Yesterday, Russ Cofano and I gave another blogging seminar, this time in Seattle as part of Ed.con 2006 put on by the Washington Realtor Association.
[photopress:elvis_and_liberace.jpg,full,alignright]I thought the day went over really well and considering it was the first seminar we’d given to the “home town
If you want a look at one possible future for the real estate world, read job jacking and replace every instance of job jacking with listing jacking and replace every job company with your favorite web-based real estate search companies. Sure, real estate isn’t quite so spread out, but it’s getting there.
I think it’s a silly complaint. People post jobs so they can find applicants and people list houses so they can find buyers. Most limits on where the jobs or houses are displayed are not in the interest of the lister.
[photopress:images_1.jpg,full,alignright] I know that applying the “Goldilocks Principle” puts me in the category of “hopeless utopian”, but hey, for one solid year, until December 31, 2006, I am going to stay in this thought mode.
I’ve tried various commissions with various people, and for the most part disregarded anything I’ve ever known, and everything that anyone has to say on the subject. I say “for the most part” because you really can’t erase your brain. But you can test and try varied options, just like Goldilocks rested herself on the three beds before deciding which one was “just right”.
I find that all of the rhetoric available on the topic is pretty much bunk. Reality is, it depends on the sale price/purchase price. I plan to do a “year in review” on 1/1/07, my blogging anniversary, to post my experiences and conclusions. But since this topic keeps coming up in the comments of various articles with everyone spouting out percentages, or flat fees, or hourly fees, etc., I thought I’d at least post that the results of my experiments are absolutely hinged to price of property.
The other reality is that my “awakening” with regard to commission issues started three months BEFORE I started blogging, and being in the Blogosphere really isn’t what turned my head with regard to commission issues. What turned my head was when I, myself, purchased a house for $850,000 with $59,500 of commission issues plus $22,000 of other credit issues thrown into the mix. Trust me. There is no question in my mind that I, the buyer, am the one paying for that whole $81,500 in my mortgage payment. I’m not complaining. I structured everything that way for a reason. But overnight I realized that the buyer pays the commission…no question.
I also realized that it didn’t bother me on the 10-12 properties I purchased before this one. So price of house does matter. The experience revolutionized my whole thought process with regard to real estate commissions. Nothing causes you to “get real” more than putting yourself into the equation, and experiencing it personally, from the inside out. So for now, I’m trusting my own judgment and using “The Goldilocks Principle” when determining the fairness of commissions. A full year of experiments, and then I’ll come out the other side and see where I’ve been and which feel “just right”, which were too high and which were just not enough.
For now…price matters is the key, and almost none of the discussions anywhere, focus on different fees for different home prices. So basically, they are ALL wrong.
(As observed by this author, from livingcode)
My list is a little longer than Greg’s…
Akismet. A must for WP blogs… I’ve complained in the past how their service is somewhat of a blackhole and I can’t seem to rescue a few of the people who leave comments on RCG from the Akismet spam filter. Nonetheless, the service catches hundreds of spam messages every moment. If I didn’t have a life, I could just keep hitting refresh on my spam filter and there would always be another spam message to delete. Matt, if you’re listening... Here are the two improvements I’d like to see. (1) A way to not have spam limited to showing only the most recent 150 spam messages. Recently, I’ve had two different people leave comments who say there were picked up by the spam filter, but because my queue had already built up to greater than 150 messages, I had no way to rescue them. When I hit the “delete all” button, I only (wrongly) reinforced that these people were spam. (2) A way to rescue people who are labeled spam from deep within the blackhole of Akismet’s database. Galen, one of RCG’s contributor’s has to go “save himself” every time he posts. This sucks! (but is better than me dealing with 450 spam messages a day!)
Exec-PHP. Allows for Admin and Editors to write PHP code within their posts… Both dangerous and powerful and the easiest way to get the Archive plugin to work.
Filosofo Comments Preview. This allows for the preview button. I wish I had time to figure out how to format the “preview” page, but I remember spending a whole evening on that one time and not making enough progress, so I just leave it unformatted. It’s ugly, but better than not having the preview option!
Gravatars. This plugin allows me to easily show the author’s photo on the beginning of every post. At one point, I tried to set this up to allow commenters to have their own gravatars (which is the more common use for this plugin), but I couldn’t get it to work with my theme.
Recent Comments. This really nice plugin lets me show the most recent comments on the sidepanel. It is highly configurable and very easy to work with. I attribute the use of this plugin to the high comment level that we get on many RCG posts because it allows everyone to easily seeing where there is “action” on the site…
GeoPress. This allows me to geocode my posts so that they show up over a map. If you haven’t seen this in action, then you’re going to have to wait a little longer. Normally, when you visit adetail page on Anna’s home search tool, a bunch of little rain drops show up that represent blog posts about that location. At the moment, no rain drops are showing up and I suspect this is because of changes to the server during my recent move and Robbie and I never noticed it was broken (until now!). It’s a very cool feature and way under-utilized by me. Note that the author mentions there is a new and improved version of the plugin here.
