In case you missed it, the iPhone is $400. You can read Rain City Guide from anywhere with it, which is really what it takes to be a great Realtor, right?
Best phone for Realtors just got cheaper
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Author Archives: Galen
Google's My Maps
You can create and link to custom maps on Google now. It’s an easy to use slick interface that would be useful for real estate agents interested in making a tour of their neighborhood. Parts of your tour will also pop up in searchers results, so don’t forget to put a link to your homepage. Actually useful for marketing? Only if you do it “right” and make some interesting tours. It’s like websites – every agent has one, but only a few (like Marlow) have great ones.
Non-agents (the home buying / renting public): it looks like it’ll be a great way to get to know a neighborhood once more maps are created.
Belltown-Denny Regrade (or things we couldn't do today)
If you’ve ever wondered what Seattle looked like right at the beginning, there’s a great short history of Seattle’s Belltown-Denny Regrade at HistoryLink.org. The article describes the massive earth moving project, the resulting fill project, and the city’s first of dozens of voted down mass transit projects (this one in 1912). Check out the original plans for the civic center – amazing!
Mercer Island would have made a beautiful park.
Using fast cars to sell homes
Advice to sellers: Put a Corvette (?) in the listing photo. It will make your property really stand out.
Buyers please be advised: advertised price does not include totally sweet car.
Why FSBO without putting it in the MLS?
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Last week, a Seattle-area woman contacted us out of the blue asking if we advertise FSBOs and FSBO open houses on ShackPrices (we don’t), which led to a back-and-forth exchange that went sort of like this:
Me: Out of curiosity, why don’t you list your home in the MLS for $400 and get a lot more exposure? If you’re worried about the 2% – 3% commission, just mark it up that much.
Her: It’s sort of an experiment.
Me: Ah.
Me (in my mind):A $400,000 experiment that will probably result in significantly less exposure for your home and probably result in a longer time to sell (and result in continued payments during that time!) at the very least? Skip the experiment, list it on the MLS and buy yourself a new (if inexpensive) car with the money you are likely going to lose!
Yesterday an even better solution for FSBOs popped up: IggysHouse.com lets you list your house on the MLS for free. Experiments aside, it makes a lot of sense if you’re a FSBOer to get your property in the system that almost every home buyer looks to for listing information.
Do not be offended, dear real estate agent reader. This free listing service, which is apparently a slap in the face of real estate agents, is actually a backhanded compliment. IggysHouse claims to be offering this just so FSBOers will consider their buyer agent service, but it’s clear that they are convinced they can sell those FSBOers on other products and services and that a decent percentage of their FSBO listers will be convinced to work with an agent when they don’t find success going alone or have trouble getting through the close or negotiating with someone who has done it 100 times before.
Update: Greg Swann thinks Iggy’s House will make money from mortgages.
A look behind the Shack, Part 1: Speed Kills
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Really, in the world of the web, slow speed kills. And most people only think about the length of time it takes a website to load when it is taking eons to show up. For static sites, meeting the magic four second page load time isn’t too hard, but for sites with lots of “dynamic content” (fancy menus and whatnot) and maps, it becomes sort of a trick.
Many (most?) fancy real estate search sites are plagued by slow load times – see the real estate 2.x person’s site reviews to see scathing analyses of how long it takes to for many sites to load. In light of this, we took great pains to make our site both feel and be speedy and, if I don’t say so, I think we’ve been pretty successful. On my old-ish computer, the Seattle real estate page typically loads in under 10 seconds (we could still do better on this!) and house detail and nearby pages typically load in under 3 seconds.
One of the tricks we employ is we don’t actually shuffle visitors from a complete page to a completely new page, which means we don’t have to reload the time-consuming Google Map or any of the stuff on the sidebar. Instead, we load little subpages within the site using AJAX (which is, I believe, a dumb acronym). When you click to see the details for a house, we only load up those details and leave the side and top of the site alone and intact. When you click back to the map tab, it’s already there waiting for you because it was just hiding behind the house information.
