WE AT JMV&CO HAVE ALSO BEEN HAND-COUNTING “BALLOTS’ THIS WEEK
Although no court has ordered us to do so, we at
JMV&CO have been hand-counting 17,576 “ballots” this week. Our ballots have been the “Events” logged by
our computer tracking responses to the offering of Gambler Sale I on www.se-timbersales.com during the
five days 12/8-12/00. The offering
included 44 documents: 1 contract with the landowner, 1 road map, 1 tract map,
1 cash-flow schedule with IRR%, 4 annual inspection reports, and 36 photos of
the trees on the tract. We notified
3,172 persons of the sale in an article last Friday, and our tracking report on
www.vardaman.com revealed that 107 of
them spent an average of more than three minutes looking at it on the
screen. (We can’t tell whether anyone
down-loaded it.)
This was encouraging, but the only serious interest
would have been displayed by the persons who took the all-important step of
studying all these documents. This
could be determined only by examining the “Events” where each one logged on the
tract GA95222SN. Here is a record of a
typical Event:
Event: GET
Date: Sun Dec 10, 2000 – 22.03.43 (Central Standard
Time in hours, minutes, and seconds)
Address: xxx.xx.xxx.xx (user’s computer
number)
Domain: Numeric IP
Suffix: None
Country: Unknown
Referrer: http:///www.se-timbersales.com/ Tract ID =
75
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows
95; Via NetLineAmerica, Inc.)
Protocol: HTTP/1.0
File: /Attachments/GA95222SN/Snew222con.htm (this is
the contract alone)
Size:(Whenever he switched to another document, he
caused another Event. His time log
indicated that he was on the screen more than 40 minutes altogether.)
We tallied him as a serious prospect. There was no “hanging chad” on his
ballot. We could have counted the
number of similar persons with a computer program, but our interest was too
serious to risk making a mistake in designing the program. Therefore, we printed out the total log of
Events on 569 pages and examined each one.
Through yesterday, we found 14 “ballots” like his.
Jim Vardaman personally inspected about one-third of
the 17,576 because he owns personally a 95% interest in GA95222SN. He intends to continue the offering until
the tract sells, but he didn’t want to make an offer that would be
ignored. Although we don’t own any part
of tracts that you list on this site without our help, we’ll give you the same
sort of service if you ask. Other firms
offer timber-sale services. When you
consider using such services, ask them to provide you the same data.
