Overall, we were able to make a number of changes that decreased the initial size of our IDX by nearly 30%!! We made all of our images much, much leaner, we further combined our JavaScript and CSS into fewer files, and we removed some preloading where it just didn’t make sense anymore.

Additionally, we moved nearly all of our JavaScript, CSS, and images / icons to the same global network infrastructure that twitter, SmugMug, WordPress.com, Amazon, and other multi-million/billion dollar companies are using! The advantages we gained by making that move is that the majority of our IDX is now served from 14 locations around the world depending on the visitor’s location instead of just a single location. In other words, a dsSearchAgent visitor located in Boston will no longer have to wait for a myriad of image, JavaScript, and CSS requests to be served up from a data center 2,600 miles away in Los Angeles; instead, that visitor will pull all of that data from a dedicated cache location in Newark, NJ.

Speed matters. Google found that their traffic to Google maps increased by 25% after they shaved 20-30% off the initial size of the Google maps home page.  Amazon found (PowerPoint presentation) that for every 100 millisecond delay that they introduced in testing scenarios, they experienced a 1% drop in revenue. That’s huge!! Now that we’re leaner and closer to our visitors, we’re really excited to see what this does for our own traffic.

Anyway, give it a whirl. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think!

So without further ado, please visit our launch site to learn more and try it out yourself: http://dslistingexpress.diversesolutions.com

We know you’ll like it.

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

As an admiring fan of their Walk Score idea and their motto (“Software for Civic Live”), we knew that it was our responsibility to bring this greatness to our dsSearchAgent product, so that’s what we did. You can see the functionality on our demo IDX site. Starting today, all of our IDX clients can easily flip a switch in their control panel area to enable that great Walk Score functionality. Specifically, we’ve implemented it in the following four places on our IDX:

1. Search by Walk Score. Now this is cool. We love being able to put in an address Walk Score, but it makes it SO much better when you don’t have to constantly look up the Walk Score for each address for each property you’re interested in buying / leasing.
2. Sort by Walk Score. If you can search by Walk Score, you should be able to sort by Walk Score too. Just click in the “sort by” box at the top of the results and choose “Walk Score, Highest First” to order the search results from highest to lowest Walk Score.
3. View the Walk Score in both the search results and property details. Even if our clients choose not to show the “Search by Walk Score” search panel, they can still enable the functionality to allow their visitors to see the Walk Score for each listing in both the search results and property details. Check it out here; just look for the little walking guy icon at the top-right of each search result and in the top-right corner of the property details area.
4. View the Walk Score tile. When you click on the “Walk Score” link at the top-right of the property details area, you’ll see the Walk Score tile that shows all of the amenities that are factored into the score.

In case you missed the link above, check out the demo. We hope you’ll enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it into our system. We’re really excited to say that we’re the first national IDX provider that enables this type of functionality. We spent quite some time on the UI for this feature in order to make everyone happy. We also did our homework to make sure that the implementation appeased the compliance departments at the MLS’s who mandate their percentage of employed anal-retentive individuals to be greater than 80%.

Anyway, we’d love to hear what you think!

Update 3/31/09 8:47 AM: Just to be clear, if you have dsSearchAgent and you want the Walk Score functionality for your own IDX, you need to enable this in your control panel. There are two places you can enable the functionality, and they’re both in the “Options” section. First, you can drag over the “Walk Score” panel under the “Search Tab” tab. Second, under the “Result Tab”, you can put a tick in the “Show Walk Score in results” checkbox. The sort-by option for Walk Score will automatically show up as soon as you enable the search functionality.

Mike shares with us an overview of their product and examples of clients who are putting it to use in their markets. He also discusses why they are such huge supporters of the RE Barcamp movement. 

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I posed the question in a discussion forum on the Diverse Solutions Facebook page and invited folks to provide us their thoughts on the issue. We received some really great insight and input. 

“Well that is just crazy. The world is too big to play that game. I’m friends with Rudy at Trulia, Sarah and David G from Zillow and I think everything is just fine”. – Derek Overbey Roost.Com

One of the very first social networks to launch on the web was LinkedIn. I remember as it started to grow in popularity, so did the number of detractors that felt as if it were a way to allow your competitors access to see who it is you do business with etc. The issue obviously hasn’t stopped if from becoming almost a business necessity these days.

