Diane Tuman of the Zillow Blog asks, how cold is it in Fargo?
Here’s what my weather widget shows right now:
Here’s a picture taken minutes ago from my office window looking out at my Prius in the middle of a near blizzard right now:
See, the weather here stinks, which is why we’re so darn productive and do more than our fair share to boost the economy that all the big city folks seem intent on collapsing.
Even though the winters are rough, we make the most of them by snowmobiling, skiing, skating/hockey, and all sorts of other bravehearted outdoor activities. Here’s a picture of my daughters getting ready to sled down a hill.
And here’s a picture I took of my family at a UND hockey game, which is the best hockey anywhere in the world:
And then we have summers. Fargo borders Minnesota and is just an hour from some excellent lakes both in Minnesota and North Dakota. Here’s a picture taken last summer from my dock at our lake place in Minnesota (all of these pictures were taken with a phone, which is why they largely stink):
The kids have school off tomorrow for conferences, and so I may head off to Alexandria with my youngest daughter for some skiing with the fresh snow. It’ll be cold, but we’ll have fun!
P.S. A little known fact about the movie Fargo is that none of it was actually filmed in Fargo. They came here to film the opening sequence, but there was no snow and so they had to go further north to find some. Also, only the opening scene was placed in Fargo. The rest of the movie takes place in Minneapolis and Brainerd, MN.
Russell Shaw just posted a great series of articles I highly recommend to agents, brokers, MLS execs, and anyone else involved in real estate:
This series from Russell is a tour de force demonstrating the value of good real estate sales people.
To add my own small twist, here’s a personal story that evidences many of Russell’s points:
My brother and I (and our spouses) own a lake cabin on West Battle Lake in Minnesota. It’s a nice little cabin on a small lot, and we love to spend our summer weekends there. Frankly, it’s too small for our two families but we make do because it’s all we can afford given the value of lake property these days. Nonetheless, we’d often boat around the lake and fantasize that some of the places we liked would come up for sale, which would rarely happen because our lake is really great.
The last few years, we became even more serious about getting something bigger because our kids were getting older and wanted to bring friends down, and there just wasn’t room. So, we had an agent sending us updates from the MLS system (yep, a flexmls Web system!) to keep us apprised of what was coming on the market. Typically, we’d get the emails and pass them around with our spouses, exclaming, “Sheesh, can you believe they want $X for that place?” or something to that effect because our place was always better. Because we thought we’d never find our perfect place, we decided to add on a few bedroooms and a bathroom this last fall and the construction is nearly complete now.
Last week, however, we received an update that a nearly perfect lot (with a tear down cabin) had come up for sale on the best beach on the lake. The lot was on the same beach as some of our relatives, was twice as big as ours, and had the same ideal combination of level lot to a sandy lake bottom that we already had. This was our dream lot come true. My brother and I rushed down there to meet with the listing agents, Pat and Connie.
I had not previously met Pat or Connie, but they exemplify the “joy” Russell describes in his “doing meaningful work” post. Pat and Connie made a great team, had a lot of passion for selling lake property, which passion translated into a lot of knowledge about the development history of West Battle Lake (and, I’m sure, the other lakes on which they sell). Our extended family has owned property on West Battle Lake for something like forty years and yet these agents were able to tell us a lot we didn’t know.
They also knew how to price the property. Want evidence? In the dead of Minnesota’s winter, with a tear down cabin, the property sold in less than two weeks on the market. As Russell said to John, “If it is in MLS correctly, on lockbox and not sold it is overpriced.” Clearly, this property was not overpriced. (Even in this down market, there is still a lot of demand for quality lake property.)
Ah, you might be wondering, did we realize our dream, were we the buyers? No, we chickened out at the last minute. After having a two-family heart-to-heart that evening, we realized that we were happy enough with our place and that investing twice what we already had and going through the process of building something new was more investment and work than we wanted.
However, if we had moved forward, we would have had Pat and Connie list our property, even though we also would have been dealing with them as the seller representative of the property we were buying. Would that have created all sorts of crazy conflicts? Sure, no doubt, but there’s little doubt in my mind it would have been efficient and worth every penny of commission to both us and the seller of the other property. Would a discount broker have provided that same level of value? I wouldn’t have been interested in going through the hassle of trying to find out. I just would have wanted the deal done, and done quickly.
So, as I read through Russell’s posts linked above, they all rang true to me. Read through them yourself and go comment on Russell’s blog. It should be a good conversation.
