Trulia just released a new application, that will allow the user to get open homes and open house information on their iPhone. Check out the video demo. It looks interesting.

Being that I just purchased a BlackBerry phone, I have found e-mail and data on the fly is a very powerful tool. I wonder how many home seekers will use this new Trulia application? At first glance this appears to be a great tool for Sunday open house searchers. It would be great to turn your phone on and have all of the open house data in your vicinity. One question I have is, does this service have all the MLS listed homes on it? If not, how soon until your local MLS designs a copy cat service? 

I have written several postings in the past about all of the unimaginable things going on with real estate development around the world. Many of my posts have focused on Dubai where whole islands are being literally raised out of the sea.

Recently, I ran into a new concept that is in the process of being designed and building. Each story of the building actually rotates independent of the others. This means that the building is constantly in motion, so that it supplies every view possible to the occupants of each unit. What an interesting idea for a building that actually shifts its shape. It sounds as interesting for the people who view it on the street as it does for its occupants.

The renowned architect David Fisher is the visionary of this project. Of course Dubai is going to be one of the first cities to receive on of these animated projects. Check out the building in motion on the architects web site at: http://www.dynamicarchitecture.net/intro-high-resolution.html

A friend introduced me today to www.pandora.com.

If you like music, this is a great site for finding new music that is in the same genre as what you already like. The site is part of the Music Genome Project. I don’t know what that is but it sounds cool.

We write mostly here about very serious subjects because we take yours and our financial situations very seriously. Here’s something a lot lighter than what we normally serve up. Enjoy!

Tulia has an interesting new real estate search tool that places photos of either the most expensive, least expensive, newest listings or oldest listings on a Google map. This makes for an interesting new way to look at real estate with in a specific city. Check out Trulia Snapshot.

I just took a test drive of a fantastic mapping application called Policy Map. It tracks real estate (my favorite), neighborhood conditions, mortgage orientations, education, money and income, demographics, owners and renters, jobs, energy and even presidential election data. Just enter you area and click on the statistic you desire. You will receive a heat map describing the data for your specific location. This is a great way to look at the demographics in a specific location.

I just read an article posted on The Real Estate Bloggers stating that Zip Realty an online discount real estate firm based in Emeryville, California just had a first quarter 2008 loss of 7.2 million dollars. It does not surprise me.

Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the real estate firms that are using new technological tools of communication to drop the cost of a real estate transaction. Yet, I see the biggest problem is not the technology, but it is in the lessening of service with the lessening of fees. I have had many transactions with discounted brokers and I have found that throughout the transactions they are constantly trying to cut their cost even if it is not in the best interests of their clients. They consistently attempt to save time or cut corners. I don’t think they are bad people, but they have to discount their services and increase their volume of transactions in order to make a living. My question is does this model best benefit the consumer? I would say that that as illustrated by Zip Realty’s large losses it does not.

As our market shifted, so did the total volume of transactions. As regional volume diminished the ones most effected were those who counted on it. Through our volatile market we are also seeing a shift where buyers and sellers are needing more powerful advice in order to take care of all their concerns. Thus, discounted brokers are being suffocated in both directions. The less volume means less revenue on an already slim budget. The increased care needed means that they cannot compete with the more robust services that full service agents provide. There is now a lack of efficiency in the market that makes a cookie cutter approach to buying and selling real estate obsolete. Gone are the days of putting a sign in the front yard at 9:00am and having hoards of buyers by 12:00pm.

I am all for cost conservation, but I have found that I make and save my clients far more money through our complete services then I would by giving back some of my commission. Dropping margins only puts agents and their clients at odds with each other in a time where the customer needs more help than ever before if they want to avoid unwanted consequences in a vastly changing marketplace. I believe that buyers and sellers need top notch service in order to gain competitive advantage. Sellers need heightened property visibility and superior strategies for selling their homes in a slowing market. Buyer’s need knowledgeable agents who can make powerful observations and assessments. They both need a competent adviser who can offer them the capacity to get the best deal possible.

