BloodhoundBlog is addressed to real estate professionals. We won’t reject anyone who wants to come and play, but we made a conscious decision very early on that we would be talking to Realtors, lenders, investors and other professionals, with a special emphasis on real estate webloggers. In that respect, we’re probably a pretty bad example for real estate webloggers to follow. We write about things that are of interest to you, but they aren’t likely to be interesting to ordinary people.
We’re leading into a discussion of last week’s ActiveRain fiasco, so here are two items that I think are very important to real estate webloggers — meaning webloggers who are not writing for the benefit of real estate professionals.
First, the MyBlogLog recent readers widget is not your friend. It visually convinces you that you are writing for the amusement of your real estate weblogging buddies, when in fact you should be writing for your target market, the people who can put money in your pocket.
Second, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not be your primary traffic-building strategy. Search engines will bring you unique visitors, which can be useful for advertising monetization business models. But search engine traffic comes with a truly gargantuan bounce rate: They land, they see that what they hit wasn’t what they wanted and they’re gone. Search engines can bring you visitors who will come and stay, some of whom might do business with you. But other traffic generating strategies — better targeted and much more viral — will make you a lot more money in the long run. I know I’m shouting down a well because everyone wants to believe SEO is a magic bullet, but facts are facts.
What does this have to do with ActiveRain? The sweet folks at ActiveRain have managed to convince themselves that talking about inside baseball to their good-time buddies will result in SEO traffic that will turn into money for them. This might actually be true, but it seems certain to me that, erg for erg, their energies could have been much better spent. ActiveRain argues that its search results prove it has consumer traffic, but the bounce rates on that traffic are going to be enormous. The people spending one minute or more per visit, or viewing two or more pages per visit, are almost certainly real estate professionals.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is. However, this week Brian Brady reminds us that you probably ought to be devoting your on-line efforts to making money. And Joel Burslem points out that the value you are creating may end up lining pockets other than your own. All of which leads me back to one of my own favorite hobby-horses: Your best strategy is to control your own technology as much as possible.
And all that leads us to this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal, Jonathan Dalton with Real Estate 2.0 and the Phoenix Real Estate Consumer:
Neither Active Rain nor Move.Com nor Real Town Communities nor HouseHugg nor Trulia nor Zillow really cares about what happens to the consumer. They don’t have to deal with the public – not on (albeit electronic) face-to-face basis. We do. Real estate professionals, as maligned as we may be, do.
We explain why the Zestimate is off or why the advice you’re getting from agents in North Dakota on Trulia has no bearing on Arizona law. We try to rectify the bevy of errors that are written as fact in the blogs of some newbie whose sole interest in writing the post isn’t public education but rather lead conversion.
I don’t agree with half of what the bubble bloggers write but at least they strive for some form of honesty, aside from the fiasco that is Housing Panic. They’re trying to educate the public with their side of the story. But at least they have an opinion and passion.
Most of the real estate 2.0, transparency-trumpeting companies have neither. Because neither pays, to their mind. They view you as a lead, a piece of inventory to be converted to cash when Mother Google or some other larger company comes along to write the check.
And then they’ll be on the beach with an umbrella in their drink while the rest of us keep picking up the pieces and carrying the banner for what Real Estate 2.0 really ought to be – an effort to educate first and foremost, with possible business running a distant second.
In the interim, hell will freeze over before these groups profit on my intellectual property again. I’ll still list in Zillow because it’s what owners expect … but the blog posts, the heart and soul of my business, are mine. Not Active Rain’s. No one else’s.
The Black Pearl Award this week is really a string of black pearls, Steve Leung detailing Hidden Factors When Calculating a Home’s Value:
If all real estate factors could be boiled down to a commodity spec sheet, buying homes from Costco would be today’s reality. As it is, there are several factors that go into how much a home is worth that may not be easy to fill out in a form. Here are some examples.
1) Daylight. There’s no substitute. More precisely, it would be very expensive to create your own light as bright as natural sunlight.
2) Privacy. Complete transparency in real estate is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to live in a glass house. People often trade-off privacy to live in an urban environment. In a more residential area, people might live on a main road and trade-off total cost.
3) Noise. Road noise and trains are rarely seen as selling points when it comes to listing a property. But when they come with public transportation or a short walk to restaurants, shopping and other things to do, the positives often overcome the negatives.
4) Equipment Condition and Age. Roofs, furnaces, air conditioning systems, ovens, flooring, cabinets: the list goes on. Homes naturally decay over time and deferred maintenance is a common reason why one home doesn’t sell for as much as the one next door.
5) Easements. Sometimes other people or companies are allowed to use portions of your property — the electric company might have a pole on your land or there might be a driveway to a home behind yours. These easements are documented but may interfere with what your plans are for your property. Because it affects your freedom to use the land, it also affects the value.
