com, to show off the neighborhoods we farm, but we will be able to use it for any purpose we can imagine — listing appointments, price-adjustment meetings, etc. We can make a map out of any search we can run. It’s not a mapping search interface, but it’s something while we wait to get a mapping search interface.

August 7, 2007

New York Times discovers Earth: “Mr. Sulzberger, tear down that wall!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Says the New York Post, the New York Times is about to remove the paywall that conceals from public awareness its once-famous (even if smarmy and tendentious) op-ed columnists:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives – including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.

The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis would only say in an e-mailed statement, “We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com.”

While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.

I’m told there is something like this in real estate — news of dubious value jealously hoarded behind a paywall — but, since I don’t pay for ordinary information, I can’t say for sure.

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August 6, 2007

Black Pearls: Two practical uses for video in real estate marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Someday soon I’m going to write a post with a title like “Why all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.” Here’s the one-word summary as a teaser: Bandwidth.

In the mean time, here are two ways of using video in real estate marketing that are actually useful and practical right now. These qualify as Black Pearls because Cathy thought up one of them while we we at the StarPower Conference.

Black Pearl #1: At your initial listing appointment, videotape the seller’s tour of the home
If you do this, you’ll able to revisit everything you saw in the home, to review every detail the seller divulged and to provide the basis for your notes on repairs and staging. You can use stills or clips from the video to show the seller what you want corrected. You may even be able to use clips from this video for your marketing video — even though all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.

Black Pearl #2: Videotape the seller’s instructions on the major systems
This may happen at the final walkthrough or some earlier time, but if you’re representing buyers of homes with complicated amenities — pools, spas, septic tanks, home theater or central vacuum systems — you should be writing training classes into the purchase contract. We use language like this: “Seller agrees to hold a two-hour class for Buyer at any mutually-agreeable time prior to Close of Escrow to teach the care and use of the pool, septic system and any other major systems, tools or appliances on the property.” If you’re the buyer’s agent, you should videotape this class, but you should do it even if you’re the lister if the buyer’s agent does not. Deliver it to the buyers as a DVD, split into chapters by major systems. This is a closing gift that keeps on giving.

We have a third idea, videotaping the reactions of visitors to our open houses, HGTV-style, but they’re always too shy. Besides, all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.

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August 3, 2007

Project Perfect Blogger – Applying What I’ve Learned.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Yesterday I shared the formula for the perfect Blog post. I acquired this wisdom at the Inman conference, and now it is time to test my new skills as I attempt to target the Scripps Ranch home buyer (and risk killing this bit once and for all). Note to feed reader clients: You may not get the photos, which is a big part of the schtick.

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HOW TO FIND A SCRIPPS RANCH REAL ESTATE AGENT FOR BUYING A SCRIPPS RANCH HOME KRIS BERG KRIS BERG KRIS BERG

If you are planning to relocate to Scripps Ranch from somewhere far from Scripps Ranch, you will probably fly to Scripps Ranch. When you arrive in Scripps Ranch, boy, will your arms be tired!

Many Scripps Ranch real estate agents, like myself, live in Scripps Ranch. Many unnamed others have won awards and recognition for their service to consumers wanting to buy homes in Scripps Ranch. Certainly, you have many choices when selecting a real estate agent, and you will likely want to align yourself with someone ranking above the 85% percentile, or one standard deviation above the mean, on your typical Bell Curve, but this Normal Curve is anything but normal in that the population is diverse, thereby resulting in a flatter graph.

You will be 172.9% more likely to find the perfect Scripps Ranch home, when compared to the 30-day Gross Domestic Product rolling average and taking into account the annualized per capita income of Celtic women, than other consumers if your agent is a Scripps Ranch neighborhood specialist.

If you have children, you are probably concerned with Scripps Ranch schools in Scripps Ranch. Hypothetically speaking, your agent might have two daughters currently attending Scripps Ranch High School and would therefore be the perfect Scripps Ranch Realtor to help you buy a home (in Scripps Ranch). This illustrative “type” of agent would also be infinitely (a figure of speech as, technically, it is not possible to divide a number by zero) more likely to speak to local sports opportunities, such as Volleyball Camps, and even Exchange Programs to, say, Cairo. That is, if you find Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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