It’s fun when the posts just come right to you.   Seems to happen to me a lot when I am driving, although this was a first for me.

I needed gas on my commute home.  So I stopped at a 76 station just off the freeway, sidled up to the one armed bandit, and got out to start the painful transaction.

I stood up and looked straight into the face of a gorgeous, sexy, high resolution flat panel screen embedded atop the gas pump.  If you have read any of my posts here you will realize how fun this was for me.  I love marketing, and examining and evaluating marketing angles.  Much of my writing imagines technologies to bring information to us more ubiquitously, which of course opens the door for a whole new level of penetration in marketing and advertising.  In particular read my posts on Microsoft Surface, WiMAX, synch, and even my very first post on this site referenced a half mirror half LCD that can be toggled from LCD to mirror mode (coincidentally I read about one of these in a custom designed home today).

So it was rewarding and fascinating for me to watch this screen while I got my gas (and of course perhaps get lost in it and pump more gas than I really wanted to or could afford)… distraction is a marketing technique, make no mistake.

But then it got cool.  Local traffic on a dynamic map courtesy of yahoo flashed up… all the while the business news channel was embedded on the left third of the flat panel.  This was not a static low res display on a programmed loop… this was live information.  And of course you can have your advertisements on the screens, for the right price.

That starts to get fun…  what a fantastic advertising angle for local open homes.  As the Director of Technology for CCAR, I manage our HomesOpenToday.com (HOT) website (sorry, shameless plug).  My mind was already whirling with the possibilities of that sort of hyperlocalized advertising…  a new layer of functionality for the HOT website was roughed out by the time I got home.  Contact the vendor, work with them to establish some preferential pricing for my members in return for a stream of recurring ads each week as members opt into syndicating their open house publication from that definitive content source to the 76 (and soon others to be sure) gas station nearby blanketing the time of their open house.

Like I said, sometimes the posts are really easy to come by.  This was a new and fun experience for me, however.  Wathing tv at a gas station standing outside your car isn’t something I want to do every day, but it beats just plain old standing outside your car at a gas station by a long shot, at least in my book.

Add this little wrinkle to your marketing and advertising repertoire.

advertising, marketing | No Comments »

So the blogosphere has been lighting up with references to the recent launch of Roost^sm. It has been quite interesting to read the reactions to the product on many levels.

Having played some small part in helping to bring this product to market, I thought I would make an effort to give a description of the technical and business model.

Please understand that I am going to attempt to remain neutral on the topic, identifying both potential strengths and weaknesses in what I think is a fascinating, buy side enabling technology.

Roost^sm; is essentially a virtual IDX directory that feels like a vertical search, but fortunately is not. That is important, so I will elaborate.

First, a bit broader of a statement. Roost^sm is a very effective real estate search interface that is fast and quite intuitive. It is a well branded, well funded product designed to allow an interested broker to sponsor a property search which ultimately showcases properties on that local brokers site.

In a sense it allows a broker to directly control their marketing expenditure in a manner that closely resembles modern SEM models.

The site launched January 23rd, and is currently running with live content in several markets and I am told expanding rapidly.

A vertical search in this context is a bad thing. Vertical searches are a way to describe a search engine that delves straight into specific content gleaned from other websites (this is the traditional definition in my view, and can certainly be argued).

Yahoo Shopping is a very good example. When you search from this search engine, the results returned are a subset of what Yahoo sees on the web.

It is a vertical search that pulls the searcher straight down to content on that plane - in this case things to buy.

In the case of Yahoo, this sort of vertical search is great, because the websites that they glean this content from A) Want that information to be consumed by aggregators like Yahoo so that you can find it and purchase it, and B) because those sites are the definitive source of that information.

Since they are the definitive source, they are well incented to have ample quality control measures in place to ensure that the aggregated content is accurate.

In the case of real estate, this is not true. Property information exists in so many places, some ‘legitimate’ sources of data with at least an effort to be current and accurate, some not so much so.

‘Gleaning data’ from these sort of disparate, non-definitive sources is a losing proposition.

