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Category: Technology (page 54 of 60)

April 20, 2007

Zillow.com notes: Fear and Ludditism, advertising, a better farming strategy and more

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow notes: Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy asks “Why do so many agents fear Zillow?” He makes the same point in a BusinessWeek article on the Seattle-based Realty.bot.

Brian Brady, America’s Most Opinionated Mortgage Broker and a BloodhoundBlog contributor, covers some of the same ground: “Is your Realtor threatened?”

Both gentlemen are objecting to what we might characterize as the opportunistic bandwagoneering going on with respect to the Arizona Board of Appraisal’s attempts to outlaw consumer-oriented Automated Valuation Models. I can’t speak for them, but for me this is a matter of vitally-important principles, liberty the first among them.

I may write more about this over the weekend, because the issues involved are vast and very interesting — at least to me. Earlier this week, in email, I wrote, “When the sabot is a Ferragamo, Ned Ludd has a whole new style.” I have no doubt that this regulatory and legislative initiative is Ludditism in a Brooks Brothers suit. It’s bad enough that Zillow is afflicted, but I expect this is but the first salvo in a long war.

Witness: This came in as a comment last night, but I wanted to highlight it:

MLSPIN of Massachusetts just sent out this notice:

“RULES AND REGULATIONS REMINDERS:

I. Recently, the On-Line Valuation site, Zillow announced a new function being made available to advertise listings for sale on that site, whether or not you are the listing broker/agent. The MLS Rules and Regulations, STRICTLY PROHIBIT the advertising of another broker’s listings without their prior WRITTEN consent. The REALTOR&174; Code of Ethics, Standard of Practice 12-4 also prohibits the advertising of a listing without proper authority. Better safe than sorry; do not advertise another office’s listing anywhere without prior written approval.”

“Better safe than sorry” is an interesting choice of words.

Even more interesting is the fact that MLSPIN is arguing that MLS members have fewer rights to act than ordinary people. As things stand now, any non-MLS member can advertise another party’s home for sale, but, of course, no one does. Why? Advertising costs money. But anyone except MLSPIN members can announce that another party’s home is for sale Read more

April 19, 2007

Protecting whom? There are no complaining parties in Arizona’s quest to outlaw free consumer-oriented home evaluations

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I hear a lot of rumors, as you might guess. They’re usually way less than half the truth, but they can be useful for shaking the real truth loose, so they’re not entirely a bad thing. In any case, I’ve been hearing ugly rumors about Zillow.com in Arizona. Zillow Public Relations Specialist Amanda Hoffman has been working night and day to help me pin them down.

Like this:

  • Q: Is Zillow being sued by Arizona homeowners who regret having used Zestimates as opinions of value? Anywhere else?
    A: “Nope. Not true.”
  • Q: Are there any extant complaints about Zillow before the Arizona Board of Appraisal? In other words, have any real persons claiming standing as victims come forward?
    A: “Not that we know of.”
  • Q: Do you have any comment about Arizona Senate Bill 1291? Has Zillow had any involvement with the debates on this legislation so far?
    A: “We recently learned about the Arizona bill and we’re looking into what it may mean for Zillow users. We believe it’s important for home buyers and sellers to have easy access to real estate data and home valuation tools.”

I’m reading that last response to suggest that they might only have heard about the bill today.

The first two responses are significant because they argue that there are no self-identified injured parties appealing for relief from Zillow.com in Arizona. I don’t think offering an unwelcome opinion of value can be conceived of as a tort, but no one is complaining of an injury in the first place.

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April 16, 2007

Zillow.com at the Dawn of the Age of Abundance: Working for free is not a crime, trying to forbid it is . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid (more INTx evidence). One of my favorite books was Voyage From Yesteryear by James Hogan.The plot turned on the conflict between an economy like ours, based on scarcity and hoarding, and a radically different economy based on abundance and sharing. At the time the book was published, the latter economy would have seemed wildly utopian to a lot of people. But there were others who saw the Singularity on the horizon and understood that Hogan’s vision was one way it might play out, in the near term.

