Contemplating cosmic changes in real estate

I made the decision to become a Realtor® last July. As in any life changing decision, there were a number of factors. I wanted to be in an industry that valued individual contribution. Working with people where I could develop a relationship was also important to me.

My vision of real estate came from my own experience of receiving dedicated personal service when buying and selling houses over the years. While I found houses of interest on the Internet when we did our last purchase, we ended up buying one that we had never seen on a computer. A great local agent at Bluewater GMAC Real Estate in Cape Carteret, NC found us just the right spot after showing us plenty of places we couldn't see digitally.

Now as I am coming up to speed as a Realtor® here on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina (SOBX), I find that there is a huge push for real estate brokers to embrace the Internet. It is true that more and more customers are doing their initial searches on the Internet. The younger the people, the more likely they are to depend on some Internet help at first.

I believe that the Internet can add value to real estate transaction. I am a huge believer in technology used properly. However, I think people who believe that the Internet is going to drive all the costs out real transaction are misleading themselves or others whom they're trying to capture as customers. Adding technology to real estate purchases is not going to be the same as pay at the pump, ATM, or self checkout at the grocery store. Technology hasn't driven down our banking, grocery, or gasoline costs.

Buying real estate is also not like buying a car. While the Internet helps intelligent car purchasers save some money, it hasn't help much with my service costs at the local dealership.

Real estate is still a local market unless you just don't care where you live. Buying a home is far more complicated than any other purchase and comes with lots of potential pitfalls. The reason many people think that real estate transactions are easy is that they have been fortunate to have had some very good real estate brokers working with them. The number of things that can go wrong in a real estate transaction are amazing. Having nearly 24X7 human help during this process can protect the largest investment that you will likely ever make in your lifetime.

While the Internet can truly help, it is still important to have trained professionals doing a great job for each client who wants to find the right place to invest money in real estate, whether it is the perfect place for a second home, or the right spot for a great retirement home. There is no getting away from real estate requiring lots of shoe leather hitting the pavement or in our case lots of sandals on the sand.

While the real estate business is going to change dramatically just as many others have, it's not going to change to the point where working with quality professionals isn't important.

A post on one of my other blogs deals with an article which hinted that real estate professionals are on their way out because they don't add value equal to the commission that they charge. The post, "Old school at times and proud of it," is a detailed commentary on the subject and explains many of the complexities of the subject.

In this market, I think most sellers will find that a great Realtor® is worth every penny they charge.

While it may be very easy to buy a property right now, buying it and buying it right are two different things. Selling homes today requires all the professional help you can afford.

Our technological infirmity

Today it's possible to buy some amazing technology for very little. Look at flash drives which can haul around digital music, pictures, and documents. For the most part you plug them into your computer and copy information to and from them. I recently saw that you could buy Turbo Tax on a flash drive.

The unfortunate thing is that most technology isn't like a flash drive. I have some wonderful ink jet printers. They produce pictures with quality as stunning as is possible to transfer to paper or canvas. Well at least they do that when the stars are aligned, and I am holding my mouth at the correct angle.

Last night I was trying to print a few real estate listings from the Multi-Listing Service. My printer burped. The output from the printer which had been perfect all day, turned nearly unreadable. I tried cleaning the printer nozzles. That didn't work. I tried my wife's prescription when faced with malfeasance from any of our electronic devices. I turned it off and decided to let it rest overnight.

I even waited until after lunch before facing the printer once again. In a couple of hours of working with all my tricks I managed to get things back on track. Most people would have given up or thrown the printer over the cliff.

It occurred to me after this battle of humans and technology that we have reached the point that we can afford more technology than we can understand. It used to be that technology was expensive and came with people who understood how to make it work.

When something didn't work, we could call someone who might be able to explain why it didn't work.

Today technology is so inexpensive that there are very few people involved except the people who don't know out to make it work once they have purchased it.

Certainly the people selling most of the technology don't understand it. I wrote about the mostly clueless technology sales force when I faced the challenge of buying a new fax, printer, scanner, and copy machine which is more popularly known as an "AIO" device.

These are wonderful devices which cost very little considering how much they do when they are actually working. I wrote a couple of posts about my experiences getting a home office going with my AIO, a laser printer, a Mac computer, and a Windows/Linux computer. The first post, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX," and the second one, "The not so reluctant home system engineer," have some enlightening comments. Some very intelligent people, even with the help of some supposed experts, can't get all the features of these AIO devices to reliably work.

Printers aren't the only problems. I recently went out looking for a wide angle camera to take pictures of homes for my new career as a Realtor® in what I like to call my coastal North Carolina paradise. I wasn't surprised that once I got outside of a photo store, few people even understood what I was asking. In fact even in the photo store I probably knew as much about wide angle digital cameras as the sales people.

