Or in other words - Some clarification on the recent NAR/DOJ settlement…..
There has recently been various blogs, comments and observations that have created some uncertainty regarding the requirements and obligations imposed on MLSs and brokers who operate websites under the recently announced settlement of the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against NAR relating to NAR’s VOW policy. As part of CRT’s mission, we will continue to help clarify and navigate through this questions as much as we can.
Below are some clarifications from Ralph Holmen, Associate General Counsel for NAR. Hopefully this can be a first step in clarifying the nature of the settlement and address issues raised by it.
Continue reading ‘WASSUP WIT DAT DOJ?’
So, I stumbled across the Google Chat Badge. It’ll let any user to your site, blog, etc chat with you if you are online. Best part is, they don’t need to have a Google Chat account. Could come in handy for visitors checking out a listing, see you online and ask a quick question.
PS - it looks like it even respects when you set your status to ‘BUSY’. SCHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!
I love when I stumble across something that completely changes my perspective on things. Its even better, when this perspective starts to go against some traditional thought processes. This time, it is web traffic - or where people are coming from to your site/listing.
My REALTOR (yes my place is on the market) sent me some weekly stats of traffic to the listing page. I looked at it and had a semi eye opening observation. Most of the traffic came from Craigslist! How awesome is that? I still don’t think people realize how simple it is to really get major exposure. I keep reading about ‘gaming the search engines’, optimizing pages for placement, the big debate about Trulia and its linking practices, or one of the many other ‘best practices’. All of which to me seem like you are trying to outsmart the search engines. But look how simple and effective just getting yourself in front of some targeted eye balls really is.
To me, I still believe, if you provide something that has true intrinsic value, it’ll rise to the top. When you build things for search engines, and not people, you create limited value to those people that you attracted. It’d be like attracting bees with a fake smell of honey. Eventually, they figure out the game and not care. Real honey, with real value - will get them everytime.
On Last weeks episode I spoke about an easy way to get a little better data piece of mind. This of course was after a horrible, data laziness accident.
My accident wasn’t catastrophic, it was some pictures of the my dog. But they were the only pictures, and of course I wanted salvage them. I tried hooking the hard drive up to an external enclosure and connecting via windows. Boy did that give all sorts of pain to Windows. It saw the drive, and either just said ‘Do you want to format’ NO!!!!! or it just locked up file explorer.
So, the easy way was out. I needed to come up with a better plan. I decided to download DSL Linux. DSL linux is a small linux distribution that can be booted off a CD/USB Stick. Once you boot into it, it has a bunch of tools and utilities for file system exploring, as well as Wifi Sniffers and other utilities that you may want to tinker with, but dont want to set-up configure a whole Linux roll-out.
After some experimentation with copying the files to a good drive, removing that drive, and checking to see that I didn’t copy a corrupted file, I came up with a very smooth and easy method.
Continue reading ‘Save The Data’
We all get lazy. Right? [Well maybe not Keith]. Storing files locally on our desktop or laptop. Only maintaining one copy of them. Hoping that nothing happens to the drive, or the machine gets stolen. Right? Are you with me so far?
Well, for a while I was maintaining a little linux R2-UNIT (my nickname) for Windows Samba shares. It would do its thing at night, archive itself so i can roll back X amount of days, etc. It was working dandy, but the machine was a beast. Pentium II, power hog, desk hog, and I just got annoyed maintaining it. I get to tinker at work all day, sometimes at home, I just want to forget about all that fun stuff.
So, needless to say, I got lazy, and started to store it all locally and not really even think of occasionally transferring it to the other machine. That would mean, I would have to turn it on, which became a chore in itself.
Continue reading ‘How not to store data: a lesson’
A few years back, I watched MLSNI turn off their consumer facing website because members took the stance that this was reducing broker/agent centric website exposure. Ironically, seemingly overnight, this almost perfectly coincided with the flash flood of Syndication Portals (Trulia, Zillow, GoogleBase, etc).
At first, the industry was very apprehensive to giving their listings away for free. Over time they eased up, and saw how they can leverage these advertising vehicles. In all essence, they are just a more refined online classifieds model (such as the newspapers, but focused). More and more of these advertising sites began to appear, somewhat diluting the benefits, increasing the work for exposure (see Andrews Syndication Article to battle this issue) and calling more attention to what was really going on. These sites were filling a critical void in the consumer marketplace.
Continue reading ‘Is it a sine?’
Today, a call triggered an idea, triggered a quick project, triggered this post. And where did this trigger all start from — well from one of the great REALTORS I met at this years REALTOR Land Institute Conference. Todd (sorry didn’t get your last name) called me this morning and asked for some recommendations on a quick way to follow up with other REALTORS after a showing.
I’m sure there are some gadgets and sites that are out there, but the first thing that came to mind was linking a web form to a Google spreadsheet. What this would allow, would be a very easy way to create a web form that you can email to the agent, that would then update a spreadsheet for further data slicing and dicing.
This of course is one of those things that probably makes a little more sense through a demo, than explaining over the phone and/or sending some links. So Todd - here is a quick and dirty proff of concept ‘Showing Feedback Form’. It links directly to a Google Apps spreadsheet, which can be downloaded into Excel for pure data fun.
Posting your listings online should be a standard procedure. And from a marketing point of view, the more places a listing appears, the better. The downside is that if you want your listings on half a dozen sites, you have to enter listings manually to each site or invest money in developing an automated system. And if the price changes, you need to update each site individually. So even if you want your listings everywhere online, the amount of time you have to invest in posting and updating often makes widespread listing aggregation more trouble than it’s worth.
Fortunately, some powerhouses in the listing aggregation realm recognized this problem, too. In January 2008, Google, Yahoo, Zillow, and Trulia began working together to create a single, standardized feed that would facilitate the marketing and advertising of properties on multiple Web sites. And with help from the National Association of REALTORS(R) and the newly formed Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), they’ve achieved their goal in record time.
Continue reading ‘Getting your listings out there’
For those of you looking for a bit more information on The Real Estate Channel (formerly The Gateway), an Interim Report has been posted. The RE.net will surely start to buzz about it.
At first I was a little discouraged about the results from my informal survey about ‘Who is your blogging target audience’. Blogs aimed primarily at REALTORS was the hands down single category winner. The concept of REALTORS blogging towards other REALTORS just baffles me as the majority use of this medium.
However, as I stepped back a second I realized two things - first, the CRT blog’s readership is probably skewed more towards ‘industry’ members and blogging towards REALTORS makes a ton of sense (ie Michael Wurzer’s FBS Blog). The second, and more important, is that ‘Prospective’ and ‘Any’ Clients tally up to be almost the same as REALTORS. This gave me a lot of relief - as I still holding my ground that there is a lot of opportunity out there for ‘Client’ targeted blogging, and that the secret recipe/combination for it hasn’t been formulated to perfection yet.
I am still inquisitive though. If you are a REALTOR visiting here, and are in fact blogging towards other REALTORS, please get in contact with me. I am trying to grasp the concept of R2R blogging. It just reminds me of the time I had to leave the room before I started to chuckle out loud when Russ Caper (eREALTY fame) asked, when are REALTORS going to have time to do their jobs if they are busy reading and replying to 1.3 million other REALTOR blogs?
