Landlord Shmandlord

Hi all, welcome to the Carnival of Real Estate Investing #3. Thank you to everybody who participated in this week’s Carnival.

The pick of the week goes to:

• Paul’s Tips has a great recommendation on How to deal with information overload. This is obviously exceptionally important in today’s world because, and Paul offers a great way to think about it.

The remaining posts in no particular order:

• Stock Market Beat discusses Blackstone Groups’ acquisition of Sam Zell’s Equity Office Properties Trust, “the nation’s largest office-building owner and manager” in When Zell Sells, We Listen
• SharpBrains has a post about emotional self-regulation and biofeeback. I feel that as a real estate investor, it is very important to keep in control of your emotions. When looking at a property to purchase, you need to remain calm and logical. It is too easy to get emotionally swept into a purchase, which will most-likely result in a bad investment.
• Michael Emilio gives us Five Reasons Why Real Estate is the Ultimate Investment.
• Musings about Money gives us Don’t Invest in Texas… But Consider Moving There
• Rob Thomas Blog gives us Property prices and low cost airlines which discusses how cheap airline tickets will effect real estate prices in Europe.
• Debt Free gives us Different Real Estate Retirement Strategies - Pros and Cons which is a good overview of three different ways to invest for retirement using real estate.
• Mortgage Lowdown gives us the very thorough 43 Must-Know Tips (and Resources) for Every First-time Home Buyer. This is a must read for any would-be or soon to be first time home buyers.
• The Landlord Blog gives us Working With an Out of State Property Manager which details a few tips about working and coordinating with remote property managers.
• Worldwide Success gives us The Truth About Rich Dad Poor Dad - What Robert Kiyosaki Does Not Want You To Know

Thanks again to everybody who participated

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is a much needed Carnival because of the many people who can benefit from the REI knowledge that exists in the blogosphere. Look for the Carnival next week on BiggerPockets. Make sure to submit your post by December 12th at noon.

Thanks chris_starscream for the image.

• I just stumbled upon a new site on which I’ve already wasted too much time: neighboroo. It allows you to analyze a few statistics about the population of the country by zipcodes, then work your way out.
• Check out John T. Reed’s analysis of Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which goes completely against what you’ll hear from most real estate investors. If you’re familiar with Kiyosaki, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this analysis.
• A cool rental listing site: housingmaps,
• Maybe/Someday: Sotheby’s International Realty
• I’ve been playing a bit of chess recently, and would like to play against any interested Shmandlord readers. If you’d like to play, start up a game with me over at Post Card Chess (using the email address landlordshmandlord AT gmail)

Thanks saad for the image.

Anesia over at The Landlord Blog just started the The Carnival of Real Estate Investing.

Check out the first edition here!

There were lots of great posts this week, and it’s been hard picking which ones to include. I was very impressed with the breadth of topics, and feel that we, the Carnival of Real Estate community, should continue to encourage posts regarding all aspects of real estate: realtors, mortgage brokers, landlords, stagers (yes, there was a good post on staging this week), etc.

I am going to list my top 5 and then include the remaining posts in no particular order. Here it goes:

1. The Pumpkin That Sold Me a House describes how a realtor can differentiate him or herself. Whatever industry you’re in, it is always important to focus on the customer’s experience, which is something that is too often forgotten. This post is short, but illustrates how one realtor, without exerting much effort, is reaching their customers in a very effective way.
2. Ugh. True Gotham has a really great read about a frustrating mess, at Co-op Board Antics-Redux.
3. In Defense of Landlords over at hotpads.com explains why rental prices are rising.
4. Mike’s Corner Web 2.0 for Real Estate Pros has some good commentary about adapting to change in Change is a good thing.
5. Transparent RE makes many much needed points in An Open Letter to the Title Insurance Industry.

Additional Posts:

• This Old House is Worth $1.23 Million compares two houses, each worth the same, in two different parts of the country.
• Are Zoomf and Nestoria imitating Trulia? What are British real estate sites like?
• The National Association of Realtors Takes an Ad in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a great time to buy or sell a home”? Doesn’t sound like sound economics to me.
• Bloodhound blog refutes some of the ridiculous claims against Zillow by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Defending Zillow.
• We often don’t hear from Stagers on the CoRE, but this week Home Staging, Rants & Ravings submitted a list of reasons to stage in Stagers.. are we red headed step children that get no respect?.
• What’s the difference between the rich and the ultra-rich? Wisdom From Wencypoo’s Mental Wastebasket describes it in A Revolt of the Fairly Rich.
• Zillow blog gives an overview of the Blog Business Summit containing many good tips for using your blog to help your business.
• Nubricks.com has a little insight into Parisian real estate at The future of immobilier in the Paris property market.
• Always a great read, The Landlord Blog has (one of many) great posts about Sifting Through Property Manager Candidates.
• YoChicago today on What does it mean when a Chicago developer moves into his or her own building?
• Real Central VA has a short but good post on Brand loyalty and quality customer service stemming from a recent consumer experience.

Thank you everybody for submitting the wonderful posts. Also, thanks to everybody who stopped by for the Carnival of Real Estate. Next week, the Carnival will be hosted at True Gotham. Please submit your posts by Sunday, November 12th.

• Joshua Dorkin over at Real Estate Investing for Real found a really great way to buy the vacation house you’ve always wanted. What an awesome idea! But unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a method we can all use at the same time.
• Whoa, homes selling for over $100 million. These things are pretty amazing: car washes, multiple golf courses, gold fixtures, titanic-style stair cases, 2+ million dollar taxes.
• The Carnival of Real Estate is up over at YoChicago today. Check it out here!
• Once again I’d like to thank the people over at Zillow for their great API, which made it really easy to setup NetWorth. They have a great product, and I can’t wait to see what new features are coming down the pipe.

You may have noticed a new image on the sidebar:

It is from a little web application that I’ve been working on called NetWorth. It allows users to monitor their Net Worth using real estate values from Zillow.com and stock quotes from Yahoo Finance.

Once you’ve input your assets and liabilities, you can then put a banner on your website like the one above. It’ll then automatically update as it receives new values from Zillow and Yahoo.

There are actually three different banners to choose from You can show:

1. The percentage change in your Net Value over the past week
2. The dollar change in your Net Value of the past week
3. Your current Net Value

If you choose to allow only the first one, viewers have no way of knowing your actual net value, but can get an idea of how it changes over time (and therefore, your mood).

Give it a shot, and I would appreciate any feedback.