Last night it was a bit of a late night, chasing down a bug I had introduced into my property listing database. I got that squared away around midnight or so, so once the bug hunting was done I was able to finish up the project I was working on when I first saw the problem, my page of Roseville Listings by Price and Area.
The bug is fixed, so tomrrow I can go after a few cosmetic bugs there and call it a day on that section of the Roseville listings, at least.
Several months back I published a link to a Sacramento Zip Code map that another webmaster had published. It was amazing how many people clicked through to the blog post with that link, so clearly lots of folks are interested in finding out where one zip code begins and another ends. I guess snail mail is still popular.
Ever since, every so often I’d think to myself that I wanted a better zip code map if I could lay my hands on one. Better in this case meant something resizable, clickable, that sort of thing — the kind of thing someone publishing web pages containing real estate in certain zip codes or another would consider “better”.
Also, better meant I’d be able to use it without spending a lot of money and / or violating someone else’s copyright, which I had a feeling the guy I was linking to was doing.
Well, it turns out that everything I found was either worse, very expensive, or also subject to copyright.
As I was looking into how to get Googlemaps to do such a trick, I came across Matt Cutts’ Fun With Zip Codes article, which has little enough to do with Googlemaps (except by way of showing you what you might need to know once you’ve looked up the appropriate Googlemaps API, which is GPolygon). But the article does show you to have fun with zip codes (as promised), if by fun you mean using an open source plotting tool and US census data to draw the picture above.
Well, yes, that’s fun, assuming one can make James Joyce roll over in his grave at the same time.
The other day I mentioned that I had begun work on some new software to enable me to display more listings in many different ways — by city, price, subdivision, or what have you. When complete, this software will unify and supplant the three or four different scripts and exports I run to provide the Sacramento duplex, new homes, and condo listings on this site, and the Granite Bay subdivision listings on that site.
This project is progressing fairly well, somewhat better than expected in fact, so I should have something to show for it in a week or less. I say it’s going better than expected partly because PHP makes coding to mysql easier than expected. I always knew PHP was a cakewalk, but it’s even more of a joy to work in a full LAMP environment.
It’s also going better than expected because I have a tendency to announce and begin projects that don’t get finished. This one’s looking like it won’t fall into that category.
I guess I’m not the only one whoever did this sort of thing, because there’s a tee shirt for that, too.
I should probably become a ThinkGeek affiliate if I’m going to keep this up. Until I do, I should have this disclosure:
If you click on one of these ThinkGeek links, I make a 0% commission.
I’ve published some comparative real estate data for the following Sacramento Counties: Sacramento, Amador, El Dorado, and Placer.
It’s pretty dry stuff, even for me, but you might enjoy it if you know without looking it up what the shirt at right is about.
If you do know what the shirt at right is about without looking it up, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this as well, and you’ll realize that this shirt is actually real estate related.
Word of honor: I will work on being less obtuse.
I know the quantity of my posts has slacked off somewhat lately.
Once again: work cuts a hole in my whole day.
Actually, in real estate, one’s work is as likely to cut a hole well into one’s evening instead, sometimes leaving your days pretty laid back to catch up on paperwork. Last night was a personal record, I think, as I was still talking to a buyer and working on an offer at 10:45 PM.
Usually I get to knock off by 9:30 PM at the latest. Piece of cake.
This is my story and I’m sticking to it: my brain is mud not because it’s congenitally muddy, but because of the deleterious influence of work.
It’s so muddy that there are no Web 2.0 bells and whistles here. It was darned charitable of Kevin Boer to link to me and use me in an example, especially because I’m the second least likely guy I can think of to add Criteo’s Autoroll to my site. I’m still pretty much a dinosaur, albeit a rather modern one. From the late cretaceous, maybe. (I’m sure my daughter would be happy to learn I’m taking an interest.)
There’s hardly any Javascript here, if any. Much less any Ajax. When I visit a MyBlogLog enabled site, I appear there as an annonymous black head. (No, not an anonymous blackhead — that would be worse — watch those spaces).
Once in awhile I need to discuss the mud that my thinking has turned into, by way of cleansing it, turning the back porch hose back on the anonymous black head and washing it off, so to speak.
To coin a phrase.
Do I dare to go back for thirds? Sure: as it were.
In a few days it’ll be April, so I can set loose my muddy brain to a task that won’t overload its sedimentary sensibilities: teasing out the data from March.
Meantime if any bright sparkle of intelligence filters down into the muddy deeps, I’ll be sure to share it.
I’m not greedy.
I’ve publised our second photo tour, this time highlighting Vicki’s beautiful listing on San Jacinto in Citrus Heights.
