Okay maybe friend is never going to happen but a LOT of real estate agents seem to hate Zillow (and Trulia and Redfin) and similar sites. When I ask why, the response is generally along the lines of "They give out information that should be up to us (the agent) to provide. They give out incorrect information that makes it hard to get sellers to set a realistic price"

I'm going to use this space to point out a slightly different point of view. About 9 or 10 years ago the big management consultant buzz word was disintermediation, which Wikipedia defines as:

".....the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: "cutting out the middleman". Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediate (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with every customer directly, for example via the Internet. One important factor is a drop in the cost of servicing customers directly."

The disintermediation channel was of course the internet. Web start-ups were providing information and services directly to consumers frequently for free that the "brick and mortar" companies were used to "controlling". Of course the management consultants were selling the need for companies to build elaborate "web portals" and "lock-up" partnerships and distribution channels. Companies found that in general giving consumers real information and providing real value became the most effective way to compete. One well-known retailer still runs ads occasionally that say "an educated consumer is our best customer".

Zillow, Trulia and similar sites both solicit and provide information directly to consumers. Some consumers will use these sites, some consumers will do extensive research and make decisions based on online and offline information sources so what? Blogs have not replaced newspapers and magazines. Free content online has not replaced books because most consumers want the polished, packaged product and they will pay for the privilege.

Most consumers want content that has been researched, proofread, edited and polished. So if you are a Real Estate agent that doesn't know the difference between a comp sheet and a Comparative Market Analysis then maybe you should worry about Zillow. If you are an agent that creates a real Comparative Market Analysis, takes the time and makes the effort to become the local expert on real estate in a given community then you should be using Zillow and the other sites. You use the consumer sites because as a professional you need to know what information your buyers and sellers get for free and then come to the table prepared to show them what they get by working with a real professional. This "value add" is something that will always give you as the local agent and expert, an edge over Zillow.

Still not convinced? Ask yourself which buyer you would prefer to work with:
1. Buyer A walks in and says they are looking to buy a house and to show them something. They can probably spend 0,000.
2. Buyer B walks in and says they want to buy a 4 bedroom ranch just North East of Main street in your town. They've already seen on Zillow that the price range in that area is between 0,000 and 0,000 and they have already been pre-approved for a 0,000 loan.

Competition is a good thing.

This radio show was new to us but it is being added to the podcast queue. Anyone interested in an analysis of how the current economic crisis got to be so bad should listen to the "This American Life programs". These two broadcasts will give you the chills when you realize how fragile the whole economic system really is, and how it has been gamed by companies and people that really have betrayed the underlying trust that held it together.

If you want to know how the housing crisis was turned out and played up by Wall Street. How people made millions lending hundreds of thousands of dollars to other people that obviously could not repay the loans (no jobs, no income, some cases not even breathing). Well, listen to the shows. One factoid that made me sit up and go wow was a depiction of the U.S current 70 trillion dollar debt in layman's terms

"Take all the money spent by everyone, everywhere on the planet for one whole year and it is still less than ,000,000,000,000 ( trillion)"

First Show: This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money. Second Show: This American Life: Another Frightening Show About the Economy

The old Information Technology joke says that you can always tell the technology pioneers because they are the ones with the arrows in their back. However, given today's market conditions, it is the innovators and Early Adopters that are most likely to differentiate themselves from the competition and even increase their business in down markets. Real Estate is no different in the adoption of technology than any other industry - each organization (and individual) can be loosely classified in one of the following groups.

Innovators: Buy into the technology as soon as it's available - may even use pilot or "beta" trials of the technology.

Early Adopters: See value in new technologies and are willing to try it out in controlled testing usually for themselves before clients in order to formulate how best to use the technology.

Market Maker: This is where the buzz picks up. You guys make the markets. The technology is not brand spanking new but adoption will provide competitive advantages because you know exactly when, where and how to use it. The non-adopters don't even see you coming.

Followers: Late to market adopt technology when its "proven" its business value. At this point there is no competitive advantage and you are basically playing follow the leaders. For Followers technology adoption is the ticket to stay in the game.

Kicking and screaming: May never adopt the technology - only wait until its a "bargain" or until clients "demand" it. Generally these guys are just heading out-of-business. They never learned that you can't lead by following others.

Okay,so Digitalbeat is a technology provider and clearly wants to sell you something (our technologically advanced LocalHost service comes to mind) but if you gain nothing else from this article you really do want to position yourself, as an organization, into one of the top two groups and if you're in one of the last two groups you can always hope that the real estate boom will come back again - quickly.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way......

