There’s always something to howl about.

Month: July 2007 (page 1 of 7)

Zillow.com takes on BloodhoundBlog, attempting to crush The Future Of Real Estate Marketing in the process

In a move that is either inspired or incredibly stoopid, Zillow.com will this afternoon launch a brand new group weblog devoted to real estate technology issues. This of course is a large part of the content of BloodhoundBlog and it is the entire focus of The Future Of Real Estate Marketing. The new weblog, called GeekEstate Blog, will draw its contributions from a cadre of real estate technology vendors. Presumably this will be pleasing to the foxes. The hens? Not so much.

From the Zillow Blog (this text is extracted from a pre-launch press release):

As much as the real estate industry is based on people-to-people contact, there is no denying that technology is becoming ever more crucial for real estate professionals as a way to reach consumers and each other. With this in mind, we are proud today to announce the launch of a new technology blog that Zillow has founded — GeekEstate Blog!

[…]

GeekEstate Blog is a multi-author format and is launching with seven contributors. Our kickoff team of regular contributors includes Michael Price from MLPodcast, Matt Dunlap from Realivent, Damon Pace from Incredible Agent, Brendan King from Point2, WordPress designer Cory Miller, and Steve Jagger from Ubertor. I’ll [Drew Meyers] be the seventh contributor rounding out this group.

I happen to think Steve Jagger is a nice guy, as is Mike Price. Jay Thompson likes Point2. Even so, what we have is a union of fairly low-tech tech vendors, none of whom is going to issue a discouraging word about one of the others’ products, nor about Zillow.com. INTJs like Drew Meyers might say something interestingly impolitic from time to time, but the rest of these guys got the windowed offices because they know how to tailor a response to the demands of their marketing. In other words, if you’re looking for independent balls-to-the-wall analysis, it won’t be at the GeekEstate Blog.

Nota bene:

Zillow will play an administrative role on this blog and keep the wheels turning. We’ll also occasionally provide our own insight based on our understanding of real estate technology. Lastly, we’ll head up the process of recruiting other bloggers as Read more

Why Author 12 Hates to Fly

And so it was that I arrived in San Francisco for the big event looking as if my hair had been styled by an angry ring-tailed lemur.

My trip began innocently enough. Operation Packing Plan B was an enormous success. Sure I was a little short on time, but I compensated by piling my artificially golden, wet locks up in a fashionable clip. For every person that would think I was a wreck, I was certain that another would consider me whimsically, see-how-much-I-don’t-try-too-hard eccentric.

I made it to the airport with an hour and a half to spare. I immediately parked at Terminal 2. I did this for two reasons. First, I was flying American Airlines. I knew I was flying American Airlines because my eTicket, which I booked on AmericanAirlines.com, said “American Airlines” all over it. Second, American Airlines is located in Terminal 2, that is if you believe the numerous airport directional signs, the logos on the parked planes at Terminal 2 gates, and my experience from having lived here for the PAST 30 YEARS! True, my eTicket didn’t specifically say “Go to Terminal 2”, but I suspect few can argue with my logic here.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t privy to one little detail, a detail written in secret, invisible ink on my eTicket, a detail so safely guarded that only the truly psychic would possibly make their flight this morning. As I attempted Self-Service Check-In, I got an error message on the screen along the lines of “Danger, Abort, Unauthorized Access Attempted, Hide Your Children, Secure Exit Doors!” It was then that Helpful Lady at the Check-In Counter, shaking her head in disgust, explained that San Francisco departures are on their Partner airline. “You will have to walk down there“, she said (pointing to, oh, North Dakota), “carry your (49.8 pound) suitcase down that flight of stairs, and check in at Terminal 1″.

No problem! I had time, and as luck would have it, Terminal 1 was not nearly as crowded as stupid-snooty Terminal 2. Then came (insert creepy music) SECURITY. This is where I and my fellow Terminal 1 travelers Read more

Left out at Inman: The truth is, Kris Berg is a blogging supernova, and her cosmic brilliance leaves everyone glowing

Is there a Carnival of Off-to-Inman Posts? If so, Kris Berg won:

So, this morning, I am off to the Inman technology conference in San Francisco. I am off in theory, at least. I haven’t exactly packed. Packing Plan A always involves meticulously planning out wardrobes, including appropriate accessories, neatly laying out the items the night before, and then, the morning of the flight, casually arranging the military-folded articles in the suitcase. I’m going with Plan B. Within the next hour, I will be shooting every item of clothing I own out of a cannon into an undersized carry-on and hoping for the best. Pity the poor, random power cord. If it simply looks like it might fit into one end of a camera, video recorder, voice recorder, iPod, or laptop, it’s coming along for the ride. I will have enough electronics and peripherals to inspire the Port Commission to beef up staffing at the security check point, and I can all but guarantee that at least half that make the journey with me were designed to power the VCR I sold at a garage sale in 1993.

