Top Field Guides for January
The list of the 10 most used Information Central Field Guides for January 2010 was released recently. They are:
1. Field Guide to Short Sales
2. Field Guide to Preparing & Staging a House for Sale
3. Field Guide to Opening a Real Estate Brokerage
4. Field Guide to Errors & Omissions Insurance
5. Field Guide to Quick Real Estate Statistics
6. Field Guide to 1031 Exchanges
7. Field Guide to Real Estate Transfer Taxes
8. Field Guide to Do-Not-Call, Do-Not-Fax, and Do-Not-E-Mail Laws
9. Field Guide to Real Estate Office Policy Manuals
10. Field Guide to Foreclosures
Have an idea for a new Field Guide? Click here to send us your suggestions!
Apple Tablet: if it’s coming, are you ready?
While there’s no guarantee that Apple will launch a tablet computer on Wednesday, Jan. 27, the web has been a-buzzing for over a month with rumor and speculation. If you haven’t kept up, Gizmodo or CNET have recaps for you on the latest gossip.
But unless you’re in the market for a new small computer or are in love with all things Mac, why should you care? Well, for one, Apple tends to drive the competition to keep up. Already Amazon has announced that it’s opening an apps store for its e-reader, the Kindle. Similar to the way the iPhone changed the smart phone market when it debuted in 2007, Apple’s tablet could push other firms to copy and improve on the tablet’s design in their own products.
So, like the iPhone, you may not actually want or need the iSlate, iTablet, iPad or whatever name Steve Jobs reveals on Wednesday, but it will shape your technology purchases down the road.
Unless it’s another AppleTV.
Stay tuned…
Oak Park REALTOR® Opened Builders Library
This Month in Real Estate History – January 2010: In 1911 an innovation was introduced to help Chicago-area home builders. It was the “Ho
me Builders Library,” established by REALTOR® George R. Hemingway of Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway was a prominent home builder as well as the uncle of then 11 year-old Ernest Hemingway, who would become one of America’s most famous writers.
George Hemingway said the library “was established for the benefit of persons who have an inclination toward building a home of their own, but do not know just how to go about it.” Connected to his offices, the library’s collection included “house book plans and bungalow design books, catalogues and books from the most prominent concerns in the country dealing with the subjects of plumbing, bath room designs, fireplace designs…and several monthly periodicals.”
“It is my aim to have in the library every bit of material that will be of benefit to home builders.”
In its January 15, 1911 issue, the National Real Estate Journal gave the library good reviews. “It consists of a beautifully furnished room with comfortable chairs and appropriate wall hangings and is open and free to the public during office hours.” The Journal also noted “The broker who is best equipped to furnish advice and information to his customers naturally attracts the better class of investors and profits by the service that he renders them.”
Read the full article here.
Upgrading from XP to Windows 7
Didn’t get that new Windows 7 laptop you were hoping for at Christmas? Still have a pretty robust machine running XP? Well, if you plan on sticking with your existing hardware for awhile but want to get out of XP, you can upgrade (somewhat painfully) to Windows 7.
When Windows 7 launched last fall, it sounded to me like upgrading from XP would be an all day process that might or might not be worth it. I wanted the modern OS, but didn’t want to risk losing my existing files. After watching this video from CNET (and buying another backup disk), I took the plunge. It wasn’t so bad.
View the video after the jump.
Read more
Have You Noticed The Change?
We recently upgraded our blog to give you more organized access to the information, a cleaner look and feel, and an address that’s easier to remember.
You may also notice that we’ve rearranged a bit. You will now find “Leave a Comment” at the top of the blog post, under the title.
Want to see what everyone is talking about, or simply get more exposure? We’ve added a “Recent Comments” section in the right column that lists the 5 most recent comments and their authors. Readers can click on a commenter’s name to go right to their Web site. So keep the discussion going—and don’t forget to add a link to your site.
Finally, our new address is:
http://infocentral.blogs.realtor.org/
Take a look around and let us know what you think!
Your Agent Is Worth His Commission
DECEMBER 2009 — Real estate agents “have spent many years in acquiring a knowledge of their work and these men serve you skillfully and well.” So wrote M. L. Dye, President of First Federal Savings in Salt Lake City in a December 1957 article for the National Real Estate and Building Journal. “There are many fine and reputable agents whose judgment you may trust and whose ability will serve you abundantly by saving you time, inconvenience and often money.”
“When you buy a house,” Dye wrote, “do you calculate the value of all the advertising, equipment and time of all the agents that have been placed at your disposal?”
Top Field Guides for December
The list of the 10 most used Information Central Field Guides for December 2009 was released today. They are:
1. Field Guide to Short Sales
2. Field Guide to Preparing & Staging a House for Sale
3. Field Guide to Quick Real Estate Statistics
4. Field Guide to Opening a Real Estate Brokerage
5. Field Guide to Errors & Omissions Insurance
6. Field Guide to 1031 Exchanges
7. Field Guide to Buying and Selling During the Holidays
8. Field Guide to Do-Not-Call, Do-Not-Fax, and Do-Not-E-Mail Laws
9. Field Guide to Real Estate Office Policy Manuals
10. Field Guide to Real Estate Transfer Taxes
Have an idea for a new Field Guide? Click here to send us your suggestions!