Boomer 411 made PC Magazine’s top 10 baby boomer web sites. Below is an excerpt from PC Magazine’s commentary.

This news-aggregating site is like Digg for the older set. With Boomer411, you can bookmark and share your favorite content, as well as submit content to be voted on by other users. Topics range from jobs and insurance to alternative medicine and real estate. Visit the Boomer411 blog to read interviews and guest columns and comment on them.

Financial Ambition has been tagging relevant finance and real estate related content for Boomer 411. They are a great search tool and resource for the baby boomers.

I often get the question of what movers, Storage, utilities, phone, internet and TV offers are available on a specific home. I came across a great new free service that will not only tell you what services and products are available, but what it will cost and if there are any special deals from a specific company. The site is called White Fence. They say that they are a national service and I checked my address in the Bay Area and they seemed accurate. Check it out and let me know if you have heard of any other interesting solutions for home service providers.

We sighted Boomer 411 a new baby boomer web portal in a previous posting. They really have a unique approach to aggragating relevent content for the baby boomers. Their goal that is posted on thier home page is, “…to help people access Trusted and Relevant content related to baby boomers quickly.”

There are 2 new major events surroundiung Boomer 411. First, they have launched the portal. Financial Ambition has been assisting Boomer 411 to tag stories that are relevant real estate and finance information for baby boomers. You can check out many of our tags under the real estate and financial portions of the portal.

Second, I was interviewed for Boomer 411. The interview is being released in 2 parts. This is the first part of the interview. More to come as they post it.

We recently introduced you to Realius the fantasy real estate game. Because, Red Oak Realty is beta testing this new game, we were able to make an offering of the free beta in our previous posting. Now, Realius is offering prizes to play! 

Play and win! Price homes between November 21 and November 30 and you will be entered into Realius’s first Sweepstakes to win a $250 gift certificate to amazon.com. For every 25,000 points you score, you’ll earn one chance to win (up to 5 entries). The more you play, the better your chances to win - and bragging rights within the Realius community! The winner will be announced in December.

Click the link below for a free trial of the Beta version of the game. Click the Sign Up tab in the top right corner of the screen and register to enter yourself in the sweepstakes.

http://redoakrealty.realius.com/invite/ngz9g

NO PURCHASE IS NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Must be 18 or older and a U.S. resident. Begins November 21, 2007 at 12:00 P.M. (PT) and ends November 30, 2007 at 11:59 PM (PT). Void where prohibited. To enter, log on to www.realius.com, register, play the PRICE ME NOW game and follow the instructions to enter the Sweepstakes or, hand-print your name, address, city, state, zip code, daytime phone number, and email address on a 3”x5” piece of paper, mail in stamped envelope to: Realius, Inc., Attn: PRICE ME NOW Sweepstakes, 1625 Shattuck Avenue Suite 210, Berkeley CA 94709. Maximum five (5) entries per natural person per email address. Mailed-in entries must be postmarked by November 30, 2007, and received by Sponsor no later than December 7, 2007. Odds of winning depend on the total number of entries received. Sponsored by Realius, Inc. 1625 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94709. See www.realius.com starting November 21, 2007 for complete rules and details.

There have been several interesting tech articles recently written about Realius. Realius is a real life real estate game. Currently they are getting ready to release their first game called, “Price Me Now”. Players of the game look at photos and MLS data on properties and try to guess their pricing. Their beta release has been made in conjunction with Red Oak Realty the firm where I work.

Our first game, a home pricing game, meets Jason’s requests. Players will see what the community thinks homes are going to sell for and how they fit into that community. Take a look at a partial screenshot from the game:

Players will also see what realtors think and will be scored on how close their guess is to the ‘crowd guess’.

Realius was recently featured on Tech Crunch and was shown in the Tech Crunch 40 demo pit. See the video below.

