Tag Archives: real-estate

Is MyBlogLog Good Social Networking Porn?

Posted on by
27

[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.

Hot or Not?

Posted on by

(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

I need friends!

Posted on by
42

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…

Posted on by
21

[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

Posted on by
16

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.

Rain City Guide Year In Review

Posted on by
10

The most popular articles on RCG from this past year as measured in total hits:

(I encourage all RCG contributors to do something similar):

  • 10 Great Conversations. This was the first of my “list” posts and was a lot of fun to put together…
  • The Best Online Real Estate Marketing Time Can Buy. Getting people to return to your site day in and day out is simple (but not easy)… Be interesting!
  • Improving Online Home Valuations? I like this article mainly because it jump-started a bunch of internal discussions at Move about real estate blogging.
  • Plus How to Link. I include this one because I’m often shocked at how many real estate agents think they can blog without linking…
  • Paying for the Privilege of Marginalization. I don’t think the real estate community at large has really come to grips with what it means to take part in some of these online classified sites and the tech-savvy agents seem to have given into their fatalistic instincts in terms of their industry as a whole. Fascinating stuff that borders on the “can’t tread there anymore” territory for me… 🙂

And finally, I found it particularly fun to read the slew of interviews I did at the beginning of last year. Lots of stuff has changed in a year in real estate blogging, but not as much as you might think!

An SEO Update…

Posted on by
6

My guess is that there is still a lot of interest from real estate professionals on how to use SEO (search engine optimization) to drive (free!) traffic to your site. With that in mind, I thought I’d keep people updated on the little SEO experiment I started a week ago. As you’ll likely see, the results so far have been somewhat mixed.

First the worst news: Google dropped RCG out of the simple search [Seattle Real Estate] (at least on the first few pages). RCG has been in the top 10 for at least a year, so this is quite surprising! (Over the past year, this term has driven about 3% of the new users to RCG, which might not seem like a lot, but it is the most dominant driver of traffic to the site. No other phrase even comes close.

Better news is that after eliminating some of the pages and focusing on only a few tabs on the top of the page, the results for searching like [agent recommendations] has been much better. (RCG is #1 on Google!)

Also of interest, it took less than a week for RCG to now appear on the front page of some obvious searches like [Seattle Real Estate blog] on both MSN and Yahoo. I think this bodes well for the future as these sites do a better job indexing RCG thanks to the keyword and title changes I made.

For comparison purposes, I’ve decided to see how the site has changed using these days:

  • Pre SEO changes: Nov 12th through the 16th
  • Post SEO changes: Dec 10th through the 14th

Considering the changes in the status on the big search engines on the big search terms, not much as changed in terms of overall traffic:

  • Google. Pre: 1738, Post: 1568
  • MSN. Pre: 41, Post: 42
  • Yahoo. Pre: 28, Post: 25
  • Ask. Pre: 22, Post: 15
  • Technorati. Pre: 21, Post: 34

The overall Google traffic decreased 10%, while there was virtually no change from the other search engines. I included Technorati thinking that would be the “control” that wouldn’t be affected by SEO, but of course, that is the ONLY site that increased substantially! Go Figure!

Redfin's Maven of "The Mavens"

Posted on by
7

[photopress:hoffman__s.jpg,full,alignright] What a lovely unexpected surprise! When Kevin Boer of Three Oceans called to ask if we could have coffee during his whirlwind tour of Seattle, we “group dated” with Redfin’s Marie Hagman. Redfin’s new “Maven of the Mavens” I’ve already signed up to get an auto email with every new “Sweet Digs” entry. It automatically comes up as San Francisco, so be sure to hit the drop down menu and put in Seattle.

Marie assures us that the seven bloggers selected from the 300 or so that replied to Redfin’s Craig’s List Ad, just turned out to be ALL WOMEN destined to be in the running for next year’s Top Ten! Hey, that only leaves three spots for all of the rest of us.

Redfin’s Rule stated that none of the bloggers could be real estate licensees. Sweet Digs is very cool, and very much the answer to Galen’s prayers. As non-licensees they are free from all of the weight and chains of rules, rules and more rules, and they are just blogging away to their heart’s content. And I DO mean their “heart’s content” as all were chosen, Marie included, based on their passion for anything real estate and their ability to write with that same passion.

And OH MY GOD!…the Eastside Sweet Digger is Jessi Princiotto…cool enough to have her photo taken by cell phone while in the car…I can’t wait to meet her…I can’t wait to read her…and my side of town to boot!! How lucky can I get! My East Coast fix and local real estate reading all wrapped into one!

Congratulations ladies. Marie and Jessi, we’re calling ahead to Hoffman’s for that torte…just name the day and time.

Oh, and Kevin and Kim were there too LOL. My partner Kim Harris (far right in the photo) and Kevin Boer (left of Kim). Kevin is definitely going home with some stories, and hopefully some insight, into how very different the Seattle Market is from his neck of the woods.

Kevin asked, “What do you say when a ‘Redfin Buyer’ calls and says, “I want to see your listing RIGHT NOW!!”, LOL. I answered “Same thing I say to ANY buyer who says I want to see your listing RIGHT NOW!!” Redfin Buyers don’t exactly grow horns, by definition. We had a fun chat. This is Seattle, very few times do we meet people that are ornery, nasty or unreasonable. It’s a great town with a lot of great people…even “Redfin Buyers”.

Have a safe trip back to CA, Kevin! Great meeting you and thanks for the intro to Marie.

Faster than fast, Quicker than quick, Ka-chow!

Posted on by
4

While spending quality time w/ the Cars addict in my family (the 3 year old who says “I wanna see the race car movie Daddy”) got me thinking about something that moves faster than Lightning McQueen, the relentless march of high technology.

A couple weeks ago, Real Central VA, had a link to an interesting NAR Center for REALTOR Technology survey on what agents/brokers plan to spend on technology.

Some of the more interesting findings were

  • 95% of agents use digital cameras
  • 90% of them use cell phones
  • 77% of them use PCs
  • 71% have web business sites
  • 60% of agents have IDX search features on their web site
  • Sites with IDX listings generate more leads than sites without listings.
  • 30% of agents spent more than $2000 on technology in 2005
  • Less than 15% of those participating in lead generation programs are satisfied with the results.
  • 67% of agents want their broker to expand their technology offerings.
  • 84% of agents want the MLS to expand the technology and service offered.
  • Most internet leads come from broker web sites or agent web sites
  • Realtor.com was the 3rd largest source of internet leads
  • The Internet is the third most important source of leads (after referrals and repeat business), it is surprising that the majority of agents spent less than $500 to build or maintain their website, and that a super majority of brokers (67%) spent less than $1,000.

The net take away for me was that agents and brokers have an appetite for technology second only to MindCamp attendees, and yet the vast majority of them probably spend more money at Starbucks in given year than they do on their web sites! Given the importance of internet leads, the effectiveness of broker / agent web sites in capturing them, the disappointing effectiveness of lead generation problems, and appetite for more technology it seems to me that the industry on a whole is seriously under investing in technology. There are exceptions of course, but it seems that real estate tech spending is going to have to trend up. Otherwise the tech leaders around here, both inside & outside the industry (RedFin, John L Scott, CB Bain, Zillow, Trulia, etc) will increasingly make real estate professionals look like real estate amateurs.

So where are your tech dollars going in the next year? How much do you plan on spending? How will technology change how and where you use your marketing budgets? More Zillow, Craigslist, and Google ads, and less paper-based ones?