By now, of course, Hogan’s ideas don’t seem very radical at all. There are still a great many economic goods stored behind lock and key. But we are seeing more and more goods, especially intellectual values, delivered at no cost, often with no form of “monetization” at all. I wrote about this in my first BloodhoundBlog post and later in a post about disintermediation in the for-pay information business.

The interesting question I asked then is even more interesting now:

How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

This is a question that Zillow.com’s new Q&A feature asks, and it’s a question that seems to be uppermost in the minds of members of The Arizona Board of Appraisal.

But here’s an angle that may not have occurred to you: When Zillow.com introduces a potential buyer to a Make Me Move seller, it is engaging in the essential act of real estate brokerage. Why isn’t this “illegal,” much as the Board of Appraisal is attempting to claim that Zillow’s Zestimates are “illegal” appraisals?

The answer: Because Zillow is not accepting or anticipating compensation for engaging in real estate brokerage. The Babbitts who wrote the real estate laws did so in the hope of creating a cartel, with correspondingly higher fees, by forbidding non-licensees from listing and selling real estate for compensation.

This is a criminal conspiracy against the consumer, the use of the coercive power of the state — guns and prisons — to forbid consumers and vendors Read more

April 15, 2007

The Future of Realtor Data Management

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Realtor, Real Estate Investor

Author website

Following on the heels of Greg’s write-up on web technology for blogging, I thought I’d share with everyone a relatively recent technology discovery of mine…one that is quickly transforming how I as Realtor organize and manage all the information I come across with in my work.

For whatever reason, going to college in Microsoft’s backyard made me very anti-Microsoft. Perhaps in my youthful, idealistic mindset I didn’t like their apparent lack of innovation. Instead, they just bought everyone else’s ideas (think Powerpoint, Hotmail, Frontpage, Visio) or copied the idea and threw a ton of money at it until they overtook their competitor (think IE vs Netscape). This mindset of mine has gradually changed over the years as I realized that’s just what businesses do (why re-invent the wheel) and also Google has shown that a small player can challenge and beat the big MS. But anyway, I was introduced to a relatively new product from Microsoft by a client of mine who works for them: Microsoft Office OneNote. Probably, in the consumer market, the first really innovative product I’ve seen in a long time from MS…and it’s really not all that complicated…just really smart!

MS OneNote

I don’t know how other people manage their data but I’ve been basically using a combination of my computer, a binder, folders and lots of tree-killing paper. I don’t like this system since the data is not centralized anywhere. Some of it is on my computer, some of it is loose sheets in folders or my binder. However, it’s been working for the most part. All of that has changed in the few weeks I’ve been using (or learning to use) OneNote.

Think of OneNote as a spiral-bound, tabbed notebook, where each page is as long and wide as you want and you can have an unlimited number of pages. It’s free-form so there is no set way to organize your tabs or pages. You’re given 3+ layers of organization: Notebooks, Sections and Pages. (I say 3+ because within Sections you can create another layer Read more

April 15, 2007

Better, faster and cheaper in time and effort: Software for managing the weblogging workflow

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Robbie Paplin has a new weblog and he writes there and at Rain City Guide about the Deep Geek thinking underlying his decision-making process in selecting his new blogging platform. Very interesting reading.

I spent my junk time yesterday doing fussy CSS tweaks on Teri Lussier’s weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. This is a hugely frustrating iterative process: Make one minor edit, FTP it to the file server, refresh the page, discover that the change was a mistake, undo, redo, repeat, express frustration in a way that does not exacerbate male pattern baldness.

HTML is hugely forgiving, which is not really a good thing. Web developers have worked for years with multiple computing platforms, each one home to multiple versions of multiple web browsers, all so they could see how their code would be interpreted in an array of hardware and software environments. Not cool.