Below is link to play Realius’s first beta game! Enjoy playing and feel free to sign up under your own account and play!

http://redoakrealty.realius.com/invite/ngz9g

I often keep track of new tech innovations by reading Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer blog. Robert used to work for Microsoft’s channel 9 web site and he now works as the Vice President of Media Development at Podtech.net. He has written a fantastic book called Naked Conversations, which chronicles blogging as a transparent tool for companies to reach their customers. It is an interesting read for those of you that are interested in blogging.

In his current position Robert travels the world uncovering exciting new innovations. The video below is an interview Robert made with Arron Patzer who created a new financial web tool called mint.com that was unveiled at the TechCrunch 40 conference on September 17th in San Francisco. The video shows how this online application could rival Quicken. I always recommend that my clients keep track of their finances as a powerful way for them to keep tabs on their financial goals. This looks like a new low cost way to do it. The video makes it look interesting, but I have yet try it myself. Let me know if you have tried it and what you think!

Starbucks to Offer iTunes Access

Starbucks Corp.’s agreement to offer a special Apple Inc. music downloading service helps the Seattle coffee giant tap into the fastest-growing part of the music business.

The new service, which Starbucks announced at an Apple media event in San Francisco on Wednesday, will let customers buy music using iPods in several hundred Starbucks cafes before the end of the year.

The service will allow customers with iPods that have wireless Internet access, such as the new iPod Touch or iPhone, to browse, search and preview for free, as well as buy, millions of songs on Apple’s iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. Customers with PCs or Macs will be able to use the service too. Users won’t have to pay a wireless connection fee to shop in the iTunes store like they currently do when they access iTunes from a Starbucks.

(Read more¹ on Apple’s new iPods.)

One aspect of the service will answer a question that customers often ask Starbucks’s baristas: the name of the song playing inside the store. Now, when a customer walks into a Starbucks that has this new iTunes service, the customer’s music device or computer will tell them the name of the song that’s currently playing and allow them to buy the song in what Starbucks describes as a “seamless” transaction.

“I’ve said for years that an unexploited asset was this wireless network,” Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said in an interview. “The big payoff is the sense of discovery that will exist.”

The move is Starbucks’s latest effort to stretch its brand beyond coffee by integrating music, film, books and other forms of entertainment into its cafes. Starbucks has been successful in selling exclusive CDs and reviving older artists by placing their new albums next to its cash registers. Last year Starbucks put its Hear Music catalog on iTunes under a Starbucks-branded area.

Starbucks has for years been trying to branch its CD business into music downloading inside its cafes. In 2004, Starbucks said it would install several dozen so-called media bars in cafes under its Hear Music brand that would allow customers to burn a selection of 200,000 songs onto compact discs, but later backed away from that strategy.

“We didn’t get it right the first time,” Mr. Schultz says. He says the chain spent two years negotiating this deal with Apple. The companies declined to say how they’ll share revenue from songs purchased inside Starbucks but Mr. Schultz said of the arrangement: “It’s beneficial to both of us.”

Starbucks plans to launch the service Oct. 2 at 600 cafes in New York and Seattle, then add it to 350 stores in San Francisco in November, 500 stores in Los Angeles in February, 300 stores in Chicago in March and in more U.S. cities later next year. The price of the songs will be the same as in the traditional iTunes store, which is currently 99 cents per song. The service will run on the T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi network. Customers will continue to have to pay to access sites outside iTunes while inside Starbucks.

I generally leave the real estate and cool house stuff for Mark to write about but with the mortgage market imploding at the moment, all I have to talk about is the subprime mess, foreclosures, bankruptcies, loan companies closing and I’m tired of this downer news so I wanted to post something cool. 

A client told me about this site today and recommended that I take a look. It’s a cool modular housing design and the tour is actually an amazing piece of work.  I’ve never seen a house tour quite like this one, it is beautiful and entertaining.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.livinghomes.net/tour.html

A client of mine just introduced me to http://www.walkscore.com/. Just enter your address or the address of the property you are looking to acquire and the site will assess the walkability of the home.

