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When comparing the week of August 23 – August 29 with the week prior, the number of times an RMLS™ subscriber opened a Supra lockbox decreased 9.7% in Washington and 1.5% in Oregon.
Archive
View an archive of the Supra lockbox statistical reports on Flickr.
The RMLS™ Communications Department has been honored with the Bronze Beacon Award of Excellence by the Oregon-Columbia Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (OCIABC).
According to OCIABC, the annual Bronze Beacon Communicator Awards program was created to give local communications professionals the opportunity to showcase their work and receive recognition for communication excellence. Past award recipients include Kaiser Permanente, Nike, Conkling Fiskum & McCormick, and Providence Health & Services.
OCIABC also aims to provide communications professionals with networking and learning opportunities. The organization’s mission is: “To foster excellence and awareness of communications as an integral function of every organization.”
Last spring, members of the RMLS™ Communications Department submitted an entry for the Bronze Beacon Award. The entry was entitled, RMLS™ Comparative Market Analysis Release, and gave a comprehensive overview of the communications plan for the new RMLS™ Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) report feature. The entry included samples of communications tools that were used during the release, as well as a written explanation of the plan’s goals and results. These samples consisted of Twitter, Facebook, RMLSweb and blog posts, as well as printed materials and eight electronic tutorials.
This week, the RMLS™ Communications Department was notified as a recipient of the Bronze Beacon Award of Excellence. This wonderful news has instilled a sense of pride in members of the department, as well as the whole company, who all contributed in making the CMA release possible.
In case you didn’t know that we recently released a new CMA, here is some information about our new, transformed CMA report feature. View our tutorials below:
Or, print out our Creating a New CMA in RMLSweb quick reference guide.
In addition, RMLS™ is offering a new training course called CMA & Statistics. To view the training calendar, log onto RMLSweb, go to Toolkit on the toolbar at the top of the screen and scroll down to Training Calendar.
Or, you can contact the RMLS™ Training department at 503-236-7657 or call help desk toll-free at 1-877-256-2169 or via email at helpdesk@rmls.com
Here’s a quick rundown of upcoming real estate events & education for September in Oregon & Southern Washington. If you have an event that is not listed here, please let us know by commenting below. For future events, please send an e-mail to communications (at) rmls (dot) com.
RMLS™ Events:
-September 30: RMLS™ presents Show Us the Money!, an educational event in Salem. Come hear the latest on USDA Guaranteed and Direct Home Loans that are fully funded and waiting for your clients! Register here!
Events around the Region:
-September 8: Join other brokers for the Sherwood Broker Tour. Meet at the Sherwood Subway sandwich shop at 8:30 a.m. Call Angel Aguiar, Mortgage Broker for Sunset Mortgage Co., directly at 503-437-9000 for more details.
- September 9: Women’s Council of Realtors® Greater Portland Chapter hosts The Real Estate Business Resource Breakfast Series: Cultural Awareness.
-September 16: Oregon Association of Realtors® Home Foundation hosts A Taste of Portland.
-September 16: Clark County Association of Realtors® presents the Barn, Bottles & BBQ benefit.
-September 22: Inman News is taking its Agent Reboot one-day class on the road to 12 cities this year, including Portland on September 22.
-September 27: Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors® hosts the PMAR Education Event.
-September 30: The NE Branch of Oregon First is sponsoring the fundraiser, Friends of Trees Benefit & Last Thursday Alberta Arts Walk, which is open for all members of the real estate industry.
In addition to these events, RMLS™ is offering a new training course called CMA & Statistics. Here is a brief description about the class:
Want to be the expert in your market area? Want to better explain pricing to your clients? In this class we’ll show you how to get the statistical and comparable data you need to do just that. We’ll use the RMLSweb Statistical module to examine MLS Areas for trends and the CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) module to search for comps to create a customized report that stands apart from the rest.
Also, if you’re an RMLS™ subscriber, we have lots of FREE opportunities for continuing education credit at a location near you; click the link for your area to view the September Training Calendar:
- Coos County
- Eastern Oregon
- Eugene
- Florence
- Gresham
- Hood River
- Portland
- Roseburg
- Salem
- Vancouver
When comparing the week of August 16 – August 22 with the week prior, the number of times an RMLS™ subscriber opened a Supra lockbox increased 7.3% in Washington and 1.5% in Oregon.
Archive
View an archive of the Supra lockbox statistical reports on Flickr.
When comparing the week of August 9 – August 15 with the week prior, the number of times an RMLS™ subscriber opened a Supra lockbox increased 1% in Washington and decreased 0.6% in Oregon.
Archive
View an archive of the Supra lockbox statistical reports on Flickr.
We have also heard concerns from users regarding font size being too small on the new CMA. We appreciate your feedback and are currently working to improve this aspect of the new CMA.
In case you didn’t know that we recently released a new CMA, here is some information about our new, transformed CMA report feature. View our tutorials below:
Or, print out our Creating a New CMA in RMLSweb quick reference guide.
In addition, RMLS™ is offering a new training course called CMA & Statistics. To view the training calendar, go to Toolkit on the toolbar at the top of the screen and scroll down to Training Calendar. Or, you can contact the RMLS™ Training department at 503-236-7657 or call help desk toll-free at 1-877-256-2169 or via email at helpdesk@rmls.com
Terms like “short sales” and “bank-owned” are on many people’s tongues and minds in the real estate industry. The recent addition of the Short Sale and Bank Owned fields on RMLSweb now allow us to look at data for these listings individually.