Kaila’s recording of her rendition of Spanish Dance music appears courtesy of Kaila’s Piano Music Web Page.
I’ve been making some good strides in the last few days in working toward adding some additional online service offerings. Over the next few weeks and months, we should have two of these new services rolling out.
In addition to these two services, we’re also pleased to be working directly with the management team over at Docusign.com on a set of templates we can use for our clients who would like the convenience of signing their real estate paperwork online. We find that for many of our clients, working online and via email is much more convenient than having to fax paperwork back and forth. (We’ve already taken a step in this direction with our eFax systems that allow us to email you anything we’d otherwise have to fax).
All of these services are optional, but we think many buyers and sellers will want to take advantage of the convenience and hands-on control they offer.
We’re pleased to announce a winner in the great pick our sign contest. One of our preferred lenders, Linda Spafford, takes home first prize of a $10 Starbucks Gift Card.
This is especially fortunate because of all the zillions (seven) people who participated, I think the contestant who really most wanted to end up swigging down mochas was Linda. But she won it fair and square anyway, when my lovely wife picked her card out of the deck.
I love contests. Maybe I should write for a real estate carnival.
It turns out lots of people liked #1, and there I was all ready to order signs based on a variation on #1, when Susan’s graphic artist friend said she’d ship us a late entry in our draw a sign competition.
She’s a graphic artist, so she’d better beat me without breaking a sweat, because I’m just a hack with a copy of Fireworks.
Several months ago, I visited the subject of being able to provide buyers and sellers with the ability to sign their documents online. Recently when I was working with Mathew and Minie, the benefit of having the abilility to do this became even more apparent, because Mathew asked the (quite reasonable) question — Why aren’t Realtors® doing this yet? Look, you can do your taxes online, why can’t you sign your real estate paperwork the same way if you want?
When I last looked into this, I decided that the time and effort involved were not worth the trouble, because the main company that supported our real estate forms software had what I thought was a fairly kludgey solution requiring you to drag and drop electronic “sign here” stickies on each page. That’s not too onerous in itself, of course, but with a minimal purchase agreement weighing in these days at some 22 pages or so with disclosures, and given the fact that the last thing we want to do is hold up a buyer who’s ready to go, the process seemed to me to be too time consuming to be worthwhile.
I am happy to report, however, that our main electronic signatures provider, DocuSign, has recently released a Beta version of some software that’s destined to make this process much easier and faster to use, so that I think we’re ready to start serious work on rolling this out and making it available. This doesn’t mean that you have to use electronic signatures, of course — if you’re more comfortable working in person or by fax, of course we’ll still do business that way as well. I strongly suspect, however, that a lot of the folks who are users of this web site are the type of people who would find the convenience of being able to do their real estate paperwork online to be a real plus. For example, we often show people homes who live out of the area and who only decide on a purchase once they’ve gone home and “slept on it.”
Email software and web browsers have long ago replaced the fax machine as the communication medium of choice for many people. It’s time that Realtors® caught up with that, it seems to me, and got ourselves out of the dark ages.
I enjoyed fifteen seconds of fame among my colleagues recently thanks to the benevolent auspices of The Tomato, real estate’s best marketing blog.
I wanted to thank everyone who put up with my heterodox ideas there, especially Jonathan Greene, author of the Tampa Real Estate Blog: Real Opinionated, who had to put up with me twice, Teresa Boardman, resident Eskimo of the frigid tundra of St. Paul, Minnesota, Ben Kakimoto, who blogs about condos in Seattle, Maureen Francis, who’s putting my production to shame in Oakland County, Jonathan Dalton, who’s got his capitalist head on straight in Phoenix, Joe Zekas, expert on Chicago neighborhoods, Marty Van Diest, who unlike Teresa services the temperate Wasilla, Alaska, just a stone’s throw north of Anchorage, assuming you can chuck a stone about fifty miles, and who also chimed in recently with some helpful advice about the transaction management software I’m considering, and I owe him a comment there.
And if I missed thanking anyone, I’m very sorry, but it’s 1:15AM here in the Big Tomato. Do you know where your buyers are?
January’s Placer County real estate market numbers show prices continuing to drop, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than we’ve seen earlier for Placer County. From January 2006 to January 2007, the average sale price dropped from $526,087 to $509,030, nominally a 3.2% decline. However, this year’s buyers found their dollars buying more as well, so the average square footage rose 7.2%, from 2038 to 2185 square feet. As a result, the average cost per square foot showed a much higher decline of 9.8%, from $265.01 in January of 2006 to $232.97 in January of 2007. Meantime the median sale price declined 5.6%, from $450,000 in January of ’06 to $425,000 in January of ’07.
