Tag Archives: research

Move Along…

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[photopress:selling_peaches.jpg,full,alignright]Thanks to both Ardell and Joel, I’ve been tapped to list five things you may not know about me… Not sure where to start, I decided to focus today’s theme on some fun jobs (but I won’t go so far as to take you back to the days of selling fruit on the streets of LA! LOL):

1) At 16 years old, I spent the summer working as an ice cream scooper at a Haagen Dazs shop in Paris. At the time (early 90s), Haagen Dazs was all the rage in Europe, so it felt like I was in the center of the universe. Needless to say, I learned a lot working around a bunch of older (early 20s!) Parisian models for a summer, although my French never got very good because all the girls wanted to learn to speak “American” as oppose to their school-taught “English”. One of the highlights (that I can discuss in a real estate blog) was blasting Nirvana on the shops speakers (loud!) after-hours while closing the shop down. At the time, Nirvana’s Nevermind album had not yet been released in Europe (at least everyone around acted like it had not!), so having a copy turned out to be a HUGE hit.

2) The next career arc came during my UC Santa Cruz years when I was studying Environmental Studies… At 19, I drove to Alaska to work for consumer interesting group, AKPirg, in order campaign for “Campaign Finance Reform”. (I find it more than mildly amusing that 10 years later, their lead issue is still campaign finance reform.) While raising money and making a big fuss about all things political and environmental, I was getting paid to travel around the state and made many national park stops! Grizzlies in Denali, hiking under glaciers in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and that long, long, long Alaskan highway are all unforgettable experiences… I guess I wasn’t so bad at raising money for causes, because later in the summer I was asked to work for the USPirg office in Chapel Hill and was given the hilarious opportunity to canvass Jesse Helms in an effort to get him to join the Sierra Club! I guess I don’t have Bono’s magnetism, because despite a good 15 minute conversation, I couldn’t get him to join up for even the basic membership! 🙁

3) At 22, while studying Engineering at UC Berkeley, I decided to spend a summer working as a student-researcher for the Pavement Research Center. Believe it or not, this was a fascinating job that brought me up and down (and up and down) the state taking samples from test pavements in order to see the effects of some experimental pavement mixtures under different conditions. The pavement job was really good to me (financially), so I was able to stash some cash away for the school year and still take my girlfriend, Anna, on a cross-country trip via drive-away cars for the last few weeks before school started.

Our first assignment was to drive a car to Charlotte, NC (from Berkeley, CA) and we took I-40 almost all the way. Some of our stops including an evening in Las Vegas, a day on Lake Mead, hiking around the Grand Canyon, wondering in Santa Fe, eating huge steaks in Oklahoma City, dancing (and more dancing) at Elvis Week in Memphis, visiting the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, and shopping in Atlanta. For the return trip, we took the northern route (roughly I-80) with stops along the backroads of West Virginia (just in time to watch Bill Clinton give his famous mea culpa speech at our hotel room), a county fair in Kentucky, a Second City performance in Chicago, the Iowa State Fair, an evening in Boulder, CO, a hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and a hike on the Great Salt Lake. The kicker is that we did all of this in just a little over two weeks!

4) After graduating from Berkeley, I spent the first seven years of my professional career as a planner/engineer for a transportation consulting firm. This was interesting work in that I got to spend a lot of time working with local government officials to improve their transportation, and in particular their transit, systems. I worked all over the west coast for clients like BART, SF MUNI, SCAG, MAG, Portland’s Metro, and King County Metro, Sound Transit, WSDOT and the City of Seattle and became somewhat of an expert in travel demand modeling and GIS. Despite lots of good opportunities ahead (transportation in every American city will get worse before it gets better!), I knew it was time to look for new opportunities when Rain City Guide started to take off…

5) About eight months ago, I jumped off the engineering bridge and went to work for Move. One of the things I’ve learned is that while the technology (or secret sauce) behind large websites can be complex, it is the business development and marketing opportunities that most interest me. Hence, about a month ago, I switched out of our product development team and into our marketing team (although things are never that simple… :)). Probably the best news (at least for me) is that this switch means I’ll be able to come out of my dark cave and blog a bit more during the next year!

