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I was inspired by a piece on the Zillow blog today, on MTV’s “Real World” show.

In college one of my constant companions was MTV and I always tried to watch it and study at the same time. It’s a wonder I ever graduated. Anyway, when Real World came to Seattle, I was fascinated with their very hip digs down on the Seattle waterfront. Zillow blog has a post about other homes used by the cast, entitled “Would you want the Real World House to be Your Real House?” , and the answer for me is Yes. Yes, I would.

The series was filmed in Seattle at Pier 70, a creaky old pier built in 1902 jutting West into Puget Sound. It had been used by the Liquor Board and the Coast Guard and in 1970 it was converted to retail and restaurant use and was the home to one of my favorite live music and disco venues of the same name, Pier 70. (For anyone interested in local Seattle-area bands that used to play there, check out “Pacific Northwest Bands Tribute Page“. Pier 70 was not the first disco in Seattle, as I think that title would go to Shelley’s Leg (so named because it was named after the leg poor Shelley lost to an errant cannon ball shot off at Occidental Park in Pioneer Square for a celebration there. The cannon ball, or the cannon itself, exploded and ripped off Shelley’s leg. She used the settlement money from the City of Seattle to open the disco under the viaduct, but I digress…. ) anyway, Triad Development bought Pier 70 in 1995 and renovated it into its current use as a restaurant and office/retail space. (I think Shelley’s Leg closed after a truck over turned on the viaduct and somehow caught the disco under it on fire…. if you like obscure Seattle history, be sure to check out Clark Humphrey’s soon-to-be-published book Vanishing Seattle.)

So, Pier 70 would be the coolest place to live, but it would be impossible to get a permit today to build something like this. Residential uses are prohibited on the Pier because of an urban-harborfront overly district. In order for the series to be filmed on the Pier, a special permit was obtained declaring Pier 70 as a “24 hour” film set. The interior design was created by Two Downtown, Ltd. The filming of series in 1998 delayed the planned remodel of the Pier by 6 months. Pier 70 has now been remodeled and the exterior no longer resembles the Pier that was used for the filming of the series.

So, I tried to use Zillow to find out what its value would be. What would condo’s that jut out over the water cost? But, since it’s not a residence, there were no comparable sales nearby. However, I was able to use Property Shark and found out that King County gives it a value of $3,003,300, which seems incredibly low to me. The wharf has 76,000 sq. ft. on 3 floors. With a change in zoning, you could put at least 40 condos there. At a minimum of $500K a piece (with the end units probably going for $1M+, you’d think this pier could be worth a lot more than $3M….. They changed the zoning across the street to build the Marriot, so who knows what could happen with this property. Anyway, building anything over the water here is a challenge. That’s why the Union Harbor Condo’s on Lake Union are so unique. And for an incredible story of City of Seattle politics, zoning, vision and perseverance, read about Rome Ventura and Lake Union Crew. The rowing club, located at 11 E. Allison St., had been at odds with neighbors and city officials since it opened in 1998. Zoning laws ruled against building any permanent structures over the water. So, in a way to get around those regulations, she moved two barges onto the lake and connected them to land by a gangplank. She converted these barges into two Coast Guard licensed passenger vessels and now these “vessels” are the Lake Union Crew Club. You can view photos of these “barges” (wink) and judge for yourself. (Speaking of ways people try to get around rules, did you hear about the couple in Ames Lake who attached an outboard motor to an illegal dock and then called it a boat? Ha ha….)

Matt Carter writes on Inman Blog “Practice What You Preach” about some real estate companies purchasing keywords of competitors on Google.

sellsius° has a post about the 2007 NAR amending its Code of Ethics that prohibits “deceptively using metatags, keywords or other devices/methods to direct, drive or divert Internet traffic or otherwise mislead consumers.” Most of the comments seem to poo-poo the misleading use of metatags, but I think the NAR’s amendment also applies to purchasing the keywords of competitors.

