BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 59 of 60)

October 16, 2006

PropSmart and Trulia, you’re cuddly and cool, but you don’t know a thing about searching for homes . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s what I mean. This is a search I’m doing right now for a client:

Active listings only
MLS grids l32, k32 and j32 only (3 x 9 miles)
Minimum of 3, maximum of 4 bedrooms
Single-family detached homes only
Minimum of $350,000, maximum of $450,000 list price
Single-level homes only
3- or 4-car garage only
Only homes with formal dining rooms
Only homes with all tile roofs
Only neighborhoods with homeowner’s associations
Only homes where the land is owned in fee simple

There are two desired criteria that I’m omitting because they’re not reliably entered into the MLS system:

North/south exposure only
Only homes with pantries

But even with all those highly exclusive criteria, I’m still getting 25 possible candidates, way too many to work with. Probably we’ll end up isolating by particular subdivisions.

There is nothing in any computer system other than the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service that can search at this level of detail. But this is the only appropriate level of detail for a true home search. We campaign constantly for more power.

If you have visions of replacing MLS systems, please enlarge you vision to at least this size…

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October 12, 2006

The luxurious look and feel of true CMYK saturation . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s the sign for the new listing. I’m able to continue working at one-sixth scale in QuarkXPress, which is a huge time-saver. But this time, when I resampled the photos, I rendered them in CMYK (as against RGB) and saved them as PhotoShop EPS files. This made all the difference with the saturation. I can save the page as an EPS from Quark with the full-bleed preserved, then bring it into PhotoShop at 600% scale, 300DPI, CMYK, then save that as a CMYK TIFF file, which is what the printer wants to eat.

It’s possible to wrestle with printers about what their equipment can do, but it’s usually not advisable. If you give them exactly what they want, they’ll return the favor with alacrity — and alacrity is a big part of what we sell.

And what is the benefit of learning to hold your own hand? I made this sign on Tuesday morning. I’ll hang the finished product later today. That silly saturation problem might have taken who knows how much chatter to resolve — and how much time and money. In general, we like to spin off everything we can. But for the items directly related to our stock in trade, we want complete control over the quality.

JPEG hates the spectrum: The live image is quite a bit better-saturated than what you’re seeing here.

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October 12, 2006

Out of the sandbox and into the ether . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The weblog for 214 South 122nd Av is live. Not as easy as it might have been, not as hard as it could have been. I’m not 100% thrilled with the weblog template, but my plan is to vary them to fit the house in any case. What I have now is maybe 70% of the up-front effort to do another one. Cameron has been iteratively rewriting our content engine to work in any environment, and winching it into place here was relatively painless.

No new search results for “214 South 122nd Av”, but when I search on the tagline for these pages, I find every one of them — when everything but index.php was created yesterday afternoon.

It will take two or three more before I can do these with dispatch, but this wasn’t bad…

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October 11, 2006

Real estate weblogs and the Google Sandbox of Doom . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a new domain going live tonight, the first custom web site we have done for a real estate listing built as a weblog instead of a static web site. When we talked about this before, Free the Drones wondered if custom web sites might get lost for a span of time in the postulated Google sandbox, a place where Google, at least hypothetically, exiles new domains to make sure they are not spam, scams, who knows what.

The weblog is far from being finished, but I have results to report. I registered the domain on Sunday, but, because of a MySQL problem, didn’t install WordPress until Monday. The first new post on the weblog showed up at blogsearch.google.com in less than hour. I blogrolled from the new weblog to BloodhoundBlog, but this was the only thing I did in the way of an outbound link — or anything else of a proactive SEO nature. That link showed up in Technorati within a few hours. I’ve been wrestling with content engines, so the weblog has bascially sat around doing nothing since Monday.

This morning it showed up on the main Google search engine, along with its own pet splog!

Three days from registration, two days from going live as a WordPress weblog, in a painfully retarded form. Free the Drones would argue that the Sandbox would keep this weblog from scoring high on searches, but the only searches people are likely to make will turn up this weblog, given that it’s there. And: I don’t know if a static web site would have become available as quickly.

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October 4, 2006

HotPads.com: A for-rent-by-owner site based on a whimsical map mash-up . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the map search screen from HotPads.com, a for-rent-by-owner site launching tonight:

This is the most whimsical map mash-up I’ve seen yet, and the site is a treat if only for the cartoony graphics.

In Phoenix, at least, they’re aggregating listings from local property management companies, although landlords can register to list their homes on-line. The site provides a lot of details on the listings, along with neighborhood information.

The site seems to be reliably alive right now, but tomorrow is their real launch date, so, if something flakes on you, cut ’em a break and come back later. There’s a weblog if you want to track their progress.

