Real Estate and Technology

I remember a book from a long time ago. ? It was called “Future Shock”. The story was about the response of people to the ever increasing amount of change in the technology world. There was so much new stuff being thrown at people that they went into shock and shut down. Now I’ve already said more than I really remember. I suppose, I might be wrong, there’s so much to remember.

As a kid I remember watching Lassie on our black and white TV on Sunday night. I seem to remember they played Greensleeves at the end with credits rolling by. In the background there was a kid running around in the outdoors with his collie Dog doing the kind of things kids did before video games. At one point you can hear the kid calling “Lassie—Lassie” and you see the dog far off responding by coming on the run. Along with the kid’s happy outdoor voice you hear the dog barking.

After Lassie, the wonderfull world of Disney would come on. There would be a flourish of music and the announcer would say something about Disney being in “Living Color” and a peacock would fill the screen with its tail feathers spreading. My mother would say “I bet that would be beautiful in color.

There was no such thing as a remote, you had to stand up and walk over to the tv and turn one of the channel dials. There were two, “UHF” and “VHF”. One of them didn’t seem to do anything, the other made a satisfying chunk, chunk sound as you turned channels. You could fine tune the sharpness of the channel with a ring behind the dial that was like a radio tuner.

I used to like the ciggaret ads. A cowboy riding through the fields with “Virginian” type music playing in the background. The cowboy wheels around on his horse and pulls up in front of the screen. Zoom in, He cups his hands in front of his face and lights a Marobarro and takes a long satisfying drag. Pan back again, nothing but sky and beautiful scenery with the cowboy, his horse and his pack of smokes in the middle of it.

The announcer says “Come to where the Flavor is, come to Marobarro Country”.

There were cigarets for women as well. The Jingle: “You’ve come along way baby to get were you’ve got to today, you’ve got your own cigarette now baby, you’ve come a long long way.”

There was Clancy the cop and Carmen the nurse and there was Casey Jones. Casey Jones started with a shot of a window with a shade and a finger pull ring hanging from the shade. The slow beginning to the William Tell Overture would play and a little worm looking thing would appear over the edge of the window sill, It was obviously someone’s finger with makeup on. The little worm thing would weave around with the calming music working its way to the pull ring on the shade. At the end of the calm part of the William tell overture the worm thing would yank the shade and it would go flinging up as the Lone Ranger part of the William tell overture kicked in and the show would start. That’s what the first generation of blue screen was like.

Today kids sit on the couch and play video games instead of running through the woods and the dogs get fat as their only chance to go out is to poop and pee in the morning and at night. We talk about Nature Deficit Disorder and anyone over thirty has a vague feeling of being left behind. If they don’t, they probably have been left behind.

I’ve kept up pretty well myself, well kind of. We have color tv now. Fact is I’m a bit afraid of it. I’ve made a point of not watching it much. There’s always one of my kids or my wife around who will run the thing. My dogs probably know more about it than I do. Our TV, yes we just have one, is probably 17 years old. We’ve plugged all kinds of things into it. We still have a vcr, we have playstation(my kid won it in an easter egg hunt) and we have a dvd player . We are also plugged into statalite service. Since the tv has only one, maybe two plugs in the back of it, I ran down to radio shack and bought a switch.

I recently discovered I am unable to watch tv without help. I turned it on the other night and there was only fuzz. I went through three different modes on the remote. Still just fuzz. I clicked all of the switches on the radio schack thing and gave up. I went to my computer, which has a bigger screen than our tv, and watched an old science fiction movie on Netflix. Not a single advertisement.

Nobody knows everything about technology. You have to just keep moving and take what you find useful and use it.

A while back our local MLS decreed that we would start using electronic lockboxes. It seemed like a really dumb idea to me. Don’t get me wrong, the Supra lockbox we use is pretty cool. I will even admit I kind of like using the system when its cold.

Here’s what’s weird. No one seems to complain. This is a system that requires every Realtor rent an electronic key that has to be updated every day by communicating with a server. The agent has to pay to use the key and must purchase an expensive lockbox that will die in a few years when the battery in it goes dead and/or the MLS replaces it with the next innovation. The Realtor has to update the key each day and remember a pin code for the key and a shackle code for the box. Just what I need two more passwords and another quarterly bill.

For me it is my income trickling out, for someone else(General Electric?) it is money streaming in. Its also exclusionary. If you don’t belong you don’t have a key.

