Category — Info

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The new Altera website has just been born.

www.alteragroup.com

As with any site it’s a work in progress but we’re glad to have it up. There’s free stuff as well as info on our various services.

I hid an easter egg on the site. It’s a secret page that’s not in the normal navigation. Whoever finds it gets a Starbucks on me.

Here’s a 2 minute video from one of my favorite authors, Jeffery Gitomer. His get-real approach to business and sales is extremely refreshing. This should be required reading for all real estate professionals.

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

If you don’t have any of his books, do yourself a favor and pick up a few. I promise you’ll get a ton out of them.

Pick up a few today!

If you’re on Windows and still running Internet Explorer 6, please upgrade. If not please skip this post. To find out what version you’re running, launch Internet Explorer, click help, then select “About.” If it says version 6 please upgrade.

Why?

Because the internet has moved way beyond what IE6 can handle. You’re not seeing the full picture, kind of like watching black & white TV when you can get color for free. A full 40% of visitors to this blog are still using IE 6. This is too bad because they’re not seeing a lot of cool things that are going on on the web and they’re causing developers to dumb down their apps to accommodate the IE 6 users.

Being a small business owner or the owner of “You Inc.” means that among the many hats we wear, hiring manager is one of them. From time to time we’re called to hire a new employee that will no doubt have a direct impact on the future of our business. Fortunately we have a great resource, Karen Goedert, owner of Resort Recruiters here in Steamboat.

In this 20 minute podcast, Karen gives some great advice for small business owners on where to find great talent, how to hire & what they expect.

While you may not be in hiring mode today, you might be someday so be sure to bookmark this page for later.

Click the green button to play:

To get in contact with Karen, visit www.resortrecruiters.com

Got an iPod?

Get this interview in iTunes:

Here are some great PDF resources from Karen regarding employees:

Hire the best people you ever worked with.pdf

How to write better ads.pdf

Hiring your first employee.pdf

Really interesting representation of US Home prices adjusted for inflation. Take a ride on a roller coaster as it traces home prices from 1890 to 2007.

(Can’t see the video? Click here)

I recently had the difficult task of hiring a new employee for Altera. In the end what made it so difficult was trying to choose between several well qualified candidates. Karen Goedert owner of Resort Recruiters, offered her company’s screening service. What a relief. Each candidate was interviewed by her and I received a concise report of each candidate along with a follow up call from Karen. She uncovered things that I missed and helped confirm other issues I had.

The big value to me was she helped me get from A to B faster and with more confidence.

Sometimes we are so “in” what we are doing it’s hard to see things from other perspectives. As you look to bring on new brokers or employees I encourage you to try her services. You’ll save time and have additional perspective to make a better decision.

Resort Recruiters: 970-367-4416

I’m at the NAR conference in Vegas and for those of you who aren’t here, I’m posting pictures from my iPhone of some interesting sights from the convention. You can see the photos here:

http://gallery.mac.com/jayohare#100086

Cool stuff here and an absolutely huge event.

If You Only Do One Thing Today, Watch This Video

This video speaks to one of the most important aspects of your real estate business - information and the creation & organization of it.

Understanding that consumers are seeking, creating and organizing useful information is key to the future of your business.

How can you enhance their experience? How can you tap into these rich resources? Others are providing tools for your potential customers. What tools are you providing? Try these links on for size:
http://www.terabitz.com/
http://outside.in/Boulder_CO
http://www.streetadvisor.com/
http://www.iggyshouse.com/default.aspx
http://www.yourstreet.com/steamboat-springs-co

With 80+% of real estate customers looking for answers online what do you have of true, current & relevant value to offer them when they come knockin’ on your site? Are they coming to you way downstream because others are helping them make sense of information upstream and you’re not?

Those who get this video & embrace it will have an excellent chance to succeed.

Those who don’t will simply create more opportunity for those who do.

You owe it to yourself to spend a few uninterrupted minutes watching. Then, I’d watch it again.

