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)

Free Margaritas!!!*

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margaritaWho servers the best margarita in Seattle?

Apparently, I stirred up a little bit of a hornet’s nest as there is definitely some contention in the blogoshere as to the best margarita in Seattle.

Some say that La Carta de Oaxaca serves up the best margarita, while other good sources say that El Gallito is the place to go.

But the real answer may be a different place altogether! (Did I mention that I serve up a mean margarita?)

There is really only way one to find out, and that is a Gringo Tour! (Am I allowed to say that on a real estate blog?)

I’m all over organizing a tour to get the determine the margarita in Seattle… If you’re interested in joining the tour bus, let me know, along with the evenings within the next week that would work for you. I’m thinking that this weekend would be best although both of these places can get quite busy!

Some people who simple need to show up include Virginia from Seattle Pulse, Chris from Metroblogging and Chris Pirillo from, well, Chris Pirillo, but all are welcome! Just email me if you’re interested and I’ll coordinate from there!

party drinks

* Free Margaritas are ALWAYS available to people who use Anna to purchase or sell a home. Unless, or course, I find out there is a policy against offering Margarita’s to clients… 😉

Does Zillow's Game Plan Includes Blogging?

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dark doorYou bet it does!

I just noticed that I’ve started to get hits from website with the URL: www.zillowblog.com… (Don’t expect much from the link as the site is password protected at the moment.) IT’S LIVE!

A little research into the URL suggests that the site is owned by Zillow as one would expect.

I don’t think the idea of a zillow blog will shock anyone, but it may help one of those people who are attempting to put together the Zillow puzzle.

And while I’m up to Zillow updates, the latest press release from Property Shark mentions Zillow 4 times!

New York City, February 7, 2006 – PropertyShark.com announces its home sale-price maps to empower appraisers and real estate professionals to effectively serve home buyers and sellers.

Launched as a beta, an example of this map for New York City can be seen here: http://www.propertyshark.com/maps/sales/

“We’ve decided to launch this on the eve of the launch of residential home valuation tool Zillow because, in my opinion, computer-based automated valuations, such as those you will likely see at Zillow, are more likely to be wrong than right. Every property is an illiquid, unique asset, and a computer program cannot accurately predict the price it will fetch on the market,” commented PropertyShark.com founder, Matthew Haines.

PropertyShark.com, which is designed primarily for use by appraisers and real estate professionals, provides users with the original data directly from government records, including sales price, mortgage amounts, document images, and ownership records.

“My understanding is that Zillow is out to disintermediate the broker and real estate salesperson, attempting to devalue the broker’s Comparable Market Analysis by providing an instant valuation of sorts. Unlike Zillow, PropertyShark.com is focused on empowering real estate professionals, not disempowering them. We give professionals, and savvy consumers, the actual raw data, as well as an unprecedented level of depth which captures the unique nature of each piece of real estate and its value,” expanded PropertyShark.com chief executive officer, Ryan Slack.

I wonder if the people at Zillow feel extra pressure because of all the expectations?

UPDATE:
Here are the Seattle property maps from PropertyShark. Select “Residential Sales/Sq ft (2004)” from their pull down menu to see an interesting map of all the property sales in the region color coded by the price per square foot of the sale. Interesting stuff…

Interesting Insurance Program from King County Metro

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I just received a newsletter from Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute that describes an innovative project that is being tested by King County Metro.

King County Metro, the Washington State Department of Transportation and other partners has $2,2 million to develop a Pay As You Drive (PAYD) Insurance Pilot project for Washington State over a 4-year period to evaluate the impacts of a pilot including at least 5000 participants. They are in the process of recruiting an insurance carrier to join in the project. The deadline for expressions of interest is February 15, 2006. For more information contact Bill Roach (bill.roach@metrokc.gov) or Bob Flor (bob.flor@metrokc.gov).

I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I noticed that the Cascadia Scorecard had an article on this topic today, Pay As You Drive Insurance, and they didn’t mention this interesting program. This makes me think that the project must be really below the radar and in need of some Rain City Guide attention!

So how does it relate to Seattle real estate? Barely… But what’s important is that if you are a King County resident whose car spends almost all day at home, then you may be able to save money by joining this program and only paying insurance on the miles that you drive.

Best Seattle Area Restaurants

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peppersChris Pirillo had an excellent list of his recommended Seattle-area restaurants. The list is huge and he’s right-on with most of recommendations like Zoka Cafe and Mighty-O donuts, but his choice of Mexican food is downright dismal (Taco Del Mar???).

Finding good Mexican food in Seattle is not easy, as there is a lot more bad options than good places. However, Seattle Pulse came to the rescue with a much more enlightened view of Mexican food with their article dedicated to finding Seattle’s Best Margarita!

They were right on the money when they rated Ballard’s Oaxaca a perfect 10 for both the quality of the food and the quality of the margarita! Oaxaca is the best Mexican food that I’ve come across in Seattle. It’s extremely tasty… It’s authentic… If you’re craving good Mexican food, then I highly recommend checking out Oaxaca!

