Technology Strategies for Real Estate

I subscribe to The Mossberg Solution -a newsletter by the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has a good article on bluetooth solutions for the car. It is called “No Hands, All Ears For Sound in Cars. Check it by clicking here. I “preach” in my classes to NOT dial, text message or read emails while you are driving. You need to figure out a solution. I use the Jawbone headset. it has a noise cancellation feature.  It measures the ambient noise and helps eliminate background sound so you can hear clearly. To see a demo click here. Mr. Mossberg speaks about adapters that you can put in your car. His articles are always in depth and informative.

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According to a post on Jessica Beganski’s Blog, a REALTOR who specializes “west of the River” in Connecticut they will.  She attended a seminar with Ken Gronbach (now demographer, once ad exec) hosted by Horizon Home Mortgage, who offered some trends that will effect the real estate market.

An aggravating factor in the real estate market will be that the homes Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964 and about 79 million in size) built, won’t have anyone to buy them. Gen X (born 1965-1984) is a smaller generation by about 10 million.  The only remedy would be an influx of immigration.  When do you think we’ll start to see McMansions converted into condos???

Gen Y (born 1985-2005), the largest generation of about 100 million, is about 4 years away (at the peak of the generation) from buying their first house and having a significant impact on the real estate market.

With the increase in population will come an increase in crime in inner cities, driving everyone who moved into upscale downtown apartments back out to the burbs.

As people work more out of their homes, he predicts office space will be become harder to lease. 

Know how hard it is to find a contractor?  Help is on the way - technical schools are full and have waiting lists of Gen Y’ers waiting to get in. 

 Check out his website at http://www.kgcdirect.com/

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What’s old any more? Who knows? The basic delineation is email. Can they open them, read them and respond? My parents can’t. They try, but just can’t. They are not one of the 80 year olds that get it. But I found a great solution - MyCelery. This device is a state of the art color fax machine. Friends and family email them at their mycelery.com account. The phone rings and tells them they are getting an email . . . over their fax. It prints out the email and the pictures. If they want to respond, they hand write the email with the persons name at the top. The software recognizes the email address and emails the person the handwritten note back . . . as an email. My parents love letters. They print out emails now (when they can figure it out) and reread those emails over and over.

So - all the grand kids are ready to email their grand parents at least once a week with a photo or two, so are the kids. We are really excited to keep the generations connected with this device. With a great grandchildren here, we will keep the photos and emails coming.

Here is a video demonstrating the product.

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I recently updated to Microsoft Office 2007 and have been playing around and getting comfortable with Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I found a great new feature in Word 2007. When you open a new document it asks if it is a document or a blog post. You can now create a blog post and publish it right to your blog from your computer. You can use the features of Word, to add hyperlinks and pictures, which has quite a comfort level for many of us. It works with many of the popular Blog software platforms. I found a great video on CNET that explains it very well. Click here to view. A great feature if you want to blog and you are not online, or if you just don’t feel like Jotting!

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Social Networking, one of the new buzz words, and most likely if you are reading this blog, you are involved in other social networks other than blogs, like Linked In, Plaxo, Flickr, Digg, etc. etc. There are connections, plain and simple. Ways to connect with others who have the same interests and may be interested in doing business with you. More of social networks that WORK for Realtors later . . . but for now, another great video from CommonCraft.

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I usually don’t post the same information on both of my blogs, but I felt this was “groundbreaking”.

“Real estate had somehow missed the boat on the lessons of search,” said Rowles owner of MainRhode. And so Rowles and his counterparts at Century 21 set out to change that.

John Rowles, of MainRhode,  is a former buyer with the company where I am licensed. He then became our website company  I was intriqued with their concepts to reinvent the real estate search process. They just had a whitepaper published on them by Google. Click here to download it. They have combined Google Search and Google Maps to provide a groundbreaking user-friendly real estate website.

The Century 21 Access America website allows customers to search for real estate with a simple interface like they are familiar with from the major search engines. So, a customer can search for properties using language that sellers would actually use to describe a home. For example, a “single level two-bedroom house near public transportation and shopping” or a “handyman special, two-family home near Hartford.” A customer who had passed a house with a for sale sign while driving could enter a search for “well-landscaped yard on Main Street, Providence.” The same property would be far more difficult to locate using standard MLS searching.

