The market crunch has hit the Seattle real estate scene hard this week. First there was Redfin announcing it was laying off 20% of its employees earlier this week and today we get Zillow’s announcement that they’re cutting 40 jobs (roughly 25%). You can read about it on the Zillow blog.
Author: James Hsu (page 1 of 1)
Realtor, Real Estate Investor
One of the things I want to see in this industry is the bar raised. I hope what Zillow is doing now with the lending industry will carry over into the agent’s world. I understand mistakes can happen and do happen, but the ability to minimize the number of mistakes made or how fast you can fix them is paramount in any industry or facet of life…especially ours when we have someone else’s money/house on the line.
I was putting a pricing/marketing report for a client today and I come across a listing that’s only been on the market for 3 days and it already had a price drop. Naturally I was curious to see why the sudden price drop. I find this in the listing history:
Okay, …again …mistakes happen. But this mistake is almost unforgiveable. First, in our MLS system there are two text boxes for you to fill the price in separated by a comma. If the intended price was $599,000, I could fathom someone not noticing the second text box right after the comma (which is pre-populated with 000) …and enter the entire list price in the first box …but that would have resulted in a $599,000,000 list price. No…the only way to get the original list price was to enter the price wrong $59900 , 000. This person obviously needs to go through the MLS training class again.
BUT…that wasn’t the worst offense. As a seller, I could probably forgive my agent for an entry error. Don’t see how it could have happened, but fine…it happened. What is really unforgivable is that it took this agent practically 48 HOURS to correct their mistake. For the first 48 hrs of this listing’s life, it was probably THE most expensive house in our MLS. Do you not look at your own listing after you’ve posted it..even as a cursory check to make sure it actually posted?!
Not to mention this $600K house still has…62 hours later ….zero pictures posted for it.
Good times.
Pictures are worth a thousand words. Wouldn’t it be nice if all thousand of those words were actually in praise for the subject of the picture? Time and time again I see photos of homes in the MLS that make me NOT want to look at the house, it’s either too dark or washed out or it just doesn’t make the house look appealing. Or it’s pictures of inconsequential things, like the seller’s dog, or a squirrel in the lawn, or 5 photos of the staircase and no other interior pictures. I swear I’ve seen pictures that were made by a camera phone.
What is the point of pictures in our line of work? It is to showcase the house. In this day and age when the vast majority of folks are going online to see everything they can about a house, the photos we have are your first impression. It can make a buyer drool and want to jump in the car to go see it right away, or it can make someone simply pass over it without a second thought. What kind of photos are you taking?
The options are pretty simple. Take good pictures or pay someone that can take good pictures. I was very close to start paying a professional photographer until I learned how to make astonishing photos myself. This isn’t for everyone, but it might work for some! So let me show you some examples.
This one is your ordinary every-day split-level house. The picture on the left was pulled from when the house was for sale 4 years ago. It has nothing wrong with it. It’s actually fairly well exposed in that you can see the house clearly. However it’s kinda plain and split-level homes here have a certain negative stigma. The photo on the right is of the same house that I am listing now. This house has a gorgeous front yard and the goal was to emphasize the overall property’s beauty and de-emphasize the split-levelness. Read more
I’ve fallen off the face of the world for a long time, but I’m back and I’m here to provide a follow-up to my discovery of Microsoft OneNote and tablet PC’s. In short, I’ve been able to complete my last 3 transactions …from first meeting the client through to closing ….generating less than 10 sheets of paper myself ….total (2 transactions had zero paper that I produced and the third had about 6 sheets). It has simplified/revolutionized how I organize my client data and all the information that’s gathered in the course of a transcation, my notes, my tasks, prospecting, …you name it! I’ve been able to reclaim a good portion of some desk space since I’ve been able to do away with almost all my printed client files. When I go out for a showing, all I bring is my tablet pc and my keycard. The benefits go on and on. It has by far surpassed my expectations from only a few months ago.
All my information about all my transactions are at my finger tips. Lender contact, escrow, title, cooperating agent, etc. No more waiting till I get back to the office to dig through files or worse yet, pull out the boxes of closed transactions from 6 months ago to find something. I have it all right in front of me and I have to thank OneNote for most of it. I have yet to see any other agent carry one of these things around and I just think … they just haven’t seen the light yet! 🙂 Last week Stewart Title emailed me saying they were going to start going all electronic and had this huge write up on the benefits. It was nice to see an industry that generates a TON of paper going in this direction. It’s just gonna keep going!
Here is the setup that I’ve settled on…this is by no means an advertisement for these products (as they all have little issues or quirks).
Data management – Microsoft OneNote. OneNote stores all the Read more
Following on the heels of Greg’s write-up on web technology for blogging, I thought I’d share with everyone a relatively recent technology discovery of mine…one that is quickly transforming how I as Realtor organize and manage all the information I come across with in my work.
For whatever reason, going to college in Microsoft’s backyard made me very anti-Microsoft. Perhaps in my youthful, idealistic mindset I didn’t like their apparent lack of innovation. Instead, they just bought everyone else’s ideas (think Powerpoint, Hotmail, Frontpage, Visio) or copied the idea and threw a ton of money at it until they overtook their competitor (think IE vs Netscape). This mindset of mine has gradually changed over the years as I realized that’s just what businesses do (why re-invent the wheel) and also Google has shown that a small player can challenge and beat the big MS. But anyway, I was introduced to a relatively new product from Microsoft by a client of mine who works for them: Microsoft Office OneNote. Probably, in the consumer market, the first really innovative product I’ve seen in a long time from MS…and it’s really not all that complicated…just really smart!
I don’t know how other people manage their data but I’ve been basically using a combination of my computer, a binder, folders and lots of tree-killing paper. I don’t like this system since the data is not centralized anywhere. Some of it is on my computer, some of it is loose sheets in folders or my binder. However, it’s been working for the most part. All of that has changed in the few weeks I’ve been using (or learning to use) OneNote.
Think of OneNote as a spiral-bound, tabbed notebook, where each page is as long and wide as you want and you can have an unlimited number of pages. It’s free-form so there is no set way to organize your tabs or pages. You’re given 3+ layers of organization: Notebooks, Sections and Pages. (I say 3+ because within Sections you can create another layer Read more