Not a convention goer by nature, I was sucked into this one for a couple of reasons. I am looking forward to actually meeting the many people I have met online over the past year. Mostly, though, I am hoping I can bring back some better mousetraps to help us with our business. I’ll try to report back with updates, that is, if I can find the right power cord.

One of the break-out sessions at Inman Connect is called “The Blogging Superstars.” Kris Berg is not on that panel. In rebuttal I offer this lengthy argument:

Ahem.

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Black Pearls: Custom directional signs can draw buyers to your listings — and make your listings seem to multiply

Okay, here’s a Black Pearl made from sandy irritants we picked up at the StarPower Conference.

First, one of the Stars is making custom signs featuring photographs of the listed home. I’ve been writing about custom yard signs for more than a year now, but, so far, I haven’t heard from anyone who is doing them — other than us, that is. What the Star is doing is not our way of making the signs. He’s putting up his regular brokerage sign, then supplementing it with a separate sign that features photos of the home.

Second, another different Star is using directional signs to direct buyer traffic from main thoroughfares into the subdivisions where her listed homes are to be found. These are the size of an Open House directional, but they’re mounted in the yards of cooperating (or compensated) neighbors.

This idea I liked a lot for two reasons. First, it would tend to bring more buyers to the listed home. And second, using these directionals would tend to make it look like you had half-a-dozen listings nearby, rather than just one or two. You could be half the signs in the neighborhood with one listing. If you list in that subdivision frequently, the directionals need never come down, and they could serve more than one home.

Where’s the Black Pearl? Put the two ideas together in custom-made directionals:

These would be coroplast signs mounted on wire H-frames. Any sign printer can do them. Any Kinko’s can do them. They’re cheap to print in bulk, so you can hold out some replacements for stolen or damaged signs. Meanwhile, the photos do some of the jobs we expect from the custom yard sign: They stop traffic and preview the house. At the same time, they radically differentiate you as a lister.

This is pretty simple compared to some of the ideas we’re playing with, but it seems like a sweet little supplement to the idea of custom yard signs.

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The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

…is up at Sacramento Real Estate Voice. The theme is a Monopoly tournament, but I can’t tell who won. Kris Berg triumphed at her table with I’ve Been Working Too Hard! Ask the Wall Street Journal. Brian Brady, writing from his home blog, took over the real estate on his table with San Diego Mortgage Advice: Call to ARMs. There are five other table winners to be seen, so get yourself to Sacramento Real Estate Voice to check them out — without passing GO, of course.

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A comprehensive take on the StarPower Conference: Reinventing the pearl the Bloodhound way

Here’s my final evaluation of the StarPower Conference in four short words: I didn’t hate it. The intellectual content of the thing was oversold by a hefty percentage, and virtually everything in the curriculum was an upsell for something else. We were entreated all week to gather “pearls” from the presentations, but the best I was able to come home with are grains of sand from which we will craft pearls of our own. The event was stage-managed with precision and flair, although a little cheerleading goes a long way with me.

This post is largely a critique. In the coming weeks, I want to detail some of the pearls Cathy and I will be assembling around the gritty sand we brought home. Here I want to enumerate what I considered to be important defects in the StarPower Conference. I don’t know that this will do anyone any good. Most of the companies I take on seem not to spring into action to address my concerns. But I find myself taking an anti-vendor position again and again, and my four days at StarPower served only to reinforce that redoubt.

However: I think it’s important to note that the StarPower organization is not unique in exhibiting the defects I will catalog, nor does it come even close to being the worst specimen of the milk-the-Realtor industry. I could have wished for a lot more — and more-rigorous — information in exchange for my time and money, but I did not come away empty-handed, and I may yet succumb to one of this week’s incessant upsells.

First, with a couple of exceptions, StarPower is stuck at about 1999. Web sites, lots of web sites, all of them static, almost all of them templated, most of them mindlessly mimicking the me-me-me meme. There is weblogging, sort of, substantially worse than what I’ve been bitching about and yet utterly invisible to Technorati and the Googlesphere. In the StarPower universe, there is no Web 2.0, nor any derivative implications of Web 2.0. I heard the words “long tail” out of my own mouth only. This thing that we do Read more

A Simple Question, What Can You Blog About?