But: CSS is hugely unforgiving, as crotchety and irascible as a compiled computer language — without the error messages. I was starting with a style sheet created by someone else and trying to torque it into doing what I wanted done. The worst part about making a change in CSS is not seeing that the change you made is wrong, but that the change you made changed nothing. If the original CSS was improperly formatted, the results you’re seeing on the screen are actually inherited from somewhere else. Nice.

I don’t do this for a living, not alone because there are laws against homicide. But I do have good tools, and it’s worthwhile to talk about what good tools can do to make work like this work easier if not actually easy. I live in the Mac world, so, if you’re stuck with Windows, you’ll have to translate. We’re talking about categories of tools, so this stuff exists on both platforms.

For editing, I use TextWrangler, a free programmer’s editor from BareBones Software. I use this for everything, writing, editing, coding — everything. I’ve been using BareBones editors since 1991 or so. Someday I’ll pop for the for-pay product. There is so little HTML in a weblog post, you might as well learn to Read more

April 13, 2007

Arizona Board of Appraisal to Zillow.com: In your Zestimation, does this posturing make us look stupid?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Arizona Republic (tipped by Adam Tarr and Sharon Kotula):

An Arizona regulatory board has ordered Zillow.com to stop offering its online estimates of home values.

The Arizona Board of Appraisal has issued two cease and desist letters to the popular real estate Web site, claiming Zillow needs an appraiser license to offer its “zestimates” in Arizona.

“It is the board’s feeling that (Zillow) is providing an appraisal,” said Deborah Pearson, Board of Appraisal executive director.

This would be in contra-distinction to all the other Automated Valuation Methods operating in the state, some of which are actually used by lenders to underwrite home loans.

All last year, I wondered when the appraisers were going to rise up and rail about consumer-level AVMs. Today was that day, it seems.

This is Rotarian Socialism in action. The so-called regulatory body serves at the beck and call of the putatively-regulated industry. They have no hope of doing anything but making themselves look ridiculous in public, but they have to answer to their allegedly regulated masters no matter what.

If this kind of corruption is just now making you sick — you haven’t been paying attention…

Further notice: Official Zillow.com response from David Gibbons:

Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s President asked me to convey this official response to you, Greg:

“We strongly believe that providing Zestimates in Arizona is completely legal (and in fact an important public service), given that Zestimates are the result of our ‘automated valuation model’ and are not a formal appraisal. The Arizona Board of Appraisals relies on USPAP, the national professional standards for appraisers, and USPAP Advisory Opinion to determine propriety of activities. Here is the relevant opinion on this matter (Advisory Opinion 18): http://commerce.appraisalfoundation.org/html/2006%20USPAP/ao18.htm As you can see, it reads: ‘The output of an AVM is not, by itself, an appraisal.'”

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April 13, 2007

Customizing your weblog with CSS and PHP: Navigating from post to post

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you click on an individual post in BloodhoundBlog, you’ll see something like this above the headline:

The code for doing this is built into some themes, but not in the theme we’re using. The PHP code for making it happen is actually pretty simple, you just have to plug it in in the right place. And all of this presumes you are working on a WordPress.org weblog on a host you can access by FTP. I know nothing about WordPress.com-hosted weblogs or other weblogging systems.

Where is the right place to insert the code? In the folder for the theme you are using (inside the wp-content/themes folder), you may find a file named “single.php”. If so, that’s the file you want to edit. If “single.php” is not there, you want to edit “index.php”.

Before you change anything, save a back-up copy of the file you are going to edit. That way, you can back out and try again if things don’t work out.

You are looking for this line of code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Immediately after that line, paste in this code:

<div class="navigation">
<div align="center"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link') ?></div>
<div align="center"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;') ?></div><br>
</div>

Once you have edited the file, FTP it back up to the host and see what happens. If it worked, you should be able to navigate your weblog post-by-post. If it didn’t, go back and try to figure out what went wrong.

