Author Archives: Dustin Luther

About Dustin Luther

Founder and original blogger on Rain City Guide, Dustin has since started #InterestedIn Marketing where his team provides content and social media services that helps industry experts earn recognition as thought leaders. You can find me on Twitter (@tyr) and LinkedIn (/DustinLuther)

RCG’s Zearch is Released!

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Robbie has just released what may be the most addictive home search tool I have every used!

Search Tool Codename: Zearch!

Some obvious highlights include:

  • Dynamic map of color-coed listings
  • Geocoded Rain City Posts

I know the search is addictive because earlier today I showed this to a friend who is in the market to buy a home in Seattle and we couldn’t pull ourselves away from bouncing around the map. To get an idea of what I mean, follow this link to the detail page of this listing in Ballard.

You should see a few things:

  • Photos of the listing
  • Lots of color dots
  • Raindrops

The color dots all represent different homes that are currently on the market in the nearby area. Light blue dots mean the house is far below the average listing price while dark red mean it is far above the average listing for that area. The addicting part is that you can click on any of these dots to bring up the home details (and photos) for that home. With my friend sitting beside me, we kept searching for light blue dots amid lots of red hoping to find a “deal”. Very interesting stuff.

You might also notice on the map that there are some raindrops. These represent Rain City Guide blog posts that have been geocoded. This is subtle, but very powerful, as it essentially represents a mapped-based archive page for Rain City Guide’s posts. The cool part about this is that as you’re searching for background on a home, you can see what RCG posts have said about the neighborhood! And as we continue to add more neighborhood content on Rain City Guide, I’ll continue to geocode the posts, which will automatically add more background data to the home search tool…

[photopress:zearch_screenshot.jpg,full,centered]

What else has Robbie done?

For starters, he didn’t mess with the stuff that works well. You can still use the site to:

Some other things to notice about the new detail page is that whenever you move around on the map, all the nearby active listings show up. More impressively, you can also toggle on the nearby schools, gas stations, grocery stores, and other points of interest associated with every day living. Again, the color coded pushpins show that homes in Medina are bright hues of red, many homes in Renton are purple, while most of the homes in this area of Tacoma are blue. So much cool stuff, so little time!

On a side note, today was my last day as a transportation engineer! For the next few weeks I’m unemployed! 🙂

Nominations for Real Estate Innovators?

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Ever since I accepted the position of Director of Consumer Innovations a few weeks ago, I’ve been paying a little more attention to the concept of innovation. Innovation seems to imply something more than simple “ideas”, and mean something much closer to a new way of thinking. While flying to LA two weeks ago, I was happy to see BusinessWeek take on the topic of innovation until I realized that now I’m involved involved in two fields that will quite possible suffer the Curse of the BusinessWeek Cover: Blogging (Blogs Will Change Your Business) and Innovation (The World’s Most Innovative Companies). (I don’t think their recent cover on real estate, Buyer (and Seller) Beware, counts since they seem to advocate running away from this insane industry, whereas I’m jumping in!. 😉 )

This ramble on Innovation is meant to introduce a series of innovation awards that Inman is going to announce at their Real Estate Connect 2006 in San Francisco.

Here are the categories Inman has included and the sites that I would nominate (Do I need to mention that this is a very biased list?).

Most Innovative Real Estate Blog

  • Rain City Guide. First to figure out a way to bring a group of real estate professionals together to market themselves by providing unique and interesting content.

Best Business Models

  • Redfin. Like it or hate it, someone was going to light a fire under the bums of real estate agents to ensure that agents are providing value to tech-savvy clients.

Most Innovative Real Estate Data Site

  • Zillow wins this hand’s down just for their uber-confidence in a complete data-centric solution.

Most Innovative Technology

  • It looks like Google Earth won this last year. If Google Earth won out over Google Maps, then Inman should “right” a clear “wrong” and give this award to Google Maps this year. Google Earth may have more “wow” factor, but nothing sparked more innovation in real estate in this past year than Google Maps.

Most Innovative Mortgage Companies/Services

Most Innovative Brokers/Franchises/Realtor

Most Innovative Web Service

  • I’m not sure what this means… However, if I had to describe the innovation that will most change real estate over the next year, I’d keep it simple and vote RSS.

Most Innovative Media Site

  • No one site should get this award. Instead it should go out to all the real estate bloggers who are creating their own diversified media through blogging (Inman included! 😉 ).

