There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 1 of 191)

Redfin runs out of other brokers’ agents to milk, resolves to milk its own, instead.

How bad is your listing agent?

“There are two real estate brokerage business models: Selling houses or milking agents. Redfin yearns to discover that it can’t do either.” –Greg Swann

I’ve spent much of this month documenting how ineptly Redfin.com lists homes for sale. It wasn’t something I set out to do. I’ve been dour about them since I discovered CEO Glenn Kelman’s racist staffing policies, but I had never paid any attention to them with regard to real estate. They have mattered nothing to my business: I’ve never had a Redfin showing, never shown a Redfin listing.

But I was simply amazed by what I found. Just as with iBuying and the carrying costs of owning non-producing housing, every experienced broker knew that salaried agents would not produce. But even so, I was unprepared for what I found: Multiple bone-headed deal-killing errors in each listing, with those errors repeated in listing after listing. Since the MLS listing is the gatekeeper to showing and every succeeding step in the purchase process, if the listing repels the buyer, the home cannot sell.

And they don’t. Many listings Close over 90 days, some over 180. They have a lot of Cancelled and Expired listings, as well, with many of those at huge DOMs. Strangely, a significant number of these sellers relist. Having already lost six months and 20% of the property’s value, why not truly go for broke?

Oh. Nevermind.

So after only 18 years of insisting that salaried agents are better, Redfin now proposes to become a split shop. The splits are crap, but that kinda doesn’t matter, taking account that the commissions are already cut to the quick, thus to market to people who think saving 1.5% on commission makes losing six months and 20% of the property’s value worthwhile.

And that would be the real problem. Redfin makes a point of not understanding real estate, so their plan is to recruit an agent who no longer exists – the top producer. The team leaders and rainmakers who actually sell homes are working at 95% to 100% splits – but the Read more

Get up. Get Out. Get Contacts. Get Paid.

If you are following my journey, we moved to Tampa/St Pete FL last year.  We still have a home in San Diego but spend most of the year in Florida. The reasons are plentiful but, when COVID lockdowns hit, it gave me a chance to start a new “product line” (commercial real estate loans) in a new location.  The move isn’t without challenges.  Although I can lend nationwide, most folks want to work with a local lender unless they have a prior personal relationship.

How did I parachute into Florida and build up a profitable mortgage brokerage business in 15 months?

1- I worked my inactive client database.
2- I added Florida agents, whom I met at industry happy hours, to my weekly email list
3- I try call 5 inactive clients and 5 agents daily.  Few people answer their phones now so I usually end up leaving messages.

Last year started off really well.  Our Florida purchase volume was about half of our California purchase volume.  My goal for 2022 was to have our Florida volume to exceed of our California volume. 2022 was shaping up well until St Patrick’s Day-volume got weaker through Memorial Day, then even weaker by Labor Day, then it damned near dried up through now (Thanksgiving).

A month ago, I decided to try something different.  Calling agents and inactive clients is still a daily discipline but it gets depressing when few calls are answered.  I decided to do some “in-person canvassing”, one day each week, to meet business owners in and around St Petersburg.  Pinellas County is a hodgepodge of independent businesses so I decided to make a goal of having 25 conversations each day, each time I went out.

First, I went to the charming seaside village of Dunedin.  The local Chamber of Commerce gave me a map of 145 businesses within one square mile.  I met:

-8 real estate agents,
-6 bar/pub/restaurant owners, and
-13 shop owners.

16 of those people owned a home and 2 owned investment properties.  12 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter.  4 of them said they would like to own investment properties.

Last week, I visited Read more

#OpenDoor shows the world how the #iBuyer idea will die: Death by Days-on-Market.

“If a slacker employee was mysteriously transformed into a house for sale…”

Ask any old-timer in real estate what’s wrong with the iBuyer idea and he’ll tell you right away:

“What happens when the market turns?”

It would be charitable to argue that the iBuyers actually thought this mishegoss would work. Perhaps that’s so: They’re flippers, except they are very bad at every part of the flipping process. And they’re pawnbrokers – buyers of last resort – except they buy first, not last, paying top-dollar for the honor, then cling to their assets like precious prodigal sons.

Brokering real estate works for almost nobody, but it only works because the broker does not own the asset. Owning non-producing assets as “investments” is insane. It can only work if you buy at deep, deep discounts – like flippers and pawnbrokers do, and like OpenDoor apparently cannot do.

