Tracking Homebuyer Activity August 24, 2008
Last week an agent said to me, “I have had the same 6 or 7 buyers and sellers for the last 4 months.” Reminded me of a waitress who couldn’t “turn a table” because the same people stayed all night long.
I decided to track homebuyer activity to see how many buyers who have been looking [...]
Pocket Listings in Seattle? June 23, 2008
I was a meeting this weekend with an agent in Southern California where he showed me a website he says he visits a couple times a week. A competitor had built up a large repository of “pocket listings” for the Beverly Hills area and then stuck them behind a registration wall… of which he visited [...]
Listing Square Footage — How hard can it be? May 27, 2008
Back in middle school, one of my favorite math classes was geometry. Calculating the volume of cylinders, figuring out the angles of oblique triangles…now that was living! Best of all, it seemed like math that maybe I might really use someday.
Fortunately in this business there’s lot of opportunity to practice. Whether we’re helping a client [...]
Safety can’t be stressed enough for agents and sellers of property…. February 21, 2008
Safety is always a concern of mine for both me, my team, and my clients. Oddly enough, agents work in a profession where we and our clients are frequently targeted for a variety of opportunistic crimes such as burglary, assault, rape, and murder. Recently, notices went out from our local MLS letting agents [...]
The MLS is not just for advertising your property October 23, 2007
Agent receives $5,000 fine for taking the key from the keybox, giving it to the electrician and allowing the electrician to remain on the property unattended.
Agent receives $5,000 fine for giving her keypad to an unlicensed friend to show property.
Agent fined $3,000 for changing the price by $1.00 or $2.00 to cause the property to [...]
Consumer Benefits of a Statewide MLS? June 3, 2007
I’ve been asked to speak before the California Association of Realtors (CAR) committee on MLS/Computer and Business Technology this Thursday in Sacramento, CA and I’m just now coming to the conclusion I may be in over my head! Despite the slightly off-topic nature (California MLS issues as oppose to Seattle MLS [...]
Where should the MLS end and the IDX begin? May 10, 2007
The whole ruckus over the NWMLS no longer sending its member’s listings to realtor.com inspired many unlit pixels of commentary and many more wasted bytes of hard drive space. As I pondered a while ago, the industry appears to have a healthy appetite for technology. However, one of the comments was really insightful….
I still feel [...]
The MLS of the future March 8, 2007
Recently, the Center for Realtor Technology and Jim Duncan’s Real Central VA had blog posts on the desire to have MLSs’ add another column to their schema that indicated the broadband access status of a property. I think this is an idea whose time has been a long time coming. When I moved from my [...]
Death by a thousand paper cuts February 25, 2007
Every once in a while a realtor or broker from out of state will ask me to develop an IDX web site for them. Unfortunately, supporting a new MLS is very similar to supporting a foreign language. It is a large software engineering task that takes a lot of time, and since I don’t already have the [...]
Talking Up Shackprices January 24, 2007
Nathan of nPost just did a great interview with Galen on Shackprices… Lots of gold including some indication of Galen’s vision for the future for Shackprices!
What is your long-term plan for ShackPrices?
I would really like ShackPrices to be a national real-estate search website. Our goal is to make it for anyone in America to [...]
