What We’re Reading: Aug. 28-Sept.3

Third edition of OED unlikely to appear in print format (The Guardian UK)

How panhandlers use free credit cards (The Toronto Star)

Boston.com Launches a Free Real Estate App for the iPhone (MarketWatch)

Food fights: Locavores, conventional food fans battle over benefits (Chicago Tribune)

Paying Off the House in 15 Years (Wall Street Journal)

I admit it. I was wrong. Now I’m a Twitter convert (MarketWatch)

From The Future of Screens, Circa 2014 (Gizmodo)

The benefits of a local board, 99 years ago

In 1911 real estate professionals saw the benefits of organizing a local real estate board.  In August of that year, Wycliffe A. Hill’s argument in favor of local real estate boards was published in the National Real Estate Journal.

As Executive Secretary of the Texas State Realty Association (a precursor to today’s Texas Association of REALTORS®), Hill argued that local Boards can inspire “a spirit of good fellowship among the different men…engaged in the same line of business…it will promote acquaintance and co-operation among its members, thereby facilitating the sale of real estate.”

Hill also saw the business advantages a local board can offer.  “It provides a means for the distribution of information which is of interest to the real estate men, and an exchange of ideas which is beneficial.”

He also quoted the adage, “In union there is strength,” and, “it places the real estate men in a position to accomplish many things as an organization that they could not as individuals.”  He said the real estate men in a city could be ”in a position to demand and obtain any necessary change…that is necessary for the development and upbuilding of the town and its real estate interests.”

Of course business ethics were of paramount importance.  A local board “places a legitimate dealer on a higher plane…it forces the man who is crooked to either reform his methods or be branded as unreliable, and get out of the ranks.”

Top August 2010 Field Guides

The list of the most popular Information Central Field Guides for the month of August 2010 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 vs. Renting
8. Field Guide to Foreclosures
9. Field Guide to Real Estate Office Policy Manuals
10. Field Guide to Personal Assistants

Field Guides are one-stop resource packages on dozens of subjects of interest to REALTORS®. Everything from Tips for New REALTORS® to How to Sell Your Book of Business. On each page you’ll find links to articles, books, web sites, statistics, and other material on each subject. Have an idea for a new field guide? Let us know!

Vote for NARdiGras 2010 Video Contest

The National Association of REALTORS® Convention group has announced the five finalists of the NARdiGras 2010 Video Contest.

From the homepage:

Congratulations to the five finalists of the NARdiGras 2010 Video Contest! Now it’s up to you to choose the winner. View the finalists in the player below – then vote for your favorite. Poll closes September 25. Reminder – the winner receives an all-expense paid trip to NARdiGras 2010, November 5-8, in New Orleans.

Viewing and voting takes place here.

What We’re Reading: Aug. 21-27

Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s (Fortune)

Don’t Call Sprouter ‘Twitter for Entrepreneurs’ (WebWorker Daily)

Outsourced Call Centers Return, To U.S. Homes (National Public Radio)

Watts up? People Habitually Underestimate their Energy Consumption (The Economist)

Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say (NY Times)

5 Strategies for a Captivating Social Media Conversation (iMedia Connection)

Florida Real Estate Professionals Receive $16 million from Special BP Fund (Florida REALTORS® Magazine)

Be Polite and Put your Smartphone Down (CNN)

What We’re Reading: Aug. 14-20, 2010

BP Oil Spill Now Impacting Real Estate Markets Beyond Gulf Coast Cities (Real Estate Channel)
Beloit College Mindset List (Beloit College)
The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet (Wired Magazine)
Is the Web Really Dead? (Boing Boing)
Facebook Places: A Field Guide (Mashable)
How Can You Tell When You’re Being Falsely Flattered? (Denver Post/Dow Jones)
Office-Leasing Rebound Could Be Deceiving (Wall Street Journal)
When Personal Style Impedes a Sale (New York Times)

Facebook for REALTORS®

With over half a billion members, Facebook is THE social network today. It’s also an ever-changing, evolving time-suck. Poking is passé, privacy rights are in flux, and don’t get me started on Farmville! Rule number one for Facebook – or any other social network for that matter – is to assume all the privacy shields you have created will fail and your whole profile will be visible to everyone. Before you post that photo or add that snarky comment step back and consider: how would you feel if your mother saw this? This NEW Field Guide goes over the basics, reviews current security settings and explores how REALTORS® are using the social network to build their brand.

What we’re reading – Aug. 9 – 13, 2010

Some of the items that caught the attention of NAR Information Central’s staff this week:

The iPad may not be the magical device that Apple claims it is, but sales aren’t slowing down. However with the new high-resolution screen on the iPhone 4, at least one Gizmodo writer is ditching his iPad for the convenience and functionality of the smaller device.

