This September, take advantage of FREE RMLSweb training

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

Activity up from previous week

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.

Mixed, yet small, changes in both states

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.

Learn and experience our new, improved CMA

Since the release of the new CMA, the number of old CMA users has been steadily declining. Because of this, we will be discontinuing the old CMA report feature so that we can now focus on pursuing future projects and improvements. You may have noticed that we have recently extended the deadline for the discontinuation of the old CMA from October 4th to December 31st. As of December 31st, you will no longer have access to the old CMA.

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:

• CMA Overview
• Accessing the CMA
• How to Use Radius Search
• User Preferences
• Adding Comparables and Making Adjustments
• Creating a CMA Profile
• Customizing your CMA Report
• Entering Subject Property Information

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 “3^rd Party to Transaction” field. As you may know, “3^rd 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 3^rd 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 23^rd, 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 30^th, 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.

Can anyone say “DUH!”?

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Attention all Realtors®

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.

The new, improved CMA report has arrived

The transformed RMLSweb CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) has a brand new look and feel, as well as a new location! In addition to an extensive remodel of CMA, RMLSweb also now contains a Radius Search and enhanced User Preferences. Creating a CMA has never been easier and yet offered so many customizable options to set your CMA apart from the rest!

Highlights of the CMA include:

1) Navigate forwards and backwards without losing data
2) Adding comparables via seven different methods (MLS Numbers, Radius Search, Map Search, Address Search, Advanced Search, MLS Number Search, Saved MLS Numbers)
3) Saving the CMA in progress
4) Printing to PDF, printing to your printer, or e-mail with the touch of a button
5) Reorder your comparables or the pages of your CMA report by dragging and dropping them into the order you desire
6) Incorporate properties that are in different categories (ex: Farms/Ranches + Lots/Lands)
7) Display your recommended price through a graph
8) Customize your report with pages dedicated to Company Information, your Resume, and/or color themes to match your office/team
9) Auto-populate subject property information with Tax ID or previous MLS #

For more information, print out our quick reference guide.

Want a trainer to come out to your office and demonstrate this enhanced functionality? Call our Training Manager, Kerry Meeuwsen at 503-872-8051 or e-mail kerry.m@rmls.com.

Learn more about an area by clicking the links!

Recently, RMLSweb was updated with several new features. One of these features is the ability to view a city or county’s Web page by one simple click of the mouse. In client and agent reports, most city and county names are now links to local Web sites of municipalities for that area.

This can be useful if you have a client who currently lives in Ashland, Oregon, but is interested in buying a home in Portland, Oregon. After performing searches to find an appropriate listing that meets your client’s needs, you can email them a client report and they have the ability to also view the city or county’s Web page for more information.

By looking at the city or county’s Web page, your client can decide if that particular area would be a good fit for their needs. This new feature can also be used by agents who would like to learn more about a particular area in order to educate potential clients.

Take a look at the image below. This listing has links for both the city (Portland) and the county (Multnomah). These links will take the viewer to the official Web site for the city of Portland and to the Multnomah County home page.

How else have you used this new link feature?

Hopefully they get this figured out soon.  I know that, as a data provider and a Mac user, it has annoyed the heck out of me forever that I had to borrow a friend’s Windows machine just to log in to make a required password change.

Read more »

Bout time.  :)

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Mobile is now free for everyone

Now, you will no longer have to pay for RMLSweb Mobile. Want to view listing information but you aren’t in your office? Just login to mobile.rmlsweb.com to access a simplified version of our subscriber-only website designed to be used on mobile devices, allowing you to access MLS information while in the field. With the mobile format, which works on almost all mobile web browsers and smartphones, you can:

• Search by address or MLS#
• Search RMLS™ Roster
• Find properties within a one mile radius of a listing
• E-mail or call other agents via active links

There isn’t a better price than “free”!