I’m going to do some more of this stuff over the weekend, but not too much. The truth is, if your mind runs this way, you’re probably better at it than I am. And if not, your eyes are already glazed over. If you’re somewhere in the middle, a little bit of simple PHP can give you a whole lot of custom control over your weblog’s behavior. To that extent, it’s worth talking about.

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April 13, 2007

Real Estate Weblogging 101: Our story so far

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of weblogging: Sometimes you decide you want to do something that requires you to go back and edit 30 or 40 posts. As an example, imagine that you decided you wanted to add a new category. You would have to go back and re-categorize all the posts that should be shoved into that mental drawer.

I did something like this when I created the Weblogging 101 category. I went back and added that category designation where it was appropriate.

Tonight I decided to go that one better, by highlighting the more important posts in that category in such a way that I could reference them repeatedly from other posts. You’ll see me do this from time to time, where we have multiple posts on one important topic. I’ll link back to all the others from each post so that no one misses anything.

There are two ways of doing this. One is manual coding, pasted in to the affected posts again and again. The other is to use PHP, the web-based programming language WordPress itself is written in. I can write my links into a separate file, then include that file when I want to reference the links. The advantage is that I have one canonical version of the links. Moreover, the list of links is dynamic; every time I edit the list, all the posts referencing that file of links are changed accordingly.

WordPress will run PHP unaided in many places on a weblog, and BloodhoundBlog runs on a lot of PHP. But within what WordPress calls “The Loop,” the software that displays weblog entries, running PHP requires a plug-in. I use the runPHP WordPress plug-in by James Van Lommel.

So, what happens? At the end of a post like this one, I append this code inside angle brackets:

?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?

The file named REWL101.php, my file full of links, is opened and inserted at that point. When I make a change in that file, the change is instantly reflected in every post that “includes” it. I can add my set of links to dozens of posts — even making them Read more

April 11, 2007

Birth of a Zillow.bot: A faster way to pee on the tree

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a little prototype of a Zillow.bot. Here is all it does for now:

  • It takes as input a download of listings from the ARMLS system
  • It isolates the street address, the price, and the listing brokerage, throwing away all the other fields
  • It sorts these newly concatenated fields by street name and house number, pumping the results to the screen for printing or post-processing in an Excel spreadsheet

The gross idea is that a human input operator can work street by street in Zillow, which is more convenient and less error-prone than working in price order, which is how the MLS system sorts listings. (Plus which, there is no Excel-sortable ARMLS report that includes the name of the listing brokerage.)

Ahem #1: I can convert the output to an XML file in four minutes, tops.

Ahem #2: If I get bored enough with doing this work manually, I’ll figure out a way to do it in JavaScript.

Actually, the real grief is going to be hot-sheeting every search.bot I build for my little Zillow.bot. If I pee on the tree when the house is listed for sale, I have an obligation to hose it off when it sells. This is a challenge for automation…

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April 9, 2007

More random notes on Zillow.com: Conquering fear, uncertainty and doubt to become the neighborhood superhero

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer and others are tying themselves up in knots trying to prove that they understand what Zillow is doing wrong. My take is that they don’t even understand what Zillow is doing, so, necessarily, it’s going to look wrong to them from their frame of reference.

I said this the other day, and I thought I did a nice job, twenty-five words on the nose:

Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

The important word is “community.” Wikipedia.org is not building a database of encyclopedia articles. Ebay.com is not building a database of merchandise.

Criticizing — or praising — Zillow about its databases is all but completely beside the point. They’re not building databases. They’re using databases — and incentives to user-initiated database maintenance — to create a self-sustaining community of users.

Ebay.com is not a reproducible phenomenon. Wikipedia.org is not a reproducible phenomenon. The technology is easy. Venture capital abounds. But the niches are already occupied, and neither of those two communities can be replaced as long as they are serving the needs of their members. It does not matter how much money you throw at the problem, they cannot be supplanted.

