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 »

Banking behemoth BofA purchased Countrywide financial for 4 billion and some change.

Ok, so what?  Well, I actually think it is a very positive thing and a sign of hopefully more to come.

First, Countrywide apparently held nearly one in every six mortgages in America at one time.  That seems high to me, so feel free to correct me, but their portfolio did hold 9 million loans in 2007.  That is 9 million consumers who don’t need to fear the consequences of a Countrywide failure.  That alone is a very good thing.

Second, BofA shares only fell 80 cents on a very negative trading day after announcing this acquisition.  On a stock valued at 38.50 at the end of trading, that is a healthy 2.6% drop, but not really out of line with the overall 2% drop the market suffered today.  Investors basically shrugged off BofA’s increased exposure with this move.  That is a very positive indication, in my eyes, that analysts feel BofA is right in their bet that they can stabilize Countrywide AND that moves by the Fed and Congress may help stabilize the lending and real estate markets in 08.

Third, this really helps a lot of people who need the help the most.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (major holders of Countrywide paper) would have both suffered badly if Countrywide failed, causing an even uglier chain reaction.  When I purchased my first home, it was with the assistance, albeit indirect, of Fannie Mae.  Despite all the problems, despite all the corruption at these institutions, they are a critical engine for the loan origination process.  If they can’t help you get into a house, no one can, even if no consumer has ever talked to anyone at either institution (which is quite likely).

Fourth, the Fed again gave strong indications that they might again lower rates, perhaps by a half point.  They said that last time in december, and I am reluctant to believe they will actually go a half point, but even another quarter point can really help things out.  Of course, it appears that I was wrong in december when I said that I believed the Fed wouldn’t go lower for a while.  That is fine, hack away Bernanke, because we need to jumpstart things here.  But the fact is that his hands are tied as to how far he can go.

So, I reiterate… this is a very good time to be looking into refinancing your existing home, or finding the one that is right for you if you have been sitting on the fence.

Putting my money where my mouth is, I am starting to look very seriously myself.  I just can’t resist the deals that I am seeing out there right now.  And with 2008 looking like a very shaky year for the market, I am thinking that my money might be just about ready to find a home.

business, economics, market conditions, real estate | No Comments »

Netscrape vs Internet Exploder. That was how aficionado’s of their various browser’s disparagingly referred to their competitors product in the mid to late 90’s. It was a heady time, evidenced by the hugely successful IPO of Netscape Corporation in 1995.

I recall when I first moved to Silicon Valley, working for a semiconductor fabricator on Ellis Street in Mountain View across from the sprawling new Netscape campus… It was an impressive sight for an impressionable young techie. I do remember wondering how they intended to support that infrastructure when their primary product was free. “Plugin search servers and advertising” was the answer I usually heard, and I remember wondering about that. Turns out that is a pretty fantastic model, but one dominated by google.

That leaves Netscape, well, officially dead. AOL, the current owner after purchasing the software in 1999, announced Friday they would cease active development effective Feb 1, 2008.

If you don’t know the story of this first mass market internet communications suite (there were predecessors, but Netscape really was the first browser to kind of put it all together), you might want to take a moment to familiarize yourself. The wiki article will do as well as any brief history. Suffice it to say that Netscape got there first, and better (in my opinion), but Microsoft countered by weaving their subsequent competitive Internet Explorer browser deeply into their desktop OS experience. This resulted in an infamous lawsuit which Netscape won - but the damage was already too great. Critical mass quickly flip-flopped, and by the Millenia IE had 90% of the browser market. But a key decision by Netscape in 1998 yielded something quite special - the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla, and its flagship release the Firefox browser, is the result of a bold development move by an open source group largely funded by Netscape. Netscape 5 code was scrapped and rewritten, and Firefox was eventually born. (Unfortunately for netscape they tried to release a version of this as Netscape 6 too early, and at a critical point in the browser market shift).

As Mark has already written, Firefox is a vastly superior browser to IE. It is more secure, more functional, and more fun. And because of this, its adoption rate is climbing, especially among Gen X and Y crowds. Overall, Firefox can perhaps claim 15% currently. But that number is climbing. Netscape fought the good fight… they lost the battle, but will win this war in my opinion.

