Q: Time for #DIY #homebuyers to persevere w/ conventional home buying or to be #proactive?What would Steve Jobs do? j.mp/15f0CXP

— Bill Wendel (@RealEstateCafe) May 3, 2013

TECH-SAVVY? Don't need a full-service #buyeragent? Propose your own fee & #rebate bit.ly/DIY_Rebate #DIY #homebuyers #realestate #savings

— Bill Wendel (@RealEstateCafe) January 23, 2013

Click on link above to view slideshow on our new web site or contact us to view over coffee. 

Please visit this post on our new real estate blog, LIKE our crowdfunding campaign and share with homebuyers who've been waiting for the "off-season" in real estate to bargain hunt.  If you've never heard of The Real Estate Cafe, contact us to learn more about our money-saving, fee-for-service business model or watch this 80 second video introduction.

BUBBLE HOUR: Anyone want to Hangout on Google+ to talk about this? Is #realestate rebound for real? boston.com/realestate/new… via @bostondotcom

— Bill Wendel (@RealEstateCafe) August 29, 2012

Keeping an eye on real estate in Massachusetts?  DIY homebuyers, visit our new experimental blog and tell us where you see Boston housing prices going in 2012 and beyond.

It's All Saint's Day 2011 and my thoughts have turned once again to the practice of burying St. Joseph statues upside down.  Unbelievable as it may seem, an article on same subject was the most forwarded link in the Wall Street Journal four years ago today -- five rankings ahead of Google's new G-Phone!

Who would have guessed that one in four mortgages would be "underwater" four years later.  Maybe that's part of the reason that some vendors are backing way from St. Joseph as a miracle cure (the metaphor the Wall Street Journal used four years ago), and repositioning the saint as someone who protects you from making bad real estate decisions:   

Others are making repeated disclaimers that burying a St. Joseph statue does not guarantee the quick sale of your home, but advocating the practice nonetheless because "It couldn't hurt." 

Still others, including at least one Catholic publishing house, are offering St. Joseph as a model and source of fortitude and faith for millions of households facing foreclosure and financial difficulties.  More than a decade ago, a similar impulse caused me to write an article entitled "Doing Justice to the Just Man." 

If China is playing the lead roll in the bailing out business, do you think distressed home sellers would be wiser to bury Buddha statues upside down instead of St. Joseph?  What about consulting witches and psychics?  One in Greater Boston is reportedly performing an average of two house blessings a week -- and that was in May, not a Halloween prank. 

Beyond misguided superstition is the wisdom and experience of "divine alchemy."  Suffering can bring out virtues, human if not saintly, but financial difficulties can also cause one to become discouraged or embittered.  If falling temperatures are causing you to give up on selling your home this year, maybe it's time to rescue St. Joseph statues before the ground freezes.

If you do, we'd be glad to exchange your statue for one of two books offered by Pauline Press -- think of it as a St. Joseph statue buyback program (limited to first 10 respondents):

If you're facing foreclosure, could participation in a prayer group -- online or off -- provide an emotional and spiritual safety net during the holidays?  Advent is a season of waiting -- would connecting with others who are waiting for an opportunity to modify their loan or sell their home help you hold onto hope?

Over the past sixteen years, The Real Estate Cafe has experimented with a variety of alternative, money-saving approaches to real estate brokerage.  Today, we're rolling our latest experimental dish: DIY crowd financing with a 16% ROI!  We're not talking about crowd funding someone's mortgage or downpayment at this point; just a short-term loan of $1,600 to meet our operating expenses.

We've already received $650, and would like to raise the balance of the $950 ASAP.  Please note, we're NOT asking for donations!  Anyone lending money will be REPAID by approx. September 20, 2011, after we receive a referral fee on the sale of a townhouse in Cambridge, MA. To get people to act TODAY, we're offering a guaranteed 16% rate of return, so for every $100 you advance, you get back $116.  How does that compare to the rate of return you're getting from your bank or other investments?

Why 16%? Because we're celebrating our 16th anniversary acting as consumer advocates and Guardian Angels for home buyers.  After trillions of dollars have been lost in home equity around the country, the services of a tech-savvy buyer agent -- with ZERO conflict of interest -- is more important than ever (see our video and article in Wall Street Journal about our 100% rebate option).

We need funds ASAP, first to pay rent and second to relaunch our website on http://RealEstateCafe.com (see image of original site from 1995).  Although this is only the second time we've asked clients to "chip-in" to meet our own needs, we first proposed a DIY micro-fundraising campaign a decade ago called ASAP = AIDS Shelter Alliance Partners and encourage all of our clients to share a portion of their rebate with local organizations through our informal "Rebate-it-Forward" program.

If you're a past client, current client, or just want a quick return on a small investment, call or text us at 617-661-4046. 

PS.  If you think 16% is a good rate of return, ask how much money our home buyer clients have saved in the past.  Once called one of "100 Interesting, Influential & Impressive People in Real Estate on Twitter," we invite you to follow us on http://Twitter.com/RealEstateCafe to see what we cook-up next!