Seems over-hyped, over priced and way over engineered for what is basically a high tech hide-a-key. The weird part is that Realtors don’t complain about it and they actually kind of like them. I like mine, but I would get rid of it if I didn’t need it to show homes. It’s just added complication and expense.

My Showing Log ?is web based, there is no computer setup. Everything just works,  ?as long as you have internet access. All you need to do is go to myshowingLog.com and click “get an account”. This article is focusing on members of ? North Star MLS, but anyone can get an account. Members of the North Star MLS will click on the first choice. In order to get your account you will need to know the email address you have registered with the MLS and you will have to be able to open an email sent to that location.

After providing your name , office etc. you will be sent an email with a link to your new account and instructions on how to get started.

Getting your listing information into my showing Log.

The information required by my showing Log is minimal. ? You need to enter an address and you should enter a price. Uploading a property photo increases your feedback responses. If you enter an expiration date my showing log will warn you when the property expiration is approaching.

Why is My showing log ?Free?

There might not be a completely reasonable answer to that. I know that Google started by offering its services for free and still offers many things for free. ?The approach ?seems to have worked pretty well for them. Eventually we will charge $10 per month. We have to do this because MLS charges us for the agent Roster, there are development costs, hosting costs and simple maintenance. The advantage to you is that signing up is simple. Try it, see what you think, give us suggestions. We will try to make “free” last as long as possible.

No.

I wrote before about the Multiple Listing Service and how protective they are about ?listing data. I alluded to the fact they won’t let one byte out into the public until someone else ?starts to do it. I often find myself thinking of the MLS as the property of Realtors. I think of the data as belonging to me. I am a Realtor, I list houses and I enter the data into MLS. I share My data, I get everyone Else’s data in exchange.

I am not an owner of MLS. The fact is that the MLS owns all of the listing data and you can’t do a thing without paying money and getting approval. If you ?don’t follow the rules they’ll fine you or shut you off. ?The MLS ?is a company that makes money off of Realtors. Each Real Estate office is a profit center for local boards of Realtors and the MLS.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. ? It’s an exclusive club ?which you have to pay for to belong. Having strict rules mean we have good data. It means as long as we pay a middle man, we have access to something others want.

The MLSÂ ?discussion is not about good or bad, its more of an observation. There is a huge shift going on and its changing the way we Realtors do business. The shift, of course, is the internet. MLS came before the internet and it’s business model with Realtors as a captive audience was as solid as a rock.

The internet allows the free trade of information. Technically speaking, I don’t need the MLS any more to share my listings with other Realtors or the whole world. ?Now its become ?almost like the MLS is a system of not sharing information. ?I’m still a little bit afraid that my ?value may be diminished if everyone has the same information I have. ?

There is an order in the MLS system which still has value to Realtors, but does it match the cost? The one piece of the puzzle MLS still holds is the sharing of commission information and agreements between each other. When I think about it my value isn’t in the information that MLS holds. Its more in my knowledge of an area, my familiarity with the process, my knowledge about homes and negotiating skills. My availability. It is very interesting to watch this unfold.

The folks who run the MLS have a blog and they talk about this all of the time. Here is a related post on their blog.

Sooner or later you’re going to buy something on the internet and you’ll be forced to pull out you’re credit card. Even if you think credit card companies are blood suckers, you have to admit electronic money makes the world go around.

Taking your credit card information and putting it out there on the web is common practice these days, but it presents a risk. Google has a tool called Google Checkout to help you minimize that risk. I’m afraid though, its not the best. Pay Pal by eBay wins the prize here. Get a pay pal account and enter your credit card information once. I actually pull money directly from a checking account using Pay Pal and avoid the credit card all together sometimes.

Now you have one big company responsible for your credit information rather than every Tom Dick or Harry with an e-commerce website. It’s safer, easier and cheaper.

Since the stated purpose of this blog is to advertise My Showing Log, I better do at least a little of that.

Here is how My Showing Log ?came about. Several years back I went to a seminar to pick up a few educational credits.

The speaker was a real estate attorney. He was banging away at the idea that we Realtors had a lot of work to do to justify our comissions. He was talking about how the internet was going to kill our business if we couldn’t justify ourselves. He said that new for sale by owner internet companies were going to give everyone a run for ?our money.