What does this have to with Real Estate? A lot. More and more of what we do is online. Mark has already written an excellent article on whether browser compatibility should be a factor in choosing an MLS. It is that important; your browser is your window to the online world. And despite all the claims of cross platform applications, it rarely works out that way. So it becomes a question of whether vendors with services like MLS’s should adapt to the buggy, insecure ‘fix it after it costs too much to ignore it’ mentality of IE, or the open, agile and adaptive open Mozilla community.

I think the latter will prevail, and in the end we will have finally freed ourselves from the momentum created by what was an admittedly illegal monopolistic practice by Microsoft. And at that point, your window to the online world will be much more secure, much more functional, and much more fun. As we learn to appreciate that, let’s not forget those who fell in battle so that we could win this war.

R.I.P. Netscape.

business, computing, open source, technology | 1 Comment »

Ok, hardly worthy of Cartesian logic, but there is something to be said for the concept. If you are not creating content, and blogging is perhaps the best way to do so - as we have repeatedly stated on this site, then as far as the online world is concerned, you do not exist.

One of my leadership recently asked me to help unpack what a blog is conceptually. Certainly, at this point, we have all heard of them. But what makes a blog a blog, and perhaps more importantly what makes a good blog?

Well, it starts with the content of course, and answering questions is a great way to generate that content. So, taking my own advice, I have converted that question, ‘what is a blog?’ into a post itself. This way I can answer the question but continue to get ‘legs’ out of my work as more than one person might take advantage of it. This may be a bit pedestrian for many of our readers who are obviously more than familiar with the topic, but even for you it may add some perspective.

So, that being said, this is written in my bloggers voice. Understand that this is somewhat liberating. When I write, I don’t write for the consumer… in my opinion that is a part of the point. I don’t know who the consumer is (if ever the uncertainty principle applied…).

I write for myself. I assume that in so doing, I will be creating content that is attractive to people like myself. Good blogging has one key ; AUTHENTICITY/TRANSPARENCY. It is the antithesis of the ‘look at me I am great’ sales marketing that has dominated the last 50 years. It is the car salesman as REALTOR®, literally turning the monitor around so the customer can see the sticker price. You don’t put a post out there, you put YOURSELF out there.

We have a member who calls themselves ‘the gun toting REALTOR.’ Branded across the top of their website in big bold letters. I kid you not. And I think that is brilliant. It is a niche, true, but obviously one that they are passionate about, and presumably one that struck a chord with someone just out there enough to think that was attractive as a quality in their REALTOR®. Is it likely to turn some people off? Absolutely. The lesson to be learned here is that consumers are becoming, have become, very demanding of this sort of authenticity and transparency. Increasingly, expect consumers to have googled you, facebooked you, searched you on LinkedIn, and on, before ever contacting you (funny, this gives me a product idea).

A blog is short for weblog. Historically, A weblog is just a term created for things people like myself did – people with access to server space and time on their hands to start posting mainly text ‘blurbs’ about this or that. Funny little rants and jokes started to pop up in random places between websites. A list of your mp3 files was a very common early blog type. It didn’t take long for that to mutate into more serious efforts at humor, social commentary, politics, business and other forms of ‘conversation’ started to appear online, and Weblog quickly got shortened to ‘blog.’

A blog is a web page, or a web site (a page sits on a site, and a site can contain many pages). Taking our example, psyne.net, we have a blog site. There are currently many posts on that site. As Mark and I have generated content, especially around a particular theme, that in itself could rightly be called a ‘blog.’ As in ‘got to psyne.net and read my blogs on SEO and SEM.’ The ‘blog’ has become both a loose term for the site, for a post, and within a site for a particular genre or collection of content.

There are many different types of webpages, and many different types of websites containing those pages. What makes a blog a blog is the type of content it contains. Blogs tend to be informational, sometimes opinionated, occasionally even rantlike. Blogs also tend to be theme oriented, though often the theme is simply ‘this is what is on my mind today.’ That is what is referred to as a diary blog. It is basically just that, a diary kept online. For our purposes, the theme will obviously be professional education for REALTORS®, but understand that the proposed blog would be very different from what a practitioner themselves might want to maintain. In short, there are many types of blogs.

