iPadding You Wallet?

Saturday will be known as Holy Saturday for some of us, and I'm not referring to Easter Weekend.

This Saturday, the iPad will finally go on sale, and Apple fanatics the country over will be hammering for the holy grail of computing.

But as a real estate professional, should you be in line, too?

Many of us in the industry already use a computer at some level, but will the iPad change the way we use personal computers the way the iPod changed the way we listened to music or the way the iPhone changed what we thought of as a smart phone?

Personally, while I am a Mac user at home, I have my doubts about the iPad. But I won't be so quick to lament the gadget, as so many were want to do when the iPhone first came out. A sample quote from way back in 2007:

“Apple begins selling its revolutionary iPhone this summer and it will mark the end of the string of hits for the company.”

-Todd Sullivan; May 15, 2007

Even now, I can certainly imagine a tech-forward agent getting the most of the iPad, especially when coupled with great time and money-saving online services such as DotLoop. So, we'll see.

What do you think? Will you be buying an iPad this Saturday, or will you just spend the afternoon hiding Easter eggs? Do you think it will be ubiquitous in a year or two?

Friday Farewell - "CSA In The USA"

Earlier this month, my girlfriend and I joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and this past weekend, we had a tour of the facilities. For a few hours a month of volunteer time and a few bucks a week, we'll be able to enjoy fresh, locally grown food every week until next fall.

My taste buds and stomach are smiling at the prospect of receiving fresh, local produce that I had a hand in growing, but the best part is that I'll know exactly where my food came from. In her amazing book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingslover talks about how most of us have no clue where our food actually comes from.

Of course, I'm among those who think that food comes from a well-lit grocery aisle, which is one of the reasons I joined the CSA, but after last weekend's tour, I'm more than ready to get my fingers muddy.

Have any of your joined a CSA? How have your experiences changed your ideas about food?

Apps In The Cradle

DotLoop's Chief Technology Officer, Matt Vorst, handed me his copy of Fast Company this morning and thought I might be interested in the cover article about the smart phone revolution.

The article discusses how kids are becoming more and more in-tuned with technology and starts by detailing the smart phone habits of Eliana and Gemma Singer, who are both three years old.

I found it fascinating, if only because I have a three-year old niece who is just the same and always seems tethered to both her stuffed giraffe toy and some sort of tech toy, as if she's a link between the analog world and the digital abyss.

Of course, the article seems even more timely as today, DotLoop CEO Austin Allison gave a keynote speech at the REtechSouth Conference in Atlanta on the same thing: how today's - and tomorrow's - home buyers are connected more than ever.

Still, a part of me questions whether all of this constant connection is ultimately a good thing, or if staring at a screen from cradle to grave will eventually turn us all into cyborgs. I did find one thing ironic, though: I read the article from the magazine in front of my computer, where the same article was posted. I guess there's still hope after all for not becoming completely sucked into the digital void.

What do you think - are we introducing kids to technology too soon?

How Many Miles Per Gallon Does Your Home Get?

I'm not sure if you heard or not, but this week, the federal government announced a major policy change that will most likely affect every American.

Don't worry, I'm not talking about the health care overhaul - I'll let others debate the merits of that. What I am talking about is the new Housing and Transportation Affordability Index.

Here's the low-down: it used to be that the standard measure of affordability was that housing costs should be no more than 30% of your paycheck. The new standards add in transportation costs - now, the affordability is that less than 45% of your paycheck should go towards housing costs plus transportation costs. This makes sense as, the farther out you go from a metro area, you generally spend less on housing, but more on transportation.

No big deal, right? After all, we have cheap gas and parking is free at just about every Target. But the numbers say otherwise. Using the 30% metric, about 70% of all US housing was "affordable". When you factor in transportation costs and increase the threshold to 45%, the percentage of affordable housing drastically dwindles down to 39%.

The report was done by Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and was discussed this last Tuesday with deputy HUD secretary Ron Sims. Sims observed that knowing transportation costs as well as housing costs would have lessened the amount of defaulted mortgages because homeowners, he said, "did not realize they had a transportation cost burden and a mortgage."

Another goal of the report: enact legislation requiring real estate agents, brokers, and landlords to dislcose the neighborhood transportation costs when marketing a property.

