It seems to me lately that a lot of the discussion among the inhabitants of that distant place, the “real estate blogging community”, has been about the effort to try to normalize, document, and promote what they’re doing.

There are real estate blogging coaches now, with a really fuzzy and indistinct line between those who make a living heping real estate bloggers and those who just say they’re real estate blogging coaches. Meaning no disrespect to the blogging coaches who actually are pretty good and make their living at, I suppose that to the extent you tell someone that a capital letter goes at the beginning and a period at the end, or whatever you tell them, that makes you a coach.

Also noteworthy is a growing body of rules, which is quite a challenge for those of us who have to keep up with the daunting task of breaking them as soon as they come up. This paragraph is a case in point, since the first rule of real estate blogging fight club is that we deny the existence of rules governing real estate blogging fight club.

On the promotion front, you’ll be pleased to know that if your public has yet to be lured into the brilliant circle of light that shines through your prose, for a mere three hundred bucks you can get your head on the back of the blogobus, thereby letting your public know that you’re a new face of real estate and leading the way and so forth.

There’s probably no other profession in any species on any planet in the visible portion of the universe that loves vanity ads the way human Realtors® love our vanity ads.

“Look at me. My head’s on a bus.”

Don’t get me wrong, Sellsius. I admire your ability to get paid for this.

One thing I don’t get, though: Aren’t there two of you, and if so, are there two of you in one Sellsius, a sort of alchemical binary, or is there only really one Sellsius, and if so, which one gets the head that’s not his on the bus? I came in late.

What I Really Think About Poor People

I didn’t react skillfully to the beginning of the whole charity thread, days ago, before we knew anyone was going to get ahead on a bus.

The truth of the matter is I was bitter about my experience raising exactly zero dollars from the real estate blogging non-community for the winter blogathon, and getting blamed for it into the process. Also on some level, I couldn’t bear to look while it happened like deja vu all over again, with the punditocracy donning their callous indiference as though it were the fine silk of virtue. I didn’t have to wait long, either. It took about a minute, and came precisely from the expected direction, right on time, with all the annoying precision of an off-key song.

So for being a dope to Sellsius, I apologize. Twice if there’s two of you.

But seriously though, where’s my beach?

It’s the perfect opportunity to catch up on some of my Amador / El Dorado blogging today.  I’m out of the office, enjoying a perfectly outstanding coffee at It’s a Grind in Cameron Park.

I need to snap a photo of this place some time.  Or you should just come over here.  It’s here, plus or minus a couple of hundred feet.

This is probably the best coffee shop in El Dorado County, and here it is in my own home town.

How’s that for convenience? 

I must be living right.

Today I had the pleasure of living La Vida Amador again, when the prophecy of my visit to the Great Sutter Creek Duck Race was fulfilled.

This is my second Amador Adventure, the first one having been the subject of earlier blog chronicles.

I got lots of good photos.  Well, I think they’re good photos, anyway.  Hopefully Athol Kay doesn’t have a “Bad Sutter Creek Duck Race Photos” series in mind.

	This band, Bobby D. and the Blues Organization, was really good.  They played nice jazz, by which I mean jazz that an un-jazz-sophisticated boor like me could enjoy.
	The other great thing that happened at the great duck race was that I finally got to sign up to become a Bone Marrow Donor, which I asked my readers to do a couple of weeks ago in support of Trevor Kott.  There’s the booth over at the right, and a poster-board featuring the Kott family.  We had fun, those of us in the line, amusing ourselves as we waited to get swabbed.
	I got to make friends with the D.A.R. ladies.  They were really nice. It turns out those historical dresses are made of cotton, so they are comfortable. I’m not sure what prompted me to ask.
	Here’s me with my Duck-Quacker bill, mugging it up for the Camera with Janelle, this lovely lady who sells cotton candy to support the Pine Grove Civic Improvement Club. I had a picture of Margie, too, but it came out somewhat unflattering, so she’d probably prefer it if I didn’t put it up here, or maybe if I went back and took a flattering picture. Margie and Janelle were charming as could be, but eventually I was crowded out by throngs of sugar-crazed cotton candy buyers.
Where are Bridget and Jamie?	Bridget and Jamie from our Amador County office were there, but I didn’t take their pictures.  I got the sense they didn’t want me to impose.

