Earlier today, a client emailed my husband Mike about a great deal on a red Mercedes 500 SL convertible available on eBay. It was a 2004 model with only 7000 miles and offered a three-year warranty to boot. Located in Florida, this two-seater beckoned with a red price tag of around $28,000.

Ever the bargain hunter, Mike grabbed the San Diego Union Tribune’s Sunday classified section for cars, expecting to search through at least three pages for comparable sales.

It turned out be to a very short search because there was less than a quarter-page for all used cars in San Diego.

I am not particularly interested in red convertibles, but the slim number of classified ads in San Diego’s daily newspaper DID catch my attention.

We have all heard that the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and other august print publications are on the ropes. The cause could only be financial, and financial resources are provided primarily by (1) Advertisers and (2) Subscribers (the number of which determine what advertisers pay for advertising).

I’ve been following these stories because I have a natural interest (because of background and training) in journalistic business–and also have a keen and active interest in how information (and advertising) is transmitted via the internet.

And it seems the latter may have overtaken the former. E-Bay and Craigslist are trampling traditional media.

Yesterday morning, I had a call from a Nevada broker asking if we had an agent fluent in Chinese who could help some Chinese investors seeking property in La Jolla.  Hmmm….we have agents who speak Spanish, Polish, Russian and Farsi, but none who were fluent in Chinese.

The solution was simple.

I clicked to Craigslist, immediately placed and paid for an ad for a Chinese-fluent real estate agent–and serendipity took over. Within hours, we had a perfect response.

This morning Shumei Tao, a very bright and talented real estate agent, joined our company, San Diego Previews Real Estate.  She is fluent in not only Mandarin, but Taiwanese, Cantonese–and the Internet. She too thought it serendipitous to find an internet ad that addressed her specific qualifications.

And it was only this evening as I looked at the sparse classified ads in the newspaper that I realized yesterday morning’s  instinctive reaction to a need: Head over to Craigslist and have the ad online within minutes. And then today, a Florida client sends not a classified ad, but an eBay listing for an automobile.

And then I stop to wonder: When was the last time I scanned the newspaper classified ads for…anything?

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Post tags: classified ads, craigslist, ebay, newspaper, san diego real estate, san diego union tribune

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It of course answers endless questions and sends curious clients my way, but also handles my email, documents, maps, spreadsheets, instant chat, and more. And when I want to check traffic conditions, I can do it with another Google real time mapping application on the Blackberry.

Just when I have to count both fingers and toes to list all the very cool Google applications, they surprise us with another:

GOOGLE REAL TIME STOCK QUOTES

Now, we can all get real time stock quotes and financial news about our favorite stocks. No more delayed quotes from Yahoo or other financial sites. If Google had any shortcoming, it has been in the financial arena. For stock quotes and financial news, son and sometimes-trader Scott has always championed Yahoo Financial News for quick quotes and relevant company news.

No more. When life moves quickly (and it does), consider the importance of twenty minutes–and all the things that can happen in that short time frame.

Yahoo! to Google (and a thousand balloons) for transporting real time stock quotes from the traders to the people. This is major financial news–and one I’ll also be able to put on my Blackberry.

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I attended the Inman Connect event in San Francisco last year and met lots of people I knew only from the real estate blogging world–and others who would become good friends.

Could I resist missing this event, where we can peer over the bloody edge of the envelope and see what’s in store not only for the real estate market, but in the technologies that serve and propel this economic sector?

Not a chance!

I am already calling real estate blogging buddies around the country to see if we can connect at the Connect this summer. The event will be held at the Palace Hotel–where we will be able to peer over the bloody edge of the real estate technology envelope, go to beer blogging events, and take lots of photos.
This may have little to do with Luxury Real Estate, but I hope you enjoy this rare hippie footage with Scott McKenzie singing that classic “If You Come to San Francisco.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: blogger, blogging, connect, inman, luxury, market, real estate, san diego, san francisco, technologies

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Deepest apologies to those of you who were unable to access Luxury Home Digest this past week.

It seems we were the victim of a malevolent hacking attack last Sunday night, whereby all of our content was deleted–on not only Luxury Home Digest, but San Diego Previews as well. Thanks to the tireless work of blogging gurus at the Real Estate Tomato, we have been able to restore most of our material.

And thanks to those who brought this site and our San Diego real estate blogsite down, I am now musing about the consequences for such actions.

Is attacking a website and deleting its content a crime? And if more than one attacker, a conspiracy?

