There’s always something to howl about.

Month: June 2008 (page 1 of 7)

Project Bloodhound speaking in tongues: To whom am I speaking?

I had a lady phone me the other day who would rather have emailed. She was on our Phoenix real estate web site and she couldn’t figure out how to email me. In fact, my email address is associated with every post, just like here, but that wasn’t obvious to her. I revisited the sidebar, which is a topic to which we will return. But for most real estate weblogs, there is an ever more exigent problem: Who the hell am I speaking to in the first place?

If you’re the only person writing on the weblog, you might think you can get away without a byline on your posts. I think this is a mistake. Yes, people can go to your About page, but your job is to make connections, not to make people work. I think our way of doing things — an avatar plus every which way of grasping onto more content — is a better way of going at things.

We do our avatars with custom PHP, but I know they can also be done with the Gravatar software — I just don’t know how. I’m going to show you everything we’re doing at BloodhoundBlog — not because you should do all this, but just to show you how to do it.

The theme files you will want to edit will be named index.php, search.php, archive.php and possibly some others. You are looking for files that contain “the loop,” the means by which WordPress extracts posts from its MySQL database and displays them. The code for “the loop” looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : 
while (have_posts()) : 
the_post(); ?>

Any files that contain that code will need to be edited.

Edited where? Look for the div that already contains posting information — usually the date. You’ll be editing within that div. You can start with index.php, working iteratively until you get to something you like, then copy that code over to the other files you need to edit.

Important: Work on copies of your theme files! If you screw something up, you can always go back and start over.

This is what BHB is Read more

How I avoided deleting 23 different cliches for an introduction by taking the easy road and just saying Happy Birthday.

Allow me to further the B-day round of toasts at Bloodhound by introducing my relationship to these very pages.

It is with great pleasure that I’m allowed to share thoughts on the pages on Bloodhound.  You see, I have been a long time reader of the posts that put thought to action in Real Estate the way no other blog does.  My interest go back to turning to the web to try and find clues to help with marketing as a newb to Real Estate.  The requisite “Realtor type” mags et al did not cut it for me from the begininng.  Already finding success with buying and selling merchandise, reading the Times, and do I dare say dating through the web, I knew that at least trying to leverage the power of my trusty notebook to crush the competition was worth looking into.  What I found at the time were plenty of shiny buttons to poke at and play with.  I must have bookmarked upwards of 500+ pages of plans, actions, and helpful hints on RE I thought might be of interest.

When it came down to it, the one thing that mattered is what I found on the blog pages of the Real Esate community.  No one did it better than those here that howled.  Aside from shadowing my broker as he wheeled his vehicle throughout the hills of SF and walked and talked the business, reading  and getting involved in the discussions that take place on these very pages are what motivated me to win.  The creative thinking and ideas that we come up with when we are challenged to the fullest is what gives birth to opportunity.   The contributors that currently write here and have passed through have given me giant shoulders to stand on.  They are passionate entrepreneurs of the new medium of Real Estate technology.  We are still far into the early days of blogging, and we know how slow our industry has been to keep up.

With all that said, I personally know my way pretty well when it comes to all things social media and the like Read more

How Can The San Diego Union Tribune Compete Against Bloggers? Build SDBackyard.com and Invite Them To Contribute

SD Backyard.com is the San Diego Union Tribune’s answer to competition from citizen journalists.   I get the majority of my news from the internet but the local fishwrap does a nice job on the obituaries.  I’m a serial obituary reader (I love people) so the U-T is my Sunday companion on the beach.

I damn near jumped off the blanket this afternoon!

This mainstream medium invited the bloggers into the big tent.  Editor and Publisher magazine reports:

The paper plans to reverse publish some of the content of sdBackyard into community publications.

“sdBackyard.com embraces the growing trends of user-generated content and social media by giving users the tools to create and share content online, with the added benefit of reverse publishing some content into a print product,” George Bonaros, marketing director for the Union-Tribune, said in a statement. “The unique geographic targeting allows small businesses, nonprofit organizations, clubs, and other community groups opportunities to promote themselves in print and online.”

