SarahGray Lamm ~ Chapel Hill / Carrboro / Durham Real Estate Blog ~ Agent Outlier

We keep hearing there are more foreclosures coming and it's just common sense that those bad loans will affect our marketplaces.

If you could see what percentage of these troubled assets your local banks or credit unions own relative to their capital and loan loss reserves and relative to the county as a whole, would you want to know?

The BANKTRACKER UPDATE was launched 16 September 2009 by The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a part of The American University School of Communication in cooperation with MSNBC.

The search tool these talented investigative journalists have built is intended to allow the public to see graphically the percentage of troubled assets owned by any bank or credit union in the United States. Pretty interesting stuff. According to the BankTracker Methodology, The FDIC requires banks and the NCUA requires credit unions to submit certain data quarterly and these are all public information. The workshop members have extracted and organized certain data points and organized them into this easy to use tool.

There are a few caveats and explanations about this data which I recommend you read before jumping to any conclusions about what this data shows but still, it is window into the operations of your bank that would have been tough to find on your own until this tool was developed!

That, my friends, is the message from one of my favorite bloggers, Thomas Baekdal. I've posted his stuff before and not gotten much response but if you don't read this latest post you will miss one of the biggest heads up you will ever get!

He describes how we are very quickly moving from a "find economy" to a "use economy". In a "use economy" your observations about the things you know and the conversations it starts are part of people's very existance. What matters is your CMS...Content Management System...your internal work flow...and he provides a checklist for us. What self respecting real estate agent doesn't like a checklist!

I know we all have friends and colleagues who don't "get" social media, blogging or what we are doing on ActiveRain. All I say to them is you need to "do it" to "get it". Maybe what I'll do is pass this article on to them. After all, as Baekdal points out, people discuss articles, conversations, and what they care about and how they feel (I would add people they respect, or don't, as the case may be) but they do not discuss presentations or campaigns.

Happy Labor Day!

I’m the kind of person who loves timelines…I am always intrigued and well, comforted, to see how things got to where they are and a really cool timeline is a great way to show it to me. So I was not surprisingly drawn to it when I ran across this beautiful timeline.

Thomas Baekdal is way ahead of the curve when it comes to social media. He is so cutting edge as to be ahead of the class by light years. But he does what I like, looks at history to show us where we might be going. This is his admittedly ‘flexible’ timeline of how people have gotten information since 1800. It accompanies a fascinating article about how people have been trying to connect with each other for over 200 years.

He begins his assessment of this fundamental shift in how we get information with a look at history. His colorful timeline is necessarily flexible (for all you data purists) because it would be boring to look at it in even, static increments! (Rule #1 – as all high tech marketers know if it ain’t pretty or intriguing nobody clicks on it!)

But once he gets to the last couple of years the timeline colors swirl together in a way that screams speed of light at you! His point is made visually whether or not you read the article. That’s how we get our information these days and will in the future…at the speed of light and from every direction!

How does your brain decide what to snatch out of the swirl? And isn’t that what we are all grappling with in the brave new world of marketing? Trying to be the flash of color that gets snatched out of the swirl? Isn’t this the reason we spend so much time communicating with each other about how we should communicate?

The truth is that as I sit here, I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I clicked on or what caught my attention for the micro second it took to decide to click on the link to his article. I have no idea…but isn’t that the point? He is part of the natural flow of information…he is organic.Who cares how I found him, I found him.

Isn’t that what you want to be?

SarahGray Lamm is a licensed, full time, residential Broker in the Triangle of North Carolina.  She specializes in serving the real estate needs of home owners and home buyers in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, SW Durham and Northern Chatham County.  With over 60,000 hours of experience in North Carolina real estate, SarahGray is proudly associated with Allen Tate Realtors , the Carolinas largest independent real estate company, ranking #8 in the nation.  With exceptional relationships all over the Carolinas, SarahGray is able to connect you with other professionals in all areas who will make your home buying or selling experience the best you have ever had!

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