Monthly Archives: August 2005

More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online

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South Lake UnionThanks to a tip from a reader, I found out about a new home search site (MLS search) that is worth highlighting:
http://www.mlsmapsonline.com

The site uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology to plot MLS listings. The idea is great, but the implementation is definitely lacking some key features. For starters, if you are a Firefox user (like me), you’ll be presented with this message when entering the site:

“We’re sorry. MLSMapsOnline.com is an IE only application. Please download the latest version of Internet Explorer to continue to this website.”

What a bummer! I’m surprised that people still write programs that only work with IE. Under most circumstances, I just ignore sites that don’t support Firefox, but in this case, my curiosity for new map-related MLS searching was greater than my dislike of IE. By the way, don’t even bother to try to view this site with a Mac, I had to use my work computer (as oppose to my home computer) just to test-drive the site!. Now that I’ve acknowledged this major drawback, I’ll move on with my review…

Some things I like:

  • The mixing of flash technology and Microsoft’s mapping technology makes for some really smooth visual searching. It is extremely intuitive to navigate the site. The future of home search is definitely visual, and this site is getting us one step closer.
  • The ability to search by “Listed Date“. The rest of the search controls will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an MLS search.
  • The ability to log-in and save search results is nice, especially since they do not require it to use the site.

Some things I dislike:

  • It is worth repeating that an IE-only tool is really pathetic, especially when it doesn’t even work on the IE version for a mac!
  • The site design really encourages the user to define a city and/or county to search, when the best way to get to an interesting area would be to zoom in on that city. In other words, if I’m searching for homes in north Seattle, why limit me to the city limits. If I scroll north of Seattle, I want to see the homes that are for sale in Shoreline.
  • The search options are pretty minimal. A user should have access to more advanced search options.

At this point in time, it is one of the better home search options for people in the State of Washington (assuming you’re working on a PC and willing to use IE). However, I happen to know that there are a few more MLS search sites that will come on-line soon that will be using similar technology, but won’t have as many of the limitations. The layout they’ve created is not all that different from the standard MLS search and would be pretty easy to duplicate, which leaves me still waiting for a break-out search site.

It’s worth repeating that I’m definitely interested in hearing about more of these technologies. (I find this topic much more interesting than bubble talk 🙂 ) If you know of another interesting home search site available for Seattle residents, I’d love to hear about it!

UPDATE:
1) MLSMapsOnline went live with a version that works well with Firefox! (that was a really fast update!)
2) The VP of Technology for Windemere emailed me to let me know that Windemere also offers a map for viewing homes for sale via their PropertyPoint software. I’ve played around with their mapping software before and it definitely impressed me a year or two ago when it came out. However, I’m pretty sure they are using an ESRI ArcServer backend and that technology seems dated. I definitely think that the future is in running a backend using Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Besides being extremely expensive to run, ESRI server-side software is way too difficult to implement for there to be much innovation using this software. Leave it to the big companies (like Windemere) and governments (like MTC) to run ESRI software, while the rest of us take advantage of the mapping wars that the big internet companies are waging!

Shack Prices

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Picture of Homes on RiverShack Prices (which I mentioned a few days ago in the comments section of this post) just went live. Their site gives the sale price of King County homes (including Seattle!). Their reason to be:

Shack Prices was created with the hope of giving people as much information about home values as possible. We realized that there were many websites that show you prices of homes on the market (i.e. homes that haven’t yet sold) and some websites that would sell you information about comparable houses nearby, but no sites that let you pick the comparables and the area. The difference between Shack Prices and realtor web sites is that Shack Prices shows the actual price that each house sold for versus the price that someone hopes their house is worth. You can use it to virtually appraise your home or a neighborhood. We hope it helps you as buyer or seller.

In playing around a little, the site seemed pretty darn intuitive. If you are interested in getting a rough idea of how much your home would be worth on the open market, just insert your bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet. If there is not a lot of data in your area, extend the time-frame out a year, instead of the default three months.

