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Meet a Realtor Who Doesn't Sell Houses…

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The NY Times ran an article a few weeks ago on how hard it is for new real estate agents to break into the market (I’d like to the article but it is now behind a password-protected wall, so instead I’ll just link to the Property Grunt’s excellent summary and analysis). This article got me thinking of a way that I could still be very useful to my clients without actually buying or selling any homes.

What’s that? A Realtor who doesn’t buy or sell any homes?

For the next six-months or so, I really won’t be in a position where I can dedicate a significant amount of time to helping clients. (higher priorities! ) But what I would really enjoy doing over the next few months is staying connected to the business by helping buyers and sellers find appropriate agents.

Say that again?

Mariel Kicking a Soccer BallIn my office alone, there are almost 100 real estate agents who would love to have your business (assuming you’re buying or selling a home) and while I don’t know all of these agents, I do know the successful ones . What I would like to do is use my inside knowledge of successful Seattle agents to connect individuals with the right agents.

For example:

  • Are you looking for a condo in Downtown? I know an agent who specializes there!
  • Are you looking to buy land in Woodinville? I know a different agent who specializes there!
  • How about a modern-style home in Seattle? I know a different agent who specializes in modern homes.

Regardless if you’re trying to sell a home, condo, boathouse, townhome, etc., I’ve come into contact with a highly successful agent who specializes in that field. Talk with me, and I’ll connect you with the right person.

Why would I do this?

It is really a win-win-win situation. You get the best representation possible, a successful real estate agent gets one more client, and I can continue to help people in a small but important way. (I’ll also get a small referral fee from the agent…)

By the way, my recommendations are not limited to just people moving to Seattle. I know a few listings agents who go out of their way to please, so if you are currently a Seattle-area homeowner looking to list your house, talk with me before you list. I’m confident that no matter how good your realtor is, I can get you a better one!

What's in a Name?

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[photopress:thor.jpg,thumb,alignright] I like to think that Rain City Guide is constantly growing and evolving… Along those lines, Anna has been doing some growing (and evolving?) of her own lately. (She’s going to kill me for saying that!)

For those that don’t already know, Anna is expecting to have our second child in a little over a month.

So, let’s get down to business… What should we name the child?

Some ground rules:

  1. Boy or Girl: We don’t know if it is a boy or girl, so you’ve got twice as many names to suggest…
  2. Bilingual: Like her big sister, this child will grow up to be fluent in two languages (it is a must since one set of grandparents speak only Russian and the other only speaks English!). While I encourage you to suggest all types of names, if the Russians can’t pronounce it, I’m pretty sure that it won’t end up flying with Anna
  3. Outrageous: I love unusual names. Anna hates them. While I might be able to sneak past a name like Thor or Tyr, you can be pretty sure that we wont’ be naming our child after a major corporation.

Beyond that, I just look forward to reading your suggestions!

Major Upgrade Completed

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I’ve wanted to make some improvements to the layout of Rain City Guide for quite some time, and I finally found some time this weekend to get the changes made and tested.

For those who are curious, here is what I did…

I took a wonderful wordpress theme and started hacking at it in the following ways:

  • Added another column on the right to display my del.icio.us links, called “Worth Noting” (more on this in a minute).
  • Changed the colors around a bit.
  • Added recent comments and recent posts to the sidebar
  • Moved all the buttons down to the footer where they are less distracting (but still useful!)

I also made some more changes to the backend of the system, such as:

  • Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, and
  • Changing the linking structure on the site so that all the pages get a direct link (instead of the “?p=xyz”).

Of all the changes, the one that I like best is the new “worth noting” feature. You might have noticed that a couple of weeks ago I started posting a set of links with a tiny bit of commentary (They always had the title “links for 2005-11-xy”). I REALLY enjoyed putting these collection of links together because it took almost no effort and yet it let me cover a whole lot of ground. However, the feedback that I got from these posts was that they looked ugly and showed that it took no effort to post! 🙂 Hence, I’ve been looking for a better way to display this links… and I’m hoping that the “worth noting” column is the answer.

The links from the Worth Noting column will not show up on the main feed from this site, so if you tend to read Rain City Guide using a feed reader (YEAH!), I also recommend subscribing to my “worth noting” feed. Not sure what a feed reader is? Here’s some background.

