Category: Technology (page 24 of 60)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m totally loving my iPhone, so far. Wine Dog is right about power. I think I want two, one each for in- and out-bound calls. But it’s so far beyond any other phone I’ve ever had, I would never even think of stepping back to yesterday’s phone.

I have a piece of software called HandBrake for the Macintosh. It will convert DVDs to other file formats. It’s how I made this clip of Pleasantville last Summer. In early July, I ripped a full copy of Pleasantville in the iPhone’s ideal video format. I just watched it now. Excellent video, and theater-quality sound through the headphones. I’m ready to convert a DVD a night, while I sleep, and park them on a big hard disk for easy syncing.

I had calls drop today when I was in the mountains — nothing new for Phoenicians. Otherwise, the iPhone was fault free, and it works beautifully with the Jawbone headset. I do see power as being an issue, but it was with the Treo 650, too. I often drive for part of the day with my phone plugged into the cigarette lighter (what’s that?). With a hands-free headset, it doesn’t matter. Give me a strong voice dialer, and it will matter even less.

The Jawbone is so much better in sound quality that I’m thinking of pushing a lot more work toward Jott or other transcription software. Cathy is playing with OmniFocus, an iPhone-optimized GTD app. The iPhone is a software universe, rather than simply a set of tools like an ordinary smartphone, so there are almost unlimited horizons for us to discover.

My biggest challenge, I think, is to get Cameron interested in the iPhone SDK. Brian already has a project, and we can come up with dozens more. It’s not that this is the ultimate computing solution — far from it. But in many ways it is the optimax solution, the tool that offers the most, the most-flexible and the most-available computing power relative to its portability and form factor.

An example: I was talking to a reporter today from a business magazine about the availability of Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This

is the F.Q. Story Historic District in Downtown Phoenix as rendered by the flexMLS MLS system recently adopted by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. ARMLS is 30,000 Realtors working in the fifth largest city in the U.S. — and the 14th largest market area — so this is a big MLS system by any measure.

This particular map looks a whole lot better on the screen. I had to scale drastically to get it to fit here. Here’s the good news: You can see it for real, live, on a “portal” that I built for this post.

Do this:

Go here.

Your user name is: Jack Swilling

Your password is: demo

Please don’t reset the password, or no one else will be able to get in. For all of me, I would make passwords optional, but that’s only because I hate them with the passionate heat of a thousand suns — no big deal.

I built this search to show off just a little bit of what flexMLS can do. I’m not even a good tour guide on the subject. Cathy has a much richer base of experience than mine. For all the gee whiz technology we talk about around here, I am not an early adopter. The words you are most likely to hear from my mouth, when discussing new technology, are “mission critical,” and I won’t risk a mission critical function on something new until it is completely tested. I’ve been in love with the iPhone for 19 months — and I’m getting mine next week.

But, even so, this software is cool.

In the photo (or in the map view in the portal), you will see that I have defined F.Q. Story as three irregular polygons. Why? Because Realtors can’t spell. In principle, I should be able to use the “Subdivision” field in the MLS listing — but I don’t trust it. If the address is mapped correctly — and flexMLS makes it difficult to map a home improperly — it will show up in a polygon search.

And because I can use multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons to define a search, I can base my search of Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have a place to howl in Orlando at last. We wanted something very sexy, very cool, but the constrictions on time and space were killing us. We finally settled on a hotel conference facility to get a room big enough to accommodate all the people who want to join us for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando. As a bonus, we get to go back to our original plan of a twelve-hour event. This will give us time to explore some mastermind ideas that we would have had to leave out of a shorter presentation.

The flip side of this is this: The Earlybird price is gone. If you go to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com, the levy for tickets is $199 — full price.

But don’t take out a second mortgage — whatever that is. We’ve made arrangements with some good friends of the kinds of ideas we teach. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll spy opportunities on other web sites to snag Unchained tickets at a discount. If you want to pay us full price, feel free. But you will have plenty of chances to save yourself some money.

For example, lender Kevin Sandridge can get you into Unchained in Orlando for half-price. Be sure to thank him when you meet him in November.

There will be other offers out there — but don’t dilly-dally. We only have a limited number of seats available, and there will be 20,000 Realtors in Orlando for the NAR Convention. When the music stops, they won’t be seats available at any price.

Technorati Tags: BloodhoundBlog Unchained, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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 Read more