Rain City Guide

Looks like our friend Galen has been busy….
In case you haven’t heard, ShackPrices has been rebranded Estately. With a new name, a new logo and a more publicized business model, it appears this old Shack has been retired. Here’s what the ole RE.net blog-o-rama has posted thus far…

Bloodhound Blog
The Real Estate Bloggers
John Cook’s Venture Blog
The [...]

I was reading an article on HouseValues on the Motely Fool. I discovered they relaunched their site recently. Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of the things I noticed…

They are now using MS Virtual Earth instead of their old flash map
I like how they integrated “Home Buying”, “Home Selling”, “Loans” into tabs onto one site
Home value [...]

Before Reba posted her article on the upcoming House Values layoffs, I recently ran across an interesting article about HouseValues on MSN Investor. It was basically a press release from Zacks Investment Research that stated HouseValues (SOLD) made their list of the top 5 stocks to sell now. Needless to say, this is not a glowing recommendation.
Also during that [...]

Hmmmm, the Seattle Times article in today’s business section talks about HouseValues reducing staff because they’re moving out of selling leads to mortgage brokers and they had also overestimated where they’d be financially at this time on top of the fact that sites like Zillow.com have taken over part of their target site user. HV [...]

I don’t know how many of you on this site have dealt with HouseValues as one of their subscribers but I saw some recent postings on the RE/MAX International message board (RE/MAX agents only) where they were getting hammered by agents for what they saw as predatory practices, lies, and now combative collections processes. Having [...]

Just for fun, I started recording notes on real estate conversations I enjoy following and I decided that when the list hit ten, I’d hit publish:

David Smith has a great (no wining allowed) article about the housing bubble. I only wish David interacted with the real estate blogging community a little more because [...]

Dustin’s comments in his last blog post got me thinking (which is never a good thing). Dustin said “You just set my blogging efforts at Move back by a year or so”. To which I reply, “I hope not! You don’t have that much time!”
One of the cool good things that has happened recently is the [...]

If you haven’t seen it, Microsoft released a demographic tool that gives the estimated demographic for a search term and/or URL. Just for fun I threw a few of the major real estate technology sites (as well as the search term [real estate], kept track of the results, and that pushed this chart out [...]

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 [...]

My 10-12 weeks of “blogging” have been quite interesting for me, in that for 15 years I mostly have talked about the real estate industry with other industry people, and talked about local real estate with my own clients and local agents. Blogging opens up talking to consumers generally about the industry, which is [...]