Marketing Homes: Use DVDs!

If you or someone you know is thinking about selling their home, it is important to consider the use of full-motion video and DVDs. We have been doing this for years, and have gotten to the point where we own cameras, remote microphones, lights, Avid post-production systems and more. Here are a few of the reasons we have found that having video and DVDs is so important in selling a home today.

Click here to see some sample video.

• Open House 24/7. The most critical factor in selling a home for top dollar is marketing exposure. By having full-color brochures with DVDs in the flyer box at all times, buyers can take a DVD and watch it on their TV at their convenience. A DVD makes it easy for buyers to preview your home, and, basically, means that your house is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

• Relieves Burden. For some people, having to make way for buyers who want to see your home can be a significant burden. The most common examples are: 1) people who work at home; 2) people with medical conditions; 3) parents of babies/toddlers; 4) seniors or others for whom the disruption is unsettling; 5) homes with pets that get upset by the presence of strangers; 6) people who have a lot of work stress who try to relax during the weekend. DVDs allow every person who stops by the house to see the home in comfort on their TV. If the buyer likes what he/she sees, then a scheduled appointment to show the home can be arranged.

• Having a DVD takes some pressure off from showing the home to every buyer/agent, regardless of the request. When possible, you should allow people to come in and see your house as much as you can. But there are times that it just isn't possible. Due to home office situations (e.g., conference calls), health issues, or simply convenience, there may be times when showings would be extremely burdensome. With a DVD, the good news is that one can kindly say to the agent or buyer, "Now is not a convenient time, but please take a DVD home with you to watch on your TV, and if you like what you see, please call again and I will be most happy to allow you to see it at your convenience."
  

• A video is a great take-away gift for the interested buyer. We can't say enough about this! Buyers who take home a video of a home can watch it many times, show it to a spouse who wasn't able to see the home, and share it with friends and family to get extra input. This is a REALLY important feature because your home video will stand out among the available homes. We know -- we have even sold homes to people who had never seen the home before placing their offer on it!

• DVD, not CDROM, technology is CRITICAL. DVDs will play right on the TV set; CDROMs require a computer. For a DVD, you just put it in the DVD player and hit go; for CDROMs, media players, computer speed, etc. can cause compatibility issues. In short, having the home tour on a DVD means that buyers can relax in the family room while watching the video; it makes the home tour a pleasant experience and allows it to be seen on a big-screen TV. Finally, DVDs can hold about 7 times as much data, which means that the video can be much longer and much higher quality.

• Richness of information. Because a DVD can store so much video, the DVD can sell the house in ways that paper brochures and computer virtual tours cannot. Example: One one DVD, we filmed neighbors talking about the neighborhood and community and placed this footage on the DVD. This is great because the buyers feel really good about the home that they are buying and the community into which they are moving! Example #2: Where an elementary school is particularly strong, it can be great to get the Principal to say a few words about the school and the community. This brings a depth to the marketing that homes in other areas simply do not have.

• Ease of Distribution. Because DVDs are so compact and inexpensive to make, they can be easily attached to brochures, distributed to other agents, and distributed to nearby neighborhoods where a buyer may live. Once you have the video, it is easy to manufacture 1,000 DVDs, which is usually the minimum number that the Hokkanen Team creates for any listing.

Of course, once you have the cinematic grade of video, it is very easy to spin out the video file into a format that can be uploaded into YouTube or streamed from your own web site. If you want to see some examples, click here to see Carlsbad and Encinitas homes on video.

If this post was interesting to you, feel free to comment. If we get a few responses showing interest in videos, I will consider putting my top 10 hints to being effective in front of the camera while giving a home tour.

Margaret Hokkanen (760) 942-4242

Encinitas and Carlsbad Homes

Downloading Data to Your Real Estate Site the New Way

RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard)

A few months ago I found out that my MLS (Sandicor) supports a new data transmission standard for IDX web sites called RETS. That sounds really boring, but it is really great, and here's why:

Old IDX Way	New RETS Way
In the past, we had to download data via FTP. These FTP files were created by the MLS around midnight, and then you could download them around 2:30am. That was the only update you could get all day.	With RETS, you can query the MLS servers for the updates in the past 3 hours. This now allows my web sites to have nearly up-to-the-minute information for our users
The old FTP files were tab-delimited text files and you pulled with an FTP client. This was a compact and effective way to transmit the information when Internet connections were slow. Unfortunately, the information was encoded (A=Ocean View, B=Canyon View, C=Park View) for the various fields. One had to write the decoding programs and maintain them.	The new way is with a SOAP service call which uses http (the web browser protocol). That sounds complicated, but what it really means is that you can specify what you want in the URL/Address that you are requesting. For example, if you only want 3 fields of data, just ask for the three fields and that's all you get instead of having to download the one massive file. If you only want updates for the last two hours, ask for them. AND, if you want all the fields decoded for you, just say so in the web address! No more maintaining the decoding logic when they add a new option.
The old way required you to parse the entire update file.	Since you can ask for just the updates, you can have impose a smaller update requirement and just update those fields that need to be updated. Also, in our MLS (Tempo software from MarketLinx), the ModifiedDate field now has a timestamp so you now EXACTLY if your entry in your database is up to date. In the old FTP file, it was just a date stamp, and experience taught me that agents may update a listing 2 or 3 times when they are editing/previewing.
I also found that downloading photographs via the FTP servers was a bit of a problem. The technology was all there, but photos could be corrupted or missing. This was probably due to some bug in the copying process because they copied all the photos to a holding place.	With RETS I encounter fewer problems. Getting a photo is simply another URL request just like getting data, and since there is no holding place, there seem to be fewer problems.

Last week, our MLS sent all the people pulling IDX data an email indicating that they would be discontinuing the IDX data feed in Q1. I had already written the programming, so I completed the conversion to the new approach in a couple of days. So my site now uses RETS exclusively for updates.

For those of you who like the old approach, there is one other security benefit to the MLS. Every request has to be uniquely authenticated with your individual username/password. If someone starts handing out their username/password to a bunch of people, the overuse of the account will be immediately detected and a halt will be put to it. It's understandable why that's important to the MLSes.

Switching over to RETS is probably wise because this is the way for the MLS to provide all sorts of improvements without disrupting existing processes (admittedly once you are switched over). From the NAR meeting about a week ago, it sounds like over half of the MLSes support RETS, though some of them are not advertising it. So, if you want to switch your website over, ask your MLS about this new technology.

NOTE: Programming SOAP services with authentication and everything IS a bit on the complicated side. However, there are programs that you can set up a scheduled data pull, and then it creates a file on your machine or server much like the FTP pull. (Example: RETSconnector.com)

NOTE: If you are a real estate agent and doing your web site development in ColdFusion and are having any difficulties implementing RETS, contact us and I'll have my husband follow up with you. He's the programmer in the family.

Margaret Hokkanen

www.EncinitasCarlsbad.com

A Review of Geocoding Providers

We do a lot with geolocated information and maps, and I asked John to provide his review of the various geolocation services that he has had experience with.

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Geocoding providers come in various flavors from the highly value added to barebones geo location. Thank goodness for the US Census Bureau and their effort to geolocate the census data and offer it to the public for free. This has resulted in a number of vendors offering nearly-for-free Tiger line (Census) geolocation capabilities. That fact has brought prices down a LOT. A good example is http://geocoder.us/.

Having thanked the Tiger line vendors for bringing prices down, I have to say that the Tiger data is not particularly accurate (80-85%?, not sure). But, if you have no other choice, you can still get 80+% of the homes, businesses, or other information geocoded so that you can display them on maps with this data. That's good.

When investigating geo-coding services, there really are only a couple of source data. The tiger data is sort of the base line. There are also several private companies that create private mapping data; the two largest, I think are NavTEQ and Teleatlas. You've probably seen both of these names on various on-line maps around the Internet (Google, Yahoo, etc.) Having worked with both datasets, I can say that I prefer the Teleatlas data and I believe that it is of slightly higher quality (that's a personal opinion, but one grounded in experience), but both of them will give you results in excess of 95% usually. I cannot imagine how much effort it must take to send out cars with geocoders to continuously drive all the new communities in the US so that we can get quality mapping. The third solution is Microsoft's Mappoint. I'm not sure if they are developing their content or are acquiring it from a vendor. What I can say is that my experience is that the mappoint geocoding is inferior to TeleAtlas and NavTEQ.

So, the next question should be: Where can I buy this data? Here is a short list of vendors that I have used and can review. I tend to only go with very high quality providers as this is really important data for me.

ESRI - This is the granddaddy of mapping technology. They create mapping interface software (ArcView), though they don't create the lat/lon data for US Roads and instead license it from vendors like NavTEQ and Teleatlas. These are the folks who brought us the Shapefile for GIS. They have a web SOAP service that you can use to geocode addresses with either the NavTEQ or Teleatlas data (your pick). The cost is around $1200 for 100,000 addresses, and has to be renewed annually. If you're creating data for a large metropolitan area, 100,000 addresses isn't that many, but if you're in a rural area, then this is probably significant overkill. They run a first rate service and at a cost of 1.2 cents per record, it is quite reasonable especially given the quality of the company.

