One of my more favorite days of the year is almost here.  I am talking about BLACK FRIDAY (Cyber Monday is a close second).  I'll be out with all the other crazies at 5am this Friday.  So in honor of this great day, I thought I would veer off my usual subject of real estate and list some of my personal favorite gadgets and technology of 2008 to help with gift ideas.  If anyone wants to add to the list, please leave a comment!  Would be cool to get a good list of ideas going.

iFlip camera - Part camera, part cam corder.  Takes great point and shot pictures, and such an easy way to get into video.  The price on these has really fallen (they even have a pink one now) to around the $129 mark.  The camera has a USB built right in to allow for easy upload to a computer and to YouTube- and it now comes in pink!

External Hard Drive - I know this isn't a particular sexy gift, but take it from someone who totally crashed her computer twice this year, it is good to have when you need.  Cost has really fallen on these too, so it is a pretty cheap insurance policy to protect your data and pictures. 

Archos- This little less-known device is great for someone who travels a lot.  It functions much like any other portable music player.  But a big differentiater here is that you can hook this up to your TV and it performs like a DVR, taping shows right on to the device for offline viewing.  The device is little bigger than iPods, but smaller than the portable DVD players.  Great for long airplane rides, as you can upload your favorite shows and movies. 

Subscription to PhoneTag- I am pretty quick on responding to email, but I am not a phone person and am admittedly terrible to responding to voice mail, so this service has been a god send to me.  For a small fee it will transcribe all your voice mails into emails.  This allows me to respond to voice mails via email, when possible, even when in meetings.  It is about $10 a month, I get so few VMs that I do the .35 cent per message plan.   

Monster Cable- Seems like we are always hooking our computer or iPod up to our speakers to play thru the house or on our patio and this simple cable let you do that without buying a separate iPod speaker device.  Cheap way to let others enjoy your iPod selections.

Polar Watch- This watch is AWESOME for anyone who likes to work out, and especially for those who are into more competitive sports. There are a lot of features on this watch, but my two favorite are the heart rate monitor which helps you stay in the right heart rate zone and keep an eye on your heart rate in races.  I also love the calorie counter, you can set it to display how many calories you are burning based on your heart rate and pre-entered information. 

Electric Blanket- I live in Chicago, do I need to say more?  I have a electric blanket on my bed and an electric throw for watching tv.  I also love the space heater I have in my office.  Guess I am a fan of anthing that gives off heat! 

Sprinkler Timer for Garden- I got this because when I am gone for more that two days, my garden suffers.  But I found that I loved having it, even when I was home.  Because of the regular watering my garden got, I had one of the most lush gardens ever this summer.  I buried a soaker hose and hooked it up to this timer.

iPod- This one is pretty obvious, but I do love my iPod.  One cool thing I wanted to mention here was that the Apple store is doing free engraving on any iPods ordered from them.  I have had this done with my company name on it and used it for a trade show give away.  The engraving is very subtle, but a nice touch.

Roomba- My husband told me he bought one of these and I said- you bought what?  No way that will work.  THIS THING IS AWESOME and I am asking for an upgraded one this Christmas.  We have hardwoods and carpet and it works great on both, but is especially good on hardwoods.  I am allergic to dust, so this thing is great as it gets in areas you usually can't reach like under furniture.  I believe this has helped my sneezing.  It doesn't do as good as manual scrub, but I find myself vaccumimg more often because it is so easy, so it does keep my home cleaner. Two models to consider are the 415 or 530.  

A friendly commenter noted on my blog today that it had been a few weeks since my last post. Yicks- sorry! I attending the NAR annual convention two weeks ago and was rarely at my computer (note to self- learn how to submit a mobile post) and then I have spent the last week playing catch up.

I usually come back from the convention full of ideas and with pages of blog topic ideas. But this year I mostly confined to our trade booth, so unfortunately I didn't get to attend a single session (except for the one where Zillow was on the panel). So all I have to write about this year is what I learned in the confines of our booth- which was actually quite a lot!

One thing I was surprised to learn was how many Realtors didn't know that their listings were already appearing on Zillow. When they didn't know, it was usually because a virtual tour company or website developer or media company was submitting on their behalf. When you use these types of service providers, make sure you ask everywhere they are sending your listings. Unfortunately some don't send good communication out each time their syndication list gets updated. If you ever wonder who is the source of your listing info on the site, look in the contact info area and you will see the company.

We got a lot of questions about the accuracy of the Zestimate at the booth and we had some good conversations around this topic. One of the things that Realtors constantly were glad to learn is that we are very transparent about our accuracy rates and actually publish them on the site. At the bottom of page, there is a link "Zestimate Value & Accuracy". Clicking here will take you to a page that lists out by county, how accurate we are. This is a great tool to use when people have an inaccurate idea of what the Zestimate actually represents.

There were some questions about our recent press release that we had dropped all of our broker licenses (except in TX and WA). Overall, people were happy about this, and further proved that we have no desire to get in the transaction business. Spencer was there, and his insight on it way- if I had known this was such a big issue to folks, we should have dropped the licenses a long time ago. We did it mostly as a cost savings measure, but it seems to have also been a good PR move.

Finally, I got a lot questions about customer service. What if I see something wrong on the site, or the listing is expired, or it has the wrong listing agent? The best thing to do is to ‘flag' the listing. Here you can tell us what is wrong and it immediately gets sent to our customer service team for investigation. Doing this is just like calling or sending us an email. It will get into the right hands if there is indeed something that needs to be corrected.