There are some other tricks that are much more technical: before we launched in December we did a bunch of optimization to cut down the time it takes our database (with over 30,000 western Washington properties currently for sale) to find and spit out the houses that match each search. Currently it it returns the ‘shacks’ that match your search within a second of you dragging the map around – the rest of your wait is the time it takes to actually send and display that information on your screen.
The dynamic updating introduces a can of worms of it’s own, including longer development time, but we think the tradeoffs were entirely worth it.
This is the first in a series of “Behind the Shack” themed posts. If you are especially interested in one aspect of ShackPrices.com, let me know and I’ll try to write about it!
Low flow toilets and old houses
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A relative of mine just replaced the old high-flow toilets in all 5 units of his building with low flow toilets. The result: a water bill that is $100 a month lower – the replacements should pay for themselves in six months. The toilet of choice: Toto Drake. It’s approximately $200 and it gets rave reviews on the internet.
I live in an old house (1908) with the requisite sloping floors and rusty iron pipes that come along with it. We already have low flow toilets (usually excellent Sloan Flushmates) which were purchased on Consumer Reports rave reviews. See the second rave review above – the only toilet they liked better than the Toto has a flushmate system. HOWEVER! Consumer Reports clearly does not have an old house that has charmingly rust-flecked, low pressure water. See, the Flushmate system works by storing up pressure from the pipes in a sealed tank and uses that pressure to forcefully push water out when you flush. There is no need to rely on gravity to move water through Flushmate toilets, although there are no mentions of them being used in space on the internet. When you put one of these suckers in a house with rusty pipes, little bits of rust get into the workings of the tank and the flushes get progressively worse over time until you’re left with a toilet that pushes the tank water down about a half inch on the flush and then gurgles at you. When this happened, I found myself cussing (a lot) at an inanimate object.
So last Thursday I found myself doing a midnight toilet installation of a Toto Drake. It comes with excellent instructions which should be supplemented by these instructions. And now that it’s done, I very highly recommend it. In fact it’s amazing. For decency’s sake, I will not go into further details.
The moral of the story:
- New house? Get a Flushmate
- Old house? Get a Toto Drake
- Hate money? Keep your high flow toilet
Valentines day – a day to heart your favorite houses
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ShackPrices – now with 100% more hearts. Limited time only. See site for details.
Taco trucks on the radio today
I was on KUOW 94.9 this morning as a guest on a show about taco trucks. Unfortunately I was on my cell phone without a landline in sight, so my voice was a little muffled. LosTacoTrucks.com was my first Google maps-based website (can you tell?) and it has been entirely neglected of late for ShackPrices.com. In the early days, we considered a spanglish (or a franglais) name for ShackPrices, but elhouses.com just doesn’t have the right ring or the right feel to it (is it a site for houses in Spanish speaking countries?).
One of my favorite things about Seattle is the boom in immigrant run restaurants that are for other immigrants. Taco trucks are a prime example of this – you couldn’t get anything but americanized Mexican food when I was growing up, but now you can get really good, authentic Mexican food at taco trucks around the city and around the suburbs. And when you go to the trucks, you will be surrounded by Mexican people getting a flavor of home.
There are a lot of other great ethnic restaurants in the Rainier Valley and in White Center. My girlfriend and I went to a great Eritrean restaurant / bar just south of the I-90 – Rainier Avenue interchange the other night – it’s similar to Ethiopian food, but I wouldn’t say that too loudly at the restaurant. If you’ve never been to White Center, I highly recommend visiting the Salvadorian Bakery for dinner. If you’ve already been, you should visit one of the two taco trucks nearby – they’re great.
Here’s the taco truck list if you can’t find one near you on my site: http://kuow.org/resource/weekday/taco_truck_070208.txt. The other guests on the show went for the exotic soups and full meals offered at taco trucks, but I recommend the simple, straight forward items like tacos and tortas.
Worse than a trampoline
Insurance companies sometimes cancel policies of homeowners who have trampolines in their yards. If only they knew about human slingshots.