Permeating Self-Promotion

Here’s a few stories from around the real estate blogsphere I found interesting…

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Phil is obviously have some fun in Boise, although others may find his anatomy of a listing he won’t take more relevant to recent RCG conversations…

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Jonathan sends out a blogger’s prayer and some really nice words about RCG.. Thanks!

Fortunately, I ran into Ardell DellaLogia, her blog, and the Rain City Guide. Between her advice and her blog, and the larger Seattle based blog to which she contributed, I got a sense of what a blog could be – articulate, meaningful, educational. And that’s what I decided I wanted and what I’ve strived for, with mixed success.

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The xBroker is clearly and definitely over-the-top. Yet, despite the self-promotion that permeates all of his posts, I really like this guy. In emails and blog posts, he’s come across as someone who is definitely informed and wants to communicate his knowledge… There’s definitely a there, there…

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Tech alert: Greg Linden turned me on to a very interesting post by Google’s Steve Yegge, where he looks at the management of Google through the lens of the Agile programming philosophy. The story would have been good enough, but then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo made it better by comparing the ideas to the (failed) management structure at Enron… All three posts are worth reading (but make sure you have some time!).

Live from Virtual Earth! Any questions?

I’m going to have lunch w/ member(s) of the Microsoft Virtual Earth team tomorrow. They just released a new version of their mapping control & local search service this week (highlights include more Birdseye images, polygon support, and MapCruncher layers). Since Dustin’s recent conversation w/ Yahoo went over well, I figured I’d extend the same courtesy and see if my fellow bloggers had any interesting questions they wanted to ask.

FYI – Due to NDA’s, I suspect they’ll be unable to answer the really interesting questions. However, don’t let that stop you from asking the question or giving a product suggestion. Since I’m talking to the program manager and/or software engineers that blog, I suspect they’ll appreciate the feedback, even if they can’t be completely forthcoming in their responses.

PS – Is anybody else waiting for them to combine the Vexel technology they recently accquired, Photosynth, Flight Simulator X, w/ Birds Eye images and give Google Earth a battle worthy of a level in Halo 3? Should be a ton of fun watching Master Chief battle the Covenant armies of Mt. View during the next year.

Microsoft vs. Google a real estate perspective

[photopress:mac.jpg,full,alignright]On a side note, nothing to do with the topic, isn’t that MAC advertising campaign fabulous! Doesn’t everyone want to run out and get a MAC when they see that commerical? Of course I can’t get the mls on it, or at least not easily, so I hate them. But that has got to be the best advertising campaign I’ve seen in a long time. Doesn’t everyone want to be that guy on the right? Heck, I’m a woman and even I want to be that guy on the right.

On to Microsoft vs. Google. So far my Google clients have been able to negotiate significantly higher savings in real estate transactions than my Microsoft clients. Of course I’m dealing with a very small portion of the Microsoft poplulation, even though I have more Microsoft clients than Google clients.

Microsoft has a contract that kicks back 35% of the real estate commission when a new employee is hired, even if they don’t buy a house for a year to 18 months after they are hired. Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t get all of that 35%, but the agent who has to pay it is still unable to negotiate with the buyer, nor are they as able, at 65%, to resolve issues in the transaction using commission dollars. This agreement that the agent pay 35% to Microsoft also limits the employee with regard to agent selection.

I recently had a call from a Microsoft employee’s wife who is being transferred. She was checking online and trying to pick an agent she felt comfortable with and happened upon me. I told her that she really needed to check with her husband and his employer, as I didn’t think she was totally free to pick an agent of her choice. I told her I might be willing to match the 35%, but she would likely need to try the assigned agent first, before suggesting she wanted someone other than the assigned agent.

Now these programs where an agent is assigned to an employee are, of course, beneficial. These programs have been around for a very, very long time. I myself did tons of relocations with Siemens and other companies around the Country, utilizing this very same program. The 35% of the commission paid by the agent to the relocation company, helps pay for a portion of the relocation benefits such as movers, temporary housing, and other benefits.

In my experiments over the past few months with negotiating buyer agent fees, and a few other out of the box negotiations, I have been able to transfer $20,000 of pure cash advantages plus an additional $10,000, into transactions, with Google clients. More importantly, I have been able to treat the Google clients in these negotiations, identically to the way that I treat seller clients…which is my goal.

If Google does hire 1,000 new people, as Dustin suggests they might, I hope that they will not lock the employees into a program that skims off the employee’s ability to negotiate and ties their hands with regard to agent selection. Relocating is a very stressful and emotional process. Feeling hogtied at the same time, only adds to the stress. While many are happy to have someone ready, willing and able to assist, this benefit should be optional at best and should allow the employee more freedom of choice and no restriction with regard to fee negotiations.

