The right call?

Here's a post from our blog in February 2005, 18 months ago.

...."Of the myriad projects under construction now in Center City Philadelphia in Feb 05 -- only those with the largest square footage, with the best locations and design have a chance for appreciation for their buyers. At some point within the next 36 months this market will see a 20% valuation decline. This is a gut call, open to criticism by agents and developers. If you want to pay these prices do so because you need a place to live not because you think there is upside investment potential. Take it with skepticism any agent that does not give you some degree of caution and hypes the investment potential of these overpriced small studio, 1-2 bedroom condos in "up and coming" areas."

New call for January 2008.

So in 18 more months we may see some buying opportunities. Still not nearly enough blood in the streets to go real estate investment fishing. I think a nice snowy day Winter 2008 will be when I start buying some distressed condo/apartment buildings.

Patient? Confident...

You bet. That's how you make $.

It works for real estate, it works for tech investing, too. After all, we filed the patents for location-triggered place-based searching +/- 6 years ago, and put Smarter Agent in motion when anything with a technology bent was tanking. Who knew, cell phone mania would be here in 2006, LBS (location based services) would be an emerging game changer for 2007, and people would take a shine again to Internet and wireless telecom. Well, we thought it would and so did you if you've been hanging with us.

Get your own people

We hope in the future we'll have more time for this blog, and we'll try to give you some tips on what to look for in real estate. In the interim, give us a call, 856-614-5423, and ask for the get me some people coodinator, the Marnster (marnie). We routinley talk to the best agents, and can get you started with the right people. Having the right"people" is always good. Even us so-called experts, never sell our own property, would never buy a residential property without an agent. Hey, who you gonna sue when it gets all f-d up? Sucks having to blame yourself for your own idiot moves. Kidding (we never have sued anyone). We threatened Exxon once, they left some oil tanks lying around, and they took care of it because we had people...big bad lawyer people....

THE MORALS
Wait to be an real estate investor, be patient. Get people. Buy a place to live because you need a new home or vacation place. And of course...use Smarter Agent mobile to be the smartest real estate person you can be. In slowing markets, research breeds confidence built on fundementals not hype. Know more, spend less...keep more dollars for your family or cocktails.

New York 1, that uniquely (Time Warner) NYC television newscast, will be showing an interview with Eric Blumberg, this week on the FORTUNE BUSINESS REPORT.

This follows on the heels of some pieces we read in the New York Daily News (got the NYC scoop), and Newsday about Smarter Agent.

We're hoping our friends at the Times, WSJ and the Gawker folks (lockheart where are ya), give Smarter Agent a try.

You know, if we can make it there...

Eric Blumberg, President of Smarter Agent will be at CTIA September 11-15, as well as in the Los Angeles, Orange County area during that time. If you would like to meet with Eric, at CTIA on or off-site, please call our appoiment center at 856-614-5423. Several media interviews are scheduled as are partner meetings and we will try to be accomodating.

The first day we launched our application we got our first "lead". We define a lead as a consumer using Recently Sold, who hits the 'call agent' button and asks for more information.

So on Day 1 we got a hot transfer that said "hey there, I am looking in the neighborhood, can you help me find things that are for sale?"

So where in the nation do you think the first mobile lead came from? Tech hotbeds Silicon Valley or Boston. (Silicon Valley was our second lead).

Well all I have to say is that maybe Al Gore did event the Internet, because our first lead came from a suburb of Nashville Tennesee.

So, during the first few weeks since Recently Sold Homes, by Smarter Agent launched, we have had downloads in a lot of cities.

The application is a new location based service (LBS), that uses GPS in cell phones.

Inman News once said we should change our name to Smarter Consumer. Eric Blumberg, President of Smarter Agent, agrees and sent me a note saying he thinks there are going to be a lot of smart consumers in cities where Smarter Agent is being used.

Here is a sampling of where people are downloading during our launch of Smarter Agent.
Phoenix, AZ
East Bay, CA
Fairfield/Suison, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Madera County, CA
Orange County, CA
Sacramento, CA
San Bernardino, CA
San Diego, CA
San Fernando, CA
San Francisco, CA
San Gabriel Valley, CA
San Jose, CA
Santa Monica, CA
Silicon Valley, CA
Washington, DC
Ft Lauderdale, FL
Jacksonville, FL
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Palm Beach/Boca, FL
Sarasota, FL
Atlanta, GA
Davenport, IA
Des Moines, IA
Peoria, IL
Kansas, KS
Wichita, KS
Boston, MA
East of Maryland, MD
3 Rivers, MI
Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
Kansas City, MO
Greensboro, NC
Raleigh, NC
Omaha, NE
Morris-Sussex, NJ
Southern New Jersey, NJ
Catskills, NY
New York, NY
Syracuse, NY
Akron, OH
Columbus, OH
Philadelphia, PA
Pittsburgh, PA
Puerto Rico, PR
Nashville, TN
Dallas, TX
Denton, TX
Houston, TX
San Antonio, TX
Arlington, VA
Seattle, WA

This is going to make our broker partners very happy. They love working with smart consumers, they know more coming in the door.

Smarter Agent to be profiled on NBC Philadelphia (top 5 media market) , Channel 10 NEWS. 6AM, and on the Evening Newscasts on [next] Monday, August 14. http://www.nbc10.com/index.html

If you miss it there will be a link on NBC's 10 Philadelphia website to the piece, and we will try to get a copy of it on our website as well...the lovely Laura from Sprint's media team took the reporter and some folks in the neighborhood through the paces.

I heard they all said how easy it was to use and thought is was very amazing indeed. Very nice.