Maybe it’s a content grab but I think the quid pro quo is more than tilted to a business blogger.  Needless to say, I set up a profile, uploaded a ton of video content from Bloodhound Unchained, published a blog post, and keyworded everything.  Like Home Gain Blog, the platform will be shared with the established, stronger home website (in this case, SignOnSanDiego.com) so the “find-ability” via SERPs should be strong in 3-6 months.

It’s too early to tell if the “Community Editors” will go overboard by limiting content but I’m enthused about the possibility SDBackyard.com offers.  Oh, here’s the other cool part; it’s free ! If you thought about building a hyper-local weblog, this very well may be the platform you seek (as long as you back up the content).  I expect that I’ll see Don Reedy in Oceanside, Sean Purcell in La Mesa, Kris Berg in Scripps Ranch, Jeff Brown talking about investment real estate, and Dan Melson talking about mortgages, in the not too distant future.

This is a new project and I’ll be reporting back how the mainstream media embraces its local citizen journalists.  The courtship was painless; let’s see how the marriage proceeds.

WordPress Plugins- Like Shopping at WalMart

Have you ever gone to the store and found odds and ends of things that you just can’t live without?  How about a tape measure for $2, set of plates for $10, etc.-and then get home and wonder where the heck you are going to put all of it?

That is kind of where I am while looking through WordPress Plugins.  I feel like I have found the Mother Load of Clearance racks.

Here are the ones that are grabbing my attention with a big red tag on them.  Are you using any of these?  What’s your opinion on them and are some of them a waste of space?

  • Events Calendar– This would be pretty neat for Open Houses, Conferences, Local Happenings on a local blog
  • Subscribe2– Since not everyone is techie enough to read through a feeder, being able to subscribe through email
  • SMS Text Message– Allows people to subscribe via SMS TXT
  • Better Blogroll– The theme I chose does not have a blogroll that you can add links to..and I want one
  • HB Social Bookmarks–  I like the top of mind approach
  • All in One SEO–  Yeah, well…

By now you know that with Project Bloodhound II one of the goals is to keep my site clean and crisp, so I am wondering exactly which Plugins to use and not clutter up my ‘cabinet space’.  I want to be conservative now because as the site continues to grow, there will always be more.  If you have found a kickin’ Plugin that is not in my shopping cart, I’d love to hear about it!

BloodhoundBlog at two: The scene of the real estate scenius

BloodhoundBlog came into this world two years ago today. I had tried twice before to craft a workable real estate weblog. The second attempt donated its 60-odd posts to BloodhoundBlog on the way in. But BloodhoundBlog was different from our prior attempts right from the start. We were focused on the national real estate industry from the beginning, mixing good writing, deep philosophy and radical new ideas into what has seemed to be a consistently heady brew.

In our first two years, we’ve served over 1.4 million pages to over 750,000 unique souls. We’ve written more than 2,800 posts and hosted more than 25,000 comments. As I write this, we have 600 Technorati links and 67,000 Yahoo backlinks. Those are interesting numbers, but these are more interesting to me: In the past two years (less than that, really, since we didn’t start tracking for about two months), 37,347 people have visited here here 200 or more times. Just short of 151,000 people have visited us nine or more times. And keep in mind that we live by RSS and email subscription. The flip side of this is that just short of half-a-million souls have come to the site only once, which I think is a nice illustration of the relative value of search-engine borne as against more-organic sources of traffic.

And, in reality, none of that matters. BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very loud voice in the RE.net, but BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very serious about big ideas. From the earliest days of the blog, we staked out a ground — the philosophy by which the most serious, most dedicated real estate professionals would thrive in the Web 2.0 world — and defended it with the ferocity of real Bloodhounds. We are always about the grunts on the ground, never about the bosses and vendors who seek to bilk them of their hard-fought earnings. We’ve built an audience not by dumb SEO stunts, not by kissing up to the NAR or the Inmanosphere, not by fawning or flattery or appeals to pity, but simply by delivering the goods day after Read more

Project Bloodhound: URL Structure

When you start browsing through blogs and as you click from post to post and page to page, watch the address bar. Here are some examples:
http://www.ericonsearch.com/greatest-real-estate-agent-in-the-world-your-name-here/
This is the one from the post that we chose for the SEO contest.

WordPress Security – More important these days.


