Ken’s Sandbox

The other day Hope MacManus at Old Town Realty in Florence asked if I could (would) host a video tour for her. It seems that linking the tour from the office web site was in violation of the RMLS rule about branding tours (more than a little ridiculous but I don’t make the rules, I just have to listen to the complaints ;-).

So far, this is the second video I have seen that client agents have had done for their listings. Now, two video tours out of 2,400 listings does not necessarily make it a trend. But throw in a couple of comments from other agents and there may be some interest. Maybe a few others would like to try it. Add the fact that I take pride in keeping ahead of other real estate sites in areas such as this* and well … you never know where an idea is going to come from.

So, beginning immediately, RealWorld will host your video tours at no additional charge. If it looks like we are going to become the youtube of real estate, I may have to rethink things. But for now, I would like to encourage the use of video as much as possible.

A couple random thoughts:

Video tours will have the virtual tour icon on RealWorld. If videos become popular enough, I will add a video tour icon and add an upload function to the on-line menu.

I recently purchased a Cannon digital camera that takes beautiful 640 X 480 video. A camera like this would allow you to shoot your own video. It would be great if someone offered the service of editing raw video into a nice looking tour with music and or voice over.

If you have a video produced, you should ask for two versions. In Hope’s case she had to have her producer go back and cut out the title segments with the office name and contact information. This unbranded video is the tour she will enter in RMLS.

Are video tours a good idea or a waste of time? Post your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.

If you know of someone who produces video tours or can help with production, post their contact information in the comments as well. I would like to provide a resource list.

* The end of August RMLS will be expanding their photo capabilities to allow 16 photos per listing and the photo size is being increased to 640 X 480. RealWorld has supported up to 25 photos and 800 X 600 for over a year.

In a typical case of investors living only for the short term, they dumped on Google’s stock after the company reported quarterly earnings were up only 28%. Here is the AP article.  I realize Google is an expensive stock. But this definitely falls under “what the f__k” in my book.

I ran across this blog post this morning. I love “knock their socks off” customer service and since this was real estate related, I thought it would be worth sharing:

The best realtor in the East Bay, Bar none, an unsolicited testimonial.

I have been following Marc Andreessen ’s blog recently, and in very good post about blogging, he announced that he would no longer be allowing comments on his blog. Given the prominence of his blog, I can appreciate the time it must take to moderate the comments. But it has caused some interesting discussion on the subject.

Another post I ran across mentioned that if you are going to allow comments you should have a moderation policy. The post mentioned the very simple moderation policy of Push Button Paradise. Consider it adopted.

I have had comments turned off on this blog for some time. I am going to begin leaving comments enabled. It may inspire me to find a better way to manage them.

When I got my new notebook, I went out of my way to avoid Vista. I’m not quite able to go to Linux yet so XP was number one on my list of “features”. Since making that decision I have read reports that Microsoft Vista runs 15% slower than XP (a billion lines of code, what do you expect), Vista is no more secure than XP (ditto), and I just ran across this article about the information Vista sends back to Microsoft. It seems that M$ is collecting more information about Vista users than even I suspected. And I suspected a lot.

So I’m going through my drafts turning them into posts, and I get to this link: http://www.realfuturecrm.com/public/. I vaguely remembered it, but to be honest, it has been in my drafts so long I don’t remember how I found it.

RealFutureCRM is a real estate specific customer relationship management system. Not being an agent, I did not sign up (they have a free trial). From the information on their web site it looks good. If/when I have time, I’ll contact them, sign up and write a short review.
In the mean time, if you decide to give it a try (or are already using it), let me know what you think.

A while ago an agent, who shall remain nameless, mentioned that some of the spelling in RealWorld ad copy made our agents look like a bunch of back country hicks. That may be a bit excessive but spelling and grammar when correct go pretty much unnoticed. When was the last time you read something and thought “wow, no spelling errors and what nice grammar”. However, if spelling and grammar are bad, you notice. And when you notice, you automatically wonder about the person who wrote it.

A spell checker won’t catch all of your errors. It won’t catch typos like an accidental d on the end of an. It won’t catch there for their and other grammatical errors. But if you are a bad speller like me, you need to check your spelling.

I was told RMLS uses a plug in that allows you to click a button and check the spelling. This would be nice but it is one of the things that makes their system compatible with IE only.

I was delighted when I installed Firefox 2 and discovered that it had spell checking built in (automatic for text areas and you can right click on a text input field and spell check it).

If you don’t want to use Firefox, iespell is an Internet Explorer spell checking plug in that will spell check your web input before you submit it. You can download it at http://www.iespell.com. It is free for personal use, $15 if your conscience bothers you.

So their you have it. You know longer halve any reasons to look bad in print. (hay - it passed the spell checker).

The city of Bandon Committee for Community involvement had an agenda item about a community blog a month or so ago. It sounded interesting so I attended to contribute my $0.02 worth which amounted to a lot of encouragement. As a result of the meeting city manager Matt Winkel polled his newsletter readers as to whether they would like to get his newsletter in the form of a blog rather than via email. According to Matt, the response was less than overwhelming. I attribute this to peoples lack of understanding of exactly what a blog can do. (more…)

I went to a client website yesterday to grab a logo and the site was down. Their site is hosted with Advanced Access. Tried another client site that I knew was with Advanced access and it was down as well.

Running my own servers I understand that an occasional outage is inevitable. However, I checked again this morning and both sites are still down. Checked a third clients site and it is also down. That’s gotta hurt. It looks like a good time to be a web developer if the competition cannot keep their web servers running.

I have just added a function to the Utilities menu that allows you to view your listings (and the hot sheets for MLS members) on your desktop without having to log on to RealWorld. I have been using these to monitor new listings as you enter them into RealWorld and am quite excited about what can be done.

The functions use a desktop Dashboard program called KlipFolio. KlipFolio is a very small download (about 900kb) and with all of the RealWorld functions installed (as well as weather and Google news), uses about 5 mb of ram. KlipFolio only runs under XP and Windows 2000. And, because it automatically downloads data from the server every few minutes, I do not recommend it unless you have a broadband (always on) internet connection.

So far the response to these has been very positive. I am in the process of adding more capabilities around KlipFolio so install it today.