Group Therapy

I’m spent. I continue to cling to the notion that for every problem there is a solution, but this morning I am throwing in the towel.

All I want to do is continue to post market statistics for a half-dozen distinct zip codes and for San Diego County as whole on our web site. That should be easy enough. I have MLS access, dang it! I have been doing this for years, and while this seemingly simple task has always been the source of much frustration (and has often resulted in a few colorful words being tossed about, like “darn” and “jeepers”), never before have I found myself resigned to utter defeat.

When I set up my first, ugly web site a decade ago, I decided I wanted to provide on-going market statistics because a) Consumers liked them, and b) I could. Since I have always shunned the canned web site, I am able to entirely control the content. The power is intoxicating. I can update any page or create new pages any day I am in the mood, or even several times in one day if I am feeling spunky. Even today in my evolved state, our web site is not vying for any “pretty” awards, but it is content-rich.

It is no secret that I am not a huge fan of our new MLS system. But, even the old system presented it’s challenges when it came to sharing data. This is mostly because Realtor Associations, as we all know, have never been good at sharing. In the early days, I started by providing a list of homes on the market, in escrow, and recently sold for a single Zip code: Scripps Ranch. Within weeks of publishing my stats for the first time, I got the nasty-gram from my Association. Where active and pending listings are concerned, by showing actual property addresses, I was a big-fat rules violator. Even with the proper disclaimer (”listed and sold by various Brokers”), I can only publish this information if I am the listing agent. If I was a Virtual Office, things would be different, but as a lowly agent with my license hung at a brick and mortar Brokerage, this is forbidden. Fair enough.

Instead, I started providing the lists with street names only. Not so fast! In nasty-gram number two, I was counseled that this information was still too specific, and a consumer might actually be able to figure out to which property I was alluding. Obviously, we can’t have that. The solution, I was told, was to identify the home by “subdivision.” The challenge here is that while listing agents presumably get the address right, they rarely get the subdivision name right. “The Willows” often becomes something like “Scripps Ranch PUD Unit 12B 987-J Heck if I Know.” I overcame this with a little sweat equity; the MLS report tables could be cut and pasted into my own table where I could set about correcting the data before posting.

Over time, my statistics offerings were expanded to six Zip codes plus the county summary. I always wished I could provide data for more areas, but given that there is no way for me to automate the updates or even easily grab the data, this will never be an option. The Altos Research charts helped, but these (so far) only reflect active listing trends. Until they (or someone) are able to provide a similar product for pendings and sales, I am relegated to doing things the old-fashioned, manual way.

Enter Tempo5. I am no longer able to “right click” reports, and I am certain this was by design. Further, the standard reports either include fields I don’t want (map code and listing type) or fields I can’t use (address). I can create a custom report, but I can’t add column labels. I can’t find a way to even find the county-wide summary statistics because, before I can get to the “statistics” report option, I have to display the listings meeting my criteria, and this display is limited to 250 records. 

The fun doesn’t stop there. Statistics reports for some Zip codes include Days on Market, while others do not. If an address is long, it overwrites the adjacent column, the column for Zip code which I don’t even want because I am searching by Zip code. Duh. There are a million other little problems, like price-per-square-foot being reported to ten decimal places, but they are too numerous to go into here. So, I have been playing with work-arounds. I have tried saving screen shots of reports and dropping them into Photoshop for cropping and resizing, but that only works if the search results fit within one screen. They rarely do. I have tried saving the files as PDFs, but being one who is not prepared to pop for the $7,985 full Adobe software, I then have no way to correct or edit the data.

If someone has any ideas, I would love to hear them. I know I can pay DataQuick to provide me with the sold data each month, but this just seems wrong. I have access to the data I need; I just can’t get it from Point A to Point B. In the meantime, I am seriously considering nuking the statistics pages from my web site entirely. And, maybe, nobody would notice or care. I just hate to have to admit failure.

So, to the three people who might accidentally read this, help! If you are a vendor, is there a solution I am not aware of? If you are an agent and you are willing to share, have you found a solution? And, if you are a consumer, are the statistics offerings really of any value to you, or can I make them go away and put myself out of my misery? I could always lobby our Association and Sandicor to provide me with what I need, but given that we are still trying to untangle the mess that is their current offering, that is not really an option at all.

Tempo5 Footnote: This is a little off-topic, but it is still important. If you are a San Diego agent, do you know where your listings are? A three-week old listing of ours is still not showing up on Realtor.com, the “Offical Site of the National Association of Realtors,” if you believe their banner. I am told that “they” are working on this. Presumably ”they” are the same “they” that told us we would need to update our ActiveX controls again this morning, only for us to be met with an error message that told us to contact our system administrator. On Yahoo Real Estate, a site relying on my Broker’s feed, our three-week-old listing is also AWOL. Fortunately, it is resident on Trulia, but only because I use Postlets to syndicate our listings, and on Zillow and Craigslist, but only because I manually enter our homes for sale there. It shouldn’t have to be this hard.

