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The Importance of Using the Digital Darkroom… June 30, 2006

Back in February I wrote my first and only article on Real Estate Photography for Rain City Guide with suggestions for improving the quality of real estate photography images. I guess I had high expectations. But sadly, there are still listings out there with what I’d have to call ‘awful’ pictures. I’m somewhat disappointed. I thought I could change the world, or at least the quality of marketing images of Real Estate. Today I picked up a very slick, glossy Real Estate publication of premier listings to ogle what I expected would be some awesome and inspiring interior photography and I really couldn’t believe what I saw. There were certainly good exterior photos, including aerial views of sweeping estates, but I saw several poor interior images on full page listings of multi-million dollar homes which must have been a significant advertising expense for the Realtor. Several of the interior images were much too dark to really show off what must have been beautiful interiors and many of them showed converging verticals created by the use of a wide angle lens, which may not have mattered much anyway as the images were so dark. I have to tell you, a digital camera in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what he/she is doing is a dangerous thing. I don’t know if the Realtors don’t think it’s important, they don’t recognize poor image quality or some other esoteric explanation.

However, I have a confession to make. Some of the images that come out of my camera are pretty darn bad. Fortunately no one sees them at this stage and I wouldn’t want you to. So how do I get people to pay me to photograph their listings? Well, the image capture with my camera is only the first half of the photographic imaging process. The other half is image editing or post processing that takes place on my computer with software such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. And it’s amazing what image editing tools can do to transform an image. Referred to as the digital darkroom, I learned fairly early at my entry into
digital photography to regard image editing as an extension of the camera. Although camera manufacturers strive to create cameras for the point and shoot crowd that will require little or no post processing, almost all images will benefit from some editing and the high end digital SLR camera’s are intended more for user involvement in the post processing. This involves making necessary corrections in lighting, color balance, saturation and perspective. Sometimes even a few more tricks are at our disposal for a photographic faux pas or a special touch like a sky replacement. Ideally, photographers consider a good original capture important and reliance on too much editing to be a bad strategy. In the case of interior photography for real estate professionals, I have a choice between bringing in and setting up lights (a time consuming process on location) or simply shooting with both flash and/ or available light and working out the results on the computer. For most homes, the Realtors or home owners are comfortable with about an hour of their time to be present while I’m shooting the interior. After about an hour for the average home, I’ve worn out my welcome, so I’ll only set up the lights in a situation where I consider it a necessity.

For the purposes of illustration, I’m going to be brave and show you how one of my images looked when it came out of my camera and follow it with what it looked like when I submitted it to my customer.

kitchen before

Pretty bad, huh? Would you pay me for something like this? I could try to convince you that the carpenter was really incompetent to explain those slanting cabinets and walls, but would you believe me?

kitchen after

The final image may not be quite ready for the cover of Architectural Digest but most people (agents and buyers) when they see the ‘after’ image are likely to respond ‘wow, what a beautiful kitchen!’ After all, it’s one of the primary selling points of this home and it should make that impression. Do I make my point?

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Inman’s Innovation Awards! June 29, 2006

Congrats goes out to all the contributors on Rain City Guide! We were nominated as a finalist for the “Most Innovative Blog Award” by Inman News. In my world, contributors are not only the people with their photo up on the sidepanel, but also those of you who return to give your comments on a regular basis. This site thrives off of your continued involvement!

The winners in each category will be announced in SF at the Inman Connect Conference. I’m definitely going to be there (I’m speaking on a panel on lead conversion)… Additionally, I would really enjoy organizing a meet-up of bloggers one evening. If you’re interested in joining us, then leave a comment below and I’ll send details as things get closer!

Luther engineeringIn the meantime, I’m not proud to say that I didn’t know many of the non-blog nominations so I spent some time this evening on google researching the other companies nominated. Here are some notes (or at least links) I took while scanning the other nominees.

Most Innovative Brokerage

I wish Inman provided some more context so that I could know why they picked these particular real estate brokers. If anyone can let me know what sets these firms apart, please share!

Most Innovative Web Service

Luther engineering 2Most Innovative New Business Model

Most Innovative Real Estate Blog

Most Innovative Real Estate Data Site

Luther engineering 3Most Innovative Technology

Most Innovative Mortgage Company or Service

Most Innovative Media Site

Most Innovative Rental/ New Home Online Service

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Addicted to Google’s Mobile Maps June 27, 2006

phoneI was just reading a post from Jim Kimmons where he gives advice for Realtors on how to better use their handheld Treo’s and it reminded me that I really should put a plug in for Google’s mobile mapping program because I’ve simply become addicted to it and many others could probably benefit from this tool.

