Darn, I was eagerly awaiting them to go out of business so I could pick up one of their vans (all Fords btw) at auction for pennies on the dollar. Their drivers in SF are absolutely clueless and honestly should not be alowed on the road.
Where does the data come from? We collect and publish building permit data at the property level which might be a good add-on for investors looking to for info on the the condition of the structure. If you're interested in adding building permit records to your reports I'd love to discuss. You can email me direclty at chris [at] buildzoom.com
I created http://picmint.io just as a place to keep photos I have taken that may come in handy for projects and as a way to tinker with IFTT. Free for anyone to use if you see something you like.
If a company doesn't treat you properly and refuses to help, cut your losses and move on.
Switch to athenahealth. By far the best company in the space (my wife works there so I'm biased), but you can dig in to their financials (NSDQ: ATHN) and see for yourself.
Medical billing is an incredibly broken process, so I applaud anyone trying to fix the problem. There is never an excuse for treating customers poorly, however. If you do, you will no longer have a business.
This is a tech-heavy community, but the interest of foreign buyers cannot be overlooked in this current market. San Francisco is a world-class city and if you look at overall macro trends of comparable cities (London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, etc), SF is still downright cheap. There will always be a wave or renters in great locations, so if you have the cash SF real estate is a good place to park it.
Average price of a 3 bedroom house in central London is currently around $4,900,000.
Europeans get xenophobia all wrong. They freak the fuck out about minarets but do nothing to keep foreign speculators and billionaires out of their real estate markets.
If you want a decent life in your town, keep the despots and oil sheikhs and drug kingpins the fuck out of your real estate market.
I saw the same thing in Italy when I lived there in the 90s - any kind of real estate was much more expensive than it seemed like anyone would be able to afford.
Never did figure it out - in the US, the public policy issue with homeownership is making mortgages easier or harder to get. If they're easy, then prices go up but more people own something. If they're hard, then prices go down (because no one bids them up) but fewer people own. I can't figure out a policy that leads to high prices and low rates of ownership.
Restricting affordable housing so that it doesn't grow as fast as population. In the UK the rise in the price of housing is expected to hit 7%, whereas inflation is supposed to maybe get as high as 2% over the next two years. This should give a property bubble in the southeast before the next election, which the government can claim represents an economic recovery.
The problem with the VC model is that they look for a large liquidity event in the short term, and so push companies aggressively to reach this goal. With the number of IPOs so low these days, these liquidity events are much more infrequent than they used to be, yet the VC model remains the same. It angers me that nobody is doing anything to innovate in this space, as funding is hands down the most limiting factor for a new venture's growth. I found this slideshare presentation which includes some of the freshest thinking I've seen on the subject. Any thoughts? http://cli.gs/g3BA9v