You know, I’ve been at this awhile and I’ve only scratched the surface of the pictures.  This happened during my last Amador adventure as well.

I think Amador County is just too photogenic.

Here’s proof, in case you still need it:

It’s April 27th, and you know what that means…

It’s The Great Sutter Creek Duck Race Eve.

The big event happens tomorrow, April 28th.

Bridget didn’t want me to write about the duck race. She gave me the idea that if I wrote about the duck race, I wouldn’t be respectful enough or something.

Respectful? Heck, I’m jealous. I wish Elite Properties were on the list of local business sponsors where you could get your duck. This is probably a pretty Elite Group of Businesses, so Elite Properties ought to have no trouble getting in-duck-ted into it.

In the meantime, I understand that we do have a little modest company swag — or at least, literature — that Bridget and Jamie will be passing out at the duck race.

I’ll have to talk to our Amador County District Manager about getting maybe some duck shaped key-rings for next year or something. Or ducks with elite crowns on them.

Here’s the other thing: I think if you’re going to have a town named after a creek, you owe it to your residents and visitors to have a duck race. Otherwise you may feel like you’re up Sutter Creek without a paddle. Or rather, without a duck.

Finally, I’m not sure how much respect one is supposed to accord to a duck race. I mean, isn’t a duck race supposed to be pretty fun and tongue in cheek to begin with? I guess the idea was that I would make fun of the rural lifestyle in Amador County or something. Not really. I’m jealous there, too. I wish my dogs had some dirt to run around and chase squirrels on. The dogs wish for that even more than I do.

Heck: I live in El Dorado County. That would be like the pot calling the kettle black, even if we do have such thriving metropolises* as Cameron Park, not to mention Swansboro. *(That’s probably really “metropoles”, but no one would recognize it).

You would think that in Swansboro they would run a Swan race, but as far as I know, they don’t. That’s false advertising, if you ask me.

One last thing: A duck goes into a pharmacy and asks for a tube of lipstick. The clerk says, “That’ll be $3.99″, to which the duck replied, “Just put it on my bill.”

I’ve been reporting lately on another blog about the progress we’re making on a listing script to display MLS data. The completed implementation is probably a couple of weeks away, but I’ve never been able to wait to show off partly working software, so here it is, partly working software.

Actually that script works perfectly well for what it is, which is a proof of concept. So you can click the link, it won’t actually crash your computer or bite your leg or anything bad like that. It’s partly working in the sense that it does only about a third or so of what I need it to do. Probably in two to three weeks or less I’ll have something polished up a bit more that I can start using everywhere — down on the corner, out in the street.

I’ve filtered the results in the demo above to include only El Dorado County, though anywhere in Metrolist would be supported. There’s some pretty heavy iHomefinder integration in this, so implementing something similar for Amador County might take a little more time. (The throw-money-at-it solution is to subsidize iHomefinder to get Amador’s MLS supported — I understand that that’s do-able and is not hugely expensive as such things go, but perhaps not within our budget yet). However it would be outstanding content for BridgetSells.com or the like. We don’t yet have a Wordpress plugin implementation of it, so using it here might be a bit of a chore.

If you want to win a real estate trivia contest, here’s a tip:  when it comes time to pick your team mates, if there’s a real estate nerd in the room, pick him.

Maybe I spent too much time in math classes in high school.  Believe me:  if I could have escaped earlier, I would have.  Let’s face it, my goal at the time was to chase more high school girls and engage in other sorts of high school high jinks.

Nevertheless, I hung in there on the math classes until my junior year, and somehow between that and watching too many Star Trek episodes, I became a nerd.  No, that’s not a picture of me at the right, but at one time, it certainly could have been.  I do think that that’s a really cool tee shirt, and the software box in the back in the original cinches it.

Again, that’s not me over on the right.

The truth is far worse.

One of the downsides of being a nerd is that you tend to get excited whenever you get a new idea for an article with numbers in it.  Let’s face it, pocket calculators are a sort of gold standard of nerd-identification tools — or in an earlier generation, slide rules.  The flip side of that is that we’re good at trivia contests.

