Would you lie for God?

Yesterday’s theme was PreFab, today I’m back to simply providing links to 10 interesting real estate conversations…

  1. Prosper is an online marketplace for people to lend money to other people. Shaun has been playing with Prosper and has some interesting observations.
  2. I don’t agree with Mark’s conclusions, but I think he makes an interesting case that a good time to “upgrade” is in a down market. (via Steph)
  3. For those looking to improve things before they sell, Rory provides some great home improvement links.
  4. If you are going to be upgrading (up market or down), you’d be wise to follow Noah’s advice and sell first!
  5. Will the number of sold homes rise in August as Bill suggests? But I sincerely doubt it.
  6. Todd, since you asked… My take is that if you are going to change domains, you want to do it sooner than later. You’ve still got lots and lots of growth left in your site, but the longer you wait, the harder it will get. Even better, consider getting a hosted version of WordPress that you can put under your own domain. Many hosts have made it so that there is a “one button” install of wordpress and they even manage the upgrades on the backend. (WordPress.org has a list of their “preferred” hosts.) In the long run, this will definitely give you the most flexibility with things like video/podcasts and stat tracking.
  7. Jim’s thinking he wants a sideblog plugin… I’m thinking just take notes and when you get to 10, hit publish. Have you noticed? 🙂
  8. Fran is good for providing a useful tip every few days… Today it is about the importance of the buyer walkthrough.
  9. Jay Thompson (of AZ) gives us a “pick of the week” that includes one hell of a house!
  10. Larry Cragun tells us to watch out for real estate transactions involving religious institutions. Some people are more than happy to lie for God.

I’m actually shocked at the number of emails these lists have generated. Don’t people know I have a job? 😉

34 thoughts on “Would you lie for God?

  1. Dustin,

    I have been a loyal reader of RCG since February 2006. I think you all do a great job of improving the real estate industry. I hope your recent move to Move has gone well and it’s on this front that I have a question.

    How does Move.com benefit REALTORS? It seems to me that it may be a detrement to REALTORS future earning capability.

    I may just not be seeing things properly and I welcome your response to my recent posting at http://www.atlanta575realestate.com/

  2. Jim,

    What’s important to note here is that Brad is simply regurgitating an email that was sent out by the Georgia Association of Realtors to all their members. Here are the two comments I’ll give:
    1) I’m simply not allowed to talk about this issue (as I noted in a previous (private) email exchange with Brad)
    2) Realtor.com staff has already set up meetings with the G.A.R. to address their concerns. The Realtor.com staff involved are definitely the right people to talk about this issue.

  3. Re: #6:

    How about a different direction? What’s a good platform for one-off short-duration mini-blogs? What I’m thinking of is adding a weblog to each on of our secure Document Kennel folders. Right now, clients can retrieve their transaction doucments on-line, but it would be cool if that space could also be the locus of clinet/brokerage communication for that transaction. For that to work, it’s got to be comething that’s easy to set up. I suppose I could have Cameron build something, but I was wondering if there is something like that out there already.

  4. Greg S., cool idea. The one-click installs of wordpress are really easy on a lot of hosts – it takes me 5 minutes to set one up. I would lean toward a one-click install wiki, though.

    Dustin, no Scoble status yet? We want Move critiques!

  5. Galen, thanks. I just did the math in my head, substracting from the post-Winer weblog to a minimalist weblog. That turns out to be extremely easy, fifteen minutes of chop and drop in PHP. Now I’ll look at the hosted solutions you’re talking about to see if I want that extra robusticity (now that’s a word!).

  6. Greg,

    I started out this comment with the intent to recommend a hosted wordpress blog since they now allow for “private” blogs, but that is probably not a good solution for you since it would require another registration system for your users…

    I think creating a minimalist WP blog and hosting yourself is definitely the answer for you.

  7. > I think creating a minimalist WP blog and hosting yourself is definitely the answer for you.

    That’s where I’m leaning, too. We already require registration for the documents for the extra layer of security, but I think the weblog can be open… With a captcha…? Ick! But some of my forms have been spammed by ring-tone vendors. I don’t care, but I can’t have that happen with clients.

  8. Are you using Akismet? It is far and away the best spam protection I’ve ever used and only lets through a few spam items a week at most. (for context, the service catches at least 1000/week).

    Interestingly, it did go down this weekend, but that really proved its value. It was the first time I’d experienced the service dropping and they had it back up pretty darn quickly. When it was down, people on the hosted WordPress blogs got hit the hardest because they don’t have a backup option… I was able to turn on the default WP spam filter and that picked up 90% of the spam while Akismet was down.

  9. Ardell,

    Dave Winer has the best example of a minimalist blog that I’m aware of…

    Essentially, by doing away with titles, comments, trackbacks, etc. one story really flows into another much easier.

    I’ve wanted to experiment with something like this for quite a while and for a while, I had a “worth noting” blog so that I could add simple comments, but that didn’t do the job for me because I want my simple comments to be read. 🙂

    The “list of 10” posts I’ve been doing is actually my incarnation of this within the context of RCG. Essentially, it just doesn’t make sense for me to make 10 posts a day on simple topics, but when I combine then into one post, it doesn’t feel overbearing…

  10. I’m thinking the point/counterpoint will also be one entry, along the lines of my “As Good As It Gets”, so both views are in one post. This way I can do the back and forth via email and pull the best out of the email discussion posted into one entry like I did with “Jack”.

    I have several of those I can do now with Home Inspectors, Sellers, Buyers. Real conversations I have had via email, turned into an “Interview Type” post.

    An easy way for people to see what people really talk about in the Real World of Real Estate. What the actual buyers really ask. What the actual sellers really need to know. Not hypotheticals.

    What are your thoughts? Fake names, of course.

  11. For what it’s worth, what I’m thinking of is even more minimalist that that: No comments, not RSS, no post-hoc revision (although that wouldn’t be hard at all). A scrolling log of messages and file activity in reverse chronological order. Especially: No MySQL. What I want is to be able to write the whole folder down as a CD-ROM at the end of the transaction with no added effort. A complete and permanent record of this one discrete agency relationship.

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