So: Closed Sale Price compared to Original List Price, on average: April -$9,537, May -$16,935, June -$31,698.

Those are from Phoenix. Perhaps they’re doing better in other cities, but this is their primal market and ground zero for all things iBuyer. I think we’re seeing how they work.

The trend on Days-on-Market is not great, and I would expect it to get a lot worse: April 41, May 40, June 48. By June the market had well and truly turned, but in April they should have been moving everything in single-digit DOMs. That they were not – and that they score so few winners in pricing, amidst so many huge losers – tells you how they will do, going forward.

The problem, as I have been saying for years, is that even if they bought right, which they don’t, and even if they rehabbed and marketed right, which they don’t, they would still own the “investments” far too long, resulting in killer carrying costs.

The delusion in iBuying emerged from two ploys from the Federal government, suppressing interest rates for home-buyers and also for Wall Street. Yippee! Practically-free money to buy assets that seem only to go up in price…

Ahem.

Imputed losses per “investment” will get uglier by the day – Read more

In two years, this will be the news: “Glut of unsold houses.”

Sticks and stones might make a home, but money makes all the difference…

I live in a world in sticks: Everywhere I look, I see domiciles in progress: Single-family, huge multi-family projects – and the strange hybrid of single-family apartment communities, tiny single-story houses packed cheek-by-jowl, like little Legos affixed to a concrete carpet.

This is all Trump, so you know. Four or five years ago, investors decided that not only would right about now be a good time for new housing, the times would still be good for cashing in on opportunities planned for five years out.

You may think them unwise, but risk is what makes horse races. Moreover, had Trump retained the presidency, the bets would have paid off handsomely.

Things may be different where you are. It’s very easy to build in Arizona, compared to other places. Even so, you have your Trump-promise investments – in sticks, in stone, in steel – and you will have the opportunity to see how things work out locally.

I am beyond dour, for what that’s worth. We are on the cusp of global famine, and how tight belts will get in America remains to be seen. From borrower activity, we know the market has well and truly turned, and yet I suspect people still in the market are underestimating how bad things will get.

Will prices go down? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Since Reagan gifted us with Volker, we’ve treated housing prices as a bellwether to market trends – in real estate and everywhere. That will be a lot less useful as the market tries to find dry land, when it is awash in funds that are 80% newly-counterfeited. The tale going forward will be told by Days-on-Market – from single- to double- to triple-digits.

And yet: Isn’t there a housing shortage? There is here. How about Seattle? No one there will tell us, but the Great George Floyd Migration created housing shortages mostly where bus lines don’t run, leaving locales well-served by rioter-movers hugely vacant. We can expect rent-seekers to fill the most-vacant of that housing with Fiasco Joe’s illegal immigrants – Read more

Don’t drop that listing price just yet!

Southern California, agents are telling me that homebuyer enthusiasm has dropped quickly.  More homes are on caravan and some are starting to reduce listing prices to get the home sold.  Tampa Bay area agents are whispering the same.  And while the US Home Price Index rose 2%, year over year, we see price reductions in over 30% of the cities across the country.

This is no surprise to me.  Mortgage rates doubled in the past 6 months with a big move upwards in the past 60 days.  That, combined with the rapid increase in home prices since the pandemic started has severely impacted housing affordability.  With less buyers buying, and sellers looking for unrealistic prices, agents are pleading with sellers to drop their listing price.  You can offer your seller a couple of options BEFORE you drop that price:

1- If the home is secured with a low-interest VA or FHA mortgage, you can highlight that those loans are assumable in the marketing remarks.  This Safety Harbor listing offers an assumable loan, at 2.25%–half of what most lenders are offer today.
2- Offering a seller-buydown of the mortgage rate could save the seller some money.  I run through the numbers of a seller-buydown in this video.  This is a great response to a low offer.

I will be hosting a Realtor Happy Hour, in St Pete Beach, FL, on Thursday May 12, 2022.
I am hosting an Agents Helping Agents event, in Tampa, FL, on Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
Stay tuned if you are in San Diego.  I will be hosting an Agents Helping Agents event in mid June.