The apartment market often follows the broader economy, but lately things have been turning up even though unemployment remains high. Experts aren’t quite sure why vacancies are trending down but theorize it could be due to renters feeling a bit more sure of their own situation, parents willing to co-sign for their children just to get them out of the house, or continued general skittishness over housing.

Facebook is the dominant social media channel today, but one real estate agent learned the hard way that putting all your eggs in one basket can be risky when Facebook disabled his primary marketing vehicle for several days.

MarketWatch recently gave advice on how to get through a home loan modification. Their advice? Don’t let your feelings get in the way, bBe rational, ask for names and contact information, and do not hesitate to call the banks repeatedly to talk to someone.

Is the Internet making us smarter or dumber? Nicholas Carr discusses this issue in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain. Do we still have the patience and attention span to read an entire book or are we only able to jump from one hyperlink to another, never stopping to think deeply? Along with the impact of the Internet, Carr writes about the history of reading and writing, the decline of print, the history of the book, losing the need for memorization because we have the “outboard brain” of the computer that can retrieve any fact in an instant and much more.

What We’re Reading: Aug. 2-6, 2010

Pop-up stores are gaining in popularity with both small businesses and property managers, says the Wall Street Journal:  “Large fashion retailers and high-end designers have long demonstrated the success of the pop-up model for generating buzz about new brands and designers. But now, small businesses in a wide range of industries are testing new retail concepts and markets by leasing commercial space on a short-term basis, in some cases for just a few weeks.”  The July-August issue of Inc. Magazine offers some practical tips for making a pop-up store successful.

Is Google losing its edge as the be-all-and-end-all of search engines?  Maybe, according to CNN/Business Insider’s analysis of the Bing/Google smackdown.  Google has adopted some of Bing’s innovations, such as photography on the opening page.  Bing now incorporates Twitter results in their searches, and Google followed quickly also adding Twitter.  In contrast to Google, Bing groups search results by category, such as Web, News, Wikipedia, Blogs and Images, and provides a list of related terms that might be useful. Google lists results links and offers different ways of searching in the left column, such as date of results, sites with images and related searches.  Try it and see which search engine works best for you.

The Wall Street Journal has been running an interesting series this week, What They Know, on internet tracking and online privacy. Minority Report is closer than you think.  Most of the series is available for free on the journal’s website.  The step-by-step guide on how to strengthen your online privacy is especially useful.

As a good example of “what they know”, CNET’s Technically Incorrect reports how the town of Riverhead, NY, scoured images from Google Earth to find unpermitted swimming pools — and collected $75,000 in fines from the offending homeowners.

And last but certainly not least for this week, Realtors Property Resource™ (RPR) is wrapping up its beta testing and preparing to launch in a few weeks.  The RPR Blog is a great place to find out what RPR is (and isn’t) and keep up with its progress.

What We’re Reading: July 26-30, 2010

Some of the items that caught the attention of NAR Information Central’s staff this week:

Researchers from MIT and Harvard report in a study to be published in the American Economic Review that, on average, a foreclosure can reduce the value of a home by 27%, while a forced sale due to bankruptcy or death of the owner only decreases the value by 3-5%.  Foreclosed properties wield a stigma effect, too, causing neighboring homes within 250 feet to 1% of their value.

In Where the Highest Paying Jobs Are (The Atlantic), always interesting Richard Florida writes about a new report released by the BLS on relative pay levels of major US metros.  Mr. Florida sees the dark side of this, the country divided into haves and have-less, but it doesn’t look like cost of living factors into what this means in real life.

Sunday’s New York Times featured a sobering article on privacy in the digital age.  “We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion,” says Jeffrey Rosen in The Web Means the End of Forgetting, “but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files.”

On a similar note, the Guardian explores Foursquare, a hot social networking tool that’s becoming popular with many REALTORS®, but its geo-location features and lack of privacy settings worries some.  The New York Times also reports that Facebook’s customer satisfaction level is remarkably low, ranking with utilities and cable companies.  Is this a function of its ubiquity, recent privacy issues, or something else?  CNNMoney.com takes a look at who’s making money on Facebook, including Oodle, the online classified ad company.

And last, Apple released its new Magic Trackpad this week, and of all the reviews that immediately followed, Gizmodo’s is perhaps the most interesting.  Not for the review itself (the Trackpad is “comfortable” but “not magical”, Gizmodo declares) but for the overview of the product’s implications.  Multi-touch will gradually cause the death of the mouse, says Gizmodo, the convergence of iOS (the iPhone/iPad operating system) and Mac OS, and change how users interact with computers in general.

What are you reading this week?  Leave your comments and suggestions below.

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