PhotoPress. This was top-of-the-line when I first started built RCG a year and a half ago. Since then, WP has designed a built-in photo uploaded that is better integrated with the core system. However, I’m stuck on the old photo upload program because I don’t even want to try thinking about reloading all the photos to a new system and getting everything to work. I dread thinking about the day when the PhotoPress people stop updating their code because demand has shrunk. That’s the day I’m going to be forced to hire a developer for this site!
WP-Print. Add a little printer icon next to the post and allows people to print off a clean looking version of the post. I never print articles, but I’ve heard others do, so this is meant to help save a few trees.
Role Manager. This lets me be very picky about what the different contributors can do on the site… Do I want Jon to upload photos but not publish? Do I want to give Ardell all “editor” rights except the ability to run PHP within posts? This plugin handles that kind of thing.
WP-Stats. This page provides a lot of pretty useless stats, but I installed it and have never turned it off… On the day when I decide to award free-round vacation packages to the top 10 WP contributors, I’ll use this plugin because it counts links like number of posts by author and number of comments by author.
Smart Archives. Clean, simple, smart archive.
Ultimate Tag Warrior. This this is so feature rich, I’ll never even play around with half the options on my beta site. At this point, I’ve been keeping it pretty simple and using the code to tag the bottom of blog posts and create the tag cloud in the archives.
WordPress Database Backup. A backup option without the need to go into PHPmyAdmin! Greg once mentioned that he linked my quote: “I believe real estate agents are either in marketing or broke”… Today’s version: “People running website either backup on a regular basis, or they are broke!”.
WP-Contact Form. Simple, but useful, contact form. I use it on the buyer information and seller information pages. (note: this is also the way that I monetize this blog! 😉 )
[photopress:images.jpg,full,alignright] The big news today, according to Inman, is that the Judge has ruled against the National Association of Realtor’s motion to dismiss the suit against them by the Department of Justice.
I don’t think this is a surprise. In fact, had the Judge ruled otherwise, it would have been a great disappointment. A lot of time and money has already been spent by both sides, and much more money will be spent before all is said and done. Had the motion been dismissed, all of those public funds spent, would have been for naught. And that can’t be a good thing.
My only concern about the whole thing, is that the DOJ doesn’t know enough about what they don’t know, to achieve the best results for the public at large. Lots of fishing expeditions, but what will they achieve, when all is said and done. It clearly would be best for all concerned if NAR would just “get real”. But that is not likely to happen. So the chips will fall where they may, in the end. My worst fear is that it will end up like the AT&T breakup. My worst fear will likely be the end result, the way things are going so far.
Here’s a few stories from around the real estate blogsphere I found interesting…
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Phil is obviously have some fun in Boise, although others may find his anatomy of a listing he won’t take more relevant to recent RCG conversations…
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Jonathan sends out a blogger’s prayer and some really nice words about RCG.. Thanks!
Fortunately, I ran into Ardell DellaLogia, her blog, and the Rain City Guide. Between her advice and her blog, and the larger Seattle based blog to which she contributed, I got a sense of what a blog could be – articulate, meaningful, educational. And that’s what I decided I wanted and what I’ve strived for, with mixed success.
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The xBroker is clearly and definitely over-the-top. Yet, despite the self-promotion that permeates all of his posts, I really like this guy. In emails and blog posts, he’s come across as someone who is definitely informed and wants to communicate his knowledge… There’s definitely a there, there…
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Tech alert: Greg Linden turned me on to a very interesting post by Google’s Steve Yegge, where he looks at the management of Google through the lens of the Agile programming philosophy. The story would have been good enough, but then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo made it better by comparing the ideas to the (failed) management structure at Enron… All three posts are worth reading (but make sure you have some time!).
Or someone has tried to explain it to you and failed. Whatever the case may be, your problem is solved by the Oprah-style explanation of RSS.
RSS is a way to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs. RSS makes it a lot easier and faster for you to get the storeis you care about from around the web.
I use NetVibes for my RSS feeds because it allows me to organize my feeds into topical groups and to see which stories I haven’t read yet.
[photopress:date.jpg,thumb,alignright]A young couple on a “cheap date” wandered into my Open House yesterday. I can certainly empathize with guys who need to find a way to entertain women on a date, without spending a lot of money. But when the cheap date escalates to cheap ways to look like a bigger man by trying to cut someone else down to size, I have to draw the line.