A few days ago, I commented about the uproar and retraction following Facebook’s attempt to clarify their terms of service so users would know what they post for others is no longer necessarily theirs. (Kristen Carr also has a post on the Facebook terms of service issues over at her new blog for Bridge Interactive.) I followed my earlier comment on the Facebook terms of service with a post asking whether CRM data is the broker’s or agent’s in the context of real estate.
It’s pretty clear from that post and the comments that followed that the contract between the broker and agent answers the question. I’ve never seen such a contract, however, and I’m wondering if they’d address some of the issues presented by consumer interactions allowed by current MLS, IDX and CRM systems. For example, imagine the following scenario:
Here are some of the questions:
It seems to me that, as before, the answer to these issues depends on the contracts involved, so what do yor contracts say on some of these issues? Do they address them at all? Is it important to address these issues?
Brokers own listings but who owns the contact management data, is it the broker or the agent? My guess is that the practice is the agent takes their contact list with them when they leave, and the brokers don’t say anything, but I wonder if they could object if they wanted? The reason the listings are the broker’s is because the agent is acting on behalf of the broker. So, if they are working on behalf of the broker when they sign a listing, are they not also working on behalf of the broker when they get and manage new leads? As I noted in my last post, I haven’t heard this issue addressed before in terms of MLS systems, yet I think it’s an important issue. What is the right answer?
I awoke early this morning and decided to peruse my feed reader. Because I follow quite a few blogs, I usually skim very rapidly over the posts and only pause if something catches my eye. This morning I was presented with a wealth of interesting posts, each of which I considered posting about but decided instead to post about all of them in one fell swoop:
The One Site to Rule Them All — Rob Hahn asks why agents have blogs separate from their listing search sites. This caught my eye for two reasons: (1) today several blogging agents/brokers are promoting listing search in every blog post, whereas a year ago they thought the two should be separate; and (2) I’m personally working on re-framing the FBS Blog to include our support and sales sites.
Anatomy of “Connect” — David Recordon (co-inventor and evangelizer of OpenID) asks if 2009 will be the year of “Connect” in social network computing? Interesting, because I’m seeing more and more real estate people using social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and am wondering if MLS systems will evolve or if the social part of the MLS will transfer to the social networks.
Computational Mountains — Okay, so the title of the post really is Jeff Dean Keynote at WSDM 2009 but that isn’t what caught my attention. The truth is I read almost every post from Greg Linden because he tickles my tech fancy. After reading this post about some of Google’s current exploits, I posted the link on Twitter saying: “For geeks looking for inspiration.” I also then commented one of Greg Swann’s posts about TED with the same thought. The sentence from Greg Linden’s post that inspires the Googler in me? “The amount of processing required is difficult to fathom, yet it seems the kind of computational mountain that might cause others to falter calls out to Googlers.”
Sorry, you can’t be our customer — Seth Godin advocates defining when to say yes to customers and how to say no to non-customers. This was interesting to me because of our MeTAL initiative this year. We need to understand our customers perfectly so we know who are customers are not.
Identity Software + Services Roadmap — Kim Cameron from Microsoft is a leader in the evolving world of identity technology (identity helps answer the question “who are you?” on the web and in other software systems) and ponders in this post ” the decline and fall of the ‘closed domain’”. For relevance to me, see the post above from David Recordon.
Facebook Backtracks and Goes Back to Old ToS (for now) — If you haven’t heard, Facebook recently tried to change its Terms of Service to make clear that the content you upload to Facebook is like an email message you sent to your friends — once they get it, it’s up to your friends to decide what to do with it, not you. However, the uproar from users was enough to make Facebook retract the new terms of service, for now. This is relevant to me for a couple of reasons: (1) I think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has done a good job of managing and communicating with his users about the issue; (2) it seems that terms of service are more important to users than I’ve thought previously; and (3) I think these types of data ownership issues are something MLSs will have to deal with soon. On this latter point, MLSs have focused well on listing data ownership for years, but the reality is that MLS systems are containing a lot of data beyond listings (such as contacts, emails, and more) and ownership of that data is far less clear than listings.
There, that’s a nice roundup of posts. Maybe one or more of these will germinate into full posts in the coming days. Which one(s) do you think are most interesting?
I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter, where I post as @mwurzer. Tonight I was Twittering around and did a search for posts containing the term MLS, which, of course, is a passion of mine and all of us here at FBS. I found two things: (1) Beckham is under some sort of deadline from Major League Soccer; and (2) there are a lot of people talking about Multiple Listing Services on Twitter, most of which I’m not following currently.