Days on market increased but not by much, from 61 on average to 71. The expired to sold ratio also didn’t change dramatically, rising from 91.4% last January to 99.5% this January. What we’re starting to see is that we’re comparing the buyer’s market now to the buyer’s market of a year ago, so some of the indicators haven’t moved as dramatically as they did when we first started comparing them.
Inventory is moderate at 6.8 months. By the way, I’ve changed how I calculate inventory from my earlier method of comparing current actives to last month’s sales, and now compare it to the average of the last 12 months, which probably paints a more realistic picture given seasonal fluctuations.
More nerd fun: I want to thank Google for their Docs and Spreadsheets software. Rather than shell out for another copy of Office for the laptop, I thought I’d see if I could get by with Google’s free stuff while on the road. Naturally it’s a bit slower than an application running on the desktop, especially on updates, but it’s serviceable for the everyday uses I have planned for it.
I’ve been seriously behind the times as far as portable devices go, but I’m making up for it today by posting my first entry from my new Toshiba laptop, while sitting in my lazy boy in the living room, with the new wireless router ensconced safely in the study.
I could get used to this.
My daugher inherited my barely wireless old Dell, which lately has also been barely not on fire. We’ll have to fix that or replace it soon.
Within a week or two, once the mild sticker shock from this purchase has worn off, I’ll probably go and pick up an HP portable printer to go with this thing, so I can write up real estate purchase agreements, either at Starbucks or at real coffee shops. This is actually a price tradeoff from what I thought was really cool, a tablet PC.
Quite incidentally, this PC is running Windows Vista. Vista has not been failing left and right, but neither has it been overly impressive. It’s a memory hog, so count on a gig or more of memory to run it. I counted some 432 Mb in use just to sit there — your mileage may vary.
I wanted to thank everyone who’s been participating. Mark, I apologize if I was a little heavy-handed in the loan thread — you brought up some good corrections to Jen’s article in terms of pricing, but I wanted to err on the side of standing up for Jen since it was her first post here and I wanted her to feel welcome now that the Internet comes on computers.
I also wanted to thank all the colleagues who stopped by recently with many an encouraging word. Did you know that encouraging a blogger is one of the seven technological acts of mercy? Why aren’t those listed in this article, I wonder? It covers the corporeal and spiritual acts.
Probably the reason is this: They didn’t have nerds yet when they made up those lists. At least, they didn’t have nerds as we know them today.
Well, no matter, here for your convenience are the Seven Technological Acts of Mercy:
Happy Friday. No biting!
One of our lenders has some Powerpoint buyer presentation slides that she’s promised to provide for our use, so we can convert it into HTML and launch an email buyer seminar. I just thought I’d brainstorm some ideas here, so this post is more a set of notes on how such a seminar might look than an article in itself. I’ve been wanting to create such a thing for the longest time, and given that the “discount newsletter series” has proven to be the wrong offer twice, now’s a good time to try it out.
I’m thinking a six to ten email series would be about the right size, and it should more or less cover the following general topics:
One of the real technical / managerial / social challenges that I have been giving a lot of thought to these last few weeks is the idea of how one might build a technologically savvy real estate company on the Internet. Part of this is driven by the simply mechanical question of working out how my compensation program will work for the blog I’m sharing with Bridget. Part of it is driven by considerations that are larger in scope.
The problems that I’ve run into in trying to start a more “company-wide” sort of web presence are partly technical, but I think those are the easiest to solve. My IDX provider, IHomefinder, now tells me that they can track (albeit it in a non-automatic way), the leads that are generated from a given campaign. This means that in principle one could build a very low cost company site and let agents link to it from their individual sites and still gain the generated lead. Those agents could use a variety of strategies to drive traffic to their own sites. Pay per click. Blogging for dollars. Article submissions. All the usual suspects.
Moreover, it’s possible one could work the site as a community blog, which could serve as an adjunct to agent’s individual blogging efforts — a sort of Metrolist-only ActiveRain, if you will. WordPress multi-user would support this kind of thing nicely, and it’s probably a pretty tractable solution for a nerd like me.
