Danger Will Robinson!

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18

[photopress:lis_robot.jpg,thumb,alignright]The MLS data is already “Garbage IN” today, before noon on the first day of the new year.

Not only is garbage going in, but it is also coming out, with some VERY popular public search sites showing properties as “ZERO days on market” that are NOT new listings.

Well, at least those trying to fool the public ended up the fools.  Yes folks, same glitch this year as last year.  Agents who jumped in without testing the water first, thinking they would get that NEW mls sequence of 27xxxxxx…failed in their efforts.  The clock didn’t start over and so re-entering their old listing to get a 2007 number didn’t work.  Kind of falls into that “You can’t kid a kidder” arena.

Yes an agent IS allowed to “get a new number” IF there is a huge price change, or the owner takes the property off and puts in a brand new kitchen.  In other words there are some exceptions to the rule.  But most of the ones who tried to “grab the brass ring” today, did so against the rules.  Same price.  Same old listing.  Just trying to get a new number. 

But the real “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON” message here is to the consumer’s seeing ZERO days on market!  Do NOT run over there to be the first to see it, and the first to get an offer in, without first checking the REAL property history on “purported to be new” listings.

Is MyBlogLog Good Social Networking Porn?

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[photopress:Rain_City_Guide___MyBlogLog___Mozilla_Firefox_12_30_2006_3_27_30_AM.jpg,thumb,alignright]Because it has become somewhat ubiquitous around the real estate blogosphere, I started playing around on MyBlogLog about three days ago… Here is what I’ve done so far:

  • Added a bunch of contacts (pretty much anyone I recognize from the blogosphere) who happened to show up as I cruised people and website profiles.
  • Added Rain City Guide as a site and invited the other RCG authors as I found them using the system (only two so far).
  • Left a bunch of messages for people including one for Rudy letting him know that I still didn’t get the purpose of the site… His response was that it is easier to connect with people using this tool than via email.

Probably the “coolest” feature is that you can “see” who is visiting your site… I’ll keep this feature since it costs me nothing despite the fact that it misses out on a substantial number of users who consumer RCG posts and comments via RSS…

Renthusiast is concerned about how easy it for someone else to claim your blog…

Overall

My reaction is that it is so easy to connect with people on this system that the tool borders on the pointless… If I want to connect to someone on the internet, I’ll link to them. Do I really need a tool to connect with people?

Is connecting too easy? The obvious answer is yes… One soft-core porn blogger (bless her heart) decided to add Rain City Guide as one of her communities… To the general internet public, porn is vastly more interesting than real estate… Now when I look at statistics to see “What My Members Clicked on Other Sites Today” (which is a really cool idea in theory) it is loaded with porn sites like PornoTube (I’m not providing a link to the site, you’ll have to type it in the address bar yourself!).

Anyway, I’ve given the site three days and now my “pro” account has run out and they want me to upgrade to paying them a monthly fee for site stats and other unspecified “community” features. I’ll pass.

When real estate agents practice law…

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Bad things can happen. I recently worked on a matter where seller signed an offer. The offer included an escalation clause and indicated that the the legal description was “to be attached.” However, the offer also included the tax parcel number. The listing agent attached a new addendum stating the sale price as a sum certain (calculating the price based on the terms of the escalation clause) and attaching the legal description. The seller initialed these “changes” and sent them to the buyer for the buyer’s approval. All other terms of the offer were unchanged and accepted by the seller.

Before getting a response from the buyer, the seller received another, substantially better offer from a second buyer. The listing agent informed his client that he could still revoke the first offer and accept the second because, when the offer was returned with a legal description and a sum certain sale price, it constituted a counteroffer. Thus, according to the agent, as long as the seller rescinded the “counteroffer” before it was accepted by the buyer, there would be no contract with the first buyer and the seller could enter into a contract with the second buyer.

Unfortunately, the seller took the listing agent’s counsel and proceeded to rescind the “counteroffer” and sign the second offer. The first buyer promptly hired an attorney, who promptly threatened legal action. The buyer’s attorney reasoned that, when the seller signed the offer, there was mutual acceptance of the terms of the offer, and thus a contract was created. The contract contained a tax parcel number, thus satisfying the requirement for a legal description. Moreover, to be enforceable, a contract requires either a specific price or a mechanism by which a specific price can be determined. Because the offer contained an escalation clause, it probably satisfied this legal requirement as well. This attorney’s reasoning was sound and the seller had a significant legal problem as a result of selling the same house twice.

Thus, the seller was subjected to potential liability on a breach of contract claim by the first buyer (or the second buyer, depending on which contract he breached when he sold to the other buyer). While real estate agents are allowed to engage in the limited practice of law by completing blanks in pre-printed forms, they are not allowed to provide legal analysis or counsel to their clients. In this situation, the agent did just that. If you have a question or concern about your legal rights and obligations at any point in the transaction, you rely on your agent’s input at your peril. An agent, no matter how experienced, is not an attorney and may not give you good — or even competent — advice.

Hot or Not?

