Spencer Rascoff

I was on ABC News with the Charles McMillan, President of NAR yesterday. Enjoy...

Nothing too earth-shattering, but good to share the screen with an esteemed Realtor like Charles.

Real estate video of ABC News here.

I think this is one of the more important (and least talked about) stories in online media lately.

Boston.com has created a hyperlocal site, Yourtown, for Newton MA. Yourtown is pulling in headlines from WickedLocal (owned by Gatehouse Media, which owns 125 local papers nationwide). True, Yourtown links to WickedLocal, keeping with general internet protocol. But Gatehouse has sued Boston.com – according to Peter Krasilovsky, “The suit contends that Boston.com’s deep linking directly to the article bypasses WickedLocal’s homepage, and implies an endorsement by listing the title of the local papers next to articles. Gatehouse specifically complains of “unfair competition, false advertising, trademark dilution, unfair business practices and other misconduct.”” (I don’t think it helped that, as Peter wrote, “Boston.com VP Bob Kempf, who has spearheaded the hyperlocal effort, previously served as a GateHouse executive, and is the originator of the WickedLocal site.”)

Why does this all matter? With more and more bootstrapped startups monetizing traffic through Google Adsense, it’s vitally important to figure out who owns content. And do blog post headlines constitute content in and of themselves?

Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Imagine a new startup called “TheBestOfTheRain.com” which selected the best blog posts from within the ActiveRain community every day and posted those headlines – with links to the blog posts themselves – on their site. That startup monetizes the site through advertising – Google Adsense or some other ad network. When you click on a link, a new browser tab opens to visit ActiveRain. Now extend the idea to the entire real estate blogosphere – imagine a site that pulls in the “best” posts from across the web real-time via RSS. Imagine some UGC or maybe voting or comments on the post topics. (Sounds like digg, come to think of it.) And poof: you’ve got a pretty cool website, which would attract traffic and revenue, built on the backs of the content created by thousands of other people. Does the traffic and linkjuice which this site sends to those bloggers compensate them enough? Or is this an example of a someone stealing their content for personal gain?

Take the example offline for a second – imagine if (pre-internet) someone copied headlines from hundreds of newspapers and magazines and compiled them into a weekly newsletter and sold it by subscription. Here’s a great way to receive a digest of the week’s events. Perhaps the offline example is more obviously illegit because there’s no ability to “click thru” if I’m just reading a headline on paper. But what if it’s branded and sourced to that original media outlet?

I wholeheartedly agree with Peter who wrote: “the lawsuit might bear paying attention to, with possible implications not only for the turf war in Boston, but also for place blogging in general.”

I checked in online for my flight back from New York after the Inman Connect conference, only to remember the obvious: I didn’t have a printer with me in my hotel room. But fear not: Continental Airlines now allows you to check in online and have your boarding pass appear in a mobile web browser which can be scanned by security. It was pretty slick, though I felt sort of funny handing my iphone to the TSA guy holding a scanner as the whole line of people gawked. It’s the future of travel though, no doubt.

Advice to anyone who tries this:

I thought it would be smart to take a screenshot of the boarding pass from the iphone web browser. (BTW, you can take a screenshot on an iphone by holding down the round button and the on/off switch at the same time.) But that doesn't work because the TSA guy needs a super-duper zoom of the bar code, and photos can't zoom large enough. So you need to pull it up on the browser rather than the camera roll.

Have you ever fallen in love with a house?I just did.

This is the danger of going to open houses for fun when you already have a house you like and you're not currently selling. It's the same reason that married men shouldn't go to adult entertainment locations: nothing good can come from it.

Well this happened to me last weekend. (The falling in love with a house thing; not the going to a strip club thing.) My family was out in Issaquah at a Christmas tree farm where we sawed down our own tree (which I highly recommend). And we saw an Open House sign nearby. We couldn't resist the siren song of a good open house, so away we went.

I've been to hundreds of open houses over the last few years throughout Seattle. I've checked out every open house in Madison Park (where I live) for the last 7 years, and many others in Capitol Hill and Montlake. And I can honestly say that the house we fell in love with this weekend is the only one (in our price range) which I can't stop thinking about. It's literally keeping me up at night.

Now all I have to do is sell my current house! And it's not even for sale.

Zillow released our 3rd Quarter Real Estate Market Reports today, offering a detailed analysis of housing trends in 163 cities around the country. This is by far the most detailed report of its kind, and it delves into many more cities than any other report. We believe that Zillow's data is a more accurate represenationof what's happening to overall housing trends than Case-Shiller for a variety of reasons.

Some of our findings:

• Nationwide, the median value of all homes declined 9.7%, the 7th quarter in a row to show a decline
• 30.2% of all homes sold in the last 12 months were sold for less than the seller paid for the house
• 1 in 7 (14.3%) of all homeowners in the US have negative equity
• 18.6% of all homes sold in the last 12 months were sold as part of a foreclosure transaction
• Some notable declining markets include:
  • Los Angeles home prices were down 19.8%
  • Phoenix home prices down 19.4%
  • Las Vegas home prices down 24.6%
  • Stockton home prices down 35.5%
• Some notable markets which held their value:
  • Dallas home prices were up 0.1%
    
  • Austin home prices were up up 0.9%

Here's me on Fox Business this afternoon discussing declining home values.