Realty Thoughts and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal both are reporting that the Houston Association of Realtors has reached an agreement to post all of its MLS listings on Google Base.

Some may argue this is another step toward the imminent demise of the MLS; that conclusion makes little to no sense since the Houston area MLS is the vehicle through which these listings will be entered into Google. I would be willing to entertain arguments that this is another nail in the coffin of Realtor.com; while R.Com remains the dominant player for real estate listings (despite Zillow's traffic catching up, the big Z lacks the listings at this stage), signs of erosion are growing.

This agreement also likely will lead to the usual Chicken Little chirping from those who believe this will push Realtors closer to extinction. Aside from the immediate idiocy of the argument - who do you think is entering these listings into the MLS - and the general need to rationalize one's own decision to go it alone with real estate versus using an expert, this stance also assumes an unbreakable (but non-existent) link between Realtors and Realtor.com.

Back to this in a moment.

Says Bob Hale, president and CEO of HAR, "As far as I know, we're the first association in the country to put all of our listings on Google." Congratulations, Bob. I think. We only can assume (and/or hope) that Bob and his group asked the member brokerages before making the decision. This isn't to say the idea is poor but it does lead to other questions, such as those raised later in the San Jose Business Journal article ...

"Google won't sign a document to protect the data, and they won't sign a document to use it for limited reasons," says [James Harrison, president and CEO of REInfoLink, the Silicon Valley MLS service.] His agreements with the brokers who provide listings to REInfoLink limit what his company can do with the listings information, he says, and he legally cannot give Google more rights than that. ...

No matter how benign the relationship appears today, questions remain about Google's longer term strategy.

Will Google try to sell advertising around the content? Or ultimately will Google replicate a business model others have tried of seeking payment from local real estate agents for leads generated from the Web site traffic?

To its credit, Realtor.com does not sell its leads back out to the agents who are providing the content with their listings. But they do charge a fairly substantial sum, based on the number of listings an agent has, for "enhanced" listings that are more visible on the website. Pay an extra fee and you can add additional photos, get a pretty color border around your listing, etc.

Personally, I've yet to pay for a Realtor.com upgrade because I've not seen any value other than being able to tell the sellers "look at the pretty colors." There are reports that show the number of viewings each property has had - not bad for CYA - but most sellers are less interested in the number of showings as the number of offers they have received. To me, the value's just not there.

So to try and link my business to the fate of Realtor.com would be a mistake. And the same goes for the MLS, which I believe will remain if only because it still serves its original purpose - allowing brokerages to communicate listings to each other. Those who understand the basic premise of the MLS also will understand that the future of a local MLS is unrelated to all the other changes technology is bringing to the real estate industry.

Dissemination of listings to the public was an inevitable outgrowth of the Internet-drive communication revolution. But despite the increased visibility of these listings, the public is not a party to the MLS - not in its truest sense, not looking at it for its core purpose. While many agents still inexplicably tell clients that the MLS sells homes, adding to the misguided mystique, others of us are doing everything we can to market our homes outside the MLS. We are embracing the technology and leveraging it to our clients' advantage.

Back to the Houston MLS ... is the agreement with Google Base a good thing for sellers? Probably. For brokerages? Possibly. For agents? Time will tell. But, much as I feel with Zillow, I believe HAR should keep an eye out for the other shoe in case it drops.

(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes

Yesterday's bus ride to Tucson for the Arizona State game was an eye-opening experience, and not just for the abilities of some folks to "fuel up" for an 11 a.m. bus trip to a 4 p.m. game at a very early hour. No, what was truly amazing was witnessing the changing landscape between Phoenix and the Old Pueblo.

When I first made the trek in 1990 for my first ASU-UA game in Tucson, the drive was straightforward. A short trip through Chandler, with civilization all but ending shortly after Chandler Boulevard and not picking up again until Casa Grande, the one-stop towns that are Toltec and Picacho Peak, passing Picacho Peak and then driving through Marana and reaching the Tucson border shortly thereafter. For much of the ride there was little to see, especially in the way of single-family residential housing.

Needless to say, the landscape now is decidedly different than it was then. Houses are coming closer to the freeway in Casa Grande and even in Arizona City. The Chandler city limits now extend well below Queen Creek Road and the Tucson borders merge seamlessly with Marana. So many new homes and in areas, I must admit, I've not visited often (if ever) despite living in Arizona for nearly 30 years and traveling to Tucson at least every other year for the past 16.

The drive crossed my mind again this afternoon when I spoke with a homeowner I'd talked to a week ago about listing their home in Peoria. One of their primary criteria was neighborhood knowledge and, with one listing in that subdivision already under my belt, and my fairly regular visits to this portion of Peoria, I felt fairly confident that I'd be the lucky lister.

It turns out I wasn't. Instead, the owners decided to go with an agent with admittedly more experience but also based in Chandler, 60-odd miles away from the home. It's hard to argue against experience (though it's an argument I can make.) But the distance took me by surprise.

(Brief disclosure: I once had a listing in Queen Creek, 85 miles one-way from my house, that I accepted from one of my neighbors. To service the listing, I recruited one of my office's agents down in Gilbert to assist. The house sold, and I'm eternally grateful for the help I received.)

And so today's question is how important is local knowledge? I envy many agents who are in much smaller locales, if only because they have the luxury of specializing in a much smaller area. The vast sprawl that is the Phoenix area - Maricopa County covers 9,200+ square miles and most (but not all) can be considered the "Phoenix metro area" - make it far more difficult to do so.

To my mind local knowledge can be less important when working with buyers if only because there's far less "selling" to be done by the agent. Either the home and the neighborhood fits a client's needs or it doesn't; most of the local information easily can be located and relayed impassively to the buyer.

Impassiveness is much less useful when you're the lister, however. Some will argue that any for sale sign in a yard is good for an agent, but if there's no enthusiasm for the sale, if there's no belief in the home and in the area and in the market, then that will be apparent in the marketing effort put forth. It's fairly easy to tell even from the 680-character write-up in the MLS when an agent truly knows an area or simply is guessing at it.

One of my greatest strengths is having grown up first in the East Valley and then moving west, as I'm comfortable in large portions of the Valley and can speak intelligently about different aspects of the different areas. But I'm also honest enough to know when I don't really have any idea about an area (read: Maricopa, Queen Creek - my seller knew this going in - south Gilbert and Chandler) and will refer out the business to someone who can put their local knowledge to work.

Honesty builds loyalty which builds return business and referrals, without which we don't stay in business very long.

(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes

I had toyed with the idea of individual property pages for my listings once upon a time but surrendered for a number of reasons, most technical and involving the scripts my sites runs. Without getting into details, it was rather cumbersome to add a new page to the system every time I had a new listing; until I found a shorter method, one that preferably allowed me to use the property address as part of the URL as a subdomain, I was going to let the blog page suffice.

Tonight I finally finished the template for the new-and-improved listing page, using my listing at 18378 W. Paseo. I'm going to populate the links at the bottom of the page over the next couple of days - of all the technology I do have, the one thing I don't have is a reliable PDF creator and that's the one thing I need. But the overall style and look will remain consistent.

These also ought to work well for the search engines. Even the simple blog page served it's purpose, at least on Yahoo.

Check out the page when you have a chance and let me know what you're think. As with everything on the Internet, it's a work in progress.

(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes