360Digest

Rain City Guide rags on PubSub’s list because the Seattle P.I.’s Real Estate blog keeps coming up on top, ahead of them, Grow-a-Brain and the Zillow blog. I dunno….. I kind of like it! As a matter of fact, it’s one of my favorite lists (tee-hee!)

Bloodhound Blog has a nice post about blogs that feed the hungry mind. He mentions yours truly as having a “serious mind. Not dour or joyless, but never frivolous or shallow.” I’m flattered. But obviously, he’s never seen this.

I got a heads up about the Holm Team website. Anytime you use their real estate search, and click on “more details”, it frames the results with my name and photo. Ssshhhh! Don’t tell them! The site has a -0 page rank, but it’s a hoot to think that anytime one of their clients searches for real estate, my name, photo, website address, email and telephone number comes up and it looks like one of my listings. (I’m not sure if they stole the code or they just have a lazy website developer… Let’s not tell them. Let’s just wait and see how long it takes for them to notice.)

That reminds me of a time that an agent took Debbie Ferrari’s rotating MLS Search Image, and drew it directly onto his site from her image URL, of a flipping MLS search.

According to Debbie’s husband, William Koelzer, this agent blatently and obviously took the gif from Debbie’s site, so they loaded up THIS message to that URL:

“THIS agent IS STEALING
MY MLS rotating IMAGE artwork
from DEBBIEFERRARI.COM“

Several days went by. Then they got more aggressive. Gene Carey of View MLS Homes in Northern Illinois, made them an even better gif to replace that one with:

So, any visitor to his site saw that message! It was on their for several days before someone called it to the agent attention. (For a cached view, click HERE.) Sweet.

Arizona Realtor Alice Held of Come2AZ.com has had her cactus-themed Web stolen and her content used almost verbatim without permission more than once, and she added some very scary “legal stuff” to her website, complete with her attorney’s name and contact info, in case you “forget” and lift some of her content.

Your site is typically considered copyrighted by putting the appropriate copyright notice ( © Copyright, year, by your name. All rights reserved) on each page. However, unless you register your content with the Copyright Office, you have no recourse but a “cease and desist” letter when people infringe on your material.

Wonder how you can check and see if anyone’s stealing your stuff? Check out CopyScape.com

Have copyrights for the pictures on your web site? Don’t want visitors to be able to save them? Visit “Right Click Disabler“.

This whole blogging phenomenon is fueled by content on other blogs…. we use them for inspiration and for jumping off points to continue and further the rant. But there’s a difference between being inspired and just stealing content without credit. One would be advised to know the difference!

Zillow Blog had a cute story about Rats on a Fence (vs Snakes on a Plane….). Well, I had another rodent problem just a few weeks ago. We thought we had Squirrels in the Attic. Jack, age 10, pronounced the critters “wall weasels”. Upon further investigation, we found opposums! They were living in the attic of our house on Capitol Hill. They would climb the tree by the side of the house and walk across the roof to enter the attic. Before we sealed the hole. Sweet creatures, but we’re kind of glad they’re gone……!

Sellers hire real estate agents to sell their homes. Sellers want the information disemeninated far and wide, and don’t care how it’s done. Most agents want the same thing, and pay dearly for print ads, flyers and web leads, and the good ones know the free websites to use for online promotion.

But what does an agent do when their company prevents, discourages or illegalizes these free forms of web promotion?

Many companies have provisions that state that all listings are the property of the company and are subject to copyright laws. In Seattle, the large firms all have “Terms of Service” or other such rules and regulations that state that all listings are the property of the company. Even the NWMLS’s listing forms indicate that the listings belong to the broker, not the individual agent. I suspect it’s the same in most states.

Many firms don’t want independant 3rd-parties publicizing and advertising their listings. The local MLS has rules regarding interior photos, that those are property of each individual broker and cannot be used without permission. Even blogs, such as Redfin’s are breaking copyright laws by publishing information & photos of other agent’s individual listings, without their permission, when they include interior photos, though, in their defense they haven’t done that in awhile. Maybe they got called for it, I don’t know. (Personally I love when they advertise my listings… Hint: I have a new million dollar townhome on Queen Anne that would look lovely on your blog!) The right wasy to do it is as Asset Realty Group blog does, is by asking permission to feature, as they did with my groovy Mid-century Modern listing in Kirkland. (Again, I want to make it clear, no one needs to my permission to feature any of my listings, at any time, on any blog or website. Advertise my listings to your hearts content!)

But this practice of advertising other agents listings does bother some people, not to mention violates some MLS boards rules, the National Association of Realtors, and some companies copyright rules.

Which brings me to Trulia.

What’s there not to love? They market themselves as a independent, unbiased media company offering both free and paid opportunities to market property listings online, with the basic links from Trulia to the property detail pages, free. They disclose agents contact info, and don’t try to sell me the leads. That sounds darn near perfect.