Melissa Data - This company seems to specialize in data validation and enhancement. I used their SOAP interface for geocoding addresses for several years, and they do a great job of breaking down the addresses into the component parts, returning standardized data. They even have calls to do reverse lookups on addresses, phone numbers, etc. They provide tools that allow you to improve the quality of one's data, and that's why I took an interest in them. I don't use them any more because I ran into a number of customer service issues and I also thought they had not adjusted their prices in light of ESRI and Teleatlas getting into the geocoding business. Customer Service issue: I got calls from the company saying that they were going to imminently cut off my service due to overuse, when, in fact, their system for counting usage was messed up. I did not like the effect of such calls on my blood pressure. Cost: For 50,000 addresses, they used to charge $1500 (as I recall). Now, if you need absolutely top-notch scrubbed data with enhanced address standardization, it might be worth spending nearly 3 times as much for your geocoding. But I just wanted accurate plotting of my addresses with Teleatlas data (which they can provide). However, we write our code in ColdFusion, and they had easy-to-implement examples to interface our ColdFusion programs with their SOAP services. It was a piece of cake. I'd probably still use them if their prices had adjusted to the market.

Teleatlas - In the 2005-2006 timeframe, these folks created an access via SOAP. However, as indicated above, I used Melissa Data's Coldfusion interface. Over the past couple of years, they've expanded their documentation and now have examples in Perl, Python, Java, etc., though still none in ColdFusion. So the time had come that I wrote my own Coldfusion implementation of their interface using their Java classes (actually, I hired a guy in Romania who wrote the code inexpensively and then I just adjusted it to create a custom interface). I just turned it on this past week, and I must say that it is REALLY fast, and their SOAP interface now provides Census data pointers as well as standardized address information and lat/lon data for the address sent to them. Cost: about 1.5 cents per record, BUT you don't have to commit to large quantities if you don't want to do so. You'll pay a little more if you only want to charge your account with 5,000 address calls, but this is good data and it's quite reasonable in expense. For more information, go to WWW.GEOCODE.COM

Google - Recently Google made its geocoding interface accessible. For years, you could not geocode addresses, at least not directly and get the lat/lon returned. THIS IS FREE! And it appears to be very, very good quality, and has an exceptional address parser. They do limit you to 50,000 pulls per month on your account. That sounds like a lot, but if your web site is also displaying their maps (each of which constitutes a pull), then you have to be careful.

Yahoo - Yahoo blundered a few years ago by not making their mapping stuff available to businesses for commercial sites that were exploring how to use mapping (i.e., you could use it if you were an engineer developing your personal web page, but if you were the IT director of the company, you couldn't tell your engineer to use it on the corporate web site). This resulted in thousands of folks (like us) turning to Google's mapping technologies. I saw the recent presentation at the NAR meeting where the Yahoo guy demonstrated how you could integrate their local data in their maps, and it was impressive (though not for the technical initiate). I mention them only because they now offer their geocoding service for free, but I cannot review it because I have never used it.

Microsoft - I checked into using the Mappoint servers a few years ago, but at the time I thought they were expensive and worked only through value-added resellers (i.e., cost-increasing vendors). I was not overwhelmed with the Mappoint dataset, so I did not investigate this further. They do offer some cool mapping technologies now (a few years later), so this might be something to check out.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

If you have no budget, use: 1) Google; 2) Yahoo; or one of the low-cost providers. If you have bulk files, go with one of the low-cost Tiger data people and that will get you 80% there.

If you have a modest budget with modest needs and want very high-quality commercial data, then you could go with Google (if you are not using their maps or the combined usage is under their limit requirements) or you can go with Teleatlas due to the low up-front cost requirement.

If you can spare over $1000 per year, then Teleatlas is a good choice. I can also recommend ESRI because they have all kinds of bells and whistles and are a tad cheaper than Teleatlas (even though they sell the Teleatlas data), but I don't remember that they provide the Census block info like Teleatlas, so use care if that's important. They have nice clean examples for most development environments. If you need some of the data cleanup and validation tools and are willing to spend at least double the price, then MelissaData has good servers and they have some good tools; but you're going to pay for what you get.

I hope this is useful for you. It's based on five years of working with these various vendors. Write us if you have questions.

John Hokkanen

Encinitas and Carlsbad Real Estate and San Diego County Real Estate

Review of Verizon Blackberry

Blackberry - Voice Service?

I bought a Blackberry not long ago from Verizon in order to connect my laptop to the Internet with high-speed access. I told the sales rep that I was replacing a Cingular (now ATT) PC Card, and the sales rep persuaded me that the Blackberry was no more expense every month and so I should get it.

A couple of notes about the purchase -

1. I learned that the charger for the Blackberry connects to the same port as the computer tether for the Blackberry. This means that you CAN'T run the Blackberry off the A/C while it is connected to the laptop. This means that if you run out of battery power on the Blackberry, then your PC is off-line until the Blackberry is charged up. They didn't tell me about that!

2. The Verizon Blackberry was SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the Cingular PC card. Different technology - 3/4 times as fast. Much better. I'm sure the PC Card running the same connection technology is equally fast.

