The Atlanta Report

Mobile High Speed Wireless Internet Improves Productivity

I’ve been using a Verizon high speed wireless card in my tablet computer for about a year now.  It’s really nice being able to access the Internet pretty much any where that I go.  If I have an appointment and I don’t know how bad the traffic will be, I just leave a lot earlier and if I arrive early I can get things accomplished online.

If I’m out with a client, I can pull up other homes or I can pull up the tax records.   

It’s still not as fast as my office or home computers are but it can handle most sites without too much problem.  Verizon gives you a package deal if you have your cell phone with them.  It saves you $20/month.

I love testing gadgets out and try to stay ahead of the curve.  I haven’t been happy with the GPS sytem that I purchased.  It is a bit too slow and it sometimes sends you to roads that do not exist.  I am so lucky that I double checked a few addresses on a real map before I relied on the GPS unit.  I would have looked pretty silly driving into a field. 

There’s nothing like a real map that you can unfold and mark up.  It give you a good perspective on distances and it can be given to the client at the end of the day.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Atlanta home search tools | No Comments »

Zillow Will Become the National MLS, Realtors Need to Adjust

If you haven’t heard of Zillow yet let me be the first to introduce you to it.  Zillow started out in February as a site that had hooked into all of the public property tax records and started a system of trying to give the public a computer generated estimate of the value of their home. They combined that with a neat mapping feature and the term Zestimate started to be used.  I never though much of it because the amount of data I have access to through the MLS system makes the tax records that Zillow look like a cheap toy. But things are changing as of yesterday. Zillow has the potential to be the standard national MLS system open and free to anyone and everyone. They just introduced a free listing system as a new feature.   If they can entice a critical mass of people to put their listings into their system, then it will be a must for everyone who wants to sell a home. 

I have a feeling they might have a hard time convincing all the Realtors to put their listings on there but their system is so easy to use that the sellers could very easily do it themselves.  So the challenge to Zillow will be to try to become a household name.  They seem to be getting a lot of free press lately so it might not be that difficult.  In a few years if your home isn’t listed on Zillow it will be the same as someone without email or a cell phone.

It should be interesting to see how long it takes for things to change.  I look forward to the new opportunities of doing business in hopefully a more efficient and economical way.

The one thing that Realtors have that I can’t see being eliminated is the lock box key system.  Without the lock box system, showing real estate will be slowed down to a crawl.  It’s a beautiful thing right now showing homes without appointments during the day.  You make a few courtesy calls to sellers to tell them when you’ll be by and you can zip from one home to another never having to worry about keeping to an exact schedule and meeting sellers at specific times.  If homes aren’t listed with agent lock boxes, agents will only be able to show homes when the owners are home.  I guess there could be lock box keys given to the public but that sounds like a pretty risky proposition.  Realtors have been screened to some extent and have their livelihood on the line if they abuse their lock box privileges in any way.

For now though, if you want to search for homes in Atlanta, you really need to be using my home search tool.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Atlanta home search tools | 3 Comments »

Google Zip Code Boundary Map

Who can ever know for certain where the boundaries for a particular zip code are?  If you have a typical Realtor map book you can go crazy going from page to page piecing together a zip code area.  I found a great site where you type in a zip code and you get a Google map that has a zip code boundary overlay on it.  You can zoom in to street level. It’s your typical Google map. Here’s the link to the zip code map.

This should help a home buyer when using various home search tools or help them define a targetted home search. Many times searching on city names doesn’t give you a well defined area as zip codes do.

 Call me a geek, but finding a little, easy to use tool like this brings a little joy to my life. Hope you enjoy this tool also.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Atlanta real estate info, Atlanta home search tools | No Comments »