What do you think? Should transportation costs be incorporated into housing costs? Should potential buyers have access to that information?

(Image source: CNT)

Get Smart

My girlfriend wants a smartphone, but I keep telling her that she already has a smart boyfriend with a phone, so isn't that close enough?

But she's a fan of foursquare (I tell her she already has me; she just needs three more) and her old phone isn't making the grade.

Of course, she's not alone. In 2009, smartphone sales grew by over 41% over 2008 numbers and some have gone so far as to say that smartphones have changed their lives.

People are quickly turning their attention to their phones. A new Pew Internet study showed that 33% of adults get their news from their smartphones and a blogger at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas last week noted the lack of netbooks and notebooks amongst the tech-forward crowd who were overwhelmingly reliant on their smartphones. Is this a sign of things to come?

DotLoop will be at REtechSouth in a few days and I'm curious to see how many tech savvy agents there will be texting and accessing the web with their smartphones.

As for my girlfriend, she'll get a smartphone eventually. I just hope that when she does, she doesn't become addicted to it and that I'll still be able to converse with her without having to type a single text message. Real conversation, you know?

Is there an app for that?

Friday Farewell - "Tools of the Human Spirit"

This week, I've been discussing the future broadband. For today's Friday Farewell post, I thought I'd show you just how far we've come. This news clip from 1993 discusses the "revolution" going on in rec rooms that allows people to pass on cooking tips.





It's funny to laugh at now, but consider this: according to this report, there were only 15 million users of the Internet in 1993, a scant amount relative to today. Yet, notice he says it cost about $200 a year (Canadian). That averages out to about $13/month in US dollars. you'd think, with more people paying for the service today, that that price would have decreased. Hmmm...

What Happened To Our Broadband?

On Monday, the FCC announced its new broadband initiative for the next decade. That got me to thinking, because didn't we have a broadband initiative back in the 90s? I could have sworn I remember seeing pictures of then-Vice President Al Gore installing fiber optic cables in schools when I was in middle school.

Telecom Again?

Actually, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 did create a broadband policy and most states paid a total of $320 billion to have a few companies (most notably, AT&T and Verizon) replace old copper wiring with new fiber-optic cables throughout the US. The idea was to then have "open access policies" which would allow other companies to come in and use the infrastructure laid down to foster a competitive marketplace, eventually lowering costs for consumers.

Thanks to some lobbying, that never happened. Look around today, and what you see in almost every major market is not a competitive environment, but rather, a duopoly. The fiber optic cables have not fully been installed as promised and America is 15th in the world when it comes to broadband connectivity.

Who Wants the Competition?

The complexities about how this happened (including lobbying from the telecom industry and former telecom employees being appointed to the FCC) go back more than a decade and are a bit deeper than can be detailed here, but basically, what we now have is a murky area where a public utility (which is to be available statewide) is more or less controlled by a few private companies. Companies that don't want competition.

No Clicks For the Sticks

While this certainly is a concern, what's most alarming is that, unless there's a profit margin to be met, broadband will not be available to communities that are too small or too spread out, even though taxpayers paid AT&T and Verizon billions of dollars to upgrade the Public Switched Telephone Networks, a public utility.

Yet, there are stories of rural communities still using dial-up who have approached AT&T and Verizon and have offered to pay them to tap into their broadband lines to bring high-speed internet to rural communities, only to be denied access.

Verizon has even threatened to stop adding fiber optic cables unless legislation is changed in their favor, a sort of broadband blackmail. And, if you happen to be in a town with limited options and choose AT&T as your provider, they'll suspend your connection if you happen to blog bad things about them. Of course, this is after they increase your rates and before they limit your usage.

Searching For Competition

But there may be some help on the horizon. Last month, Google announced plans to select one city to test its new ISP. Creating an ISP is expensive (hence the open access policies other countries use); while it may fail miserably, but we need competition injected into the telecom industry, or America will continue to pay for sub-par broadband.

Otherwise, we'll have to continue our surrender to the few gatekeepers of the Internet.

We're Number Fifteen! We're Number Fifteen!

