Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
In Memory of Sheila Lublin
August 7th, 2008 Categories: Uncategorized
My heartfelt condolences to Bill and the rest of Sheila’s friends and family.
From The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson:
Some of us are chipping in money to help Bill and his son get through the next few days by setting up food deliveries from local Philadelphia area restaurants/deli’s. If you’d like to contribute, you can click on the donation widget in the right side bar (on Jays site). Excess donations will be sent to the American Cancer Society.
Services for Shelia will be held on Friday August 8, at 10:00am Eastern time.
Goldstein’s Rosenbergs Rafael Sacks Funeral Homes
310 Second Street Pike
South Hampton, PA 18966If you’d like to mail Bill a card, email me or leave a comment and I’ll get you his address.
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DOJ vs NAR Lawsuit Turned Into an Exercise in Irrelevancy
May 27th, 2008 Categories: Uncategorized
Here is a classic case of technology outpacing the legal system.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) settled its case with the National Association of Realtors (NAR) primarily because neither side had much to fight for. The policies that the DOJ had issues with simply became irrelevant with the increasing ubiquity of ‘cheap technology’ and the social media dynamic.
Real estate blogs, other ‘Web 2.0′ centric real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia and especially brokerages like Redfin have effectively achieved what 3 years and untold millions of dollars couldn’t do in court…vanquishing NAR’s ability to ‘restrict competition and consumer choice in real estate services, and discouraging low-cost services.’
NAR lost its hands on this wheel awhile ago, fighting the DOJ in court while Ivory Tower technologists disintermediated the industry from underneath them. Dissension from the large trade organization is rather en vogue right now for the once tightly locked constituency, so you gotta figure they cut their losses and settled out of an irrelevant and expensive lawsuit, hopefully to address bigger problems and spend their war chest on items that may keep them viable, going forward. If I was a tax paying Realtor, I’d be doubly pissed since I would have theoretically paid for this lawsuit on both sides…
This should be a lesson carefully studied by the mortgage industry. Before everyone goes all legal on each other, consider one of my favorite Twain quotes: ‘History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme’. The industry of real estate traditionally runs about 5-7 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to implementation of progressive practices and technologies, pretty bad until you consider the industry of mortgage lags a few years further behind it.
It’s a matter of time before the release and adoption of similar technologies and progressive practices achieve what the perpetual mortgage circle jerk will only fumble through…achieving greater transparency and refined business structure within an industry that has internal conflicts of interests, misalignment of objectives and a slew of other appropriate cliché’s [Insert Y0ur Favorite Here]…
Sphere: Related ContentFirefox Web Browser
October 3rd, 2007 Categories: Uncategorized
I know, this isn’t some sexy new piece of advice on how to improve your web-experience. It’s probably safe to say most people who read a site like the XBroker have a higher than average technology acumen and have heard of Firefox. However, it bears repeating, ad nauseum, that if you are using Internet Explorer your overall browsing experience is retarded, literally.
Mozilla’s Firefox is far, far superior. People tend to have an aversion to change, so FF pop developers have made it so you can even skin the browser it to make it look like IE if that is your wont.
Its far more stable, reads web-sites without ‘breaking’ them, has tons of add-ons that probably won’t be released until IE 10 is ready, and everything is really easy to integrate.
Spend the 5 mins it takes to do all of this, its time well invested.
The XBroker is in no way paid or otherwise enriched by the people at Firefox and/or Mozilla for this plug…All their stuff is free.
Also See:
Sphere: Related ContentI’m a Member of a Real Estate Social Network, Where’s My 40 Acres and a Mule?
October 1st, 2007 Categories: Uncategorized
In light of the recent Active Rain (AR) vs Move.com lawsuit, one of the compelling issues and hot button topics revolves around ‘Who owns the content…The business or the individual who wrote it?’
This seems trivial to me. If I write original content, then I own it and you must at least credit me for my words, plagiarism is criminal. Don’t expect everyone to follow the rules…take the time to protect your writings with a creative commons license, digitally fingerprint your stuff and sign up for Google-Alerts to police the web for perpetrators of content scraping.
Just for fun, let’s say Move.com (The NAR) did buy AR and ‘my content’; If NAR wants to publish my content on their social network (so long as they cite me appropriately) I’m 100% fine with that, although they may want to read what I write before doing so…No one will accuse me of being very NAR friendly. In any case, my content would have graduated to a larger stage, getting me (potentially) more notoriety, and a deeper readership base. Isn’t this what marketing and advertising is supposed to be about: Getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible?
The status-quo of real estate professionals still have a hard time wrapping their head around the notion that sharing information is a good thing, so I understand how foreign it must seem that wide, even uncontrolled distribution of their work can actually benefit them. It’s that Kool-Aid kicking in.
I post on AR to expand my potential audience reach, not to indulge my narcissistic needs. It’s the same reason I submit my posts on Real Estate Voices, why I put a huge RSS icon in my sidebar, offer up my posts to be conveniently delivered via email, and give anyone multiple ways to access, bookmark and otherwise distribute my writings for me. A couple of posts ago I mentioned how I cant find The XBroker via any traditional search queries (mortgage blog, mortgage opinion, et.al.) yet I have a pretty solid readership according to my sites traffic metrics. These desirable results are a product of an organic and viral process where a friend of a friend (FoaF) tells another friend about The XBroker.
I’ve had discussions with more than 10 Realtors who are all into learning about SEO, ‘Web 2.0′, new marketing ideas, etc. yet they still get upset at the notion of their ‘information’ appearing else ware or someone else properly publishing their work, critically or otherwise. This leads me to believe that there’s still an abundance of ignorance as to how/why/what the web in it’s present state can do for them and their business. If you plan to use the web in a marketing strategy, open discourse and communal sharing encapsulate the New Rules.
So keep writing, putting your idea’s, your business and yourself out there. Put your listings on Zillow, engage Trulia Voices, keep posting on AR and hope Google buys one or all of them. As a type of insurance, start your own blog-site (or other semantically natured web-presence) to preserve your content no matter what happens to anyone else. There will come a time in the not so distant future that the term ‘blog’ will fade into the description of a website. It’s a matter of time before the consumer nation discovers these lesser known networks and recognizes them as the authoritative voice.
Also See:
What Active Rain Should do Now
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