Another Round of Updates to Rain City Guide

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You might have noticed that I’ve done some updating here at Rain City Guide… (Didn’t I just do that?).

What inspired me? WordPress came out with another major update (from version 1.5 to 2.0), and I decided to upgrade. Then, while I was making those changes, I just kept going until I had implemented a few more ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while…

The big changes are that I got rid of the third column and moved a lot of that content onto separate pages. I’ve wanted to do this for a while because (1) I noticed that the main blog page was taking way too long to load, and (2) the layout didn’t look good on some monitors.

For those interested, here are some details of the changes I’ve made:

  • I did a slash-and-burn operation to my side-panel in order to get it down to the basics. Only things I kept was a tips link, the frequent contributors section, an expanded comments section (the comments have been a highlight of the site recently!), some buttons, and a “Meta” section that makes it easy to register and log-in with the site.
  • I moved the About section to it’s own page where I’m able to go into much more detail about Rain City Guide and blogging in general.
  • I broke out the Agent Recommendation page into For Buyers and For Sellers pages.
  • Moved the Worth Noting column to its own page where it has gone from being the ten most recent entries to the 100 most recent!
  • Moved my blogroll to a new page (appropriately title linkation) where I have a TON more flexibility. I’m using a new feature of del.icio.us that makes updating this page extremely simple! And now each of the real estate sites that I link to include a description on what makes the site special! I have a bunch more ideas on new link sections to add and new ways of formatting the page, but I really like the general layout.
  • Added an archive page using a very cool SmartArchive plugin
  • Upgraded to WordPress 2.01, which has an updated backend that should make it easier for contributors to post!
  • Throw some Google Ads on the individual posts. This is really just a test and unless they are extremely lucrative, they probably won’t last long.
  • Added some more red to the layout… (Is it too much?)
  • Added Grier Smith as a Frequent Contributor
  • Fixed the problem that was causing the footer to not show up in Safari browsers.
  • Added the author’s name in bold under each post.

So, I’ve done some testing, and it seems like everything is working to me. However, if something about the new layout is not working for you, please let me know!

UPDATE

I got an email letting me know that some of the navigational links on my photos broke, so I spent some time upgrading my photo plugin… This one thing lead to another, and before I realized it, I’d blown a whole evening organizing photos. By my evening of organization is your gain… I’ve added categorization to the photos and fixed up a bunch of titles and descriptions. The upgraded photo plug-in also makes it easier than ever to include photos in posts, so hopefully more of the contributors will take advantage of this feature!

Bedtime Stories…

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What I enjoy most about our home are the many places where our family gathers to share stories. Some of the places include our the kitchen table, our computer room, and our deck. But the place that I’ll always associate most closely with epic stories is our living room.

Taken by itself, our living room is nothing unusual. It is not too big, not too small… It includes two couches, a rocking chair, and a fishtank that takes up way too much space. What makes our living room is not the stuff or the size, but rather the time that our family spends here almost every evening reading stories.

Sasha's Book Shelf

We’ve spent countless hours observing Harry Potter (barely) make it through the 5th year of school… We’ve helped and been helped by Aslan in the land of Narnia an numerous occasions… We’ve been fortunate to travel along with Laura and her family from Wisconsin to the Oklahoma Territories to Minnesota to the Dakota Territories…

I only have to think of the many enjoyable nights we’ve spent sharing stories with a roaring fire in the fireplace and the rain pouring outside to remind myself why I love our living room!

Please feel free to join us on the day’s leading up to Valentine’s Day as we romance our homes by discussing some of the many ways we love our homes and neighborhoods.

Romancing the Home

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I’ve been inspired by Bill Wendel of the Real Estate Cafe to explore the theme “Romancing the Home!” during the next couple of weeks that lead up to Valentine’s Day. My hope is that some of the contributors (and readers) will use this as an opportunity to talk about the things that we love about our homes!

[photopress:girls_walking.jpg,full,alignright]I’ve had a great email correspondence with Bill for a while now and I always find him to be exceptionally knowledgeable and full of inspiration. Last year, he built a Valentines Day blog that is filled with wonderful stories including one about the Valentine’s Day parties that he would celebrate with his daughter every year.

When real estate blogging, it is so easy to get caught up in the investment value of a home that we can easily overlook some of the more subtle benefits. No matter how hard we try, most of us choose our home based on considerations that go beyond getting the best deal… Maybe we want on a home with a fireplace… Or a home in a nice neighborhood… Or a home with a great school system…. Or a home with a large kitchen. All of these things represent features that make our homes special.

So what makes my home special? Things that come to mind include our family room where we spend many nights reading stories around our fireplace, our neighborhood filled with great kids, and our garden where we’ve spent many a wonderful spring day after a rainy winter.

I encourage you to share you’re stories as well as check back in over the next two weeks as we spend a little time romancing our homes!

Trulia Lands in New York

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I just got an email announcing that Trulia launched in New York!

