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Category: Technology (page 14 of 60)

June 19, 2009

To celebrate BloodhoundBlog’s third birthday, let’s celebrate all of the insanely great ideas we have come up with…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last week I was working, late at night, plugging street addresses into encartus, in preparation for building a bunch of new engenu pages for a new web site we’re building, an exposition of truly-distinguished homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona. While I was working, I got pinged by an incoming email, a moderated comment to Brian Brady’s first post on the idea of disclosing all real estate purchase offers.

While I was reading all the other great comments to that post, I got pinged again, this time a private email asking me what I thought about the nominees for Inman’s most-innovative blog award.

To misquote a line many Bloodhounds love: I don’t think about them. I will stop in at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy once or twice a month, and I know I’ve been to MyTechOpinon and the Clean Slate Blog. But I don’t associate any of those sites with innovation. They’re just weblogs, that’s all.

This is not sour grapes. I don’t give a rat’s ass about beauty contests, and I’ve deliberately painted Inman “News” into a corner: By consistently ignoring what is obviously the most innovative weblog in the RE.net, they come off looking like petulant crybabies even as they despoil their reputation as a “news” source. And does this malign neglect hurt us? Uniquely among RE.net weblogs, we’re a PR6, as is the Inman “News” web site. With no capital investment and nothing but part-time, amateur writers, we’ve pulled even with the life’s work of a big-baby billionaire. One would think the idea of gamesmanship was invented yesterday.

And please don’t post treacly little comments about how you get good ideas everywhere. I have no objection whatever to the Special Olympics, so long as you don’t insist on calling the contestants Olympians. The three innovations cited in the first paragraph of this post, three among hundreds, are more than enough to split BloodhoundBlog away from the herd.

But that’s the point. BloodhoundBlog is ten days away from being three years old. In those three years, we’ve pioneered a vast host of jaw-dropping ideas. If we stopped writing on June 29th, our anniversary, we Read more

June 18, 2009

Data Discrimination, A Class Action Lawsuit in the Making

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

Anyone a member of the Texas Bar Association looking for Pro Bono work?  I think you may be able to rassle up a class action lawsuit in big “D”, little “a”, double “L” a, s (Dallas folks 😉 )

Texas is one of five states that do not require disclosure of sale prices, however, I believe the local MLS board in Dallas may be violating their fiduciary responsibility to their buyers and sellers.  I strongly suggest you read the following article.

Actual home sale prices are not being entered into the MLS.

Does this not blatantly fly in the face of transparency.  Moreover, how can the local board stand for this?  Without accurate data shared at least to local members, the guidance and counsel for properly pricing a property places sellers, but more clearly buyers, in a very bad position.  The article suggests that lower priced properties which have sold may be intentional left out in order to provide a perception that property values are higher.

Not only is this a direct violation of an agent’s fiduciary responsibility to his/her client, it is borderline fraud.

Real estate is local, consult a local REALTOR and find out how much your home is worth – or NOT.

Is it any reason why data aggregators are winning?

June 16, 2009

Darwin and the Notorious NAR

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

One of the most powerful outcomes of attending an REBarcamp isn’t necessarily attending the many great discussions during the day, but the great conversations and discussions which take place over a beer after the meeting is over.  I also believe that REBC – now after experiencing yesterday’s REBCCHI – is the real personification of a virtual tool – a living and breathing example of how Twitter converts 140 characters into 140+ face to face meetings and discussions.  Followers carry more weight when they transform from the virtual world to the real world.

For me, the most meaningful discussion took place at the end of the day.  Todd Carpenter, NAR’s Social Media Guru, invited the CEO of NAR, Dale Stinton, to share his thoughts and address questions posed by the group.  His initial stance was somewhat defensive, however, during his discussion I gained a somewhat different perspective regarding the challenges that NAR is seeking to address and overcome.

NAR’s largest challenges is to address the needs and the ranks of the young professional.   Attempts by NAR to try to level the playing field may be difficult because of entitlement issues with older members.  Of the 1,500 boards throughout the country, 200 or so wield the most power.  Many of the larger, more influential boards may not embrace attempts to level the playing field for younger, more independent brokers.  Hence, Dale encouraged everyone to get involved in the boards to influence change.

I think NAR is evolving.

