Posted on by mwhybark

Zilliness

I have been keeping an eye on Zillow’s valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It’s certainly what I expect the site to do, as a way of creating stickiness – it’s certainly working very well in drawing my repeated site visits.

Curious to see if anyone has done a systematic analysis of what Zillow’s reported values for a given property are in comparison to what people are actually paying for these listings, I was disappointed to find that no one’s done so in a careful, large-scale way. Are you listening, Consumer Reports? For that matter, are you listing, HouseValues and Redfin? Careful competitive analyses of competitor’s datasets over time could be a great marketing tool!

However, I did not come up wholly dry. This Phoenix-area blogging realtor did a quick set of reality checks on some recent sales in the Arizona community, and while I’m guessing he must have cherry-picked, he found little correlation between Zillow’s estimates and what he takes to be real-world market values. In two cases, he found gross overvaluations based on inaccurate data at Zillow, and in cases of homes currently listing, he found that Zillow was undervaluing the homes, based on his opinion of the market.

His basic critique is reasonable enough – you can’t trust an automated valuation service to provide accurate estimates because the actual condition of the property is likely to vary from that represented by the available data. I’m also not surprised that he feels the site is undervaluing homes that he is involved in developing listings for – the more capital there is in his market, the more there is available for him.

I am surprised that Zillow’s valuations do appear to be on the conservative side. I suppose that after this summer winds down and Seattle’s market cools down to match the rest of the country’s slowing sales, I’ll have a better sense of things. I was amazed to see that so far this summer nearly every house that has sold in our immediate area has well topped $400k. Wonder if it will hold. I hope so, now that we’re in it.

Posted on by mwhybark

Access denied

I’m hacking away at our database at work, attempting to automate the daily data imports we use to bring orders into our order management system. We have three distinct data sources for each merchant identity, and of course these three sources employ diferring schema. I have chosen not to worry about normalizing the data at import in any significant way, rather storing the data in one flat-file table with fieldnames that segment the unique datasource elements. This makes it very easy to pull out the original source data in the format it was passed to us.

The associated merchant IDs are not written into the export files; this, determining the associated merchant ID is implicit and cannot be established by testing the data structure.

What I want to do is automate the import process such that my operator svaes the daily downloads in a given appropriate folder. Currently we have been saving them in files tagged with the data provider’s name and the date. I beleive I will change this to incorporate the data provider, merchant ID, and date shortly.

However, MS Access does not natively support automating data import with a dynamic file name – the Text Transfer function requires a hardcoded path and file. I think I could set up macros that useTextTransfers that import from a fixed-location file and that then create a new exported file incorporating additional data such as date of import and merchant ID, but again I find myself bumping up agains the fixed-file-name issue in Text Transfer.

I’m sure there must be a way to use VB to construct the filepath from user input selected via drop-downs, but I’m not there yet. Argh!

Posted on by mwhybark

nearly wrapped

About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning – I’m guessing around 11 am – and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results – the shots look great, we got good sound, and our actors’ performances were all we could have hoped for.

I was initially skeptical about the project and agreed to participate because I am interested in learning about fast-and-light filmmaking. the practice of which I believe poses a significant threat to the revenue dominance of major film producers, much in the way that the proliferation of cable channels has challenged the predominance of the US Big Three networks.

I haven’t looked at the shots and schedule we were working from since sometime on Thursday, but as I recall, this ten-minute film used about twenty shots and a bit less than ten setups. Last I heard, we shot two full mini DV tapes, which I think gives us 180 minutes of footage; generally we were trying to get three takes of each shot.

Greg and Joey and I worked together very fluidly, and in some ways the best was the way we developed the lighting for the setups. I hope that the dailies look as good as I think they do at 6 am after being up all night.

Posted on by mwhybark

Fillum

I’m spending the weekend out of town helping with a friend’s film shoot. The crew has taken over a good-sized house in the south Puget Sound area and tonight I am running sound on the shots, which mostly entails holding my arms above my head for a long long time. We’ve completed the first of three setups and one of seven shots. We started at 8 or so.

We project continuing to shoot straight through the weekend – the schedule tonight calls for us to work until about 4 am.

Posted on by mwhybark

Carkeek

Viv and I finally took the walk to the sound through Carkeek Park from the shopping center that sits by one of the park entrances this morning, and we’ll be back. The highlight of the walk was a restored apple orchard by the trailside that had been planted by the Pipers, who originally homesteaded the area a bit over 100 years ago. It was a mix of incredibly old and beautiful fruit trees, gnarled and bent, and younger trees planted at the time of the orchard’s restoration in the late 1980s.

It’s quite rare to find a large orchard with such old trees – my grandfather, a fruit rancher, told me that trees are often pulled out at about twenty to forty years – and it was wonderful to wander around the slope, smelling the various heirloom varieties that were fruiting in great abundance in the summer sun. I came home with six; it would have been seven, but the incredibly ripe par I clambered up one senior citizen to pluck fell away as I jostled the branch that bore them.