It is a Google Map mashed up with our database that has the combined feeds from 3 CT MLSs, the RI MLS, plus enhanced listing information from their Agents. Since the whole point of using Google Search technology is to provide  homebuyers with a search tool that returns accurate results, This has the combined effect making their listings relevant to a wider set of search criteria as well as improving the quality of the content that is associated with our client’s listings.

According to John Rowles, “we use 3 technologies provided by Google: Search, Maps, and Analytics for Agent Web sites. The Google Search Appliances we use start at $30k. Google Maps and Analytics, Trulia and Zillow are integrated using those service’s Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. The use of APIs is generally free, but you have to meet the terms of service.”

APIs are one of the key drivers of Web 2.0, because they are the vehicles that enable you to improve your user experience using technologies and data that have been developed by third parties. Most of them use XML to query the third party tools and return relevant information. For example, they send Trulia a Zip Code from their Property Detail page and Trulia sends back a market snapshot for that zip. In exchange, they agree to display the third party’s logo as well as links to the third party’s own Web site on their Broker’s Web site.

Some Brokers might have a problem with that, but pretending that Zestimates don’t exist is not going to keep users on your site. In fact, it has the opposite effect, because the first thing many homebuyers will do when they find a listing they like on the Broker’s site is to go to Zillow and check the Zestimate. At that point, that Homebuyer may find that Zillow has the house listed for sale, with the seller agent’s contact info, and you lose the chance to position your agent as a buyer’s agent.  By combining all of these tools in one place they retain more of the homebuyers because the whole is more useful than the sum of its parts.

The cost of using APIs varies depending on the Broker’s set up. If a Broker has a custom site and a Web team, they either have or can contract with a coder who can integrate APIs, but good coders are not cheap. Brokers who are stuck with a canned App from a better-known Real Estate Web site vendor might have a difficult time customizing their sites to use APIs unless the vendor decided to make it a feature that is available for all of their customers which, frankly, cheapens any function’s impact and reduces its value as a point of differentiation to zero.

MainRhode is unique in that we are a vendor, but we work with one broker in any given market exclusively, so our clients get the competitive advantage that comes from differentiating on user experience without the cost of hiring an in-house Web development team to develop and manage a custom web site.

Try out the site at www.c21accessamerica.com

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One of my favorite places to speak and visit. I was able to present to a lively group in Kalispell MT. I taught all about creating video for listing, syndicating listings and of course BLOGS. Click here to see what Jim Gonser, a student created. And YES got to ski at Big Mountain, also called WhiteFish Mountain now. Lots of snow and powder.

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Who needs a laptop to search for something on the internet when you can use your mobile phone. There are new websites every month tailored to viewing in a mobile browser on a smaller screen. Some of them are indispensable for business and some are just lots of fun. Yes, go ahead and bookmark them all. Just click on the highlighted name of each link and you will be brought to that site. Have fun.

AltaVista
A text only search on a clean simple search engine.

AOL - AOL users will appreciate this easy link to Mail, myAOL and other services including Mapquest, Moviefone, CityGuide and more.

Ask Mobile Search - Provides links to find exactly the search you are looking for, including Web Search, Directions, Images, Business Listings, Maps, Weather, Bloglines, Area Codes, and Time Zones.

Google - If you haven’t used the mobile version of Google lately, you will see it has changed. It has local search results and lets you build your own mobile Google page of all Google services.

PDAPortal - At this count, this site offers links to over 700 mobile websites. You will spend a lot of time here.

Yahoo! - Okay, equal time for Yahoo. If you use Yahoo services you can access them all here like mail, messenger and calendar. You can view photos through Flickr as well.

TheWeatherChannel - Put in your zip code and you can get a view of current conditions. You will also find airline delays.

Road Warriors - All airlines, and flight information. The quick list: American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, United and . . .

SeatGuru - to research seats on every plane in the air, and Flightstats Mobile. You will find flight status, departure and arrivals, delays and security wait times.

Last but not least, check out PhoneFavs. Set it up on your computer first then access them with any browser. There are so many other sites available on your phone.!

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