Need More Listings? Check Your Inbox

If you know me, you know that I am a fan of the Millionaire Real Estate Agent book by Gary Keller. His high touch marketing, to people you know, is a proven way to generate seller leads. Why aren’t more people deploying the 36-touch strategy then?
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Three reasons why Realtors aren’t doing this are:
1- it’s hard
2- it’s onerous
3- call reluctance
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Let’s face it– you probably don’t have a formal “database” which you nourish and grow and it’s probably because of one or two of those three reasons. This is what I did:
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I set up a Homebot account for my past clients and encouraged my Realtor partners to set up one for their database (Realtors need to be sponsored by a lender so ask me how you can do this). Mega San Diego/Phoenix real estate agent John Gluch shows you how he uses Homebot in this 6-minute video.
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Then…do two things:
1- call 5 homeowners daily who aren’t in your Homebot database and get them entered
2- call everyone who opens the sticky Homebot monthly emails and ask them for a referral.
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If you do this, you will have close to 1000 homeowners in your database and will have asked for some 500 referrals in the next year.
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It’s simple but not easy. If you want to make the “simple” easier, send me a message and I will get you a demonstration of Homebot, scripts for the calls, and sponsor you.

Am I charging enough rent for my investment property?

I don’t need to tell you that housing inventory is tight. Buyer agents are having a hard time earning a living today while listing agents are finding more and more competition.
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One thing you can do is to prospect out-of-state investors and offer one free service for them– comparable rent analysisRents are rapidly rising and most investors aren’t keeping up with the market.
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Many out-of-state investors are former residents; they lived here, moved to another state, and hold the property as an investment. While some Realtors are focused on telling homeowners and investors what their property is worth, hardly any are speaking with investors about what they could be earning from their home.
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I subscribe to two services to help me offer my expertise to investors:
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Rentometer offers a quick, easy, report, which you can generate with your branding, showing the comparable rents for the property. It costs less than $100 annually.
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A more proactive approach is to subscribe to Homebot. Homebot keeps you in touch with past clients and prospects by sending them a monthly homeowners digest, showing them data on property valuation, rent estimates, AirBnB analysis, potential homeowners equity, possible move-up potential, and a whole bunch more. It’s VERY sticky– My Homebot email open rate is north of 70%. Homebot offers real estate agents a free version and the full service costs about $25/month. You must be sponsored by a lender to subscribe to the free or upgraded version so, if you want to see how it works, just hit reply and ask me to sponsor you.
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Out-of-state investors have made money on their property and may want to sell for two reasons: they want out real estate as an investment OR they want to invest in another area with a higher capitalization rate. You can grab their attention by offering something other agents won’t offer– a comparable rental analysis. After you perform the analysis, you can keep that data, and your name in front of them, every single month. That is going to earn YOU more listings

Overnight News: What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

Ya think it's easy?

“How sad would it be to be the only puppy in the litter?”

Software gets better by versions, we are promised, but viruses do nothing but weaken: It’s actual evolution in action as highly-lethal strains do not propagate in time, while insufficiently-contagious strains do not propagate at all. The strains that survive tend to be more contagious but less virulent – and evolution gifted us long ago with the surefire solution to contagious respiratory diseases: The Nyquil trifecta – coughing, sneezing, runny nose – means stay away. How simple is that?

So what to make of the new Moronic strain of CoronaVirus? If you swear it’s more virulent, I want to know if it’s software. But if instead you tell me that the objective is to hide inflation by crippling demand, ideally long enough to steal the next election, you will have landed in a place where your claims make sense to me: The entire purpose of the virus is political – and plausibly genocidal.

We are as gods? Nonsense. We are far beyond gods. What god, be he ever so potent, would deliberately undermine his own nature? What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

In other news:

Zero Hedge: A Scared Nu World: Here’s What We Know About The COVID “Omicron” Strain.

City Journal: Guaranteed Murder: From Waukesha to New York, lax bail assures homicides.

Jim Brovard: The Biden Crackdown on Thought Crimes.

Overnight News: Get woke, go broke? Ain’t that America?

Ya think it's easy?

“Why is the ‘Dog Show’ more people than dogs?”

We watched network TV yesterday, briefly. Cathleen loves the parade, and she and Cleo were both thrilled by the dog show. Miss Chioux likes barking, running and, especially, running preceded by barking.

Fun to see from the commercials that all American families are black, and all black families are possessed of a scruffy male adult who dances madly and pretends that’s fathering. Amazing to watch American commerce shit all over the money – in pursuit of what, exactly? Paychecks for white voiceover actresses must be down by 90%, post-George-Floyd-sobriety-day, but is anyone measuring the consequences at the cash register of everything being sold by hectoring black women issuing treacly nursery rhymes?