The People’s Choice Award this week is a triumph for the entire RE.net, in a way, but the award was earned and very much deserved by Jay Thompson for Tragedy Begets Triumph: Why I Love this Community:
As word spread across the real estate blogging community this morning about the tragic death of Aaron Anglin, some pretty amazing things began to happen.
First was the gut wrenching news — Aaron Anglin, just 24 years of age, was killed in a car accident yesterday. Aaron leaves behind his wife Aleisha Anglin, 25 and their two babies — Eleanor who turns 1 THIS week and McKenzie who is only 6 weeks old.
Aaron is the younger brother of Lani Anglin, my dear blog-friend at r.e. Revealed. He was the “star” in a Realtor video spoof that was released late Thursday night.
Now Aaron is gone.
The amazing spirit and caring of this community however quickly became a shining beacon of light that pierced through the darkness of this horrific tragedy. Literally within minutes of hearing about Aaron’s death, real estate bloggers across the country began working together to do whatever we could to help Aaron’s wife and young children.
Jay reminds us that donations have slowed considerably since last week. Click on the donate button you’ll see here, at Jay’s place and all over the RE.net to lend a hand to a young family that will need far more than we can ever hope to get to them. And, if you have a working relationship with a big-money vendor, it can’t hurt to ask them what they can contribute.
If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. We had 20 posts on the short-list, plus another 20 great entries on the long list.
As always, if you see something remarkable, nominate it. Don’t shrug it off. Only a few posts get more than one nomination. If you don’t pull the trigger, who will?
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Brian Brady says:
Great choices!
I think Jon Dalton did an excellent job explaining the pitfalls of Real Estate 2.0 while reminding us of the benefits.
The overriding theme of most entires this week was that real estate is local; Steve’s entry didn’t disappoint.
Props to Jay for running with the ball for the Anglin children. His tireless efforts are noticeable both here and on Facebook.
October 1, 2007 — 4:15 pm
Derek Burress says:
“BloodhoundBlog is addressed to real estate professionals. We won’t reject anyone who wants to come and play, but we made a conscious decision very early on that we would be talking to Realtors, lenders, investors and other professionals, with a special emphasis on real estate webloggers.”
I was thinking about that last night while I was writing part of my book. I got side tracked and started realizing I needed to edit the recipe book to a specific niche rather than just a collection of random recipes. That got me thinking about what makes blogs unique and why others fail when their writers offer tons of great content and are excellent writers in their own rights. It all boiled down to a defined niche. Bloodhound = real estate professionals, RSS Pieces and Tomato = real estate bloggers, RCG = Seattle residents. Then you look at the other blogs and you do not see a niche. You have RE bloggers writing national news, local news, about this and that, and while they have a huge following of friends, their blogs are not as successful as many would like to believe and to me it’s a waste of their time.
Mine was in the same category of time wasting bloggers but I never really had much of any intentions with blogging other than a love of writing and of course, storing information. I did not blog for business, or anything.
Now with book writing and stuff, I am having to define a niche and my website will hopefully go to work for me in stengthening that niche once the books are published.
Another thing I thought about was about people. As I said early on, there is a lot of good writers and some who are real estate agents who I could easily compare to some of the more legendary writers, but real estate is what they do. It’s their comfort level and security factor and they are just too scare to venture out of it.
For instance, we have a very successful RE blogger who could write Hamlet all over again and be very successful as a writer, but RE is what he does and it pays his bills. He isn’t leaving his comfort area even through he could be a lot more successful as a writer in my opinion.
October 1, 2007 — 7:47 pm
Jonathan Dalton says:
I don’t believe a blog that bounces between local real estate and national news is doomed to failure. Maybe it’s because I believe what will attract people’s interest is a combination of content and voice.
Kris Berg could retype the phone book and I’d probably read it just because of the way she writes. The voice is what interests me (far more than her Sketchpad work.)
I bounce up and back because I’m interested in both. And the readers I’ve had from the general public have seemed to appreciate seeing both sides for a more complete idea of what know, or at least what I think I know.
October 1, 2007 — 10:16 pm
DB says:
I do not feel a blog that bounces is a failure, but the loyality is not there. There may be a local audience here and there but they do not tend to remain loyal readers. Then the national audience who are interested in real estate in general, offer very little pocket wise and they do not tend to be regular visit but bored visitors just checking in when they get bored. Niche type blogs tend to generate more long term readers in my opinion.
October 2, 2007 — 8:26 am
Greg Swann says:
> I don’t believe a blog that bounces between local real estate and national news is doomed to failure.
Nor do I. But a weblog that splits its attention between consumers and professionals — or between delivering consumer benefits and kibitzing with other webloggers — is probably effecting a self-sabotage. Dan Melson is a good example of a weblogger who can take huge bites of national news and chew them over with consumers. Not coincidentally, his posts, each one encyclopedic in scope, should do very well on long-tail searches.
October 2, 2007 — 9:43 am