If I had to give a critique of the site, it is that they borrowed a little too heavily from the typical home search websites instead of re-thinking how an “appraisal” site might work. For example, if I’m going to appraise my home, I know precisely how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the home. Why do they have the option for a range? Also, my experience in estimating a home’s value is that some other data fields within the County’s home sales database (like the home’s style code) is much better than the number of bedrooms at indicating the estimated value of a home. The number of bathrooms plays a minor role at best, so I wouldn’t have even bothered with that field. Granted, some of my suggestions might take some user training if they are used to the more traditional home search, but it would be a more valuable tool.

With that said, if you are living in King County and interested in an estimated value of your home, Shack Prices is a great place to start. However, if you want something a little more robust just ask any real estate agent. ANY agent looking for more business will prepare a “Comparative Market Analysis” for free and the agent will likely be more experienced at weeding through the appropriate data fields to develop a better estimate of your home’s value.

Congratulations to Galen for making this happen and check out Seattle Real Estate Talk’s post on Shack Prices…

green living resources

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Sand Storm at Burning ManI recently added some links on my sidepanel to some environmental resources that I’ve found interesting and/or helpful. Below are the sites along with a little description of why I decided to highlight them.

FreeCycle Seattle “lets you find new homes for things you no longer use and receive what you need–free! Clean out your house, save good stuff from the landfill, and help others at the same time.” The site is similar to the “free” section in most classified ads except EVERYTHING is free… A lot of good stuff turns up on this site, although it is often gone pretty quickly as the turnover rate is quite high.

GreenClean is “the environmentally sound guide to cleaning your home.” While promoting their book by the same name (GreenClean), the site gives some good advice and background on cleaning with the environment in mind.

ReStore has field crews that pick up, salvage, and dismantle building material all over the larger Puget Sound region and central Washington. They offer “quality building and home improvement materials, a wide variety of services including sales, pick-up, salvage, and whole building deconstruction.” Their store in Ballard is filled with hard-to-find materials like old bricks, stones, doors, lamps, etc. If you have an old Seattle home (like I do!), this store can be great source of “original” materials.

Rocky Mountain Institute “is an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization that fosters the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. We do this by inspiring business, civil society, and government to design integrative solutions that create true wealth.” Based on the 30 years that they’ve spent researching efficiency improvements in everything from water to cars, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins at the RMI offer a glimpse into the environmentally-friendly future that we can create. The book they wrote with Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism, is a must read for anyone who wants understand how businesses (even small real estate companies!) can learn from natural processes to create positive impacts that benefit us all.

Tree Hugger “The Future is Green. Find it Here.” This blog offers frequent updates on environmental issues and products. Far from being an activist site, the blog is more likely to engage your “environmental aesthetic”. Even so, it is a fun blog to read with lots of good content.

Do you have another environmental-related links that real-estate minded readers might find helpful? Share the wealth by leaving a comment.

more on real estate search technologies

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[photopress:Ballard_RR_Bridge.JPG,thumb,alignright]In researching the options for different real estate search tools, I came across an interesting site called NeighborhoodScout. The idea behind the site is that it would help people moving to a new area find an appropriate neighborhood. I think that the idea is great, but my brief investigation came across some serious flaws in their implementation. For starters, I couldn’t get their algorithms to recommend a neighborhood in Seattle despite my effort to tweak my entries to things I thought would cause their algorithms to recommend Seattle. Instead the site kept recommending Bothell, which is a nice place to live, but not the neighborhoods I was looking for… Another major flaw is their pricing mechanism. The $20 fee to use the interesting parts of their tool seems like a major momentum killer for any website. As I alluded to yesterday, data wants to be free!

I have found a few other neighborhood sites, but they tend to be pretty focused on a local market. For example, Sustainable Seattle has an excellent site that maps demographic and environmental data for Seattle neighborhoods, but my current interest is in sites that have attempted to analyze real estate demographics on a neighborhood level based on national data.

Does anyone have any experience with NeighborhoodScout? Do you know of another neighborhood finders? I’d be very interested to hear about it!