So, why does the NAR not want to allow wholesale scraping of all listings this way?

Well, for one thing, the business model of Trulia could change. If the NAR and separate brokerages don’t have the option to opt out, refuse or forbid this scraping and if they don’t take a hardline to it, then Trulia or the next company, could scrape the listings, put them on their portal, and then, instead of filtering the leads to the individual agents, direct them to their own agents instead. Or worse, sell their own leads back to the original listing agent.

No large or well-known company is illegally doing this yet, as far as I know, but it could happen.

But if the NAR and our local MLS and the local brokerages don’t at least give the appearance of caring, then they could lose their rights over this issue. If this information is NOT copyrighted, then everyone would have access to it. As it stands, a portal, such as Yahoo Real Estate, needs to contract with a member of the NWMLS (in this state, it’s PrudentialNW) to access and show all the MLS listings.

So, back to Trulia. They say they have no plans to join the MLS in the different states. Instead, they’ll allow an individual agent to submit a feed, or they have whole companies that do so. Individual companies such as “Help-U-Sell” and “Realty Executives” and “Prudential” do so, and also website developers such as Z57 and Advanced Access and Number 1 Expert.

But what does the agent do who has signed a TOS Agreement with their broker indicating that the Broker owns the listings and the broker does not want their listings advertised on Trulia? Z57, Advanced Access, Number 1 Agent and many more website developers have submitted their feed to Trulia, to allow them to display their listings, in violation of many of these individual agents TOS agreements. Winderemere, J.L. Scott, Coldwell Banker Bain, and many other local and national companies have NOT authorized their listings to appear on Trulia, but they do, under the auspices and with the consent of these website developers, but not the agent’s brokers.

Trulia dilemna for everyone involved.

It’s a plus for individual agents as all leads are sent directly to them. But it’s an unauthorized use of listings. Most of these website designers provide an opt-out box if the individual agents want to do so, but how many even know it’s there?

As more individual brokerages realize that their listings are being shown on this (and other similar portal sites) without their permission, I wonder if they will be more persistent in enforcing their copyright.

Do you know why the term “REALTOR®” is capitalized? It is because REALTOR® is a registered trademark of the National Association of REALTORS (NAR). (r)ealtor is NOT proper use of the REALTOR® registered trademark NOR is it appropriate to use it as a generic term when you mean a real estate agent.

Why is this important? Because there is a lawyer named David Barry who filed suit in 1998 to cancel NAR’s trademarks for the terms “Realtor”, “Realtors” and “REALTORS®”. He lost, but he’s still making waves and filing suits today. His latest endeaver is to start an independant Multiple Listing Service in the U.S. He has an organization, The Open MLS Institute which appears to be masquerading as a non-profit organization, but is actually funded by several real estate companies who want to use copywrited listings for their own profit.

Barry’s main arguments for an open MLS appear to be ethical, yet most of the ethics situations he sites are clear violations of the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics. It seems like most of the ethics violations he cites could be taken care of by requiring membership in the NAR (hence bringing real estate agents under the jurisdiction of a Code of Ethics), yet in the past, Barry has sued to do away with some state real estate boards requirements that MLS members belong to the National Association of Realtors.

What is David Barry’s true goal? Some may say that his goal is not ethics or reform, but destroying the NAR and the privately-owned MLS’s so companies that do not share these goals, or, in some cases, even actively participate in the buying and selling of real estate, can use the privately held data (listings) for their own benefit and profit.

It has been interesting to watch Mr. Barry, and he’s someone to keep an eye on.

They say money can’t buy happiness, so FINE LIVING TV set out to see What You Get for the Money. From a 500-square-foot urban dwelling to a five-bedroom rural house, find out what your money really can buy in various cities across the country. How far does your money stretch? Or does it shrink?

When the price range is about $1 million, these houses are within reach in six markets across the U.S.: a Boulder, Colo., 3,100 square foot 1950s renovated home in a “freaky” mountain town, an Art Deco home updated by husband and wife architects in Chicago, a ranch in Jackson, Wyo. and three other million-dollar babies in Pittsburgh, Seattle and Philadelphia.

We filmed about 6 hours and it was edited down to about 30 seconds in this TV Show. See Yours Truly tonight for one of my 15 minutes of fame.

What You Get For The Money

Marc Davison’s excellent article on Inman “Time for Elvis to pass the torch” caught my attention because how often can a writer include Elvis and real estate in one sentence? I got a contact high just scanning his commentary.

His article was about Inman’s Connect technology conference. He starts with relating a story about an old-timey broker calling him, but he just couldn’t drop the doobie and take the call.

“His point of view was irrelevant now. His words are bubble gum music and I’d just seen Hendrix. I turned my cell off, opened the window and let the wind cry Mary.”

