The Lure of Property Auctions

In the not so distant past, hard to sell properties ended on the rental market. Now they’re more likely to endat auction. Just last month, two New York City real estate executives launched Bid on the City to auction residential and commercial properties.

The founders, Albert Feinstein and Vlad Sapozhnikov, have high hopes for the site. “It’s going to be huge,” Feinstein said. The auction process “speeds the process, makes it more convenient and accomplishes the objective of selling the property.”

Challenging Multifamily Stereotypes

The National Multi Housing Council is turning to technology to fight stereotypes about apartments and the people who live in them. It created this PowerPoint, based on a keynote speech NMHC President Doug Bibby made before the Federal Reserve Board of Governors last month.

The NMHC calls it a “powerful advocacy tool” designed to make four key points:

1. America wants rental housing.
2. America needs rental housing.
3. Renters—be they affordable renters or lifestyle renters—are not second-class citizens.
4. There is a growing disconnect between America’s housing needs and its current housing policy.

“A number of macro factors are converging to make rental housing not only desirable, but necessary,” the NMHC states. “ They include a  projected 33 percent surge in population by 2030, a worsening affordable housing shortage and a growing desire to accommodate our population growth in a fiscally and environmentally sustainable manner.”

Numbers Game

If you want to buy or lease real estate, find a broker. But if you just want to get a full picture of the real estate in a specific geographic area, then find the census enumerator that worked the block.

Enumerators walk from property to property, block by block, verifying addresses and sorting residential from commercial properties. They count apartment units, look for hidden units and conclude, in some cases, if a seemingly uninhabitable space is really some body’s home.

It’s a necessary, though time consuming job that legions of temporary workers perform nationwide every 10 years, in advance of the Decennial Census.

The task has remained virtually unchanged since the first US census in 1790. But the tools used to perform it have changed significantly–and the history of those changes effectively mirror the history of technological change.

When the first census was taken, slightly more than a year after George Washington became the nation’s first President, US marshals supervised assistants appointed to collect the data. The enumerators had no printed data sheets to guide them and had to provide their own supplies, including paper and pencils.

More than two centuries later, enumerators are using hand-held computers (HCCs) and GPS to plot, record and update the information on every possible living space in a significantly larger United States. It’s not the most sophisticated technology: the HCCs have little computing power. They’re slow and prone to intermittent freezes. As for the GPS, enumerators concur it’s not the best geographic  positioning system on the market.

Even with its problems and glitches, the technology represents a huge advance over the days when every piece of data was collected by hand. It helps standardize the data and make it somewhat more reliable.

It’s useful…but it’s no substitute for the enumerators themselves. They still have to walk from property or property, counting, evaluating and using their intuition as much as their technology. It confirms what everyone in real estate already knows: technology is only as good as the judgment of those who use it.

Human Unpredictability

Humans aren’t rational. So why should financial theories assume that they are? That’s the question writer Chelsea Wald posed in Crazy Money, in the Dec. 12, 2008 issue of Science. It’s a reasonable question, she explains.

Even the experts seem bewildered by the current economic crisis. Quantitative analysts (quants)–the whiz-kid financial engineers whose algorithms have dominated Wall Street trading in recent years–have watched those algorithms fail. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan acknowledged in October that there was “a flaw in the model that I perceived … defines how the world works.”

Stopping Mobile Spam

Commercial real estate professionals love their smartphones…and so, apparently, do spammers.  “The convergence of unlimited messaging plans, enhanced capabilities on mobile devices and the lack of messaging security at many carriers create a perfect opportunity for mobile spammers,” said Jamie de Guerre, chief technology officer at Cloudmark, a company that markets SMS security to wireless  carriers.

A recent Nielsen Mobile report estimates the  typical US  mobile subscriber sends and receives more SMS text messages than phone calls. In the second quarter of 2008,for instance, the report said there  was a  450 percent increase in text messages over the same period in 2006.

Online Property Scam Raises Questions

Technology has changed the way properties are bought and sold. But it’s also created a world of opportunity for fraud and scams. Just recently, the National Association of Realtors warned that its name is being used as part of a property rental scheme.