Not trying to change Microsoft here…just trying to encourage Google not to follow suit. Once released from the 18 month requirement, I have been able to assist Microsoft employees and negotiate fees, but the Google guys are still way ahead for some reason in total dollars. Not sure why that is, I’ll have to ponder it when I do my year end round up of “the experiment”.

Since we are entering the Age of Transparency in the real estate transaction, kind of like The Age of Aquarius in my day when everone was stripping off their clothes, I do think that it should not be a surprise to anyone that there is an exchange of monies between the agent and a third party. That goes for any “purchase of a person”, see Zapped, that does not disclose to the person that they have been bought and sold.

Flaming for Ardell

There’s definitely a tech bent to today’s list…

  1. Starting off with Niki’s interesting take on the Reply.com launch. Niki runs Homethinking, a site dedicated to letting users review agents. I had a chance to talk with him at SF Connect over a beer (or two or three) and got to learn a fair bit about his site. It is definitely worth checking out as there is a lot to the backend of what he’s doing and it is not necessarily what you might fear (assuming you’re an agent!).
  2. Inside Google talks about a fun press release from Intermedia that talks to the snarky discussions that Galen and Robbie have been having around online office applications. Tech blogger Om Malik gives his reason for not using google’s new service.
  3. Others are asking if Google services are joined too tightly? I’d be really curious to get Robbie’s take on that.
  4. Thinking of Google, Ardell, does it help that Google could could be adding 1000 people in Bellevue? (via Greg)
  5. I’m not the only one thinking of Ardell… I noticed someone trying to start a flame war on Craigslist over Ardell (look for the post title: “Get the feeling Realtors read from a script?”)… It was great to see a few people come to her defense and unlike so much of the stuff over there, the flamewar never materialized.
  6. I’m all over microformats, so I was glad to see someone write this post about understanding microformats for the non-technical web professional or marketer. Most relevant to real estate is the hListing format currently being deployed by Edgeio.
  7. Watch out when Greg’s talking about rethinking everything. 🙂
  8. Also, considering Greg’s opinion on hosted blogging platforms is not exactly private knowledge, I thought he might enjoy this comic from Chris Pirillo
  9. The blogger from from hismove (a christian real estate network???) points out an interesting chart from the NY Times displaying the inflation adjusted home prices in the US since 1890.
  10. Not only are the For Sale By Locals people ready to launch, but these people are serious about going international. Interestingly, they will be launching their official site at a conference in Bolivia. Their temp site looks really bad in firefox, which doesn’t bode well for them in my mind, but considering the massive activity on their blog as of late, I’m definitely interested in seeing what they produce.

Top 10 reasons to ditch gMail for Microsoft

[photopress:BringItOn.jpg,full,alignright]OK, you knew I had to respond to this. I brought my flame proof suit. I used to work on Exchange, Outlook and Outlook Web Access when I was a ‘softie. Galen’s last post was very Roeper, and I’m going go Ebert on him. I have 3 sets of 3 words and 10 reasons for my buddy Galen.

The 3 set of 3 words
Windows Live Mail
Outlook Web Access
Bring It On


The 10 reasons

  1. So your cheap and use Firefox. Well I agree Hotmail sucks, but Windows Live Mail is damn near OWA good, does very well against gMail thank you very much.
  2. Try using gMail w/o internet access. Where’s the offline functionality? I’m sorry folks but Verizon EVDO and those T-Mobile hot spots aren’t everywhere yet. Have you tried using an AJAX app w/ a slow cellular net connection? (talk about a fate worse than water torture). Wanna gMail on a plane? Sorry, no can do. Until ClearWire takes over the world, a desktop / offline e-mail is a requirement for me.
  3. If you use POP/SMTP w/ Outlook and store your mail client side, your limited only by your computer’s hard drive space. (didn’t Google’s CEO say 2GB ought to be enough for anyone) 🙂
  4. That said, web e-mail is also a requirement for me. Which is why I use Outlook Web Access 2003. OWA still kicks the living snot out of Gmail (on IE anyway). Remember kids, the OWA team practically invented AJAX (they called it Remote Scripting back in 90s). They were the team that convinced the IE team to include an XMLHTTP object with the browser! Without them, there would be no gMail. That said, the FireFox version of OWA 2003 sucks. In partial defense of MS, the last version of OWA shipped before Firefox 1.0 was released. I’ve heard OWA 2007 will have much better FireFox support. But if you use Firefox only (I use IE & Firefox), then I admit OWA 2003 won’t do it for you.
  5. Hosted Exchange servers aren’t that expensive. I currently use Intermedia and have the ability to add/remove mail boxes, change storage quota, etc. I’ve heard 1AND1 is even cheaper.
  6. Privacy. What if the US government decided to Subpoena Google and read your e-mail? Don’t think it doesn’t happen. Granted, Live Mail would also be a target of govt. snooping, but my Exchange server probably would not be.
  7. Calendaring. Can you type “2 weeks from Friday” into a gmail appointment form and have it resolve to “Fri 9/15/2006”? You can with Outlook! Get a real date parser!
  8. Contacts. Where the heck is the mapping integration w/ address info in gMail? OWA & Outlook have had this since the Web 1.0 days. I know cause I wrote that feature for OWA for Exchange 5.5 (way back in 1998)!
  9. Looking for Tasks & Notes? Sorry Google doesn’t have that either.
  10. API support – Google may offer an API in the future, but Microsoft offers that today