He was hung over. His head throbbed. His body ached. “Conjure up the day after Woodstock.” So he opens up the newspaper.

“…. Page after page I searched for signs of the award-winning brands, innovators and progressive people I partied with for three days inside the Inmansphere. Something that would deliver me a new and exciting experience. With each turn of the page my post-conference high diminished. Midway through I imagined an announcement over the Starbucks speaker system: “Attention. Testing one, two, three. Hey man, don’t eat the brown acid. It’s bad! I repeat the brown acid is bad, man.”

I ignored the warning. My page turning pace increased as if I had lost something and was frantic to find it. Things like virtual tours, videos, mapping, digital signatures, online estimates, neighborhood data - ideas and services witnessed during the Worlds Fair of real estate. My bad trip included giant agent heads dwarfing tiny shots of homes that all looked exactly alike and carried the same message. One ad freaked me out completely: The Realtor in the picture claimed she “IS the changing face of real estate. She IS the eyes in my community. She IS the ears listening to my needs. She WILL sell my home.” With what? I thought. There IS no link to a Web site, there IS no e-mail address.

Was Connect real or did I hallucinate it? Didn’t I brush up against innovators? Had I not held meetings with the rock stars of our business? If so, how did I end up back here at home surrounded by personalities rather than a real estate reality that doesn’t include Redfin, Trulia, HomePoint, digital signatures, paperless processes, Neighborhood data, TMS, or an Oodle of LocaModa – services as opposed to individuals. It’s wrong, it’s antiquated and it’s whole-heartedly unfair to consumers.”

The Rock Stars of real estate? Man, them are pretty powerful words. They brought me back to earth. I was trippin’ but I crashed and came back from my own contact high.

So who is this Marc Davison who writes so eloquently, and the only other guy who can write about real estate and Elvis in the same article?

His point was that it was time to pass the torch from the traditional ways of doing real estate to this new way envisioned by the CEO’s, venture capitalists and technical writers.

“Two thousand Beatles appeared at Inman’s event last week. These people – the attendees, speakers, vendors and visionaries- are the most important people in this business.

It’s a new era now. The old real estate business, with its million-plus Elvises might be able to find some work in Vegas but as of now, the torch has been passed. There’s no going back”

So, I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Are real estate agents outdated and obsolete? Will they be replaced by the mash-ups and data sites and the do-it-yourself searches and the electronic signatures? Is it just a business of software writers and venture capitalists now?

Marc Davison is vice president of OnBoard, a real estate data provider based in New York. Davison previously served as vice president of VREO, a provider of electronic signature and Web site software for the real estate industry. OnBoard supplies data to companies such as Coldwell Banker and J.L. Scott.

So, I’m thinking…… if he’s one of the rock stars of real estate, are the agents just lounge singers?

His attitude is similar to many other CEO’s of technical and software companies who supply a product to an industry, but this one just happens to be real estate. They seem to get confused about who actually does the work. Rather than seeing themselves as a useful business tool or partner, these guys lose sight of who their client is and what role they perform. Just like coke gives those with low self-esteem delusions of grandeur, the software designer’s high he gets from creating the business’s webpage or supplying some data somehow makes them think that they now are more powerful than the business they were hired to make the webpage for…..

So many CEO’s of these brave new software companies are frustrated that business, not just real estate, remain in what they consider the stone age. They get inpatient with the fact that many people still depend on print advertising as a major source of revenue. From reading interviews with these guys, I get the feeling that they’re frustrated with agents and brokers for continuing to advertise and for buyers and sellers continuing to read that damn newspaper!

“Don’t you see? We’re the wave of the future! We software designers, CEO’s, venture capitalists, technical writers and paperless signature processors, WE are the true rock stars of real estate and all you real estate salespeople are just the, uh…. groupies.” Or something. Not sure. Oh, maybe we’re just supposed to be their clients and pay them to create products they design to “disintermediate” us…. Again, not sure. Many things remain unsaid by these guys.

One thing I do know is that if agents and brokers quit doing what we do, then many guys like Marc Davison and his company OnBoard, could lose much of their client base. If traditional agents and brokers are forced out of the business, then who will be left to purchase his product?

Picture yourself in a boat on a river. With tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, A girl with kaleidoscope eyes…..

Canadian photographer Robin Collyer began documenting houses that aren’t houses at all – they’re architecturally-disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, blinds, and bourgeois landscaping.
“During the 1950s and 1960s,” Collyer explains in a recent issue of Cabinet Magazine, “the Hydro-Electric public utilities in the metropolitan region of Toronto built structures known as ‘Bungalow-Style Substations.’ These stations, which have transforming and switching functions, were constructed in a manner that mimics the style and character of the different neighborhoods.”

From Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG

Effects of electro-magnetic fields in the home.

Solutions for electro-magnetic sensitivity