Gregg Petch, our CIO has been elected to the RESO Board of Directors. RESO — Real Estate Standards Organization — is the newly formed governing body for the RETS standard.
For those interested here is the complete Board of Directors:
Often seen as the perfect real estate lens, the wide-angle lens allows the photographer to get the most room into a photo as possible. They are easy to use, but also easy to use wrong.
Probably the biggest issue I see with the use of wide angle lenses is the problem of “converging perspective.” Converging perspective is the term for the exaggerated sense of perspective created by the wide angle lens.
This fireplace picture that we have used in other lessons shows a classic example of converging perspective. Note how the horizontal lines of the top and bottom of the fireplace are exaggerated. It just doesn’t look right. Here is another example with vertical lines.
There are two ways, one before the picture is taken, and one after.
Before you take the picture.
This fix is simple. To fix the converging vertical lines. make sure the that camera is perpendicular to the floor. In other words, the back of the camera should be perfectly straight up and down. Any upward or downward tilt to the camera will exaggerate those vertical lines. Along the same lines, to fix the converging horizontal lines, try to keep the camera as parallel to the wall as you can. Converging horizontal lines is generally a lot more forgiving to your eye than the vertical lines.
After you take the picture.
Making changes after you take the picture takes a little more effort, and a little more software. In Larry’s document I link to above he shows you how to fix those lines using a Adobe Photoshop. In our next post in this series, I’ll show you how to do it for free. (Hint, download and install the Gimp — the free Image manipulation program.)
 The Q3, 2007 MRIS Economic and Market Watch Report is now posted on the MRIS Web site. Click here: http://www.mris.com/reports/marketreport/ . You’ll see a rather ominous copyright stating that you can’t reproduce the material, but that does NOT apply to MRIS subscribers. Subscribers have permission to reproduce the info for their own marketing materials, newsletters, etc. You just have to credit MRIS and NAR for the source material. (We had NAR alter that copyright language originally, but they snuck the old one back in. We’ll get it straightened out.)
Anyway, this quarterly report is always worth a careful look, and this edition is, in particular. You’ll see the usual statistics according to ZIP Code, but a new Long View report has been added by Lawrence Yun, Vice President , NAR Research, and it’s a must read. Yun shares a great example of why real estate is still a winner as a long-term investment. “Due to leveraging, $10,000 used for a down payment on an average priced U.S. home at an appreciation rate of just 5% will return $110,000 after ten years.” Here’s how that investment compares to $10,000 invested in the stock market with 10% annual appreciation. The stock investment would result in only $23,600!!! Now, that’s one to share with your clients.
The Trends report is good read, too. NAR Economist Ken Fears points out that the number of days between the Contract Date and the Sale Date rose 12.1% during the first quarter. Read his report and you’ll find out exactly what that means.
The thing that makes these reports so appealing is that they give you knowledge you can use, in the right doses. They don’t go on for days; they’re short and worthwhile. Even if you only spend 15 minutes on it, you’ll walk away with something worthwhile.
You may have heard the phrase “Eat your own dogfood“. This originally was attributed to some engineers at Microsoft, and it essentially means that before you unleash a product or change on your customers, then you should subject yourself to it first.
We’ve been doing that for some time here at MRIS. Many of our staff have been using the Secure Login token for some time, and today, all our staff have switched over to the token based login.
Mary Jo and I will be blogging our experiences with the token, and will try to offer insight and tips whenever we can.
When you get your token, the first thing you’ll need to do is “enroll your token”. This is a simple operation that associates the token with your user id. In the process you’ll be changing your password from whatever it is currently to a combination of a 4 digit PIN (similar to your ATM pin, that you keep secret) and a 6 character one-time-use password that you get when pressing the button on your token.
I thought I would record the enrollment process when I enrolled my token this morning. As you’ll see, the process of activation is quick and easy, it only takes a minute, and you’ll only have to do it once.
UPDATE: In the video I say that the PIN needs 3 different digits, and that is not quite accurate. For your PIN the rule is that no digit can appear three times, so 3111 is not allowed, but 3131 would be allowed.
I know it’ll take some getting used to, I’m sure there will be some tribulation on the way, but we really want to make this necessary switch-over as easy and painless as we can.
I hope you found the “Perfecting your Listing Photos” series helpful. I just wanted to create one post for anyone who visits later that has the entire series in one convenient playlist.
In this video you’ll see how to select your favorite photos that you adjusted in the last lesson. These photos are resized and exported to a new folder. By resizing you’ll ensure that your photos will upload quickly and look great.
In the video you’ll see how to resize your photos to a smaller size that will make uploading to Keystone much faster. If you routinely use Picasa to adjust and edit your photos, this technique will work great.
On the other hand, if you don’t use Picasa, or just want to resize a batch of photos you might also be interested in an earlier lesson showing how to resize in a batch using VSO Image Resizer. I should emphasize that you DO NOT need to use both programs. Just use whichever feels more comfortable to you. Personally, I use Picasa for nearly everything so my work stays in one place and I only have to learn one program.
In previous lessons, we’ve created a basic workflow that should get you good-looking and quick to upload photos. Now we’ll turn our attention to a few techniques to take better pictures, and to fix common problems with photos.
Today’s video shows a quick way to correct the color of a listing photo if the colors look a little “off” due to an incorrect white balance setting.
For the first time in years, I did not attend the NAR conference, this time in Las Vegas. That’s OK though because I’ve been keeping up with the action over at the NAR Updates blog, created just for this conference. There are also some nice twitter feeds over there to stay up to the minute.
Got any other resources for keeping up with the conference? Let me know in the comments.
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Today, the rubber meets the road. We’ll take a look at how to adjust those photos so that they look great when you upload them.
We’re going to see three particular sections at work: Tuning, Straightening, and Sharpening. Tuning is used to make sure that your pictures are bright enough in Keystone, Straightening allows up to make sure the photos are nice and level. After making those two adjustments, we’ll sharpen them to make sure the detail pops out.
By the way, the techniques demonstrated here will also work great on any other snapshots you take.
Next we’ll look at selecting the right photos for upload.
Every once in a while you get a perfect example of how the MLS is NOT supposed to be used. This darling image was posted as the “Exterior Main” image on a listing. I’m sure I don’t have to review the many reasons why this type of image is not appropriate for the MLS in any circumstance, do I? I have to believe it is a prank played on the unsuspecting listing agent. Foul play or not, this just ain’t right.
In any case, the listing agent has been contacted to correct the image.
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