July 2008

For ARMLS, the new FlexMLS goes live tomorrow (July 28, 2008).  As a result of the change over from Tempo, all data updates have been frozen since Friday morning.  Therefore the accuracy for this update is certainly off, as changes in statuses for Friday, Saturday, and today (particularly closings on Friday) are not reflected in the numbers below.  Next week, I expect bigger changes than we would otherwise expect, as the new data pours into the system on Monday/Tuesday to catch up from over the weekend.

Across all of Maricopa County, there are currently 37,381 single family homes for sale, up by 464 from last week. There are 5675 sales currently pending, down by 119 from last week. And 3483 homes closed escrow in the last 30 days, down by 919 from last week. As a result, broader Maricopa County now has 10.7 months of inventory, based on this week’s numbers.

*All data comes via ARMLS, and is presumed to be reliable, but is not guaranteed. All numbers represent single family detached homes only. Condos, townhouses, timeshares, vacant land lots, and manufactured homes are not represented in these numbers. All sold properties were sold in the last 30 days.

The following trend indicators are relative to the previous week’s update:

Positive move upward Positive move downward

Negative move downward Negative move upward

.

One of the more frequently viewed posts for the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog is a post I did last December about a saguaro that fell down and split in half.  Google sends people here frequently with the only search word being “saguaro”.

I’ve done a normal Google search on saguaro and this blog doesn’t rank very high, being considered approximately #350 of 1.9 Million possible sites.  To be honest, I can’t imagine anyone is wading through the top 350 sites for saguaro to finally get to that post.  Doing a Google image search, however, the photo below often ranks in the top 20, which must be why Google sends them here:

As a result, photos of saguaros got me thinking, maybe there’s enough interest in them that people would like to see more, and thus I’m planting a seed.  Saturdays shall be Saguaro Saturdays in honor of our state flower (the saguaro blossom), and what is often recognized as the definitive icon for Arizona or the southwest.  Each Saturday, I’ll feature a picture of a saguaro that I stumble upon throughout the week.  And now and again, I’ll probably sprinkle in some other cactus varieties, particularly when they are in bloom (as prickly pear are right now).

I was going to start with a new photo today, but this post is already long enough, so you’ll have to check back in next Saturday for the first new photo. But before I end this, I feel compelled to point out that my ranking for saguaro is exactly 1 slot higher than Jay Thompson and his saguaro photo:

Yes, yes, yes, I know…another iPhone post.  And I’m not even going to try to say this will be the last one, because I doubt it will be.  Sorry if it’s annoying you.  Someday the novelty will wear off for me.

Getting to the topic, I’ve installed a very cool plugin on the blog that recognizes when it is being viewed from an iPhone, and renders a simpler, faster, post-only display.  I tried 2 different plugins before settling on iWPhone.  This plugin doesn’t support one feature of the alternative I considered (WPtouch), which is the ability to switch to the non-iPhone view.  iWPhone reports they are working on that feature, and as I didn’t deem it to be critical, I went with iWPhone’s better content display (personal opinion).

This is particularly handy for those iPhone users that follow me on twitter, and click over from a New Blog Posting tweet to view the post.  In those cases, the post should load fairly quick, as the top banner, bottom footer, and both sidebars are stripped away, leading straight to just that post’s content.

Upcoming, I’ll be customizing the iPhone theme, to better match the non-iPhone theme, however, it won’t happen until I redo the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog’s theme, which is a pending transaction.

Last week, a TV producer from the Austrailian TV network SBS called me, and asked me whether or not I would agree to an interview.  In her request, she mentioned she had found me from this blog.  She relayed that they were working on 1 hour documentary about the state of the US economy leading up to the presidential election, and asked whether I would be willing to answer some questions about the current foreclosure market in Phoenix.

Intrigued and feeling as though my ego was being slightly stroked, I graciously agreed.  The crew’s schedule bounced things around a bit, and the interview finally went down at 5pm today.  I’m not one to complain much about the weather, but it was about 110 degrees today, so doing the interview outdoors was a challenge.  Hopefully my head wasn’t “glowing” too much.

I don’t know when the documentary will air, if I will be included in the final result, or if I will ever see the final result.  I do have the TV producer’s email, so hopefully we able to stay in touch and I’ll be able to see the documentary when it’s complete.  They did have a bit of script, or talking points, that they wanted to get to, so hopefully that means I play a role in making a point they want in the documentary.  The nice thing, was I wasn’t coerced in any way to say something I didn’t agree with.  Really, they were very supportive of me expressing my personal viewpoint.

Deborah, the TV producer, said I did a great job.  I replied, I just didn’t want to do a bad job, and she countered back, that no, I really did do a great job.  That was nice to hear.  At any rate, throughout the interview, I gave my iPhone to Deborah who snapped most of these shots.  Given I’ve never used the gallery feature that was introduced in Wordpress 2.5 (this blog just went to 2.6 today), now seems like an excellent chance to share what the iPhone captured via the Gallery.  All shots were edited slightly in Photoshop, with some cropping, but otherwise this shows approximately the quality you can expect from a well lit iPhone photo.

Wordpress released an iPhone app yesterday (July 22) that allows you to read and write posts for your blog extremely easily right from your iPhone. In fact I’m doing it right now.

To test iPhone pics I’m including a shot I just took of the pool at the Belt residence for Jamie Geiger, which should appear at the bottom of this post. That’s not ideal, but would work well for a blog like Theresa Boardman’s AllTAllDay, an idea I’ve been kicking around myself.

Linking out (several are sorely needed for this post) is difficult. You can visit iphone.wordpress.org for more info.

Via Twitter (you are following me, aren’t you?), Chris Griffith over in Bonita Springs, Florida, mentioned Wordle.  I clicked through her tweet, to the post on her blog, and then clicked through from the post to Wordle, and was a bit geeked out over the cool way Wordle takes the words used on a web page to turn them into a cloud, similar to a tag cloud, but without any clicky.

Here’s a Wordle cloud for the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog’s home page right now:

The colors, fonts, orientation, and many other visual aspects of the cloud can be modified in the settings of Wordle.  Wordle does require Java to make it work, which needed a few seconds to get running.  Once running, however, it was a breeze to customize a Wordle cloud into something that appealed to me.

Have you Tweeted a Wordle today?