I would like to share with you the fantastic afternoon I had this last Saturday. My wife and I had the privilege of being invited to the two hour Saddleback Civil Forum with Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain. This was the first time these two presidential hopefuls, and expected nominees for the Democratic and Republican Parties, shared a public stage. 

Rick Warren, author of “A Purpose Driven Life,” and pastor of our Church, Saddleback in Lake Forest, had organized for Obama and McCain to come and present their views on important issues. 

Recap of Beijing

Mark Spitz's 36-year old record of 7 gold medals at one Olympic event, across all Olympic sports, was shattered when 23-year-old swimming machine Michael Phelps grabbed his 8th gold in Beijing and 14 all-time gold medals. Who will ever forget his 0.01 of a second photo-finish with Serbian - Wow.

With the XXIX Olympiad - The 2008 Summer Olympic Games - officially underway in Beijing China I thought it would be interesting to have a small online real estate olympiad of our own.
 

Last week, President George Bush signed The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 (the Housing Act) into law.

No IPO in 2009 says Zillow, as they feel the pinch of the real estate, financial and online marketing markets. Intriguing as leadership has always been very bullish on building a business model entirely around online advertising.

Stuart Siegel has successfully parlayed eNeighborhoods, a business which he founded, sold, re-bought and sold again, into a co-ownership of the Florida Panthers. Here is how is happened:

When the stock market took a nose dive, real estate brought growth.

When the economy did poorly, real estate introduced wealth.

When 911 all but destroyed our faith, real estate restored the American Dream.

In many occasions, and in many years, real estate has been the rock to depend, or in some cases even the rocket to ride to riches. But times have changed and the bright years of 2000-2005 have become a dull memory.

It’s not really that real estate itself crashed and burned, but that with new construction out of control, speculation spiraling and lending becoming irresponsible, the burden real estate had to carry became to heavy and the first nail in the coffin ground what was a good thing, to a halt.

And another one bites the dust. In the 2007 Swanepoel Trends Report trend #10 was named “The Hangover” and in the 2008 Real Estate Trends Report I named Trend #2 “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Both discussed the potential devastation and legacy of the collpase of the mortgage market.

Well, Pasedena based Indymac, the 7th largest savings and loan and the 2nd largest independent mortgage lender in the nation, is the latest casualty of the subprime collapse. Below the letter from the CEO to stakeholders.

Dominion Enterprises is owned by Landmark Communications Inc.  The family-owned company is nearing its sale of its most prized procession, the Weather Channel, and has now announced it is also selling Dominion Enterprises – the parent company for amongst other things:

After a year of trying to sell her four-bedroom home and eight years of singledom, Deven Trabosh is offering her South Florida home and a shot at marrying her on the Internet. Read the full story by Associated Press here.

One has to wonder if this will help sell the house faster or not at all.

It looks like many of the traditional media just have to fight off one Internet battle after the other as Web 2.0 alternatives lay siege to longstanding methods of communication. With the blogging boom, the social community explosion and “texting and twittering” detonating together with the wide adoption of readily accessible and portable video, the transmission of ideas, messages and announcements will never be the same.

Avalar Network, Inc., parent company of Avalar Real Estate, has acquired Better Homes Realty and all of its associated franchise operations.  Better Homes Realty (BHR) began serving the Northern California market in 1964, later expanding throughout the state. Today BHR has 64 offices and upwards of 800 real estate professionals doing $1.5 billion in annual sales. 

Avalar is an agent-centric franchise designed to enhance the recruitment and retention of top real estate professionals through its agent training, technology and patented revenue-sharing program that becomes a retirement income for brokers, agents and staff alike. Chuck Scoble is the President, CEO and Founder of Avalar.

What is ChaCha? It is one of the most innovative and interesting Web 2.0 technologies to come out this year. 

textChaCha as it is officially named is a mobile search service provided by Cincinnati Bell Wireless that allows you to get answers to any question you might have - right on your mobile device.  You can ask any general type question (nothing illegal) such as directions, nearest restaurant, movie listings, the meaning of life, yes even who wrote the best trends report :)

What more, all your questions are answered by real people so answers are precise, very clear and sent to you in less than 3 minutes 24/7. Answers are limited to 160 characters. 

During the first five months of the launch Real Estate Wiki increased 200% - from 7,000 to 21,000+ entries.

The three most popular categories used by real estate professionals are: Adding their personal bio's and company profile, the information on real estate business service providers and lastly the downloading the Real Estate Wiki Widget. The "Wiki Widget" allows brokers and agents the ability to add this search bar to their own website thereby enabling their customers to gain access to the information on Real Estate Wiki without leaving the own website.