It’s a glorious Monday morning in San Diego and here’s what’s happening:

Quick Hit #1- Now that my Principal Partner and Chief Technology Officer, Kris, has had her brain fried by our new and exciting Tempo 5 MLS software, I should probably be thinking about a new career. Obviously our value to our clients was not foremost in the minds of the San Diego Association of Realtors (SDAR). So I’m thinking about going into the software biz myself. The fact that I am totally unqualified shouldn’t make a difference. I have found the perfect client - SDAR. If they bought the Tempo 5 piece of (insert favorite, colorful expletive), I’m certain they will buy just about anything I have to offer. I’m sure glad SDAR is here to better serve me.

Quick Hit #2 - The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reports this morning the Pending home sales took and unexpected jump in April, up a much greater than expected 8.3% in the West. Based upon the fact that Kris and I, along with our two Buyers Agents, John and Lisa, are currently working with a dozen active/serious buyers, I can’t say I’m surprised. Add to that the fact that we are actually short on inventory in the market areas and price segments within which these buyers have interest, and we may be getting closer to stabilization than many think.

Quick Hit #3- Scripps Ranch closed sales stats for May, 2008 showed mixed results. There were 26 closed escrows (If we can trust Tempo 5). This is down from May, 2007 when we had 31 closed escrows. However, it was also the fifth straight month of increasing sales in 92131. The average “sold” price was also up 6% from the previous month to $296 per foot, but still down approximately 10% from May, 2007.

Quick Hit #4- While our fearless leaders in Washington D.C. contemplate another big and creative (but totally worthless) incentive program for the many homeowners on the path to losing their homes (throw them another $600 check), maybe they should be thinking about real solutions. Instead of focusing on the Supply side, maybe they should attack the problem from the Demand side. How about the “Home Investment Act of 2008?”  Buy a home (Primary owner-occupied residence) over the next 24 months with a minimum 5% down payment and get a supplemental tax write-off of 10% of the purchase price, not to exceed $50,000,  taken pro rata  over the 3 tax years subsequent to the purchase. Driving demand will solve the supply-side problems, including the government sending out billions of $$ that are essentially worthless to solving the housing recession.  

Those are my thoughts this morning. I’ve got to go take Kris to therapy now (I will be forwarding the bill to SDAR). Hope everyone has a great week.

We don’t need no stinkin’ beta test!

I’m still on the rampage. That’s because my MLS is broken.

There is a popular saying that goes something like, “143% of home buyers start their search on the Internet.” Well, if you currently have your home listed for sale in San Diego, I wouldn’t be calling the moving truck any time soon.

In a comment on my last rant, the tech savvy and ever eloquent Galen Ward wrote the following:

Tempo5 sounds like a can of suck. Add the fact that their IDX went down for 5+ days and you can imagine why no one was answering the phones.

Now, being one who appreciates artful prose, I was focused on the “can of suck” part. I missed the forest for the tree stumps. Actually, I had suspected  a couple of days ago that if I couldn’t access listing date in my own MLS system, the IDX (data exchange) feeds to other sites might be compromised. I made a quick trip to my own web site search feature and saw that the data looked fine: No funky entry fields, a populated map, and so forth. How naive am I? (That was rhetorical, so let’s move on, please).

It was this morning, nine exciting, fun-filled days after the big coming out party of Tempo5, that the words a buyer client uttered yesterday starting reverberating in my dense skull. “There haven’t been any new listings in a week.” Now, at the time, I thought she made this statement much like my children say, “There is nothing to eat in this house,” meaning, “There is nothing that interests me.” Au contraire. What she meant was there haven’t been any new listings showing up on the sites she uses for her search — None, nada, zip.

In my unofficial survey this morning, I confirmed that no home listed since D-Day appears on Trulia, Realtor.com, Prudential’s web site, or even my own web site with the most-awesome search feature compliments of Diverse Solutions. I found a few newer listings on a site which shall remain nameless (it starts with an “R” and ends in “edfin”), but I ran out of steam before I confirmed their offering was complete.

What does this mean? Well, for starters, Zillow should start a full-on promotional blitz of Tempo5 nationwide in order to solidify their global dominance. Because I can (and do) manually enter our listings there, my sellers are represented. Ditto Craigslist, and the half-dozen or so random sites which are fed my property flyers via Postlets. If your data is coming straight out of Sandicor, however, you (and my clients) are screwed.