The first thing to realize is that the mapping program is separate from your cell phone’s browser. In other words, you’re going to have to download a program to your mobile cell phone. Here is the url you’ll have to type into your cell phone’s browser to download the program: http://www.google.com/gmm/.

Obviously, this program won’t work with all phones, but Google is kind enough to give a list of supported phones. Note that they do support Blackberry phones (which is what I use!).

Why am I addicted?

The interface is simple and and clean. The main options I use are “Move to Location” and “Find Business”. The “Move to Location” option is used to locate me in a general area, while the “Find Business” option gets me to specific places.

Being in a new area, this one-two combo has been extremely powerful. For example, today I used the program to find (and get directions to) a local post office, a washington mutual branch and a coffee shop, all while out of the office and miles away from my desktop computer. Very cool indeed.

As with many google programs, the tool gets even more powerful if you learn some of the “tricks”. My most common one is to use the “3″ and “1″ buttons to scroll between turn movement descriptions while navigating directions. I also like that “i” zooms in while “o” zooms out. (Note that I’m using a Blackberry and other operating systems will surely use different buttons!)

If you happen to be in my situation where you have a powerful phone (and no powerful in-car navigation system), definitely consider checking out this program. It has done away with my need for hard-copy maps!

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HouseValues knows the hard sell June 26, 2006

A friend of mine contacted HouseValues once to get the scoop on their system and now receives (actually pretty funny) high pressure emails sprinkled with phrases like

“If I don’t hear from you by end of day, I’ll ask the next real estate agent on my list – possibly one in your own office.”

“we have an IMMEDIATE NEED FOR A GO-TO AGENT”

“If you are not planning to be in real estate for the next year, then you are not the right candidate for us”.

The qualifications to work with them are pretty rigorous:

1. You can professionally handle 10 to 20 buyers and sellers every month.
2. Plan to be in real estate for the next 12 months.

Lucklily, they seem to find an additional 10 - 20 customers who need an agent NOW every week or two, so my friend feels like he can start picking these low-hanging fruits when he is good and ready.

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What’s a buyer to do? June 24, 2006

frustration In the under $500,000 market, good properties are flying off the shelf. In the last two weeks, we were chasing properties with our client in multiple offer situations from Bellevue to Edmonds. It’s a tough market to work in and gets very discouraging to our buyers. When a market is this hot it always requires an accelerator clause if you want to be in the game.

I was thinking about how typical this chase was and want to share this little history with you. Two deals we lost, one where we bid higher and one where we bid the same and the last one that we got, we paid less than the highest bid. Here’s what we did and how we finally got a happy ending!

Offer 1:condo in Sandpoint, priced $325,000. We were the high bid on this one at $375,000. We used an accelerator clause because we knew we had to and in fact, there were 10 offers. We knew we’d have to waive inspection and form 17 and be pre-approved and we did all that, but the seller, rather than selling for the highest price, sold the condo at 5000 below our offer because the seller had met the other buyer and liked him. Our buyer, by the way, has great credentials.

Offer 2: condo in the north end priced at $330,000. we did an accelerator to 350,000 and we were beat at the same price because the other buyer was all cash. This was smart of the seller, since there’s always the problem of appraisals, which are tougher on condos than single family homes

Offer 3: condo in Roosevelt district, this one was listed at $320,000 and we put in an accelerator clause up to $365,000, no inspection, waive 17 and pre-approved. This time our buyer was in town and met with the sellers and, as usual, we found something in common with the two of them, and we got the condo for $5000 less than the highest offer.

Lesson learned: Always always try to get some connection with the seller if at all possible. It’s best, if you have a likable buyer, to have them meet and chat a bit. Even if you’re working with a sour personality, you can still coach them a bit and I’m right there with them to act as a catalyst. If the seller or buyer are out of town I write an interesting summary of how much the buyer likes the house, their strengths and I always try to find something really touching about them, some sort of volunteer, a special hobby, etc. Knowing the listing agent and/or treating them really well is a great asset, too. I’ve been known to bring a Starbucks when arriving with an offer. Sellers like to know who they’re selling to and often their home is not just a financial investment but something with soul and they want the “right” person to buy it.

So, you just never know. Selling a home is an emotional venture and there are as many reasons for who they’re going to sell to as their are people!