And one more last thing about the “worth noting” column that I think is worth noting… I’ve set it up to be a true community-based resource. If you want to post an item with a little bit of commentary to the “worth noting” column, all you have to do is to tag an item using del.icio.us with the phrase “raincityguide”. The link won’t immediately show up because I cache the feed for about an hour, but I assure you that the link and commentary that you write will show up on the site sooner than later. Now, I realize that this method has the potential to be abused, but I think that the readers of rain city guide are generally considerate people, so I’m not too worried. As a matter of fact, I look forward to seeing what links you bring to my attention!

(If you are wondering if this is the RSS announcement I was planning to make, it’s not! There’s still more to come!)

Of course not everything can go too smoothly… There are two issues that escaped my testing that are yet to be resolved:

  1. The search form does not work when searching from within a post (it works from the main page!)

  2. The site simply won’t load using internet explorer on a mac (I get an error that says “Handler could not be removed” which means nothing to me yet!)

Neither of these issues seems like a show stopper, so I’m not going to role back to the old layout… Can you find any other bugs with the new site? I’d definitely like to know.

Now that I’ve given my opinion on the good and the bad of the new layout, I’d be curious to hear what you think!

UPDATE: Solved the search issue thanks to some help on this wonderfully active post for the Regulus theme.

However, since then I’ve also found out that my footer needs some work… So much to do and so little time!

Is Santa Planning on Moving to Seattle?

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I don’t mean to brag, but I was just checking my log files and I noticed that someone from the North Pole found my site while searching for real estate on Google.

I imagine the street level up there is pretty high this time of year. I wonder if one of the elves is thinking of getting out of manufacturing and into a more high-tech job?

[photopress:santa_moving_to_seattle.jpg,full,centered]

Also, if you look closely, you’ll notice that my North Pole visitor had cookies enabled 🙂

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for Real Estate

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Duck Flapping WingsI can tell from some of the questions I got from my past post about RSS feeds that I was going over some people’s heads. As the resident geek here at Rain City Guide, I feel it is my responsibility to explain RSS feeds and why they are so cool… So let’s begin with the big picture…

Who cares about RSS?
Imagine that you could create a newspaper that only included content that you were interested in. Mine definitely would not include tables if yesterday’s stock quotes! But what would it include? My ideal newspaper would be completely personalized to my interests and include this type of information:

  • Current world, local, real estate, transportation, and tech news
  • Commentary from my favorite writers on world news, local news, real estate, transportation and tech issues
  • The latest photos of my friends and family
  • A photo and description of every new home that came on the market in Anna’s market area
  • Upcoming local events
  • Blog articles written by people who are moving to Seattle

But wait! I’ve already got that newspaper and it is delivered (digitally) to one place every day. Even better, it is delivered continuously throughout the day as new articles appear. My newspaper is ALWAYS up-to-date. It includes selected articles from the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the Seattle PI and 4500 other newspapers!. As a matter of fact, I’ve created such an awesome newspaper that I rarely search the web anymore for new content. Just about all the content that I could possible be interested in gets delivered to me! And best of all, this newspaper with articles, commentary, data and photos personalized to my tastes is delivered to me FREE!

How does this work?
Through the magic of RSS.

What is RSS?
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. The idea behind RSS is that a website (newspaper, blog, photo site, etc) publishes a text file on their site with a very specific (RSS) format so that other sites can “ping” this one text file to find the latest news, information, photos (or home listings!). The text file is pretty ugly to look at (here is Rain City Guide’s RSS feed), but that is beside the point, because users should never be looking at a raw RSS feed. Instead, users (that means you!) should get a feed reader that will parse all the ugly text and reformat it in a nice, easy-to-read package.

Have a lost you yet?
Stick with me, and I hopefully you’ll start to see what makes RSS feeds so cool (at least in a geeky sort of way!).