So the problems around such an approach are, it seems to me, more cultural and managerial in nature than strictly technical. If you have a tech savvy broker who could pull it off, would agents want training on the relevant techniques and would they be willing to sign the NDAs and “Your broker owns it if you quit on him” sort of language to protect the broker? And if they wouldn’t, how does the broker protect himself once he’s spilled all his trade secrets in weeks of agent SEO classes? Can you hire enough people — or teams of people — who combine the necessary sales and writing skills to pull it off effectively? What do you do about productive sites that agents already bring to the team? In other words, how can the broker optimize those to help his agents while mitigating the competitive risk to his own positions? I suspect that ultimately you’re forced into the same sort of geographical-splitting-up that brokers did back in the old “lead farming” days. “You take the east side, Bill, and Jane over here will take the west side”. But if you do that, certainly the guy who ends up with the blog for Oak Park is a bit less motivated than the owner of the Granite Bay blog.
Anyway, I’m not sure of the answers to all these questions. But as long as you’re not commenting on something, I thought I’d at least try to come up with something worth not commenting on.
Or who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.
I have a couple of hours here before getting ready for a New Year’s Eve day showing of several homes in Folsom. I’m going to spend it doing a couple of year in review articles. Market watchers may want to watch for the Sacramento County real estate year in review that I’ll do in a few minutes, but I thought I’d write a few personal notes first. On a blog, of course, you want your best effort last because that will push it to the top.
My personal year in review is a very interesting one, I think, in that this was the year that my love-hate relationship with real estate as a career finally resolved itself and pointed more strongly toward one side than the other. By now it’s pretty clear to me: I love this work. I had to go back into the faux comfort of software engineering one more time to realize it, and that final brief trip reminded me of what I didn’t like about that non-sales job: the disconnect between competence and effort on the one hand and earnings on the other. Tom Hopkins talks about the main benefit of sales being that the two are intimately related. (That’s also the main drawback of sales, by the way). Speaking one more time of software: I noticed just now that the company that believed my cheap foreign competitor’s estimate that their site would be done in two weeks has yet to see a launch of that site six months later. Hooray for globalization.
Interestingly, getting back into software ocurred right around the middle of the year. I believe, and will try to show in my next article, that this was also the nadir of the real estate market here. At the very beginning of the year, I was working at REMAX as a team leader for the Real Estate PLUS Team, but my overall production was suffering from my failure to take better control of my incoming leads, and my team was pushing back as I tried to remedy this. A couple of months into the year, the strain of this effort led me to decide to go off on my own as an individual agent at REMAX, and this move gave my sales a temporary boost while wearing me down to the point where software became attractive again.
While working this software opportunity, I did something that in retrospect turned out to be a very good idea, setting up John Lockwood Associates as a California Corporation and striking off on my own. My initial thought was simply to sell referrals and save on expenses, but as the software job turned out to be yet another rat race against cheap Elbonians [yes, I hate Web 2.0 but I LOVE Wikipedia!], a couple of weeks later I found myself flying without a net once more. After a few confused weeks writing some dumb .NET app that eventually got replaced by a less than $300 per year Application Service Provider, I decided to put on a blue suit and go to the Stardust Ballroom once more, i.e., climb back in the car and start peddling wooden shelters again.
That’s worked out extremely well. It was the best real estate Christmas ever. God bless us, everyone.
Looking back, this success also coincided with a period of some good Boddhichitta development on my part (that’s not a bad article as it applies to martial arts — it applies well to real estate, too). If I could extend that to Web 2.0, I’d be really cooking.
While this was happening, another wonderful thing came to pass. Bridget joined me, and so did Elite Properties. So in the course of the year, I’ve come full circle — leader of a real estate team, individual real estate agent working for another broker, get the heck out of this job, independent real estate broker on my own, and leader of a real estate team again.
My personal journey in real estate in the year behind was not much different from many agents in the business, who move when the markets shift either toward a second income or toward greater professionalism in real estate, or both. As a businessman, I belive in 2007 I need to grow both as an individual performer and as a team leader. The lesson I learned from the first team was that doing another salesperson’s prospecting for them is like giving a man a fish — pretty soon you run out of fish. So this year I’m experimenting with teaching others how to fish. But I’m not counting on their fish. I’ve got my own fish.
However, to my fellow area real estate bloggers out there, lest I forget — HELP WANTED: Fishermen. Inquire at (530) 672-9160. (The pier’s getting pretty crowded, so my new business model is to own the pier — not bad, huh?)
Have a great year everybody!
For some reason, Technorati hasn’t seen this site get updated in seventy-some-odd days.
Don’t tell my wife or my teammates, though. They think I’ve been typing my fingers to the bone.
Anywho, I think I may have a fix for this, and this post is just to test it out. Stay tuned….
Some of you will recognize in the title an old Bob Dylan song title. You may be old like me, or just well educated.
I recently learned that this is true to a great extent of my blog readers — you ain’t going nowhere. I’ve been getting into Web Analytics lately — the art of probing into your web site traffic to find out more about your web site and what your visitors are doing or not doing. The reason for looking at that, of course, is to make the web site better, which in our cases means to help more people search for and buy or sell houses.
