360Digest

I’ve gotten over a dozen calls and emails this morning about my beautiful view home rental advertised on Craigslist. Great, right? Except I have no rental listing available.

Someone, not in malice, erroneously put an ad from the CBBain website on Craigslist, with my contact information on it.

Obviously, we have seen ads places there with malicious intent, like that gal who placed the ad to come and take anything they wanted out of her aunt’s house. Or those who place rental ads, collect first, last and a deposit, on homes they don’t own, and do it a dozen times to a dozen different renters. Or the stupid and short-sighted landlords and agents who post fake, repetitive, or bait-and-switch adds over and over. This is tame and harmless compared to that. But annoying, nevertheless.

It serves as a reminder to check your links before posting anything online, don’t believe everything you read and “flag with care”.

Every once in a while I’m contacted by location scouts searching for places to film around the Seattle area. They’ve usually seen something on Unusual Life or some artists home on Seattle Dream Homes and they need a house or vacant lot, other times they’re looking for entire streets.

I wrote about being contacted last year by a film crew looking for an idyllic farm to shoot that lovely tale of man/beast love, Zoo. They found a farm, a horse, a couple of actors, and the film was in the can in a couple of months. It premiered at Sundance and just opened up in Seattle last week to, uh…. rave reviews. You know, the classic love story of a man and his horse.

Some L.A. friends Tim and Jill, were approached a few months ago by a location scout for the F/X show “The Riches”, a show created by Eddie Izzard and starring himself and Minnie Driver.

I’m not sure I would have watched it if it hadn’t have been filmed at my friends house, but now that I’ve started, it’s compelling. The plot surrounds a family of “travelers”, roaming gypsy-type criminals who through a twist of fate, end up in a dead families upscale suburban home. They take on their personas, jobs, clothing and education, and it’s an interesting glimpse into both lifestyles. It’s like hijacking the American Dream, in a nightmare suburb somewhere in the Southern United States.

Tim & Jill’s house belongs to the “next-door neighbor” sort of an eccentric artist-type of gal, and it’s featured in several shots.

Click HERE to view more interior photos.

Tonight is the last episode of this season, but it’s become so popular, F/X announced that it’s been picked up for a second season.

Should you rent your house out to a filming company? If you do, make sure you have an attorney to hammer out the details in case of inadvertant damage. You’ll want to make sure your home is restored to as good or better condition.

In my friends case, they’re replacing all the carpets and re-doing the flooring after the wrap. And that’s on top of the daily filming fee, so it’s not a bad trade-off for them.

Go for Filming – site to list your home suitable for location shooting

Films made in Seattle

Film in America — locations across the U.S.

Settling in with Richard Seven, The Seattle Times

CBS producer Caroline Cooper contacted me last December about appearing on 60 Minutes on their Real Estate Confidential expose. I can still hear the sweet lies emanating from her lips as she tried to seduce me with whispers of face time on the show, if only I would agree to go on camera.

It was apparent that they had already figured out their angle, and they only needed a victim as a foil to Kelman’s studied calm and sensible demeanor, a windmill for him to fight, a Goliath of the real estate industry to his upstart David.

But Deborah Arends, bless her heart, tried her best. After hours of interviews and 3 days of tagging along and following her about, they edited the hours and hours of video down to the 2 or 3 sentences that would prove their point.

So, what I really want to know is, who is he sleeping with? Kelman blogs about hitting the road looking for more venture capital, within days of this 60 Minute tribute…… the timing of this homage couldn’t be more perfect. They’ve been hemorrhaging money since they started, and now they’re probably down to their last million or so, and I can almost hear Kelmans gentle puffery as he schmoozes the VC panels trying to squeeze out just another few million or so…. “We’re so close! We’ll go door-to-door! We can do 8 deals a week! No, 8 deals in a day! 8 deals in an hour!”

There are dozens, probably 100′s of discount real estate firms in the Seattle area, and probably 1000′s nationwide. But none have the combination of millions of dollars of venture capital, a charismatic CEO, and just the right amount of chutzpah and misinformation to make it all sound so plausible and right. After all, he wants to delight us!