Ducks at LakeWhy go through all the hassle to get a site’s RSS feed when you can just go to the site whenever you’re interested in reading their content?
The beauty of the RSS feed is that updated information is brought to you! Ever since I’ve started using a feed reader, I find myself searching the web for interesting information a lot less because interesting information is brought to me! To give you an idea of the diversity of feeds available, here are some of the things that are delivered to the inbox of my feed reader every time new information is published:

I mention these items just to give you a picture of the diversity of feeds that are available. In reality, over 100 of my feeds are all from bloggers, but the options for different feeds are massive and growing every day. I’ve really enjoyed being able to read articles and see photos from all of these sources within one place (a feed reader!), which brings me to…

So where do I get one of these feed readers so that I can create my own on-line newspaper?
There are a ton of feed readers available. Some of them are desktop-based and some are web-based. Most of my experience has been on the following three web-based options, so I’m going to limit my opinion to these three, but feel free to search beyond my experience:

I began using MyYahoo years ago, and then a while back (months? years?) they added the ability to add any RSS feed to a user’s MyYahoo page. I took advantage of this and enjoyed it so much that MyYahoo page became extremely cluttered. I clearly needed a better option which is when I turned to Bloglines. Bloglines allows you to categorize your feeds into an unlimited number of folders and it does a great job of keeping track of which articles you’ve already read, making it extremely popular and easy-to-use program. Plus it is 100% web-based so that if you log into the service and read an article on one computer (let’s say at work) then when you log in from home, your home computer will know that you’ve already read that article… Bloglines is a great way to keep up on your favorite news, blogs, etc.

Ducks PlayingI’ve also been playing around with Google’s new feed reader called GoogleReader. It’s a great option as well and I really like that it has an “relevance” option that brings the things I’m most likely to be interested in to the top of my list of things to read.

What’s next?
My hope is that if you’re new to RSS feeds, then at least you are starting to see that they have a ton of potential. They are everywhere and Scobleizer (over at Microsoft) would even argue that they are essential for new web companies! Feeds are only going to become more popular, so if you want to be a web-savvy individual, it is time to hop on the band wagon and try it out!

And if you’ve made it this far, you’ll start to notice orange RSS “badges” all over the web. These badges are letting you know that you can read this site’s content from your blog reader.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to assume you are using GoogleReader… To add Rain City Guide to GoogleReader, here is what you need to do:

  1. Go to GoogleReader
  2. In the search box, type is “Rain City Guide” and click “Search for New Content”.
  3. Where you see “Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide”, click on the Subscribe button. This will add Rain City Guide’s RSS feed to your GoogleReader.

It is that simple to add a feed. In addition, most sites offer an “+ to XYZ” buttons like this one (Add to Google) from Google. There are bunch more feed readers on the market, and I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to add Rain City Guide, so I’ve added a button for all the ones that I’m aware of on my sidepanel.

Also, if you are interested in real estate feeds, feel free to grab the real estate feeds that I follow by downloading this file to your hard-drive and using the “import” feature within GoogleReader to add these feeds. (To do this you will need to (1) click on “Your Subscriptions” and (2) on the pull down menu that says “more actions”, click on “import”. Then (3) just follow the instructions to import the XML file.)

So why all the big fuss about RSS feeds? And what does this have to do with real estate?
I’ve been playing around with some ideas I have for an RSS feed of real estate listings and before I announce anything, I needed to have a post I could turn to where I could say “This is what an RSS feed is and why you should care!” There’s nothing I’m ready to present yet, but if you’re interested in being an alpha-tester, let me know and I’ll pass along a link soon enough!

Growing Rain City Guide…

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Russian GenealogyI noticed yesterday that this site has started to get hits from google on the search term “real estate”. I did a little more digging and found that Rain City Guide still doesn’t rank that high on standard google searches, but on Google’s Blogsearch, I’m now one of the top five sites that it returns for “real estate”

This reminded me of a post I put together last march (before Rain City Guide existed!) on Anna’s first real estate blog. Back then I was still trying to figure out What does it take to be a successful real estate blogger?” I just reread the article for the first time in months and I’m amazed at how much that article set the stage for everything that has become Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide. I thought I’ve give my thoughts on how this site has evolved, but first I’m going to take us back to my initial thoughts on a real estate blog:

What does it take to be a successful real estate blogger?
What does it mean to be a successful real estate blogger?

I’ve been asking myself these questions a lot lately as I try to figure out where I should take this site. Where does one start? Google, or course! So I searched “Real Estate Blog”:
Google Search: real estate blog

Of course, generating traffic is of the highest priority, so I want my site to rank high in google searches… So what are:
Southern California Real Estate Blog and Toronto at Home doing “right” so that they rank so high?