The largest international network of vacation rental websites, HomeAway, announced this week its acquisition of EscapeHomes.com.   With this addition HomeAway expands its offerings, providing owners the tools to research and find real estate professionals who specialize in second homes and their dream vacation, investment or retirement home. Other sites owned include VRBO.com, Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, Abritel.fr and FeWo-direkt.de.

Foreclosure filings across the country in April increased 65% compared with April 2007 according to RealtyTrac. Another record month!  

The West is still leading the way and the wildfires aren’t the only reason Californians are losing homes this year. California’s rate of foreclosure is over twice the national average with places like Riverside County reporting a 161% jump for first quarter of 2008 compared to 2007.  Other cities across have even reported that they expect that a third of the real estate market in their area will consist of bank-owned property by the end of the year – one in three … unbelievable. 

Property Prices 

 Don’t you just love the youth – their energy, their enthusiasm, their eagerness, their burning passion and above all their love for life? Man and do they seem to be able to do everything and anything. For example they are the creators of MySpace, Dell Computers, eBay, Yahoo, Google, You Tube and Facebook. And companies like these are changing the face of the Net. According to Wikinomics, the book I referred to last week, it states that 2006 was the year when the programmable Web eclipsed the static Web; on every level. For example:

The National Association of Realtors® has reached a favorable settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, resolving litigation between them regarding how listings from multiple listing services are displayed on brokers’ virtual office Web sites. The proposed final order, to be filed with the federal district court in Chicago today, validates NAR’s longstanding Internet Data Exchange (IDX) policy and strengthens the rule governing participation in multiple listing services. 

The real estate market might be tight, but profits just continue to rise at Internet giant, Google. First quarter profits rose 31% (to $1.3 billion) while revenue grew 42% (to $5.2 billion). According to CEO Eric Schmidt PPC (pay per clicks) grew 20% over the first quarter over the same time a year ago quieting concerns by analysts. 

And while Microsoft, with a 9.4% market share of Internet searches, battles for ownership over Yahoo (21.3% of Internet searches), Google seems to be above the aforesaid battle with its market share of Internet searches rising to a dominating 59.8%.

We are “about halfway through” the housing crisis says Daniel Mudd, Fannie Mae CEO. Expect prices to fall as much as 25% from the mid-2005 high before the worst is over he told shareholders on Tuesday. Some areas already have… Let us know about the percentage drop in the housing or apartment market in your area.

Reported today on INMAN News was an interesting article about SecondSpace, an online marketplace targeting the second-home market. The company also launched three new sites in Canada and the United Kingdom that aim to connect brokers, developers and agents to buyers and owners of vacation property around the globe - ResortScape.CA, ResortScape.Co.UK and LandWatch.Co.UK. 

A report released in March of this year opened with … A "Statement of Inevitability" states that "consumer-focused real estate Web sites are gathering more and more information," and "without convenient, immediate access to information to analyze/interpret for their clients and customers, Realtors will no longer be at the center of real estate transactions." 

The report, released by NAR’s Gateway Presidential Advisory Group, states that the project has been renamed to The Real Estate Channel (TREC) and is focused on enabling the real estate community to continually expand the breadth, depth, immediacy and power of trusted real estate information available to
Realtors. 

Zillow has announced that they have entered into a listing agreement that allows all Homes.com hand-entered property listings to be fed directly to Zillow.com at no additional cost to the agent or broker. The first listing Homes.com feed to Zillow was 105,000 active property listings. 

Daniel Mudd, Fannie Mae President and CEO, said yesterday that he expects no significant recovery for the US housing market before 2010. 

Fannie Mae is the largest US source of mortgage finance and although historically conservative has recently faced multibillion-dollar losses in the recent sub prime and foreclosure collapse.He predicted that the rockiness experienced last year will continue through the balance of 2009, some 18 months away.

What are your thoughts?

Foreclourses has become the new real estate Four-letter word.

In March one in every 538 households in the U.S. received a foreclosure notice with Nevada (1 in 139 homes) leading the pack, followed by California (1 in 204 homes), Florida (1 in 282 homes) and Arizona (1 in 283 homes).

And the bad news is just everywhere...CNN, Fox News, USA Today, the Web, etc. etc.

To assist homeowners Real Estate Wiki (see previous entry on launch of the new wiki in real estate) has added a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) covering questions such as: