Technology

Tons of fun new features going on here at Altos Research. Today we get to announce AltosXplorer: our full database query and charting system, is now mobile! That's right folks, a couple terabytes of real estate statistics and pretty charts right at your fingertips.

Altos subscribers: Get your AltosXplorer mobile link by logging in to your account and selecting My Xplorer, Xplorer Mobile from the menu. Then send the URL to your phone. That's it! (You will, of course, need a phone with a web browser. And it'll need to have javascript enabled. My Blackberry did not have javascript enabled by default, FWIW.)

On your phone, you'll be able to select market area, city, zip code, and any of a bunch of different statistics. Want to take a peek at condo inventory trends while showing properties to a buyer client? Just a couple of clicks and you're at the data.

Lead Contact Form Goes Mobile Too!

Many of our realtor subscribers like to use the data to reach new clients. What do you do when you find yourself engaged in a conversation about the market with a someone? Well now you can say, "Here, let me send you a report, you can check for yourself." The AltosConnect mobile lead-sign-up form is super handy. Pop in their name and contact information and they'll have a local market report in their inbox before you're even done with the conversation. How cool is that? We rolled this out a couple weeks ago. Lots of positive response.

To get the link to the mobile version of your AltosConnect contact form widget, sign in to your account, select My Connect from the left hand menu, Save and Preview the widget, and enter your phone number. Again, that's it! Bookmark it on your phone and you'll always have access to your Altos database.

Give both features a try and let me know how they work for you!

This blog has been frustratingly silent for too long. The ebb and flow of running a company and my personal creative juices combined for an extended drought. I have not been totally silent, however. Here are a few of the things that I've been up to, and some things to look forward to:

Twitter, for all its virtues, has clearly detracted from my blogging output. Why articulate a full, reasoned article when you can blurt out a 140-character idea? I'm only partly kidding. The good news is that Twitter has proven help me weave surprisingly deep relationships with the same people who read this blog, so I'll continue. If you concur, make sure we're connected on Twitter. I'm @mikesimonsen

For more complete thoughts, I've started publishing over at AgentGenius. For readers not familiar, AgentGenius is a forum about and for the real estate professionals. The articles I'm writing over there are tending to be about how realtors can use market data when working with their clients. I have a lot more to write for them.

That brings up another channel for my creative output the last few months: Real Estate BarCamps. Since January we've been in New York, Seattle, Virginia, Los Angeles (also Atlanta by way of RE Tech South). Next week we're in Phoenix and Portland. Upcoming are Denver, Charlotte, Chicago, Philly, and Boston. If you're a real estate pro and haven't found your way to these free events yet, I highly recommend them. We lead a session on Using Real Estate Data in Your Marketing. It's been very well attended and very enjoyable. Lots of other goodies on technology, social media, marketing, and the future of the real estate industry at these events. Find your way to one.

At any rate, I have a personal goal this month to get the publishing pace back up. Stay tuned.

We've been quietly rolling out new features for subscribers here at Altos World HQ over the past couple weeks. Today I get to announce a super cool new feature that our subscribers (especially the bloggers in that crowd) have been raving about. [sound the trumpets]

AltosStats Live Market Statistics Widget

Previously our widgets were trend charts. Plug in a chart to your site to illustrate the trend of one or two local real estate statistics. But the data is often just as interesting in a table format - the precise reading, right now. Good information density as Tufte likes to say. To whit:

We built the AltosStats widget to work like our other widgets. Just copy a little chunk of HTML and Poof! Live data on your site.

If you're an Altos Pro subscriber, here's how you can play: Log in to your account. Select the My Web Page menu item. Then click the Stats Widget link next to the market you want to display. That's it. All the data is live and all the formatting is done for you.

We made a skinny version too so you can drop one in the blog sidebar.

There you have it. Enjoy.

It's been rumored for weeks, but Microsoft made it official today, cutting 5000 jobs. Microsoft.

You're watching the last leg of the stool being kicked out. The tech industry held out longer than most this time around. In the first half of 2008 many of the highly compensated and generally well-financed people in the tech industry were keeping prices steady in the most desirable neighborhoods of the Bay Area and Seattle (notably waterfront properties). Then as the stock markets declined in the second half of the year, we lost a lot of down-payment money. Finally this crew is now worried about basic monthly income.

Here's how the housing market has been buffeted by the financial storm in Seattle.

