I’m chatting it up with bloggers and vendors from the Inman Connect conference in New York this week. Since Robbie already covered the big news this morning, I thought I’d post some cool new sites I found here:
FortiusOne is easily the coolest site that you’ve never heard of. They sell their product to brokers or agents and let them let you (the consumer) filter your home search in all sorts of neighborhood based (and RESPA-pushing) ways like populated with “young people,
If you live in select Seattle area zip codes, you can relive just a little bit of 1999 with Amazon Fresh. They have reasonable prices and early morning delivery. Complimentary Pets.com sock puppet not included.
The answer: everywhere. An especially instructive mashup would be coyote sightings and missing cats (via Craigslist?). I saw one running in my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago and found a raccoon two doors down last night.
It was a wet day yesterday, what with landslides and 4+ inches of rain (7+ near Bremerton). Four inches is a little over 11% of Seattle’s annual 36 inches of rainfall. I know of at least a couple of people who were pulling soggy belongings out of their basements last night. My stuff: not on the floor of my basement. I learned that one early on. If you’re collecting your damp belongings from your basement, you can count your blessings that you can still get into your home and there is still stuff there – some people aren’t so lucky.
Photos:
Seriously. Real estate agents have known this forever: people aren’t very interested in buying or selling a home during the holidays. Do you really want to put in an offer and then manage it from your in-laws house in Florida?
Search volumes for Real Estate, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving Day. Christmas and Thanksgiving alone (without “day”) totally overwhelm the chart for real estate:
[photopress:real_estate_christmas_thanksgiving.jpg,full,centered]
Real Estate agents work whenever you aren’t; evenings, weekends, holidays, but many take December off. Except the ones who sell homes on Christmas Day (it’s a holiday – that means a chance for the busiest of professionals to fly in and close). See you in January!
We “dog food” our real estate search product at Estately (we use it like a consumer): I subscribe to a couple of daily email alerts, a constantly updating RSS feed showing properties as they come onto the market near my house, and I subscribe to a feed of my saved homes to see when they sell.
Today two properties came on the market (welcome to Seattle prices, out of towners!):
$720,000 3 Beds / 2.25 Baths / 15 photos / 1,412 sqft / $509 per sqft
$729,000 0 Beds / 0 Baths / 0 photos / 1,700 sqft / 2,400 sqft lot / $428 per sqft
I didn’t even look at the second property – really, what’s the point? Like most buyers, I’m driven by emotion. I click through photos pretty much as fast as they load until one catches my eye, I linger, something about the property gets past my reptilian complex and I actually consider the details. Good agents know this on both sides; they take fantastic, eye catching photos or hire a professional to do so. Some of our Agent Match clients have found that they overlooked a great property with bad photos until they were dragged there by their agent and at least one was pleased to find that bad photos and staging could cost a seller upwards of $25,000.
If you are a consumer selling your house, dog food it. Subscribe to a daily email of new homes for sale for a month or two before you list your house and see what catches your eye. It’ll make “decluttering” easier.
If you are a realtor who works with sellers, dog food it. Sign up for a daily email from your company’s website. If your listing doesn’t look good there, you’ve lost a lot of the buyers who are currently in the market. You missed your chance to catch their eye and they’ve moved on to Craigslist. Maybe you can have a second shot at impressing them there.
I’m no Microsoft “fanboy,” but have you ever noticed that when they release some half baked project with a promising future (Microsoft’s “Unified Communications Products”) they get a lot of grief (“Microsoft’s Phone Ambitions Face A Winding Road,” but when Google comes out with a half baked product with a promising future (Google’s “Presentations”), the media thinks it’s cool and they focus on the future potential (“Google Presentations…one more step in the right direction“).
“They often hire Realtors, but banks make lousy clients … Buyers need to understand that when making an offer in a bank owned property it can take weeks to get the offer presented and then accepted, or rejected. They don’t seem to negotiate offers like other sellers do, they just accept, or reject and wait for a better offer.”
I think the running joke about blogs a couple of years ago was that belly button lint blogging was why most blogs would forever remain niche-y and unread. Today much of the “fantastical” thinking about locally-focussed blogs is that citizen journalists will report on everything (everything!) happening in their neighborhoods. When they look up from their navels, the online future gazers say (actually they blog) that we’ll all be served better local news by a cadre of unpaid neighbors noticing things in front of their houses and doing a little snooping. I tended to sneer at this concept until today, when I read every word of this blog post about a pothole in my neighborhood. Yes. A pothole.
Perhaps citizen journalism does have a place…
Over at the Estately Blog (formerly the ShackBlog) we did a little digging into how easy it is to find publicly advertised Short sales and foreclosures in the MLS and we found a few.