Here is one of my posts on BHB

Why the difference?
First off, Greg uses what is known as the default permalink structure. The one that comes out of the box. He did this because when he fired up BHB, it made referencing the posts easier for him. There is NOTHING wrong with this. Optimization is about making choices and trade offs, not about good and evil.

I chose a more keyword based structure that has become pretty popular these days. Here’s how you do it:
In WP go to Settings: and then Permalinks. You will see this:

Here’s a closer look:

These are your choices and you can see that I went to “Custom” and typed in /%postname%/ and hit save changes. Simple as that. IMPORTANT NOTE: On a few hosts this will barf up an error saying that the Permalink structure cannot be changed. If you are on GoDaddy or 1and1, feel free to email me and I will tell you how to solve this.

The effect of this is that any posts you write will include the title of the post in the url. For me, it makes it easier for the reader AND for the search engines. Doing something SOLELY for the sake of search engines is rarely if ever wise. Ideally, what enhances user experience and adds relevance will help you rank (having a site made of FLASH would be a BIG exception to that…)

Why you should NOT just arbitrarily go and change this with an established blog. Simply put, the search engines already knows where all of Greg’s posts are. He is right IMO to NOT change things and move their “cheese”. You can and redirect the old posts’ URLs to the new ones with a 301 redirect, but that can be WORK. I wanted to keep this simple. And while they figured out where everything was / is, he would lose some Read more

Happy Birthday Bloodhound Blog

Bloodhound Blog is two years old tonight.  Congratulations to all the Bloodhounds.  Here’s a little something from the archives to demonstrate my  improvidence:

How can this development persist in a real estate market that all experts predict to plunge? The simple answer is that demographics are on California’s side:

1- Population still grows here statewide at a 1.5% annual clip. Now that may seem like anemic percentage growth compared to Nevada and Arizona but look at the astounding number of people moving to the Golden State. California enjoys a net gain of some 700,000 people each year.

2- There is a housing shortage in California. The affordability index may not be an applicable measure moving forward.

3- California employment is holding steady, in fact, a net gain of higher paying jobs are coming into the state. Why? California has high taxes and is hardly business friendly. Businesses want to be near the huge consumer base (the fifth largest economy in the world) that are California residents.

4- People would rather live in California than Buffalo.

Oops. I was bit early with the recovery prediction.

Congrats Greg and Cathleen.

Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers…

[Okay, BloodhoundBlog will be two years old in less than an hour. Here’s one more little bit of our past in celebration. This is from May 31st, 2007. –GSS]

Question #1: Why did Microsoft call its new table-top touch-screen interface “Surface”?

Answer: “It” and “Thing” are trademarks of The Addams Family.

Question #2: What makes a great real estate weblog?

Answer: Whatever you do, don’t ask Inman Blog.

I don’t write about everything that tickles or rankles me. I couldn’t, even if I didn’t have other things to do. But I thought it was particularly ironical for Joel Burslem and Jessica Swesey to talk about weblogging in a video. Joel has proven blogger credibility. Jessica is a good reporter who has never impressed me as actually understanding weblogging as a distinct medium. I have told Brad Inman in private that he doesn’t “get” weblogging, to which criticism he issued testy but irrelevant rejoinders. If putting marks on phosphors in reverse-chronological order is weblogging, then there really are 70 million webloggers.

But take a look at this, as an example (and I’m picking on Inman because they’re professionals and, I hope, thick-skinned enough to bear up to the scrutiny):

In the middle of the 16th Century, the Great Chinese Wall was built to keep enemy armies out and to create a perception of invincibility. Gated communities were built in the US suburbs in the 1980s to keep urban criminals out and to create prestigious residential compounds. The building of walls and fences along the Mexican border are being built to keep workers and terrorists out and to appease a multitude of American nationalistic fears. The Great Chinese Wall did not work; gates in the burbs were irrelevant to safety and fences on the Mexican border will not stop people from risking their lives to find work. One of the ugliest walls in history was the Berlin Wall, which came down when freedom persevered over human repression.
Walls and fences are an admission of our failure to solve problems in a civil way. They divide people; they exclude; they fracture societies and communities.
In the 1950s in my small hometown of Carlinville, Read more