There IS of course a definitive source of this information, but often the MLS is divorced from the public display of the information, and I think this is a good thing. MLS applications are challenging enough in their own right to not have to be concerned with display, which is a venue that is changing frenetically.

Consider. Two weeks ago I got a call from broker asking why we (my MLS/Association) were sending bad/old data to a website. I won’t name them here, but we can just call them site x. I replied that of course we are not, and have no affiliation with site x. The ‘data’ displayed there was from his listing three years ago. Site x is a prominent ‘deep vertical’ search engine.

I have a theory that with enough examples I can provide a formula to accurately predict the degree of listing data error as it diverges from the source, specifically because of all the steps involved in acquiring and/or moving the content from place to place.

Even the best syndication will see an echo as details change at the source and flow downstream… if you don’t ask the source directly every time, it is wise to limit yourself to one step removed from that source.

So, Roost^sm, again, feels like a vertical search but is not. ‘Feeling’ like a vertical search is a very good thing. Vertical searching is cool.

Many definitive content sources, one search result interface. I don’t have to go ford.com and toyota.com I can just go to cars.com and get them all. But in real estate it just doesn’t work.

Even large search engines like Yahoo and google have suffered from the vertical search dilemma I have described above. If they want to know the solution to that problem, I have access to the working prototype, but cannot divulge the details. Drop me a line and lets talk.

In the case of Roost^sm, it feels like you are having a vertical search experience. The content is ‘market fresh,’ with rich listing content flowing in from many areas.

But this content is not gleaned from other sources. It is official, quality controlled content (not data). The search is therefore modeled on top of the source content - one step removed - in the care of a highly reputable and responsible vendor. That vendor IS in the business of displaying content well and rapidly adapting to the needs of the market for search solutions.

This makes the Roost^sm search a plugin.

So lets examine that plugin to this ‘official’ content store. The integration is so seamless and essential that in the end Roost^sm cannot really be called a search at all. Roost^sm is really a hub of activity to relay a public consumer (lead) to an interested broker’s own IDX website.

The exchange from Roost^sm down to that individual brokers site feels so much like a vertical search because of the richness and quality of the content AND because the experience is so seamless and smooth. This fluidity is due to the use of a virtual IDX site, which then passes you directly on to that interested brokers own website when you click an individual property.

Roost^sm takes the consumer, passes them to a cities worth of results via a plugin to an IDX virtual site, branded precisely like the interested brokers site. The next click is a seamless transition into that interested brokers site.

Let me give you an analogy from the consumers perspective. Picture a river. You are fishing for properties in your kayak. And of course there are lots of kayaks on the river. All by yourself, it is hard to ensure sufficient quality properties to make for the best fishing (searching). Some searches are all fished out, others results need to be thrown back.

Now picture a riverboat. Very Mark Twain’esque, with the revolving paddlewheel like a windmill on the back to propel it.

Instead of scooping water to propel the boat, it lifts listing content up to the group of well dressed, well informed consumers sitting on the riverboat enjoying a nice search outing. The interested broker simply places some modicum of her advertising budget into controlling how fast that wheel rotates to pull the listings content up to different consumers on the riverboat.

The more she wants to invest, the more likely her interest in representing a qualified buyer will be expressed by her position at the top of the search page and the fact that the consumers clicks will navigate to her broker idx webpage. If she is not represented to the consumers waiting for the content as the interested broker, then she is not charged.

Let me try it from the reverse (the brokers side). Picture a series of turnstyles (like you find at the transit station). Hundreds of them. And lined up looking at them are brokers eager to serve a consumer that they know is out there. To try to meet that consumer, they have to invest in a choice… which turnstyle to go through.

The only caveat is that some of the turnstyles don’t really work well, and some just don’t work at all. So you need to invest wisely in that choice.

What Roost^sm attempts to do is provide a very well oiled, high performance, centralized turnstyle. This mechanism takes one interested broker at a time, and places them on a well funded marketing platform. If you don’t want that service, then you simply don’t opt in. You still get the benefit of additional traffic to the network of IDX sites powered by your MLS and its content, which in the end brings you buyers.