That got me thinking: Since MLS is our business, should I be following everyone who also is interested in or discussing MLS? On the one hand, I generally haven’t been using Twitter to reach out and follow lots of people I don’t know; I usually have some connection to them already either because they follow me first or I know them already. Yet again, I think we have some good insight on the MLS world and want to be part of as many conversations about MLS as possible. So, should I reach out and follow more?
If so, should I do it as @mwurzer or create a company Twitter account? As I thought of that question, I remembered that I created an @flexmls account awhile ago and haven’t posted on it or followed people there but have only focused on my personal account @mwurzer. The great thing about Twitter is it mixes business, pleasure and even the mundane. It’s really quite personal and a company account seems less personal. On the other hand, if I’m following a lot of new people I don’t know, the @flexmls account seems like it may be a better fit.
Any advice for me on these questions?
. . . instead of MRIS’s Homesdatabase.com? Here’s the Inman article and Trulia’s announcement. I wonder if MRIS was in the running for this business or not? Is MRIS syndicating listings to Trulia? In other words, is Trulia’s inventory complete or not? Something just doesn’t make sense here unless MRIS just doesn’t care about this kind of partnership, but that seems unlikely. From my perspective, this is a good win for Trulia in trying to build the biggest brand in online search in the D.C. area and a blow to Homesdatabase.com. What do you think?
We’re very fortunate to now be serving the Telluride Association of REALTORS and the Aspen Glenwood Springs MLS, and I want to extend my welcome to both MLSs and all their members! We look forward to working hard for both of these new customers and helping them with their MLS needs.
One of the many reasons we feel so fortunate to bring on these customers is because the real estate there is so beautiful and brings play to mind as much as work.
On the work end, Troy Feeken and Melissa Terry (pictured right) of FBS are just finishing training Aspen/Glenwood Springs this week. While they’ve been working hard all week (really!), I’ve been wishing I was there with them so I could enjoy some skiing. When I was younger, my family went to Aspen for several vacations and I have incredibly fond memories of Ajax Mountain and the Face of Bell in particular.
We’ve had a lot of snow here in North Dakota this winter and I’ve been doing all sorts of outdoor activities with my girls, including two cross-country and downhill skiing outings with them for the first time. I hadn’t been downhill skiing in ages and it was so great to get back on the boards, even if it was only on the tiny hills of Minnesota. Now I’ve got skiing on the brain and can’t wait to have an opportunity to get back to the mountains.
All this thinking about snow brings to mind the many other customers we serve in other beautiful mountain regions. Here are some great examples of the incredible real estate available from our mountain customers. Enjoy!
Thanks to all of these great customers, we love working for you!
I’ve been holding this news for a bit and I need to post it before I burst (even though he doesn’t technically start for us until March 2):
FBS has hired Dave Rifkin as our Vice President of Sales!
I’ve known Dave for years from back when he was working with Greg Robertson and Dan Woolley (founders of Dwellicious) at IRIS LLC, building a reseller channel through MLS and REALTOR associations for the popular line of Lightning software. We’ve been friends since a very fun trip to Alaska for the CMLS conference when I first came into the MLS industry, and that friendship makes it even more cool for me that he’s now joining forces with FBS.
Dave comes to FBS from eNeighborhoods where he was the VP of Agent Services managing an inside sales team of over 25 people. Dave also created eNeighborhoods’ IDX Resource Center Department that was critical in maintaining MLS relationships for the launch of remax.com, century21.com, coldwellbanker.com and era.com.
Dave will be working for FBS from Boca Raton, FL, where he lives with his wife Flonda, daugther Alicia, and son Nathan. You can follow Dave on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and I look forward to him writing some great stuff for the FBS Blog. Please help me welcome Dave to FBS by commenting below!
Update: Greg Robertson has a good post on Dave over at VendorAlley as well.
I was pleased to find Carol Van Gorp’s blog the other day (Carol heads up the MLS in Columbia, MO, and is one of our customers), and it got me to thinking about whether other MLS executives are blogging. Given that Carol is one of our customers, it was very interesting for me to read what’s going on in Columbia and it would be great to be able to easily keep up to date with other MLSs via blogs as well. From Carol’s blog roll, I see Cindy Butts’ blog and Cindy has a few others, like Ben Martin, but I’m wondering if any MLS executives are blogging that I don’t know about. If you know of any MLS executives blogging, please provide the links in the comments below.