This is what Zillow.com is aiming for, in my opinion. The listing.bot traffic is nothing. It doesn’t amount to a fart in a gale of wind. Zillow’s own very impressive traffic is nothing, as we’ll see in a moment. What they want is a community of users as loyal as the Wikipedians, and potentially as profitable to its professional users as Ebay is.

Let’s look at the numbers: Zillow is getting four million hits a month, it says — with others saying otherwise. If each of those four million users is visiting three pages on average — which seems like a lot to me — then we’re looking at twelve million pageviews a month. It’s possible they do better than this, but it doesn’t much matter, as we’ll see. Assume three EZ Ads per page — where the average for now is probably closer to one. That boils Read more

April 6, 2007

Web site builds community of real estate consumers, vendors

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).

This is adapted from my main post Tuesday night, of course. I get 350 words in the paper. They cut me today to 330, so I used my own version of the text for the permanent link.

But here’s the sad part: This is breaking news in the Republic. This is the first word of Zillow’s new release to appear in the newspaper. Aren’t you glad you have a choice about where to get your news?

 
Web site builds community of real estate consumers, vendors

Zillow.com, the national Realty.bot growing out of the popular automated home valuation service, released a new version of its popular web-based software Tuesday night. The system’s new functionality comes in three broad categories:

  • Any user of the system — not just homeowners or their real estate agents — will be able to report that a particular home is for sale and at what price. Only owners and/or listing agents will be able to create more elaborate listings for homes for sale.
  • Any user of the site will be able to ask or answer a specific question about a home, whether or not it is listed for sale. The questions and answers will be stored with the record for that home, and each user’s questions, answers and Zillow Wiki contributions will be recorded on that user’s personal profile page on the system.
  • Agents or other users wishing to promote either themselves or their homes listed for sale will be able to do so through a new “EZ Ads” system. The ads will be sold by the zip-code at a cost of one-penny per impression.

“With this release, Zillow becomes a community,” said David Gibbons, the company’s Director of Community Relations. Zillow’s home value “Zestimates” have been very popular with home sellers. Zillow.com is giving buyers and Realtors incentives to join its community.

Zillow wants agents to submit at least limited-data listings, which will in turn bring it buyers, which will in turn reward sellers and listing agents for inputting full-data listings and other information, which will in turn provide a stickier and more satisfying experience for buyers. Read more

April 5, 2007

Why doesn’t Zillow.com act like Trulia.com? Because life is short but art is long . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy had lunch today with a friend and ex-colleague. Cathy was talking about Zillow.com as a Web 2.0 phenomenon, and her friend was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of Web 2.0.

I sent her mail when I heard about this, summarizing and quoting from the seminal Tim O’Reilly article:

In an elevator speech: Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

This is O’Reilly’s summary:

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

  1. The Long Tail
    Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
  2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
    Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
  3. Users Add Value
    The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
  4. Network Effects by Default
    Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
  5. Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design Read more
April 5, 2007

Zynergy: They searched for a house, but they found you

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This ad:

Appeared this morning next to Cathy’s listing in the FQ Story Historic District of Phoenix.

As I said last night, I think all this kvetching and caviling is beside the point. You have a chance to put your marketing message in front of your share of four million visitors a month for free. If you do nothing more than create a profile page, your web site will gain an inbound link from a site with a Page Rank of seven, a fulsome offering to the Church of Googolatry. I had 37 page views on my profile yesterday, which is amazing considering that I have added almost nothing to the site.

My pet theme for the year is: Control your own marketing. It becomes ever more clear that various types of lead vendors want to soak up as much as half of your commissions — even before your broker stuffs his bear-like paw in your pocket. The more you can do to make your own rain as cheaply as possible, the better your chances of earning at least a starvation wage in our “overpaid” profession.

Take a chance and play with Zillow’s new toys. I don’t know that this will work. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing but your time. But if it does, you will gain control of a whole new marketing channel.

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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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