This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
In a declining market, buying a short sale is too tall an order

Is it time to kick the stilts out from under short sales?

Right now in most neighborhoods in the Phoenix area, the houses that will draw the most attention from buyers will be either short sales or lender-owned homes. They’ll be in all states of repair, but the prices will be very aggressive.

And of those homes, the lender-owned homes will actually sell. They may be completely trashed, but the people whose job it is to sell those properties are judged by how quickly they can unload non-performing assets. Make an aggressive offer and you’ll get a aggressive deal.

There are downsides, of course. You can inspect all you want, but don’t expect repairs. Because of this, many lender-owned homes will not qualify for FHA or VA financing. And once escrow closes, you’ll have to restore the home to livable condition.

By contrast, a short-sale home might be in better condition. And it might be even more aggressively priced. The trouble is, the price in the MLS listing will be meaningless. The seller can approve that price, but the seller’s lender has to approve it as well. And the people who approve short sales aren’t judged by how quickly they sell the home but by how much money they bring in.

The lender can take from 60 to 90 days to respond to your offer for a short sale home. And the response may be to counter at a higher price. If you counter back, you may wait another 30 days for a response.

Here’s the worst part about this unwieldy procedure: Home prices are still falling in the Valley. You could wait months to get approval on a contract for a house that is now worth tens of thousands of dollars less than what you offered for it.

My take? We need to cut short sales off at the knees. It seems foolish for Realtors to take them as listings, and beyond foolish to encourage buyers to pursue them. Lender-owned homes are offered by motivated sellers. Short sales are a waste of time.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
This endless election season may give the real estate market time to self-correct before new legislation can make things worse

Looking for a silver lining amidst the black clouds of financial news? Here’s one: The fact that we’re in the middle of an election campaign gives us at least a fighting chance of solving our own problems without more government interference in the real estate market.

Everything that’s happened so far has been a triumph for the government approach to what should be free markets. Since the 1930s, the Federal government has been guaranteeing home loans. That made it easier for Americans to buy homes, but it dulled that flinty due diligence we expect in bankers.

Our tax laws favor homeownership with deductions, credits, capital gains exclusions and favorable loan terms. It’s nice to save on taxes, but these incentives induce us to own homes where we might otherwise do something else with our money.

In the recent past, the Federal government decided everyone should own a home, no matter what. After 9/11, the Federal Reserve Bank reduced the cost of money to almost nothing. Hundreds of different arms of government at all levels gave away financial incentives to homeownership. And the U.S. Treasury seemed to hint that American mortgage-backed securities were as safe as houses.

This has turned out to have unhappy consequences. That old-style flinty banker could never conceive of houses losing even 20% of their value, where the Phoenix market has given back twice that much since the market peaked.

Even so, the sky has not fallen. Wealth is not dollars, wealth is the productive power of the American economy. The majority of Americans still have significant equity in their homes, with many of them being owned outright.

What’s happened is that lenders and their financiers and, unfortunately, the American taxpayer, have taken a hit to the wallet. If the Federal government can restrain itself from overreacting, we’ll dig ourselves out in due course. And that’s why we’re blessed by this election: It will be at a least a year before the Feds can marshall any significant new legislation, and, by then, we could be well on our way to solving our own problems.

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Fannie and Freddie fall to foreclosure, but, still, lenders lend

I write this column at the beginning of the week, and it appears at the end of the week. My topics are usually timeless, but, if I turn my attention to current events, there’s always the chance that I’ll end up with my foot in my mouth.

Even so, the news that matters most in residential real estate this week is the takeover by the federal government of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FannieMae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FreddieMac). These two quasi-private corporations define the lion’s share of the secondary mortgage market in the United States.

What does that mean? If you got a conforming loan for your home, it will have been sold into the secondary mortgage market in short order. FannieMae or FreddieMac would have guaranteed the loan to investors, this so your lender could have had a renewed supply of capital from which to make new loans. Federal Housing Authority and Veterans’ Administration loans would have been guaranteed by those entities, and sub-prime (non-conforming) loans would have been marketed directly to private investors. The secondary mortgage market exists to keep loan originators liquid in a market where very few people keep their savings in banks.

Given the federal takeover, has the sky fallen on the secondary mortgage market? No, although things may be a little sluggish as the newly-installed management teams learn the ropes. But as San Diego real estate broker Jeff Brown says, “Lenders lend.” There are still plenty of dollars chasing mortgages, so there will be mortgages chasing dollars. It’s plausible that interest rates could even go down, now that the secondary mortgage market has a rich Uncle Sam to back its loans.