Come the end of 2009, NAR is rolling out two intiatives that have been more than a few years in development:

  1. RPR – Real Property Repository – to all NAR members, a database consisting of the property attributes including tax records etc. for 70 million properties in the US, allowing members to provide comments and additional information to the unique property description.
  2. A consumer focused website, equivalent to Realtor.org.  It is NAR’s response to providing everything a consumer needs to know about real estate.  Again, consumer focused versus member focused.

Timeline again for both is slated for fourth quarter, 2009.

Okay – so now RPR appears to be an almost national MLS, provides data Read more

June 15, 2009

The Case For Twitter, Really Fast

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

House Hunting? in Ohio?

or maybe

LandLord Problems In Pittsburgh?

What if your:

“Rate Went Up”

maybe you want to

“Look At Another House”

Whatever you do, don’t be a “Stupid Realtor”

These people are BEGGING for some help.  They are SCREAMING for it. And you can fish though and find some phrases in your area that will get you houses this week.  And you gotta fish a little bit, but seriously?   What the hell else are you doing?

Search.Twitter.com and a little elbow grease and a friggin’ phone call is the way to go.  Betcha you can get tweetdeck loaded on a computer, run about 10 searches near your area and throw 65,000 in GCI.  And I’ll betcha you can do this without having to talk to any idiots.

These are people with their hands up.  And the first person that clicks through and responds on their website or not JUST on twitter…they are the differentiators.  They are the ones that get to date the prom queen.

So…loads of people are needing a deal.  A connection.

Make that, and get real paid.

June 10, 2009

What If The Real Estate INDUSTRY Didn’t Control The Real Estate Market?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

I have the heart of a trader.  If you read Mortgage Rates Report, you know that I’m fascinated with the forces that make markets move up, down or not at all.  One of the things I’ve noticed, since I started writing on Bloodhound Blog, is that the real estate industry is:

That lopsided opacity was the real reason for the eventual implosion of the real estate market. We hid market information from the buyers while the Baby Boomers moved through the home ownership life cycle.   A huge generation, yearning for “The American Dream of Homeownership”, assured strong demand for houses in the post-World War Two housing boom.  Banks were all too happy to hand out money, even when forced to lend by the Government.  Lew Ranieri saw a 25-year boom ahead and found a way to create a shadow banking system that could “bury bad loans”.  Any agent dealing with a short sale understands the problem of buried loans because she’s heard:

“Well, we aren’t quite sure WHO owns this loan”

Kind of sounds like the forensic audit of Bernie Madoff’s books, doesn’t it?  That’s what you hear when the jig is up on a Ponzi scheme:  confusion, wagon-circling, and practiced deflection.  It eventually catches up with the schemers.  I’m firmly in the camp that no matter how many incentives we offer to stave off the inevitable forced sales, or to provide a middle-class tax cut, or to bribe the next generation of buyers, the simple fact remains that we have more houses than we need in this country…and the people just ain’t buying like they used to.

It’s partly the National Association of REALTORs fault.  They’ve hoarded supply data and intentionally suppressed demand data since inception.  Suppressing the demand data resulted in a valuation system that relied on false positives (comparable sales) as a standard that contributed to the Ponzi-like atmosphere in the real estate market.   Think about it.  When we ask agents about rising demand, they point to dwindling supply as a measure of it.  Read more

May 31, 2009

Happiness is a green status board…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s the SplendorQuest server a moment ago. The numbers come and go, but it’s a rare thing for the server load to go over 5% right now. During the worst of our recent attacks, we were redlined at well over 90%, an enormous amount of computing power.

We still have a lingering problem with the MySQL server, but this is much abated by having rid ourselves of these battalions of termites. We’ll get that taken care of shortly, too.

Thanks for your indulgence during our recent troubles.

May 28, 2009

Truzilla IDX = N/A R.Com?

by

Retechulous...

Author website

When I was looking into whether or not Realtor.com was publishing scrapable rss feeds based on searches a few weeks ago, I also took a look to see if Trulia was doing the same thing.

Sure enough, they are, but of course the quality and the diversity of the types of feeds they’re offering are way juicier than Realtor.Com’s. Not surprising.. absent a Move/NAR type hook up, these guys actually have to innovate, right…

So, with all this fuss over local boards and NAR trying to control the “misappropriation” of property data by regulating idx feeds, I’ve been wondering if one couldn’t just turn Trulia into a personal, free idx solution using the same method I used to tap R.com…

The ingredients?