I imagine that many of the readers of this blog are bloggers themselves; who in their daily perusal of the blogosphere for inspiration and news land here as a reliant destination for intellectual discussion of the issues at the fore of our industry. If I’ve got the readership pegged then I will assume that most of you tend to write about the issues you feel most strongly about. Divorced commissions or Zillow or discount real estate operations are all part of the RE.net cacophony. Amongst this backdrop of honest, well-reasoned discourse I pose a simple question:

“What can you really blog about?”

Let the initial reaction of “anything I feel like” go by the wayside and think about it for a moment. What can you really blog about? The reason I bring this question up here is that there is a rather disturbing series of events developing in the blogosphere – not too far from the RE.net over at a web site called Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter. As members of the real estate community I’ll assume that you’ve heard of it – an f’d company for the new bust that is mortgage lending. It may be loosely grouped with housing bubble blogs; but really it is an aggregation of news and information about the “implosion” of the mortgage industry. It is written with a “Daily Show” sarcasm that I personally find enjoyable; and although it is a private site, conceived and started by one man – it has become the web site of choice for thousands in the industry each day looking for the latest news.

Regardless of your personal feelings about such housing bubble sites you must admit that ML-Implode is quite a phenomenon. One man starts with an idea – to aggregate and track the downfall of mortgage companies via a personal web site; suddenly thousands of people visit it every day for news and information. Such is the power of the Internet.

It is not unlike Bloodhound in that regard. Bloodhound started as one man’s idea and grew in to a vital Read more

Cyberhomes vs. Zillow – Dueling Valuation Tools for Your San Diego Home

For the uninitiated, the title is a bad joke. Moving on…

At our most recent office meeting, between the property pitches and the vendor pitches, our office manager promoted our company’s new affiliation with Cyberhomes. Now, being too lazy to do a site search this morning, Cyberhomes has undoubtedly been talked about ad nauseam here. And, as I have confessed many times lately, I have been too time-challenged to be the good little feed reader “reader” I should be of late, so the subject of Cyberhomes has probably been beat to death elsewhere. That’s the beauty of ignorance – I will barrel bravely ahead.

Prudential California Realty is in Beta with their Cyberhomes affiliation. For now, a home valuation feature has been added to the Prudential website but, ultimately the feature will be included in all individual agent pages. It is being promoted to us as superior to Zillow in that (according to our office manager) it incorporates “MLS data as well as public records”. I found this confusing. Aren’t MLS sales ultimately a matter of public record and, therefore, inherent in the Zillow model as well? With the help of a colleague, we stumbled on what he meant.

My colleague and I decided to play a little Zillow. In our version of investigative reporting, we proceeded to embark on some exhaustive comparative analysis. By exhaustive, I mean, we decided to look up the value of both of our own homes on both Zillow and Cyberhomes. Elbow to elbow, armed with dueling computers, undaunted by the challenges which might lay ahead, we Searched.

In each case, our homes were valued approximately $150,000 lower on Cyberhomes than on Zillow. Bummer. Being blessed with the keen eye for detail, we suddenly realized that we live in the same subdivision and in the same model, one block apart. Where scientific method is concerned, we are the Suxors. What about a different neighborhood? I threw out the address of an active listing I have a mile away. Ready, set, show us the money! His “Zestimate” returned a number in the ballpark while my CyberValue (back off, I’m copyrighting that) Read more

There’s no place like homepage: Insanely great Guerrilla Marketing tactic for locally-focused real estate weblogs

From ProBlogger:

I met a blogger recently who had a blog with a very local focus. His Guerrilla Marketing Tactic was to do a deal with three internet cafes in his area to make his blog the home page on all of the computers. In return for this he gave them some free advertising on his blog. The same blogger made a similar deal with the local library who also made his blog the home page of their public internet computers. This worked particularly well for him as his blog was on his local area.

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By-owner home seller is no match for a skilled listing agent

This is me in Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
By-owner home seller is no match for a skilled listing agent

We’re about to list a home for sale in a fairly pricey neighborhood, so we are very aware of our competition.

We knew a similar home was ready to go on the market, but we were convinced it would be marketed as “for sale by owner,” so we didn’t feel threatened.

Why not? Because a by-owner seller is no match for a skilled listing agent.

I’m willing to concede that there are some unskilled listing agents, but that doesn’t matter to us. We compete against professionals, not amateurs.

In fact, the seller instead went with a limited-service listing, which is slightly — but only slightly — more likely to succeed.

By now, go-it-alone sellers are thin on the ground. You can get a true MLS listing at a range of discount prices, from $3,000 down to $99.

So why is a limited-service listing unlikely to succeed? In this market, a home must be marketed perfectly from Day 1 or it will sell slowly and at a deep discount, if at all.

Except for the MLS listing itself, the home will be offered by owner in every respect: priced wrong, prepared wrong and inaccessible to buyers and agents.

This is not a necessary consequence, but it is very common.