What is not so plausible is the notion that investors will suddenly abandon housing altogether. Things will shake out. The ideal situation would be for a new free-market clearinghouse for the secondary mortgage market to arise. A business like that could cherry-pick the strongest loans, those least likely to go into foreclosure, leaving the more marginal loans to the Feds — the FederalExpress principle.

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
August was a great month for real estate sales, but when 40% of buyers are pushed off the playing field, home prices could plummet

We won’t have reliable numbers for a few days,* but preliminary results leave no doubt that August was a huge month for real estate sales in the Valley of the Sun. Not for prices, alas, which continued to slide by around 1.5% last month. But, of the bread-and-butter suburban tract homes we track, around 200 will have sold, a two-year high.

September promises to be a banner month also, with nearly 280 homes currently under contract. Not all of those homes will make it through the escrow process, but most of them will.

What accounts for all this activity? The single greatest factor is seller-paid down-payment assistance programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah. An FHA loan requires a 3% down-payment, and these grant programs permit the seller to fund the grant, along with up to 3% more for closing costs. The upshot is that buyers can take possession of the home for “nothing down.”

In recent months, down-payment assistance programs have accounted for as much as 40% of sales of resale homes, and as much as 90% of new-build sales.

Here’s the catch: Under the mortgage relief act recently signed into law, seller-paid down-payment assistance will be forbidden. The restriction takes effect on October 1st, but most lenders have already closed the window on new AmeriDream and Nehemiah loans.

It’s possible these programs will be reinstated by future legislation, but, even if they are not, it’s not the end of the world. It’s no great challenge to find a decent starter home for $100,000. And if buyers cannot manage to save up $3,000 for a down-payment ($3,500 after October 1st), acquiring a huge new debt may not be the best solution to their financial problems.

But the short-run prognosis seems pretty obvious: When 40% of resale buyers are forced onto the sidelines, the downward pressure on prices should accelerate.

The bottom line: If you’re prepared to buy a house in the Phoenix area, either as your residence or as an investment, prices could be very attractive.

 
*Final results for August 2008 are reported in the BloodhoundRealty.com Market Basket of Homes.

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Here are some more of the investment properties I’ve been shopping in the West Valley suburbs of Phoenix. These are all potentially premium rental homes. All but one faces North or South. All but one is lender-owned, a much easier way to buy than a short sale. All of them are in premium, high-demand subdivisions.

In other words, I eliminated everything that was less likely to appreciate and rent well. These homes should stay rented to premium tenants while you own them, then sell easily to owner-occupants on the way out.

The prices are all over the map, and they matter not at all. It’s reasonable to treat all of these homes as selling for $70 - $80 a square foot, with the smaller homes going for slightly more, the larger ones for less — this because plumbing is the big money in a house and smaller homes have proportionately more plumbing.

Some of these homes need work to make them rentable, but none of them needs very much — perhaps $5,000 at the most. If it’s possible to pick up one of these for $10,000 less than recent comparable sales, it is eminently profitable to do the repairs on the way in. Paying more for turn-key condition may not be the best strategy. In any case, we can arrange for any needed repairs to be done quickly and economically.

Take a look:

• 10529 West Almeria Rd, Avondale, AZ, Sunrise at Harbor Shores, Lender Owned, $124,900
• 10806 West Virginia Av, Avondale, AZ, Upland Park, Lender Owned, $119,900
• 10809 West Citrus Wy, Avondale, AZ, Garden Lakes, Lender Owned, $156,000
• 111190 West Coronado Rd, Avondale, AZ, Crystal Point, Lender Owned, $104,900
• 11194 West Berkeley Rd, Avondale, AZ, Crystal Point, Lender Owned, $154,900
• 11206 West Holly St, Avondale, AZ, Crystal Point, Lender Owned, $129,500
• 11222 West Almeria Rd, Avondale, AZ, Crystal Point, Lender Owned, $129,900
• 12367 West Hadley St, Avondale, AZ, Coldwater Springs, Lender Owned, $134,900
• 12500 West Adams St, Avondale, AZ, Coldwater Springs, Lender Owned, $117,100
• 12513 West Adams St, Avondale, AZ, Coldwater Springs, Lender Owned, $121,850
• 12783 West Palm Ln, Avondale, AZ, Rancho Santa Fe, Lender Owned, $149,900
• 12921 West Alvarado Rd, Avondale, AZ, Rancho Santa Fe, Lender Owned, $119,800
• 15847 West Papago St, Goodyear, AZ, Estrella Vista, Short Sale, $130,000

I’ll be writing about this in this week’s Arizona Republic: Seller-paid down-payment assistance is essentially gone from our marketplace. This had accounted for as much as 40% of recent sales, so there are going to be a whole lot fewer buyers chasing a large number of available homes. This should make sellers very interested in negotiating price. We are on the cusp of a perfect storm for investors to pick up premium rental homes at unbelievable bargain prices.