If there is any such thing as a science of marketing, its iron law for the 21st century is simply this: Get woke, go broke. None so deserving. None too soon.

In other news:

American Thinker: Leaving California.

Newsweek: Salvation Army’s Donors Withdraw Support in Response to Racial ‘Wokeness’ Initiative.

Zero Hedge: ESPN Hemorrhaging Subscribers, Down To 76 Million As Disney Scrambles To Stem Tide.

Overnight News: Health care to be thankful for: Finding a doctor you can trust.

Ya think it's easy?

“I like the vet. He knows how to play rough.”

I go to a free-market doctor: Cash-and-carry is the ideal, but if you want to get your insurance company involved, you’ll be doing all the paperwork. He has zero employees, an out-of-the-way office and a shrine to Charleton Heston in the waiting room.

That would be health care for the self-employed – self-insured for all but catastrophes – but I would go to him, anyway. I trust him to see reality for what it is and not to lie to me about it. He may be the only doctor I will ever see again.

Certainly I am done with all vaccines. Whatever the net lethality of the COVID vaccine turns out to be, it is by now obvious that anyone who presumes to speak in an “official” capacity about public health is a liar pursuing unknown objectives.

Nice going, dipwads. Your reputation was nothing but good, and now it’s shit – probably never to recover.

Meanwhile: Find a doctor you can trust. Otherwise, you’re on your own…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Home Prices Hit a New All-Time High, Giving Sellers Much to be Thankful For.

Seth Barron: Voting Is For Citizens: New York City’s latest effort to extend the franchise to legal permanent residents would devalue citizenship and dilute the power of the vote.

John Daniel Davidson: Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie: The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

Overnight News: What better year to learn how best to fight with your relatives over the Thanksgiving Dinner table?

Ya think it's easy?

“Blah. Blah. Blah. The Kiddie Table is where all the dropped-food action is.”

Miss Chioux is with us for Thanksgiving, a very special treat, and I don’t feel much like hectoring the world this morning. Instead, I will send you to one of my favorite essays: “How to fight with your relatives over the Thanksgiving Dinner table.” Seems especially momentous this year…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Rental Market Tracker: Rents Up 13%, Outpaced by 17% Growth in Monthly Mortgage Payments.

City Journal: Strength in San Diego: The city’s triumvirate of police chief, district attorney, and mayor has not given in to disorder.

Overnight News: If you laughed when Kyle Rittenhouse said, “We all know how the FBI works” – the joke is on all of us.

Ya think it's easy?

“What do you call a dog who is good at guile? The Imaginary Dog.”

Much of my speech is ironical. I am a poet, to begin with, and I hate to bore my own ears. And I am a Swann boy, raised into a rapid-fire verbal wit: Homophones, definition-swaps, non sequiturs – work it and work with it fast or be swept away in the vortex. And: I am Loki from my father, my mother, her father, her brother – and from my own delight in trickery.

Accordingly, to speak with me is kind of a shit test: I can tell right away if you are actually listening to me, since you won’t get the jokes if you’re not. The good news is, if you are listening, I know you will be listening when we get to the parts of the conversation that are not deliberately inverted for comic effect. But before even that, there is simply this: People who are awake enough to laugh at the world are awake.

Last night on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Kyle Rittenhouse issued an unintentionally-comic national shit test: “We all know how the FBI works.” He wasn’t being ironical, alas, but everyone who laughed knows he is telling the truth.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Cooled in October, But Relief For Homebuyers Was Short-Lived.

TheHill.com: Electric car chargers to be required in new homes in England.

Andrea Widburg: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kyle Rittenhouse is fascinating.

Seth Barron: Trial By Jury Needs No Fixing: Outraged by the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the Left claims that the American justice system is illegitimate.

Overnight News: How Take It Down takes it down – with or without the lyrics.

Ya think it's easy?

“French Bulldogs are dutch babies – simpering pseudo-sucklings. Prove me wrong.”

I managed to surprise Cathleen the other night: I argued that what makes a song great – we were talking about Take It Down by John Hiatt – is not the lyrics but the music.

That’s a claim I would normally dispute: Popular music – and all music with a lyrical or performative component – is narrative first, with the music serving in supportive, ornamental or incidental roles. No story, no opera. No story, no ballet. Grieg wrote music better known than the play he wrote it for, but this is very much the exception, not the rule.