Feel free to call me at 6:30AM, you know I'll be watching ;).

It's nice the top technology and real estate writers in the country are beginning to review Smarter Agent.

Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal did a great overview from an emerging business perspective that just went national.

The real estate editors at the 4th largest and 6th largest newspapers in the country - the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune - picked right up on covering the launch, as well. Both papers have over a 1 million circulation numbers each.

And I know the LA Times folks took it out for a spin in LA neighborhoods, courtesy of the outstanding Sprint media team. We tried to do a "see what the rich and famous payed for their house tour", but it was not ready -- stay tuned 'Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, we are working on a new twist to the old map of the stars homes. Still working the kinks out of that one...

Here's something from the LA Times article from this weekend.

From the Los Angeles Times
NEW PRODUCTS

Home price info a phone call away

Sprint is the first cellphone service provider to give customers access to recent sales data.

By Ann Brenoff, Times Staff WriterAugust 6, 2006

Attention all real estate hounds and home voyeurs.

Your cellphone can now answer that all-important question: What did it sell for?

The cellphone must be armed with a global positioning system — standard on most new phones — and the data service Smarter Agent will beam the property price, size and date-of-sale information straight to your curious eyes.

Smarter Agent has teamed up with Sprint, which offers the "Recently Sold" service exclusively for now. It's pretty simple to use. The phone will show you all sales made in your GPS vicinity in roughly the last two years. The data comes from public records, and most deeds take about three months to record after sale.

Another feature allows you to type in any U.S. address and get information about area sales including square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, lot size and tax information. It also maps the homes' locations.

By the end of the year, other phone service providers will probably offer the feature, and its developers have plans to expand the data to include available rentals and, eventually, data from Multiple Listing Services. The developers say they have data for 180 of the 200 major metropolitan areas, which includes all of Southern California.

Sprint charges $10 a month for its GPS data portal — Internet access, e-mail and photos — plus $4.99 for Smarter Agent.

At some point, I suspect, the media will hone in on how "mobile" + "location awareness "changes everything.

The medium of location-aware mobility is different from all that came before it.

The winners of radio, were not the winners of TV, mainstream media and traditional corporations were not the winners of the Internet. And the winners of the Internet will not be the winners of mobile - winners in the sense of the come out of now where "ebay", "yahoo" type companies.

Mobile will create entirely new winners, you wait and see.

In the interim you can still find the clues in 1960's media guru Marshall McLuhan.

The Medium is the Messege
Here are some of his "McLuhanisms", and we all know about his quote the 'medium is the message' --meaning when we look at a photo we have to add our thoughts to interpret it, whereas TV streams right at us filling in most of the information. Based on the time period, and the business case, each medium created wealth in it's own way.

The winners of mobility will not be merely putting the internet or video on your phone. It will be the ones that use the medium to the fullest.

Here are some other famous quotes from M - rememeber he wrote them about 40 years ago, and most still stand out. How about the one 'the future of the book is the blurb', he may be have hit it on the head 'the future of the book is the BLOG'

QUOTES BY MM:

If it works, it's obsolete.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is“sent.”

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards intothe future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

The road is our major architectural form.

Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once.

The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

—Copyright © 1986, McLuhan Associates, Ltd.

I have been told that GPS is luxury car, while texting is more like a Yugo.

Here's why that is true for mobile searching, even though the numbers say many, many folks have tried texting. I suspect many are very young (I don't text), and there is jargon that texters use to get over what a pain it is to type on mobile devices. 2MI = too much information, BRB = be right back. Or texters use letters to disguise what they are saying --- for example, my 11 year old niece taught me that texting POS to your friends means parent over shoulder. That abbreviated typing is not going to work for many types of commerce.

Using SMS/Text Messaging for real estate info:

To get an answer about a real estate property, even if it is an automated system, via mobile sms/text-messaging/email - you have to type on your cell phone's keypad.

So in real estate it's a pain in the arse.

Want to know about 271 Winding Way Drive, Pleasanton (Sp? - spell it wrong and you have other problems) California.

To get a text message answer - you have to peck that address in. A 20 minute exercise. No way. And in some text messaging scenario's you may have to look for the code to type in, and that's an added expense for the person who wants you to text about their product (house, store, etc) and not everything you want to know about will have a text message code sticker on it.

That's why for real estate and place based things we patented the use of LBS (location based Services) and GPS (global positioning systems) to trigger real estate searches for example. GPS is a form of LBS, and so is 'location-detecting' WiMax.

I like solutions that are simple and elegant - (like E=MC squared - not that I understand that, but I like the theory that says the better you understand something the more simply it can be explained).

We have been granted 3 patents using GPS as a trigger to start a search. GPS triggered searching is an elegant solution that makes it easy to use.

At Smarter Agent we created a grid that has EVERY property in the United States listed (and are working on some international things as well). We add things like comps, for sale listings, and rentals to this grid.

As carriers roll out LBS services all you have to do with Smarter Agent is hit a button and we tell you all the information about the properties around you. The GPS in the phone gets your longitude and latitude and this allows Smarter Agent to instantly bring you back information about the property. 1-click, no typing required.

This is about as close to changing the TV channel (with a remote) as we could get. Forget about all those other keys!

As more people and the media continue to learn about the coming pervasiveness of GPS in cell phones this will be a game changer for real estate and other local search and local finding applications.

You can see what I mean by stopping in a Sprint-Nextel store and trying out Smarter Agent. Or with millions of GPS capable phones already out there, you may already have one that let's you experience this Star Trek like searching. Try it, you'll be hooked - after all we all like a little luxury WOW! experience now and then.