“Wow! Those who know me, know I rock the transparency all the way, so it boggles my mind not to let anyone into my circle. This doesn’t mean they get to stay there depending on their behavior but very rarely is someone ushered out.” Kye Grace – Realtor

One of the best chapters in the book Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki is a whopping 2 pages in length and it’s entitled “Power 3.0; Kinder, Gentler and Better” I think some of what he has to say is very relevant to this issue. What does power have to do with your social networking endeavor? In my opinion everything. 

“Despite thier location or even their direct competition with me for web traffic, this is a big pool we are all playing in…and there is room for everyone.” Clint Miller – RECR.com

Truth told, all of us our trying to amass the strongest network that we can in the hope that it helps us with that ultimate goal of the pursuit of happiness, whatever it means to you. Kawasaki uses quotes and references from another book entitled “The Power Paradox” by Dacher Keltner to show that there are basic myths to the “game of power” including the Machiavellian way of thinking that says “it’s better to be feared than loved”. Keltner says “Social behaviors are dictated by social expectations” and that “Machiavellians quickly acquire reputations as individuals who act in ways that are inimical to the interests of others”. 

I think the power of an effective social networking effort comes from a desire to hold the interests of others above your own within your sphere. What better way to demonstrate that than to embrace those you may perceive as competitors? I’m not saying to reveal your strategic efforts and plans or to beguile people you wouldn’t otherwise engage. That makes no sense no matter what platform you’re using to be social. If you’re managing your online effort correctly, I doubt you’re saying anything you wouldn’t put in a press release anyhow.  

“….I guess you have to tend your FB garden very well.” Kristal Kraft – Realtor

 There’s on old saying “nice guys finish last”. It’s not always true. I think if you play it smart, the concept of engaging everyone in your sphere in a transparent and genuine fashion will eventually start to reward you in a way you had no idea was in store for you. I remember when I was boy my Dad came home from work with the latest and greatest Hot Wheels set. No birthdays, it wasn’t Christmas. He said he gave it to me and my twin because he thought we deserved it. I couldn’t tell you to this day what one single action we may have taken to make us deserve such a cool gift. Whatever it was, We both did it without expectation of reward. Isn’t it the unexpected gift that always seem to be the best?

So, what do you think of the issue? Join our Facebook page and let me know.

RETech South – Atlanta – March 20
RE Barcamp LosAngeles – April 2
RE Barcamp Phoenix – April 23 

We will have representatives at each event. Contact  us on Twitter or through our site if you’re interested in meeting with us during any of these events. Be sure to subscribe to our blog to see where we will be next!

Being a curious individual myself, I decided to run a quick query on our own database to find the foreclosure numbers across the country look like as of right now (3:32 PM PST). Before I reveal any of the data though, let me first go over some things you need to know before interpreting it.

• We do have a couple million properties in our database representing the listings from most of the major metro areas across the United States. We don’t have everything though, so it’s entirely possible that there’s a city or community that should be somewhere in the rankings but isn’t.
• In order to prevent rental listings in the MLS’s from skewing the results, I excluded all listings from the calculations that had prices below $5,000. It just helped me get a more accurate representation of the data was all.
• I excluded all cities and communities that had less than 100 total listings.
• We generally only carry active listings in our database. Depending on the MLS though, we sometimes carry pendings as well.
• I didn’t exclude any property types from this, meaning that condos, land, detached homes, etc all got lumped together.
• We have two methods that we use to determine whether or not a particular listing is a pre-foreclosure (short sale, notice of default file, etc) or foreclosure (bank or lender owned). First, we look at the data. A good deal of MLS’s give us data that tell us how the listing agent for each property wants to represent the property. In other words, when the agent ticks the “this is a short sale” box in their MLS software, we see that and correspondingly mark it as a pre-foreclosure or foreclosure. The second method we use to determine the (pre)foreclosure status of a listing is to have our systems examine the listing agent’s property description using a proprietary technology we developed. Our internal testing has found that our second method is about 99.5% accurate in identifying these (pre)foreclosures when compared to examining the descriptions manually.
• This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the data. It’s just something I thought was interesting to look at. Please don’t send me hate mail if your results differ.

