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Thank you. Plain and simple.
You make this blog so much better, and I am grateful for the time the time, energy, thought and insight you provide here. The knowledge I gain from your comments istremendous, and I sincerely appreciate every one of you.
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Going to San Francisco Next Week
Next week I will be sitting on a panel Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2008.
I actually have to work next week as well (there’s more to the real estate life than blogging and conferences), so I will unfortunately be missing Beer with Bloggers and RE BarCamp.
The panel on which I’ll be sitting is one that, to me is fascinating and intriguing, particularly in today’s market where there is an ongoing seismic shift away from Realtors’ core competencies being “searching for/finding homes” to “representation of clients’ best interests.” There is a lot to discuss and I expect that forty-five minutes won’t be nearly enough time.
This should be interesting.
Thursday, July 24, 3:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Changing Roles: Brokers & the MLS vs. the Listing Aggregators
Panelists:
Ben Phillips, Vice President & New Product Development, Managing Director, Realogy Franchise Group
Beverly Faull, GM & SVP, Fidelity National Information Services
Celeste Starchild, Vice President Broker Sales, ListHub: Broker Division of Threewide’s Broker Division
Jim Duncan, Realtor/Blogger, RealCentralVa.com
Sean Black, VP of Sales, Trulia
This is the third time I have been invited to speak at Inman Connect, and every time I learn something new.
- In San Francisco 2007 I spoke about the benefits of local blogging
- Earlier this year in New York City I was on a panel titled, “Blogging, a Fresh Take on Client Prospecting“
* I despise writing stories with “I” as one of the core elements, but writing this post in the third person would have been a bit odd (and perhaps arrogant sounding)
Coming up this week on RealCentralVA - 16 June 2008
- One thing that didn’t make it in last week’s Daily Progress story
- (Hopefully) more on homeowner’s insurance and vacant houses - about 33% of the houses currently on the market in Central Virginia are vacant - so this is a very pertinent issue.
- A breakdown of the state of the Central Virginia (including Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Nelson - not Louisa) real estate market by price range.
- Duplicate content on real estate blogs - good, bad, indifferent?
- I’m sure going to try to do a market update for Waynesboro and Augusta.
A thought on the current Realtor.com/AVM debate
Copying is not innovation. Realtor.com has the opportunity to leverage their tenuous data advantage and position themselves ahead of the competition. Their current tactic of emulating rather than differentiating is not a positive sign.
The 93rd Carnival of Real Estate
Presented as only the Phoenix Real Estate Guy can - with Mexican food as the theme. I’m hungry.
Coming up this week
Tuesday - Why I cannot tell you with accuracy how often CSX’s trains run
Thursday - One way to encourage walking/biking
Friday - Market update for the Central Virginia region. I’ve found that posting market updates at the immediate turn of the month is imprudent and not the most accurate of practices, so I tend to give Realtors a few days to update the Charlottesville MLS before I post my analysis.
And likely some other news will warrant posting as well.
As always, you may subscribe to this blog by clicking here.
Proximity to rail equals higher property values?
What’s old is new again. Estately, one of the best real estate search sites out there puts forth this as fact -
When buying a home, living near rail lines is better.
I wrote about mass transit’s ability to increase property values in May of 2005, in which I linked to this story at RCG.* I wonder what the Anti-planner would say about this.
What Estately are doing falls in line with a story I have scheduled to post on Thursday this week - stay tuned.
*For real estate blog geeks (like me) the first line of my post in May ‘05 is intriguing to me - “Found this blog today with a very interesting story about the above subject -” “this blog” is the venerable Rain City Guide. 
What will MLS data standards do for the consumers?
Hopefully, all of our lives - buyers, sellers, Realtors - will become more efficient.
With the recent talk of how forthcoming data standards are going to make property data sharing more efficient and thus better for consumers and Realtors, here is one of my requests -
I’d love to see a (Google) Mashup (or the MLS would be even better, and I think a no-brainer) providing an overlay of school districts. Albemarle County School Districts are here and the City of Charlottesville’s school districts are here. Even better, make it so that registered users could make their own pages with all their important locations to help them organize their thoughts and help their Realtor representatives better understand their thoughts and thought processes.
But here’s a problem - Albemarle’s maps are PDFs and the City’s districts are encased in a Java-heavy page. What’s the solution?
The number I have heard of common fields to be shared is around fourteen - methinks there’s some work to be done with this. I could think of fourteen fields pretty quickly …
Price, address/lat-long/parcel ID, bedrooms, baths, living room, dining room, fireplace, pool, garage, lot size, view, fenced yard?, flooring type?, room locations, laundry?, paved?
Ok, that’s 16 from a stream-of-consciousness, but you get my point.
From a consumer point of view - what are the most important pieces of data that help you get an initial picture of the property?
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