What do YOU want and need?

The objective of my website realestateknowledge4u.com is to provide the information YOU are looking for releated to the very complex field of real estate. I have been progressing through the learning curve after a long career in Information Technology. My knowledge of real estate was my house. Therefore I had no idea where to even start learning about realestate.

The objective of this site is to share my progress that will shorten the time for you to learn about real estate. Please let me know what You feel should be on the site.
Links?
Subjects?
Articles?
Magazines?
Usenets groups?
terminology?
Seminars?
Web sites?
Editorials?
These are just SOME of the idea starters.
I really need YOU the visitor to let me know what YOU need or want.
If you have no ideas, let me know that the subject (real estate) is so overwhelming you do not know where to start.
Place a comment on the blog or email boblevy@realestateknowledge4you.com
or click on the email link at realestateknowledge4U.com

A little humor?

There must be a lot of jokes and/or cartoons related to Real estate. Please share them on my blog. Even a link to them would be appreciated.  Here is one humorous piece, or is it humor?  Your thoughts? Thanks to Dennis R for this contribution.

Subject: Short Economics Lesson

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.  After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little..  The second test average was a D!  No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that

Updates to map and traditional HTML pages

I have just finished updating the mindmap as well as the traditional HTML pages at:

http://www.realestate-knowledge.com

IRS and self directed links have been updated as well as a pointer so some new education

Great source of education

Feb 4 2009 the Wall Street Journal had a great article.
A Boost in Online Money Courses
here is a link (may require subscription)
http://tinyurl.com/cs6kek
In the article were a number of links to education but the one that caught my eye and time was a free course from MIT!
Real Estate Finance and Investment
This course is an introduction to the most fundamental concepts, principles, analytical methods and tools useful for making investment and finance decisions regarding commercial real estate assets. As the first of a two-course sequence, this course will focus on the basic building blocks and the “micro” level, which pertains to individual properties and deals.

I downloaded all of the material but have not had time to review. If anyone is interested, here is the direct link:
http://tinyurl.com/54g3d7

If anyone reviews the material would appreciate posting youghts on this blog.

Bob Levy

TV’s Eleventh Hour series – relation to Realestate-Knowledge!

TV’s Eleventh Hour series – relation to Realestate-Knowledge!

The mind is a very interesting creation.

Last night (2009/03/05) I watched Eleventh Hour and really enjoyed the message. Awaking Friday morning, I realized why I enjoyed their solution. During the night, my mind was busy at work analyzing and comparing their solution to Realestate-knowledge.com

In the plot, several people dropped dead some distance from their home. There was zero connection between any of the people. They looked at a lot of raw data and could make zero connection between these people. They plotted where the individuals lived, and where they dropped dead. There was no connection.

Dr. Hood asked, Is there anything we did not see? The “common” missing piece was no car keys in any of the victims effects. That led to the conclusion that none of the victims drove (to their death) but took public transportation. This led to using the map and drawing a line between home and final location for each of the victims. What appeared was an intersection common to all of the victims. This knowledge allowed the team to take action which led to the “solution”.

During the sleep process, my mind was reprocessing the discovery plot and comparing to what Realestate-knowledge.com is attempting to accomplish.

Transforming raw data to information then to knowledge that allows you to take action.

The real estate space is like the victims in the story. Lots of different isolated pieces of data (like the millions of sites that contain the phrase “real estate”). The problem is that raw data that is the root cause of information overload.

It is the goal of realestate-knowledge to provide real knowledge that will produce the intersection map like the TV story did.

Realestate-knowledge will  NOT make you rich, but will provide an action point which is what knowledge is all about! No advice or recommendations will be made, just knowledge that allows the visitor to take action.

Eleventh hour link and summary below:

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/eleventh_hour/recaps/116/recaps.php

When several people in Philadelphia fall victim to a what seems to be a nerve-agent, Hood, Rachel and Felix get called in.
Using maps and recreating the victim’s morning commute, Hood determines all the victims intersected in a corner of subway station and that they crossed paths with a man who had something in his backpack spray them. They find the man with the backpack, dead in the corner and realize that he was traveling to a theater to meet others: their intention to use all the children at the afternoon performance as hostages (threatening to use their nerve-agent on all of them) in order to get the G8 meeting in nearby Washington to release political prisoners.

Bob Levy
boblevy@realestate-knowledge.com

http://www.realestate-knowledge.com

Welcome to Realestate-knowledge’s BLOG

2009 03/05

This is the first on many Blog entries that will document my quest for providing information to people interesting in learning about Real Estate.

My experience includes a 50+ year background in computers on both side of the “fences”.

On one side,  I was a “customer” performing every aspect of Data Processing starting as a “printer operator”, moving on to just about every job in computer operations. Next was application development and management. Managing  a 3 shift 7 x 24 support organization provided a very unique education about people and their needs. A specialty I enjoyed was the management of data storage which led me to the entire spectrum of managing lots of data and transforming data to information to knowledge.

The most valuable lesson learned was to provide people what they needed, NOT necessarily what they asked for.This was very a critical turning point in my career. I learned most people (in a corporate environment)  have no clue about they really  need and perform actions based on what they are told to do.  Is the same statement true about real estate? What do you think?

The last few decades have been spent on the vendor side of the fence.  Involvement included sales, marketing, tech support and pre-sales activities. Once again my data management skills came into play as the amount of information available exceeded the capacity of people to acquire the knowledge needed to take action.  Most of my vendor activity was focused on break-through technologies.  This is where by extensive user activity experience provided the “insight” in providing prospects and customers with information they really needed.  Providing knowledge they needed was part of the “secret sauce”  of exciting prospects and turning them into customers.

Leaving the software vendor world, I began looking for alternative techniques to make money. My long time mentor had been attempting to get me to look into real estate as a way to make money. His advice (which I almost always follow) was very straight forward and sincere. DO NOT INVEST IN REAL ESTATE until you have to education. Thus began my entree into the complex space of real estate education.

Google delivers 504 MILLION hits on the word Real Estate.
How can you possibly determine which sites are useful and which not?

Our goal is to search out relevant data and information, combined with the experiences of others and provide you with the KNOWLEDGE to take action. What subjects do you think should be included in our site?
Please email boblevy@realestate-knowledge.com with your suggestions. You will be given the credit for your contribution (If desired).

The success of the site and it’s growth will be based on YOUR input. There is no such thing as a bad opinion, only those not expressed.