Social Media Explained and Expanded
Pat Kitano does it again with this excellent demonstration of social media’s value:
For example -
I can be contacted here in a variety of ways; below are a couple of the many.
(the closest thing to a resume I have to offer)
I’ll go ahead also and use this post as a shameless request for listeners/callers this Sunday on WNRN. A few of the topics we plan to discuss are -
-owners being upside-down when trying sell their house
-being uncomfortable buying in these times, even though it may be the best time around
-how much should a seller lower the sales price?
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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.
Street View in Charlottesville
While it’s not “street view” in the traditional sense (Google) and in spite of some questions about how they’re doing the display of IDX data, but what CurbPlaces is doing is pretty cool.
We’ve begun rolling out a solution to this at CurbPlaces.com: Street Pictures. Now, when you zoom all the way in on the CurbPlaces map, little camera icons will appear throughout the neighborhood. Clicking a camera will bring up 360 degree pictures of the area. Try it out. We’ve started with Downtown and the City and our slowly making our way across the map (as fast as our intern can ride his bike carrying a laptop, digital camera, and GPS device…)
Update 13 June 2008: For a tremendous discussion about display of the “good old days,” where we are today and where we might be going, take the time to listen to this discussion on 4Realz.
What’s outside the window?
I’ll be adding these photos to my listings soon - what’s outside the window of the house, what the street looks like, what’s to the left and right … not just because a client mentioned it to me the other day, but also because Google just released Panoramio:
Have you ever looked at a photo and wondered what was beyond its edges - just what was left of that castle or what the facade of Notre Dame looks like from close up? We certainly have, which is why I’m happy to tell you about a new feature we’ve just introduced for Panoramio, Google’s site for sharing geo-tagged photos.
Panoramio enables photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs and to view those images in their geographic context. You may already have seen photos from the Panoramio layer while zooming around in Google Earth or Google Maps (just click the “more” button), but have you visited the Panoramio website? Now, when browsing photos on the site you can explore multiple images of a particular location in a more seamless way.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I only wish we could integrate this into the MLS … but we’re relatively limited in the photos we can upload and then we’d likely run into the “you can’t have your own branding!” issues … Google’s (etc’s) flexibility in this arena may be one of the downfalls of the MLS as we know it. (and that might not be a bad thing)
One thing that absolutely must be fixed on the new Realtor.com
Spell “separate” correctly, for goodness sakes. I guess that’s why it’s a beta.
Also, in the message sent to the Realtor, why have pre-written text advertising to the Realtor?
Policy Maps for today’s real estate consumer
One of the most common questions that buyer clients ask is - what kind of people live here?
Most often (although I do have some stories about profoundly ignorant people) they are asking - “do they have kids here?” or “do the people around here work at UVA?” or “is it safe?” or “how are the schools?”
Enter Policy Map. In many ways similar, if not a competitor to (as far as I can tell) to Geo Commons’ products. They have data layers for Real Estate Analysis, Neighborhood Conditions, Mortgage Originations, Education, Money & Income, Demographics, Owners and Renters, Jobs, Energy (wind and solar aren’t options - yet) - and dozens of subsets under each respective data layer.
This is all information that today’s real estate consumer wants (and needs) to know. Buyers relocating to new areas should find this kind of data invaluable.
The possibilities for using this data are endless. More data, presented in a usable fashion, especially by MLS’ and sites such as Realtor.com will be valuable - to consumers and Realtors.
Thanks to RWW for finding this site and for highlighting some of the data that he found interesting
I’ll be moving next month, just six blocks away from where I live right now, but that part of the neighborhood is quite different. This is interesting data to look at. I did not know, for example, that a certain 10X10 block area I walk my dog through regularly is filled with people who have donated to the Presidential campaign of John McCain. No wonder I was the only one shocked when an openly gay man was elected Mayor of our city last night! I thought the whole city was filled with conservative lawn signs - but it’s just that little patch.
Now, if only I could figure out a way to mash this data up on my website.
Update: Blown Mortgage’s take on the new site.
A 30 second review of the new Realtor dot com
Not bad.
I like how it shows when the listings were last updated.
I like how they have finally integrated decent mapping.
Not sure why a featured listing asking $995k shows at the top of the screen when I’m searching for houses between $250k and $350k.
I think I like the grid-limiting search. I still want GIS, crime, school, etc, but this is a decent start (as well it should be - Realtor.com has continually redefined the standard of “underwhelmingly underperforming” for YEARS.
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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This work by Jim Duncan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. -