Congratulations Pete and Sami! I know that was pretty high on your list of ToDo items!

Are you wondering what Trulia is?

I wrote a post on their service when they launched in California. In general, they have one of the nicest interfaces around for real estate search. If someone is looking for inspiration on how to build a tight real estate search that is focused on providing a maximum of useful information to buyers, they they need to look no farther than Trulia to see how it can be done.

Trulia Launches New York

So is there anything wrong with Trulia? I only have two qualms about their service. One, they launched in New York before Seattle! 🙂 and two, they don’t have a comprehensive database of homes (The California agents I’ve talked to have all mentioned that Trulia does not include a lot of homes that are available and did include a lot of homes that had already been sold.)

With those two caveats in place, it is my opinion that they have one of the most interesting real estate search tools available!

More:

Contributing to Rain City Guide…

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staircase with windowSeveral real estate agents (and one broker) approached me last week with an interest in contributing to Rain City Guide. Just about every one of them said they had noticed that Rain City Guide has a very high rankings on some key Google search terms, like Agent Recommendations (#1), Seattle Real Estate (#6), and real estate (#2 on blog search). (All of them were surprised to hear that we got these high rankings despite being less than a year old and not spending a dime on typical search engine optimization (SEO) techniques!) I’ve been trying to spread the blogging gospel for quite a while that if real estate professionals work together to create their own useful content for their potential clients (i.e. blog together!), all the agents involved would benefit. It is nice to see that some local real estate agents are finally starting to “get” it.

So back to the original question… What does it take to become a contributor on Rain City Guide?

It’s easy! Here are three steps that are guaranteed to get my attention:

  1. Join in the discussion by leaving comments! The number of people writing comments has grown dramatically in the last few months, with many popular and/or controversial posts getting dozens of comments. (If you have been only reading the posts and not the comments, then you’ve been missing out on some of the most interesting real estate conversations on the web!).
  2. Register with Rain City Guide. (As a bonus, this gets you a username so that you can log-in and edit your comments.)
  3. Email me and let me know you’re interested!

Who do I think should be contributing to Rain City Guide?

Curb Appeal EnthusiasmAnyone who is willing to share their unique insights on the Seattle-area real estate market! There is no doubt in my mind that the site will be a better resource as more and more experienced real estate agents/brokers, mortgage brokers, and title representatives join the discussion. I also think the site would benefit from having a few other real estate professionals, like photographers and investors, adding their unique insights. All-in-all, there is plenty of room to grow and improve!

One more idea… Maybe you’re an agent who doesn’t want to jump into the blogosphere where your opinions can and will be closely examined (dare I say, “examined with hostility” 🙂 ) but you still want to benefit from the exposure that posting on Rain City Guide will provide. I have an idea on how you can get involved as well! I’m looking for someone who would be willing to post an article each Friday that lists the most promising Open Houses of the weekend similar to the wonderful Curb Appeal Enthusiasm column that Alex of Behind the Mortgage puts together! I know that some agents already do this type of research, and if you are one of them, this would be a great way to get additional exposure for your hard work and knowledge! If you’re interested in putting something like this together, or have another idea for a regular column, let me know.

UPDATE:

I had an email from a reader asking me how many hits Rain City Guide gets per month from Google… Not knowing the answer right away, I dug into my stat program and produced this chart:

Unique Visitors Per Month on Rain City Guide

Some interesting notes:

  • More than half of Rain City Guide traffic comes from Google searches
  • In January of this year, Rain City Guide received more visitors from Google Image search (378) than from either Yahoo search (333) or MSN search (194)! (While I’m missing data from one more day in January, the trend will almost definitely hold!)
  • The uptick in May ’05 was almost definitely due to my release of gHomes (now replaced by this home search).

Healthier Living Involves an Urban Home

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A recent study was just released that concludes that living in a walkable neighborhood is healthier than living in the suburbs! Another good reason to live in Seattle!

The Seattlest nominated this article for the “No Shit Sherlock” department in that it does not take a study to conclude that people who walk more will be healthier. However, to the study’s benefit, this kind of data gets used in the most obscure (yet important) ways. For example, I found the data to be extremely useful for a transportation demand management (TDM) tool I recently built for the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT). It can be so darn hard to quantify the benefits that make neighborhoods special that sometimes us engineers, (yes, I am an engineer by training) latch onto relatively obscure concepts like “walkability” in order to differentiate good neighborhoods from bad! Besides just letting us know that a walkable neighborhood is a healthier place to live, the study also helped to define what it means for a neighborhood to be walkable!

Bonus: One piece of my involvement in the TDM study involved creating a map that displayed the walkability of every single neighborhood in King County. My memory of the map was that the most walkable neighborhoods were almost all located in Seattle (surprise) with only a few located in the Eastside. If you’re really interested in learning more about what makes a neighborhood “walkable”, let me know!

The moral of this long-winded post? Living in a walkable neighborhood is not only more pleasant, but better for you!

Walking at the Ballard Locks