I’ve updated our Schools pages with links to the latest API scores and the like. I may be adding a table of school districts in each county and links to GreatSchools pages and district pages for each, but for now I’ve mainly fixed broken links and several other issues I found — those pages were looking a bit long in the tooth, since this is their first update in a couple of years.

Enjoy!

John over at Uneasy Rhetoric has a good article about proposed expansion to Sutter Hospital, including some great links to Heckasac’s entertaining rant about lofts. I wish we’d entered the loft-o-mania phase two years ago when I had a buyer who wanted a loft, and all I could mumble at the time was “Lofts? — isn’t that a San Franscisco thing?”, or words to that effect.

Fortunately for us the team has a new buyer who wants a loft this year, as well as a lot of good recent business in the non-loft category.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I’ve reached one of my important career goals this year, that of getting a real estate broker’s license. I just checked at the Department of Real Estate, and sure enough, I passed the test and they’ve upgraded my license. The broker’s license recognizes people who’ve trained hard enough and are competent to conduct real estate business on their own. I anticipate continuing at REMAX for the time being, however, though it’s nice to know I can explore the possiblity of perhaps opening up a full service shop (real estate sales plus financing).

More importantly, I’m naive enough to believe in what Ben Franklin was alleged to have said about career development. “Empty your purse into your mind, and your mind will fill your purse with coins.”

Of course, back in those days you could wear powdered wigs and carry a purse around and it was no big deal.

Times change.

Oh, and speaking of times changing, I’m pleased to say that my real estate broker’s license became effective yesterday, December 6th, even though I learned of it today. I always remember December 7th instead as a date that will live in infamy, so I’m glad it came through yesterday.

Our colleagues over at NorCalHomes.com have published a really handy Sacramento Zip Code Map you can download. Click on that and save it before they take it down!

The reason it’s nice to have this handy is to make better sense of the upcoming posts(s?) about Sacramento prices by zip code. I’ve just done a snapshot of home prices by zip code over the last six months (total), and will be publishing the results here shortly.

I’m going to try to focus on some new topics that I haven’t written about much here yet, relocation and schools.

We’ve had a schools section of the web site for a long time now, and it’s had a trickle of visitors during all this time. We’re going to beef that up somewhat, and have a section devoted to relocation as well.

One of the surprises I found when I started looking at who was visiting our web site was how many folks visit our site come from right around Sacramento. The reason this was surprising was that we do such a great business with relocation clients, so I would have expected most of our visitors to have been from out of town.

This got me thinking in turn about what I wrote about earlier — the small number of folks from the blog who visit the search pages. It occurred to me that by focusing on the changing real estate market, I was satisfying a sort of vague intellectual curiosity about where the market’s headed, and I was making some nice new friends who enjoyed thinking about such things.

However, my experience with buyers and sellers is that they tend to have more urgency than that. Sure, they do their research to find the right property, but as a rule someone moving from Ohio or Michigan or New York is more likely to be concerned with where the good areas are to live, what schools will be best for their children, and the like.

We’ll to continue to write about the Sacramento real estate market to some extent as well, of course, so if you’re a die-hard Sacramento market junkie, take heart, we’re certainly not going to abandon you completely.

However, at the same time, we do want to bring in more information to appeal to those “out-of-town” folks who’ve been so good to us in the past.

…money for God’s sake. So sang 10cc. You can look up anything on the Internet.

So that’s what I’m doing here later on a Friday. Grindingly, exhaustingly late on a Friday. Just cranking out a few words before calling it a night.

So how’d the broker’s exam go? Well, just fine, I suppose. Reasonably gruelling, really. Consumers, take heart, they just don’t give those brokers’ licenses away. Yet all in all, certainly not as hard as the state bar or med school. Definitely nowhere near as hard as as quitting smoking — now that was a challenge.

Anyway, by this time next week or thereabouts, we should know if I’m still a salesperson or have become a broker.

It’s kind of a strange goal, in a way, to have a broker’s license. To continue working at REMAX, I don’t need one — all the state requires when in the employ of a real estate broker is a “salesperson’s” license. From a press release sort of perspective, one might say that having a broker’s license gives me enhanced knowledge that let’s me serve clients better.

True enough, I suppose, but for that matter I’ve been working the Blogging / Web Development side of the business so hard recently that I let my team do just about all of the direct client work. Well, that’s the traditional role of the broker with or without the license — providing general advertising and rainmaking so that others can close the business. But that sort of begs the question, too, since REMAX’s team model pretty much lets me accomplish that even with a good old regular sales license.

I suppose off in the future I may well open up shop as John Lockwood Realty or the like.

Rejected names include “Honest John’s Used Houses” and “Low Tide Realty”.

There’s no tide in Sacramento to speak of. Maybe a smackerel of it down by the river.

I suppose what I think about most when I think along those lines is wanting to make sure I would have a better business model than I have now. (Because otherwise, of course, why do it?). One possible avenue to explore would be opening a thorough-going buyer brokerage. It turns out that working with buyers is 80% or so of our business anyway, and making it official might have advantages both for us and our clients. Another possibility that ties in nicely to a focus on buyer representation would be originating loans, but there’d be a learning curve there I suppose.

Of course I tend to see much of that challenge through the eyes of a web developer, too. One area of my site that I wish performed better is our loan prequalification form. We tend to get lots of inquiries via that form, but find that we actually refer out more bona fide loan business through our work with buyers who respond to our MLS real estate listing information. So I wonder how to make that better — perhaps as simply as calling it Loan Preapproval, but more likely through developing a more full blown loan application 1003 form processor. Actually I see a good one as being something I might offer as an ASP to Realtors®.

But that’s yet another project, isn’t it?

By the time you read this, I may be at the Department of Real Estate, taking broker’s exam.

There is probably as much real estate minutiae rolling around in my head now as there’s ever likely to be, so if anyone has a Trivial Pursuit Game going, I’m your boy.

Except I’m not good on the sports questions. Really not good on them. Trust me.