Dustin Sparks has brought a bug to my attention in the featured listings plugin for wordpress. This plugin requires a function called simple_xml() which allows a very easy way to share data, but it only works in PHP 5.

PHP 5 is still in infancy, and only installed 14% of all servers running PHP.

Chart compliments of: nexen.net

I do have a fix, and I will have this patched soon.

So if you run into a simple_xml function error with the featured listings plugin, agent details plugin, buyer and seller reports plugin…don't fret, it will soon be fixed and uploaded to realiventblog.

Thanks
Dustin

Popularity: 5% [?]

With the new attacks on Al Gore for his energy wasting mansion, I started looking around to see if I could find more celebrity gossip about energy monsters…

I came across some old articles about Barbara Streisand and her lawsuit against California Coastline Project for taking a picture of her Malibu mansion. The $10 million dollar lawsuit was eventually dropped, because, it was not highly offensive ridiculous, and a waste of time, for everyone except Barbara, who got some good PR for her mansion.

I wanted to see if I could find the address on zillow, or some other real estate estimator, but I couldn’t find the address. Of course I could have searched the google maps and microsoft’s maps to find it, but it’s late and I’m lazy…BUT i did find her old mansion. She donated this mansion to Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in 1993. YOu can now take tours of the mansion for $30.

Ms. Streisand’s $12 million estate consists of 22 1/2 lushly-landscaped acres accented with sycamore, oak, walnut and pine trees, picturesque bridges and gardens, and a stream flowing through the property.
Source: http://www.seeing-stars.com/Live/BarbraStreisandsHouse.shtml

So, I decided to zillow it: 5750 Ramirez Canyon Road, Malibu CA
Ouch…the Zestimate is only $2.9 Million, this is the worst Zestimate I have ever seen!

Anyhow, Barbara is old news, let’s talk about Al Gore…this is just too funny. Here are some things I’ve learned through my life.

1. if you run for President, all your past dirt will be dug up
2. If you are a major celebrity, all your past dirt will be dug up
3. If you are a celebrity that preaches and tells the common man how to live, your dirt will dug up and then you will be buried by it.

So Al Gore wins an Oscar for his movie An Inconvenient Truth and within days he is being hounded by conservatives stating that his 20 room mansion uses 20x more energy then the average house.

The Gores used about 191,000 kilowatt hours in 2006, according to bills reviewed by The Associated Press. The typical Nashville household uses about 15,600 kilowatt-hours per year.

Gore, who owns homes in Carthage, Tenn., and in the Washington area, has said he leads a “carbon-neutral lifestyle.” To balance out other carbon emissions, the Gores invest money in projects to reduce energy consumption, Kreider said.
Source: news.wired.com

Why do I get so frustrated from this?

It’s not because he has an energy wasting house, because he donates more to environmental projects then the average American. It’s because he makes a movie that looks decades into the future to see the results of global warming, but he can’t see 1 year into the future to see that he is going to get bashed for his billion dollar movie…

I mean come on, Gore, how hard would it have been to start making your home more energy efficient when the movie first came out. It would have saved you a lot of hassles. You have enough money. All you would have to do is add some solar panels, some of those ugly flourescent blubs, and maybe sealed off some of your 20 rooms…I thought you were a visionary?

An Inconvenient Fruit
An Inconvenient Tooth
getting nastier
Biggest polluters
Gore the Conman

Why can’t you be more like Ed Bagley Jr? Now there is an environmentalist.

“He currently lives near Los Angeles in a self-sufficient home powered by solar energy.”

Oh I forgot Barbara also has her list of energy saving tips for the common man because according to her, we only have weeks, not years to make a difference

As the weeks progress and our energy crisis worsens…

Second only to Rhode Island, California is the best conserving state in the nation – but we can do even better. Let’s join together to be a part of the solution to help our state through this problem period. Our collective efforts to conserve can actually make a difference.
* Turn up your thermostat to 78 degrees when you’re home, and 85 degrees when you’re out.
* Avoid running your appliances during the peak hours of 4pm to 6pm.
* Use warm or cold water to wash clothes and try to line dry as much as possible.
* Only run your dishwasher when it is fully loaded and air-dry your dishes instead of using the dry cycle.
* Turn off appliances and lights when they are not in use.
* Turn off the television when you leave the room and turn off your computer at the power strip when you’re not using it.
* Replace your air conditioner filters, seal and caulk doors and windows that might leak, and buy energy-efficient products like Energy Star Light Bulbs.
source: Babs Press Release

Popularity: 3% [?]