Best Rental/ New Home Online Service

  • I’m really not too familiar with this category, but I’ve seen some of the stuff that Move is developing, and it seems quite impressive. I’ll hold off judgment for the time being, but welcome your suggestions.

Gone Wiki

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A little less than a month ago, I released the Rain City Guide Wiki and I’ve been very impressed with the results so far… I’ve had quite a few local real estate professionals add themselves to the (free) directory that I’ve set up and even a few, like Grier Smith and Chuck Reiling, add their own pages.

Interestingly, I figured it would take some time before Google caught up with the wiki site, but I’m pleased to say that it really didn’t take much time at all! A search on Chuck’s name shows that the wiki page he created for himself is the number one result, even above his writings on Rain City Guide, which kind of surprised me.

[photopress:wiki_screenshot.jpg,thumb,alignright]Because creating a page on the wiki is as simple as putting text in brackets: […], it seems like a no brainer for real estate professional who want to kick start their internet exposure. All you have to do is add your name (in brackets) to the Seattle Real Estate Directory. After you save the page, you will be prompted to create your own page where you can write about yourself and add photos to your heart’s content.

However, I think the real benefit of the wiki will come as people fill in more details about the home buying process. Grier did a great job starting up the discussion with a page on the Home Buying Process. If others are interested in adding to his description, editing the wiki page is as simple as clicking on the link that says “edit this page”! And if you are making a meaningful contribution, I highly recommend you add yourself as a source!

Here are some of the areas of the wiki that I’ve put some time into updating recently:

  • Innovative Real Estate Search Sites. I get a steady stream of emails from people who want me to add their new real estate technology site to my list of innovative sites. My latest response is to say “feel free to add yourself to the wiki page because I’m in the process of moving the list over there anyway!” On the wiki, each innovative real estate site gets their own page and I’ve added lots of cross-links making it easy to see connections between companies. There is still lots more that could be added, so I welcome your contributions!
  • Seattle Real Estate Blogs. This is another wiki page I feel pretty good about because I’ve seen a bunch of local real estate bloggers add their sites recently. I keep learning about new sites thanks to this page!
  • National Real Estate Blogs. Similar to the Innovative Real Estate sites, whenever a blogger emails me asking to be added to my blogroll, I send them to this wiki page where they can add their own site. After I complete adding all the real estate blogs that were already in my blogroll to the wiki, then I’ll completely move my blogroll over to this wiki page so that I don’t have to do any work at all! 🙂

I’ve definitely gone wiki, and if you care to join, it can be a lot of fun!

INBOX: Best Brokerage in Seattle to Work For?

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I just received an email from a Seattle investor who has recently earned his salesperson license and is now interested in finding the best place to hang his license. I began by sending him to the list of brokerages I’ve compiled on the wiki, but I imagine there are some readers who could do a better job focusing his search.

I know him well enough to say that he has more than a little bit of experience investing and he is interested in focusing his energy helping other investors.

Is there a brokerage that does better with this segment of the market?

What questions should he be asking as he interviews brokers?

What a week!

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[photopress:view_of_santa_monica.jpg,thumb,alignright]My family and I spent the past week scoping out appropriate neighborhoods in Ventura County! No matter where we choose to live in Southern California, it will definitely be a major change from our way of life in Seattle…

As I spent most of the week away from the internet (I did have a BlackBerry, but that doesn’t really count!), I’ve fallen way behind so I’m going to play a quick catch up here by mentioning a few of the things that have caught my eye this evening as I returned to the web:

  • Dan Green, ofThe Mortgage Reports Blog, let me know that Rain City Guide received at least one nomination for the Most Innovative Real Estate Blog. Very cool! Thank you Dan!
  • There has been some buzz around a new real estate blog featuring a large group of real estate professionals. I look forward to following the site…
  • I received emails from people at both Zillow and Move on how to better use their systems to find appropriate neighborhoods, so I’m going to have to revisit my post on the home buying process.
  • Ardell published a great article that has been very well received by other bloggers!
  • For the first time since the inception of RCG, I’ve not read EVERY single comment that has been posted on RCG! AHH!!! I’ve got some more reading to do! And on a very related note, my inbox is over-flowing with emails that are worth a quality response, so don’t be surprised if it is taking me a while to respond!

