Found this interesting news article about scam on zillow: Sophisticated Zillow scam puts NAR and MLS on alert

For most people who use online ad service this is not something new. As a matter of fact, this is an ongoing battle at FindMyRoof and we are working really hard to make sure our site is clean every day.

Recently we just launched text verification for posting feature to ensure posters must be from U.S. to post property ad. Even this mean a few users will be turned away because they have no texting service (by the way, you can always email support to get your account activated.)

The result was interesting. We were able to stop some scammers at the gate, however, some of them still manage to slip in. Like the “technique” discusses in the post, some scammers are getting more sophisticated. And sadly, whatever they do probably worked and people who fell to the scams lost money on them.

Fighting scammer is an ongoing process and we are committed to make this our highest priority. And we welcome any suggestions that can help make FindMyRoof a better place to advertise.

FindMyRoof has been online for 5 years. Though it has been stable and reliable like your good old friend, there hasn’t been much changes lately. Like everything else, things can get a little boring staying the same way. About 6 months ago we decided to do a complete redesign and functional upgrade. Today, I’d like to announce that we did it.

This is not just an eye candy release. Besides the beautiful interface, our core value still remains and is greatly emphasized. FindMyRoof is a real estate platform for people to connect, and “focusing on what’s important” is our motto. And we delivered exactly that in this release:

• We increased the size of the photo so your curb appeal start on FindMyRoof
• We REDUCED the size of the ad banners to cut down the distractions
• We upgraded Google Map in Neighborhood Explorer and Citypedia data to present information using the best technology available
• We upgraded the neighborhood forum to make it even better place to share your knowledge
• We enhanced the REACH directory for professionals to create profile
• Probably more importantly, we upgraded the spam control system to continue to make FindMyRoof a clean place.

And with all these upgrades, we still manage to keep the site simple and easy to use.

Our team had to work really hard to make this happen. But in the end, nothing feels better than knowing that our service has provided more options for owners and helped people who need to find roof above their heads.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

If you haven’t tried FindMyRoof ad flyer I encourage to come in and give it a spin. It’s not exactly a new feature, but with some new templates, you should be able to create some beautiful fliers in PDF format.

As part of the simple ad posting process, all you need to do is to select a flyer template and a PDF file will be automatically generated for you. If you don’t like the one you see, just delete it and re-generate with a different template; or if you want to have different ones, just save the file locally and re-create. Everything will be done online and there is no need for a PDF editor. So give it a try and let us know what do you think.

Below are the templates that we have. Feel free to send your favorite one our way!

Here are some good news for the real estate market:

Bulldoze: The New Way To Foreclose

We can talk all day about financial crisis and recession, but the fundamental problem of today’s real estate market is that we’re overbuilt. And as long as the supply far exceeds demand the market will remain sluggish.

As pointed out in the article, the inventory that banks take out will probably not enough to make a difference. My guess is that we won’t see a turnaround until some national builder goes belly up.

What do you think?

So what if you can hack into time squire’s big bulletin board and put your real estate ad up for hundreds of people to view? I bet you can get a lot of leads.

This video shows how easy it can be done. There is no black van parking at the corner of the street full of electrical equipments, just one guy with an iPhone.

Is it illegal? I bet it is. But it’s still fun to see that how easy it can be done. Digital bulletin board will get more popular for their flexibility to change ads, but it also has its share of vulnerability to be hacked into.

Here is some technical details if you are interested:

“The way it works is pretty simple: plug in my transmitter into the headphone minijack of an iphone 4 and play back any video clip. you can play it through the ipod feature or through the camera roll. the transmitter instantly sends the video signal to the video repeater and the video repeater overrides any video screen that it’s being held next to. it doesn’t matter what shape or size the hacked screen is because the hack video will simply keep its correct dimensions and the rest of the hacked space will stay black.”

So if you are a scammer but you speak broken English, it is a lot harder to make people believe you. Some con-artist actually thought of an idea to overcome this “disadvantage”. How? By setting up a “support center” and gather a bunch of more con-artists to “assist” identity thefts to trick banks in United States. Of course there is an assisting fee involved.

…CallService.biz, an online business that assisted over 2,000 identity thieves in over 5,000 instances of fraud—pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire and credit card fraud.

Operator of ‘Support Center’ Assisting over 2,000 Identity Thieves Pleads Guilty

The good news is that the operation has been shut down. However, it also shows the direction of the cyber criminals are heading too. As we are dealing with a vast cyber space, it becomes more and more important to stay alert and vigilant. Especially in real estate dealings, meet the person and verify the identity!

CityPedia is a web product by FindMyRoof. We aim to provide city facts such as unemployment rate, demographic, and home values so our users can have a better knowledge about a place. Recently we just refreshed our data sets using the latest information from Census Bureau, FBI crime rate report and Bureau of Labor Statistics. With an improved graphic charts, it’s also much easier to understand the meaning of the data. We always welcome your feedback, and feel free let us know if there is any particular information that you want us to include.

Just read this upbeat article about buying a house: Why your best investment is a house?, and it talks about why it may be a good time now to buy real estate property now.

Unless you have been hurt financially by the housing bubble, or the overall economy downturn in the recent years, it is VERY tempting to buy a real estate property now.

However, one thing I want to discuss in this post is: why do we want to buy a house? It is a simple question with a lot of readily available answers that every home buyers can give, such as “providing a shelter for my family”, “why rent when you can buy”, or “a home is one’s best investment”. But the problem is, a lot of home buyers, just like the premise of this article, get the priorities wrong. Here is how I want to look at it:

The first and foremost reason is: you are READY to take on more responsibilities. A house is a property that government taxes you on. And for most of people, you would also sign on a contract with a bank to pay a mortgage for the rest of 30 years. It also means all of a sudden you become responsible for this piece of structure and its surrounding areas. The ownership also makes it harder for you to move. Not that you can’t, just harder. So think this through before even making a decision to look.