In my quest to make perfect homemade videos, I ran across a very cool tool to remove your shaky hands when walking. The great part is that it’s completely free, works well, and fairly easy to use. It’s called Deshaker, and it’s a filter used in Virtual Dub (Free Video Editor)

Going back to the beginning of my quest for the perfect homemade video, (TPHV) from now on, I have a sony DCR-SR40. It’s nice but of course when I was buying it, I had these great ideas about making videos for youtube, DVD’s, and movies, but this camera will just not do the kind of quality that I was hoping for. It has a 30 gig hard drive which is nice, and a large viewing/touchscreen to configure the camera…of course most of the time I’m using “Easy mode”. One of the first posts on this blog was a video post of my talking about how I was going to make more video posts. Well, this is my second post about videos. I’m trying to do more, but I’ve been having trouble with my lighting, and I just don’t look good on camera, even though I’ve dressed up and tried make-up…:)

The biggest problem I have is lighting. It seems that inside my house there just is not enough lighting and all the videos look bad. I have tried bringing in lights, but then you get shadows, anyhow, I’m working on it, and hopefully I will figure it out and start making some video casts soon.

Back to this cool Deshaker tool. Deshaker is a filter that you run in Virtual Dub that removes the shakes out of your video. The process is simple, load you AVI video, run the first pass to build a log file on the frame locations, and then run the second pass to smooth out the video. The first pass take a while to complete, but the second pass is much quicker, and you can run the second pass over and over until you get the desired effects without have to run pass one again.

here is a sample, 2 videos before and after of me walking around my car.

With the Shakes

Shake Free after Deshaker

First let’s get Deshaker…
Download both of these
Homepage for Deshaker: http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
Download Virtual Dub: http://www.VirtualDub.org/download

Unzip all the files for VDub into a folder. There is no install for Vdub, when you want to use it just click on VirtualDub.exe in your VDub folder. Inside the Vdub folder you will see a plugins folder. unzip the Deshaker file into the plugin folder.

Now you are ready to dehake.
Open Vdub, and load a video. (must be AVI). Then in the top menu go to video->filters click add, and load the deshaker filter. Once the filter is loaded, select it and click on configure. This will open a screen like this (click to enlarge)

The setting in this image are the setting that I used for the sample videos. Go ahead and use the same setting when deshaking your videos. You can go the dehaker homepage for more information about all the setting. I also hit more info below.

When configuring the filter, you start with the input video.
You will most likely use this as an Source pixel aspect: Standard NTSC (0.912)
For Video Type: Interlaced, Lower field first
You can put the log file anywhere on your computer, I just leave it on C:/

Now for the 1st Pass
click on pass 1, if not selected so you can edit Pass 1 fields.
Most of this will stay default.
Change Scale to Full, and change Use Pixels to All

Now for 2nd Pass.
Click the big pass 2 button.
Make the Destination Pixel Aspect the same as your input (Standard NTSC (0.912))
Make Destination Video Size = to input, or in Most cases 720×480
Change Edge Compensation = None (Large Borders)
Check the box for Use previous and future frames to fill in borders, and leave the previous and future frames at 30
Motion Smoothness…This is what removes the shakes. Setting all to 0 will make the output look exactly like the input video. You should change these in increments of 3000. I leave zoom at 0 and set all the other to 3000…The highest you want to go is 18,000 for smoothness.
Set all Max Correction limits to 99

Again, look at the image for all these configuration numbers.

Important** Click on Pass 1 button, then click on OK…you need to run your first pass.

close the filter window, and make sure the video is at the beginning, and play for output…Make sure you press the play button with the ‘0′ on it, third button from left

it will take a while for the first pass to complete. Once it is done, open the filter window and go to the configuration of the deshaker filter again. click on the Pass 2 button. You should already have this configured so you are ready to run your second pass. Click OK, and close the filter window.

Make sure you are at the beginning of the video again. Choose your codec, by clicking on video->compression. I choose Cinepak Codec because it makes the video byte size small.

Then Click on file->Save as AVI

The second pass is much faster and, you can run it over and over without changing your first pass to fine tune your video. I was suprised to see Sony Vegas didn’t have this filter, but this works great, it’s free.

Source Articles: http://premiere.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=28849

Popularity: 8% [?]

The other night I could not sleep. I had a my weekly technology class at KWSFP in the morning so the stress from having to get up early probably made it impossible for me to relax. So around 3 in the morning, I got out of bed and started to tinker with the plugins. I try to make the plugins as easy to use, but still give enough freedom to extend and use them in ways that I don’t think of.

The Featured listing plugin works great, I love it…but some people are finding it difficult to use, so I fixed it.

The old steps.