I mentioned this to Aubrey Cohen at the Seattle PI in an interview last September as the job situation was starting to look bleak. "Seattle's drivers seem to be intact until the economy hits Microsoft and Amazon," I said at the time.

Well. Here we are.

UPDATE: IPO June 30, 2009 - Here's the latest on the MacroMarkets Housing ETF

Getting closer to reality: Yesterday Bob Shiller's firm MacroMarkets announced that they've cleared the final approval for their exchange-traded funds based on the Case Shiller Index.

I've written in the past how huge this is. You can finally stem your real estate losses in a falling housing market. Or you can bet on the return of the market. And it's as easy as buying a stock on e-trade.

From the press release

MacroShares Major Metro Housing will provide investors with much needed access to the housing asset class, allowing for investment in either the upward or downward movement of home prices. The securities are designed to track the change in U.S. Home Prices as measured by the closely-followed S&P/Case-Shiller Composite-10 Home Price Index through the termination date. The paired securities will have a ten year term and will feature a 2x (200%) leverage factor.

...

Robert Shiller, co-founder and Chief Economist of MacroMarkets noted, "As recent events have proven, our global economy will benefit from modern, transparent, market based risk management solutions. Ongoing private sector innovation remains a vital complement to governmental efforts to modernize and protect our financial institutions, and I am confident that MacroShares will help meet a key 21st century economic challenge: delivering greater market access, new price discovery and liquidity to real estate."

Case Shiller based options and futures have been listed on the Chicago Merc for several years now. But the mechanics of that trade and account system have made it virtually impossible for anyone outside of Wall Street (aka the "End Users") to take advantage.

The funds are scheduled to IPO November 3. They'll trade with NYSE:UMM (which goes up when home prices go up.) and NYSE:DMM (which goes up when home prices decline)

These are unique financial instruments. In particular they don't own any real estate assets. This is not like a Gold ETF that buys gold and keeps it in an Amsterdam warehouse. Rather these funds hold cash (or treasuries). The cash moves from one to the other depending on the movement in the underlying Case Shiller 10-city composite. There are other peculiarities of these things too, but suffice it to say that these are the simplest, most direct way (only way?) to make money in real estate without going out and buying physical property. More complete review is here.

Obvious disclaimer: don't take my advice about financial instruments or investing.

The folks at IAC (NASDAQ:IACI) broke into five different companies this week with the real estate and mortgage related assets now under the umbrella of a company called Tree.com (NASDAQ:TREE) Is escaping from the conglomerate goo going to help this group prosper? Tree ostensibly has a bunch of internet properties but from where I sit, only two are viable, ahem, branches- LendingTree.com and RealEstate.com.




The former is the web 1.0 mortgage holdover with traffic now supported by TV ads. The latter a straightforward real estate broker with simply the best domain name in the business. The rest of the properties are a collection of, shall I say, unimpressive lending and home-search affiliate web sites.



Needless to say, being a volume mortgage player is a scary business right now. Maybe the secondary markets recover enough to support this model on-going, maybe, um, not. According to their S-1, Tree has limited exposure to the subprime and Alt-A mess. Surprising that they escaped that temptation that hit the etrades, etc. so hard. Good for them.

What does Tree have to offer? As a web site, RealEstate.com is decent enough to get a solid stream of leads by virtue of being many home searchers' very first stop on the internet. (Evidenced by the steady 800k visitors/month). The domain name is a built-in low-cost marketing channel for a brokerage. A really nice asset for sales and to recruit agents (the real business of brokerages). Is it enough? The site risks getting walloped by innovation happening in the intensely competitive home search space. (see Trulia, Estately, Redfin, Roost, Zillow, heck even Realtor.com is lumbering more quickly these days.) The big question for the future of this unit is whether the technology costs of keeping competitive continue to remain cheaper than traditional marketing channels for brokers.

Of Tree's lesser brands, I identify with the business proposition of Improvenet - home contractors and service guys need a better way to be found). But the competition with craigslist has to be brutal. And Angie's List is starting to run away with the premium end of the contractor referral market.

The bottom line for TREE is this: in the internet real estate space, it's a tough time to be an incumbent and a great time to be an innovator. Tree, despite the new name, is the incumbent.

[disclosure: we have realtor clients in the RealEstate.com brokerage and like all our clients we sincerely hope they kick ass.]