The Mind of a Home Buyer

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So, we’re moving to Southern California, and we have some obvious questions we want answered:

  • What neighborhoods should we be looking in?
  • What neighborhoods can we afford?

Here’s what we do know:

  • I’m going to work at location 30700 Russell Ranch Rd, Westlake Village, CA.
  • We can afford a home in the $500 to $600K range.
  • I’m willing to commute a fair distance (up to 40 minutes) if the home was a great deal, but I’d really rather be within bicycling distance to work.
  • The employees of Move that I talked with recommended Thousand Oaks (10 minutes), Santa Barbara (45 minutes) and Santa Monica (45 minutes).
  • If we can’t afford something in our price range that is acceptable, I’d consider renting a place, especially if it was close to the beach.

Anna and I spent some time on the internet playing around. We tried what I thought would be the most promising options: Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow. I know that none of these sites is geared toward finding appropriate neighborhoods, but I thought I might be able to “trick” them into helping us out:

  • Realtor.com. I began by doing a search of [3 bedroom homes in Westlake Village, CA]… Surprise, surprise, the only home listed under $600K are mobile homes (and yes, there is a mobile home listed for $599K). I didn’t really expect to find a home in Westlake Village, but I was hoping that I might be able to do a large-area search using this tool, so that I might be able to get an idea where a concentration of appropriate homes are located, but there was no (obvious) way to widen my search using the available tools. Next I turned to their beta map search. This was more helpful in that it gave me homes nearby Westlake village, but it was not entirely clear to me how it determined it should widen my search. And scrolling around the map doesn’t refresh it with new properties as one would hope. Because we don’t even know the cities/zip codes we want to look in, I couldn’t keep Anna interested in searching around the beta site and we moved on after a few minutes.
  • Zillow was a bit better because I could zoom in and see a price next to each City’s name. Presumably, this is the average price for the City, but I’m not 100% sure of this. However, smaller cities (and/or huge neighborhoods in the case of Los Angeles) don’t show up. Until I zoomed into each individual property, there was not an easy way to tell if I could afford the area. Overall, we gave up on Zillow after a few minutes as I couldn’t “trick” it into telling me about appropriate neighborhoods.
  • Trulia was definitely the best of the three… I could give it a very detail search entry [3+ beds, $550K to 600K, Westlake Village], and then scroll around the map to see what neighborhoods might work for us. It also had the bonus of showing us “average home prices” depending on where you center the map. (i.e. if I’m over Thousand Oaks, I see the average 1, 2, 3 and 4+ bedroom price!).

Here is what I learned from Trulia from my search:

  • There’s no chance we’re going to buy a home along the coast of Santa Monica or Malibu (I didn’t really expect that this would be an option, but now it is confirmed).
  • If we want to buy a place within biking distance, we may be able to afford something in Thousand Oaks. My brief foray into Realtor.com hinted that a place in Thousand Oaks would likely be a townhome.
  • There are a lot more options either north (Simi Valley) or west (Camerillo, Oxnard, or Ventura), but the dream of owning in Santa Barbara is definitely out of the picture.
  • It looks like there might be something available for us in “the valley”, but both Anna and I want to go in the other direction if possible.

We’re thinking of making a trip to LA relatively soon to check out neighborhoods and tour some homes. Is it enough for us to check out the Ventura and the Simi Valley/Thousand Oaks area, or should we add a few different neighborhoods/cities to our radar?

Of course, the home search process definitely makes me wonder if the LA market has topped off and if it might make a whole lot more sense for us to rent (could we be near the beach?). If I do decide to look further into renting, I’ll definitely post an review of my online search.

Interesting side note: Despite my proclaimed confidence in “context” tools like blogging, I haven’t yet turned to blog posts and/or forums for any answers about neighborhoods (nor have I felt compelled to click on any ads).

The Mind of a Seller

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So we’re moving…

This seems like a very appropriate place to discuss some of the things that are going through our minds as we prepare to sell our current home and buy a new home in a new city… Interestingly, my knowledge of “good” improvements to make is very limited and probably much closer to the typical home owner than an experienced real estate agent. With that in mind, I’m going to throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see what sticks.

So where to start?

[photopress:tree_house.jpg,thumb,alignright]We have a wonderful Tudor in North Seattle that we’re going to be selling. The home is not perfect, but it has some features that make is pretty darn desirable (Good size, big backyard, a good school district, great access to Downtown, great neighbors, etc). However, it is an old home, so I’m thinking that we could add some value and make the house more “marketable” if we made a few improvements.