So lets take a look at the interested broker. Why is she interested?

Well, of course because she is trying to help you to buy a property, and she knows that you are looking online. She may be trying to get leads for her own listings as well as qualified buyers to work with, or she may just be a great farmer of territory and has a laserlike focus on the buyer. As a listing agent, you WANT her, you NEED her. This is her specialty. She can bring you the qualified buyer and get the deal done, but she has to be able to find the buyer. She has to be able to spend her dollars advertising her listings and soliciting qualified buyers intelligently.

The prospect of an effective search that feels like it is vertical, but has quality real estate content (and of course has a mix of the latest technology and blazing speed), appeals to her greatly. What appeals much more is the fact that this single portal allows her to both market her listings well, as well as enable her to express her interest in marketing her own services. The degree of her interest can be carefully controlled by her investment in sponsoring searches.

I hear agents all the time referring to trying to nail their business plan down in terms of their ideal volume of transactions. That may sound like a bad joke in this market, but regardless of how many are actually moving, the dedicated agent needs to keep marketing themselves and their content.

For many in this market, it is they - themselves and their ability to work to find an ideal buyer for your listing - which IS the content they offer. Being able to tightly and carefully throttle that interest level, and examine in detail the return on that investment, would seem to be desirable.

I have heard the critique “I am not sure listing agents are going to want to be having leads sent to another brokers site when someone clicks on details for THEIR listing.” I can understand the sentiment. In an ideal world, you could pocket all of your listings and still sell them yourself by generating the immense amount of traffic to your own resources required to serve your clients well.

Certainly, if that is your goal, you would want to opt your listings out of internet display and market them solely from your brokerage. There are some other suggestions that I could make, and possibly some development work that could be done for you; but in the end isn’t that just the point? It is easier and usually better done by those that focus on this as their core business.

However, knowing that you as the listing agent are always given proper attribution according to the rules for public display of MLS content, and that this is ensured by one of the most reputable vendors in the industry, would seem to be soothing.

Knowing that this model can bring the sort of leads that typify the vertical search experience, e.g. people genuinely interested in precisely and solely what you have to offer, as opposed to the stumbleupon sorts, would appear to be comforting.

Knowing that the investment in quality is matched by an investment in bringing the traffic to warrant interested brokers’ attention, would probably feel empowering.

If, in the end, the worst criticism that can be leveled at the application is that it creates a sort of ‘prisoners dilemma’ whereby brokers feel the need to shift some of their advertising dollars to this venue, I suspect that the authors will happily accept that.

Of course, this dilemma already exists across the spectrum of advertising choices that brokers make daily. The fact that this venue at least offers the ability to tightly control the expenditure and map it back to metrics and results, would seem to be a huge step in the right direction.

So that is my take on the Roost^sm model. I heard it described by someone as magic. It is not magic, because of course magic doesn’t truly exist. It is a very well thought out, seamlessly executed prestidigitation to get the consumer to the brokers website.

The search is invoked from Roost.com, but actually served on the content backbone of a very reputable vendor (iHomefinder. Having personally inspected their content provisioning and compliance system, I can tell you that they are precisely the state of the art). The first click takes the search to the sponsoring brokers existing local IDX search page, and you have landed. The transition is smooth and effortless.

It is a fascinating way to bring quality content and targeted searching together, while appearing to honor the rigor and rules of the traditional real estate industry.

Now just to add my own little additional wrinkle… What I really think would be fascinating is if Matt and Alex over at Roost^sm could give the sponsoring broker some criteria to choose from about what sort of properties they can most effectively help connect someone with. They have obviously already nailed the geographic localization part of this riddle. The ability to express your interest as a broker to represent buyers in hyper local focus but with national presence and SEO is quite a nice combination.

But what else can be done in this regard? If you gave brokers a list of twenty questions about the types of buyers they can most effectively represent (e.g. SRS designees would presumably identify servicing that generational cohort as a specialty), but only give them the choice of 5 or so specialties. Now that would be really interesting. At that point you are qualifying the lead somewhat by the search mechanism itself, and qualifying the broker to the consumer by affirmation.