Wow. Do you read AgentGenius? If you're in the real estate biz, you should. Heck, if you use the interwebs in your business at all, you should. They've pulled together a group of stellar writers. I already liked the work going on over there and then they go produce a conference roundup like this. Rock on.

Over the past couple of years, we've built our client base with realtors and investors, buyers and sellers, with appraisers and traders, with planners and researchers.

During that time, our products for those folks have taken the form of either detailed analytical reports or simply raw data. Either we do all the analytical work, or you do it.

More and more though, we found that there is a big group of people who need an easy way to solve more unique problems than we can possibly address in our pre-designed local reports, but these folks have neither the time nor the experience to sift through the mountains of real estate data on their own.

We realized we needed a product that lets our clients easily query the vast Altos Research database to get the specific answers they need, and use the output in any number of different ways. Thus AltosXplorer was born.


AltosXplorer is for you if you've ever looked at our report products and said, "I don't need just one city, I need to be able to investigate any stat for any zip in the whole area (region, state, country)." Think about the investor who has opportunities that may come up anywhere in Florida, and wants to quickly compare two markets when a new deal arrives.

Or consider an appraiser who works all over Chicagoland. Any given day he needs to illustrate just a couple of key measures in a neighborhood to augment the rest of the data in his report.

For our Realtor clients, AltosXplorer is a lot of fun too. Previously, in order to use our AltosCharts you needed to formulate a long URL to get the right chart. With AltosXplorer, you build the chart you want with just a few clicks and then click, copy and paste! (See Kris Berg's first foray for the perfect example of how AltosXplorer was intended for our Pro clients.)

Can you tell we're giddy around here? I could go on and on but I'll wrap in a single (albeit multi-claused) sentence:

AltosXplorer is a rich internet application that enables you to do your own analysis, create your own trend AltosCharts, on our full database, and export the data to your own analysis in just a few clicks.

Learn more here. Try it out here.

Enjoy.

My friend Jeff, the Xbroker, finally launched RateSpeed.com a couple weeks ago. This is a project he's been working on for several years, a personal crusade to clean up the mortgage brokering business. Jeff gave me a demo the last month, and I've since referred multiple people-real, live home buyers and re-financers, to the site. I've been meaning to blog about the site for a while, and I'm now here to say, RateSpeed rocks. The site is incredibly useful for finding current mortgage rates and understanding what they cost.
RateSpeed's model is very simple: they source mortgage rate data from tons of originators, and feed that information back to you. They've done it with three characteristics shockingly rare in the mortgage world.

1. You don't have to give up anything but an email address.
2. Any RateSpeed affiliate broker has to fix and publish their fees. The system doesn't allow for the-no-fees-but-we-gouge-you-on-the-rate-spread and other opaque pricing nastiness the industry is so famous for. What you see is what you get.
3. The presentation of available mortgage products each with their costs and benefits is so straightforward, you can actually be making informed mortgage decisions in just a few seconds.

RateSpeed licenses the platform to mortgage brokers. In exchange, Brokers get an incredibly powerful marketing tool for their site - if I'm any gauge, consumers will gladly give up an email address to see the most current rates and a real, transparent picture of costs.

How cool is that?

A couple of events coming up at the end of July:

We'll be at the Inman Connect conference in San Francisco for the week of July 23-25. I'll be speaking in the blogging session on "Content That Hooks Readers" which, if you read this blog, you'll know I'm woefully under-qualified for. The good news is that the session is hosted by Kris Berg, and includes the inimitable Jeff Corbett, Benn Rosales, Ben Martin, and Sarah Hromack. Heavy hitters all. You're bound to learn something.

We've ponied up for a (gasp) sponsorship this time. Make sure you come by and help us pretend it's worth the investment.

The preceding Tuesday July 22 is the Real Estate BarCamp - conveniently also in San Francisco. Which, when shortened to REBarCamp it sounds like a concrete conference, I know, but I assure you it'll be more compelling. At a BarCamp the attendees get to create the conference on the fly - presenting content that you think others care about and interacting with those who know stuff you want to learn. I've been to a few bar-camps including the proto-FOO Camp last year and they're always a super enjoyable experience.

Scott and I thought we'd bring some Altos Research technology goodies to share with our partners and anyone else who wants to learn how to maximize all the Altos products. So if you're on your way to San Francisco for the Inman conference, stretch a day earlier and come for the BarCamp.