Here are some of the potential improvements that come to mind.

Electrical:

  • Elimination of old wiring. There are some remnants of the original knob-and-tube wiring in the house. As far as our inspector could tell when we moved into the house (two-and-a-half years ago), the old wiring only supplied power to one light in the attic. I have no idea what it would cost to simply eliminate this wiring, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be much if combined with some additional electrical work. My guesstimate for the cost: $1000.
  • Ground the computer room. At some point, someone went through and grounded the outlets in the kitchen. I think it would be good to do something similar in the computer room (which is very close to the kitchen and directly above the electrical panel which is located in the basement). My guesstimate for the cost: $1000.

New Appliances:

  • [photopress:dishwasher.JPG,thumb,alignright]Dish Washer. There is a small dishwasher in the kitchen which as never worked. It definitely get electricity and water, so I’m thinking we simply would need to find another (small) dishwasher that fits in this space. I see this as an improvement that makes the house more “acceptable” rather than one that really adds value. My guesstimate for the cost: $500 to buy and install.

Windows:

  • New Windows. We’ve got single pane windows throughout the house. They’re really old, more than half of them are painted shut, and cold air leaks in through cracks on many of them. Would we be best off fixing these before we sell? My guesstimate for the cost: $10,000.

Floors:

  • Refinish Wooden Floors. The wooden floors through the living room and hallways have potential to really shine should we refinish them. My guesstimate of the cost: $2000.

Basement:

  • Finish Basement. Our basement (which includes a separate bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, game room and utility room) has been 95% finished. However there is one wall that needs to be finished (i.e. add drywall) and I think a few other small projects (like adding a door to the closet in the bedroom) could make a big difference in making it feel “finished”. My guesstimate for this cost: $2000

Of course there are some other things on our mind as we get ready to sell:

  • Contractors? Would it be better to hire specialists for each of these jobs (i.e. contract with a window replacement firm, an electrician, etc) or just hire one contractor?
  • List in the MLS. Of course, Anna would list the house under her name, so we will really only be paying 3% of the typical 6% fee if we listed the home in the MLS. But do we really need to even go there? I’m telling Anna that we need to put the home on the auction site I installed on the back-end of Rain City Guide, but she’s not ready to be that “innovative”. 🙂
  • Time. We’d obviously like to get everything done relatively soon. My hope is that we can complete the improvements we decide to make relatively soon, but that is probably asking too much…

Also, if you are, or know of, a contractor interested in this high visibility project, definitely feel free to contact me.

I think my next post will be “The Mind of a Buyer” where I talk about some of the things that is going through our minds as we look to buy a home in a new city. Either way, look for frequent updates on our move.

Adding Some Sun to Rain City Guide

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I’m extremely excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position with Move (HOMS) as the Director of Consumer Innovations.

Until recently, Move was known as HomeStore and they (we!) are the people who run Realtor.com, HomeBuilder.com, RentNet, Welcome Wagon, and a few other sites… The idea behind the Move brand is that we’ll be creating a one-stop-shop for connecting consumers with comprehensive real estate information and expertise.

No surprise that this will be a huge change for me and my family. Not only are we moving to Southern California, but I will now have some actually time to spend pushing the boundaries of online real estate technology (I’m no longer a transportation engineer!?!). What a difference a year of blogging can make!

I imagine that there might be a question or two I could answer about this change, but I’ll save the answers to what? why? how? and when? for future posts.

Relevance is at the Long End of the Tail

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Listen to enough conversations on the internet and you’re bound to run into the concept of the long tail. It is a fascinating concept that helps define how people use the internet and helps clarify how real estate professionals can be successful on the internet.

The long tail is a concept that was first popularized by Chris Anderson as an article in Wired back in October of 2004 and grew into a popular blog devoted to the subject. The essence of the Long Tail is defined by the following chart:

long-tail-graph

In this chart, the red areas represent the most commonly sought after (and served) markets… I think of them as the “best sellers”. The yellow area represents the niche markets that only appeal to a small subset of people, and due to (the lack of) economies of scale, these markets tend to be under-served in most industries.