The interested consumer and interested broker both walk away from the experience feeling like they just met their perfect match. And then the turnstyle turns for the next interested broker.

If this sort of capability can meet a changing market in 2008 as the best time to buy becomes ‘apparent,’ then a lot of folks will be coming home to Roost^sm.

Love it or hate it, Roost^sm seems to offer a next generation platform for buyers agents to market their services against the most powerful backdrop of all - compliant, ‘market fresh’ MLS content. I have to hand it to them; Roost^sm gets an A in my book. If for nothing else than the elegance of the model.

Product review: A

REALTORS, ROI, SEM, advertising, content, marketing, online footprint, real estate, technology | No Comments »

I found this somewhat remarkable. Of the detached homes on the MLS at the moment nearly 20% are short sales of one sort or another.

Nearly 1 in 5. That is some pretty powerful math. Are you tired of dodging the short sale opportunities because there are too many potential pitfalls?

My association, CCAR now offers a step by step educational course to get you ready for these transactions. And when 1 in every 5 homes is a short sale, you need to be ready.

Click here for more information on this course.

In the meantime, make sure you are familiar with how to find these properties, or exclude them, when you search your particular MLS.

market conditions, real estate | No Comments »

 

So I am setting up adsense for the first time. Adsense is google’s program to allow folks with websites to embed ads on the page and get paid for clicks from that page. The content of the page typically delivers ad results from a particular category, in this case presumably real estate.

I am not sure how many real estate professionals would actually take this step, but I am curious to try it since it is a very popular program. More importantly for my purposes is the fact that it is of course the reverse of adwords, which I spend a good deal of time working with, and so do many of the professionals I interact with.

So, in a nutshell; if you want to be able to display advertisements (the same ads you see on the top and right side of google search results) and get paid for doing so on your website, you can sign up for adsense for free.

It took me about 20 minutes total, over the course of a two day period. To start, simply go here and either sign in with your existing google based account, or click ’sign up’ if you have no gmail or other google account. You will read some legalese (sorry, didn’t include that in the 20 minutes), and then move on to complete your account.

You will complete a brief form about yourself, and also a brief form about your web presence. You can use adsense on as many of your websites as you want once the account is approved, so don’t fret too much about what initial url you submit.

After that brief interaction you will need to wait for your account submission to be reviewed. For me the turnaround time was from Sunday 5pm submission to Monday 10am approval, so about 16 hours. After that it is simply a matter of logging into the new service and getting running. After about 5 minutes you can have a customized google search on your site that also potentially generates revenue for you. Another 5 minutes and you can start embedding ads of your choice of size and complection.

For me this is actually where it gets a little interesting. Are wider banners more effective than taller ones? What color combinations will outperform others? By setting up channels of ads, with different parameters, you can easily parse out your various efforts and get that coveted feedback. For me this is the treasure trove. The ability to learn a little more about how to effectively modulate ads to get the click is invaluable.

So you make some quick selections about what height and width, color scheme and other visual elements that the ad should conform to. You can of course easily modify these parameters going forward, without having to embed the code on your webpage(s) again. Sample ads are visible here.

Once you have selected an ads parameters, you submit the ad and get the code to embed on your webpage(s). For example:

That’s about it. Create and play, and potentially make revenue doing so. As a product I am quite impressed with the ease of use of adsense. I give it an A-. I look forward to seeing some more advanced functionality like the ability to clone and modify ad units.

advertising, blogging, marketing, online footprint, product review, technology | No Comments »

This is undeniably cool. It is not like most of us haven’t experienced a web conference on some level… but not something on this scale. According to their website announcement:

“Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world. Singularity is over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities. Singularity is three days of talks over multiple tracks. In 2008, Singularity will define Web ‘08.”

There are a couple of things I like about that. First, the conference itself is green… That is hundreds of people who DON’T have to fly across the world so they can all get online together and talk content. They are just going to skip the flight, checkin, and all that nonesense and go online. How novel. What I like more is the web ‘8. Maybe that will catch on and we can finally dispense with the abused web 2.0 term.