No perpetuation of memes from me! 🙂

20 million reasons to cancel AOL

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Update: You can now search the AOL data from your web browser.
As promised earlier, I did some scans through the massive privacy invasion from AOL for some real state search insight. I’ll leave it to other sites to search for the tell you about the disgusting things people search for.
Not many AOL searchers are looking for “seattle real estate” in those words – in fact only 21 of the 20 million queries contained that text and those users largely went to the big Google-optimized sites like Seattle Power Search (the number one result) or the Seattle Times (the number 3 result).

AOL users found Rain City Guide through many long-tailish routes, with relevant keywords like “zilllow” (sic), “small condos,” “seattle real estate,” “earnest money recipt” (sic), and “five factors that determine if an idea is a good investment opportunity.” Guilty-conscience user 917673 came to us while searching for “sellers disclosure for condominium complex.” And User 1636230, who came to Rain City Guide after searching for “seattle real estate,” also visited Winderemere and Seattle Power Search. One searcher also found us when they searched for “dustin dustin.”
Here’s where this data goes beyond our own site (and where it gets creepier): what preceded and followed those inquisitive searches? Can we tell something about these people? Well, User 1636230’s interest in real estate was passing. They searched around for five minutes in March:

  • www.happydogtoys.com 2006-03-21 14:12:20 2 http://www.happydogtoys.com
  • www.happydogtoys.com 2006-03-21 14:12:20 2 http://www.happydogtoys.com
  • hometown realty executives 2006-03-21 15:30:32
  • hometown realty executives seattle 2006-03-21 15:30:41
  • hometown r.e. executives seattle 2006-03-21 15:31:05
  • hometown real estate executives seattle 2006-03-21 15:31:24
  • seattle real estate 2006-03-21 15:33:18 1 http://www.seattlepowersearch.com
  • seattle real estate 2006-03-21 15:33:18 8 http://raincityguide.com
  • seattle real estate 2006-03-21 15:33:18 9 http://www.windermere.com
  • locks for love 2006-03-22 10:52:35 1 http://www.locksoflove.org
    …

Then decided to look into building their own home a week later:

  • lux homes 2006-03-28 15:33:40 1 http://www.luxhomesllc.com
  • woodenville builders 2006-03-28 15:34:56 (4 more identical searches)

User-1636230 then went on to search for approximately 10,000 pet related items and for much sadder subjects, including for cancer drugs and incontinence.

What of guilty-conscience-User 917673? They were clearly concerned about their condo and they didn’t want to tell the buyer. Here are three of their searches (of over forty):

  • condominium disclosure by seller in los angeles
  • arbitration for selling or buying a condo
  • consequences of no disclosure from seller

Sounds like someone got a bum deal on that condo!

In looking at the other Seattle Real Estate searches, it seems that the adage that buyers and sellers go with the first agent they talk to does not apply to searches (no big surprise here). Searchers go all over the internet and leave and come back to the same search repeatedly. If they’re as committed as User 917673, they use lots of slightly different word combinations. What I found interesting was watching users hit a site that they are interested in, then go on to search for that company’s or person’s name to see if they can find some background (so it is good to be on a first name basis with the search engines).

I only found 668 occurrences of “cancel AOL.” I suspect and hope there will be a lot more this week.

Real estate search patterns and AOL users

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Yesterday AOL proudly announced the release of 20 million web queries from 650,000 users (screenshot), with each user “anonymized,” but identified by a unique ID. This is appalling – it means that potentially thousands of social security numbers and email addresses are now free for spammers and thieves to harvest, along with a lot of other personally identifying information. Think about what you search for – email addresses, people’s addresses, business secrets and even social security numbers come to mind. AOL quickly realized their mistake and pulled the plug, but not before the dataset had taken on a life of its own.

So, spammers and thieves are having a field day, but now that it’s out, we might as well use it for educational purposes. It’s a big, unwieldy file, but I’ll try to post some real estate search patterns by tomorrow. If you’re hoping to do your own analysis on this dataset, I wager that there will be a nice web interface for you to use within a week (Consumerist thinks so too). I’ll let you know when it pops up.
More on the ramifications of the release at TechCrunch. If you’re going to cancel your AOL account, good luck.