Technology

I’ll get back to the picture in a minute, but first I think Sunday evening is as good a time as any to make your eyes glaze over. My buds at Altos Research have rolled out a new offering which they have dubbed AltosXplorer.

I have been a subscriber for awhile to Altos’ listing market trend charts which serve as useful visual snapshots of listing trends down to the Zip code level. With Xplorer, subscribers now have more historical data at their fingertips and, for the blogger or web geek (or, even, novice), they are so “clickably” easy to import.

For my maiden voyage, I chose Carmel Valley (92130) and Scripps Ranch (92131). I often refer to these as sister communities since their demographics and housing stocks are so similar. The big difference, of course, is proximity to the Big Blue Wet Thing.

Note: All statistics are for homes currently offered for sale and represent 90-day rolling averages. Since data is collected weekly, certain statistics (such as “listings absorbed”) will reflect activity over a seven day period. As a refresher, the Market Action Index reflects listing versus sale activity, and an index of more than thirty is a “seller’s market” while less is favorable to the buyer.

 Finally, I ran a chart of new listing activity (again, calculated on a weekly basis) for the two communties just to show how comparison charts are a snap with AltosXplorer.

So, wasn’t that fun?

I will mess around more with my new empowerment next week. First, I have to kick it into full commando packing mode. Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco for the bi-annual Inman Real Estate Connect conference. This is turning into a repeat performance of last year’s. Last July I wrote:

So, this morning, I am off to the Inman technology conference in San Francisco. I am off in theory, at least. I haven’t exactly packed. Packing Plan A always involves meticulously planning out wardrobes, including appropriate accessories, neatly laying out the items the night before, and then, the morning of the flight, casually arranging the military-folded articles in the suitcase. I’m going with Plan B. Within the next hour, I will be shooting every item of clothing I own out of a cannon into an undersized carry-on and hoping for the best. Pity the poor, random power cord. If it simply looks like it might fit into one end of a camera, video recorder, voice recorder, iPod, or laptop, it’s coming along for the ride. I will have enough electronics and peripherals to inspire the Port Commission to beef up staffing at the security check point, and I can all but guarantee that at least half that make the journey with me were designed to power the VCR I sold at a garage sale in 1993.

Yep, that’s me. Both the washing machine and the dryer are on Turbo setting. They are largely filled with items of clothing I have not worn since Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” tour, yet suddenly I feel the need to take these up north. I was closer to being packed and ready for this trip in 1984 than I am tonight. Every client I have every known or imagined has suddenly come out of hiding wanting to list or buy or appeal their property taxes, and every agent in San Diego County (agents presumably not trying to pair shoes and slacks, much less power cords with parent devices) has decided that today is the day their clients will make an offer on one of our seller’s homes.

This is all great, make no mistake, and very manageable (see Power Cord discussion above), yet I am living in a cauldren of multi-tasking mania. One daughter thinks she is going off to college in three weeks, and this involves not only wardrobe mobilization and dorm accessorizing foresight, but the uncanny ability to set up her college checking account at a bank least likely to fail by Thanksgiving break. Another just got her driver’s license, and I am feeling the social responsibility to post her departure times in the event that others in Scripps Ranch might be considering an outing that would coincide.

So, in times of multi-tasking, overload crisis I do what any sane adult would do. I decide that today is the day to add Facebook friends. You see, I am on a panel at Inman entitled “Get Social or Die.” I woke up with three Facebook friends, and I am proud to say that, between two offers, one listing appointment and numerous phone calls,  I now have eight. Granted, their median age is fifteen, but it’s a start. OK, I’m dead.

So, Inman may have missed on this one, but at least they had the foresight to include me in another panel, “Creating Content that Hooks Readers.” Don’t worry; they aren’t allowing me to actually speak on this topic; I am only a moderator.

As for the thumbnail photo, that is a shot my Price Is Right-winning daughter snapped on the plane on our way to New Orleans. And, it captures the essence of how I travel. I will arrive in San Francisco fully briefed on the comings and goings of the Hollywood A-list, but with one shoe, a black blazer and brown skirt, and three earrings (among which, a pair can not be found), and absolutely no preconceived notion of what I am going to speak about or how, exactly, I might moderate anything other than my incoming text messages.

On the lighter side of things, I am able to leave you with a clearer picture of where our San Diego real estate market stands. And, I will be accepting new Facebook friends throughout the week — eight going on ten. There is no stopping me now!

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.

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.

photo credit: booleansplit
It’s Mother’s Day, and I am looking forward to a day of being regaled and honored by the family unit. This will be followed by an evening of guilt when the realization sets in that haven’t done a darn thing recently to deserve a “day” of my own. Sure, years ago, I considered myself worthy. I did all of those mom things; I cooked and cleaned, and I nurtured and doted. But roles change. Today I just show up.