As stated on their web site, “Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.”

It is interesting to think about how a walk score might help to assess a properties value. If a home has a better Walk Score is it more valuable? One of the features of the site is to check out celebrity Walk Scores. I checked out Bill Gates’s house and it gets a walk score of 6 out of 100. I wonder if Bill ever walks 2.03 miles to the Lincoln Square Cinema to catch a matinee.  George Bush’s Texas Crawford ranch gets a walk score of 0 out of 100. My home got a 22 out of 100.

Maybe Walk Score has less to do with residential values and more to do with business values. I can tell you that walk-in traffic is extremely important in real estate. The walking score of my office on Solano avenue in Berkeley, California was a 78 out of 100.

Maybe the Walk Score is just a fun tool for individuals to find out what is in or close to a neighborhood. From any angle you look at it, Walking Scores sure are an interesting use of a google maps mash-up and an intriguing different way to look at your neighborhood!

Some great past clients of mine have just put the finishing touches on their new web 2.0 project. After taking a peek at Yellowbungalow.com I can say it is truly a fantastic social networking site for home owners.

My clients seem to always be updating, remodeling, and improving their homes and gardens. Now, through the new YellowBungalow site they have access to a network of people that have recently completed home improvement projects. This can help with the thousands of property improvement decisions you will need to make when considering renovations.  I found the resources section of the site to be especially helpful. Here people can post reviews of resources they have used and would (or sometimes more important wouldn’t) recommend, along with photos of the work so you can see the quality and scope of the job.  The ask a neighbor section provides a forum for homeowners to help each other solve many of the home related dilemmas that can occur.

As a real estate agent I have seen many of my clients make beautiful renovations of their homes. I have often thought that others could benefit from the knowledge and experiences that these home renovators have gained. It is my assessment that there are probably an equal number of viewers that are just as curious to see what the renovators have accomplished.  The YellowBungalow before & afters section gives a great display of all the great accolades some of these home owners have achieved. It also gives the renovators a great platform to share their photos and experiences with friends and family.

Like their tagline says it truly is, “inspiring home improvement”. Check it out and let us know what you think of YellowBungalow. 

 
Thanks to .A.A. for this great photo.

Recently, Redfin a discounted real estate brokerage firm has garnished much media attention. Partly because it just received an additional 12 million dollars in venture funding and partly because of their bold claims of changing the real estate industry. I am always interested in new real estate business models and like many other real estate agents this is one that has become fascinating to me over the last couple of years. All this hype made me want to look at the financial benefits of discounted brokerages compared to our full service model.

Redfin is a discount business model. Discounted business models offer real estate buying and selling services at reduced prices. There are many different discount models that all have different pricing strategies. Redfin offers to list your California home for flat fee of $4,000. Discount real estate businesses offer reductions in commision by making a reduction in service. Thus the ultimate consumer question becomes what does the extra full service model get you in return? What services do the discounted models do away with and how does this affect your sale or purchase?

Recently, as I was transacting in the market and I came across a direct sales comparison of the results of a discounted service verses full service. At the end of 2005 I sold a property along the East Bay coastline in a tract housing community called Promentory in Richmond’s Marina Bay. I mentioned that it is a tract, because this illustrates that all the homes are very similar in size and style. Both properties were 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath homes on a 2736 square foot lot. I represented the buyer on one home while an Assist 2 Sell (a discounted broker) represented the seller. I sold the home to my buyer for $610,000. Just next door was the other home and it was sold by a full service agent in the same month for $677,000. That is a $67,000 difference in price. I saw the condition of both the interiors and exteriors of the properties and I can say they were both very comparable. The lots, community locations and views were also very similar. Even if a discounted broker could have eliminated all the commissions (5%) on the $677,000 home It would still have been a huge profit difference of $33,150 compared to the home sold by the discounted broker.  