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(Editor’s Note: I’m very excited to introduce Jillayne Schlicke as the latest contributor to RCG! You might recognize her from the interesting comments she’s been leaving on RCG recently or from her contributions to the Seattle Real Estate Professionals blog. In addition to playing an active role in the blogoshere, she runs BPI Consulting Education and Training which provides consulting in ethics, compliance, conflict resolution, and communications, and provides continuing education to the professions including the professionals within the mortgage lending and real estate industries. Please feel free to contact her at jillayne@bpiconsulting.net or simply leave a comment below!)

I was out of town over Christmas and picked up a USA Today from the hotel lobby. In the Friday, Dec 22nd edition there’s an article called “Buying Your First Home Can be Intense

First Sunny Day Since Halloween?

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[photopress:sunny.jpg,thumb,alignright]We ARE having a gorgeous, sunny day here in Seattle.  But really, the FIRST SUNNY DAY since Halloween?

According to the King County Journal and the National Weather Service, it is. 

“Today the National Weather Service is predicting clear skies and a high of 40. If that prediction holds, today will qualify as the first official sunny day since Halloween, nearly two months ago. The National Weather Service defines a sunny day as one in which the sky was less than 30 percent covered in clouds.”

I swear I have seen the sun PLENTY since Halloween, but as I say…”It’s always sunnier in Kirland” for some reason”.  Anyone know why it would be sunnier in Kirkland?

I need friends!

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Despite my preference for blogs, (I really dislike the peer pressure games associated with almost all online social networks), I’ve been diving into a bunch of other platforms over the past two weeks (call it “work research”).

If you are on any of these, please consider sending an invite to me at dustin (at) raincityguide (dot) com.

If I’m missing a social network that you really like, please feel free to clue me in!

Also, one glaring hole in my social network is ActiveRain. The first reader to (1) send me an invite to ActiveRain AND (2) an invite to connect on at least two other social networks gets the credit for me joining up! 🙂 I’m now an ActiveRain Blogger! Thank you Cheryl of NELALive.

Move Along…

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[photopress:selling_peaches.jpg,full,alignright]Thanks to both Ardell and Joel, I’ve been tapped to list five things you may not know about me… Not sure where to start, I decided to focus today’s theme on some fun jobs (but I won’t go so far as to take you back to the days of selling fruit on the streets of LA! LOL):

1) At 16 years old, I spent the summer working as an ice cream scooper at a Haagen Dazs shop in Paris. At the time (early 90s), Haagen Dazs was all the rage in Europe, so it felt like I was in the center of the universe. Needless to say, I learned a lot working around a bunch of older (early 20s!) Parisian models for a summer, although my French never got very good because all the girls wanted to learn to speak “American” as oppose to their school-taught “English”. One of the highlights (that I can discuss in a real estate blog) was blasting Nirvana on the shops speakers (loud!) after-hours while closing the shop down. At the time, Nirvana’s Nevermind album had not yet been released in Europe (at least everyone around acted like it had not!), so having a copy turned out to be a HUGE hit.

2) The next career arc came during my UC Santa Cruz years when I was studying Environmental Studies… At 19, I drove to Alaska to work for consumer interesting group, AKPirg, in order campaign for “Campaign Finance Reform”. (I find it more than mildly amusing that 10 years later, their lead issue is still campaign finance reform.) While raising money and making a big fuss about all things political and environmental, I was getting paid to travel around the state and made many national park stops! Grizzlies in Denali, hiking under glaciers in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and that long, long, long Alaskan highway are all unforgettable experiences… I guess I wasn’t so bad at raising money for causes, because later in the summer I was asked to work for the USPirg office in Chapel Hill and was given the hilarious opportunity to canvass Jesse Helms in an effort to get him to join the Sierra Club! I guess I don’t have Bono’s magnetism, because despite a good 15 minute conversation, I couldn’t get him to join up for even the basic membership! 🙁

3) At 22, while studying Engineering at UC Berkeley, I decided to spend a summer working as a student-researcher for the Pavement Research Center. Believe it or not, this was a fascinating job that brought me up and down (and up and down) the state taking samples from test pavements in order to see the effects of some experimental pavement mixtures under different conditions. The pavement job was really good to me (financially), so I was able to stash some cash away for the school year and still take my girlfriend, Anna, on a cross-country trip via drive-away cars for the last few weeks before school started.

Our first assignment was to drive a car to Charlotte, NC (from Berkeley, CA) and we took I-40 almost all the way. Some of our stops including an evening in Las Vegas, a day on Lake Mead, hiking around the Grand Canyon, wondering in Santa Fe, eating huge steaks in Oklahoma City, dancing (and more dancing) at Elvis Week in Memphis, visiting the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, and shopping in Atlanta. For the return trip, we took the northern route (roughly I-80) with stops along the backroads of West Virginia (just in time to watch Bill Clinton give his famous mea culpa speech at our hotel room), a county fair in Kentucky, a Second City performance in Chicago, the Iowa State Fair, an evening in Boulder, CO, a hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and a hike on the Great Salt Lake. The kicker is that we did all of this in just a little over two weeks!