Today’s numerological infatuation appears below, and starts with the basic question, how are the California Counties of Amador, El Dorado, Sacramento, and Placer doing in terms of their residential real estate sales for the first quarter of this year, compared to the first quarter of last year.

So, how about some Trivia Contest questions:

1. Which of our four area California counties actually experienced appreciation in the average sold price during the Q1 2006 / Q1 2007 period?  Hint:  Jaime Boling-Puebla lives there.
2. Which of our four area California counties actually experienced suffered the biggest drop in unit volume during the Q1 2006 / Q1 2007 period?  Hint:  The Sacramento River runs through it.
3. Which of our four area California counties actually experienced the lowest decline in the median price of residential real estate during the Q1 2006 / Q1 2007 period, but was second only to Placer County in the drop in average price per square foot?  Hint:  Marlene and Greg’s restaurant.
4. Which county wins the prize for the most gentle drop in average price per square foot during the period in question.  Hint:  my house is there.

Anyway, I’m not sure what you needed hints for — the numbers are below and you can just read them off the table.  But maybe you did the right thing and escaped from math class early…

I am very pleased to announce that Jamie Puebla has joined the Amador City office of Elite Properties. A resident of the county for the last seventeen years, Jaime was actively recruited by our Amador County District Manager, Bridget Felmley, to assist her in extending our reach to more Amador buyers and sellers in the same way we extend our reach everywhere — by providing million dollar service to each and every client, regardless of their price range.

A resident of Jackson with her husband and nine year old daughter, Jaime brings an extensive knowledge of the area’s amenities and a mom’s-eye-view on the schools. Jaime understands the issues and concerns that families have when making a move. We’re also excited that Jaime’s level of technical skill seems well up to the task of working with our most exacting Internet buyers and sellers.

It’s been a while since my fabulous Amador County Adventure (see here, here, and here), but I’m really feeling that old adventure fever again because there are Historical Homes being shown off this Saturday, April 21st, 2007 — just the thing for the Realtor® with a degree in history who feels like walking around in Sutter Creek this weekend). From the Sutter Creek Events Calendar:

“AAUW presents the 35th annual Home Tour, featuring unique and historic homes and Landmark sites in Sutter Creek; itself a California Historic Landmark. Cost:$20; Proceeds provide college scholarships for local women and girls, community projects and educational programs. Contact:Lani Chapman 209 245-6052.”

Twenty bucks? Man, if my last Amador County Adventure is any indication, I’d say this is cheap at twice the price.

Ever wonder how land conservation efforts and real estate development projects are resolved at the County Level? The answer is, the Board of Supervisors is responsible for creating the County general plan document. Assisting the Board of Supervisors is the General Plan Action Committee…

a ten-member group of Amador County residents (with alternates) appointed by the Amador County Board of Supervisors to assist County staff and consultants in preparation of the Draft Amador County General Plan.

If you care about how land is used (or not used) in the county, the meetings of the General Plan Action Committee are open to the public. GPAC meets every other Thursday, and you can check out their tentative meeting schedules to see if they’ll be discussing a topic of interest.

By the way, if you’re looking for some of the reasons we think life in Amador County is so fabulous, check out the General Plan Action Committee’s Vision Statement — I think they sum it up quite nicely.

One of our most productive periods on this blog was back when we were doing our blogathon for hunger.  It wasn’t utterly successful from a fundraising point of view, but we sure wrote a lot.  The Blogathon for Hunger was a sort of a celebration of Christmas.  Holiday cheer and all that.

This April we’re having our second Blogathon, though it’s much less official.  It’s more of a kind of bet between me and Bridget that we could create thirty posts between the two of us, with me doing twenty of those.

Actually I’m not even sure it’s a bet.  More like a dare, with me being the only one falling for it so far.  So come on Bridget, join me why don’t you.  I dare you.

I double dare you.

If our first Blogathon was a sort of a yuletide celebration of the joy of the hitherto thought to exist Web 2.0 community, our second Blogathon was more of an April Fool’s Celebration of how busy we are with our real estate work, and an effort to slip in some verbiage here and there.

On an artistic level, Blogathon I and II might be compared to It’s a Wonderful Life and an episode of The Three Stooges, respectively.

Here’s Moe to explain more.