3. They CAN'T turn off the voice access on the device. I learned this because the Blackberry was stolen, and I thought I had unlimited data access only to find out when the bill came out that there were voice-related charges. Verizon was very good about undoing the charges because they saw I had signed up for a data-only plan and that I had other voice plans. IMPORTANT - Don't assume that the voice is turned off, because it isn't. This could be an asset if your phone died and you wanted to use the Blackberry as an emergency phone, but it costs 25 cents/minute.

4. The web browser did a commendable job on pages that were designed for a small screen. I created a custom and password-protected webpage so that I could pull showing instructions from my Blackberry, and it was quite speedy and pretty easy to use. This opens all kinds of possibilities.

5. I thought about having voice service when I bought it, but decided that I wanted to be able to talk on my phone while I was using the Blackberry in my hands. I didn't want the confusion of trying to do both things on one device at the same time. That said, I thought their browser function was really cool because it highlighted phone numbers on web pages and allowed one to click on the phone number to dial it.

All in all, it was a good purchase. HOWEVER, since the device was stolen, I need to buy another device to hook up my pc for open houses, and I think I am going to go with a PC card instead. Mainly, it solves the power issue identifed in paragaph one above. Call if you have questions.

Margaret 760-942-4242

EncinitasCarlsbad.com

Press Release RE: New Fire Risk Maps/Prediction

In response to media coverage of the San Diego fires and the fires' devastation to homeowners, the SurfTheTurf.com Real Estate Team has combined various map data to allow homeowners to see fire zone risks, recent fire destruction, and climate zone data all on a single map. The Team has also released a prediction of possible high-risk areas that may be subject to devastation in the near future for current homebuyer consideration. The map may be viewed at www.EncinitasCarlsbad.com/page.cfm?page=InfoWildFires.

Developed by John Hokkanen, lead realtor of the Team, the map combines fire zone risk data with 2003 and 2007 fire season burn data. It also overlays climate zone data showing the relationship of the marine, coastal, and transitional climate zones to the fire risk zones. The discussion of the map also identifies two areas that may have extraordinarily high risk for home destruction due to a combination of high fire zone risk and buildup of flammable material. The page also provides a summary of the major strategies that homeowners can use to reduce the risk that their homes will burn due to a wildfire as well as links to other resources.

"As head of one of the leading real estate teams, we felt that buyers and sellers both wanted this kind of actionable information," explains Hokkanen. "Home buyers saw dozens of their neighbors homes burn on the TV news, and they want to know 'Where are the riskiest areas?' That is the question that we have sought to answer with an easy-to-understand map based on real data."

Recognized as an national expert in real estate Internet development, Hokkanen has created rich local web sites that are used by thousands in San Diego County. Hokkanen's expertise as a software developer, real estate broker, and former chief knowledge officer, has allowed him to create comprehensive web resources that help local home buyers and sellers answer critical questions about the real estate market. The Team's web sites extensive used of mapping extends back to 2002 when he developed his own real estate mapping system because other web-based mapping tools were not available at the time. Color-coded, enriched maps of all sorts can be found on the Team's sites.

About SurfTheTurf.com Real Estate Team:
The SurfTheTurf.com Team is a group of Casa Bella Realty & Mortgage agents who came together under the leadership of John Hokkanen. Their business model focuses on developing high-value information products for their clients and using technology to offer new services to their clients. All of their service is focused around local expertise. Instead of organizing into buyer/listing agents, the SurfTheTurf.com Team agents each specialize on a particular area and serve both buyers and sellers. Clients benefit because they always work with a local expert.

To contact John Hokkanen, call the SurfTheTurf.com Team at 760-634-0300. To visit any of the Team's San Diego County web sites , visit www.SurfTheTurf.com.

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Press Contact: John Hokkanen
Company Name: SurfTheTurf.com Real Estate Team, Casa Bella Realty & Mortgage

Phone: 760-634-0300
Website: www.SurfTheTurf.com

Our New Blog

For years we have always posted all of our content on our web sites. However, now we are planning to talk about innovating change within real estate practice. That topic does not really relate to the kind of home buying and home selling information that we provide on our web sites (see, for example, our Encinitas/Carlsbad web site), and so we decided to have a blog in addition to our sites.

For us, innovating change has occurred along a number of different vectors. First we have sought to create a different kind of relationship with our clients where the goal is to empower our clients with information rather than keep it from them. Second, we have attempted to change how homes can be marketed for sellers using a lot of new technologies or changes to old technologies. Last, we have attempted to change the underlying business model so that we can adapt to the new world of real estate and our clients better than the old business models. Sharing some of our insights about those topics is what this blog will be about. Along the way, we (read: John) might nerd out a bit on technical matters.