Galen can keep his gMail. But, you can pry Live Mail, OWA, Exchange and Outlook away from my cold dead hands! Offline scenarios still have value to people. Feature rich Windows/Mac/Linux apps (Outlook, Entourage, Evolution, etc) can still clobber web only apps (no matter how much AJAX & Flash you try to put into them). I’ll freely admit the Redmond evil empire’s shortcomings (see the above “Hotmail sucks” & “OWA’s 2003 firefox support is weak” remarks), but Google is going have to do much better than have better Firefox support than OWA 2003 to convince me it’s better than Microsoft’s e-mail technology. E-mail mindshare, well that is another debate…

Let the e-mail Jihad begin! Who & what do you use for your e-mail and why? Would you pay for e-mail service or is free ad supported e-mail the only way to go? How important is your domain name to you? Does your e-mail server use SMTP/POP, IMAP, or HTTP? How important is offline to you? What do you look for in a web e-mail client? What about them Blackberry’s, Q’s and cell phone sized devices that do e-mail? Is Galen the one on crack or am I? (or are we both right)?

Five reasons to ditch Outlook for Google Apps

If I had a 5-30 person office, I would jump on Google Apps in an instant, particularly if I didn’t already have an imap server and all the other hardware and software jazz Microsoft likes to sell you so Outlook will actually work.

Here’s why:

  1. You will never run out of space on your email account: Every email account comes with 2+ gigs of storage.
  2. You can easily add and remove email addresses from a web-based panel (no more calling the tech guy for basic tasks).
  3. Your employees can access their email from anywhere and on any operating system (the Mac guy can keep his Mac!).
  4. You get my new favorite Calendar system – it’s really easy to add events, invite others, and manage multiple calendars including group calendars (we use group Calendars for the very infrequent events that we must all attend at ShackPrices). Also, you can access your calendars from other people’s computers.
  5. Your employees get all the nice little touches that are quickly being added to Gmail – the ability to preview word documents, excel spreadsheets, and pdfs without opening up a new program, in-browser chatting with other gmail users, and the ability to send voice mails (to anyone!) from Google Talk.

You can already download all your email from gmail to any email program and Google will be offering an API, so you can hire a programmer (or download plug-ins) to access all the rest of your information should you ever decide to quit.

Via John Battelle’s Search Blog (a great blog if you haven’t checked it out)

Gridirons, Grid Controls & Touchdowns!

Every once in a while, Dustin tells me I should blog more. To which I usually reply, “I’m a coder not a blogger”. Who do I look like, ARDELL? (she is the ultimate blogging machine isn’t she? Notice, how I used the bold for the branding). However, despite my objections, he is correct. So I’m going to try blogging more often with a less time consuming off the cuff remarks style, instead of the thoughtful essays I usually favor.

The Matt in the Hat

Are you ready for some football?
OK, the 2006 NFL season is upon us and with the awesome success of the Seattle Seahawks (and the less than mediocre success of my 2005 fantasy football team), it’s time to regroup and prepare for my fantasy football draft. So does the blog-o-sphere have any draft advice for who’ll be this years new star or big bust that might be found? Any good fantasy site or blogs you guys like? Will St. Reginold (aka The Matrix) will be rookie of the year and rescue New Orleans? Will Alexander the Great break the Madden Curse? Will our beloved QB continue his evolution into the next Steve Young or merely join the hair club for men (or both)? Will Arizona be worthy division rival? (Perhaps “The Swann” would know the answer to that question?) Is there a RedFin / Zillow fantasy league I can sit in on?

ComponentArt’s Grid Control – Oh yeah baby!
I recently purchased a copy of ComponentArt’s Web.UI 2006.1 for ASP.net. So when I get some more free time, my favorite MLS search tool is going to get much better. Just for kicks, I integrated the Grid Control with the search results page on RCG Search and I’m very happy with the results. Any way, if your a professional web/software engineer that writes applications on ASP.net, I highly recommend it. I also considered Telerik’s r.a.d. controls, but I like ComponentArt a little better and they had a 10% off sale earlier this month, so they got my cash (Telerik may still get some though, they also do excellent work). I also looked at eBusiness Application’s AJAX grid on Dustin’s recommendation, but it didn’t have ASP.net 2.0 support that I desire and I felt it didn’t compare favorably with the best ASP.net only toolset vendors. Still, it looks like a great PHP grid control.