I guess the lesson is that it isn't too hard to buy more technology than you can use or at least keep working reliably. With wireless networks, cell phones that can do almost anything, and $1,200 laptops that can even do video conferencing along with the rest of modern computer tasks, we are awash in technology.

Now if we just had some people who understood how all of it works. At least I have some great photographs that I have managed to keep on the web. The one thing that works almost all the time is my Firefox browser, and for that I've glad. I even heard that Microsoft is backing off in features in their Office Products.

Perhaps we are at the technological peak, and we can hope that things will get easier and more reliable instead of getting more and more complex.

The challenge that all businesses face

I just wrote a post, "The real challenge for Apple & OS X." In it I talk about how it isn't good enough for Apple to be just "better" than the new Windows version, Vista.

In order to just hold their own, Apple must be geometrically better than Windows offerings. This is no different than the scenario faced by many other businesses that do not hold the dominant position in their market. It's even the case for local businesses. If you are the new guy in town, just being "better" is not enough.

The question boils down to how do you show enough real value to a customer in order to convince them to give you a fair shot at their business. In the computer business, it is really hard, because staying where you are is often easier than doing something different. Change can be tough.

When I helped to sell email services, often the key differentiator was just being there when the customer called and being able to jump through whatever hoops needed to solve their problems. Most often that meant having enough well trained people to answers their questions and guide them through the initial sign-up procedures. Surprisingly we had a few people who thought Saturday or Sunday would be good days to switch email providers. That meant some Saturday afternoons doing coverage like I wrote about in "The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair."

The real estate world which I've recently joined has long been accustomed to working Saturday and Sunday afternoon if necessary. If we aren't around to catch the customers when they walk into the door, someone else will be.

Even companies like Apple that are product focused really need to keep their customer facing side as effective as possible. Just having stores where people can meet with dedicated and knowledgeable Apple people has been a huge success for Apple. Still as it is with all large companies, finding the right person or the right answer can be challenging. When I was at Apple, at least once a month some poor lost soul would finally get routed to my desk after a month long decent into phone tree hell while looking for someone at Apple Federal.

The other key to responding to customers is actually listening to them. In the last three years I've had a fair amount of experience with real estate agents. I also been hauled to a large number of houses that the minute I saw them, I knew we were wasting our time and the time of real estate agents. The agents had not listened to me or they would have figured out that I wanted a house with some beach characteristics instead of a two story colonial.

I'm really curious to see how Apple does with the iPhone. Apple is of the belief that you have to tell customers what to buy instead of building products with the help of customers. That's one of the main reasons Apple products seem to be headed more towards a closed ecosystem. If you aren't trying to make your products work with your customers' stuff, my guess is that it won't.

In real estate we have to listen to our customers who often become our clients. Once they become clients, we have to put their interests before ours.

It's a totally different relationship than you find in the computer world. There companies buying products have been known to be stuck with equipment made obsolete by an announcement of new products. Sometimes it happens before the purchased products even make it to someone's desk.

Of course that doesn't make for happy customers.

It turns out that the best way to get another customer is to do a really good job for the one that you already have. Happy customers can be very effective sales people for a company

In Apple's case the customers have gone that one step further and in effect become tremendous evangelists for the company. Should Apple ever lose that army of Mac users, it would be very hard to continue to be successful.

I'm actually glad to be in a world where my success is measured by how successful I am in meeting the customer needs not just today but over time. If more companies measured their employees that way, we would see more companies responsive to customers and fewer ones who just throw their products over the wall with the hopes that someone will purchase them.

Incremental improvement to meet customer suggestions might not be the best way to define new product categories, but it is a great way to build customer loyalty even if you aren't the biggest player in town or the market.

The Apple iPhone Day

Today was a big day for Apple, they stripped "Computer" from their company name and firmly entrenched themselves as a consumer products company.

The company that once produced the computer for the rest of us, is now trying to cement its reputation as the place to go for all the coolest gadgets.

As a long time user of Apple's computers, I hope this even greater dedication to consumer gadgets doesn't mean the computer part of Apple is going to be ignored, but based on today's announcements, it seems that just might be the case.

I am not exactly a heavy cell phone user, so spending $499 for one of the iPhones is probably something I'm not going to do. I am sure there will be a rush to buy this newest Apple gadget, but my life is not complex enough that I need all the features that Apple has packed into iPhone. I often can't even find my cell phone. I figure that I'm better off with a Noika that is two years old.

I made a prediction today. I am guessing Apple may have reached its pinnacle today. We will see if I'm right or wrong in six months to a year. I think Apple will do well with the iPhone. I just don't think it will be another iPod. I could be wrong, it won't be the first time when it comes to Apple. The one thing that might change my prediction is if Apple releases OS X for Intel hardware made by other manufacturers. That would be huge, but it's not likely to happen unless the dynamics of Apple's business change.