I've surprised myself, but I'm diggin' Twitter. As far as Internet communication goes, I love the blog for it's ability to reach our customers/friends/colleagues; I'm not a big Facebook user (I find FB mostly useful as a repository for friends photos); and I lean to email over IM.

In a fit of myopia, I held out against Twitter for a year, but now I've been tweeting (yes, tweeting) for a couple months. I've come to the realization that Twitter is the social network I've been waiting for. Twitter's focus on pure communication elevates it above the colleague/friend/acquaintance/follower asymmetry problem in the Facebooks of the web. With Twitter I can listen to people who interest me-whether or not they are my "friend". I don't creep them out when I listen. Likewise, my Twitter followers are people who are interested in me and/or Altos whether or not I've ever met them.

I'll often publish market data nuggets on Twitter that are too finite for a blog post. I'll post info on new products to Twitter before it goes anywhere else. Why? It's easy, and the listeners have, by definition, said they want to know.

So in the interest of developing this communication channel, if you are interested in what I/Altos say/do/visit/publish, then follow me on Twitter.

Still asking, WTF is Twitter? See Tara Hunt's explanation

Redfin, the discount real estate broker with a bitchin' website and a CEO who goes on 60 Minutes to rail against the industry, has soft-launched an up-sell - and in my opinion business-model-saving - Redfin Select service.

Given Redfin's history, I had to check the date of the Redfin blog post to make sure it wasn't dated April 1. Although Glenn Kelman hinted in a comment here a couple weeks ago that something was coming.

Select is simply a way to let home buyers opt for some hand-holding on as many home tours as they'd like. They pay a little more and get a little more service. Redfin usually refunds two-thirds of the home buyer's commission. For people who opt for Select, they'll get 50% of the commission refunded.

Still a good option for buyers who want to save some cash, but Redfin makes 50% more per transaction. This is huge step towards making Redfin a viable company. Kudos to Glenn and team.

BTW - I mentioned in my December post of 2008 Predictions for the RE.net that Redfin was going to have to make this move. (I've hit two of those so far. We'll see if Rich Barton promotes himself out of Zillow before year's end...) Here's what I said about the Redfin business model at the time:

I've grown less sanguine about the Redfin business model this year. Champion of the discounters, Redfin's gotta scale its revenue. CEO Glenn Kelman posted some of his business metrics on Guy Kawasaki's blog (which took some serious cojones, so kudos to Glenn for stepping up.) In that post, one thing is clear: he needs to marshal Redfin to $100 million in revenue, fast. If you assume that Redfin clears ~$5000 on it's discount home sales transactions, that means they have to scale to 20,000 home sales in the next couple years. In this market.

Glenn also pointed out that they have more people driving around in the field than they originally planned. (i.e. the model scales less efficiently.) But if you introduce premium services and can bring your average-revenue-per-deal closer to $10,000, that's a much more achievable target. Not surprisingly, this was also the path that Zip Realty took several years ago.

In short, it's a smart move. And it's not surprising, because Kelman seems to be no fool. Good for their clients and good for them.

Slightly more critical (natch) coverage at BHB

Just spent a couple of fine days in Atlanta with the RE Tech South crew. Brad Nix and Matt "blog from the heart" Fagioli pulled together a great session with just a couple of weeks planning, so kudos to them. All in all a couple hundred people, interactive, interested, motived to improve their internet marketing.

Great conversations on real estate video, blogging, search optimization. I did a panel where we talked about leveraging widgets on your site and in your marketing.

For me the most informative session was on video. I've not previously been a video guy but then I'm not selling houses. But the panel had a chance to dive into some of the great innovations in video that are really exploding the medium for realtors. From cheap easy cameras, to professional videographers, and powerful presentation tools. Rock on.

Rudy proved again why Pete Flint got a steal bringing him on board as Trulia's social media guru. And I always enjoy working with Dustin, Jon, and the maniacs at Domus (who contributed a lot to this day too. golf clap for Pat and Kevin.)

We met some new friends too. Atlanta Real Estate blogger Kathy Drewien is going to be spicing up her market data posts with spiffy AltosCharts. With Michael Fournier, we're growing our reach in the Charlotte market. Michael liked to point out that Charlotte is the only one of the 20 Case Shiller-measured housing markets where median home price is up in the twelve months ending January. Desiree at Bella Web Design sums up the day nicely.

Some Altos links:

Charlotte real estate report

Atlanta real estate report

AltosCharts trend charts widgets