Now having some design interest, I am perhaps more interested in the Rich Internet Application (think Flash) context of the event than most readers of this site. So lets take the web conference aspect to look at.

Intense development in desktop sharing, web conferencing and just plain remote access solutions in general have created some impressive reductions in the cost and growths in the capabilities of these tools. I can easily envision some broader ramifications, including ones that extend into real estate. Certainly it would be fun to be able to tell the boss that you are going to a conference and then sit in your pajamas for three days at home. But what about online auctioning and open houses?

Let’s say you want to hold an open house without the fuss of the visitors. I am not talking about a virtual tour, but rather a real tour. Go to the house. Take your webcam enabled laptop with a edge/data card and your digital camera with 2gb eye-fi memory card.

Now you can setup a webcast from your laptop - this is your ‘office view’ seat so choose something appropriate. From here you can introduce yourself to visitors through the webcam at decent resolution. Once introduced, you can walk them through the house using the wifi card… seconds after snapping the shot, thumbnail images start to appear on the webcast site. Your ‘visitors,’ sitting in the comfort of their own home, can then click the pics they want to view, and provide you with near real time feedback. They can tell you to go back to a spot and shoot closer. Or take video with your digital camera of a particular spot. In essence, you and your camera(s) become the eyes to your home. You can capture the leads digitally through the webcast site by requesting email address for certain services that require you to be able to uniquely identify them.

At this point you have very slickly marketed your listing in a new way, to a potentially much vaster audience, and generated as many leads as you can drive to the website at roughly $1 per click with a targeted adwords campaign. Pretty slick.

If anyone out there is doing this please let me know, I am interested to hear more. If not, why aren’t you?

REALTORS, marketing, real estate, technology | No Comments »

Mr Gates,
first, thanks for Vista. I am singularly unimpressed and should have known better. Which brings me to my much larger point.

Please stop trying to squash the Open Source Software movement with your economic clout. You produce software like the government produces corruption; there is a lot of it, it all looks and smells pretty much the same, and yet we all seem reconciled that it is just the cost of doing business and pay for it.

Mightgrowsoft has two main threats to its attempts to remove all competition via guile (as opposed to superior production values and customer service). Those threats are the webOS crowd ‘led’ by google, and the open source crowd ‘led’ by Linux. They are actively working to acquire or destroy both. Mightgrowsoft tendered a ~45 billion dollar unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo! in an effort to stop their increasing irrelevance in what is becoming the real software venue, the web. That is obviously a reaction to their biggest historic fear, which is people living within their browser. Ask anyone what they want to do with their computer these days. 95% of their responses don’t really require an operating system in the traditional sense that we have learned to live with.

What would they do with Yahoo!? Not quite sure, but my instinct tells me they would gut it and MSN.com/Live.com and Yahoo! would start looking a lot alike. I actually think this will become an anti-trust issue, and this transaction will not go forward, but stay tuned.

The bigger threat to us all is Mightgrowsoft’s consistent and well documented efforts to thwart the growth of open source operating systems and softwares. I won’t go into this sordid history now, but you can get a sense of it from this quote (full article here):

“For years, Bill Gates and other top executives at Microsoft railed against the economic philosophy of open-source software with Orwellian fervor, denouncing its communal licensing as a “cancer” that stifled technological innovation.” Now THAT is funny.

Having railed against Open Source, especially the Linux movement for a decade, engaging in every kind of corporate warfare and underhanded nonsense you can imagine, they have switched gears. Now they love open source. If you listen to them long enough, you will hear them explain how they invented open source. Out of Bill Gates own mouth came these words (full article here.

“…The reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that’s identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there.” The article I am quoting that from goes on to say “Historians will note that this is absolutely not what Microsoft came in and said, if it can be deemed to have come in and said anything at all of significance, back in the early days.”

Now here is where it gets really funny and these two threads merge. Yahoo! would bring a couple of things into the Mightgrowsoft fold… 300 million email accounts, for instance (adding to the 280 million hotmail accounts, essentially dwarfing the current gmail number), and a revitalized if still overshadowed search service. And of course, the user base… but lets focus on items 1 and 2.