The speaker got me thinking. ? I thought if all of these people were going to sell their own homes maybe I ?should be part of that. I started a web site called doFSBO.com. ?This led ?me to ?a flat fee broker model which which I figured out pretty quickly ?was not for me. I’m not a list ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy and a person has to get paid more than a flat fee ?to survive.

I downgraded dofsbo.com to an informational site.

But I had learned something. ?In breaking down the process of selling real estate for someone who knew nothing about it, I discovered there were things I could do to make life ?better for myself.

Being a broker ?owning a ?small company I get calls at home on weekends and at night from other agents wanting showings. Ocassionally I’d forget notes at home or the office ?and ?miss recording a showing. Sometimes ?I wouldn’t have a lockbox code handy. There were times I actually drove to my office to get information about a listing.

I ?realized ? the FSBO Site had a showing log and I started using it myself. Suddenly I had information for all of my office listings available to me wherever I had an internet connection. I hired a programmer to professionally reprogram what had already been done. We added user accounts for my agents and front desk help.

Since the beginning of time I had had trouble keeping up with feedback. I knew agents who just told customers they didn’t do feedback. I would like to say I was really smart and it just occured to me I could request feedback by email, but what really happened was I got a feedback form from another agent using some other service. I thought it was a great idea and I checked it out.

The problem was that I didn’t like the way the service worked. The listing agent had to type in a lot of information for every showing and the system for requesting feedback had a very “spammy” feel to me. Every agent was on their own and there was no way to tie an office together.

I spoke with another broker who voiced the same frustrations.

It seemed like we should be able to tie the feedback thing into the tool I already had. I went to work with my programmer again.

The result is My Showing Log. You can access all of your listing information all of the time. You can allow other agents in your office, like the floor person or your assistant to set up showings. My showing log is smart enough to find showing agent information from an MLS ID or a partial name. It does this using a direct ?RETS connection to MLS. ?You can make notes about the showing agent or the individual showing. My showing log remembers the last twenty agents who requested showings so you can just click on the name to enter a new showing.

When a showing is set up My Showing log timestamps the request and automatically keeps track of who entered it.

Just click a box and My Showing Log ?will send an email confirmation to the showing agent. If you like it will copy that confirmation to the seller and/or the listing agent. After the showing has occured My Showing log will send a simple form to the showing agent requesting feedback. The results of the feedback response are stored in my showing Log. You can also have the feedback results emailed directly to your seller and to your own email account. The response rate is greater than 80%.

If you happen to speak with an agent and get feedback on a showing its easy to ad this to the data collected on line. If you are in an area with non-MLS agents or if you want to record a visit by an appraiser just ad the name and it will be remembered.

My Showing Log does not require much information to set up a ?listing and its best if you enter ?each of those few ?fields even if they are not required. Specifcally, remember to upload a property photo. This increases your feedback response rate. Also be sure to enter the expiration date of your listing. Having an expiration date allows My Showing Log to warn you when a property is about to expire. We have had several comments ?saying what a nice feature this is.

The current My Showing Log is excellent, but there is a lot more to come. We have plans, but we would like your ideas as well.

In the early days of my real estate career I shopped around for a new computer. I wanted the best. I went against the flow and bought a computer that beat everything else in my opinion. At the time PCs didn’t use a mouse or windows operating system. You used the keyboard and tabbed around to places in the menu to make your selections.

The Amiga had an operating system similar to today’s windows operating system. For its time, it was solid, it was fast. You could even write little programs to make things like databases and word processors work together. Graphics were superior. The machine was the choice of many gamers of the day.

The computer in our office looked like a big wide typewriter with a roll of heat sensitive paper that printed search results. It had no screen. There was a telephone situated next to ?the computer ?that you would pick up the receiver, dial MLS ?and put into a special foam padded cradle, an early modem. I became excited when I learned the office would get new PC’s with screens and ?individual agents with computers ?would be allowed to purchase the right to dial in from their computer at home and get MLS information. Then I was told it was just too bad that a PC was the only computer with the technology to connect to the MLS.

I was disappointed. I just couldn’t believe my Amiga ?1000 didn’t have what it took to connect to the MLS.