The concept of the long tail is that successful on-line business have (with very few exceptions) thrived by providing adequate services to the people under the yellow area of the curve. Sure you can go to Amazon to find the latest best sellers (red area), but you can also go to Amazon to find hundreds of thousands of titles that you won’t find at your local bookshop (yellow area). Same thing with eBay. The internet is best situated to serve otherwise “hard-to-serve” people.

But economies of scale don’t explain everything. The real beauty of the long tail is that it is often much easier to provide exceptional service to customers in the yellow area of the curve. If someone is searching for a generic topic on Amazon like [popular fiction], it is really hard to know if they would be happy with the results. But if they were to search [accident analysis training manual], you can be pretty sure that they will be happy with the results because there are only a few books dealing with this subject and Amazon will show them all!

The Long Tail and Real Estate

Recently, Chris over at RealtyBlogging asked “How are real estate and blogging alike?”, and this is my answer. Both real estate and blogging thrive when they effectively serve a local and/or niche market (i.e. the yellow area under the curve).

The idea behind this should really be second nature to successful real estate agents who know they couldn’t possibly serve all the niches within a major City. Rather, my experience has been that successful agents will say that they began by providing exceptional service to a small subset of people. Maybe their niche involves houseboats or condos, or a specific neighborhood… The specific niche doesn’t matter. The important aspect is that a real estate agent realized that they were never going to be able to serve everyone well, so instead they focused on a small subset of people and learned that market inside-and-out.

Similarly, blogs almost always come with a strong point of view and serve a niche market well.

In addition, the internet has allowed a few companies to do a very similar thing that real estate professionals have always been doing. Namely be extremely relevant to a small subset of the overall population. Not only has Amazon and eBay found success this way, but Google has created a billion dollar industry out of this concept. The idea behind Google Ads is that they provide relevant ads to users on obscure topics. I doubt many lawyers would consider putting up a banner ad on Yahoo to attract people looking for mesothelioma lawyers, but give these lawyers a chance to reach people who just searched for [mesothelioma lawyers] on Google, and they are willing to pay $54.33 for one click!!!

This extremely relevance is exactly how the real estate agents of the future will be successful on the internet. Not only that, but I happen to think that blogging is a great way for agents to get out from under the “red” of the curve (where most real estate websites live… and die) and out into the long tail where their niche knowledge will be appreciated and rewarded!

Rain City Guide Meet-Up This Thursday

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Are you interested in meeting up with real estate professionals and/or enthusiasts of Rain City Guide? In an effort to continue to puss the boundaries of a real estate blog, I’m organizing a gathering this Thursday and you’re invited! The meetup is this scheduled for Thursday (4/6/06) at 7PM at Cupcake Royale/Verite Coffee shop in Downtown Ballard (2052 NW Market St).

This idea for a meetup has been cooking in my head for quite a while and was really inspired by a recent evening I spent with a few real estate professionals explaining the wonders of blogging, RSS feeds, del.icio.us and all things web2.0. I’ve tried to cover a lot of these topics on the blog, but sometimes it is so much easier to show people this stuff in person.

With that in mind, I’ve confirmed that at least a few Rain City Guide contributors will show up this Thursday, so you can expect a lively discussion with input from experienced real estate agents, mortgage brokers and real estate technology geeks. I don’t really have an agenda, but would rather let the group dictate where the discussion leads…

Who do I think might be interested in joining us?

  • Maybe you’re a real estate agent, mortgage broker, title representative, etc. who wants to learn how you can better use the internet to serve your clients?
  • Maybe you’re a home owner who is interested in listing your home and want to make sure that you get the most out of the internet and/or a potential listing agent.
  • Maybe you’re a buyer who wants a leg-up on the competition. I can show you how to use Google Earth, RSS feeds and more to make sure you’re getting the most efficiency out of your home search.
  • Maybe you’re a potential home buyer/seller interested in interviewing potential real estate agents and/or mortgage brokers in an informal setting. Should you want that type of thing, I’m sure that the agents and mortgage brokers would be happy to try to earn your business.

As long as you have an interest in real estate (who doesn’t?), you are definitely invited to what will hopefully be a fun and memorable evening.

RSVP? One of the RCG contributors who is helping me organize things thinks that this event might be much more highly attended than I do. Just to make sure that we don’t blow out one of my favorite coffee shops in Ballard, can you please let us know if you are planning to attend by adding your name to the list on the wiki? You don’t even have to use your real name, just something so that we can gauge the interest.