PS – I want to thank Gordon Stephenson & Jay Young of RPA for the ton of work they’ve been giving me, so I could afford this awesome addition to my software war-chest.

Live from Redmond
In other news, I decided to drink more Kool-Aid and I created this blog post using the new Windows Live Writer. Everybody knows I love MS tech, but who names these things? Names like that remind me of the Microsoft iPod video and the Office Dinosaur ads (Shudder). At any rate, it’s kind of like Word for WordPress. It’s a desktop based blog posting editor. It appears to support every blog platform that matters (Windows Live Spaces, BloggerTypePad, WordPress, and many others) and is better than most of the web based editors out there. Among it’s cooler features is auto-save (you don’t lose your post in case your web browser or blog posting app crashes), MS Virtual Earth integration (including Bird’s Eye images). Just find a map or image you want to insert, click OK, and a thumbnail is placed on your blog post (like that lovely photo of Qwest Field you see in this blog post).  So to paraphrase Dr. Suess…

Me: “You do not like MS Live Writer, so you say? Try it, try it, and you may. Try it and you may I say.”
Bloggers: “If you will let us be, We will try it, you will see”

There, that off the cuff post only took 3 hours of editing, revising, linking and tweaking…

Sigh, how does Ardell & Dustin do it? Maybe I need to link less and bold more? I’m going back to my compiler now, I’m a much better coder then a blogger.

Here’s to football! Go Seahawks!

Corporate Blogs – Yes please!

RSS IconDustin’s comments in his last blog post got me thinking (which is never a good thing). Dustin said “You just set my blogging efforts at Move back by a year or so”. To which I reply, “I hope not! You don’t have that much time!”

One of the cool good things that has happened recently is the rise of corporate blogging. What’s interesting is you’re finding them in places you wouldn’t expect. Did you know Dell has a blog, meanwhile Apple does not? I think it’s an excellent way for a company to get in touch with it’s customers (and vice-a-versa), without the reality distortion and corporate hubris that happens when communicating via a scripted “public relations firm” message.

You may be surprised to learn that even the venerable General Motors has blog (In case anybody from GM management reads this – Good luck turning the company around and keep up the great work at Cadillac and Saturn. I’m rooting for you). If a 100 year old company in the rust belt has seen the value of blogging, I have to wonder why hasn’t every large company? 

In case you doubt the potential of corporate blogging, look no further than Microsoft. Robert Scoble helped put a human face on the “evil empire”, by spearheaded Microsoft’s Channel 9 video blogs and wrote the book on corporate blogging. When he left Microsoft for PodTech, it created nearly as much news as when Bill Gates announced his “retirement”. An anonymous Microsoft employee, through his blog has changed the company for the better. Even though the Human Resources dept has a blog, and prominent engineers have them too, a small corporate blog can as useful as the MSDN blogging network is to the “Redmond Giant”.

I personally enjoy reading Zillow’s blog, RedFin’s blog, and Trulia’s blog every day. Even the HouseValues’ blog can be interesting on occassion (it seems like they have a fun corporate culture, even if they just sell leads for a living). But where is the John L Scott, Coldwell Banker and Windermere blogs? I know countless agents of those brokers and independent brokers blog and do it very well (I think I’ve seen most of them on Rain City Guide at one time or another), but where is the human voice of those companies? They should at least give me a way to search for their agent’s blogs. Are these brokers nothing but a logo for an agent to put on their marketing? They may not realize it, but I think they are losing mind-share (which may become market-share) by being silent in the blogosphere.

Which brings me back to my original question, regarding Dustin’s comment. When is Move going to get a corporate blog?

Although, Rain City Guide is an excellent blog, it’s not the most appropriate venue for Move specific information (nor should it be). Why hasn’t Move added RSS feeds to any page that offers e-mail alerts? How are Move’s product offerings better than other things out there? What cool stuff is Move is doing? Why would a Software Engineer want to work there? Why should a realtor advertise with Move instead of one of these “Web 2.0 upstarts”? Heck, why not feature profiles of happy customers (something HouseValues does well)? I’d love to hear somebody explain the the Innovator’s Dilemma that Move faces to your constituency, so they’d understand why Zillow, etc are steeling the mind-share that realtor.com used to have. What’s the best MLS in the country to deal with and why? If Dustin or his co-workers explained why things are the way they are, maybe somebody in a position to change things would read the blog and start talking? After all if GM blogs, the CEO of Sun Microsystems has a blog, and Mini & Scoble can change Microsoft, I think anything is possible.

I’m not trying to pick on Dustin, but I really want to add the Move blog to my RSS feed reader and I can’t!