I like Yahoo!. I have always used it as one of my many portals. And their new predictive search is better than google in my and Mark’s opinion. But everything BEHIND that interface is open source. Php based web pages running on Apache web servers talking to MySQL databses, etc.

SO, Mightgrowsoft, to merge MSN and Live and Yahoo! would either have to spend a bunch of money and time completely tearing that all apart and rebuilding as ASP (do they pay their own licensing fees for software, I wonder?), or accept an open source trojan horse into their midst. Even worse when you look at the main services, as those all run FreeBSD (Linux). The licensing costs alone to replace all of those with windows server systems would be huge. The project would be horrifically complicated, and the services would inevitably suffer. Far better, if you really think about it, to dump everything Microsoft has been trying to do online into Yahoos methodology than the reverse.

Mightgrowsoft’s new zeal for open source is nothing but more of their traditional tactics in disguise. By advocating multiple stacks on the same platform, and integrating those open source efforts into active directory, essentially weaving them into windows itself, you destroy everything that is good about open source. Treating the Open Source movement like third party software vendors is a neat mental trick, but it is a lot like telling the women who entered a void in the US work force in the wartime 40’s that they may have thought they were a revolutionizing force, but that in reality they were just men who didn’t realize it yet.

Difference is not bad. Innovation is not bad. Weaving Open Source into windows is the stupidest thing from Microsoft since Windows ME, which pretty much means it might be the second worst thought in the history of computing and software.

What does this have to do with Real Estate? A lot, but I will wait to see if their Yahoo! acquisition effort succeeds before returning that the issue.

Just my two cents, which, by the way, is two cents more than I need to ‘buy’ a real operating system.

Since this is vaguely a product review, I will give Mightgrowsoft a D- for their open source methodology. We don’t need to be focused on porting open source solutions into windows, but rather the reverse.

business, computing, open source, product review, technology | No Comments »

Since he will almost certainly not publish my follow up comment to his intro post, I will publish it here.

First of all, proclaiming your blog as great doesn’t make it so. Secondly, we hardly need a self-congratulatory vitriolic venue to vent our frustrations at anyone… that is what yelp and other professional resources are for.

Finally, understand that while you obviously have strong feelings on the subject, they are misplaced. REALTORS®, like any large subset of the population, span the entire spectrum of professionalism and service. There are great ones, good ones, and yes, bad ones. They have their good days and their bad days, like everyone else. They function in a fascinating, complex, often unforgiving ‘virtual’ economy where there is very little government regulation, massive opportunity from downside from consumers like yourself with an aim to complain or sue, etc. Your alternative is to allow the government to consume this virtual economy (where currently two self motivated but fiduciary representatives do their best for themselves and thereby for you) and make property purchasing a little like the process of applying for a kidney transplant. If you want this level of government involvement in your attempt to locate and transact for a home, by all means, ‘rage on.’

For my part, while I am not an apologist for the REALTOR® industry, I treat its practitioners like any other person I meet, as an individual worthy of individual evaluation. I see them every day striving to improve their business and their business partners; other REALTORS® By and large they take their stingent code of ethics seriously, and the fiduciary relationship that it implies.

Just in the last hour I interfaced with a member who was complaining that a ‘buyers fee’ markup lead to a misleading price in the MLS. In her own words:

“In this auction, the listing price isn’t that at all because it’s really required that the buyer bring in an additional 6% of that asking price in order to be considered! How can other listings compete with this? How is this utmost care, integrity and honesty in dealing for this broker to do this? How is it following our duty of honest and fair dealing with good faith? This house, if it is to be auctioned, should have its price fully disclosed. That’s what I have to do as a listing agent. “

REALTORS® actually work very hard to ensure integrity, as they rely heavily, almost completely, on it in their business. The transaction is only as good as the weakest half. Dealing with an unscrupulous agent is NOT something that any REALTOR® I have encountered is interested in doing.

