Turner's Perspective

I'm fascinated by the conversation around REALTORS® and real estate on Twitter.

I track lots of different key words and find the conversations that take place enlightening. The other day I saw this comment from PJ.

"Going to meet with my realtor. I don't know why as I've already picked out my house. GO AHEAD, TAKE MY MONEYS"

The timing of the comment was particularly interesting, since I had just had a conversation with Mariana Wagner about how her Internet clients "think" they know what house they want, based on their Internet searches, but more often than not end up buying something completely different.

In PJ's case, she put an offer on a house that same day, so she was probably right. But every REALTOR® I speak to tells me that the process is indeed made easier by the consumers search, in most cases, but that their local knowledge contributes greatly to what their clients end up buying. The stereotypical consumer thought, "why do I need to pay so much money if I've already done all the work?" is often incorrect.

So it leaves me wondering...

What percentage of Internet shoppers really find their home online? What percentage of Internet shppers end up buying something that you, as their buyer's agent, have shown them instead?

I can't resist.

This is one of the best Twitter posts I've read in a long time.

"Why do people go to lendingtree and then get all weird & cranky when a realtor contacts them? Hello? The internet doesn't deliver houses."

I have no idea what Connie does in Minneapolis, but I do know one thing for certain. There's something in the water in Minnesota, because there seem to be a lot of funny people in the Land of 10000 Lakes.

This is a classic.

Yes, I've taken down the BubbleGuru.com video bubble once again.

And it will stay down here on ActiveRain until I have something REALLY important that I want everyone to know about, regardless of which post they come to on my ActiveRain blog. Until that time comes, it's just plain annoying for it to pop up on every single post, even if you've already been to other posts I've written.

As I said in "Let's Test BubbleGuru.com One More Time," that's not the way it's supposed to work. The BubbleGuru.com embed code is built to be placed right before the closing body tag in your site. This is handled in a wordpress blog be editing the footer.php file and placing the embed code there. When you do it that way, it will only play once for each user "session."

So, for those who missed it, here's what it looked like:

The Missing Bubble Guru Bubble from respres on Vimeo.

The last time I tested BubbleGuru.com here on ActiveRain was in May of 2007. It was in Beta 3 at the time and it broke a few things for people trying to view these pages in IE7. Since I notified the developers of the problem at the time and it's been 9 months since the last test, I thought it was time to give it another try.

Please note: Because of the way you have to insert it here on ActiveRain, it will pop up for each new post you navigate to in my account. That's pretty annoying, I admit. I doesn't work that way on other blog platforms, like a self-hosted Wordpress installation. Since you can put the ebmed code in the footer, it treats the site as a whole and will only play it the first time someone navigates to your site.

Please let me know if this new edition of BubbleGuru.com creates any problems for those of you on IE7.

EDIT: I have taken the bubble off the site and you can see what it looked like here: http://activerain.com/blogsview/410253/The-Missing-Bubble-Guru