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)

Are you going to Vegas?

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or more interestingly, are you going to my presentation on Tuesday morning?

If so, I’d love to know. I’m just finishing up the presentation now and would love to include a few screenshots of people’s blogs who will be in the audience.

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By the way, the impetus for this blog post is that I like to localize my presentation. But considering most of the people in the audience will not be from Vegas, I’m looking for another way to personalize the show… Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t… but it won’t do much harm to try.

And there are lots of clues for what the talk filed under the seminar tag…

Tweet tweet

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So far, we have Jeff, Joel, Jessica, Keith and Myself prepared to twitter the NAR 2007. Follow along, or better yet tweet with us, at Jeff’s summary site: NAR Updates.

And I’m voting for using “NAR2007” (one word) as our tag on Flickr, YouTube, etc. Use it and you’ll make it easy for us to find your stuff! 🙂

Emergency Short-Term Housing In Southern California

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The interactive marketing team over at Move working pretty hard over the last few days putting together a list of available short-term housing options for people who were displaced by the Southern California fires. Our hope is that we can help people who are returning to find that their homes were either destroyed or partially burned find a temporary place to live while they get back on their feet.

With tremendous support for the Move Rentals team, we were able to reach out to local apartment associations and thousands of Southern California property managers, many of whom have been more than willing to forgo their traditional lease process and open up their vacancies to people on a short-term basis. Also, through the REALTOR.com team, we’ve been able to reach out to local and statewide REALTOR associations who have also provided lots of help in identifying homes and apartments that available for short-term leases.

Normally I don’t talk much about the work that I do at Move, but in this case, I’m going to make an exception because I feel pretty confident we’ve been able to aggregate the largest selection of temporary housing options for the fire victims and I want to get the word out to the RE.net community. Any help you can provide in spreading the word about the list of temporary homes for people displaced by the fire would be most appreciated.

Finally, one of the guys that works with me has done a tremendous job taking adding all the temporary listings we can find onto a Google Map. This has made it extremely easy for just about anyone with a website or blog to spread the word.


View Larger Map

Closing the Translation Loop

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A long, long, it-feels-like-forever, time ago, Anna covered the story that there were a lack of good translations tools available on the internet, and especially in languages like Russian. In that article, she linked to an article that showed Google had developed a much better translations service, but hadn’t released it to the general public. Well, I’m always interested in closing loops, and so I’m happy to report that Google just announced that their, much improved, translation service is now live at Google Translates.

What makes Google’s service interesting is that it doesn’t use the standard “rule-based” translation methods, but rather, it is much more statistical in nature:

We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.

Anna and I couldn’t help but to try the service out, so we choose a Russian news site: pravda.ru and the results were pretty impressive (pravda.ru in English) as I could definitely pick up almost every story.

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My take is that the translation of websites is only the beginning for Google… Not only will they improve the translations (especially if enough users adopt their feature to “recommend” a better translation directly through the tool), but I can easily see a day in the not-too-distant future when this tool is built right into gmail or google chat. This could make it extremely easy to have an online conversation with someone who doesn’t even speak your language.

In my family this could be very useful as my wife’s parents do not speak much English (and I don’t speak much of their native Russian). At this point that means that my wife has to translate everything that is said between us. What if instead, I could simple email them (in English), but it would arrive with an accurate translation in Russian? The result is that it would actually be easier for us to share stories over email or chat then in person!

From a business perspective, the possibilities are fascinating… Why not translate an entire website (Welcome to “Дождь город

I have no intention of turning this into…

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a blog about southern California real estate, but I do have a non-fire related update from Southern California.

Brad Inman and I are going to be speaking at Beverly Hills REALTOR Association’s Head of High Office Tea this Thursday afternoon. From everything I can gather, it is going to be a pretty posh set-up at the Peninsula Hotel. The plan is for Brad to speak about the status of the industry for about an hour, myself to speak for about an hour and tea and conversation making up the last hour.

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Tickets are $40 and just about sold out.

Also, I shouldn’t admit this, but I honestly have not given much thought about what I’m going to say just yet… Conveniently, back in August I did a presentation on using blogs to build up an online brand for the KW Mega Technology Camp that came off well (and took about 45 minutes including questions from others who were on stage). I think I’ll adjust that presentation a bit but go with that general outline. If anyone who was at that presentation wants to give me feedback, I’d love to hear it! 🙂

Anything but stormy

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As Tim’s last update let everyone know that his team was having fun through the storm, I thought I’d let everyone know that things are anything BUT stormy near my home in Southern Cal…

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I live right off Las Virgines Rd, which is about five or six miles away down the road from the church and castle that burned down yesterday. However, the good news is that my family is far enough away to be out of any danger, the same of which cannot be said for many bloggers in the southern California area whose homes are clearly threatened…

[photopress:malibu_castle.jpg,thumb,alignright]On a side-note, I invited Scotty Brown to work out of Move’s offices today because the internet was down at his home and work in Malibu… Normally, Scotty is quite the dynamic individual but he simply wasn’t his usual self today… But who could blame him considering his $17M listing went up in flames.

Private Money Loan Recommendations?

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I had someone email me an interesting question recently:

I had a quick question about private money loans. Have their been any posts on this? I tried searching “private money”, “hard money” but nothing came up. I’m looking into rehabbing a house and conventional lending isn’t going to work for me, so I was wondering if there are any recommendations or guidelines for obtaining private money?

The closest thing I can remember is a site called Prosper (I wrote a note about it) where people can loan other people money. However, I’m almost positive they are geared toward small loans like paying off credit card debt, so I don’t think it would help for home remodeling projects. Also, when I did a bit of searching, I see Brian Bradu covered the topic of private money loans a little while ago, but his angle didn’t include any guidelines or recommendations for finding a private loan.

Is this a common thing? Is there a good source of information for private loans? My gut says that most private money loans are probably among family/friends, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was an existing market for this kind of thing.