1. download plugin from my website, unzip and upload to your websites plugin folder
   This is straight forward…can’t make this much easier, unless we create a tool that allows direct access to your plugin folder over the internet…hmmm…this might be possible, I’m looking into this. Maybe a download manager or firefox extension.
2. In the admin section, activate the plugin
3. go to options, and click on the featured listing link
4. add your realivent account, and configure how you want to display your listingsThis is where is starts getting confusing.
5. Now, you have to make the page to display the listings. Go to write->page in the admin section
6. switch to HTML mode and enter the code snippet <!–Featured Listings–>
   Note*, this will not work: <!–featuredlistings–>, or this <!–FEATURED LISTINGS–>
   It is case sensitive.
7. publish page and your featured listings should now be displayed on your blog.

The new steps.

1. steps 1 through 4 are the same…so we are currently in the configuration section of the Featured listings.
2. Instead of having to go and write a page, I now create one from the featured listing configuration. Now you do not have to worry about entering
   <!–Featured Listings–>

   . It is done for you. You can also update the page from this plugin. To delete the page, you have to go to manage->pages. If the page is deleted, the next time you access the plugin admin section all the configuration settings will be removed from the Wordpress option datatable. In the configuration section, you give the page a title, and choose the page template. Some themes come with multiple page templates. We suggest using a full page template to display your listings.

When you go to manage pages, you will see the code added to the page to display listings. You can manage and edit the page just like any other page in your blog. I’m updating all the plugins to do the same thing…I’ve finished the home search IDX frame plugin, and the featured listing plugin, they have both beth updated in the plugin and widget section of this blog.

As always, your comment and feature requests are always welcome.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Redfin recently released a report that states their agents negotiate better then other agents.
A Year’s Numbers Come in From the MLS: Redfin Agents Negotiate Better

It’s reports like this that get me going…One of my favorite classes in college was stats, so whenever I see reports that create stats based on real estate data, I just go nuts. As soon as I read the report I jumped on the MLS for San Francisco, downloaded all solds from last year hoping to get some good data and respond to this report, but unfortunately only 1 sold SFR had a Redfin agent as one side of the transaction.

BTW, that 1 transaction sold for $2,000 over asking price, so it looks like on average Redfin agents in San Francisco, doesn’t negotiate very well…I’m just kidding, but as you can see this data makes me mad.

Since I have the data from San Francisco, I think I will create some reports based on listing and selling different and the offices. Should be interesting, but again, it will not be a report to make any judgment from, I just like crunching numbers.

Back to the Redfin report. Some of the first questions that I would like to know, which will be impossible to find out is

1. How many homes were sold in Washington? 200 seems like an very low number?
2. how many total offers were submitted by redfin. What is the percentage of homes that had an offer submitted by Redfin, and not accepted?
3. 200 homes sold with Redfin, but you have 247 evaluations? and on top of that 37% of the buyers where first timers…how can a first time home buyer know if the transaction was better then working with a traditional agent? Did you survey the kids too?

I have nothing against Redfin, but this report made me mad. If you go to the blog post on Redfin’s site, look at the comments. There is one comment from a homeowner that talks about how awful it was to work with a traditional agent…yet, they continued to work with that agent? WHY? Real estate is a relationship, if you work better with a tech savvy Redfin Realtor do so, it you want a more traditional agent, then go use one of those, but if you are having problems with your Realtor, dump them…get a Realtor that you work well with…

If you go to a plastic surgeon for a nose job and they mess up, do you go back to the same doctor for a tummy tuck? Obviously some people would!
I think the saying goes, fool me once…

Now onto commissions…Commissions piss me off too, not because they are too high, but because they are completely negotiable. Right now if you ask most agents how much is the average commission, they will probably say 5%. Then ask them “Are they an average agent?”, and I would say that most will say “No, I’m better.”
Then why do you ask for 5%…if you are better, you should ask for 7 or 8%.

I got Trang on this little no win conversation the other day…Bottom line, if you walk into a listing presentation and you tell the seller that most agents get 5% commission (1.25% to them) then tell the seller that you are so good you only sell properties for 8%…AND GET IT, then you and the seller deserve everything you get. if the seller talks you down to 3% and you accept, then that’s how much you are worth. If you don’t want to pay 3% then go to Redfin, or better yet, go to BuySideInc.com where they give you 75% back.

As Rick Geha said at the KW Reunion Last week, “I can line up 100 Realtors and let them all knock the commission down until you get the agent that will sell your home for the lowest price. But do you want that?”

And I guarantee you that no Redfin agent will know more about local market stats then Rick does. Rick also posts on theharperteam.com website, where they guarantee $20K savings…and have some incredible market stats.

So please keep your reports about how much people save, or how good you negotiate to yourself, because you just can’t prove them to be viable.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Just finished reading a good post over at the RE tomato about blogging. They are right by saying blogging is not rocket science, but to be honest, I would still consider blogging to be in the early stages. Remember 10 years ago, trying to figure out email? Now that WAS rocket science.

What is the “To” for? what’s a “Subject”…I bet you remember those questions when you first tried Outlook, or Netscape.