Consider this: Slovakia is ahead of the United States. South Korea is also ahead of the United States. Oh don't worry, we still have the bigger military and more cup holders in our cars, but America lags behind these two countries - and 13 others - in terms of Internet speed. Currently, the average download speeds of the Internet within the United States range between 3.9Mbps (Megabits per second) and 5.1Mbps, whereas South Korea leads with average download speeds ranging from 14.6Mbps to 20.4Mbps. That places the United States in 15th place, although even those numbers vary - some say it's as high as 28th. Either way, we're nowhere near the top ten, which where we were (at 10th place) six years ago when President Bush declared that "Tenth is ten spots too low".

Some say that there are reasons for the discrepancy - South Korea is about the size of Indiana and has a greater population density. But Russia is nearly twice as large as the US and has less of a population density and they have speeds faster than America.

The most frustrating part? Americans are paying more for less. In fact, right now, many in South Korea can subscribe to a 100Mbps internet connection for a more expensive $50 a month fee (most average fees are around $20). That's right - 100Mbps - 20 times faster than the speeds available here in America. By 2012, Koreans will receive 1Gbps broadband connections, a full 100x faster than what we currently have.

This is interesting considering that the FCC announced yesterday its 100 Squared Initiative - 100Mbps for 100 million households...by 2020. Get that? Ten years from now, the country that invented the Internet will be where other countries are today.

You may be saying to yourself, who cares? I can watch Hulu just fine. And you're right- most broadband in America today can easily view streaming videos. But, considering that the computer, telephone, and TV are all merging, the current broadband America has won't be able to compete with the rest of the world, who are able to upload large files within minutes versus hours.

So, just how did America get stuck in the slow lane on the Information Superhighway? I'll dive into that tomorrow.

Is Broadband the New Running Water?

Take a think of this: unemployment has been hovering around 10% (underemployment has been even higher - around 17%) for a while. Now, imagine you are either unemployed or underemployed. How would you go about looking for a job? Would you ask your family and friends or perhaps take a look at the local classifieds in the morning paper?

Or, if you're like most of us, would you hop onto your computer and head over to monster.com or careerbuilder.com?

But what if you didn't have access to the Internet?

Last Tuesday, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan discussed the importance of broadband access for all. Arguing that Internet access in the 21st Century should be approached the same way as highways in the 1950s, he recommended bringing broadband to federally-assisted housing. Currently, 77% of the country has access to the Internet, which seems like a lot, until you realize that 87% of South Koreans have access to the Internet. And, like most countries, their speeds are faster.

I for one applaud the effort, but there are naysayers who disagree and think that the Internet is only a toy and not a necessity. But this same argument - that any new technology is not an entitlement - was made about electricity, telephones, and even running water. Would anyone really be willing to say that electricity is not a necessity in a modern American home?

What do you think? Is broadband access a modern necessity?

Friday Farewell - March 12, 2010

With Friday upon us, I thought I'd start a new feature here at The DotLoop Blog: The Farewell Friday Post. I'll leave you with some lingering news story, idea, or maybe some music to think about over the weekend.

With DotLoop having just come back from the Prudential Real Estate Affiliates Conference in Austin, Texas, I've been listening more this week to Bob Schneider, a local Austin musician who has just recently reached more national attention with his song "40 Dogs (Romeo & Juliet)". Bob's been one of my favorite lyricists for years now, and it's exciting to see him get more and more popular. You can listen to some of his tracks here. To give you a taste (no pun intended), here he is performing on the Rachael Ray Show last fall. Enjoy and have a great weekend!





And remember: Keep It Simple.

Jarring Your Senses

This week I've been talking a lot about connectivity; about how everyone finds themselves placing everything they encounter into its own little jar and slapping a label on it. And how, as we start to organize our cupboards, we begin to realize that it's not as easy as it seems.

Here we've been distilling and dividing, separating and sifting, only to find that there were no jars.

Because we finally realize that everything is connected.

And it sounds very Woodstocky, doesn’t it? But I don’t mean connected just in the Avatar Na’vi , kumbaya sense, but in the real, actual trying-to-divide-water kind of sense.

Take technology, for instance.

Years ago, sending something between a Mac and a Windows machine was next to impossible. The “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads want you to believe that it’s still a hassle, but, while some incompatibility still exists, there has been one great equalizer: the Internet.

