In one of my earliest posts, I mentioned some good real estate sites where you can find a complete list of every property on the market. I gave realtor.com top marks as the best site out there.
While that endorsement hasn't changed, there's another good site I can now recommend: remax.com.
A few weeks ago, remax.com began posting nearly all west-central Illinois properties currently for sale through agents. (I say "nearly all" with a twinge of regret, but more on that in a second.)
Visit remax.com and, at the main welcome page, you'll see several blank boxes that let you type in your search fields. Once you hit enter, you immediately can begin viewing properties.
The best thing about this system? You can easily email us about any property you see -- even if it's listed by another office! (Realtor.com doesn't allow things to work quite this way; an average email sent in that system is routed directly to the agent who has the listing.)
The downside to remax.com? You'll only see listings by real estate offices that have agreed to share their listings with third-party websites. In computer geek talk, we call this Internet Data Exchange (IDX), which means an office has granted legal permission for other companies to publish the information.
Our office is very pro-IDX. We give anyone with a website permission to publish our listings. Our reasoning is simple: Sellers hire us to market their homes, so the greater the number of websites where we publish our information, the greater the number of consumer eyes that'll see that information. To understand the power of this idea, consider the opposite approach: How happy would you be if all your real estate agent did was take your home's information and stick it in a desk drawer?
Right now there are six local offices that have agreed to IDX:
* Areawide Real Estate.
* Coldwell Banker Four Seasons-American Dream.
* Curtis Appraisal and Real Estate.
* Key Realtors.
* Nye Bouslog Agency.
* RE/MAX Unified Brokers (us).
You'll find listings by all six of these offices on remax.com.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Definitions, please
One of the things I like about practicing real estate is that it lets me enjoy some of the best aspects of my old job -- as a teacher. Explaining things (and, with luck, being a little helpful in the process) can be a fun gig.
Say, for example, that you see some titles after an agent's name and wonder how qualified this person really is. So how about some definitions?
Some basics:
real estate agent - Simply means the person is licensed to sell real estate. Doesn't tell you anything more specific about how much training he or she has.
salesperson - In Illinois, this person has passed a 45-hour classroom course. But this person can't own a real estate office. (You need a broker's license for that.)
broker - In Illinois, this person has passed the 45-hour salesperson course and the 75-hour broker course. This person can own a real estate office.
Realtor - A real estate agent who has paid dues to join the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the largest trade group of real estate agents. Only agents who have paid NAR dues can call themselves Realtors. (That's why you'll often see the word "Realtor" accompanied by a symbol indicating a registered trademark; NAR owns the term.)
Say, for example, that you see some titles after an agent's name and wonder how qualified this person really is. So how about some definitions?
Some basics:
real estate agent - Simply means the person is licensed to sell real estate. Doesn't tell you anything more specific about how much training he or she has.
salesperson - In Illinois, this person has passed a 45-hour classroom course. But this person can't own a real estate office. (You need a broker's license for that.)
broker - In Illinois, this person has passed the 45-hour salesperson course and the 75-hour broker course. This person can own a real estate office.
Realtor - A real estate agent who has paid dues to join the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the largest trade group of real estate agents. Only agents who have paid NAR dues can call themselves Realtors. (That's why you'll often see the word "Realtor" accompanied by a symbol indicating a registered trademark; NAR owns the term.)
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Links to school profiles, report cards
If you're investigating school districts -- whether in west-central Illinois or anywhere else in the state -- you might want to visit some websites that compile school performance data.
Start by going here, where you can read a letter from our governor. The letter gives you overview of how the state organizes school district information, then provides you with two links.
The first, the Illinois School Profile, gives you just the highlights of a school -- the attendance rate, average class size, and district spending. You can also determine whether the school has been making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the guidelines set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act.
But if you want even more exhaustive analysis of a school -- and the link mentioned above doesn't satisfy you -- you can also check out the more thorough Report Cards. There, you can do extensive quantitative analysis of how students performed in different subject areas, as well as within different ethnic and socio-economic groups. (Call me cynical, but I have deep concerns about this ethnic and socio-economic data being included, largely because I think the people who care about this information the most are the same people most likely to exploit it for their own benefit.)
Just as universities don't use ACT scores as the sole measurements for deciding whether students should be admitted, parents shouldn't use these profiles and reports as the only means of choosing a school. The information in the reports gives a lot of data, but there's a lot missing, too. What about student evaluations of teachers, for example? Or feedback from parents? Or (best of all) how about some comments by veteran teachers, the sort forming the nucleus of any school's teaching staff, who have the best historical understanding of where the district's been and where it's headed?
Of course, you can't put some of that stuff down in numbers form, the way the profiles and reports do. But that's what I'd like to see, at least to complement the data already there. End of rant.
Start by going here, where you can read a letter from our governor. The letter gives you overview of how the state organizes school district information, then provides you with two links.
The first, the Illinois School Profile, gives you just the highlights of a school -- the attendance rate, average class size, and district spending. You can also determine whether the school has been making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the guidelines set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act.
But if you want even more exhaustive analysis of a school -- and the link mentioned above doesn't satisfy you -- you can also check out the more thorough Report Cards. There, you can do extensive quantitative analysis of how students performed in different subject areas, as well as within different ethnic and socio-economic groups. (Call me cynical, but I have deep concerns about this ethnic and socio-economic data being included, largely because I think the people who care about this information the most are the same people most likely to exploit it for their own benefit.)
Just as universities don't use ACT scores as the sole measurements for deciding whether students should be admitted, parents shouldn't use these profiles and reports as the only means of choosing a school. The information in the reports gives a lot of data, but there's a lot missing, too. What about student evaluations of teachers, for example? Or feedback from parents? Or (best of all) how about some comments by veteran teachers, the sort forming the nucleus of any school's teaching staff, who have the best historical understanding of where the district's been and where it's headed?
Of course, you can't put some of that stuff down in numbers form, the way the profiles and reports do. But that's what I'd like to see, at least to complement the data already there. End of rant.
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