Sandicor, if you are listening, please fix my MLS! I am frustrated, my appraisers are frustrated, and my clients are getting p*ssed off. If it is the IDX recipient who is responsible for making some changes to properly process your newly formatted feed, then work with them! You might think that you have bigger fish to fry than assist third-party for-profit sites get our data right, but even Realtor.com is effected. Remember them? They are the site promoted as the “Realtor’s” site, the one to whom I pay (insert very big four-digit number) a year for the privilege of “enhancing” my listings. Just having my listings represented would be an enhancement this week.

Have you noticed your agent behaving strangely? Maybe he has been a little testy, a tad grumpier than usual. Perhaps she walked through the walk-through with glazed eyes and a look of befuddlement, not really seeming into the whole discussion of how to operate the irrigation timers. Or, it could have been the odd encounter at the open house that tipped you off, an open house lacking cookies, a guest register or, most curiously, that coveted “free list of homes.”

If you have never before felt compelled to be kind to a Realtor, I beg you to dig deep this week. Muster all of the compassion you can. Your Neighborhood Specialist has been Tempo-ed.

Last Wednesday, the curtains came down on our local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) software. May 28, 2008 will be date forever etched in the memories of San Diego agents as the day the music died. Tempo 3 was killed dead and, in its place, Tempo 5 was born.

“What happened to Tempo 4?” you ask. I am wondering the same thing; the missing link is probably the software that actually worked. At a time when agents everywhere are otherwise indisposed, distracted with thoughts of just how they will eat in July and generally working three-to-the-ninth-power times harder for a fraction of yesterday’s paycheck, our Board of Realtors decided it was time to better serve us.

Now, this isn’t about agents being disinclined to embrace change. Every new lunar cycle brings a new statute, a new form and a new lockbox vendor, the latter requiring tens of thousands of soldiers defending the American Dream to converge at some random convention hall to take advantage of the limited time trade-ins. With each conversion comes a few weeks of confusion, but we have always managed to survive. That was then. Tempo 5 is Armageddon.

Here is my own analysis of what is wrong with our new Tempo 5 MLS software: It doesn’t work.

The gory details follow:

1. First we will assume that your computer runs on Internet Explorer, because Tempo 5 only runs on Internet Explorer. Before you can safely enter the system for the first time, you need to change your screen settings, download ActiveX controls from a site that cannot be accessed, a site that perpetually returns a “404 Error - Site not found” message, adjust your Internet security settings, enable pop-ups, and add a total of four sites to your “trusted sites.” This doesn’t seem insurmountable until you consider that the average agent can’t back out of their driveway without a Thomas Guide.
2. The old system required each agent to log in with a special password, one that was updated each month for security purposes. It seems that some bad apples were sharing their special passwords, however, so a new, safer system was clearly needed to ensure that only licensed, dues paying, authorized users can gain access to the proprietary data — You know, the data that you can find on Zillow or Trulia or Redfin or Realtor.com or…  So, now we have a little key fob. Logging in requires a Member Number, a Password and a randomly generated Access Code obtained by punching the button on your key fob thingy. Where is this key fob? In my case last week, it was in my purse on the Louisiana Swamp Tour, while Steve was in San Diego needing to input a listing.
3. The new software is as intuitive as the Bush administration. For a profession where the barriers to entry include a number two pencil and an opposable thumb, we have a software system seemingly developed by a rabid badger holding a Doctorate in quantum physics and a grudge.
4. We need a bicycle, but the Board delivered a space shuttle — one with defective O-Rings. Search result screens without scroll bars, even the blank “white screen” variety which Steve has been enjoying of late, were initially an irritant, but are actually becoming welcome sights. It beats the heck out of “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and must close,” which is the screen I have most often enjoyed. If one is lucky enough to keep their connection for any measurable length of time (say, a nanosecond), they are confronted with load speeds roughly equivalent to the gestation period of the African Elephant.
5. We can make this easy, or we can make this hard. We made it hard. To input a new listing requires 125 distinct inputs. The basic search screen offers thirty different search fields, and the advanced search page is the page where only the bravest dare go. While I am spending my month of June trying to get a new listing entered or narrow down the active listings to just the homes with an upstairs laundry closet with gas hook-ups and a community pool but homeowner’s fees less than $72.95 a month, every would-be buyer west of the Mason-Dixon is out signing a contract on a home they found on Craigslist.

I have only scratched the surface of the Realtor’s anguish this week, but hopefully it is enough to inspire you to be kind to your agent. Run, don’t walk, to Hallmark. Offer your sympathy and your support. Your Top Producer is going through difficult times. And, whatever you do, don’t ask us about homes currently on the market. We have no clue.