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To Promote or Not to Promote… June 23, 2006

When I posted an ad for our listing masking as an advice column yesterday, I got more than a few emails from people who apparently weren’t very happy that I was linking to Redfin.

I had a reason to link to the detail page on Redfin as oppose to our own. A little birdie whispered to me that the “most viewed” home on their site for Thursday would not only be featured in emails and on their blog on Friday, but that home would also be eligible to host the first “Redfin Showing” on Saturday. I’m a sucker for extra publicity for my home and was happy to cooperate! So if you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by our home between 2pm and 3pm on Saturday!

To the agents out there who are upset that I’m giving Redfin digital ink… Please feel free to suggest interesting ways to market my home as I’ve always been an equal opportunity promoter! :)

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Photo Friday

It’s a late summer here in the Pacific Northwest and I’m still finding a lot of snow where I wouldn’t expect it. I think this will be the first weekend of access to most trailheads, so get out there and enjoy the summer while it lasts.

Snowy mountains

(If you don’t have a super-wide angle lens, but need to “capture” a tight room, I recommend autostitch - it combined three pictures into the picture above)

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There you go again - the MLS doesn’t scale

ReaganEver since Zearch, I’ve been bombarded with work to update or create MLS search web sites for various brokers & agents across the country. Because of this, I’ve had the opportunity to deal with another MLS in the Bay Area (EBRDI) and Central Virginia (CAARMLS). Before I begin another MLS rant (and cause the ghost of Gipper to quip one of his more famous lines), I want to say the IT staff at both EBRDI & the NWMLS have been helpful whenever I’ve had issues, and this primary purpose of the post is to shine a light on the IT challenges that an MLS has (and the hoops that application engineers have to jump through to address them).

After working with EBRDI, and the NWMLS, I can safely say the industry faces some interesting technical challenges ahead. Both MLSes have major bandwidth issues and the download times of data from their servers can be so slow, it makes me wonder if they using Atari 830 Acoustic modems instead of network cards.

The EBRDI provides data to members via ftp downloads. The provide a zip file of text files for the all listing data (which appears to be updated twice daily), and a separate file for all the images for that day’s listings (updated nightly). You can request a DVD-R of all the images to get started, but there is no online mechanism to get all older images. This system is frustrating because if you miss a day’s worth of image downloads, there’s no way to recover other than bothering the EBRDI’s IT staff. If the zip file gets corrupted or otherwise terminated during download, you get to download the multi-megabyte monstrosity again (killing any benefit that zipping the data might have had). Furthermore, zip file compression of images offers no major benefit. The 2-3% size savings is offset by the inconvenience of dealing with large files. The nightly data file averages about 5MB (big but manageable), but the nightly image file averages about 130 MB (a bit big for my liking considering the bandwidth constraints that the EBRDI is operating under).

As much as I complain about the NWMLS, I have to admit they probably have the toughest information distribution challenge. The NWMLS is probably the busiest MLS in the country (and probably one of the largest as well). According to Alexa.com, their servers get more traffic than redfin or John L Scott. If that wasn’t load enough, the NWMLS is the only MLS that I’m aware of that offers sold listing data. If that wasn’t load enough, they offer access to live MLS data (via a SOAP based web service) instead of daily downloads that the EBRDI & CAARMLS offer their members. If that wasn’t enough load, I believe they allow up 16 or 20 photos per active listing (which seems to be more than the typical MLS supports). So, you have a database with over 30,000 active listings & 300,000 sold listings, all being consumed by over 1,000 offices and 15,000 agents (and their vendors or consultants). The NWMLS also uses F5 Network’s BigIP products, so they are obviously attempting to address the challenges of their overloaded information infrastructure. Unfortunately, by all appearances it doesn’t seem to be enough to handle the load that brokers & their application engineers are creating.

Interestingly, the other MLS I’ve had the opportunity to deal with (the CAARMLS in Central Virginia) doesn’t appear to have a bandwidth problem. It stores it’s data in a manner similar to EBRDI does. However, it’s a small MLS (only 2400-ish residental listings) and I suspect the reason it doesn’t have bandwidth problem is because of the fact it has fewer members to support and less data to distribute than the larger MLSes do. Either that, or the larger MLSes have seriously under invested in technology infrastructure.