Note:

This blog post belongs to 4 categories within this blog (Tech, Web, Info & Video). See that Category Cloud over there on the right? The various categories grow in size relative to the amount of content in them. Information here is flexible, movable and relevant.

Why can’t the MLS be that way? After all it’s just data. Why do I have to search using the same tired criteria (#bedrooms, #bathrooms…). Why can’t I search by elements that are important to me - morning sun, rural road, pine trees, XYZ school? There are companies out there now trying to figure this out - Google Trullia, Zillow. It’s a shame the NAR isn’t among them. That ultimately hurts you.

Our community has certainly become very polarized regarding Steamboat Spring’s growth over the past year. Some feel like the town is on the wrong track with excessive real estate development. Others embrace growth as a natural part of a community’s development. Sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and try to get a broader perspective. I recently had the opportunity to attend a presentation on global growth and thought I’d share some of the interesting points:

If you’re one in a million in China…
…there are 1,300 people just like you

The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s…
…is greater than the total population of North America.

China has more honors kids than we have kids

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world

During the next 10 minutes…
60 babies will be born in the U.S.
244 babies will be born in China
351 babies will be born in India

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s college student will have 10-14 jobs…
…by the age of 38

The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.

There were over 106 million registered users of MySpace as of September 2006.
If MySpace were a country, in would be the 11th-largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico)
The average MySpace page is visited 30 times per day

There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.
To whom were these questions addressed before Google?

The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet.

More than 3,000 new books are published every day

It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times…
…contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

It is estimated that 40 exabytes (4.0 x 10 to the 19th) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year.
That is more than all the information produced in the previous 5,000 years.

Third generation fiber optics have recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel…
…that carry 10 trillion bits per second down a single strand of fiber.That is 1,900 CDs or 150 million phone calls every second.

So yeah, we do have a lot going on for Steamboat. But in a broader perspective there’s a global boom going on that is nothing like anything this world has ever seen. We’ll have some new buildings and some new people will move here but I’d much rather be here than out there any day.

Guy Kawasaki has a very interesting post on his blog regarding start-up spending costs.

The CEO of Redfin, an online real estate company has opened up his books with a detailed expose of their operating expenses.

Yes, their model is different than the typical real estate shop where everyone is an independent contractor paying a vig to the man.

But the takeaway here is how much do you spend each month on your business in comparison? What metrics do you measure? These guys are spending VC money so they have an obligation to track their finances to the last penny and have a keen understanding of where growth is coming from and where ROI is generated.

Who do you answer to? Now that we’ve entered the 4th quarter of ‘07 how are you doing this year?

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Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin writes:
Part I: Numbers Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.
Rent, Per Employee, Per Month
Redfin Model: $250. Actual Redfin Cost (Last Month): $336Our actual costs are high because we just moved last month into an office with room to grow, which seems to happen every eighteen months. When people were sitting in hallways at the old space, we were paying about $200 per employee, per month. Class B space on well-traveled mass transit lines is roughly $20 per square foot per year in Seattle, $30 in the Bay Area. You need 165-200 square feet per person or more.At the extremes, Adobe supposedly allocates 435 square feet per person while Yahoo! allocates 220 square feet per person. The startup cult of cramming people into small spaces is counter-productive: people are what’s really expensive, not space. The cost Redfin really didn’t anticipate was for tenant improvements which you mostly have to fund yourself when signing sub-three-year leases. In September, we spent more than $100,000 to add private offices for our engineers on the hope that our current office will last us longer. It was probably too much money.Initial Per-Employee Equipment Cost
Redfin Model: $6,500. Actual Redfin Cost: $5,700Computers, 20” monitors, Ikea desk, decent chair, VOIP telephone, and cell phones for field employees. Our first phone system came from Craigslist, and we had to upgrade after a year.

Monthly Benefits, Per-Employee
Redfin Model: $600. Actual Redfin Cost: $471

Redfin benefits are competitive, but many employees are Seattle-based. Costs are 10% higher in California.

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