Before there was a short sale field on RMLSweb, there was only a “3rd Party to Transaction” field. As you may know, “3rd Party to Transaction” listings are not always short sales. They may also be estate sales or relocations. In order for you to identify short sales more efficiently, the RMLS™ Board voted to add these new fields, a change that occurred July 29, 2009. This also helps the other types of properties that require 3rd Party approval to get fair attention. RMLS™ has added the following fields regarding short sales:
Short Sale Yes/No – will be required when entering a listing and 3rd Party to Transaction will be automatically checked when Yes is selected.
Short Sale Offer (Seller Accepted; Submitted for Approval) Yes/No– The rules will be revised to require updating this field when an offer is made.
In a blog post last year, we compared 3rd Party to Transaction sales to the total active listings on the market. Now, with the recent addition of these new fields, we can look at short sale data and bank owned data more specifically and also compare them to the market as a whole. The graph below shows you the total number of active listings in RMLSweb as of today July 23, 2010, compared to the number of active listings that are checked Short Sale Yes, and also compared to those that are marked Bank Owned. The number of active short sales in comparison to the total number of active listings is approximately 11.7%, while the number of active bank owned properties in comparison to the total number of active listings is about 5.4%.
As you can see from the above graph, the number of active short sales and bank owned properties is a small fraction of the number of total active listings. There were 31,762 total active listings, 3,731 total active short sales and 1,715 total active bank owned listings.
Now that we’ve looked at active listings, let’s compare total pending sales in the market with pending short sales and pending bank owned properties. The graph below depicts this comparison using data from RMLSweb on July 23rd, 2010:
There were 5,094 total pending listings, 877 pending short sales and 913 pending bank owned properties.
Last, let’s take a look at sold listings. The graph below shows that there were 17,751 total sold listings from the period of January 1, 2010 to June 30th, 2010. The number of sold short sales was 1,620, just 9.1% of total sold listings. Bank owned listings sold at a higher rate with 3,422 sales, which is approximately 19.3% of total sold listings.
Visit the National Association of Realtors® website for more information on short sales and bank owned properties.
Also, stay tuned for future blog posts that will compare prices and the number of days on market for short sales and bank owned properties, to the market as a whole.
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Numerous Realtors® have reported receiving emails and phone calls from a person out-of country who claims to need assistance with an all-cash real estate purchase. The caller may also insist on the need to retain a lawyer with a trust account, and requests a referral. The Realtor® or referred lawyer soon receives a substantial check (reports are from $150,000 to $500,000) to be deposited into broker trust account or lawyer trust account. Soon thereafter another call is received from a person purporting to be the attorney for the scammer in his home country. The foreign attorney says that the funds were sent out of country without appropriate government authority and must be immediately returned in order to avoid sanctions and penalties. Holder of the funds is pressed to wire the money without delay. Needless to say, the purchaser and the check are a fraud.
If you receive questionable requests for service or referrals, be cautious and inquire further.
If you’re like most of us, you probably have contact and address book data spread all over the web — friends on Facebook, contacts in Gmail, followers on Twitter, and names in your local address book application.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all that data were available in one place where you could see it all, control which sites have access to it and manage your on and offline friends?
The truly unified address book is still a ways off, but there is hope it will be especially useful once it arrives thanks to some emerging standards.
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body that creates and oversees web standards, has published a working draft of what’s known as the Contacts API. The goal behind the Contacts API is to provide a way to unify your address book, pulling from both local and online sources, and to allow you to better control how third-party websites access your data.
The latest draft incorporates feedback based on the earlier draft, first published back in January of 2010. It builds upon the work being done on vCard and Portable Contacts, among other contact systems already being used on the web. The final version is penciled in for mid-2011.
The Contacts API is part of a broader initiative at the W3C called the Ubiquitous Web Applications activity. The purpose of the group is to develop underlying infrastructures web services can take advantage of to make web apps more powerful and more useful. The Geolocation API, which lets a web app learn your location, and the Devices API, which lets a web app access a camera or microphone in your hardware, are also part of the same initiative. It also fits into the ideals outlined by the W3C’s vision of a semantic web.
So what will the Contacts API standardize? Currently, if a site wants to access your contacts list it generally does so by grabbing, say, your whole Gmail contacts list. Even with standards like OAuth, which gives you control over which sites can access your contacts list, you still don’t have much in the way of fine-grained permissions.
Say you want Facebook to only grab contacts that you’ve put in the address group “friends” in your Gmail address book. With the current controls, you’re out of luck. But if and when the Contacts API is ratified and adopted, that’s exactly the sort of thing it would allow you to do.
The Contacts API would also give the browser a method of unifying all your various contacts lists — for example your contacts from Gmail, Facebook and your local address book all merged to single list.
It sounds grand, no doubt, but the Contacts API is a long way from reality. Mozilla has experimented with the API (along with other tools) to create the Labs project Contacts, but like the APIs it uses, Contacts is still very much a work in progress.
See Also:
One of the most-cited advancements in HTML5 the new syntax for embedding videos on web pages without the use of plugins.
Rather than load up a Silverlight or Flash player, you can just wrap a file URL in <video> tags and the video will play natively in the most recent crop of browsers — including Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad, where Flash and Silverlight aren’t allowed.
The design of default controls are left up to the browser vendor, but they are usually rather spartan, so the user experience is a little lacking. But since native web playback is all done with web standards, you can create fancy players in JavaScript and CSS that wrap around your video and make playing, controlling and navigating video content much more elegant.
We’ve previously told you about some great standards-based players from Sublime Video, Kaltura and Video for Everybody. Here are a few more.
[Via insicdesigns]
See Also:
