There’s always something to howl about.

Month: March 2007 (page 2 of 9)

Reality-Based Success

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.” — Anthony de Mello

For my first at-bat in the big leagues, and taking a queue from the kind introduction from Greg, I wanted to talk about a concept that we use with great success in providing our customers with a sense of stability in the current turbulent marketplace. If you think that this market is “not bad,” “just going through a rough patch,” or similar, please keep reading. The concept is called “framing reality” and it intentionally puts us in our customers’ shoes so that we can provide solutions that impact and make sense in their reality rather than just in our own.

The concept stems from the quote above, and is based on the premise that everyone, us included, has varying degrees of ego-centrism that distorts our worldview in one way or another. We each have a lens that we view the world through, and whether it’s rose-colored or other, it skews our world view — our perceived reality. When we as consultants, guides, Sherpas, whatever you want to call us (just please not hucksters and thieves) are able to align our view of reality with the customer’s, both of us stand to gain much more than if we provide a solution that is based solely on our frame.

An example of what “framing reality” is not are the new Realtor&174; ads that feature the tag “now is a great time to buy”. While it may be true in various parts of the country and in specific circumstances, it’s a tough sell to Joe Public right now. It rings a bit hollow if you’ve spent any amount of time talking with home owners, seekers, sellers. The prevailing mood is not one of “great time” it’s a bit more angst filled. The ad doesn’t do a good job of framing the reality as its perceived by many in the target audience and so it misses the mark. It’s a poor ad.

Another example of what the concept is not is “selling fear.” Selling fear is a despicable tactic, illegal, and definitely Read more

Zoomquilt

This is the text of an email I received from a friend. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It has nothing to do with real estate, a blog, getting more business, or any of the usual stuff we write about. It took many people a lot of time to create this and I was so impressed I just had to share it.

__

Subject: Zoom Quilt

WOW, this is fantastic! You can watch it all day long and keep seeing more new things. It DOES need a sound track though. Please allow time for it to load…it’s worth it.

Zoomquilt

Egoism in action: How you can grow and prosper, at work and everywhere, even in the face of hostile criticism

This is email I had from Corey Hague, one of the founders of BuyerHunt.com. This is important to the philosophical issues I’ve tried to raise, and Corey agreed to let me talk about this in the weblog:

Well Greg, I am out of ideas, slowly becoming “zestless” and looking for some inspiration. A couple of months ago a friend and I created a website, www.buyerhunt.com. As agents ourselves, we designed the site with (progressive) agents in mind. Despite our best efforts, to date, most of the agent-derived response we get is negative and is often personal and unrelated in nature. And these agents aren’t giving the site a shot. They visit the homepage, make a quick decision and write scathing responses (usually in regards to the fact that we give joe schmoe buyer and seller access). All this after we got the “stamp of approval” from Inman News, who named us one of the best new web ideas for 2007. It just doesn’t seem right. I am a big fan of your blog, and am awe-struck by the manner in which you are able to hold your own in the face of often ludicrous and nonsensical banter.

Though I pride myself on being a young (25), determined, forward-thinking individual with plenty of family-infused and “real time” real estate experience, I am for the first time finding it difficult to brush off the aforementioned criticisms and personal attacks. I guess my question is simply this… How do you do it? You lay your heart, soul and ideas on the line and so often have them thrown right back in your face. And yet everyday, I wake up and see that you have written again, unscathed and unabashed. I want to continue to be a progressive, trailblazing agent… but am starting to see a side of the business that I would rather not be privy to.

Without intending to be flippant, I don’t notice things like that. In any sort of reaction to anything — positive or negative — all I am listening for is the resonance of reason.

There’s this first: The reaction, whatever it is, Read more

Going local? Why not go hyper-local?

Todd Carpenter at Inman News Blog:

A real estate agent’s idea of local my not be local enough. I mean really local. Not a state, not a metro area, not even a single city. Go hyper-local. Every real estate agent should have a prospect farm. You mail out newsletters to just these people. You focus much of your market analysis on the neighborhood. You might even walk each block, introducing yourself door to door. But hardly any agents bother to put that commitment online. Why? Doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve personally reviewed over 400 real estate blogs over the last couple months. Only a handful of them attempt to do this. I look at most real estate sites and see an all inclusive catch all net for Internet fishing. Thats a strategy that works for now, but why not take advantage of the unused Web hosting bandwidth you are renting to build a separate, hyper-local Web site or blog for your marketing area? The alternative is to let people from out of town, who know more about html code than real estate, set up as your competition.

I have at least three more killer ideas to explore on this subject, one good, one great and one insanely great. If you’re not playing along at home, there’s still plenty of time to get in the game.
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Rocking the boat for fun and profit: Introducing Morgan Brown

We’re adding another contributor this morning: Morgan Brown, a lender from Orange County:

Morgan Brown is a mortgage banker and broker in Irvine, CA. He enjoys reading and blogging, and he is on a personal mission to change the public perception of the mortgage industry through honesty — even if it kills him.

