Back Bay Condominiums

The band-aid will be for me to buy an emulator, a piece of software that makes my Mac function more like a PC. It just burns me; imagine you needed to use your Porsche as your company car, but first you had to retrofit it so it would perform more like an Audi.

But the whole my-MLS-won't-work episode made me think, too, of the larger problems of real estate technology. I'm all for adding more data and more images to our knowledge base – that's part of what my journalism was about – but do we have an end in sight? Once we have every house in every state videotaped and Google Earth-ed, then what? Will all those images be even remotely searchable? It's tough to find comps by "style" in my local MLS now, with Victorians misidentified as Colonials, and sellers reluctant to use the word "Ranch" – how much tougher will it be when we have to line up footage against footage?

I've been reading like crazy as part of starting up my business (and, ahem, it's not like the phone rings very often.) One of the pieces of advice I really like comes from Robert Shemin: take Fridays off. Not go-to-the-movies off, but take a day a week to get a little distance on your business, a day to compare your performance against your goals. In other words, take a little time away from producing information, and spend some time processing it.

In terms of technology and our industry, I don't think this has to take the form of consultants and white papers and meetings in conference rooms (yuck!), but it's worth thinking about. Everyone loves to be near their gadgets; putting your cell phones and PDAs on the table at Lever House is just an updated version of cowboys setting their guns on the table at a saloon. And I enjoy walking around tricked out like I'm in an episode of "Alias," but it's worth taking a grander view: Our business is computerizing underneath us, what do we want it to do?