No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

[This is a multi-stop time-travel journey. I’m writing this text, here within these brackets, on June 28th, 2008. I’m reprising a BloodhoundBlog post from September 15th, 2006, that in its turn reprises a PresenceOfMind.net post from September 14th, 2004, which in its turn is unearthing a rant I wrote in 1996. It will all make sense if you let it. This is more birthday celebration — the subject is disintermediation — but I happened to think of this because we latched onto Radio Paradise, today, an amazingly excellent Triple-A internet radio station in Paradise, CA. All of this fits together, I promise, and the argument about media from 1996 is still right on point. One of the things that I, personally, love about BloodhoundBlog, is that our audience has always been so outrageously bright. It’s very liberating for me to be able to be my whole self at work. Never doubt my gratitude. –GSS]

 
No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

I got XM Radio two years ago to the day, yesterday. Two years from now, the whole deal may be done: Between the iPod, streaming internet radio and Wi-Max, the eternal footman may already be snickering for satellite radio. Sic transit gloria mundi — and orbits nearby.

That’s a disintermediation story by itself, and we’re about to nest ourselves two layers deeper in order to talk about massive, earth-shaking cases of media disintermediation. The argument made here parallels the one made earlier this week by Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato: The exponential growth of bandwidth increases the power of individuals at the expense of elites.

But: I could just as easily argue the contrary: Feeding Dan Rather to the lions is exactly what a Roman Emperor would do to sustain his power while seeming to placate the mob.

That’s a larger question than I’m prepared to settle on a Friday night. Instead, we can think about the future of real estate while we revisit the history of radio. There’s quite a lot here that relates to weblogging, as well — which Read more

Just wanted to drop this off….

One of the newer agents in our office, Judy Stockton stopped me in the hallway the other day. New is probably a misnomer…she is a savvy veteran REALTOR, just new to our 120. She always seems to have a pleasant smile and an upbeat demeanor, even when things are not easy.

This day her smile seemed especially intense…and I figured it was safe to ask her how things were going. “Great.” she said.

“You are carrying a contract, looks like things are good…” I mused.
“Yep. Actually we just got the inspection report and what the buyers want done and I just dropped it off to the sellers. ”

She then went on to explain her strategy for dealing with difficult inspection reports, low offers, and other such downers that agents often have to deal with. I was impressed enough with her strategy that I want to pass it along.

When she has particularly bad news for a client that could be a deal bender or maybe even breaker, she calls the client and explains that she is on the way to ( insert IMPORTANT MUST DO THING HERE) but just got the inspection report and wanted to drop this off first thing.

Then she explains that she will not EVEN have time to talk about it, but will return in two hours or so right after (insert IMPORTANT MUST DO THING HERE) and then she will be happy to go over the details and ANY questions that they have.

Her words: “The first couple of hours, they get the anger out and the frustration. If I was there, it would be VERY difficult to not get emotionally involved. This way, I come back when they have thought it through a bit and I am not the focal point of their feelings and we can all see it more clearly.”

Why was she smiling? Because (an hour after dropping off the inspection and heading out to do her “task”) her client had just left her a voice mail and said,”I know you were going to come back in a couple of hours, but this thing REALLY Read more

How Do You Take Your Blog From a Sloppy Joe to a Decadent and Delightful Dish?

Before I get started, I just want to take a second and say Hi to everyone!  I am honored to be part of this amazing group and I chomping at the bits to get off of Puppy Chow.

PBII Could not have been at a better time.  I have been frustrated with my Blog for quite a while and just a few days before it was announced I had decided that to make the jump over to a WordPress.org site. It is currenlty on Quickblog through GoDaddy and the theme for that is definitely NOT like Burger King.  If it’s not the template, it ain’t happenin’. Where as on WP, it’s more like your way, right away.

Turning Houston Green is the site that I am referring to and the content focuses on Green Residential Real Estate for what’s happening in the Houston area.  It is quite unique in that for such a specific niche, there really is nothing else out there unless you hop through several pages of Google.  I have started to notice recently that although it is getting decent traffic, folks are not even making to the page they need to be on.

Apparently what I have is a Sloppy Joe with a side of French Fries.