  • Lotsa fresh goog juicy dynamic content.
  • Not all, but enough mls info to make your visitors at least hang around for a little while.
  • Sales Transaction, REO, Pre-foreclosure data and any other information not available in local idx data either because of local
    board regulations or limitations in the fields available in the mls software.
  • And more…

In short, you could probably “scrape” your way to a more informative site then your competitors have without the need to wrestle with the threat of an absurd Mibor type situation.

[An Example Start Here For The Curious]

But It’s A Half Measure…

Sure…that could work, sorta. But Trulia’s info isn’t all that comprehensive to begin with and you’d be offering your visitors a half-assed hacked up version of true idx. So we’re back pretty much to square one, with some extra dynamic content but no free idx via Trulia.

[Aside: Shouldn’t these guys do the right thing and disclose to their visitors that their’s isn’t a comprehensive “search engine?” I’d buy ads on trulia in a minute if they could say something like: “Yo, we don’t have all the listings, but we’re real good at roping you in, so why don’t you click this guy’s Read more

May 27, 2009

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

May 21, 2009

News from the right side of the number line: Graphene, a possible replacement for silicon in computer chips, and a DVD-sized storage device that can hold more than a thousand DVDs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the paths to the singularity, and the one that is mostly readily plausible given the current state of physics, is nanotechnology. Here are two new nano-entities ready to break out of the laboratory.

First, how would you like to store your entire movie collection on one DVD-sized disc?

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data. 

One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.

The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using ‘nano rods’ – tiny particles of gold too small to see – and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.

Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: ‘We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.’

A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.

Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.

But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes – or 10,000GB.

Of much greater moment, consider Graphene, a perfect carbon structure one atom thick.

Eight MIT researchers, along with colleagues at Harvard and Boston University, have just received a major U.S. Department of Defense grant for graphene research. With this five-year grant, Palacios says, MIT and its collaborators “would become one of the strongest multidisciplinary teams working on graphene in the world.”

Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon Read more

May 18, 2009

Taking A Page Out of Realtor.Com’s Absurd Playbook, Craig’s List Offers FREE Showcase Listing Package!

by

Retechulous...

Author website

I generally don’t get involved in causes. I don’t vote. I try not to step on toes. I truly think doing something trippy drippy nuts absurd is a more productive use of time then taking a real side or a position on anything.

But this MIBOR/NAR deal really has me going. I can no longer summon up that blissful apathy. And I’ve been scheming ways to get involved, to somehow help this situation along, basically getting senselessly fired up over something I can’t control…then came Greg’s last post.

From Greg’s last post

 

If you despise the NAR because it is technologically inept, you’re hating it for the wrong reasons. The right reason to detest the NAR, and to seek its extinction, is because it makes war upon the free market in order to expropriate unearned wealth for brokers.

Yeah, I’ve been feeling superficially pissed that the retechulously inept are making decisions that require some bit of tech-tidude. But really, this is about my right to innovate; to hack up what the competition is doing; to market freely in any ways I see fit just so long as nobody gets hurt in the process. After all, what’s going on with situations like Paula Henry’s is that they’re messing with what many of us (arguably the best of us) consider to be the best part about being a real estate agent—The fact that we’re truly independent business people with the right to roll as we see fit just so long as we abide by the code of ethics, some local regulations, and general golden rule style decency.

 

So how the frak does displaying property listing data, no matter what the source, become an issue for anyone other than the owner of the gosh darn property and the person they hire to complete the task? Answer: It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. Way to waste those NAR dues on something productive…  This whole thing really is totally and completely absurd!

 

So, what’s a guy to do?

Well, if as Greg says, “we can obviate the NAR by supplanting it…”

Then…

I hereby pledge to replace Read more

May 14, 2009

NAR Backs Off Labeling Google a “Scraper”

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I’m basing this on a flurry of tweets out of NAR Mid Year, but it looks like the NAR rules committee came to its senses.

I await the actual verbiage. It will be interesting to see what twisted hedge they come up with to distinguish an “indexer” from a “scraper”.

Still, the question remains: Was the original decision to back MIBOR a deliberate attempt to see if they could rally the Luddites to hobble IDX?

Or was it just plain vanilla cluelessness?

Either way, it begs the even bigger question that was asked hundreds of times on blog posts over the last week: What are NAR members paying for?