Windows would love it if the only browser you used was Internet Explorer, and Apple would want you to search the web with Safari. But users are trending towards catch-all browsers like Firefox and Chrome for their 'Net fix.

Likewise, it used to be that you needed a Walkman for your music, a printer to view documents, and your Zack Morris, Gordon Gecko mobile phone to talk while on the go. Once again, the Internet - and the smart phones that were borne of it - made all of these disparate technologies obsolete. The Internet not only connected people, it also connected the technologies people used.

Even the Internet itself can't keep its own websites divorced: Facebook is connected with Twitter, which is connected to YouTube, which is linked to your own blog. And soon, even your computer's hard drive will be impossible to separate from the ether.

Technology is starting to mirror biology - everything feeds off of everything else.

Of course, here at DotLoop, we understand this connection, and by bringing a holistic approach to online transaction management, we are able to seamlessly blend together online forms, electronic signatures, and a custom CRM tool into one secure domain. Everything works together, no jars or cupboards needed.

What Are YOU doing Saturday?

On Tuesday, I had an opportunity to listen to Brad Nix speak on blogtalkradio.com and he had this to say about my personal favorite day of the week: “Nothing defines your local community better than what people do on Saturday.”

He continued:

“Saturday’s the only day where you don’t have to work, and you don’t have to work the next day. Whether it’s going to little league or grilling out with your friends, or taking your wife or girlfriend out on a date, that’s what really goes on in your community.”

My Saturday includes volunteering at InkTank, a local no-profit and attending a friend's birthday party. Taking a look at what is going on here in Cincinnati in a few days – music, parades, art, food, and wine – I have to smile. Looks like I live in a pretty eclectic and cool community. So, to paraphrase Mr. Nix, what are you doing Saturday?

Limestone Lane

I had planned on writing a bit more on connectivity today, but I found this video created last summer and thought it was amazing enough of an idea to share. Luckily, it deals with the connectivity between nature and cities, so it seems appropriate. I think this is riveting, although maybe I'm just a sucker for English accents. If you haven't been to ted.com, I'd recommend taking a look - there are some brilliant ideas out there. Of course, I'd like to think that DotLoop is just one of them.

Separation Anxiety

DotLoop is growing and, with growth comes departments and teams. We have the forms team and the sales team and the marketing team. Each has its own function, of course, but we all work together quite seamlessly, kind of like DotLoop itself.

It's working great here at DotLoop, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how erroneously compartmentalized we have made our world. As a news junkie, I stop by all kinds of news sites and see the same separating tabs: politics, business, entertainment, science and technology, health. Of course lately, everyone - even those not within the industry - are clicking on that other tab: real estate.

But after reading about the TARPs and the DOWs and the NASDAQS, I'm starting to see how silly all of these little categories are. After all, it only took one tab - real estate - to affect every other tab in one way or another.

And now that the housing bubble has burst, it seems more and more clear how interconnected everything really is. The effects of one thing collapsing can and do resonate throughout the rest of the economy not only here in America, but all over the world. A defaulted mortgage in Iowa can cause a farmer in Taiwan to lose his job. Not only are you and your neighbor Jim feeling the effects of this crash, but so are Otto in Germany and Kim-Ly in Vietnam.

If we have learned anything from this financial crisis we've all been trudging through, I hope it's this. Everything is connected. Your loss is your neighbor's loss is the world's loss.

While I understand that this need to categorize and separate is a natural thing to do, I feel that we've gone overboard. We're suffering from separation anxiety, that is, our need to separate and categorize is making us crazy.

So I am calling an end to all of this distilling and dividing. Get rid of the marker that draws lines around us. Pop those barrier bubbles faster than that housing bubble. After all, most times, it's not about black and white, wrong and right, or day and night. It's about the dusk that connects all of us.

Can I get a little kumbaya, here?

Time Is On My Side

As it turns out, not only are humans hardwired to run on a 25-hour day, but with last week's earthquake, we lost even more time. It seems the Chilean earthquake threw off the earth's axis just enough to shorten our day by 0.00000126 seconds. Granted, it will take approximately 2100 years before a one-second delay kicks in, but if you're feeling more harried than usual this week, at least now you know why.