Although I’m seeing a sitemap in the near future to help, the question I would like to pose is what is the most important thing to keep in mind when organizing the site?  Should you focus solely on Categories and Tags, or with WP should it be pages?  What makes it clean and crisp?

Now that I have my theme up, my biggest task now is making it in to a Delightful dish that will keep consumers coming back for more.  In my case I believe it is in the design, like an unorganized file.  You can be number one on every search engine imaginable but a ‘User Un-Friendly‘ site will just push folks away.  Many would rather have the convenience of McDonald’s than to have a 30 minute wait for Fine Dining. As far as the ease of use for my readers I’m aiming for the Read more

In the battle of the baseball cards, the biggest shoe-box wins — but Realtors who master the art of marketing homes will be fine

[This post appeared on BloodhoundBlog on June 30, 2006, our second day. I’m reprising it now as a part of our birthday celebration. It’s fun for me to see how much of what I talk about here was with us on our very first days. –GSS]

 
Cathleen and I live pretty much continuously in a fairly intense business conference. We’re both paying very close attention to everything, and we are in nearly-constant contact. On the ground, we’re aware of what we like in the work product of our competitors, what we don’t like, what we think might be worth improving upon and what we know from rigorous testing is a complete waste of time and money. We pay even closer attention to the net.world, because that’s where our own bread is buttered, and because the internet will someday be the entire bakery. We’re about to skip away to Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we’re taking three books on marketing — not real estate marketing, just marketing — with us.

That brings me to this, an argument that representation of sellers trumps home marketing. I don’t absolutely hate the premise. I have made a similar argument myself. What’s interesting to me — fascinating to me, a full-time obsession for me — is the idea that real estate marketing is somehow imperiled by internet-based disintermediation.

First, what is being done on the internet, so far at least, is not marketing. It’s listing, at best, the compilation of baseball-card-like stats, and if Realtors conflate the two, it’s because they have never understood marketing to begin with. “The houses sell themselves,” we say to ourselves, and there is a truth to this. If you take buyers where they want to be, they’ll pay to stay there. In crucial respects, buyer representation is the easiest sale in the history of sales. In other respects, it’s impossibly hard, of course, which is why the failure rate among Realtors is so high. But, unlike virtually every other type of sales, you do not have to convince the client to want your product before you can attempt to sell Read more

You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

So your house is finally under contract. Congratulations. It took longer than you thought it would to sell, and you had to go through three price reductions before you got regular showings. But now you’re under contract and in escrow. You’ve made it through the inspections and you’ve taken care of all of the repairs. Nothing but smooth sailing from here, right?

Not quite.

Here comes some bad news you hadn’t anticipated: Your house didn’t appraise.

A lender will only lend on the appraised value or the purchase price — whichever is lower. If the appraisal comes in lower than the purchase price, something has to give.

If there’s an appraisal contingency in the contract — and there almost always is — the buyers can cancel the contract unilaterally.

More likely, they’re going to want you to lower your price instead.

If you don’t, you’re almost certainly killing that contract. The lender will not underwrite the loan, so the buyers will be forced to cancel using the financing contingency.

You could end up waiting quite a while longer for another buyer. And that buyer could offer you quite a bit less for your home. And even then, your house will still have to appraise for the purchase price. If home values continue to decline, you could live through this same nightmare a second time.

So does that mean you should cave on the appraisal no matter what? Not necessarily — depending on your objectives. If you need to move now, take your punishment and move on. But if you can afford to wait long enough for the market to recover, that might be the better option.

Appraisers and loan underwriters are skittish right now. Lenders are taking back homes and selling them for fifty cents on the dollar. Appraisers are being fastidious to make sure they are not overestimating values.

And all of this is just another reason to price your home to the market. You Read more

Farewell

Greg, I would have written an email but I wanted to publicly address all of Bloodhound and it’s followers. I appreciate the opportunity given to me to be a part of such a powerful and dynamic group, but I must move along and pay more attention to my work and my own blog. I haven’t got the stamina to keep up with the number of blogs I post on, so I don’t want to just hang on the side pictures and not contribute.

This has been a great experience and you have some great contributors coming on board. I thank you and will always be a loyal fan.

 

Sincerely,

 

Mike