Just think for a second… If you needed open heart surgery would you look for the low cost leader? Even worse would you do the surgery yourself? My advice would be to find the best doctor available.

Yet, discounted real estate brokers assume people will choose to lop off their financial success with no concern for their financial futures. For most of my client’s their homes are their largest assets. Getting an expert to act and get them the highest price possible is of the utmost importance. Just check out Redfin’s site and read about what they offer. They write a lot about what they are saving their client’s in commission and say little about how they generate the highest possible returns for their sellers. They speak a lot about their supposed negotiating skills and little about how their buyer’s end up in homes that fits their needs and their financial situation.

Marlow Harris at the 360Digest blog has had a lot to say about the current Redfin news. Most interesting to me has been her take on the financial aspects of Redfin. It seems to me they may suffer from the old adage, “we are losing money, but we’ll make it up in volume.”

Last month we listed and sold a home in Oakland’s prestigious Montclair hills neighborhood. 5940 Monzal was listed for $1,599,000. You can check out some of my full service internet marketing at www.5940monzal.com. We generated 7 offers and the property sold for $1,937,000. That is a 698% return on their investment in our commission. Navigating the Bay Area’s complex housing micro climates is not a job for the low cost leader. It’s a job for the avid advisor.

In light of the new release of the Apple iPhone my interest in Apple has peaked. This last weekend I watched hoards of people huddled around a AT&T store in San Francisco as I waited at a traffic light. I found it interesting that many of the people in the line looked like they could not afford the $600 price tag. My wife quickly reminded me that many of those waiting in line would soon be selling their new purchase on e-bay for a profit. Below is an interesting Steve Jobs interview where he speaks about the power of the iPhone.

Thanks to creativebits.org for this great clip.

Screen Shot of EveryScape Union Square Demo Navigation

I just finished reading some of my favorite technology blogs and I came across a new internet technology that looks like it has a real potential for the real estate industry. Many of you have already seen Google’s new maps that incorporate a street view feature. It allows the user to place themselves in a location on a Google Map and then brings up a window with a rotatable 360 degree panoramic picture of the location. It is a great way to look at where you are going before you leave the comforts of your home. I highly suggest taking Google’s new street view for a spin.

Yet, a new company called EveryScape, is using Google Maps technology to take neighborhood virtual tours to a new level. They are developing a new technology that will allow the user, as they say, “escape into the real world.” They have a great demo of their interactive 360 degree environment on their site. It allows the user to walk through a neighborhood and to highlight company’s websites and locations in the environment. In the working demo on their home page you can tour the Bay Area’s historic Union Square in San Francisco.

I can see how this could be extremely powerful tool for the real estate industry. Can you imagine how consumers housing preferences could be altered by taking a virtual stroll through a listing’s neighborhood before viewing the home in person? It will be exciting to see where these new technologies lead us.

I am always saying how interesting our clients are. One of the perks in my business is to see what interesting businesses and projects people are working on in the Bay Area. Our high property prices dictate that many of our clients are working on interesting high profile projects.

I recently sold a second property to a client who I have known and advised for several years. He is an engineer in Silicon Valley who recently took a new job at one of the most interesting electric car companies I have seen. Being that my office is in Berkeley, California, I often see electric and hybrid vehicles traveling around the city. None of them look all that appealing, and I have also test driven them and they are not what I would call fun to drive.

I recently checked out the web site of my client’s new company Tesla Motors and it made me want to go out and buy one. So, although this is not finance or real estate related I thought I would post a bit about their new Electric Roadster.

The vehicle’s performance and engineering looks impressive. It is 100% electric, goes 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, and travels over 200 miles without recharging. Not to mention it is a beautiful looking sports car. The initial production run of the vehicle sold out in just 4 months. All I can say is, “Wow, I want one!”