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). There is a fuller review of this new technology here.

 
With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia.com or Zillow.com? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but this week marks a decisive change in the game: Trulia just released an iPhone application.

Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of other smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.

It’s hard to argue with the design premise: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database?

The ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency transactions, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.

But here’s the bonus that popped out at me when I heard about Trulia’s iPhone application: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. I like anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients.

The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus MLS listings apply, along with concerns about decay among voluntarily-maintained listings. But, all that notwithstanding: Trulia’s mobile-computing initiative is cool.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Buy low? Sell high? You can’t sell high for now, but prices are low enough that a buy-and-hold strategy could pay off handsomely

Last week I met with a potential real estate investor. She’s an investor because she’s got the money, the credit and the will to dip her toe in the water. She’s a potential investor because she hasn’t yet been a landlord.

With new investors, I talk about premium suburban single-family rental homes. This is normally the safest, most economical way to start a real estate investment plan in Phoenix. That’s especially true right now, when the right rental home will be cash-flow positive from the outset.

But I also talk about other income opportunities in real estate, if only because land-lording is not for everyone. I would not advise a first-time investor to take the plunge in a large multi-family community or a strip mall, but there are plenty of other ways to take advantage of our current market conditions.

An example? Flipping. There never was heard a more discouraging word, but flipping has a horrible reputation because a horde of TV-educated tycoons bought at the top of the market and sold their refurbished masterpieces at auction. Now, when entry prices are low and trending lower, a slow flipping strategy promises nice rewards.

Here’s one slow strategy: Find a great flip candidate at a rock-bottom price. Buy it to own as a rental. Hold it in that state — with the monthly cash-flow covering your costs — until prices recover to your satisfaction. Then do the refurb and sell.

Here’s another one: Buy your cheap refurb candidate and move into it. Redo the home slowly, room by room, especially when the materials for doing a particular room are very cheap. Sell it after you’ve owned it for five years or more and take the capital gain tax free.

There is a common investment idea behind these strategies: Buy low. Sell high. You can’t predict when you’ll be able to sell high, but you know for sure you can buy low right now. If the investment property is either self-amortizing or your own residence, you can afford to wait for the market to turn.

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I wrote last week about the incredible bargains to be had in the Phoenix resale real estate market. Dumpy homes in bad neighborhoods are very, very cheap, but there are so many Short Sales and Lender-Owned homes on the market right now that you can buy choice homes in choice neighborhoods for amazingly low prices.

If the run-up in prices in 2005 was caused by “irrational exuberance,” then our current market is driven by “irrational despondency.” The question for people who are not irrational is this one: How low can these prices go?

I’ve been shopping for a getaway-home for an out-of-state buyer. I’ve built a web site to show off some of the homes I’ve been previewing. The winner so far? A newer three bedroom, two bath home with a pool — on a golf course — with custom tile mosaics — for $110,000.

It’s a sad thing for the folks who lost these homes — and their lenders are no doubt shedding salty tears, too. But if you have the means to buy a home in the Metropolitan Phoenix area right now, you can get incredible values for your money.

You can visit the web site or just click on one of these links to see these homes:

• 105 South 227th Ln, Buckeye, AZ, No Pool, Faces West, Lender Owned, $94,900
• 10774 West Edgemont Av, Avondale, AZ, Pool, Lender Owned, $129,900
• 12843 West Redondo Dr, Litchfield Park, AZ, Pool, Needs Work, Short Sale, $134,900
• 12917 West Windrose Dr, El Mirage, AZ, Pool, Short Sale, $140,000
• 14179 West Shaw Butte Dr, Surprise, AZ, Pool, Upgraded, Short Sale, $124,900
• 14719 West Mary Ct, Surprise, AZ, Pool, Needs Work, Short Sale, $145,000
• 14911 West HoneySuckle Ln, Surprise, AZ, Pool, Needs Work, Short Sale, $136,900
• 15516 West Watkins St, Goodyear, AZ, Pool, Short Sale, $149,900
• 16087 West Hilton Av, Goodyear, AZ, No Pool, Short Sale, $129,900
• 16763 West Taylor St, Goodyear, AZ, Pool, Needs Work, Lender Owned, $135,900
• 22628 West Adams Drive, Buckeye, AZ, Pool, Golf Course, Upgrades, Short Sale, $110,000
• 22794 West La Pasada Blvd, Buckeye, AZ, Pool, Short Sale, $100,000
• 25759 West Nancy Ln, Buckeye, AZ, Pool, Needs Work, Lender Owned, $118,900
• 25805 West Lynne Ln, Buckeye, AZ, Pool, Decent Shape, Lender Owned, $114,900
• 30277 West Earll Dr, Buckeye, AZ, No Pool, Upgrades, Builder Owned, $128,950
• 8537 West Riley Rd, Tolleson, AZ, No Pool, Short Sale, $120,000
• 8823 West Toronto Wy, Tolleson, AZ, Pool, Short Sale, $140,000