All that said, here’s the top 20 ranking cities in the nation for distressed homes (again, both pre-foreclosures AND foreclosures) according to our data:

1. East Salinas, CA has 88% of the 309 active MLS listings in either pre-foreclosure or foreclosure!
2. North Las Vegas, NV has 87% of the 3,648 listings in either pre-foreclosure or foreclosure!
3. El Mirage, AZ
4. North Salinas, CA
5. Panorama City, CA
6. Tolleson, AZ
7. Pacoima, CA
8. Avondale, AZ
9. Arleta, CA
10. Palmdale, CA
11. Reseda, CA
12. South Monterey County, CA
13. Canoga Park, CA
14. Mission Hills San Fernando, CA
15. Winnetka, CA
16. Van Nuys – East, CA
17. Santa Ana, CA
18. Las Vegas, NV
19. Sylmar, CA
20. Lancaster, CA

Here’s the same list, except it’s broken down by communities:

1. Springdale Falls in Snellville, GA with 99% of the active listings in either pre-foreclosure or foreclosure! Ouch!
2. Meridian At Hughes Center in Las Vegas, NV
3. Maricopa Meadows in Maricopa, AZ
4. Es-68 in East Salinas, CA
5. Country Place in Tolleson, AZ
6. Johnson Ranch in Queen Creek, AZ
7. Rancho El Dorado in Maricopa, AZ
8. Sundance in Buckeye, AZ
9. Northgate/Sherwood Gardens in North Salinas, CA
10. Aliante in North Las Vegas, NV
11. Maryvale Terrace in Phoenix, AZ
12. Irnmtnrch in Las Vegas, NV
13. Lake Elsinore North in Lake Elsinore, CA
14. Romoland in Romoland, CA
15. Silverado in Las Vegas, NV
16. Moreno Valley in Moreno Valley, CA
17. Lake Elsinore East in Lake Elsinore, CA
18. Plum Canyon in Saugus, CA
19. Palmdale in Palmdale, CA
20. Colton in Colton, CA

You can download my spreadsheet if you want to look at the (pre)foreclosure numbers in depth. I only exported the top 200 cities and top 200 communities.

Some thoughts:

• I looked into what was going on in Springdale Falls in Snellville, GA, and it seems like the builder for that area just completely collapsed. Most of the descriptions for the listings in that area read like “Bank Owned.  Reduced 47 lots available.”
• As you could probably guess, the VAST majority of hard-hit cities and communities were in California. I thought that the data would be more spread out between California and Florida, but it doesn’t look that way.
• It’s interesting to me that Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, the small city that Diverse Solutions is based in and that I call home, is #65 on the list of top cities.
• Obama should have given his foreclosure speech in Vegas or somewhere like Bakersfield, CA (where 64% of the active listings are in a stage of pre-foreclosure) instead of Mesa, AZ where “only” 24% of listings are in a stage of pre-foreclosure.

Now that’s some interesting data.

NIck operates RailLife.com, a blog and real estate resource focused on Phoenix’s 20 mile long light rail system. Nick has been able to modify his IDX feed to deliver targeted listing information based on his niche and much more. By focusing on an all important lifestyle issue like commuting and developing structured content around it, Nick has established himself as a “go-to” resource for all things light rail related. It’s an outstanding example of how the barriers to entry for publishing and delivering content give you the ability to establish a consistent brand and touch prospects at all stages of the buying cycle. 

In this podcast Nick gives us a little history on his efforts and talks about the tremendous success he is enjoying with his “nichefied” marketing efforts. 

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To be honest with you, I wasn’t too intrigued with the concept at first blush, but after seeing a complete demo of the product and hearing how it is being used, I did complete turn around. There are great implications for the use of the product, as an analytics tool and much more. It’s going to take some some consumer traction to make the product a success, but I think there is an opportunity via the “Pro” version of the product and the viral nature that could ensue via MLS’ including it as an option and more. 

I had a great conversation with Dan & Greg about Dwellicious. Enjoy!

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