For instance, in Seattle, both Redfin and MLSonline is purchasing “Coldwell Banker Seattle” and “Windermere Seattle” search terms on Google, when neither are in any way associated with Coldwell Banker or Windermere Real Estate. House Values and Home Gain are purchasing the term “Redfin“. JustListed.com, RealEstate.com and Zip Realty are purchasing the phrase “Seattle Dream Homes” on Google. ( Note: I own the website www.SeattleDreamHomes.com). And there are almost 100 companies purchasing the term “Seattle Realtor“. The interesting thing is, many of the companies purchasing those words are not Realtors at all, but referral services and portal sites, in no way affiliated with the National Association of Realtors. So, of course, since they’re not Realtors, they can’t be censored for doing misleading promotion.

The siren song of fame and fortune causes many people to make decisions they would not normally make.

Who in their right mind would switch spouses with someone else? How about for the chance to be on TV and for $20,000.00? Wife Swap is looking for unusual families with unusual homes to be publicly humiliated on national TV.

What You Get For The Money on HGTV is looking for distinctive homes and outgoing homeowners to star in their show. If your home is one of the snappiest, most appealing, charming and/or hip homes in the country, then they want to know about it. When they find four delicious domiciles (priced between $150,000 to $1 million) in the same city, they’ll “come for a visit.” (You can view one of the episodes that I filmed for the show on November 19th. It will be airing on the Fine Living Channel at 11AM.)

Want your TV debut to highlight your homestyle rather than your lifestyle? Style Network’s My Celebrity Home wants to give your place a makeover. The Style Network is currently seeking fun folks from around the United States who want to participate in a design project with My Celebrity Home. Who says you have to be rich to live in the lap of luxury?

My Celebrity Home teaches regular Joes how, with just a little creative thinking and elbow grease, the good life can be had at a great price. After an exclusive tour of one star’s posh pad, host Peter Marr joins forces with a famous designer to help everyday people re-create the high-end look without the Hollywood price tag.

Is clutter your problem?? Call the Clean House Team to purge your home of all the junk. If your home is chosen, they’ll surprise you with a makeover that will amaze family and friends.

They’re also having a contest for the messiest home. Just send them a video of your nasty, trashy house and you could win a complete house make-over. That’s one contest I wouldn’t want to win.

Another show that’s casting is Hidden Potential. This program shows homebuyers what their dream home could look like before they buy it. In each episode, a homebuyer will look at three very different homes that need renovation. As they tour each home, a design expert will show the homebuyer computer-generated graphics that will showcase the home’s “hidden potential.” In the end, we’ll learn which house the homebuyer chose to turn into their dream home. Click here to apply.

Do you have a horrible kitchen, like with avocado appliances and harvest gold walls? The apply to be on “Save My Kitchen“. What about a crappy bathroom? Well then, you want to be on “Save My Bathroom”.

After all this fix up, you’ll want to find out what your home is worth. My House is Worth What? is a new series that began airing this summer on HGTV. Each show tells homeowners across the country what their current home is worth, where they should renovate if they are planning to or just how much equity is available to fulfill a life long dream. Appear on My House is Worth What? and get a free evaluation of your home by the experts. Find out its current worth, what renovations are worthwhile and what you need to do to increase your value. If you don’t make it on the show, and you live in the Seattle area, I’ll tell you all that stuff for free! (Wink)

A friend of mine, with 3 kids and overwhelmed with the thought of packing up her house and moving, answered an ad for a TV show that promised to pack up her stuff and move her for free if she allowed them to redecorate and arrange her furniture any way they wanted at her new house. It worked. The new house decor didn’t turn out that well, but it was easy to put things where they belonged when the camera crew left. She was mortified, of course, to see herself on TV, but she thought the momentary embarrassment was a small price to pay for being moved by a third party.

Matt McIlwain is a managing director at Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, venture capital investors in Redfin. In an article by Jeanne Lang Jones in the Puget Sound Business Journal (Nov. 10, 2006), Jones reports that Matt McIlwains used Seattle’s Redfin to buy their new home, but turned to Windermere Realtor Barbara Shikiar to sell their old home.

“When the consumer is more online savvy and can do their own research, a site like Redfin can lower the cost on the buyer agent’s side,” McIlwain said. Despite multiple offers on the home they wanted, Redfin helped them win the bidding.

“They did a terrific job,” he said.

But faced with the prospect of two mortgage payments, the McIlwains hired Shikiar because her “deep experience” in their neighborhood could help them set the right price on their house and get the word out quickly that it was for sale.

There’s no substitute for experience, said Shikiar, a 28-year veteran Realtor.