I will try to take the high road and when I read poorly written self-congratulatory nonsense like this I will strive not to point out that it is poorly written, self-congratulatory nonsense. If you would like to read a professional blogging resource that takes a balanced approach to the industry and its practitioners, then please click over to http://psyne.net.

REALTORS, blogging, real estate | No Comments »

The National Association of REALTORS® put out a provocative new website last week. http://www.housingmarketfacts.com/.

I will address the ‘bad’ first.

It is barely a ’site,’ and can much more accurately be described as a launch page with a few paragraphs of new content and then a number of links to existing NAR services through their flagship REALTOR.org website, in turn to REALTOR.com for searches.

Since it is done in flash as a standalone page, there are no subpage urls to link to. As a REALTOR® it might be beneficial to be able to send people to a particular piece of provocative content. In this format, you can neither conveniently excerpt information as text, nor deep link to subcontent. Iframing might be your best resort to echo this content from your own web presence.

Finally, the ‘estimate your home equity’ is particularly pedestrian. This static calculator infers that you made a 10% downpayment, and then uses aggregated market statistics averaged over time. We all know that real estate, and whatever equity you might garner from owning it, doesn’t quite work that way.

Which brings me to the good, and I think the truly provocative part of this ‘new’ resource. Namely, the assumptions that it reflects and implies. Fiscal responsibility for one, on the part of lenders, borrowers, and everyone else involved in the process. The assumptions that the equity calculator makes goes beyond just the simple issue of downpayment for purchase.

To get the 94% return on investment from your downpayment that they site claims you can realize after 3 years, you have to do a very interesting thing with your math. You have to leave out the actual mortgage payments. You have to assume that this is the cost of living, which, of course, if you are living in that home, it pretty much is. Of course, a lot of that depends on how much the cost of renting would be, etc. But lets give the benefit of the doubt here.

What is being implied here (though I highly doubt anyone at NAR would say it as such), is that NAR is really targeting the primary homeowner with its information. That when it says that a home is the best investment that you can make, they are taking into account in that calculation that you get to live in it. This obviously separates the homeowner/resident from the home investor.

Personally I am largely in agreement with this logic, although I think that the assumptions in the math should be made clear up front. The American dream of home ownership is very much alive and well, in that we keep dreaming of actually owning a home. Very few people ever get there, it seems, but under the right circumstances just the effort can be quite rewarding personally and financially. Owning a portion of a home, especially as it appreciates while you enjoy it, is just fine for me.

Hopefully, if we can keep reality separated from the dream, and encourage and maintain that fiscally responsible attitude even when market and economic conditions improve, we won’t have to relive this nightmare any time soon.

REALTORS, blogging, economics, real estate | No Comments »

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Pretty cool.
The Eye-Fi card won the Last Gadget Standing competition at CES 2008. Wi-fi meet memory, memory meet wi-fi.

I’m still not sure what I might want to do with it, but I am sure I can think of something. Direct applications for real estate are a bit narrow. Sure, you can send your pics of your new listing to several popular sites, or perhaps even setup something custom, but if you have the ability to do that and do it well, the media capture part of the process really isn’t a challenge, now is it? Tthe technology itself, however, is fascinating. In short, we can expect more in this vein.

 

What I really think is a mindblower, with real potential applications for real estate, is BUG. BUG rocks. Lego for technology.

BUG is an open source software driven technoweenies dream. With an ARM based processor and a host of integration capabilities, the BUG base can be used to do a LOT with just a little effort. In their own words :

"For example, with BUG, you can easily assemble and program a GPS + digital camera device that automatically publishes geo-tagged photos as a web service. Integrating with an online photo-sharing service like Flickr is only a few more lines of code away, and now you have your own real-time, connected traffic-enabled mobile Webcam!"

Coming in Q2 of 08, according to their website, will be a touch sensitive color lcd for the BUG base, mini QWERTY, and a teleporter. I am not sure what that means, but based on what they have done so far, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and stay tuned.

Kudos to bug labs for their open source, open invention offering. I will be ordering mine tonight.

Applications for real estate would appear to abound, but I have other work to do… so, can you suggest some?

computing, open source, product review, real estate, technology | 1 Comment »