UPDATE: Not so fast. See Malok’s comment below. It’s not a done deal, apparently, and the twits are silent.

May 13, 2009

Need Maps? BatchGeocode.com is the easiest way to create them

by

Realtor, Tech Connoisseur

Author website

I used Batch Geocode yesterday to make a wonderful “quick and dirty” map of homes for a relo buyer

All it needs is Address, City & State.

Grab the info in Excel Format from your MLS Search, paste into the Batch Geocode Window, and it creates a great, scalable map with labelled balloons. The legend even includes the rest of the information from the spreadsheet data. WAY COOL.

May 8, 2009

Multiple blog hosting and your files. A Project Bloodhound inquiry for DIY WordPress publishing.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

I’m in need of clarity. Being mostly clueless to the concept of file management and hosting in general has led me here by way of looking to publish more then one blog.  That, and after spending far too much time with “online and phone help” with what should be a simple domain name transfer for Yahoo to Godaddy, I’m at my wits end.   Word to the wise.  If someone offers you a domain name for $1.99, don’t bite.

Here’s the deal. I have a “deluxe hosting account” with Godaddy which runs me, I think, around $6.50 a month and gives me what I need. ( I know your bluehost mediatemple whatever is better and that’s not the fix here ).  Focus.

When I started another blog, I created a new database via my SQL database and now this blog lives in a folder under the main account as well (see below).

hosting-control-center-file-manager-1

So from what I gather, with 25 databases I can run 25 different sites under this one account, right?   The databases (sites) just become sub-files of the main account.  If I’m off, just let me know.

One other thing that puzzles me (utter ignorance) is the file placement in my directory.  I was going by the intructions given to me by the help desk at Godaddy, and what you see is what I ended up with.   Could you all give me a little insight to whether this looks OK or not?

Assuming that everything is set up right so far, my next question would be, what is the advantage of opening up a separate account for a new site?  With each and every domain I purchase, I am offered a free “Economy hosting account”, which of course will not allow you to host WordPress.   To do this, I would need to open another “Deluxe hosting account”.

Any insight here would be appreciated.  I plan on helping my wife with her own site and hosting and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to get her set up separately or just run hers with mine.

Many thanks. If I get somewhere with this, Read more

May 7, 2009

I received the Nobel Prize in Real Estate Today!

by

Realtor, Tech Connoisseur

Author website

Sorry if I’ve been a bit punchy – I think there’s a 9 hour time difference between Stockholm and Berkeley.. and those guys call on their schedule, so they woke me up in the middle of the night.  This is a picture of my neighbor Albert, and he plays a role in the story … keep reading on.

Albert Ghiorso who discovered more elements than any humanoid in the galaxy

The phone call came early this morning!

I’d heard the rumors, but was thrilled to find out that I received the 2009 Nobel Prize for Real Estate!

It was awarded for two different discoveries:

The Quantum Theory Of Home Buying and
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Real Estate

Quantum Theory
After a buyer writes an offer on a home, they either get the house… or they don’t get the house – there is no other state

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The act of writing an offer on a home changes the home’s final sales price… even if you’re uncertain as to what the other offers are.

If there are multiple offers on a home, and you write a low priced offer, your probability of getting the home is very low. You affect the outcome, because someone who really wants the home will raise their bid and the home sells for a higher price!

And how does Albert Ghiorso fit into the quest for my Unified Real Estate Database Field Theory of Data Integration? He’s my inspiration.

Albert, one of our 90-something year spry neighbors, was co-discoverer of more elements than any other person in the galaxy! Albert’s Wikipedia entry lists the following elements:

* Americium ca. 1945 (element 95)
* Curium in 1944 (element 96)
* Berkelium in 1949 (element 97)
* Californium in 1950 (element 98)
* Einsteinium in 1952 (element 99)
* Fermium in 1953 (element 100)
* Mendelevium in 1955 (element 101)
* Nobelium in 1958-59 (element 102)
* Lawrencium in 1961 (element 103)
* Rutherfordium in 1969 (element 104)
* Dubnium in 1970 (element 105)
* Seaborgium in 1974 (element 106)

Cogito Ergo Blogo in Berkelium Californium Americium

Degrees Of Separation
I looked at the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of Bay Area Nobel Prize winners, and realized I was one or two degrees of separation from several…. one neighbor works with someone who won the award in Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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