Based on what I have seen Apple is fully committed to requiring proprietary hardware to join the chosen circle of Apple users. I don't think that is going to change.

I wonder how big that circle of Apple users can get before they get tired of dancing only to Apple's tunes? I hate to drag up this, but seems to me that Steve once promised never to introduce products before they would ship. Actually that the only kind of products he seems to introduce these days.

On another note, if you're a small or medium company interested in email, today I posted an article, "Email Services for Businesses," which explains why I think this should be the year of email service outsourcing.

Blogs and personal product marketing

We absorb so many marketing messages that it can be very hard to make intelligent buying decisions. I doubt that is a surprise to anyone.

What might be a surprise to those who aren't paying attention is the way that bloggers are providing some interesting twists on marketing. There are so many products on the shelves these days that picking the best one can be a huge challenge. Sometimes it doesn't matter. I probably won't be upset by which Tide detergent my wife picks from the six different scents.

I would, however, be very upset if someone that I knew went out and bought a Volvo without listening to the challenges that I have faced. I wrote the post, "High tech car, low tech dealer," back in the fall of 2005. I am still getting comments on it. In fact one came in today. It closed with this comment.

I have completely lost faith in Volvo.

Now a few people complaining about Volvo isn't going to do huge damage to the company. Still in a world where people are becoming more and more connected it isn't going to Volvo any good either.

The thing is that as more and more intelligent buyers start to depend on each other's opinions, it will matter. In fact as marketing gets more questionable, the opinions which gain credence on the web will start to make a difference.

Today I had an article, "What Jobs told me on the iPhone," published in the Guardian Unlimited in London, England. In less than twenty four hours eighteen thousand people had taken the time to click on a link from the article and visit one of two main blogs, "Applepeels" or "View from the Mountain." My Ocracoke Waves blogger site is one where I don't track the traffic, but I am sure some folks wandered by here.

I had numerous notes and comments which lend me to believe that people trust what I say. I take that trust seriously. As someone who has been selling things since he starting knocking on doors in the first grade and selling first aid kits, I have always sold things in which I believed. That includes Angus cattle, Vermeer Balers, Apple's computers, G3 Systems Inc. integration services, and outsourced email from Webmail.us. It hasn't mattered whether I was selling it in a face to face meeting or recommending it in my writing. My integrity has always come first. I am not going to sell or recommend a bad product.

I have also tried to separate my personal dislikes on companies from their products. Some places it is easier to do that than others. Writing about Apple, it's pretty easy to love many of the products while not be very excited about the company. Yet even with Apple, when I have a product that has problems, like the MacBook I recently bought, I'm not very shy about saying something.

I would like to think we are heading into a world of products which receive personal reviews that I can trust. The trouble is that most of the time I cannot find the right information. A good example is my latest purchase of an "AIO" or "all in one printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine" I searched the web for good information. All of it was rather worthless.

I talked to friends, no one had current experience using a Mac with one of the machines. I went to the big box electronic stores and most couldn't even make them work. I ended up gambling on the purchase. Yet when I got it all working, I wrote about it and the articles, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX," and "The not so reluctant home system engineer," have been very popular. I am now the expert and get questions about the product almost daily.

I try to answer as many as possible, but the interest I have seen in these posts borders on more than I can handle for free. This interest in finding real answers is very indicative of the lack of trust that many people have in the standard over-hyped marketing that we're seeing today. People are accustomed to buying things where the performance doesn't match up to the marketing materials.

Over time the smart people become cautious and look to other ways to evaluate important purchases.

Companies haven't figured out how to utilize people like me since I don't want anyone to give me a product. If that happened, my review would probably be worth as much as the reviews done by magazines that are trying to protect their advertising revenue. Maybe people like me are a disorganized low budget free Consumer Reports without any consistent standards but with lots of personality.

I'll take a personal recommendation from someone I know over any marketing that I see. It might be interesting if Blogger or Typepad developed a rating system for bloggers like eBay has for buyers and sellers.

Just maybe we would find it a little easier to find out what we need before we give these companies our hard earned money. I encourage everyone to speak honestly about the product you use.

I love where I live, I tell people about my experiences on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks (SOBX). There are certain restaurants that I really like. I want them to stay in business so I write about them. My favorite place to buy fresh shrimp prompted me to write about how to fix shrimp in the post, "The easy way to perfect shrimp." The shrimp then need the right cocktail sauce so I have to tell people about Kelchner's Cocktail Sauce.

I don't consider it wrong to give a plug for something that I enjoy or which has provided me with good service or great taste. I don't make it any money for my positive comments, and most people like to have recommendations to help them filter through all the marketing hype.