Podcasting Field Guide Updated
Filed under: Field Guides, Social Networking, Technology
Podcasts were the flavor of the moment a few years ago, a place now occupied by Facebook and Twitter. While the white heat is off podcasting, it still is a powerful and popular method of distributing both audio and video content. A podcast is an audio or video file that users can subscribe to through an RSS feed. As new content is available it is downloaded to your device. While you’ve all been able to download these files to the desktop for years, what makes podcasting unique is that you are no longer tethered to the computer to listen to it. You can download a file to your iPod or MP3 player, carry the file with you, and listen to it when and where you like. Similarly, YouTube and other video-sharing sites provide a convenient platform for subscribers not only to hear you, but also to see you. Find out how REALTORS® are using this technology to market their services to customers in this updated Field Guide.
Buying and Selling During the Holidays
The holiday season is here. Your buyers and sellers are asking if this is a good time to buy or sell a house. Look over our Field Guide to Buying and Selling During the Holidays to find out the pros and cons, how to stage a home during this time of year and whether to decorate or not.
Social Networking Privacy
Filed under: Social Networking, Technology, Web Sites
Social networking is about sharing information, opening up your life to new people, and building a virtual community. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your eyes open. As social networks like Facebook and Twitter become an integral part of our daily online lives, a whole new array of potential threats to our online security have emerged. Here are some general tips to help keep you safe.
Remember who your friends are – and who your friends of friends are too!
As REALTORS® you know it is important to address the needs of your audience when showing a house or answering an RFP. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or in anger can lead to repercussions down the road. Before you post an update, think about who will see this – without the help of your facial expressions or the tone in your voice to convey your true meaning. Also remember just because you’ve posted this to your select group of friends, if they comment on you post, their friends will be able to see what you have written or the picture you’ve posted.
Be info smart
Just as you wouldn’t post your Social Security number online, don’t post your date of birth (or at least eliminate the year). And what are you using for your passwords? If it’s your pet’s name or your children’s names, you might want to reconsider – eventually you will talk about them online. Similarly, that family tree you posted or that link to Great Aunt Millie’s genealogical work is going to certainly contain your mother’s maiden name. Be careful!
Also think about what contact information you want to include. Web programs called spiders troll the internet grabbing email addresses that are resold and spammed. Consider listing your website address instead, or creating a free email account just for social networking.
Be wary of quizzes and games
They’re fun, and you can see how you stack up against your friends, but it’s amazing the amount of information they can gather as part of their terms of service. When you sign up for a quiz, typically a notice pops up to declare that interacting with the application requires opening access to information such as: “access will let [the application] pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.” Pretty broad rights.
Use privacy options
Facebook provides very granular privacy tools that are useful to spend some time reviewing. Start by dividing your friends into separate lists. You might consider creating lists for ‘work’, ‘good friends’, ‘family’, ‘clients’, etc.
Once you’ve created your lists, go through your friends and add them to the appropriate list. Friends can be on more than one list or none of them. Your friends are not able to see how they have been sorted.
Once you have sorted your friends, click on settings in the upper right corner and then on privacy settings. There are many areas of Facebook where you can control what you chose to share. Let’s start with Profile. You can edit many portions of your information here so that it is visible from everyone to no one but yourself. If you have used the list function to sort your friends you can also exclude certain lists from having access. So if you don’t want your coworkers to see photos that your friends might post, you could exclude everyone you listed in ‘work’. The granularity is pretty extreme and appears to be getting even more so. Facebook also give you a link on the page to view your profile as one of your friends will see it. This is a nice way to test if your changes are going to have the desired effect. Here is a quick YouTube video that shows how to set up lists and set privacy.
Hijacking and Phishing
Just as other websites can suffer from hijacking and phishing attacks so to can Facebook and Twitter. Most of us know not to send money to Nigerian bank officials with poor grammar, but what if your long-lost high school chum suddenly asked you for a loan? Be wary. If someone is going to ask you for a favor, it’s not likely they would do it through Twitter or Facebook. Remember, if a request, post or link oesn’t sound like something your friend would say or be interested in, be careful.
Keep your computer and software up to date
Similar to the above, hijackers and phishers will sometimes gain access to your system via a request to update your Flash or Adobe reader software. Clicking through the link will take you to a mal-ware infested website. Always go to adobe’s site on your own to update, never via a link. Keep your browser up to date too.
Watch out for TinyURLs and Bit.ly shortURLs
Twitter posts have a maximum of 140 characters. As some website links can be pretty long, Twitter automatically converts all web addresses into shortened links using Bit.ly. Unfortunately with these shortened links the user doesn’t always know where the link is pointing. Although security measures have been put in place to help spot malicious links, it’s not 100% effective. Tweetdeck, a popular application for Twitter, provides a ‘Show preview information for short URLs’ option, which offers some protection. Firefox also offers an extension you can add to the browser called ‘LongURL’.
Remember whatever you do to protect your privacy, it could fail
Finally, regardless of what privacy options you put in place, assume they will fail and the whole world will be able to see everything. Will a determined hacker target your accounts? Probably not, but you never know. Only share what you feel comfortable letting everyone know about.