Blogs tend to cycle their content. A website may change its ‘index’ or home page content periodically or even frequently, but the vast majority of the content and links are somewhat ‘fixed’ or static. Blogs, on the other hand, traditionally show the most recent story on top, and allow the reader to descend into the site by category or date or other factors. There can certainly be links on the main or index page of a blog site, but typically the primary content of that page will cycle out as new content comes in. Visit Inman.com and stop to think, are you looking at a website, or a weblog? In my opinion Inman.com looks and feels like a very sophisticated blog, that happens to have an editorial staff and professional as well as use contributed content. They manage to maintain just enough of that conversational style, while still being professional journalists.

Blogs tend to be primarily text, as they are often creating train of thought and represent a textual conversation with the reader. One fascinating thing about this conversation is that it can be bidirectional, as opposed to traditional media. I cannot easily comment on or respond to an article in the newspaper, certainly not in real time. I can do so on a blog, the moment the story is posted. Or, on a blog site that allows users to add their own content, I can create my own post – my own user contributed content.

One of the reasons that blogs are primarily text is that they usually employ a website interface to create the posted content. This is perhaps the easiest way to distinguish conceptually between a webpage and a weblog. A webpage typically involves at least a small amount of skill and effort to create and maintain. A weblog in the modern era of blogs typically takes no skill or effort to maintain. You just type and click and it is on the web. That is because nearly all blogs today are using a blogging platform to create their content.

A blogging platform, like wordpress, is itself just web software that builds a simple database and interface for you, the blogger. When you click ‘publish’ after typing your content, your content is converted into a webpage for you. Most editors offer moderate formatting capabilities, and the ability to insert pictures and videos, but ultimately you are within a fairly structured software environment, and cannot stray too far from the happy path. This is very different from the world of a webmaster, who can create content where there was none using tools that are not online and will not offer a templated solution.

So, rather than trying to waste time making things ‘pretty,’ a blog platform like wordpress (which is powering Psyne.net) makes them pretty for you, and you can just focus on your expertise. Converting your expertise easily into desirable, searchable, consumable web content is precisely what good blogging is all about.

If you think about it, wikipedia, the premiere online encyclopedia, is really nothing more than a qualifed set of blogs. In this case users have contributed explanations and definitions for terms, concepts, etc., and an ‘official’ version of the wiki entry has evolved in an organic fashion. User contributed content is an essential part of a good blogging experience. Posts are often intentionally interrogative, or even challenging, to engage participation and commentary… a well posed question can create very interesting potentials for interaction. Many early blog posts in the real estate realm were admittedly made in response to questions that real estate practitioners had seeded themselves under aliases. The reason is that there is something provocative about the Q & A process, and of course a well timed response lends a great deal of credibility and appeal.

So, to boil it down to a few practical examples. A members blog site might highlight particular knowledge that they have, or highlight things to look for and things to avoid. I advise people to take questions or examples they get in their trade and blog them. Have a disastrous scenario? Get what value you can from it, and write a somewhat self mocking ‘don’t let this happen to you story’. Someone asks you whether they think interest rates will go up or down (e.g. is this a good time to buy)… rather than trying to formulate an answer to this complex question, I would suggest they say that this is such an interesting question that they will have to write their response in a blog. If one person is asking the question, there are certainly more out there, so the philosophy becomes to put your wisdom where your website is, and post that content, that knowledge, online. (for example, my post on the best time to buy.

So, if you are not blogging, here is the easy way to get started; take the questions and feedback that you receive, and write about it. Find relevant current events and issues that have lead-ins to your professional services and expertise, and write about them. Another example; when I heard on the radio on my drive home recently that the first baby boomer had retired, by the time I got home this post was already written in my head.

The topic, the question, the mishap, the comical event, begs the post. This is the key to blogging. It is not contrived content, for the most part. Most of the best blogs are somewhat raw content, written train of thought. That being said, there is something to be said for spell checking and including some editing and organization, and relevant imagery is very powerful (I suspect that in part the good use of imagery is why this post on imaging and surface computing is far and away the most consumed post I have written, and bizarrely growing, not shrinking, in daily readership). But this also raises another critical point and illuminates why blogging is so powerful. That post had several score readers in September when it was posted. Slightly more in October, then down a few in November. Total readership by december 1 was still less than 200. Then somehow, somewhere, it got syndicated. For most of december it was being read by 50 people a day. Content that I thought had already run its course suddenly started to yield big results, and december will see that particular post read by nearly a thousand people.