1) The highest ranking site, the S. Cal. blog, is using blogger technology. (They have a ***.blogspot address, just like me.) Neither of the top two sites hosts their own site under their own domain (such as www.annaluther.com), which makes me think that I should be content and satisfied with my site location. In addition, the S. Cal site has the poster’s names in it highlighting the fact that the domain doesn’t really matter (in other words, the domain doesn’t have to say “seattle” or “real estate” in order to rank high. The content of, and links to, likely matters much more.
2) Both of the top two sites add a blog entry at least every other day.
3) The top site has been blogging since Aug 2003 (1 1/2 years), the second site only since Nov 2004 (5 months) (at least that is as far as the archives go back.
4) Both place links to other real estate bloggers in prominent places on their website.
5) S. Cal blog is chatty with general updates (spring cleaning, flipping real estate, etc.), while Toronto’s site is loaded with longer articles that would be right at home in a Realtor magazine.
6) Toronto’s blog is particularly slick and is loaded with links to good information!!! The clean photo of the blogger at his laptop sets the mood for the entire site.
7) Each entry on Toronto’s blog is categorized by type of information. This is quite nifty and very easy to use.
8) Both sites are very well integrated with a website (lots of links back and forth). My preference is to not keep up a traditional website, but instead, just find a way to host files that I can link to… I’ll have to think on that one.

In summary, I think the Toronto blog looks a lot better, and I imagine with time, it will surpass the S. Cal Blog in google searches simply because it offers more and better information.
Did I answer the question of what it takes to be a real estate blogger? Definitely not completely, but I’m getting some ideas…

So what’s changed since I did my research 9 months ago? And why did this post affected the development of Rain City Guide? I’ll follow up on each of the numbered points:

  1. Shortly after writing this first comment, I splurged and bought a domain name (raincityguide.com) and a hosting service. While I still believe I could have had a very successful blog using blogger, I really wanted some additional features (like the ability to address comment #7) that simply are not available on the Blogger platform!
  2. I learned that a blog needs to be fed regularly, and I think I’ve been pretty good about that…
  3. Rain City Guide has been up for 8 months and is only now starting to rank high in google searches.
  4. I’ve added links to my favorite bloggers. I’m pretty good about trading links with any relevant site that has good content to offer users!
  5. I’d like to think that I’ve learned from both sites. We try to keep things relatively informal (chatty?) on Rain City Guide while remembering that every once in a while, you have to provide some good meat to chew on!
  6. More than anything, I learned that I really wanted to personalize the site. Knowing that I would be using lots of photos from Wendy Baker’s digital photo library, I added four “Seattle-only” photos to the title bar.
  7. I really wanted the ability to add categories (and photo libraries, calendars, etc), so I moved Anna’s original blog from Blogger to WordPress. I’ve really enjoyed exploring all the options available with WordPress, so I’m glad I made the move early on.
  8. As you may have noticed, I haven’t even bothered putting together a regular website for Anna. If I end up getting a really good home search tool built for this site (I’m working at it very slowly), then I may throw up a more generic site… but I’m not even sure that will be necessary.

Interestingly, my prediction that the Toronto blog would pass up the S. Cal Blog (now simply called “The Real Estate Blog”) on Google searches turned out to be correct. Toronto at Home has moved to #1, while The Real Estate Blog has dropped to #4. Nonetheless, they are both great sites, and I’ve learned a ton from both of them!

Do you have any comments on the direction of Rain City Guide? Would you like to see us cover a different part of the real estate scene in Seattle? You should always feel free to email us or leave a comment on any of the postings!

More on Trulia and their attitude

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I noticed that I’m getting a bunch of hits going to my “general real estate” category. It’s odd because it doesn’t appear that any of you are coming from another webpage (there’s no “referrer”). Is there an email being passed around linking people to my website? If so, I’d be very interested in seeing this email! Can you forward a copy to anna@raincityguide.com?

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the email is probably titled “More on Trulia.com and their attitude.”

spam filters, google ads and site statistics, oh my!