The home was under contract for sale in a week.

The real estate market is dominated by 3 brokers in the Pacific Northwest, Windermere, John L. Scott and Coldwell Banker Bain, followed by ReMax, Prudential and Century 21. The Puget Sound Business Journal has ranked the residential real estate firms by volume and had some interesting statistics. For instance, in 2005, it showed that Excel Properties with 37 agents, had $702M in sales. But Real Property Associates, with 32 agents, had only $168M in sales. Which begs the question, what made Excel’s agents more than twice as productive as RPA’s agents? Both companies are located in metropolitan Seattle and both, presumably, market the same homes in the same neighborhoods. (As a side note, Gordon Stephenson, owner of RPA, is also on the Board of Directors of Zillow.) And then there’s Ewing and Clark. They have 58 agents, and their sales for 2005 was $400M, also more than twice RPA’s sales. Lake and Co. also had about $400M in sales, but they had to employ 91 agents to do that. Another company with almost that many agents, Fireside Homes, had only $175M in sales.

Again, why this differential in sales?

Real Property Associates just redesigned their website to add MS Virtual Earth and Zillow map searches, so maybe that will help their sales performance (though, for some reason, their pages won’t fit within my browser and I have to scroll back-and-forth, to view.) Excel Properties has bought a John L. Scott franchise, but rather than using the fancy Scott site, they’re using a Realty Generator site.

John L. Scott added MS Virtual Earth to their site and Coldwell Banker Bain followed a day or two later. A few weeks after that, Windermere went live with it’s Property Point mapping function. Then, last week, John L. Scott added home sales values, with CBBain right behind them. Now, we read that John L. Scott is advertising on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D maps. John L. Scott and discount broker ZipRealty are part of a beta group of advertisers who have launched virtual billboards inside Virtual Earth 3D maps. The 3D billboards are clickable hyperlinks, and John L. Scott appears to have bought the base of the Space Needle.

So, what’s next in search functions for our local real estate firms? What will work to attract eyeballs and what’s just a gimmick? Interestingly enough, the local real estate firm with the largest number of sales per agent, Williams Marketing, doesn’t even have a search function on it’s website. Williams Marketing specializes in condominiums and does mostly site-sales, but it’s still interesting that they don’t even bother trying to capture any buyers looking for condos.

Nationally, none of the top real estate search sites have interactive maps, not even www.Realtor.com. Neither does top San Francisco/Silicon Valley real estate purveyor Alain Pinel, nor does Real Living, GMAC, or the Corcoran Group.

Locally, the top real estate search site is Windermere which offers a map for viewing homes for sale via their PropertyPoint software. John L. Scott and Coldwell Banker Bain, who both use Real Tech, use Microsoft Virtual Earth. (BTW, both Scott and Bain are offering new “Home Valuations”. Except, they both call them “Comparable Sold Property Information Searches”, so it’s not mistaken for a Zestimate.)

So does having an interactive map on your site generate sales? Since the technology is still new, I think we’ll have to wait until year end sales close and assess the results at that time. Some of the more successful local brokerages such as Lake and Company, Gerrard Beattie and Knapp, and Executive Real Estate have not adopted this new technology. (Quorum which had $35M in sales, doesn’t even have a rudimentary search on its site and All American Realty, with $41M in sales, won’t even let you look at listings unless you give them your name and contact information) Time will tell whether or not this impacts their sales in the months and years to come. Newer, so-called “disruptive” sites, such as Redfin and Zip Realty didn’t even make the Puget Sound Business Journal’s list of firms ranked by sales volume for last year, but I’m guessing there will be some movement for 2006, and we may see a few other companies who have upped their PPC on Google and Yahoo such as The MLS Online, RealEstate.com, FirstExclusive, and JustListed.com — all which appear to have pretty deep PPC advertising pockets, make some in-roads onto the list. Redfin says it is paying $1000.00 a week to Google alone. Joel Burslem at Future of Real Estate Marketing has a story Searching Real Estate PPC Advertising with an estimate of what the larger online real estate sites are paying too. Interestingly enough, none of the traditional real estate players rank very highly in any organic search results, nor do they buy any sponsored links. We’ll be watching the end-of-the-year wrap-up for the results to see if all this PPC spending is paying off in sales for these “virtual” and “disruptive” real estate companies, and see how much market share of the sales they can take away from the traditional firms

real+estate+map+search+ real+estate+mash-ups Windermere Coldwell+Banker John+L.+Scott real+estate+marketing Zillow Redfin real+estate+technology

There was lots of response after I received the title Real Estate Poodle and I was going to have new cards with that added after my name, but decided to be either Real Estate Curmudgeon or Real Estate Blog Goddess instead.