Technology, the internet, streamlining and increasing sales volume should bring down sales commissions and Kelman said he had an agent who was able to close 8 transactions a week, “able” being the operative word.

Leslie Stahl stated that there was no way she could independently check those figures, but we can.

Our MLS allows us to easily check all closed sales by office. It also lists all agents associated with a particular office.

As of today 5/15/07, Redfin has 25 real estate agents listed with licenses in their office. Total sales in their service areas of King, Snohomish and Pierce Counties of all single family homes, condos, multi-family and vacant land is 150 closed sales.

That’s one hundred and fifty closed sales. By 25 agents. In the first 18 weeks of 2007. Please check my math, but isn’t that about 8 closed sales a week, by 25 agents? So did each agent make about 0.33 sales a week?

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at those meetings with the investors and venture capitalists. Pie charts, graphs, facts, figures. Lots of talk about disintermediation and volume of scale and that sort of thing.

When Redfin fails, they won’t blame themselves, the business model, lack of planning, poor management skills or bad judgement. They will blame the NAR, the “real estate industrial complex”, and the “real estate monopoly”.

VC’s out there reading this, please, use your head. At this rate, you will never see a dime returned on your money. It will just go down the same hole where the other $8M already went, subsidizing the 150 or so buyers who got their 2% refund from Redfin. That was YOUR money!

Redfin believes real estate agents are overpaid. They want to reduce commissions. If they succeed, THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO REFUND. Their whole M.O., their raison d’etre, their entire business model disintegrates.

According to the NAR, commissions have already fallen to 5.1%. Even that’s too high for some critics. If they continue their downhill spiral, the best agents will flee the business, leaving only the incompetent, the negligent and those unable to do anything else.

Be careful what you wish for….

Trulia unveiled several new features this morning, 1) Trulia Voices, a feature that will let visitors assess “curb appeal” online and 2) a property alert feature that will let buyers to keep an eye on any home and alert them when it comes on the market, is sold or has a price drop.

I signed up right away, to get that link love flowin’ and just hope that they don’t do like Wikipedia and have outbound links include the nofollow tag. (They said the nofollow tag was to prevent link spamming since some search engines do not count links containing the tag towards any weighing of the destination page, so a link from Wikipedia will no longer boost the position of a page in search results. Which pretty much defeats the purpose of me posting, if you know what I mean. It’s interesting to note, however, that while the nofollow tag is added to the standard outbound links, it isn’t applied to inter-wiki links, including links to Wikia, Wikipedia’s for-profit spin off, but I digress…..)

When Trulia first came out, I authorized a feed from my website www.SeattleDreamHomes.com so all my listings would appear on their site. That lasted for about 4 months until I was notified by my brokerage that this was not allowed. Fast-forward a year later and Coldwell Banker National announced their partnership with Trulia. I asked my broker if our local firm would opt-out and was told that they had now decided to participate. However, I believe all inquiries from Trulia about my listings go to my broker, rather than directly to me…… oh well. I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, so I’ll complain later. But it’s definitely a point of contention.

RealTown.com also just announced the opening of the InternetCrusade’s RealTown Store, which features an assortment of real estate-related goods and services all in one place. I created a webpage profile on RealTown, again to add my link. Not sure if they’ve added a no-follow order too, hoping they did not. I was told I could check in Firefox, so may try that…..

Squidoo also offers opportunities to add your profile and make a page (which I’ve done), as does Active Rain, where I’ve made a Seattle Dream Homes page. And Zillow provides a great opportunity with their agent profile pages, and I was able to customize mine very easily. It allows for entry of a great deal of information and also shows any questions or answers you’ve given.

One of the best new opportunities to arise is the Inman Wiki. There, not only can you create a profile page, but if your articles are of interest, they will link back to your website or blog for follow-up info. I’m looking forward to writing more for Inman and hope to discuss the upcoming Bloggers Connect conference in July, where I’ll be speaking on “Finding Your Voice” on your blog. Stay tuned for details!