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
What went wrong in the Phoenix real estate market? We told homeowners to treat their homes like investments — and they did…

If you were to turn back the clock on the Phoenix real estate market by four years — that would be just about right.

Judging by prices for bread-and-butter homes, it’s just as if the last four years didn’t happen. The average stucco and tile suburban dream home sold in July of 2008 for almost the same price you would have paid for it in July of 2004.

A lot has happened since then, of course. The 1,400 square foot single family home you could have had back then for $150,000 soared to $250,000 by December of 2005. That seemed like $100,000 in free money, and, regrettably, many people borrowed against that paper equity in their homes. Even if they did not, it has proved difficult to eradicate that entirely imaginary $100,000 from list prices.

The real estate market got hammered good and hard by two very bad ideas. The first is that homeownership is an unlimited good, that everyone should own a home regardless of their circumstances. Governments — and the National Association of Realtors — came up with program after program to induce more and more people to buy homes — regardless of their income, regardless of their credit, regardless of their debt load.

At the same time, lenders threw away all of their old, time-tested, flinty-eyed ideas about thrift, declaring that real estate investment was just like securities investment, the leveraged path to assured wealth.

By the old rules, a homeowner or rental property investor had worked and saved for years to accumulate a down payment. That down-payment was more than enough to cover the foreseeable losses of a foreclosure action, so the loan was secured by the property. Buyers and investors didn’t abandon homes when the market went down, dumping the investment like a declining stock in the face of a margin call.

The market is what it is, but it would be a boon for all of us if we could turn back the clock on those four years and play the game over — by the old rules.

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
There’s more to the mortgage relief bill than just mortgage relief

Having trouble making your mortgage payments? You might be able to make a change in your loan, thanks to the mortgage relief bill President Bush recently signed into law. Under the bill, you can convert your high-interest adjustable-rate loan to a lower-interest fixed-rate note if you meet what might, in a declining market, seem to be Catch-22-like guidelines: Your payment must be more than 31% of your income, and your new loan cannot exceed 90% of your home’s value. Help is available — provided you don’t need it.

Starting October 1st, seller-paid down-payment assistance grants will be outlawed for FHA loans. This is bad news for lower-priced neighborhoods in Metropolitan Phoenix, where as many as nine out of ten homes are being sold with down-payment assistance. Expect to see a flurry of this activity in the next two months.

But the left hand gives where the right hand takes away: Buyers who have not owned a home for three years can take a $7,500 “refundable” tax-credit if they buy between April 9, 2008 and July 1, 2009. The credit is to be repaid over the next 15 years.

Perhaps the biggest change introduced by the bill is a revision of the capital gains exclusion rules. Since 1997, sellers have been able to deduct up to $250,000 of the capital gain on the primary residence from their tax burden — up to $500,000 for married couples — if they lived in the home for at least 24 months out of the preceding 60. Under the new law, the deduction will be pro-rated over those 60 months. If you live in the home for the full five years, you will take the full deduction. If you live there for three years out of the five, you’ll deduct only 60%.

In the long run, this will slow down the level of residence-churning seen among monied home-owners. In the short run, expect a lot of pricey homes to sell between now and January 1st, when the old exclusion goes away.

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This link is from our new MLS system, and there are still some kinks to be worked out. But, even so, the results are astounding.

What you’re seeing are newer (1995 and later) single-family suburban tract homes — 3 or 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2+ car garages, stucco walls, all tile roofs — all listed for $100,000 or less. Some will be short sales, so the prices might be fanciful. Many will be lender-owned, and so they could be in rough condition. But each one of these houses can lease for at least $750 a month, so they will be cash-flow positive from the first tenant.

The fact is, my preference is to ignore all of these houses. The next tier up — $100,000 to $125,000 — are the ones worth having. Premium locations, upgraded amenities, higher potential resale values. But still — the mind boggles.

Right now, as I write this, there are 731 of these homes available for $125,000 or less. Not in insane locations like Buckeye, Maricopa or Queen Creek, but in developed suburbs with easy access to schools, entertainment, retail and jobs. In other words, rental homes that will stay rented, that won’t sit vacant for month after month.