Thank you to all who stopped by the booth to say hi. We heard a lot of great testimonials, including this one from Cindy in Flint, MI.

The big day is finally here! I got to my polling place at 5:50am and was third in line. Glad I am an early riser because the line was growing fast. It was so cool to see all the people in my neighborhood out walking to the polls, out doing something together.

 1st Ward,

 Chicago, IL

I heard something funny yesterday on the news, a commenter said "the only reason we have elections is to see if the polls were right".

So in that spirit, here are some interesting tidbits a recent Zillow poll found about the candiates and their relation to real estate.  Homeowners were asked who they were going to vote for in the presidential election, based on that, here’s what we found:

- Half (50%) of McCain voters believe their own home’s value has decreased over the past year, 18% think the value has remained steady, and 32% think their home’s value has increased.

- More than half (56%) of Obama voters believe their own home’s value has decreased over the past year. 16% think the value has remained steady, and 28% think their home’s value has increased.

- 22% of McCain voters believe their home’s value will increase in the coming 6 months, while 42% believe it will stay the same, and 36% believe their home’s value will decrease.

- Among planned Obama voters, 19% think their home’s value will increase, 37% think it will stay the same, and 44% think it will decrease.

Happy Voting!

Don't forgot to pick up your freebies these places are offering today to voters- Starbucks is offering a free cup of coffee, Krispy Kreme is giving away star-shaped doughnuts and Ben and Jerry's is offering a free scoop of ice cream.  Coffee, doughnuts and ice cream- that's my kind of meal!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my home for sale on Zillow.  This is the only place I posted it, I did not put it in the MLS or on any other website.  Apparently my name got placed on a For Sale By Owner list, and to date I have received at least 15 calls from Realtors. 

I do not mind the calls themselves, I totally understand that this is a method Realtors use to get business.  But let me tell what I do mind.  (My point of posting this is not to be mean, but give a homeowner's point of view, and hopefully this will help with calling techniques)

- About 13 of the calls started with the person asking "if you were to sell, where would you move?".  Some people even blurted out this question before saying hello (seriously).  Because I heard this line so many times, it sounded very scripted and eventually just sounded like a canned sales pitch or the person was reading off a list of question supplied by the list service. 

- Not one person has emailed me (my preferred method of communication) or even mailed me any literature.  I assume this is because you would have actually had to go to Zillow to do this, as the email address wasn't supplied on the provided list.  Had anyone done this, they would have stood out, at least a little. 

- I told every person that called, that I was a Realtor.  In IL you are required to say 'agent owned' in your home's marketing , no matter whether you are selling thru your brokerage or not, which I clearly stated in my marketing text on Zillow.  This was news to every single person that called.  In fact one person literally yelled at me for being not stating this (I had).  I told everyone that Zillow was the only place I had posted my home, only one person was even familiar with this site.  All this said was that no one had actually researched my home online and they were just calling down a list. 

- No one gave me any sort of information that was interesting about themselves or my neighborhood or my house.  No stats, no personal bio as to why I should use them.  I would have liked to hear something like "I sold a home three blocks down from you a few months ago" or "I was just in your neighborhood with buyers last weekend" or "oh, I love that (store/restaurant/park) near your home".  Something interesting and personal to get the conversation going would have been nice.

- ONE person said "I am working with some out of town buyers this weekend and I would love to show them your home, can I come preview it".  I know from seminars that this is a technique taught, but maybe he was serious, I'll listen.  I told him I too was a Realtor, but I would happily show him my home.  He ended by saying he'll call me next week to set up a time for the buyers to come by.  He never called, he didn't have buyers.  I felt lied to.   

- Another person called (opening with the line in bullet one) and the conversation turned toward price.  Your home is overpriced she said.  I know I said, I am not aggressively selling.  She then preceded to very snappily tell me how it would never sell at this price and basically made me feel stupid for trying. 

- One person opened with the statement that he was conducting a For Sale By Owner survey.  I huge weakness for surveys, so sure, I would love to participate.  Guess what, it wasn't a survey... sales pitch of questions asked from a list.  The survey ended around the time that I told him I too was a Realtor.  To his credit, he then shifted and asked if I knew of anyone that might be in the market.  This was good, but here is what he asked-  Do you know anyone looking to buy in the next 7-10 days?  Hmmm, I don't think I'll ever know someone who will buy a home in 10 days.  That's a pretty short window I said.  His answer was, I don't really care about people who are looking within the next 2 years, that could be anyone.  (my translation, I don't plan on being in the business two years from now).   Further, why would I refer to you?  I don't know anything about you (he hadn't even given me his name).

I have more, but I'll stop because this post is getting long.  Point is, that not a single call I got would have made me list with anyone who tried.  Some people were flat out rude to me.  Others were very nice, but you could tell they were reading off a script and the minute they went off the script, the uncertainty of what to say next really came thru in their voice.  Others just sounded clueless the whole time we were talking. 

If you are going to work from a list, I think you could get so much further if you spend a little time researching the homeowner's situation.  Of course you won't be able to bang through a list as fast, but I believe the quality of the call will be much higher and hopefully results in a higher closing percentage. 

My overall experience of getting calls was very eye opening as to how the general public is treated by real estate professionals, and it was generally not good.  I hope this post helps people who call For Sale By Owners to up the quality of the conversation they are having as they are also representing the industry as a whole with each call.