Schools have been very important to many of my buyers. We all want our kids to have the best chance possible so it makes perfect sense. A client recently asked me to find a website that rated or ranked the local schools in a given district. I started my search on google but ended up bogged down with a bunch of garbage sites. There are plenty of scammer sites that want to take your money and don’t necessarily have the best information. After more research, I narrowed it down to a couple of good research sites I can recommend for finding the best schools.
Great Schools : This one is free. There are some ads but it’s a small price to pay. You get user ratings here. Just like on Amazon. Keep in mind that people tend to speak out more when something is bad than when it is good so the results can be a little bit skewed. Still, it’s a good place to obtain some perspective.
School Match: This one is more involved and costs money. They will generate a “report card” for any given school. They also provide some rudimentry information about the schools for free. Things such as how many teachers are at the school, etc. For $35 you’ll get an unbiased opinion from a neutral third party. If you have narrowed down your search already, this is probably not a bad investment.
Please leave some comments if you have any personal experience with either of these or have other suggestions.
We now have the equipment to add video clips to our virtual tours for clients. We are able to track traffic and traffic sources on these clips so we will hopefully be able to gauge how effectively our tours capture the viewer’s attention. We feel this is an improvement over the older “fisheye tours” that were so common a few years back. As internet bandwidth is expanded, we expect the quality of these clips to rise dramatically as well.
Here are examples of our new video tours:
Ashley House Video Tour
Squak Mountain Video Tour
I have recently been invited to contribute to Zillow’s own Geek Estate Blog. The topic is internet marketing by tech savvy real estate agents and they thought I would be a good fit. I am adding a feed to the sidebar on Rostad Realty that will allow you to follow my activity on the Geek Estate Blog. If you want to see ALL of my posts, click here for my Geek Estate Blog profile. I urge you to check it out since it will give you some insight on the way I do business and some of the various techniques I use to market properties for our clients. I’m always trying out new methods and technology as well so check back often because the lansdscape of internet marketing is constantly changing.
Geordy Rostad, SamDeBord, Geordie Romer & Sunnyview (left to right)
I was invited to join the team from Zillow for lunch on May 14, 2009. I had no idea what to expect. For the couple of weeks prior to lunch I wondered if I was the only one they invited or whether they had invited every real estate professional in the area they could get their hands on. I had a suspicion they would invite Sam DeBord. He is another agent who is extrememly active on the Zillow discussion forums. I had assumed that is where they culled their guests from. The surprise came when I showed up and met Geordie Romer in person. He is not overly active on the discussion forums because Leavenworth, WA, his area of expertise, has no Zestimates yet even(At the meeting, it sounded like they were coming though). Geordie had met Spencer Rascoff at a REBar meeting and had a bit of an idenity mixup. Spencer had put us in contact because we both have a unique(so I thought) name and we both work at Windermere. Lastly, but certainly not least, Zillow invited Sunnyview, a helpful non-professional Zillow user with over 7600 postings to date. She does this purely for the love of real estate and helping people out.
Our meeting started with Spencer introducing us to at least 10 Zillow gurus who would soon be picking our brains for our perspective of Zillow. He prefaced the meeting with, “we have no specific outline for this meeting”. Nevertheless, I think it was a mutually beneficial meeting of the minds. I gained a bit more insight about where Zillow is planning to end up and thought seriously about new ways to integrate their tools into my arsenal. They gained some great suggestions from the four of us which I hope they implement soon. (I understand if it takes a bit guys, the list was long) The bonus was that I met several people face to face that I had cooresponded online with in the prior months. This can be a rare opportunity nowadays.
Thanks for lunch!
http://www.zillow.com/blog/talking-to-a-few-local-zillow-advice-regulars/2009/05/14/
The ultimate real estate phone?
Like most other professionals, I am faced with technological trade offs. A large line of devices compete for space in my pocket that used to just be for my wallet and keys. I was very happy when the smart phones came around and I was finally able to stop carrying a separate Palm Pilot that lived in a really clunky housing just to open lock boxes. Every time I’ve upgraded phones, I was wowed at first with new features I had but then disappointed at some other aspect of the phone/device.
The latest phone I have is the Palm Treo 800w. This is easily the best phone I’ve had to date. The reason that I chose this one is that it’s the only phone in the Sprint store with an infrared port. At the time, an infrared port was required on any device in order to open the iBox locks. Now, GE/Supra have released a key chain FOB which is a bluetooth to infrared adapter so real estate agents can now use their beloved Blackberries to open houses up for showings and previews. Whatever the case, my new Treo is awesome. It has GPS, it’s very small, lightweight and it has a decent thumboard. It would almost be the perfect phone if not for a couple fatal flaws. The first and worst is the battery life. It sucks. This phone has the worst and most unacceptable battery life I’ve ever encountered with a phone. I’m lucky to make it halfway through the day without sticking it on the charger. If I take the phone to Canada and don’t use the phone ALL day and then wake up in the morning, the phone is dead. The other flaws are minor in comparison but ragging on my Treo was not the point of this posting.
Enter the iPhone. At first glance it looks like the ultimate real estate phone. It has a great calendar system, needs no sync cables and Zillow’s new iPhone app just adds a cherry on top of it all. If you have not seen the Zillow iPhone app, you need to check it out. You open it up and get the values of homes you are walking or driving by in real time. Homes that are for sale or have “make me move” prices on them also show up. Zillow has upped the ante an truly made this the ultimate real estate phone except for one missing piece of the puzzle. There is currently no app for the iPhone that allows Realtors to unlock key boxes. For me, this would mean going back to the older style standalone eKey device. To me, this is completely unacceptable to have to carry two devices again. What would happen is that the eKey would be left at home on the cradle or somewhere else other than in my pocket where it needs to be.
Here is my plea to Apple and GE/Supra: Please put your heads together and get the eKey app up and running on the iPhone. Apple- You are missing a huge market of real estate professionals that would love to be sporting a shiny new iPhone. Furthermore, I know it seems like a step back in time but consider putting a full infrared port on your iPhone. I’ve seen countless times that people want to use their iPhone as a smart remote as well.
The last piece of the puzzle for me is the carrier. I know the iPhone will not be an AT&T exclusive forever. It’s just a matter of time. I’m on Sprint and as much as I like them, even I know an iPhone probably isn’t in their future. Apple Wireless Inc. anyone?