Any woman who has ever been on a “first date”, knows when a guy is sending back the wine just to look important. I liked the time the waiter said, “You are quite right sir, that is a bad wine. Maybe if you tried one that costs more than $5.99 a bottle, you would find one more to your liking.” Some guys aren’t satisfied with the cheap date scenario, unless they can find a way to go on a cheap date, and look like a big important guy, all at the same time. So what does sending back the wine, and an Open House “date”, have to do with one another?
It starts out innocently enough. The guy follows one of the suggestions for a cheap date noted in the links above, and ends up “walking around Green Lake”. It’s a great first date scenario. It’s free. You can test out if the girl has the stamina to make it around the 2.8 miles a few times, without huffing and puffing or whining that her feet hurt. But after three times around the lake, it gets a little boring. He’s out of ideas on what to talk about. He’s decided he likes this girl, and wants to impress her, but how do you impress a girl when you have no money to stop for dinner at Duke’s?
More than once, both he and she have small talked about how much they like Green Lake, to fill the dead spaces in conversation. So he gets this brilliant idea to pretend he can afford to buy a house nearby. What better way to “pretend” to spend a lot of money, without having to spend a dime? He passes that OPEN SUNDAY sandwich board on the third time around and says, “Do you mind checking out this house with me? I’ve been thinking about buying a house here. Oh, she’s impressed! Mr. couldn’t buy her a snack at World Wraps, is all of a sudden thinking about buying a house, within walking distance to Green Lake. She doesn’t believe a word of it, but she’s bored by this time too, and says sure, let’s go to ALL of the Open Houses.
The big sign out front says, “Open 1-4” and it is only 12:15. They see the door open, as I’m busily doing some last minute sprucing up. Opening the windows and doors to air out the vacant house, making sure there are no dead spiders on the carpet, etc… He pops his head in and says, “I know we are early, but do you mind if we take a peek around?” I can pretty much tell this is a cheap date scenario, and have no trouble playing along, until the guy starts his I’m smarter than you routine, to impress the girl.
I go through the house to turn all of the lights on, and check out the areas I haven’t been to yet. I’m listening to their conversation, and can tell they are not really people looking to buy a house, and in fact hardly know each other. But like I said, that’s fine with me, I have lots to do before one o’clock. They have no “real” questions about square footage of lot or house. No questions about how old the roof or hot water tank are. None of the obvious, we are checking out this house to maybe buy it questions. Everything’s going fine and I’m even playing along with him by answering a few of his questions. I tell him he’s right about a few things, to help him impress the girl. Until he starts hitting me with off the wall questions, one after the other in a non ending stream, to make sure he can impress his girlfriend without being “found out”.
Where does this wire go? I tried to head him off at the pass and show him the brand new electrical box showing that all of the wiring had been up dated, yada yada yada. But he was on a roll of obscure nonsensical questions. “Is this a hot water pipe or a cold water pipe?” Where does this vent go? Why does this pipe turn left instead of right? What year did they install this door? It looks newer. Since the house was built in 1905, and everything was changed at some time or another, I’m quickly figuring out this this could go on all day.
In between his onslaught of off the wall questions, he is turning to the girl and saying, “Now this pipe is a really good pipe, see you can tell by this blah, blah. She’s impressed. She’s so impressed her eyes are glazing over, and she wants to get out of that basement so badly, she’s almost ready to cough up the thirty bucks to go to Duke’s. When the questions just would not stop and I had to get back to the business at hand, I tried to gracefully break away, but no, he had to play the “send back the wine” game with me.
I almost feel badly about spinning him around three times, and making him look like the fool that he was, by the end of “the show”. But some guys just don’t know when to quit while they’re ahead 🙂
As a follow up to Ardell’s post about finding those homes where the owners just didn’t take the time, or have the money/energy to bring the home to retail condition, I’d like to share a few before and after photos. These two sets of photo are from light fixers my wife and I rehabbed last year (our first two, actually). We put about $15K total into each property, and each sold within a week of listing.
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This first set of photos shows the before and after condition of the kitchen in a small rambler up in northeast Marysville. We used the existing cabinets, adding new pulls and hinges for a simple update. New paint, vinyl flooring, appliances and fixtures rounded out the upgrade.
This second set of photos shows how a little paint (and some nice staging) can go a long ways. This home is in Shoreline.
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If we had chosen to do the work ourselves, we could have cut down total rehab costs to close to $10K. Now, on the other hand, as a preview for a future post on major rehabs, here’s a final before and after (total costs for this job in the $120K range). This one is on the market right now, but in the spirit of neutrality, I’m going to hold off on discussing this in detail until after it’s sold.
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