Odds-n-Ends

RE Agent and the Two Deals
Yesterday afternoon, I got a reply from my RE agent on my tentative offers. I thought she would just pass along my info to the listing agent, the listing agent would pass it along to the sellers, and the sellers would say 'sounds workable' or 'not a chance'. I guess I got a lesson in working with RE agents, instead. It turns out my RE agent was going to write-up a formal offer, and wanted some personal information about me and my spouse. While I can understand this, I was not prepared to do all this for a deal that obviously was not going to happen. I politely responded to retract the offers and dismiss the deal altogether. If it was something I knew could very well happen, I would have persued it, but from what my RE agent told me, the sellers were not motivated and not willing to take seller financing.

Conversion Program
As I mentioned several times before, my RE agent now sends me an aoutmated list of properties each morning that meet my criteria. The listings are in HTML format and are very hard to digest easily. Therefore, yesterday, I wrote a Java program that will parse the file and create a piped-delimited file that I can now import into a spreadsheet program. Surprisingly, it works like a charm. Now I can sort on columns to quickly find properties that may be better than others. From the point of downloading the file to reading it in a spreadsheet program takes only about 2 minutes. Yesterday's property list contained 305 properties, and I would still be looking through the list now with the original HTML file. Unfortunately, this is a tool that only I can use for now, since the raw data is in a proprietary form to begin with.