Of course, by using DotLoop instead of running around town gathering signatures and idling in traffic, you could more than easily make up that lost time.

Razing the Roots

Here in DotLoop's home city of Cincinnati, we're having a bit of our own housing crisis. Last week, it was announced that the Gamble House, so named because it was owned by the co-founder of Proctor & Gamble, is about to be razed, because it's cheaper to get rid of it than spend money on repairs and restoration. The house is a local landmark, with gorgeous 19th-Century architecture. As the old adage says, "they don't make 'em like that anymore." But it is in disrepair and is in desperate need of a doctor for Gamble.

But is it really cheaper to raze it than to restore it? Yes and no.

In the short-run, it probably is cheaper to raze than restore. It's the easy and convenient way to do things. In the long-run, though, it will cost more to raze the property than to restore it, and not just financially.

Keeping and restoring an old home as opposed to just destroying it also benefits the community, many of whom have fond memories of it from their childhood. It also helps preserve a piece of history for the city, allowing us to have a benchmark to show where what we once were so that we can see how far we've come (or haven't, so that we can adjust our sails).

Luckily, the community here can see this and are trying to prevent the house from becoming just another empty lot. They see the value of this house beyond the cost of new shingles and elbow grease. I hope that their efforts pay off.

As I've touched upon before, a building - whether it be a home or a commercial property - is more than just an ATM, it's a part of a community. Place matters and buildings most certainly affect how we feel about a place. That's the beauty of architecture.

The owners have every right to raze the house if they want to, but I hope they reconsider. Costs other than financial are at stake. Restoring and re-purposing the Gamble House is one gamble that will pay off for the entire community.

Photo courtesy of cincinnati.com.

I Can't Drive (After 85?)

Exactly one month ago, I wrote about designing communities for the elderly. Just last Friday, I read about a local elderly couple who went to the store and got lost coming home. They spent the next 30 hours driving around trying to find their home, sparking a statewide senior alert that included a helicopter search and some 14,000 phone calls by the police looking for leads.

Luckily, the couple were found safely about 125 miles way, in another state. But others have not fared so well and the question of when should a senior's license should be revoked can provoke heated debate. Indeed, there have been times when my own grandmother has come back from an errand with no recollection on how the dents and scratches on her car's bumper got there.

Of course, like all age groups, there are always good and bad drivers, and there are many very capable senior citizens who drive better than those half their age. This post is in no way designed to poke fun at elderly drivers, but rather, to bring to light some of the implications of aging drivers.

In a country where cars symbolize freedom, we often forget that driving is a privilege and not a right. The question is further exacerbated when you factor in the fact that most communities in America are not pedestrian-friendly and require a car to get around. As the driver in the opening story said, "If they're going to take my license away from me, they might as well put me in an institution."

From a housing perspective, the notion of zoning, with dedicated residential and commercial sectors of a town distinctly separated, may not be the best solution in the long run. It's one thing to pack up the kids and take the minivan to the grocery store across town once a week when you're younger and mobile, but it's quite another to get in your car and make that same trek when you're in your eighties and suffer from glaucoma. You're not only risking your own safety, but the safety of other drivers as well. During the 1950s, when the nation's interstate and suburb systems were designed, the average life expectancy was around 68 years old. The current rate tacks on an additional ten years, and future generations may live even longer. Viable transportation options are needed to allow seniors to keep their freedom without sacrificing their (or others') safety, especially when you consider that after age 85, driver fatality rates are nearly four times higher than that of teens.

I live in a pretty eclectic neighborhood, where there's a good mix between young and old, and I joke about how every driver is frustrated when getting around the neighborhood - the young drivers think the old drivers drive too slow, and the old drivers think the young drivers need to slow down. And, while it's easy to jest about how slow grandpa drives, it's a lot harder to tell him that he can no longer drive. Especially when his neighborhood is paved with roads and driving is the only way he knows how to get around town.

So, what's the solution? Public transportation and walkable communities are a good place to start. Mix-use development, where the grocery store is a part of a neighborhood instead of placed on the outskirts of a sub-division is also a viable option.

Either way, with the aging population reaching its peak soon, we'll eventually have to have a conversation about when people should give up their car keys.