Cathleen’s complaint is that John Hiatt has lied about the lyrics, but in the end, I don’t care. Much as with Wagon Wheel, the music is so much better than the lyrics, I just don’t care. Plus which, my love is fifty feet tall.

Why does it work so well? You tell me. It’s not a song, not even a coherent chord progression. It’s a dirge with a bridge. But once I give it to my hands, it’s hard for me to stop playing it.

I like it when I find out I’ve been wrong, even if only by a little. Without any lyrics at all, Wagon Wheel is the perfect American work song, and if you play it enough it will sweep you back to the Irish reels from which it comes.

Take It Down has none of that music theory, and none of that pedigree. What it has is a pain that’s fifty feet deep. It’s easy to see why someone might lie about that…

In other news:

Pacific Research Institute: Los Angeles Is Gearing Up to Ban Wood-Frame Construction. Renters Will Soon Pay the Price.

Brad Polumbo: Here’s Everything That’s Wrong With the Build Back Better Spending Bill House Democrats Just Passed.

Ron Paul: It’s Time to Get the Federal Welfare-Warfare State Under Control.

Overnight News: Exploring exotic dog breeds with a roly-poly little bat-faced girl.

Ya think it's easy?

“Judging solely by appearances, bull dogs are spoiling for a fight, while hound dogs are praying for absolution.”

Yesterday at the dog park, Cleo and I met a Boerboel – a South African Mastiff. A gorgeous animal, five months old and huge. She’s going to be 150lbs, and the males get to 180.

Her person is a physician at Boswell Hospital, and he has grand Boerboel plans: He has land out in the sticks, and his goal is Boerboels abounding, with his breeding operation documented by a YouTube page. I enjoyed talking to him, not alone because he is operating from the premise that there will be a future.

My belief, defended solely by historical anecdotes and prejudice, is that all domestic dogs emerge from two prototypical breeds – Saint Hubert Hounds – Bloodhounds – and Mastiffs. Snouted dogs run down their prey where flat-faced dogs fight like big cats – well-timed leaps followed by close combat. Mastiffs pulled war wagons, and if you doubt that, put Cleo – twenty pounds of Mastiff-descendant – on a lead and see where she drags you.

She was intimidated by the Boerboel, who was in her turn intimidated by Miss Chioux. But later she demonstrated what that Mastiff form-factor can do: She ran down a Standard Poodle who started with a fifty-yard advantage. Cleo is fast, and people notice when she floors it. The Poodle didn’t know she was caught until Cleo raced past her.

And then, as every flat-faced dog must do, she panted for half-an-hour. As always, I had to carry her out of the dog park…

In other news:

Victoria Taft: How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways…

Thomas Lifson: Kyle Rittenhouse Did NOT Get a Fair Trial.

Overnight News: A riot is a mass meltdown of the underfathered.

Ya think it's easy?

“If you only bother to train two out of every one-hundred puppies – leave your shoes outside.”

Allowing for Portland, as always, there were no looting riots last night in response to the Rittenhouse verdict. Too cold. There are other kinds of riots, but the only kind I’ve ever seen are looting riots, whatever their reputed pretext, and looting riots like a sultry Summer night.

I’m delighted that the railroading of young Kyle failed, dismayed beyond belief that it happened in the first place, and reconciled to the fact that this sort of persecution of the good for being good will recur: “My internal disquiet is caused by your disapproval, not by my own cognitive dissonance. I’ll feel better once you’re exterminated.”

We are sometimes reminded that almost all the violent crime in America is committed by a tiny percentage of the population. We are even slower to take notice that looting riots only happen because there is an extant looter population among us: People who are opportunistically-predatory graduate their predations with the inverse of their estimate of the risk of the consequences. A looting riot is a short period of consequence-free predation.

This is all more underfathering – Kyle, too – but we don’t have a civilization if we do not have good people, if fewer and fewer people learn in childhood why being civilized matters.

In other news:

RedState.com: The Rittenhouse Trial Shows Us Why Cameras in Courtrooms Are the Proper Move for Our Legal System.

The Federalist: LEAKED: Teachers Reveal How They ‘Stalk’ Kids, Sideline Parents To Pull Middle Schoolers Into LGBT Groups.

The Federalist: Thanks To Leftists, The Black Talent Companies Seek To Hire With Racial Quotas Doesn’t Exist: Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.

Joel Kotkin: America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It.