So what can be done to help out the large MLSes with their bandwidth woes? Here’s some wild ideas…

Provide data via DB servers. The problem is that as an application developer, you only really want the differences between your copy of the data and the MLS data. Unforunately, providing a copy of the entire database every day is not the most efficient way of doing this. I think the NWMLS has the right idea with what is essentially SOAP front end for their listing database. Unfortunately, writing code to talk SOAP, do a data compare and download is a much bigger pain than writing a SQL stored proc to do the same thing or using a product like RedGate’s SQLCompare. Furthermore, SOAP is a lot more verbose than the proprietary protocols database servers use to talk to each other. Setting up security might be tricky, but modern DB servers allow you to have view, table, and column permissions so I suspect that’s not a major problem. Perhaps a bigger problem is that every app developer probably uses a different back-end, and getting heterogeneous SQL servers talking to each other is probably as big a headache as SOAP is. Maybe using REST instead of SOAP, would accomplish the same result?

Provide images as individually down-loadable files (preferably over HTTP). I think HTTP would scale better than FTP would for many reasons. HTTP is a less chatty protocol than FTP is, so there’s a lot less back & forth data exchange between the client & server. Also there’s a lot more tech industry investment in the ongoing Apache & IIS web server war than improving ftp servers (I don’t see that changing anytime soon).

Another advantage is that most modern web development frameworks have a means of easily making HTTP requests and generating dynamic images at run time. These features mean a web application could create a custom image page that downloads the image file on the fly at run-time from the MLS server and caches it on the file system when it’s first requested. Then all subsequent image requests would be fast since they are locally accessed and more importantly, the app would only download images for properties that were searched for. Since nearly all searches are restricted somehow (show all homes in Redmond under $800K, show all homes with at least 3 bedrooms, etc), and paged (show only 10, 20, etc. listings at a time), an app developer’s/broker’s servers wouldn’t download images from the MLS that nobody was looking at.

Data push instead of pull. Maybe instead of all the brokers constantly bombarding the MLS servers, maybe the MLS could upload data to broker servers at predefined intervals and in random order. This would prevent certain brokers from being bandwidth hogs, and perhaps it might encourage brokers to share MLS data with each other (easing the MLS bandwidth crunch) and leading to my next idea.

BitTorrents? To quote a popular BitTorrent FAQ - “BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each
other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker bandwidth. The key philosophy of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) In this manner, network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible. BitTorrent is designed to work better as the number of people interested in a certain file increases, in contrast to other file transfer protocols.”

Obviously MLS download usage patterns match this pattern of downloading. The trick would be getting brokers to agree to it and doing it in a way that’s secure enough to prevent unauthorized people from getting at it. At any rate, the current way of distributing data doesn’t scale. As the public and industry’s appetite for web access to MLS data grows and as MLSs across the country merge and consolidate, this problem is only going to get worse. If you ran a large MLS, what would you try (other than writing big checks for more hardware)?

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“2010 or Bust” June 22, 2006

This may be the new mantra of the DOJ when it comes to its current anti-trust case against the National Association of REALTORS.  The boys at Freakonomics are at it again with an interesting post about some inside scoop on settlement discussions.

In a recent presentation to some MLS folks, I concluded that the DOJ has absolutely no incentive to settle this case unless NAR comes to its knees on the issue of who is a “broker” for purposes of access to MLS listing data.  I also believe that this case is very analogous to the Visa/Mastercard case brought by the DOJ in 1998.  That case took 5 years to reach its conclusion.  Based on that same time line, the NAR case could easily stick around until 2010.

Every day that goes by without resolution of this case helps the new real estate players gain necessary traction in their quest to legitimacy.  If NAR settles the case and gives the DOJ what it wants (open access to all “brokers”), Katy bar the door.  If NAR holds out and we don’t have resolution until 2010, then (regardless of the end ruling in the case), the practical effect may likely be the same with these “new” models then being accepted as part of the real estate brokerage industry. 

This case, like the Visa/Mastercard case, is about innovation or maybe the lack thereof.  Query the impact if the human and monetary resources that are being used to defend this case were instead re-directed to innovate on behalf of traditional brokers to leverage the riches of data that lies within its control.   

-Russ   

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Coldwell Banker Bain’s new interactive map search launched today

Very similar to what John L Scott did (they were both done by the same dev company) but a little more localized as far as neighborhood drill-down. They also added sold property listings driven by address reference rather than map based, but still pretty handy.

As I’m an agent for Coldwell Banker Bain I’ll refrain from singing my praises of the improvements. I’m a little more interested in what everyone else thinks of it. Check it out at http://www.cbba.com/InteractiveMapSearch.aspx

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