I called and asked if I could ?subscribe to ?the computer MLS service anyway and try to make my computer work with it. They told me “knock yourself out”. I had the phone number and a modem. I dialed in and it simply didn’t work. I brought my computer into the office and ?plugged it into the phone line. I used the office MLS computer to dial the extension my computer was on. Amazingly enough they connected to each other. Even more interesting some numbers appeared on the screen of my computer. I then called MLS with my computer and typed in the numbers that had appeared on my screen and my computer connected to MLS! It worked great. It was really easy. That technology didn’t change for many years and I used it with my Amiga ?tw thousand when I replaced ?the 1000.

The Amiga worked better than a PC, but I kept running into the same thing over and over. I was shut out of new technology and forced not to use it or hack my way around People who didn’t want me to have something different.

I finally gave up and bought a PC when the company that made the very cool Amiga went out of business. Apple computers came close to the same fate but hung on somehow. I’ve learned that you burn a lot of extra energy if you try to be too cutting edge or do things that are completely different from the norm.

You would think everyone would know this and use it. But I have shown this to a lot of people. I use it daily without thinking.

Many times while working on your computer you might find that you need to copy something, but there is no menu. Almost any place you find yourself on the computer, if you can highlight an item, you can copy it. Its called a keyboard shortcut and its the way we did everything before windows.

Highlight the item and press the “ctrl” button along with the “c” button. Now go to the place you want to copy the item. Another place on the another page or even another ? program could be your target. Click to place the cursor where you want to paste and then press “ctrl V” this time. This works with images and even in the file system for copying entire files.

Have you ever found yourself working on your computer thinking you should be able to do something, but you’re not sure what menu to try? Before hunting all over, try right clicking with your mouse in the area that you are working. More often than not a little menu pops up with a number of choices of things you can do from that screen. Sometimes I’ll print web pages that way.

Occasionally I’ll have something on my screen that I would really like to print or save, but there’s no good way to do it. Look in the upper right hand corner of your keyboard for a key that says “Print Screen”. NO, it will not print the contents of your screen, at least not directly on your printer. It prints an image of your entire screen into memory on your “clipboard” so that you can paste it somewhere else. If you were trying to do a market analysis and needed a photo off of MLS, but for some reason you couldn’t copy it into the document this would be a pretty good method, as long as you can figure out how to crop out the rest of the stuff on your screen you don’t want.

Digital Cameras

I wish I knew more about digital cameras or maybe I know every thing I need. A long time ago I purchased a Sony Mavica that held a floppy disk. The thing was easy to use and saved me a ton of money on photo costs. I kept it around and up until about six months ago when it finally stopped working, ?there were people in the office who preferred that simple, low powered little camera with a floppy disk.

I’ve upgraded a couple of times and I keep buying Sony. I like to spend $300 to $500 on a camera -well I don’t like to spend it, but that’s the amount that makes sense to the frugal real estate agent in me. The one problem with the current Sony cameras is that their memory storage cards are different than every one else’s. For me though, the card goes in the camera and never comes out. It’s really simple to plug it into a usb port to get my photos.

I should have been a little more careful when I bought my last Sony. The previous Sony would take standard double “a” sized batteries which is a nice feature. The new one seems to be a throwback that takes a special battery which works great, but what if you’re not near your Sony Battery Charger. I don’t see Sony batteries in every gas station. I’m sure its just a matter of which model you buy.

You can get a wide angle “Conversion Lens” that screws on to the front of your Sony. I keep one camera with a wide angle lens on it all of the time for interior shots. It also works well for exterior shots when you have power poles or other visual distractions in the way. The wide angle lens allows you to move closer and keep those things out of the picture.

At one time I thought maybe my cell phone camera would replace my regular camera. Not a chance. ?I tried using cell phone photos for a real estate brochure. I didn’t let the brochures out the door. The difference in quality was night and day. ?

Could it be Google Desktop?

I didn’t intend to make this a google blog, but the fact is they do a ton of stuff. Here’s a google thing I don’t like. Google Desktop. The idea with Google desktop is that it organizes all the information on your computer. A search engine for your computer.

As far as I can tell it runs all of the time. My poor computer was c..r..a..w..l..i..n..g. I removed it. During the removal process Google asks you why you don’t want google desktop any more? They offer some reasons, one of which is “it was slowing down my computer”

So, if your computer is acting slow, check for Google desktop. Why would you download one more program on to your poor overworked computer when ?the windows ?operating system has a search function that works just fine without affecting performance?

I’ll admit I never really gave Google Desktop a chance, but with me, if it’s slowing things down, its out.