We rarely do leases now, but I used to do a ton. The MLS is a poor solution, since agents don’t love to list rentals, and they really, really don’t love servicing the listings. I sell a bunch of rental homes, though, so I’m always watching for better ways to market availability. HotPads.com is a sweet solution…

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October 3, 2006

Linking my way out of the trials of tabulation . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Sellsius° wrote this morning about tabbed browsing, but they have no idea. I live my normal life with over 100 tabs open at any time, and right now I have many more than that. I’m going to do a bunch of links, because I want to close tabs I’ve been opening since last week.

(What about crashes? I use Saft for Safari. My Mac never crashes anyway, but if Safari starts to get cranky, I Force Quit then relaunch. Saft reopens all my previously-opened tabs.)

Joel Burslem at the Future of Real Estate Marketing cites some stats from Redfin. Not to be contrary, but I think 131 total transactions ain’t bad for a new brokerage. It’s nothing for the head-count of 35, to be sure, but most of those heads are useless eaters. Divided by 12 agents, that’s almost 11 sides per agent over six months, just short of two sides a month. At full-commission, they could live on that. But at one-third commission, before the broker’s cut, its pretty lousy money, so I guess Joel is right in the end.

The Property Monger shows how to use inspections as a negotiating tool. The post is pretty Massachusettscentric, but the general principles travel.

Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets takes on buying real estate during a divorce. The specifics might be Land of a Thousand Lakes-local, but, again, the principles are ubiquitous.

My favorite math gods, Altos Research, take on the media’s flavor of the month: The unaffordability of housing. Alas, the last time math persuaded a reporter is when it persuaded him to major in Journalism.

Local to Arizona, Todd Tarson at moco real estate news details how Mohave County was able to hang onto it’s land use traditions. It turns out you can fight City Hall…

John Keith at The Boston Real Estate blog weighs in on the idea of flat-fee buyer representation.

Want to sell to wired prospects? Mike’s Corner has bad news and good news, with a review of Waiting for your cat to bark? (Mike’s feed is broken, so you’ll need to visit his blog to keep up with his thinking.)

Jeff Brown at Behind Read more

October 3, 2006

BloodhoundBlog’s WordPress plug-ins . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Daniel Rothamel is swapping over to WordPress, and other people have told me that they are, too, so here, for canonical purposes if for no other, are the WordPress plug-ins BloodhoundBlog is currently using:

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. Hat tip: Michael Hampton and Chris J. Davis for help with the plugin.

Customizable Post Listings (I’m not doing anything with this yet)
Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things. By Scott Reilly.

Filosofo Comments Preview
Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. It’s highly configurable from the admin control panel, including optional captcha and JavaScript alert features. By Austin Matzko.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog. By Alex King.

Related Posts
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry By Mark Jaquith and Jennifer (ScriptyGoddess).

Search Meter
Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog. By Bennett McElwee.

Google Sitemaps
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. By Arne Brachhold.

WordPress Read more

October 1, 2006

Beautiful and functional: New BlueRoof.com map searching interface sets bar higher . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BlueRoof.com has a new map searching interface, combining a number of good ideas from other interfaces with the company’s great design sense.

The interface features the slider controls seen in ShackYack.com‘s search tool. Unlike that system, though, BlueRoof.com does not get bogged down trying to display more listings than its underlying software can handle. If your search results in too many results, you are invited to narrow it.

The search area is defined by the visible portion of the map, however, which implies that, if you don’t already know where you want to be, you can’t use a relatively unfocused search to seek out neighborhoods in your price range. We’re sweltering under heat maps just now, and that would be a simple solution here.

The BlueRoof.com interface uses three different kinds of house icons to indicate active listings: A green roof is MLS-listed, a blue roof is a FSBO, and a blue roof with an avatar out front is a FSBO with broker participation. This is an idea we had talked about when first we saw the ShackYack interface — adding to it ShackYack’s idea of using color intensity as a one-glance method of comparing relative prices.

Things I don’t like:

I want more search tools, even if they come in a pop-down tab to make things simple for the punters.

I want to be able to get a feel of the whole housing market, even if I can’t see houses without narrowing down by area.

I have a huge screen, but I still get a small map. I think the page is being built to conform to BlueRoof.com’s toolbar (which is gorgeous), rather than growing to the available screen real estate.

I could not get to the detail page on any house. (Mac OSX 10.4.7, Safari 2.0.4)

Overall: Very pretty. I think this is the new high bar for map search interfaces. Considering the money in play at the Goliath-like realty.bot sites, BlueRoof.com is David triumphant today…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #100: Beginners guide to SEO . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From SEOmoz.org, a beginners guide to SEO:

What is SEO?

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO – from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization’s offerings.

For a “beginners” guide, this is a very robust, step-by-step approach to improving your SEO performance.