10 years later, the questions are very very similar…What’s a ‘Post’, what’s a “Trackback”…

I’ve been talking to a lot of agents about web design, lead generation, top producer, and of course blogging. Here are a few tips I give.

1. get the word “blogging” out of your head. The Word “Blog” seems to freeze people when getting started. Honestly I don’t know why? think of it as a professional information source, or as Gary Keller said “This is my story, your welcome to jump on for the ride”

2. Keep it simple. The easiest way to blog is to find news on the web and give your 2 cents. If you look at the very bottom of the “Write Post” section in your wordpress blog you will see a thing called a Wordpress bookmarklet. Click and hold that link, then drag it to your bookmarks. Now whenever you are on a website that has a good story, just click that new bookmark you made. This will send you to your admin section and automatically fill your post with this link to that page. Write a paragraph or two (your 2 cents) and your done…simple and effective

3. If you do write a good original post, send to your local newspaper…or create a tearsheet or mass mail.

4. Don’t be afraid of negative comments. You have total control over what comments get posted on your site, and blogging is a great way to combat these negative posts.

5. your website or blog is not the end, it is the beginning. You now have to promote your website. I see so many agents get Top Producer and spend hours and days getting their action plans ready, and think the website will magically produce leads. This is completely opposite, spend time on your website, until you have the leads coming in, then get top producer. I’ve made countless e-commerce websites, and most people thought that it was really easy, just put up a site and let teh traffic come…buy some adwords, buy some links. This business will fail, and e-commerce site is the exact same as a brick and morter store…Your real estate website is the same.

6. Forget about SEO. Here is a good quote pulled from the tomato, by Teresa Boardman

Wordpress blogs are so great because they take care of all this for you. It’s not perfect, but it is good enough for you to forget about your page rank, and focus on getting the info to the public…page rank will follow.

7. Lastly, it is just a blog…it’s fun, it’s new, and you better get introduced because video blogs are right around the corner, and pretty soon everyone will have their own commercials.

If you haven’t tried blogging yet, go jump over to propblogs.com and try it. write some posts, gets some themes, I guarantee in less then an hour you will be well on your way to blogging bliss!

Popularity: 5% [?]

What’s hot for 2007? well at least what’s hot for january 2007…I’m sure there will be another trend in February.
The newest, hottest trend is MyBlogLog linking.

You can leave your website url when you comment about a blog post on the owners site, which will create a link back to your site, but most comments maintain a “no follow” tag so id doesn’t help your page rank. There are plugins that remove the “no follow”, but it really doesn’t help the owner of the commented blog so why use it?

So why not send them back to your MBL account, where they can see more about you, your other sites, you posse. I’m going to do it from now on. Good stuff, if you ask me. I hope to grow my posse, because to be honest, I’m having Posse envy…there are some communities over 3000!

in other words, join my community please

I found this information thru MBL and eventually this site: doshdosh.com

Popularity: 6% [?]

My computer crashed, so while it was rebooting I broke out an old Business 2.0 magazine and ran across an interview with Bob Parsons of Go Daddy.

here are his 4 keys to Success

1. Get-and stay-out of your comfort zone.
   people don’t want to get away from things they feel comfortable doing. I totally agree, I call them gremlins, and they are the same gremlins that keep you from being the person you want to be. My largest gremlin is that I always say I will start tomorrow. Procrastination. Tomorrow I will start eating right, tomorrow I will start networking, but tomorrow never comes.
2. When you are ready to quit, you already have.
   There is an old Chinese proverb; The temptation to quite will be greatest right before you succeed.
3. Anything that is not managed will fall deteriorate.
   Take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven’t examined for a while. Problems will be there.
4. Enjoy the ride.
   “We’re not here for a long time, We’re here for a good time.”

Good stuff, and I admire go daddy. I don’t use them at all, I get all my domain names from yahoo, but Go Daddy is the largest domain name supplier.

I get all my domains from Yahoo because their nameservers replicate faster then any other domain name broker. I can change my nameservers on Yahoo and within a couple hours they are pointing to the new servers. They also sell domain names for $1.99/year without having to buy additional services.

Click here for the $1.99 special

Interesting fact about GoDaddy is that they park advertising on domain names that are set up and not configure yet. They make $12,000 a day from advertising revenue on these sites, just by parking them. So when you get a domain name, get your stuff on it ASAP.

They also have a new program where you can park your domain names for a monthly fee of around $5.00 a month and get 60% of the ad revenue.

I think this is interesting, and I would like to extend an invitation to people that have domains that are not in use, to let us park them for free and we will split the ad revenue 50/50. I can set up either a adword site, community blog, or satellite site for free. If you are interested, please send me an email.

Popularity: 15% [?]