Hopefully using someone on my team to do it, because then I get paid, and this frees up time for more blogging.
You thought I was just sitting here blogging because I like the green pasty monitor glow my skin gets. Well, yes, there’s that, too. But really the main thing that frees up time for blogging is the fact that some of you buy houses. Well, not some of “you”, per se, because as we said above, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. One of the first things that stands out from the web data is that blog readers have a high bounce rate.
“Bounces” is web analytics lingo for looking at a single page then leaving the site. Sort of the HTTP version of “wham bam, thank you m’am”.
Well, what can I say — you’re welcome. And don’t call me “m’am”.
Those of you who are old like me are probably thinking that a more appropriate tune comes from the Shirelles. “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Well, maybe so, but that would be a return visitor report. You can have a high bounce rate and still be loyal as heck to reading your one page.
Actually, I’m not sure you need web analytics to figure out that blog readers aren’t the biggest category of buyers (percentage-wise), but it’s nice to see my hypothesis confirmed in the numbers. Visitors to the site who are just clicking from growabrain (my thanks to them) or following some blog roll link are a different breed of cat from those who actually type in “Sacramento Real Estate” or the like into google (thanks to them, too). Not that having a readership is wrong, mind you. What kind of writership would I be without one?
And not everyone who leaves here goes out looking at tee shirts or the like. A few of you have checked out some of our search offerings. (BIG thanks to you).
I think I should get that old search image right up on top of the blog — in case someone really in their heart of hearts is clicking through from growabrain and just kicking, drinking some coffee, killing a few minutes in between freecell games and the like — you know, being a blog reader (I am one, so I know how it goes), and then all of a sudden god forbid has a minor stroke or something and decides she needs a house in Sacramento right now and let’s go search for one and then call the PLUS Team Realtor®.
Here’s old Sparky now:
Let’s face it, you missed him, didn’t you? I know I did. I like how he reminds me of Johnson Smith catalogs, or maybe Monopoly.
I’ve just installed the WordPress Email Notification Pluginn (love that spelling).
Believe it or not, a user actually sent me an email to ask for this feature. Imagine my surprise, that someone should like what I was posting enough to want to get emails when a new post came up. Anyway, as you can imagine, part of what I’m doing in this post is testing out the plugin. I want to make sure you can opt out of getting the mailings, for example.
I offered to write a real estate blog aggregator and make it available to the Real Estate Blog Squad recently for their forthcoming historical event, but unfortunately they shot me down. They’ve already got some kind of aggregator going.
Here I was, hoping for a little social encouragement to fuel what would otherwise be a longer-term project. Dang. No luck there.
Now I know how it feels to knock on the doors of the No Homers Club. And speaking of that, let’s give the No Homers Club the benefit of a nice tasty link, shall we?
We’re switched the Sacramento Real Estate Blog over to WordPress today.
The Sacramento Real Estate Blog (http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events) has been in continuous operation since August of 2003 on Radio Userland. After our great experiences with WordPress on our Oakland site, however, we’ve decided to make the switch.
Many of the old RadioUserLand pages we’ll still be accessible just as they are, but we’ll probably bring several of the latest ones into WordPress.
We’re pleased to be sponsoring a brand new web site over in Alameda County, Oakland-Homes-for-Sale.com. It should be fun to watch this one grow, since it’s been about two years now since I’ve launched this Sacramento site, and it seems to me that Realtors® are finally starting to get going on the Internet in much bigger numbers. Oakland’s about the same size as Sacramento — actually a tad smaller in terms of population. Meantime, however, the whole competitive landscape has changed, so I doubt we’ll see our way to the top in six to eight weeks as we did here.
The new search pages I’ve been working on are in place — drop me a note if you have any problems with them. They’re on the navigation menu, but at the risk of being redundant, here they are:
Enjoy!
The new homes, duplexes, and condo pages have been working out pretty well — I can see from my web site logs that they generate a lot of interest. I don’t like the fact that they’re manually updated still, however, but as the web site is currently configured it’s the only way to get it done.
The real problem with the manual updates is not that I mind doing them — it doesn’t take that long. The problem is that in the periods in between updates many of the homes are sold, so that users end up clicking on the more details link only to reach a “listing not available” screen.
Because of this, pretty soon I’m going to revise those pages so that clicking through for more details doesn’t bring up dead links, but instead, brings up an offer to get the same information automatically (daily) by email. At the same time, I’ll provide more information at the front end — probably all the home marketing info.