Doggies and real estate have always gone together….

Accidental real estate porn via Boing Boing

If I really do add “Real Estate Poodle” to my resume, would it be passe already? I hate be tired and redundant and there seems to be so many doggies already out there….

Seattle House Hound

Bloodhound Blog

Ask Howard, the Real Estate Dog

Logical Dog, real estate resources and websites

Oregon Real Estate (Furry Tail Times)

United Country Farm Town Real Estate - “Independent labs agree”

Top Dog Agent

Blue Dog Real Estate

What is this? Never heard of bird dogging as a real estate investment strategy

Working Dog Dog Real Estate from Boston

My Dog Tess, a new bread of Realtor

Realhound, commercial real estate software

Real Estate Dog - with a keen sense for business

Top Dogs, commercial real estate marketing

Sadie sells Delaware real estate

Coldwell Banker’s Personal Retreiver

real estate poodle

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.5 for both this blog and for www.UnusualLife.com and made a few new changes and additions. There was a little trouble with the tags, but other than that, pretty seamless. I took a few hints from Dustin a few weeks ago when he wrote The Big List of RCG Plug-ins, and I added Filosofo Comments Preview and the Recent Comments plug-in. I like that it doesn’t show pingbacks originating from my own blog.

Been following the continued saga of Zillow and thought it was pretty funny that a consumer group filed a complaint against them, saying it was “intentionally misleading consumers and real estate professionals” and could be violating civil rights and consumer protection laws. I mean, it’s just a toy, right? And now, I’ve read in Red Herring about a minority rights organization that’s preparing to challenge them on the grounds that its home valuations are “inaccurate, misleading, and detrimental to minority homeowners, who are more likely be negatively affected by the inaccuracies.” Reminds me of Bonfire of the Vanities. I keep looking for Al Sharpton to weigh in on all this….

Speaking of Zillow, they put MyBlogLog on their site and now whenever I visit their blog, there’s my smiling face staring back at me. Maybe in the name of tranparency in real estate I should remove my high school photo and send in one a little more recent….

I’ve been cyber-chatting with Tyler Sookochoff about the launch of www.Livium.com, his new website that says it will be an “online real estate community that provides Real Estate Professionals with tools to better market their listings, their neighborhood and, in the process, themselves”. I like the way it sounds. And it uses the word “suck” a lot, as in “some real estate websites suck”, “some real estate agents suck” and “Livium, however, will not suck (we hope)”. Since I also hope to be suck-free, I’m eager to see what they’re all about and what they come up with. Sounds like an ActiveRain kind of thing….. not sure how any of them are going to make any dough. Maybe one has to suck somewhat to make money. Not sure. If you’d like to keep informed when Livium launches, you can sign up here.

While Move reported a net income for the third quarter of 2006 at $1.3 million, HouseValues released its third quarter results and posted a net loss of $1.5 million for the same time period.. When you’re just curious about your house’s value, why give all your contact to a real estate agent when you can get a ballpark figure from Zillow? Agents may continue to pay for leads, but they’re not going to keep paying if the leads are worthless.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer sent me this update on their blogs:

Traffic dipped a bit on the P-I’s reader blogs in October, but the effort by reader-writers passed an important milestone: As of last month, more than 1,029,878 pages have been viewed on reader blogs — more in a million page views since we began eight months ago. Just 26,000 pages were viewed that first month, compared to 173,461 in October! And three of your blogs have already passed 100,000 page views: Bus Chick, Seattle Real Estate Professionals and Mariner Housewife.

The most popular reader blog on the site was the Huskies fan blog (18,264 page views), followed by the Hawks’ fan blog (16,351) which was just narrowly more viewed than the Real Estate Pros blog (16,335).

So the only thing more popular than real estate was sports. That explains why an Open House can be so dead on a Seahawks Sunday.