Category: Uncategorized

How much lower can Move go?

When I started at Move in May ’06, the stock (and my options) was priced at slightly above $6.  Today, I see the stock end today at $0.89, making for a very sad looking chart and definitive proof that I know nothing about timing my employment options.  I’m also not particularly good at reading financials, but I do know enough to know that having a market cap of $136M when you have $140M in total assets (down from over $200M in total assets from last year) is not a good thing.  I’d think they’d be an obvious take-over target except my guess is that many suitors would view the contract with NAR as more of an impediment to growth than an asset.

Which begs an interesting question… How much lower would the stock have to go before NAR steps in, realizes Russell’s dream and buys back operation of realtor.com from Move?  My guess is that there’s a bunch of reasons this couldn’t happen, but still… It would seem that something will have to give at some point if the stock price keeps dropping.

On a more positive note for Move, they did win their patent case today that had to do with putting listings on a map (at least that’s how I remember the case being explained to me!).

Week in Review: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans Sunday to take control of troubled mortgage giants

What a fun week on the 4realz Hotlist…  I wasn’t exactly sure what type of microposts people would throw up, but was pleasantly surprised at the results.

There’s a lot of stuff going up on the Hotlist, so if you’re low on time, here are the highlights from the past week:

I think it goes without saying that I’ve been doing all my microposts on the 4realz Hotlist and going to save 4realz.net posts for the more traditional (but infrequent) blog posts.    The beauty of the Hotlist is that you can join in with me in documenting anything of interest that’s going on around the web and help get you featured on both 4realz.net and my email newletter.

Sharing some Hotlist heat

I’m a huge fan of releasing interesting projects and seeing where the community will take things.    In terms of experimentation, the Hotlist has been a huge success, and I want to thank the dozens of folks who have signed up… and especially those who have posted microposts and/or comments.

In the past day, we’ve had some great posts and I found out about some great posts that wouldn’t have otherwise crossed my plate.   Here’s some highlights:

Again, I want to thank everyone who’s started playing with this tool.  I’m sure there’s lots more fun to come!  😉

And if you want to receive a weekly email that will include the best of The Hotlist, you can sign up here!

UPDATE:  I added some links to note the author of the micropost if if wasn’t written by me. 🙂

Introducing the 4realz Hotlist

I’ve had this idea for a long time about how cool it would be to open up a blog to the general public with only minimal moderation to keep out spam, but I could never put all the pieces together until the wonderful folks at WordPress created a twitter-like theme called Prologue.

It was at that point that I knew I had to move 4realz.net to a self-hosted environment so I could realize this long-held dream and open up the site to the rest of you.  Well, after messing with the code for a while to get the site to operate just how I wanted, I’m ready to release what I’m calling the 4realz Hotlist.

4realz Hotlist Screenshot
4realz Hotlist Screenshot

So, here’s the idea…   Once you register with the Hotlist you’ll be able to submit articles to be published on the site.   And because I’m going to be very liberal in what I let get published on the Hotlist, it just became quite trivial to give yourself a link from the 4realz.net domain.

Here’s one way to think about the 4realz Hotlist.   After you write a blog post that you know is great, think to yourself: why did I write this post?   If you can sum it up in one sentence, then publish that one sentence as your 4realz mini-post along with a nice link back to your site.

With that said, don’t limit your activity to simply promoting your own stuff.   You can also use the Hotlist to promote just about anything interesting you find on the web.  And if you check out how I’ve been using the tool over the past few weeks, you’ll see that I’ve been embeding YouTube videos, photos, and generally linking out to anything that catches my eye.

But here’s the catch, I really want to encourage clever, interesting and/or insightful mini-posts.  So to put the incentives in the right places, I’m going to publish the highlights each week here on 4realz.net (Carnival of Real Estate style) AND include the highlights in my weekly emails that go out to many of the most influential people in online real estate.  This means that a clever one-liner is likely to get you some great traffic, some nice inbound links, and in front of some interesting people.

But enough about the tool… You really have to try it out to get a feel for how cool it is to publish a blog post from the homepage a blog, so get over to the Hotlist, register for an account and start posting!

I’ve convinced myself that the one thing missing from Outside.in is that they…

…never made much inroads with the real estate community (or real estate portals for that matter).   Imagine if the Realtor.com team had bought Outside.in instead of building the neighborhoods project.

And it really doesn’t matter if it was Zillow, Trulia, AOL, Yahoo or Realtor.com, it could be a win for the real estate portal (lots of local traffic and increased SEO benefits for local terms), a win for Outside.in (monetizing within real estate is easy: featured agents, listings, etc. on neighborhood pages) and a win for consumers (a large portal could easily add more local data/content such as neighborhood stats and maps).

I’ve always felt that Outside.in had an interesting thing going and just needed some real estate influence to make it pop.   Maybe the new CEO in the restructured Outside.in will do a better job reaching out to the real estate community…

Sellers to start certifying their “preowned” homes???

For around $1000, ZipRealty lets seller certify their home and give buyers some added protection…   It’s an interesting twist on the home warranty protection that many buyer’s agents provide to home buyers after the sale.

I can’t decide…  Is it just a sales gimmick by Zip that won’t have much impact?   Or might this actually interest some home owners who are looking to stand out with buyers who might be a bit skittish?