Bookmark the page. You’ll be back…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #99: Integrating a forum with WordPress . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, blogHelper offers great help on the subject of “Integrating a forum with WordPress”:

One of the most popular questions I’m e-mailed with is usually along the lines of: How do I integrate a forum with my WordPress (WP) blog?. Often, this is with reference to using WP as a more web site-ish CMS, e.g. a community site. So, I thought I’d kill three birds with this post. One: Write a (hopefully) brief guide answering the abovementioned question. Two: Before writing a how-to on using WP for a community site, prepare for it by tackling the forum integration issue first. Three: Participate in ProBlogger’s latest group writing project (which will be my first ever participation BTW).

Now, let’s get to work. I’ll list each option I know of, along with instructions or more likely, links to those elsewhere on how to integrate it with WordPress – both backend, e.g. user accounts, and layout/design-wise.

We’re not ready for this at BloodhoundBlog, but this is an eminently doable next step of blogevolution. The forum software discussed is available to you as a part of your hosting package if you host your own domain. And where a weblog can serve hundreds of active members, a forum can serve thousands…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #75: The power of an online tool . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From SEOmoz blog, a definitive resource, how to use a unique web-based tool or service to attract readers to your real estate weblog:

Ingredients: A service that you can code into a tool to save someone time, effort, money or, alternatively, provide entertainment (plus a solid developer, preferably skilled in AJAX).

Process: Tools aren’t always able to attract visitors independently, so much like mashups, you’ll need to do some promotion. Fortunately, there are dozens of online tool lists and plenty of folks blogging about their creation (like the aforementioned Ajaxian). The tool itself needs to serve a real purpose (or make people laugh) and it needs to be unique. If you’re in the retail industry, imagine a tool that could be used to help visitors custom create a product, or organize a set of products in a useful, humorous or fun way. For B2B, cost calculators for customers can be useful, but are often un-exciting. Imagine how you can expand the use of your services to fit a wide audience, then make it fun and interactive.

Results: Tools can generate traffic slowly over time, or they can have huge bursts. Often, they spread virally through email and social networks if they’re built right (and look great — so pay attention to #4, too).

I gave one of these to my dingleberry son, but he hasn’t done anything with it. It was an idea I had over the summer, and I didn’t have time to write it myself.

It’s not difficult: What I envisioned was a PHP utility that would take a marked-up text and return it without the mark-up, but with each marked-up term or phrase having been recoded as a Wikipedia look-up. For general webloggery, Wikipedia is fiercely useful, but coding a lot of links is a pain in the butt. This, by definition is what software is for.

If you want, you can bug the little booger to get busy on this project…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #60: RSS for people who can’t think like Oprah . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From mezzoblue.com: “What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?”:

RSS/XML/Atom are technologies, but syndication is a process. RSS and Atom are two flavours of what is more or less the same thing: a ‘feed’ which is a wrapper for pieces of regularly and sequentially-updated content, be they news articles, weblog posts, a series of photographs, and more. For the purposes of this article, consider the terms interchangable. XML is the base technology both are built on, but that’s almost totally irrelevant; the orange buttons are mislabelled, and should read ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’ instead. Strange, but true.

Syndication is the process of using RSS/Atom for automated updates, another way of getting the information you want. You no doubt have a list of web sites you browse daily for updates, whether they’re stored in your bookmarks or your head. If you find yourself loading 20 or 30 sites a day, and you notice if a few stop updating as frequently, you’ll inevitably stop checking them.

What if there were instead some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn’t waste time checking those that haven’t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many.

Syndication provides the tools to do this. A news reader, or aggregator as they’re also known, is a program or a web site that automatically checks your list of bookmarks (which you only have to set up once) and lets you know what’s new on each site in your list.

It goes beyond simple updates though — the news reader works by pulling in the feeds of your various bookmarks. As we covered above, a feed is a wrapper for content items, so on top of notification, a feed delivers the content that has been updated itself. You may choose to read the new content in the news reader, or you may choose Read more

September 13, 2006

Is Windermere’s the best MLS map mash-up so far . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin at Rain City Guide is pointing to this new Windermere MLS map mash-up.

“Ho hum,” you say. “Been there. Done that. Gave the tee-shirt to my kid.” Maybe so. My take is that this is the best map-based MLS search that I have seen so far, but I am not confident that I have seen it all.

Things I like:

  • Almost no wasted screen real estate
  • A super-accurate zoom feature
  • Excellent Ajaxification without waiting between every change in settings
  • Details are exhibited in a tabbed section using about 25% of the browser

The sliders at ShackYack.com are very cool, but they’re painful to use because everything refreshes in real time — plus ShackYack wastes huge portions of the screen, as do Trulia.com and PropSmart.com. Are there any other players in this same league?

Windermere has MLS feeds from wherever it has franchisees — 35 systems so far, mainly in the Western United States.

Go play with it. My take: Totally rocks…

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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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