Comment on @InmanNews blog post: Groupon, other big 'group buy' sites slow to embrace real estate

Like nearly anything online, there are "do-it-yourself" options for anyone in the real estate industry - broker, lender, seller, or product / service vendor -- to create and manage their own group offers. After looking briefly at other solutions, The Real Estate Cafe has begun experimenting with http://www.chompon.com and hope that deal syndication platform will deliver significant advantages including but not limited to the following:

1.  Smaller processing fees so we can retain a larger share of the revenue collected and offer larger discounts to homebuyers and sellers (FSBOs or "for sale by owners"):

2.  Ability to create, deliver and even edit / extend deals in "Real time" (as suggested in the idea starter we tried to seed at REBarCamp Boston);

3.  Ability to offer a variety of offers at the same time;

4.  Ability to select / share deals created by other money-saving innovators, locally or nationally, syndicated through Chompon;

We are actively seeking deal syndication partners in five broad categories: sellers, lenders, real estate brokers, and product and service vendors to co-create and aggregate money-saving offers through locally-initiated homebuyer / homesavings clubs.

Beyond what any single company or organization might offer, or any group buying site might prepackage, there are also new tools in the marketplace that will empower consumers to self-aggregate and negotiate price concessions from vendors and professionals inside and outside the real estate industry.  That's why some are calling sites like http://Loopt.com a "reverse-groupon" model.  

But DIY homebuyers don't have to wait for group buying sites to deliver savings, or organize groups to negotiate their own deals.  One in three of The Real Estate Cafe's clients proposed their own fee / rebate last year.  If you don't like what you see on our existing Menu of Fees & Rebates, propose your own money-saving deal!

The categories in this Group Switching poll give you an idea of the kind of savings the "next generation of consumer power" seeks to deliver on household bills.  For more info, contact us directly or follow http://Twitter.com/RealEstateCafe and help us coauthor and deliver a folksonomy of consumer savings for home buyers, home sellers, and homeowners. 

@TheNextWeb
Online accounts could be verified using Indian government’s unique ID project, Aadhaar http://tnw.to/19XJu by @tsuvik on @thenextwebin
http://twitter.com/#!/TheNextWeb/status/84202373072957440

EXCERPTS

For those who aren’t familiar with Aadhaar, it is an ambitious project from Indian government which aims to create a database of the country’s residents along with some simple biometrical data, and later issue a multipurpose unique national identity number to them. This database can also then be integrated by other ministries into their databases for various government purposes.

Although user participation in this project is completely voluntary and not mandatory, it is recommended to sign up for the ID number so that you can enjoy certain facilities that would require it.

Further, in an attempt to woo the app developers to create apps, he announced that the API calls for all third party apps, will remain free for the next few years. He said:

Imagination is the limit as far as what applications could be built upon the Aadhar platform.

People who have received these numbers will look for the benefits of the number. This is where the app ecosystem will come in. Different partners can build apps and provide benefits across different sectors like healthcare and banking

In the US, real estate agents, developers and lenders already have tools to access the digital identity of potential homebuyers and the Patriot Act requires homebuyers to verify their identity at the closing table. So whether the digital equivalent of the voluntary ID system in India emerges in this country or not, building blocks already exist to create a real estate app ecosystem based on a “Homebuyer ID” assuming many of the 225+ pieces of information RealTag.com uses to evaluate potential home buyers are aggregated from public data sources.

Real estate use cases in the public, private, and non-profit sectors are not hard to imagine; and cost savings from more efficient allocation of housing subsidies could motivate the government to take the lead. In the public sector, the development of a Homebuyer ID would enable HUD (US Department of Housing & Urban Development), state and local housing organizations to verify, qualify, and select applicants for affordable housing programs more efficiently, thereby reducing costs and stretching the impact of limited tax dollars.

In the private sector, the development of a Homebuyer ID would also unleash new money-savings ways of buying and selling real estate, including the ability for home buyers to manage their own identity (think reverse-RealTag or “MyRealTag”) and the creation of an MLS for buyers. This would allow home sellers, whether represented by a listing agent or selling “for sale by owner,” to search homebuyers as easily as buyers currently search listings. The ability to match buyers and sellers more efficiently would reduce transaction costs, if not bypass the real estate industry’s bloated two-sided commission built into the MLS, and result in billions of dollars in savings annually for consumers.

How do we get there from here?  Want to talk about next steps, in the US or India?

The image above is a static screen grab, but you'll find The Real Estate Cafe's new, experimental LIVE Twitter feed on our Boston.com ad.  If you'd like to know more about how Twitter and other "real-time" tools are "revolutionizing the internet, again," watch what's left of the 10 minute presentations from the 140 Characters Conference (140conf) in New York via UStream's LIVE video or follow the fire hose of actionable information being Tweeted from that event on this Twitter aggregator!  You can see the comments we've made and questions we've asked using the #140conf hashtag here.  Your feedback is welcome below or by replying to our individual Tweets.  You'll find some idea starters and discussion questions there.  We'd love your ideas about how to best use our LIVE Twitter ad to inform your home hunt and help you save money -- our mission for the past 16 years!  If you reply to one of our Tweets, may we Retweet your thoughts on Boston.com?  If not, please DM (direct message us) via Twitter.