Buyers and Sellers: Help is on the way…

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I’m pretty sure that many real estate agents wouldn’t want to hear this, but the real estate industry has been very effective at protecting their own self-interest at the expense of home buyers and sellers. There are so many useful tools that could be built, but valuable real estate data is hidden behind thick walls! But rather than focus on the problems of the industry, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the future…

If you’ve been reading Rain City Guide long enough, you probably know that last May I put together the first home search (“gHomes

Party on the Seattle Monorail Project…

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Drinks for PartyOn the assumption that the monorail board doesn’t find a way to revive it’s dying patient, the Puget Sound Business Journal had an interesting article on what might happen with the 34 properties that the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) has already purchased. They mention that some of the properties, like the 7-11 store in Ballard, could fetch a quite a lot of money on the open market. I was surprised to find that through the process of eminent domain, the SMP could only offer the “appraised value” for the properties they bought. I (wrongly) assumed that the SMP was giving property owners some type of premium (on top of “relocations costs”).

I have no numbers to back this up whatsoever, but wouldn’t be ironic if the Seattle Monorail Project was able to close up shop having made a profit from all the properties that they bought at appraised values?

Real estate and coffee… It’s so obvious in retrospect

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All Seattle real estate agents should be holding our heads down in shame today as we let a company out of Jackson, Mississippi Michigan open a the world’s first real estate cafe.

It seems so obvious in retrospect! I imagine just about every agent in Seattle has had at least one meeting with a client in a coffee shop (heck, many of us run our entire operations out of coffee shops!), but none of us ever took the initiative to open up a cafe devoted to the real estate arts!

By the way, if there are any Starbuck executives reading my blog, I just thought I’d let you know I’d be willing to discuss ways of teaming on a real estate cafe venture! You guys have been focusing too much on music lately… There’s definitely more money in real estate!

Story via Inman News.

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UPDATE: One of my readers has been kind enough to let me know that this is not the world’s first real estate cafe, as as a matter of fact, Bill Wendel out of Cambridge, MA has been hosting a real estate cafe since 1995. None the less, my offer to Starbucks executives still holds!

New Monorail Director

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The PI is reporting that the Monorail project has a new director…

A top transportation consultant who worked on the Las Vegas monorail system has been picked to temporarily run Seattle’s troubled monorail project, weeks before a city-imposed deadline for determining whether the line should survive.

John Haley Jr. of the firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was announced this evening as the interim executive director. Haley has extensive transit and transportation experience, including stints as deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

“He knows his job is to come in and help us figure out what to do,” including possibly abandoning the project, said board member Cleve Stockmeyer, head of a search committee. “He has committed to be objective.”

My hope is that he can bring the project back from the dead, but that’s probably too much to ask of a transportation consultant! 🙂

UPDATE: The Stranger presents the first positive article on the monorail I’ve seen in quite a while…

Winning isn’t everything…

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Rollin Sand SailingI know it is no good to laugh at the misfortune of others, but some people make it really hard…

The Seattle Times highlights the troubles of a group of people who bought land “sight-unseen” at an auction only to find out that the land they bought was not what they expected… Some highlights include:

  • The guy who bought 640 acres of desert land in Nevada for $75,000 only to find out later that it is about a mile from the nearest road, and there is no easement across adjoining land for access.
  • The guy (with photo) who bought land for his retirement home near the Skagit River, only to find out that the the town officials won’t let him build on the land because it is in a major flood plain.

I remember when the story of this action first made the press it was obvious to the casual reader that the land they were selling was not necessarily of the highest quality.

While we’re on off-beat real estate stories, check out this story on how NOT to handle an eviction notice from Behind the Mortgage…

“If you can email, you can blog”

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The first thing that struck me about this article from Inman the title of the article: “If you can email, you can blog”. I must have written and/or said a variant of that phrase about 10 times this past week in conversations and emails! (I’ve been evangelizing the wonders of blogging to all kinds of people!). While it IS very easy to blog, it is actually quite difficult to consistently write stuff that others find interesting. The Inman article I mentioned above describes the editor of Curbed, a real estate blog out of New York that consistently finds great off-the-wall stories to compliment their more serious posts. Curbed’s editor, Lockhart Steele, describes his site as: “It’s a blog about New York City, and everything in New York comes back to real estate.”).

Are you a food person? Curbed also puts out a blog that covers all things food in New York.