In the case of our newly listed competition, the home is offered at $200,000 over its market value. It will not be a threat to our listing.

But it wouldn’t be a threat even if priced right. A professional home marketer will bring too many weapons into battle for an amateur, no matter how dedicated, to compete.

Even worse, a limited-service listing shouts out a warning to buyers’ agents to stay away.

Why? Because it is being marketed by an amateur. The seller will have no one to turn to for advice, exposing the buyer’s agent to double the legal liability in the transaction.

There’s nothing wrong with negotiating the best price you can get for a full-service listing. But in our opinion, limited-service listings are a false economy in this market.

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From the StarPower Conference: Reasons for optimism in the current real estate climate

From Howard Brinton’s closing remarks tonight at the StarPower Conference, here are Gregg Neuman‘s Top Ten Reasons for Optimism:

  • 10. 3,600 fewer agents in my market
  •   9. Downward pressure on commissions is gone
  •   8. Developers/builders welcoming us again
  •   7. Discount brokerages vanishing
  •   6. FSBOs are extinct or nearly so
  •   5. Foreclosure/short sale market thriving
  •   4. Great market for buyer’s agents (you can negotiate)
  •   3. Declining prices opens market to more first-time buyers
  •   2. Sellers willing to listen to reality
  •   1. Sellers need us now and THEY know it

Realtor optimism, yes. For sellers, not so much. But it is a real improvement over crying in your beer that times are tough.

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Making the connection: The objective of real estate weblogging is visceral and viral, not rape and run

This will have to be brief, because I’m crushed for time, but we’re promoting Real Estate Weblogging 101 at the StarPower Conference this morning, so it’s a topical topic.

The premise: The commercial value of real estate weblogging comes from making a visceral connection with future clients, ideally leading to viral results, not spam-trolling for short-term leads. In other words, where keyword-packed tapioca content may score well for now on search engines, and may bring in filled-out web forms, it will not create the kinds of enduring connections that result in repeat and referral business for generations. Certainly none of the people brought in by search engines will become loyal readers or subscribers to the weblog: There’s no there there. Even worse, spamvertising in weblogs surely repels at least as many people as it seems to attract, and the people repelled are very probably the ones most likely to yield significant viral results over the years. You’re not only not building bridges, you’re blasting the bridgeheads.

There’s more: What happens when Google changes the rules? When a vendor crows, “Ha, Ha! We tricked Google!” the demise of that particular trick is foreseeable. When Google discovers that favoritism towards weblogs is bringing spam to the top of its results, it will change the way it weights weblogs. Locally-focused webloggers like Jay Thompson who have made the effort to build a following will chug on unabated. Keyword-packing spamvertising weblogs will dry up and blow away.

This morning’s post from Jay is good example of how to do this job: The keywords are there, but they’re there because the post wouldn’t makes sense without them. Jay is providing real value to his readership, practical, relevant advice. Even so, the post should search very well. But here’s the interesting part: Even though Jay is writing about the news of the day, if someone should happen upon this post by search a year or two from now, it will still be serving the visceral, viral function: Jay Thompson cares about his clients, and he is working to provide meaningful benefit to them with his weblog. That’s a very powerful Read more

A peek into the inverted world of venture capital: “Business plans are overrated, and profits perhaps even more so”

Infections Greed:

VCs are professional nit-pickers. Give them something to find fault with, and they’ll do it with abandon. I generally tell people to come to pitch meetings with less information rather than more. Sure, you’ll get pressed for more, but finesse it. Presenting a full and detailed plan is, nine times out of ten, a path to a “No” — or at least more time-consuming than having said less.

Profits are a different issue. Being profitable too soon gives investors, rightly or wrongly, an idea of what the margins are on the business, as opposed to what they could be in some perfect world. As a result, it takes a mighty force for them to not start wading in with discounted present value worksheets, and the like, thus hammering your valuation and generally making funding much more complicated (and equity consuming) than if you were wildly unprofitable.

How could a story like this not have a happy ending?

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When you’re not busy searching for Maricopa County real estate, you can have yourself a great Maricopa County picnic: Just whip up some tasty Maricopa County sandwiches and pack some frosty Maricopa County beverages, but remember to keep an eye out for those nasty Maricopa County scorpions

Comes news today that a keyword-packed fake weblog is every bit as attractive and satisfying as an inflatable spouse. I don’t doubt it for a minute, but if the objective is to snare random morons by deception, I think a “stealth” web site is a better-yielding joy-doll.

I swear to god it’s Groundhog Day in the real estate industry — 1974 every damn day, over and over again. Does real estate weblogging offer a path to transparency? Not if it’s just another sleazy gimmick.

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