I have started recording some of my recommendations on a new blog, "Coastal NC Daily Record." I hope it ends up being useful for at least a few smart consumers.

America the not so "overfull"

This morning I read "America the Overfull," in the New York Times (subscription required). The author, Paul Theroux, talks of a yearnng for a less crowded world.

Yes, it is just silly and fogeyish to yearn for that simpler and smaller world of the past. But one could ask for the past’s better manners, the instinctive decorum that has served to mitigate conflict. One of the lessons of travel is that, though half the world is wearing T-shirts and sneakers, they manage to live in overpopulated cities because they have not abandoned their traditional modes of politeness. These grace notes, which make traveling in crowded countries bearable, are a lesson to us in a mobbed and jostling world.

I wonder what Mr. Theroux would think of North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. I would guess that most people who read the NY Times have Nags Head, Corolla, and Duck in their mind's eye. I doubt most of them have ever even ventured down to Pea Island much less visited Cape Lookout by boat like I described in my post, "The best twenty dollars you will ever spend."

While I will agree that we have lots more people, there is still a tremendous amount of solitude if you are willing to get off the interstate highways. I've lived between US 29 and Interstate 95 when I worked in Columbia, Maryland so I know about the hum of the cities and the night sky that has no stars.

Then we moved to a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Va. While we could hear the city, all it took was fifteen minutes of hiking the mountain behind our house to lose even that noise and disappear in a forest of giant poplars which gave way to spruce trees as neared the top of Twelve O'Clock Knob. We often shared the trail with turkey, deer, and an occasional bobcat.

Roanoke, which is pretty laid back in its own rights, is a bustling metropolis compared to our spot on the White Oak River near Cape Carteret, North Carolina. Our cul de sac down by the water is absolutely silent at night. You can often go sit on the boardwalk and be alone with yourself, the wind, and the water unless one of the herons happens to fly by or a fish jumps out of the water.

While I know that our population has increased greatly, most of those people have crammed themselves into cities. Even on the east coast we have seen the recovery of many of our forest lands where trees have reclaimed much of the farm land that is no longer profitable to cultivate.

I know well the feeling that the crowds are winning. I have had that very feeling driving down Route 7 in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Yet when I am heading to the North Carolina coast, the traffic begins to thin on Interstate forty twenty or thirty miles east of Raleigh. By the time I get to exit 373 where we pick up Route 24, there are very few cars on I40. If it is late at night, when we get on 24 there is almost no traffic. It reminds me of the many nights of traveling Route 11 in Virginia as teenager on my way to or from military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Even then when I went away to college in Boston, the crowds in the city shocked me.

Still we've got plenty of places to find solitude in North America. I've stood on hill at the back of the farm we used to have in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada and wondered which way was civilization. There was none visible and certainly no noise from any.

When I walk the beaches of the Southern Outer Banks or get up to enjoy the sunrises, I know that there is plenty of solitude left in the world, you just have to know where to find it.

The ethical challenge for corporations

Most people have heard the warning, "Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning." We should have one for corporations, but I don't have one that will just roll off the tongue. The best that I can do is where there is options backdating smoke, there is likely a roaring fire that indicates the company is more interested in enriching executives than in returning value to investors or even pretending to care about the common good.

Today's news has brought news about Steve Job's potential involvement in Apple's options backdating issue. Apple investors know that Steve is Apple, and that anything which might cause Steve to leave Apple would certainly be disastrous for stock valuation.

Yet anyone with serious inside knowledge of Apple can tell you that very little of importance goes on at Apple without Steve being involved. There's always a challenge when a company is doing very well. That challenge is not overlooking the problems that might be hidden by the fantastic results being turned in at the company.

Apple is a great example. After wandering for years in the wilderness and struggling with their 3% worldwide marketshare, the iPod has turned the company into a cash generation machine and the executives are heroes. As is often the case, there might be some heroes in there, but it doesn't excuse wrong doing.

But here we're getting into a larger societal problem which one of the comments posted to one of my Applepeels post pointed out so astutely. We glorify winning at all costs. If we aren't holding winning up on a pedestal, then we're worshiping at the feet of great riches. The CEOs of America can do wrong as least as long as they don't get caught.

I don't know if Steve Jobs did anything illegal regarding stock options. What I do know is that Steve and other CEOs like him have created a climate in our corporations that isn't healthy.

The fact that who know is more important than what you know or what tasks you can do should be of great concern to anyone who hopes that American business can still provide broad based prosperity to our country.

I'm very concerned and written a number of posts on it including, "The inevitable organizational failure," "Fortune 500 workplace ethics," "Cult of the Buddies," and "True leadership."

It is certainly not just an Apple problem. It's a problem with many of our companies. We need to figure out how to fix it.