Apologies to Charles Dickens for appropriating his classic opening paragraph but the words could also be the operations guide for DigitalBeat.Com's former web hosting company. The web host was acquired by a larger company about a year ago and seems to be on a mission to trim its customer base.
Their lack of planning lost them many customers last summer when what was supposed to be a three hour data center consolidation turned into as much as a week outage for many of its acquired customers. Then last December they decided that the DigitalBeat physical servers were too old to support their current offerings and the site would be moved to a newer server, again minimal downtime and transparent to DigitalBeat. They made the move on a Friday afternoon. The site was down until the following Monday. Calls to their technical support revealed that they basically had no staff that could actually do anything available on the weekends - by Saturday afternoon we had determined that their DNS configurations for the server and database were pointing to incorrect IP addresses so we basically had no service for 3 days until a real tech support person showed up in their office the following Monday to make the maybe 10 second change.

Now, the last week of May, we were again down for most of the week - numerous calls over the first 12-15 hours got nowhere - they did not answer their phones and then when customer service finally came around there was no information (other than we're working on the problem) for two more days.

Thankfully we had pulled DNS management into our control after the December outage and by the time our former host had come back up we had rebuilt the DigitalBeat site on new servers with our new hosting company Dotable (much thanks to Aussie Bob and the Dotable team who actually understand what it means to be a service business and have been invaluable in getting the site up and running). We switched DNS to the Dotable serverts over a week ago and finally dropped our old host yesterday (they weren't getting any traffic anyway since the Digitalbeat.com name was no longer going to their servers).

To those readers that may be thinking that you get what you pay for well the old host was about 3 to 4 times MORE expensive than Dotable, our new host, and provided far fewer features and lets just say that Dotable has real tech support while the old host never really figured out the answering a phone and writing a trouble ticket was not the same thing and did not replace competent skills, planning, and effective administration.

This is more of a quick note than a regular blog entry but I couldn't resist posting this since DigitalBeat is in the business of enabling WiFi solutions but it's worth a post just to note that the tide has probably turned on WiFi connectivity and cellphones.

The current (Feb 14th, 2008) NY Times Circuits article Trying to capture that iPhone flair talks about this weeks Mobile World Congress, which is a major cellphone industry trade show and gathering. The focus in past years was on phones that flip, twist, shoot photos and walk the dog (well maybe not the last one).

This year the cellphone manufacturers, to no ones great surprise, are going after the iPhone. This means slim, sexy, touch screens AND built in WiFi. You can read the article if you want to see where the industry is heading (at least for the rest of 2008), but the WiFi angle is clearly heating up.

If there was any doubt before about the value and growing number of WiFi capable devices out there then the NY Times article should dispel any remaining doubts.

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Hello and welcome to the DigitalBeat Openhouse blo. For the most part these blogs will cover small business issues and making productive use of technology. Our client base is real estate professionals and the small retail business. To the extent that a real estate professional is often a small business operation as well, there is some synergy between the two definitions and I hope the blog will be both topical and informative. A good way to start off the Openhouse blog, is with a quick introduction to how wireless internet access works since DigitalBeat's flagship "LocalHost" product is wireless based on this technology, this blog entry may satisfy some questions on "how does the technology work"?

The wired path to Wireless
Generally, in order to connect to the internet you need a wired
connection. The wired connection up until 10 years or so ago, required a phone line, either switched (which means your regular home phone line) or dedicated. Dedicated connections like Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) can work on top of your plain old telephone service (POTS) or have a literally dedicated phone line connection to a location at your local phone company office. Today, while DSL still exists, many consumers and small businesses get their Internet Service through their cable wire. Up until a few years ago you either connected your computer directly to your ISP's equiipment (router/modem) or if you were a business (or technically adept homeowner) you would connect your computer to a wired Local area Network jack (lthey look like a slightly larger than normal telephone jack). If there was no computer jack nearby (or your spouse did not want to see cables running over the floor/ceiling) then you lived without a network connection at that location. Then came wireless

 

<b>Wireless networks</b>
A wireless connection, also called a wifi connection, is based on radio waves. The same radio technology that powers am/fm/cb radios, phones (cellular and cordless) and televisions. A radio transmitter and receiver is either built into your wireless device, or is built into an aapter card. The computer's wifi connection translates the computer data into a radio signal and the computer <b> transmitter </b> sends the signal to a receiving station (the wireless router). The wireless router<strong> receives he signal and transforms it from an analog radio signal back into a digital (computer) signal where it is sent over a physical wired connection to other computers (local or over the internet). The response from the other computers comes back with the wireless router receiving the information, transforming it from a digital computer signal into a radio signal and<strong> transmitting</strong> it to the computer's wireless adapter receiver. The receiver converts the analog radio signal to digital so that the computer can process the information.