April
1, 2007: RECS Cybertips for April 2007
Joe
Zlomek is a member of the Real
Estate Cyberspace Society (RECS). It provides these tips in a monthly
newsletter.
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Expand your real estate knowledge ... for free
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Boston, better known around the world as MIT, has taken an interesting step to democratize education. All of its materials available to students in any of its courses, on any campus, are now available to the world via the Web at no charge.
Using the materials from MIT's
Open Courseware Initiative, as it's called, does not require a registration.
Of course, you won't earn an MIT degree or certificate by reading through them. You won't have access to the faculty members who wrote or teach them, either. But the wealth of knowledge offered for public consumption is staggering, and
it includes more than 450 links to real estate content found in the university's own search
engine.
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| Live long enough to profit
on your last property flip |
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What kind of effort does it take to reach the age of 100?
Dr. Thomas
Perls, founder and director of the New England Centenarian
Study, has been researching that question for years. Now he's developed what's called the
"Living To 100 Life Expectancy
Calculator." It uses the most current and carefully researched medical and scientific data to estimate how old you will live to be, given your current dietary, exercise, and lifestyle habits.
It's free, and it offers helpful advice on how specific lifestyle changes can add years to your life.
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| Keep out bad guys and bad stuff |
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Your computer is a repository of valuable business information. Your client contacts are in there. Your listings and sales details are in there. Hey, even that spreadsheet on this year's commission payments is in there! Keeping all of it safe from hackers and viruses should be important to you.
PC Magazine regularly offers its advice on which software packages are best for specific purposes. It recently posted to the Web a list of the
Best Free Software For Computer
Security.
Taking advantage of it is better than taking time to re-build your computer's data from scratch.
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| Crank up your search results |
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A few big-name Web search engines usually dominate the headlines: Google,
Yahoo, Windows Live
Search. But there are hundreds of other lesser-known and useful search engines occupying server space on the Internet, just waiting to be discovered.
cRANKy is one of them.
cRANKy bills itself as the first "age-relevant" search engine. It's intended to find results to queries rated by cRANKy editors and members as having greatest relevance to people age 50 and older ... the
Baby Boomer
generation. It's a niche. It's out of the ordinary. But it's interesting and, on occasion, relevant to those in the business of real estate.
For example, a recent visit to cRANKy's home page showed its list of Top 10 search terms for the day. "Best places to retire" was No. 6; "best retirement communities" came in at No. 10.
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