Could such activity constitute a “restraint of trade” as defined by the Federal Trade Commission? Google definitions, as usual, provide some clues:

1. Descriptive of unreasonable acts or contracts which prevent a person from carrying on, or engaging in, their profession.
www.aapa.org/manual/judicial/glossary.html

2. Combinations, contracts, or other oral or written arrangements designed to establish a monopoly position, impede competition, fix prices, or prevent entry by potential rivals. …
www.itcdonline.com/introduction/glossary2_q-z.html

3. Monopolies, combinations, and contracts that impede free competition.
www.crfonline.org/orc/glossary/r.html

4. Any act that tends to prevent free competition in business
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

5. Restraint of trade is a restriction on a person’s freedom to conduct business in a specified or unspecified location for a specified or unspecified length of time. Such restrictions are normally enacted by contracts. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint of trade

Yes, our San Diego real estate business was impeded, and we were prevented from carrying on in our profession in a normal manner. Clients were unable to search for San Diego properties on our sites and we were blocked from our online business for several days. Searchers for luxury home news were certainly forced to go elsewhere when we were offline.

And if restraint of trade is “any act that tends to prevent free competition in business,” or places “a restriction on a person’s freedom to conduct business in a specified or unspecified location for a specified or unspecified length of time,” then restraint of trade is what I will politely and publicly call last Sunday night’s massacre.

Under my breath, though, other expletives words and descriptions are uttered.…

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Post tags: blog, blogging, blogs, crime, destruction, hacking, homes, luxury, news, real estate, san diego, site, website

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Want to know what keeps me terrorized at night?

Database management. I am in an urgent race against time–and my nightmare is one that haunts major corporations throughout the world– from retailers to brokerage firms to telecoms to the U.S. Government itself.

In our San Diego real estate practice, I have until December 30 to migrate several hundred clients and their specific and detailed property requests over to another improved database program that will continue to email the same meaningful information they are now receiving. You see, most of us are hobbling along with databases that are not compatible (because they are on different platforms with different vendors) and refuse to speak or communicate with each other. It is also next to impossible to migrate the detailed information from one vendor to another because of proprietary programming. The unpleasant alternative is to do it by hand. In our situation, we have accumulated client information from one source (that was started eight years ago), that is quite separate from real estate client information that has accumulated for the past five years on another vendor’s platform. The problem has now grown to nine distinct databases with detailed information that cannot be migrated from one to another because each database collects different types of volunteered information from web and blogsite visitors–and stores that data on proprietary systems.

Our goal is to condense this information onto a meaningful program that is retrievable and migratable from one system to another.

If our real estate practice operated at the big-time enterprise level, I would be calling ANTs Software today. ANTs now offers the solution for database consolidation, with their ANTs Compatibility Server (ACS). It is a plug-in which would allow Oracle databases to migrate IBM’s DB2, or for Sybase to migrate to Microsoft, or for Oracle to migrate to Sybase–or whatever combinations are possible therein.

Compatiblity between databases has become an enormous issue in computing of all sorts because just like me and on a much larger scale, governments and corporations usually have old legacy database programs that cannot be migrated to other systems without enormous effort and expense. That is why the ANTs Compatibiity Server is such whiz-bang technology. It is hoped that solutions such as what ACS has to offer the big guys, may eventually filter down to smaller users such as myself.

It’s only a dream, but how great would it be if ANTs’ database miracle–or something like it–could be installed on my computer before December 30? The clock is painfully ticking….

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Rumors and gossip are are swirling around a possible Google and GoDaddy marriage.

It seems about two years ago, Google became accredited as a domain name registrar. Meanwhile, GoDaddy, the worlds largest domain registrar, has been busy filing patent applications for search, VOIP and other technologies that would make it an attractive buy to acquisition-hungry Google.

A few of GoDaddys recent patents would help propel one of Web 3.0s suggested features: Online reputation. Popular eweek says that GoDaddys search results could be filtered and sorted according to the œreputation score of a domain name or that domain name owners reputation.

That should be of interest and concern to all website owners or business bloggers and a relief to those seeking meaningful search results.

When asked about a buyout, GoDaddys CEO Bob Parsons is coy, saying hed like to comment, but couldnt. He also acknowledged to eweek that Google makes a lot of money from parked domains that serve as billboards for paid advertising links. Google, on the other hand, is more circumspect, but acknowledges that GoDaddy is not only a valued partner, but has features that blend nicely with Google Apps features that allow domain registrars to get their online business up and running right away.

On a final note, I have to smile and chuckle just a bit when I think about the now-noticeable percentage of my work week that is spent feeding the Google Monster. It was never an intention, but is something that crept into my life and has somehow became a daily utility.

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