Blogs will become the journalism of the future. This is both a good and a bad thing. It is a good thing in that it gives us all the power to exercise our voice, raw and uncensored, across the planet. It is a bad thing in that it gives us all the power to exercise our voice, raw and uncensored, across the planet. This is a factor worth considering as you mull this over. If the content isn’t interesting, compelling, controversial… something, then there is not much point.

How to get started blogging? Well, it starts with writing, in your style, your voice, about something… My suggestion would be to watch the headlines. Pick something you know something about, and express that knowledge in the form of an opinion. Mark Flavin, my co-author and mirror at Bayeast, exclaimed loudly that a post I wrote recently, essentially as a rant in reaction to a Yahoo news story, is far and away the best thing I have ever written.

I tend to disagree, but that is precisely what the blogger needs to avoid. Write yourself, let the audience figure it out.

anthropology, blogging, business, philosophy | No Comments »

While I work within the ‘traditional’ real estate structure, I am certainly not an apologist for the real estate industry or REALTORS® in particular, nor for the mortgage industry or any other sector of the broader whole. When I hear that the real estate industry is under assault from the media, I try to take a balanced approach and see both sides.

Some of the press that I have been reading, however, is so unbalanced that I cannot glean any value from it. Enough people have written about the 60 minutes segment that I certainly don’t need to add anything to shed light on that lopsided assault.

An article I just pulled off of Yahoo, however, caused me to sit down and bang out this quick post.

The articles title is “Tent city in suburb is cost of nation’s housing crisis.” Any reasonable reader of that headline is going to assume, as I did, that the article portrayed direct victims of the subprime meltdown, driven from their homes to band together in a makeshift tent city. Certainly the image that conjures is a poignant one, so I can understand the journalistic goal of sensationalizing the issue this way… juxtaposing homes and tents and envisioning a series of tent cities in every community as more foreclosed people leave their now bank owned homes.

The problem is, none of the 200 people in the ‘tent city’ have suffered a foreclosure. To quote the article: “…While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it’s just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.”

I personally think that is deplorable journalism. Like I said, I can understand and even admire the technique, while deploring the results.

I am not saying that it is not possible or even likely that people across the country may be so unfortunate as to find themselves in this situation after being foreclosed on. I am not even saying that the broader ramifications of the housing downturn cannot impact and cause greater incidence of this sort of sad phenomenon.

What I am saying is that as this country tries to decide if it is heading into a recession, we ought to be particularly sensitive to the fact that we are the authors of our own reality. If there were more headlines about the absurd costs of energy and profit taking in that sector, as opposed to real estate, then people would be writing articles with headlines about how “Energy exec drives past tent city of his own causing on way to deposit 12 billion dollar quarterly profit check.”

The skyrocketing costs of energy are as much, if not more to blame for the stalling of our economic engine, which in turn took the wind out of the housing boom. It is all a matter of how you spin it. As usual, however, the easiest target is the best. Why try to riddle through the complexities of macro economics and global econo-politics when there is an easy, familiar target.

Lets get real. Everyone has a share and a stake in our current economic situation. Have an automanaged 401k? Then consider yourself a part of the problem. Greed, from wall street to your street, doesn’t know professional boundaries.

That being said, I would urge anyone who can to consider a donation to a homeless shelter if they can afford to do so. Any bit helps, and despite my rancor at the sensationalism of the headline, the underlying story of expanding homelessness is all too real a problem.

business, economics, market conditions, real estate | No Comments »

I start my commute nearly everyday asking myself the same question… why can’t I talk to my car and more importantly why can’t it talk to the internet for me?

Voice recognition has made huge strides. Cellular technology as well. And the internet is just there waiting. Yet the best I can hope for at the current moment is to slap a third party device on my dash that will at least give me directions, perhaps allow me to voice a desired location to which it will react. If I happen to own a mercedes benz Yahoo will be happy to send my travel directions to my car. Yahoo.

With a tiny investment of capital, and a little more hardware engineering knowledge than I possess, I believe I could rather quickly create a device that will have access to the internet from my commute, accept voice browsing and navigation commands, as well as develop a minimal new language for voice browser interaction (I haven’t done the research on browser accessibility add-ons, but strongly suspect that the basis for this already exists as a product).

So why would I want to? Well, I spend a great deal of time driving around. During this time I am essentially in ROM mode. I cannot randomly access what I want. If it isn’t on the radio, or I haven’t loaded up my ipod with that content, I am pretty much stuck. Why can’t I use that time to access news and information online? Why can’t a dashboard mounted device respond when I ask it to read the radio version of Yahoo or INMAN, or whomever. During that recitation if I hear something I am interested in, why cannot I open a new virtual ‘tab’ in my audio internet experience, and search for information on those things? When I find something I am interested in looking more closely at, why cannot I give a verbal instruction for this information to be sent to my email so that it is waiting for me when I get to work?

How many times have you heard an advertisement for a service while driving, and actually been interested but unable to remember the url or even the fact that you were interested by the time that you get to a computer? Think how nice it would be if, when you heard an address rattled off, you could simply say ‘follow that url.’

Granted, there is existing technology that can do some of these things, but where is the integrated device? I was excited to hear a preview of Microsoft’s Synch service, thinking that they might be on to what I am hoping to see as a consumer, but was rather predictably disapointed. Synchronizing information is not what we are looking for here. My life, most peoples lives I suspect, is not predictable enough to hope that synchronized information will serve. I need to be able to randomly access information. I believe that people in our culture should start spending less time in vehicles, but unfortunately the trend seems quite the reverse.

So I am forced to ask if a safer, much more valuable way to be productive during that time is not to put down my cell phone, and start talking to my car. I know that sounds a bit paradoxical, but I suspect it is true.

What does the have to do with real estate? A lot. Many REALTORS® spend significant amounts of time in their vehicles, often with clients. Randomly accessing information without missing a beat is an important part of succeeding in this area. The ability to get information through voice interaction without having to hunker down over your treo or other device would seem invaluable. Add integrated GPS and of course you should only be able to get lost if you want to. But that is only a fraction of the potential. Making informative use of this time is inevitable. I personally prefer to telecommute, but if I have to drive, I will continue to try to imagine ways that I can research information and create content.

Thanks for reading my rant. I suspect that someone out there is close to solving this issue, but then Apple let me down. Microsoft then followed suit. There are of course some ancillary capabilities like blog on the go voice services, but the complete package has yet to appear. So I continue to wait for someone to accept my $50/month to hook my car up to the internet and let me teach it to surf for me.

I give Microsoft synch, in terms of scope of product implementation, a C+.

blogging, computing, product review, real estate, technology | No Comments »

Sometimes a little humor is good, so if you will forgive my quixotic mood… this is a pun, intended to hopefully brighten your holidays in this difficult market period.

Recently a practitioner asked me “How can I always be closing.”

Being a literal person, I took his question at its face and set about trying to find a solution. I have some suggestions for practitioners to increase their transaction rates, but to ALWAYS be closing a transaction is a daunting task.

Quantum physics may offer us a solution, however.

First, you need a mild source of radioactivity. Scraping the tritium off of antique watches will serve nicely. Next, we will need a special ‘closing room.’ This is just a normal square room except that the walls are plywood, and two of the walls are constructed into a small Nomex honeycomb <.125″ design. One honeycomb side is covered with a real estate transaction contract made from onion skin paper, and the other is left open. A strong light is positioned outside the open celled honeycomb wall and is directed into the room. On the lens of this lightsource we smear the tritium shavings in a glue substrate.

Inside the room we place the sensor from a Geiger counter. The counter is connected to a fast relay which, when closed by an alpha particle from the scrapings, lights the light. Finally, we will need a witness to observe the transaction. We will call the observer Fluffy, for historical reasons.

Now, we turn on the geiger counter and the quantum REALTOR® and client can enter the room. The light is switched the first time with a switch which is in parallel with the relay. Instantly you can see the shadow of the signed transaction on the contract. Then, as the quantum REALTOR® and client negotiate, the light and rush of alpha particles turn the light on and off, strobe like, and you can see that sometimes the contract is signed, sometimes it is not, sometimes it is partially signed. It’s quantum uncertainty can be measured. It proves that there are at least two states for every contract simultaneously, signed and not signed. For every unsigned contract exists a signed version in alternating universes. To always be closing then is simply a matter of negotiating while measuring the uncertainty of the momentum of the transaction and the uncertainty of its position.

No REALTORS® or consumers were harmed in the making of this pun. If you found this interesting, but aren’t sure you get the references, google “Quantum physics and fluffy the cat.”

philosophy, pun | No Comments »

I am hearing a lot of this right now. To say that this is a tough time for many in our industry is an understatement.

So what can you do? Well, without knowing your business model and strategy, it is hard to answer precisely. But I thought it might be a good time for a no nonsense hit list of things that you can do (FYI, if you don’t have a business model or strategy yet, this obviously cannot help… however, if you DO, and it isn’t producing, now may be the time to get aggressive about surveying the landscape and updating that plan).

Do a quick inventory of what you have and what you do. Of this, what do you think could benefit from an overhaul. Practical example - your office is 10 miles away but the local starbucks is 2. Take your wireless laptop, some business cards, and meet some consumers. They certainly aren’t in your office place, so the coffee house office is a real potential opportunity. That doesn’t work? Take a colleague, so that you can maintain a conversation that others might find alluring. I think you will find that the $3.49 Venti Mocha tastes much better than a $3.49 gallon of Unleaded.

Provide information to the consumer to get them off the fence. Remind yourself that you are doing this for their own good. All around me I am hearing people talking about buying a house. I hope to be one of them shortly. So I honestly believe that the consumers are ready, but they may not be the type of consumers that you were facing before. The giddiness is gone. There is a skepticism and caution about them. Which is precisely why I think more REALTOR® should be talking about the fact that the ‘average’ downturn lasts roughly 24 months (as much as these complex things can be generalized).

They should be flaunting statistics showing what a home investment would look like if purchased in 1997, and point out that now is the time to find values to match or exceed that performance charted over the next 10 years. They need to be prepared for tough questions about mortgages and be clear that they are going to help consumers make realistic choices about what is practical and feasible. I hear many consumers saying that loans are difficult to secure. That is simply not true, as much as any oversimplification cannot be. Break out loan information for consumers so they understand that if they can shop below jumbo, there are plenty of options.

If you are not online in as many places as you can be, strongly consider taking a few days to focus on just that. If you don’t know how, call me and I will give you some pointers.

If you are online, and it simply isn’t working, there is no ROI for you, then strongly consider getting offline rapidly. Turn it off if it isn’t working, and go back to the drawing board. Especially if you are investing a substantial amount in that service. You get to keep the domain names, so don’t fret about that, and it is a good idea to consider overhauling your online presence once every couple of years in any event. (if you are in the middle, Mark and I have both written a number of articles on things you can do to fine tune).

Wear your REALTOR® pin everywhere but the swimming pool. Seriously, I have heard a lot of stories about the random interaction at the supermarket generating a transaction.

Learn about REO and foreclosed properties. The optimum time for these tricky deals will not be protracted, but the desire for that unbelievable deal (and the stories will abound as this market clears out) will linger for a decade. That is ten years that you can be helping consumers search for that perfect deal. When they cannot find it, guess what, you are there to explain to them that sometimes it is enough to get a great deal and move on with living in that deal sooner. The REO and foreclosure market is tricky, by most accounts, but I genuinely believe that the knowledge itself can help translate into more traditional transactions for many agents.

Be Happy. It’s actually a really big deal. Take a day to look at the person that you want to project. Spend a good part of that day looking in the mirror, literally. There is nothing disingenuous about trying to consciously project a positive image of yourself. The majority of us have a rather complex persona that is often a whirl of conflicting ’states’ of emotion. Which do you choose to project? Believe it or not, you can make a conscious choice about this. Try it. Be positive, even if you have to laugh at what a tiny silver lining you found in something… at least it is silver. If you can do that for a few days, I gurantee it will start to reinforce, as others around you respond. A smile is the greatest gift of all, corny but true, because if you give it to someone genuinely, they will instantly give it back to you.

And with that bit of doggerel, I will end my post. If you have had success navigating these troubled waters and have a tip you could share, please feel free.

REALTORS, economics, market conditions, real estate | No Comments »

The best time to buy is of course when Availability is high, Prices are low, and Interest rates are reasonable.  API… Availabilty, Price, Interest.

Now, before I go any further, let me preface this by saying that I have been studying the Greater SF Bay area market pretty intently for 5 years, and I <strong>have never before</strong> made a prediction about the market.  I am frequently asked, because people naturally assume that I have access to sources of information that they do not.  In some small way this is true, but there certainly is no crystal ball, and I do not like making predictions if I feel they are really no better than a coin flip.