For goodness’ sakes, there are twelve homes available for $125,000 or less in Estrella Vista, the best little subdivision in Goodyear.

If you want, I can build you a custom searchbot that will show you premium rental homes as they become available. What’s a premium rental home? It’s one that will attract premium tenants at a premium rent, will stay rented while you own it, will occasion few if any eviction or repair nightmares, and will sell at a premium price to owner-occupants when you’re ready to move on. Any Realtor can sell you a cheap house. I have been very successful at identifying premium rental homes — profitable to buy, profitable to own and rent, profitable at resale.

This search will expire on September 7, 2008, but I think our inventory of sweet suburban rentals might last a little longer than that. Email me if you want to discuss your opportunities.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
New FlexMLS system is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Phoenix-area Multiple Listings Service

Metropolitan Phoenix got a brand new MLS system this week. MLS is the Multiple Listings Service, the system by which Realtors share their listings with one another. Until this week, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service had been using a computing system called Tempo to share listings. As of this Monday just past, we have switched to the FlexMLS system.

Had you guessed that something had changed? If your Realtor has been sending you listings from a saved search, or if you had been receiving updates to a Tempo Gateway, all that stopped on Monday morning. Chances are your agent has spent much of this week rewriting searches and reestablishing gateways. The FlexMLS system is more robust than anything we’ve had before, but it’s also quite a bit more complicated. It may take a while before things get back to normal.

So why make the switch? For one very good reason, to tap into that much more robust technology. Tempo permitted a crude kind of map-based search, but FlexMLS allows you to select houses from within multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons. So, as an example, I can search for homes that are either within walking distance of Apollo High School or within walking distance of Valley Metro bus lines servicing Apollo High School.

There’s more: The FlexMLS pricing software is comparable to the tools appraisers use. Realtors will have to stretch themselves to learn how to tap this power, but our Comparative Market Analyses are going to be painstakingly accurate.

But not without some growing pains. ARMLS is by far the largest MLS system FlexMLS has taken on so far. This first week has been a trial for the North Dakota company — a strain on their servers, and, no doubt, a strain on their tech support staff as well.

And workaday Realtors are sharing the pain. No doubt many are grumbling, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But FlexMLS is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for ARMLS. This transition may not be fun, but it will be a boon to everyone in the long run.

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish

We do things that other brokers in the Phoenix area don’t do. We’re not the busiest listing brokerage — not by miles — but we’re among the most aggressively innovative in our marketing practices.

Our yard signs have always been very big, to try to grab as much attention as we can get for our listed homes, but for the past two years we have been building custom signs for our listings.

Working with Signs By Tomorrow in Peoria, we have been able to build huge, custom, four-color signs for our listed homes — featuring giant photographs of the interior and exterior of the house and custom descriptive copy about the property.

Our signs stop traffic. I know because I will often sit in my car a block or two away and watch passing cars as they slow down and stop to take in the sign, look over the house and grab a flyer.

We have a home listed in Peoria right now, and we took things one step further for this property. We know that a significant number of people in the surrounding area speak Spanish as their first language, so both the flyer and the custom sign are printed with one side in English and one side in Spanish.

Working from the English version of the Flyer, Enrique Lopez of YourPrintSource.com prepared the Spanish translation. This copy was typeset for both the flyer and the sign. If you approach the home — 7813 West Beryl Avenue — from the East, you’ll see the sign and flyer in English. From the West, you’ll see the sign and flyer in Spanish.

Just because there’s no reason not to, the photos on each side of the sign are unique. Instead of four pictures, we were able to use eight.

We also added a Spanish version of the flyer to the MLS listing so that Spanish-speaking buyers can read about the features of the home.

Regardless of our endlessly-debated border policies, as a matter of pure demographics, Phoenix is becoming a bilingual city. Doing real estate promotional material in both English and Spanish just makes sense.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

This is my column for last week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key.

All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, but I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a cop — not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone or for some later iteration of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. I might have a laptop and printer in my trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but I don’t have that computing power on my person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I’m perfectly happy to give up printed documents if I can shoot PDFs in all directions at will. This sounds almost implausible, but I think we might be down to the sclerotic real estate industry itself as the obstacle: Realtor associations, lenders, title companies, and all of the many branches of government.

It’s common, when discussing ideas like this, to throw up technical issues. The technical problems are truly trivial. The problem we face in real estate is the dinosaur mentality of our leadership. Properazzi.com has an iPhone interface, as do Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The National Association of Realtors doesn’t even have a clue, much less a plan, even though the importance of the iPhone has been undeniable since January 2007.

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