For the next reason, we can consider all the “nice” things that owning a property provides. There are a lot of them and any real estate agent can give you a long list in a homeowner 101 class. Just to give a few example, your own house is not only a shelter, but also a living space that you have all the freedom to change (within the boundary of the HOA covenants of course). And if you have kids, a nice neighborhood is also a great place for them to grow up… There are truly a lot of them, but since it’s not the focus of this post I won’t list all of them.

The investment aspect of owning a home is only the last benefit that comes to mind. As a matter of fact, it’s hardly a benefit because an investment doesn’t always mean profit. That’s where a lot of homeowners get misled. Buying a home can be a good investment for years down the road, but if someone tells you buying a home is a great investment by just presenting some kind of chart using some national real estate data I suggest you walk away immediately. Because it’s almost like telling someone to buy a particular stock based on the fact that the overall stock market is going up. Real estate is VERY local and constantly changing. A nice neighborhood you get in now may be very different 5 years later, with the changing factors that you have little or no control with. So if you still want to think it as an investment, assume it at least a moderately risky one.

Investing into real estate is a serious business. Bear in mind this is more than a weekend job. One or two Robert Kiyosaki’s inspirational book and an overall down market is not going to make you a successful investor. You must work really hard to analyze the local market and financial equations to figure out what to buy, how to generate a positive cash flow, and when to sell. Just like any trade, one can achieve success by making the right decision. However, uncle Bob’s home flipping success story shouldn’t be your reason or motivation of buying your own home.

Original feedback from user:

Just FYI. We are U.S. expats living in Mexico, trying to sell a home in Leander, Texas. I suppose you have made it impossible for people with IP addresses outside the U.S. to use your service because you are fearful of swindlers, but I just want you to know that you are also losing legitimate business (ours, for example). I can imagine some circumstances in which I might limit access in the same way, but I can’t imagine how a swindler could use a website for listing real estate to defraud people. So I suspect that the configuration of your website is not based on mature reflexion. You are preventing every military family stationed overseas from using your service, as well as an expat community that is probably larger than you realize. If I were you, I would not trust the knee-jerk reflex of a programmer who has never done an objective study of the risks of allowing users outside the U.S. Sometimes people’s emotional reflexes are not reliable and in this case shrink the range of potential customers unnecessarily

Since the user who wrote the feedback didn’t leave an email address, I’d like to address this issue here because I’m sure there are other users who have had the similar questions and frustrated by it.

First of all, I agree with the user that blocking everybody outside US is not a perfect solution. Legit homeowners are shunned away from the service. That being said, we chose to implement this not because it’s an easy duct tape solution, but it helps to reduce spam and protect homeowners tremendoualy. Let me explain.

Real estate scam is a serious problem. Living in a digital age, we enjoy the benefit of readily available information online, but we also sacrifice our privacy to some degrees, sometimes without even realizing. I’ll give you one example. One of my good friend living in another state bought a new home. With only his address, I was able to find out a lot of pictures from a real estate search engine site. He was absolutely shocked when I discuss his home as if I have been to the place. You might ask what harm can some pictures do? Bear in mind there is a lot more information about a property are available to public now than it has ever been. One can easily find a legit property with address, number of bedrooms, pictures, so on and so forth.

Now imagine with the information, a scammer chose a random home, create a fake for rent ad, and post it online. The familiar scheme goes like this: they’ll offer a low rent in the fake ad, as a matter of fact, much lower than the fair market price, and phish the innocent renters. Once someone shows some interest, they will make up a story about them being overseas and won’t be able to meet you in person. All of a sudden you are talking to some doctor who is curing the underprivileged kids on a religious mission somewhere far away from their property. After getting the trust from the renter, they’ll ask for a deposit before sending the keys. Now the story may be different, but they can always be summarized to the same old sh!t:

I can’t meet you, send me the money.

You wonder who would fall for this kind of scam? Well, scam is a serious business. And people behind it work VERY hard to cheat people. Persistence is one thing that they preserve. When you see the 10th African prince scam in your email inbox you probably wonder why they are still doing this. The fact is that they do this because someone still falls for it. And when this happens, the scammer almost always got away.

Besides the people who got scammed, how about those legit home owners? How will they feel about having a stream of people walking up and down their property and asking questions like “do you allow pets”?

Blocking access from outside US is a hard decision for us. But we believe it’s worth it. We may lose some business from the legit property owners, but a large amount of scams are also blocked. In this way, not only FindMyRoof becomes a safer web site, but also it helps to protect the privacy of the property owners.

Beside access blocking, we also have a lot of other measurement in place to detect, catch and block scam posts. This will be a whole new post on that subject. One thing I always mention is that you can also help by flagging ads that you think is scam. “Quality, not quantity” has always been out motto, and together, we can make it happen.

This is a tip about getting some ideas about foreclosure properties nationwide. Although this only includes the properties that have completed foreclosure process, it doesn’t include those that are in the process or being held by banks.

Here are the easy steps to generate the map:

1. Punch in any US address into Google Maps.

2. Your options are Earth, Satellite, Map, Traffic and . . . More. (Select “More”)

3. The drop down menu gives you a check box option for “Real Estate.”

4. The left column will give you several options (You may have to select “Show Options”)

5. Check the box marked “Foreclosure.”

The tip is from Google Map Foreclosure Tricks.

You probably won’t get much more granular information, but by zooming into a state or an area you get a rough picture of the real estate situation, or in another word, how bad it has become.