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I’ve made a few changes to the site recently and it seems like a good time to give some updates…

  • I added a new spam filter that has completely eliminated the amount of comment and trackback spam that I was getting. It worries me somewhat that I’ve not had one comment (besides my own test comments) since I added this filter. If you are trying to leave a comment and it does not work, please let me know via email!
  • I took down the google ads off the sidepanel and moved them to the bottom of individual posts. They seem more fitting there and hopefully you’ll find them more useful.
  • I added a site stat program, MapStats, that displays where site visitors are coming from via google maps. It is a really slick program and if you’re curious how many visitors that this site is getting (and where they are coming from), you can click on this tag Blog Flux MapStats: Stats and Counter for Rain City Real Estate Guide to find out.

I think I’m done with tweaking the site for a while. Now it is time for me to get back to providing updates on the Seattle real estate market!

map stats for rcg

Keeping up with the Jones’…

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Mariel wearing cowboy hatAndy over at MyEastBayAgent recently posted an article on how to use blog aggregators (and in particular bloglines) to keep track of your favorite blogs. I’ve wanted to post something similar for a while, but rather than repeat his good information, I’ll just second his opinion that bloglines is an excellent web application and give some background on how I use it.

I’ve tried out a few other blog aggregators, but I keep going back to bloglines because it is simple to use and offers some compelling features. In particular, the web-based nature of the service means that it automatically keeps track of the blogs I’ve read regardless of the computer that I read them on…

Here’s how you can get started with bloglines.

  1. Register at bloglines
  2. Subscribe to any and all blogs that you like to read.
  3. bookmark and then check back in at http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs on a regular basis

Are you looking for some blogs to subscribe to? Please feel free to browse the blogs that I follow. If you like any of them, then while you are browsing that blog on bloglines, you should see a “subscribe” text near the top right of the page. Click on that link and follow the instructions to add that blog to your bloglines’ blogroll.

If you are looking to add my blog, it is as simple as clicking on this button:

  • Subscribe with Bloglines

However, I’m well aware that not everyone uses bloglines, so here are some easy buttons to add Rain City Guide to many more of the blogs aggregators that you may be using:

  • add to My Yahoo!
  • my msn
  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • Subscribe with RocketInfo
  • Add http://raincityguide.com to your Kinja digest

By the way, as far as I know, all of these buttons work. However, if you find an issue with any of them, I’d definitely be interested in hearing about it!

And on a side note, I recently had a chat with a friend (who also happens to be a technology evangelist) about the fact that we both had 9 people subscribed to our blogs via Bloglines… We’re both very interested in bumping our numbers up, but it is going to take readers like you to make that happen! 🙂

green living resources

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Sand Storm at Burning ManI recently added some links on my sidepanel to some environmental resources that I’ve found interesting and/or helpful. Below are the sites along with a little description of why I decided to highlight them.

FreeCycle Seattle “lets you find new homes for things you no longer use and receive what you need–free! Clean out your house, save good stuff from the landfill, and help others at the same time.” The site is similar to the “free” section in most classified ads except EVERYTHING is free… A lot of good stuff turns up on this site, although it is often gone pretty quickly as the turnover rate is quite high.

GreenClean is “the environmentally sound guide to cleaning your home.” While promoting their book by the same name (GreenClean), the site gives some good advice and background on cleaning with the environment in mind.

ReStore has field crews that pick up, salvage, and dismantle building material all over the larger Puget Sound region and central Washington. They offer “quality building and home improvement materials, a wide variety of services including sales, pick-up, salvage, and whole building deconstruction.” Their store in Ballard is filled with hard-to-find materials like old bricks, stones, doors, lamps, etc. If you have an old Seattle home (like I do!), this store can be great source of “original” materials.

Rocky Mountain Institute “is an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization that fosters the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. We do this by inspiring business, civil society, and government to design integrative solutions that create true wealth.” Based on the 30 years that they’ve spent researching efficiency improvements in everything from water to cars, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins at the RMI offer a glimpse into the environmentally-friendly future that we can create. The book they wrote with Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism, is a must read for anyone who wants understand how businesses (even small real estate companies!) can learn from natural processes to create positive impacts that benefit us all.

Tree Hugger “The Future is Green. Find it Here.” This blog offers frequent updates on environmental issues and products. Far from being an activist site, the blog is more likely to engage your “environmental aesthetic”. Even so, it is a fun blog to read with lots of good content.

Do you have another environmental-related links that real-estate minded readers might find helpful? Share the wealth by leaving a comment.