Software and the Data « Noel's Green (make that SUSTAINABLE) Blog

BIM forces a break with status quo

Change is in the wind. Software and information technology forces a break with the past.

For generations, we engineers depended on drawings. The desktop PC, and software, such as Autocad, changed our dependence into a 2-d CAD.

Stephen Roth wrote in the recent issue of Consulting Specifying Engineers magazine.

HVAC cooling [...]

Owners: Demand more Energy Modeling for the bottom line

Concerns brought up by Howard McKew of Engineered Systems magazine in the July 2009 issue. He said “Owners, Please Demand More from your IPD team” (Integrated Project Delivery ) McKew cites the fact that the new IPD approach being promoted by the AIA is possibly a lawyers dream to make money in this [...]

Accountability and measuring performance: Metering to assure energy savings

In my opinion, “The 8th habit”, by Stephen Covey, (Free Press, 2004)
should be required reading for all business people, including building owners, managers and designers. He said that successful team work includes all of the following:

Focus on the wildly important

Create a compelling scoreboard

Translate lofty goals into specific actions

Hold each other accountable all the time

What is wildly important to a building owner or tenant? In a tough economy, lowering energy costs may be the easiest (if not the only) way to improve your bottom line. Improving the bottom line in real estate means higher asset valuations.

You cannot control the market rental rates but, all else remaining the same, you CAN control your energy costs. Energy bills continue to grow, so the impact of taking action now can increase with time. Tenants and clients are also concerned with their carbon footprint as well, and reducing the footprint has great social goodwill and karmic implications.

What is a compelling scoreboard ? The monthly utility bills are just a crude beginning. Continue reading Accountability and measuring performance: Metering to assure energy savings

Thanks Frankly

FranklyMLS.com is a superb web site that I use for searching and analyzing residential properties in this, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region. It’s my favorite tool because it is fast, easy and returns latest MLS data in a format I can analyze in Microsoft Excel, text and numericals. No gobble-dee-gook. Other web sites [...]

Dysfunctional Multiple Listing Service

Lately, we ( my partner and my team) have been looking daily and diligently for rehab properties, and making offers (or trying to ) on the ones we like.

However, a peculiar thing is happening with bank-owned (REO ) home in northern VA. There have been rumors of dishonesty and unscrupulous operators. And we are seeing some evidence of this as well.

The banks have been telling us as shareholders and borrowers, that all homes will be marketed as widely as possible, using the MLS. I do not see how that is happening.

Continue reading Dysfunctional Multiple Listing Service

Zillow Ipod ‘app’ demonstrated by 4 year old girl

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Aha! A national MLS database does NOT exist

An interesting web site Denver Home Values made this 2007 commentary. Its a bit dated, but it discloses the lack of widespread standardization of the data.

“The difficulty of dealing with the many legal and technical issues has not prevented a few national real estate conglomerates from attempting to build a national database [...]

Web sites for searching real estate listings

Recently, I have been using a slew of various web sites to research real estate listings. Most real estate web sites sport tools such as active maps that activate displays on a list on same page. There are two kinds of these.

1. Mouseover links on the map highlight individual properties on an “active [...]

Inspiring possibilities

The April issue of Building Design and Construction magazine has a pretty interesting article entitled,

BIM + IPD: Three Success Stories, by Jeff Yoders. He writes on some recent projects done using the Integrated Project Delivery approach that uses the Building Information Modeling– leveraging the synched database model inside
Autodesk‘s REVIT and REVIT MEP software–