4) After graduating from Berkeley, I spent the first seven years of my professional career as a planner/engineer for a transportation consulting firm. This was interesting work in that I got to spend a lot of time working with local government officials to improve their transportation, and in particular their transit, systems. I worked all over the west coast for clients like BART, SF MUNI, SCAG, MAG, Portland’s Metro, and King County Metro, Sound Transit, WSDOT and the City of Seattle and became somewhat of an expert in travel demand modeling and GIS. Despite lots of good opportunities ahead (transportation in every American city will get worse before it gets better!), I knew it was time to look for new opportunities when Rain City Guide started to take off…

5) About eight months ago, I jumped off the engineering bridge and went to work for Move. One of the things I’ve learned is that while the technology (or secret sauce) behind large websites can be complex, it is the business development and marketing opportunities that most interest me. Hence, about a month ago, I switched out of our product development team and into our marketing team (although things are never that simple… :)). Probably the best news (at least for me) is that this switch means I’ll be able to come out of my dark cave and blog a bit more during the next year!

No perpetuation of memes from me! 🙂

Mash-up 101 – Virtual Earth

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After reading Dustin’s Blog Posts on a Map?, RedFin’s big coding contest, and the lack of “more interesting things” to blog about (Sorry, I can only whine about the MLS before I start repeating myself), I’ve decided to show folks how to create a simple Real Estate mash-up. I want to upgrade Zearch to the latest Virtual Earth technology (I’m still using version 2, but the current version is version 4) during the Christmas break, so I figured I might as well share the knowledge I’ll be gaining from that experience.

Mash-up 101: Virtual Earth

Prequisites: Basic Computer Literacy, HTML 101

Hello class, welcome to Mash-up 101. In today’s session we will learn how create web page that contains a Virtual Earth map control. It’s easier than you might think!

First you need to fire up your favorite text editor (Professionally, I usually use SlickEdit 11 or Visual Studio 2005, but I’ll use the world famous Notepad text editor for today’s class). Then and create an empty web page and save it to your desktop.

<html>
<head>
<title>Mash-up 101: Virtual Earth</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first <b>Virtual Earth</b> mash-up.
</body>
</html>

HTML (which stands for hypertext markup language). HTML is the language used for creating web pages (it what you see, when you click View Source in your favorite web browser). All those funny <html>, <head>,<title>, <body>, and <b> things you typed in are HTML tags. When a web browser loads a web page, it reads the tags to determine how a web page should appear and behave. If the following is over your head, you should to take HTML 101 before you read any further.

OK, now that we have a simple page, we need to create our map control. First we need add a <div> tag that will be the container for our map when we are finished and we need to add a <script> tag which will download the map control’s code onto the page. Next we need to add an event handler to the <body> tag so the browser will call our code and create the <script> block that contains it.

<html>
<head>
<title>Mash-up 101: Virtual Earth</title>
<script src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v4/mapcontrol.js" ></script>
</head>
<body onload="loadmap()">
<script>
function loadmap()
{
alert("Are you ready for some mash-ups?");
}
</script>
<div id="VEMap" style="position: relative; border: solid 1px black; width: 600; height: 400"></div>
This is my first <b>Virtual Earth</b> mash-up.
</body>
</html>

Now, you have a boring page with an empty rectangle that pops up an alert! Big deal you say? Well, hang on sports fans, here comes the cool part. Pay attention now.

We now need to change our loapmap function so it will create a map of our choosing. The following Javascript code will create an aerial map around the Space Needle.

var vemap = new VEMap(‘VEMap’);
var vepoint = new VELatLong(47.62, -122.349);
vemap.LoadMap(vepoint, 17, ‘a’);

The first line of code creates a Virtual Earth map control. The second line of code defines a latitude & longitude (in this case, a couple yards south of the Space Needle). The last line of code tells the map control to create a map view that is an aerial map, a 100 yards or so above the Space Needle. Put it all together, and you’re code should look something like this…

<html>
<head>
<title>Mash-up 101: Virtual Earth</title>
<script src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v4/mapcontrol.js" ></script>
</head>
<body onload="loadmap()">
<script>
function loadmap()
{
var vemap = new VEMap('VEMap');
var vepoint = new VELatLong(47.62, -122.349);
vemap.LoadMap(vepoint, 17, 'a');
}
</script>
<div id="VEMap" style="position: relative; border: solid 1px black; width: 600; height: 400"></div>
This is my first <b>Virtual Earth</b> mash-up.
</body>
</html>

Word of warning, WordPress is a lousy HTML code editor. It changes and breaks things after you save them. (Or at least Dustin’s deployment of it on RCG does). Anyway, if you have trouble getting things to work make sure you replace all the forward, backward quotation marks with the standard quotation marks or apostrophies. Otherwise, goto http://www.annaluther.com/mashup.html to see what a working version of this example looks like.

Assuming there’s a demand for another class, future classes will cover the joys of pushpins, how to create a Google Maps mash-up or other more advanced topics.