Additionally, understand that I really don’t gain in any measurable way if the market does in fact improve.  If anything folks like Mark and I just get more work, not more reward, during high transaction periods.

Now that I have prefaced this, here is my prediction.  If the Federal reserve follows through on their strong hint they dropped last week to reduce rates again in December, I believe we will have finally arrived at that confluence of factors that says this is the best time to buy in the foreseeable future.  Rates will be very favorable, prices will be, well, where they are, which is down significantly from a peak several years ago, and there will be a large inventory to select from.  In other words, API is in effect.

What does this mean for consumers?  If you have been waiting to find the right time to start researching currently available inventory to position yourself to buy when the time is perfect, you need to look behind you.  That time has arrived.  If you have been doing your homework, now is the time to contact your REALTOR &reg; and discuss your goals.  If you are an investor, you are probably already ahead of me on this and are looking to make some purchases just before or just after the new year.

What does this mean for REALTORS &reg;?  Make sure your clients, whether buyers or sellers, are positioned to take advantage of this if I am correct.

What does this mean for home owners?  Finally, a little bit of relief and light at the end of the tunnel.  If you have been trying to sell your house, you can start to breathe a little bit easier, because as inventory first levels off and then begins to decrease, there will be a chain reaction and you will likely benefit along with most of the other folks who are scratching their head as they sign their third listing extension.  If you have been watching your property value diminish; remember that, while it certainly doesn’t always feel like it, that number is somewhat ephemeral.  It can and will go back up, often quickly as inventory that sometimes saps a neighborhoods value finally moves off the market.

So, that is my first ever reasoned real estate market prediction.  The best time to buy?  In my opinion we will be in the next few months, and the window for that ‘peak’ opportunity will be approximately 9 months.

Just my opinion.  What is yours?

market conditions, real estate | No Comments »

Where are the green REALTORS®?

If you haven’t heard of one yet, trust me you will. With a presidential election just a year away, you will be hearing more and more talk along these lines. Selling yourself as green is a good marketing angle, and an even better life philosophy in my opinion.

What is a green REALTOR®? I don’t know, because I haven’t seen one market themselves that way yet, but I can paint you a picture of a technology toting green REALTOR®. So lets imagine.

First a green REALTOR® does NOT advertise in print media (or at most devotes 10% of their ad budget to print). Newsflash people… most people are not looking to print ads to aid their property search. They are online. I have seen no less than three studies in the past 6 months, not the least of which is Swanepoels trends report, that demonstrate quite clearly that roughly 80% of all real estate ad dollars are targeted at the least productive channel of communication, namely print ads. Of course you still need to print some things… you have to have a business card to hand out. So consider printing on only recycled paper. Highlight that fact (picturing a ‘printed only on recycled paper’ on the back of your business card).

A green REALTOR® will virtualize the transaction to the extent possible. Burn relevant documents to a cd-rom for you clients. Use digital forms throughout and electronic faxing. If in the end you have to print one set of documents for archival purposes, at least there weren’t 20 drafts in between.

Send correspondence online. I don’t want your Giants/A’s calendar on my refrigerator. I would love to get an email from you breaking down property values in my city or county over time. I would actually love someday if someone sent me an email and said ‘this is so I don’t have to send you a soon to be recycled brochure.’ That alone would get me to open that email.

A green REALTOR® will learn everything they can about the environmental footprint of a home, a block, a neighborhood. “Look at that great space… that is a .25 acre lot. You can do amazing things with that space. Start composting and save money and help the environment.” This could well generate the follow up question ‘what is composting,’ and then you are in. Does the home have great southern facing roof space? It is the perfect solar generator.

A green REALTOR® doesn’t drive clients to home after home unnecessarily. A green REALTOR® knows they have to visit the house once to do the walkthrough. They bring along their camera and take lots of pics and small videos. Consumers can then dramatically narrow the field of homes they have to visit. This point can be brought home from both the buyer and seller perspective.

I think I could go on for a bit, but I believe that should suffice to make the point. There are innumerable ways that real estate is actually going green. I just think it is high time that someone market themselves that way.

So what do you think, worthy of a designation? GRN perhaps?

REALTORS, advertising, communications, green, real estate, technology | No Comments »