I have added everyone who has requested to be included to the CyberHomes listing feed. I spend some time this morning going through the CyberHomes site looking for RealWorld listings and have only found listings from the first beta test offices. I will be in contact with CyberHomes this week. I’ll post here as I find out more about when they will be showing up.
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I had occasion to drive to Portland and back on Monday and Tuesday. Our destination was in the northwest industrial district. My overall impression of the trip was “where is this economic crisis we keep hearing about?”. I read that Oregon’s unemployment rate just hit 10% but you would never know it by the number of trucks on the road. The industrial district was busy. New high rise buildings are being built in downtown Portland. So where is this economic crisis we keep hearing about? My niece had her car sideswiped by a hit and run driver a few weeks ago. She needs a new car. She is a bartender and can’t verify her tips (or they don’t count or some such) so her credit union won’t lend to her . Gramma cosigns and they still won’t lend to her. So gramma takes the money out of her money market account and finances the car. Oh, so that must be what they are talking about. For those of you who knew him, David L. Davis passed away Saturday morning. For those of you who didn’t know him, here is the short version of the impact he has probably had on you. When my wife Janice and I moved to Bandon in October 1992 we figured “how hard could it be to make a couple thousand dollars a month?” (turned out to be pretty hard). At the time the Chamber of Commerce had a list of people who were interested in helping small businesses get established. Although David was not on the list, when I told someone (don’t remember who) that I was a programmer, they suggested I go see David. This led to my taking over the Bandon CRS (Coastal Realty Service) which served as the local (paper based) MLS. He also purchased a copy of the Coos county assessor tax data, gave it to me and told me to convert it so he could have it on his PC. The CRS went on line and became the basis of RealWorld in 1994. The Coos county tax data project became FarmTeam and my tax data services which provides tax data to almost every rural real estate agent in Oregon. So, next time you enter a listing or get a lead from RealWorld or look up a property in either our Assessor Tax Information system or on RMLS, think of David L. and say thanks. Cyberhomes I have heard several times that getting your listing to appear as many places as possible is a top priority. Because of a recent request, I have recently added the ability to feed your listings to Cyberhomes. They in turn feed listings to Yahoo Real Estate, AOL Real Estate and Google Base. You can read the Cyberhomes promotional page about this here. If you would like to have your listings added to this feed, please have your office owner or designated broker email me. Uservoice Starting sometime on Monday you will notice a “Feedback” tab to the right of the menu when you log in. I have always said that my best ideas come from you. I recently found a service that allows you to post suggestions and comment and vote on others suggestions. I have posted a couple of recent suggestions to start things off. RMLS IDX and Broker Specific Feeds I received an email from RMLS Distribution Services on Thursday (Feb 19th) notifying me that their access fees for IDX service providers were going to double beginning in March. If you have IDX with us you will be receiving an email once we figure out how we are going to handle this. Fortunately, there is also an up side to this. For years, RMLS has had what they called a Broker Specific feed. This is a feed of all your offices active listings. It was not too exciting because they charged a $250 setup fee for the feed. But still, several offices do take advantage of it. With the recent fee changes they have eliminated the setup charge. So, if you are entering all of your listings into RMLS, and would like to save having to reenter them into RealWorld, let me know. No cost, all that is required is a form. If we are going to spend $300 per month to access data from RMLS, I want to get as much bang for the buck as possible. The phishing emails I get don’t usually apply to the institutions I deal with but since this is a local bank … This morning I received a phishing email that appeared to be from Security Bank. Anyone receiving an email that appears to be from Security, DO NOT click on the link. It is an attempt to steal your log in information. Always type in the web site address for any financial web sites you visit. Here is a link with more information about phishing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing I have been talking to Trish Neal and she is working to get the old listings removed from realestateoregon.com and get the bug that caused them fixed. She said it may be a week before it is fixed but it is good to know that action is being taken. We now know who to talk to to get action on any issue. Thanks Trish. I just had a report of an old listing showing up on realestateoregon.com. I have confirmed that this listing is not in the current feed. I suspect that their listing agregator at some point failed to delete old listings when importing new data. I would like to see how wide spread this problem is. Since most of you are feeding your listings from RealWorld to this site, I would appreciate it if you would visit http://www.realestateoregon.com and check to see if any sold or expired listings show up in your listings on their site. I want to continue to feed your listings as many places as possible. I am currently working on expanding the list of sites available to you to send your listings. However, I intend to hold these sites to the same quality standards you expect from RealWorld. Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers. Yesterday he posted an article titled “Advice for Real Estate Agents (quit now)“. The “quit now” advice is directed at the order takers who sit by waiting for the phone to ring. He goes on to lay out a plan explaining how to position yourself as THE person everyone wants (needs?) to go to in your selected niche of the market. Follow the link above and read the post. Then, if you have time, do what I did and go back through his archives and read everything he has written in the past year or two. He won’t disappoint you. I have been giving a lot of thought to the idea of microblogging as a replacement for the email conversations I find myself having all the times. Things like setting up a tee time for golf between two or three friends. This currently happens in close-to-real-time email with everyone ccd all of the messages. My microblogging clone would allow my “followers” to look at my personal tags (areas of interest) and follow only specific tags. For example, my golf buddies could follow my golf tag and would not have to put up with my musings about technology or business updates. A gold friend who is also a client could follow my golf and real estate tags. This would allow me to throw out a “any one interested in playing” post, tag it “golf”, and my gold buddies would get it but clients and business associates who could care less about my golf would not. I have not joined twitter, so I can’t say you could not use it to do this, but the NIH factor is enough to cause me to want write my own. It’s interesting, that when something surfaces it seems to start poping up everywhere. That is how it seems to be for me now with e-cards. I’m hoping to spark some discussion on the subject. I hope you will take the time to give me your feedback. A newsletter I receive regularly was talking about sending out Christmas (Holiday for the PC among you) cards and mentioned that she had found a site where you could send very nice classy business type e-cards for several occasions. Then at lunch today, out of the blue, my mother mentioned how she hates all of the typical e-card sites out there but that she discovered one that was so simple an nice that she just had to subscribe. She said the site was by an artist in the UK who was using the e-cards to promote her art. I checked out the site mentioned in the newsletter and the cards are beautiful. Their site focused strongly on the environmental benefits of sending e-cards. I believe this significantly helped overcome the “cheapness factor” of sending an e-card over a paper card. However, when you use their free service, the page with the card is more advertisement than card and the only option to get rid of the advertising seemed to be having them build you a custom e-card site. Fine (maybe) if you are a large company but I believe I can do better. Normally, at this point I would run off and throw together a proof of concept of what I think a site like this should do. Then it would sit in the drawer (or on the shelf, whichever metaphor you prefer) never to grace anyone’s web browser. Here is my criteria for what a nice but simple e-card (suitable for use by a business professional) should do or be:
I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I believe a tool like this would be a great relationship building tool. Give me your ideas, suggestions, objections. Is it something you would use and why or why not? Thank you in advance. Ken |
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