My role has changed because my clients, the offspring, have changed. Where they were once my wide-eyed needy charges who relied on me for virtually everything, today they are my eyes-rolling needy ones who rely on me only to lob the checkbook and get out of their way. Occasionally, I am still called on to “find something” (their homework, their shoe, their “You aren’t the boss of me!” T-shirt). Mostly, though, they are cruise missiles on an unguided course to the refrigerator, and then the car keys and, next, college.

I have also found that my role as a real estate agent is changing. It seems like only yesterday that our buyer clients were wide-eyed and almost totally dependent. The expectation was that we would take them by the hand and help them find their home. Today, we are no longer needed to fill this role, at least not to the same extent. We do much more as agents, of course, than drive the tour bus and always have, but until now this has been the most visible part of our job. As an industry, we were codependent, and we placed far too much emphasis on this one stereotypical definition of our role, forgetting that our true value runs much deeper.

More and more, our buyer clients do not want our help, at least not in the traditional sense. E-mails we send with new listings are met with, “Thanks, but I already saw that on-line” to, worse, silence. They are wearing their own iconic back-off T-shirt. Don’t call us; we’ll call you — when we need you.

As my child-clients grow up, our relationship is evolving. It is much less one of superior-subordinate or teacher-student, and much more of a cooperative venture. They still need stuff, but now they don’t need me to prepare the entire meal. They simply want me to keep the fridge stocked. It’s a bit of a struggle for independence, really. They want it, and I’m having to get used to the idea.

So adapt we must. Buyers just want a fully-stocked kitchen. They want resources, they want access to homes and information, and then they want to cook up their own home tour. Buyers’ agents are on the verge of becoming empty nesters. Your clients are growing up, and you can fight it, or you can give them what they want. Don’t make them fill in a contact form when all they want is the address. Don’t make them sign a guest book to get permission to go to the search screen or enter the home. They will just rebel.

Buyers are developing at different rates in our tech-enabled world, but developing they are. I think it is a mistake to fight their desire for independence. The MLS is still our car, but we have relinquished the car keys, so let them drive. I hear too many agents suggesting that providing the information buyers want, no strings attached, is self-defeating. If you just give it away, what will they need you for? Well, if you have to ask that question, they won’t need you, because you don’t understand your role.

I received an email from a reader yesterday who wanted to appeal his property taxes. He needed comparable sales data, complete with parcel numbers, closing dates, and all of the other little vitals that go along with a recording. He didn’t ask me to do it for him, but simply asked me where he could find the data. I did it for him. What’s in it for me, you ask? Well, probably nothing. Or maybe something. If nothing else, I might have gained some respect and trust. But what a satisfying feeling it is to know that I provided all of the tools — in this case, the blog post with information on the tax appeal process and the open search feature on the web site — which inspired this gentleman to ask the right questions. Next time, he might need to buy or sell a home, and he might think of me.

As our children and our potential clients leave the nest, our roles change. We can no longer enforce our house rules. We have given them the tools to take control. At some point in their journey, they will still need us, but in a different way. They will eventually need to tap into our intellectual property and life experience; there will come a time when they need our help and support. What started out as a relationship based on dependence is developing into a more mature one of mutual respect and understanding.

I want this to be the place they want to come home to.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Okay, this is way-cool. My favorite geek, Drew Meyers, shared his latest tech toy on the Geek Estate Blog.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how I might apply the embeddable spreadsheet feature of Google’s EditGrid, but I have this primal need to try everything at least once. Drew, being the good company man he is, would much rather I share Zillow’s first quarter market report for San Diego. I just may do that soon, but today I will instead share a little project in which we have been knee-deep for the past month.

At a recent Scripps Ranch Community Planning Group meeting, the chair suggested that it would be nice to have a comprehensive list of homeowners associations (HOAs) and management companies for the many neighborhoods comprising Scripps Ranch. His thought was that in the event of future emergencies (think fires), a single go-to resource for contact information would be helpful. So, with the help of our underpaid (as in, “not paid”) high school intern, Jeremy Haywood, we set about compiling the information. The result is the following spreadsheet, presented in two pages. The first indicates whether or not each neighborhood has an HOA and/or Mello Roos assessment, and the second lists the HOA management companies and phone numbers.

We (that would be the “royal we,” think “Jeremy”) are almost finished mapping this information using GoogleMaps. Knowing that you are all now tingly with anticipation, rest assured we will be sharing the visual version of our spreadsheet when it is finished. In the meantime, I am off to think up something else I can put in an embeddable spreadsheet that is not Zillow’s first quarter market report. I just love messin’ with Drew.

This morning I’m a little overextended at Inman News.