If you visit Morgan’s personal weblog, you’ll see that he is a man in deep earnest about reform in the mortgage lending industry. I’m a believer, and yet I know from first-hand experience that bearding the lions of the old guard is very effective as a marketing strategy. Plus which, it’s fun.

Realtors are not immune from the charge of being Pollyannas, so for quite some time I’ve been interested in entertaining a voice from The Dark Side, as it were. I’m not accusing Morgan of being dour — very much the countrary — but he will certainly bring us a take on the news you won’t hear from our other contributors.

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What Do I Want In a Loan Officer?

Todd Carpenter wrote:

Hey Greg,

Now that REMBEX is working the way I want it to, I’m resurrecting my other pet project. It’s an all free training web site for new loan officers. Details are here. http://blog.mariah.com/2007/03/open-source-mortgage-training-manual.html

I would really like to get a real estate agent’s perspective on what they think a new LO needs to know in reviewing the contract and purchase process. I know you are busy moving your web site and training your protege, but maybe you know of someone else who can write an article for the project if you don’t have time. Even a word about it on your blog would be appreciated. I’m accepting volunteers for the other sections as well.

BTW, I know you are a Mac guy. I just upgraded to a 24″ iMac and am self-learning to use Keynote & Garage Band to make training videos for some of the key topics. The finished product should be pretty cool (I hope)!


Thank You!


Todd Carpenter
mariah.com

First, a disclosure; I am not an expert in loans, lenders or what they “ought to know”. But I am very comfortable in answering the question I used for the title of this post: What Do I Want In a Loan Officer? I’m not looking for one just now, because I have one who perfectly fits the description I’m about to write. How did I get her? Almost by accident, one of my Buyer Agents, Therese – who was making the transition into being one of my Listing Agents – said she had several good experiences with Kathy Rhubottom with O’Dowd Mortgage. Several “good experiences” consisted of the loans closing when they were supposed to and here is the “big one”: she was only told things that happened to be true. In the almost three years we have done business with Kathy, every deal – with two exceptions – closed on time. Both of those exceptions were title company errors, not the lenders. When Kathy said a deal was a makable deal, guess what? It actually closed.

Do I think Kathy is remarkable in her knowledge? No. I didn’t even meet her Read more

Scale your locally-focused real estate weblog down to the size of a good time. Why? Because there’s no place like home . . .

Teri has a weblog. It’s just a prototype for now. She’s shopping for theme so that we can make something truly unique and Daytonacious. I am by now at the point where I can set up a WordPress weblog in my sleep, which is lucky because, with 23 hosting accounts still to be moved, that on top of the normal crush, I’m not sleeping very much.

Teri already owned the domain, so all I had to do was redirect the nameservers to our new semi-dedicated file server. I keep a standing folder of WordPress-the-way-I-like-it on my desktop, so I copied that in, created the database, plugged the files into the database and — Eureka! Done.

A lot easier to say it than to do it, for most of us. My experience this weekend taught me a new trick, and this is strictly for the propeller-beanie set: If you have a certain way of setting up WordPress weblogs, you can save yourself the effort of setting your preferences with each new installation. Here’s how: Get a prototypical weblog set up the way you like ’em — settings, plug-ins, the works — then save a back-up of that set-up to your hard disk along with all your set-up files. When you make a new clean installation, inherit that backup into your new database. The new install will be a mirror of your prototype, fully-formed and fully-armed.

If you’re a propeller-wanna-beanie, Dave Smith of The Real Estate Blog Lab has prepared a step-by-step tutorial on setting up a WordPress weblog from scratch.

But: That’s really the easy part. In my view, the hard part of setting up a locally-oriented real estate weblog is scaling things down to what Robert Mosescalled “the size of a good time.” Moses built Jones Beach, among many other enormous masterpieces, but he was always aware of the small touches that would make people feel at home within his immense vision.

So what are we looking for? Hmmm… There’s no place like it, and, when you go there, they have to take you in…

We’re looking for home, of course. If I could lay one blanket Read more

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

…is at miOaklandCounty, Maureen Francis’ weblog. Teri Lussier’s introductory post came in fifth place,* not bad for a start.

With his post Persistence: The Investors Greatest Tool, Michael Cook took top honors at The Carnival of Real Estate Investing, hosted this week by the Ral Estate Investing for Real Blog.

Plenty of good reading at both carnivals, so get thee hence.

*Foot(-in-mouth-)note: I think I have this wrong. Teri came in “in no particular order” (sounds like second place to me πŸ˜‰ ) and FBS Blog, one of my personal faves, took first prize.

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A Boston advertising photographer becomes a Boston real estate photographer — with stunning results

Richard Riccelli fingered this New York Times article on real estate photography and related technologies (it’s behind a registration wall to make sure you know they don’t get it). Evidently, Richard had been impressed enough with my ideas about real estate photography to impress them upon the professional advertising photographer he hired to shoot his Boston townhome.

I read Richard’s reinterpretation of what I had said, and I think my ideas were considerably improved by the filtration. In any case, the photographer was impressed enough to repurpose his entire business to real estate photography. Richard highlights one home in particular, but the whole portfolio is excellent, an inarguable statement about what real estate photography can be.

My take: Virtual tours draw eyes at Realtor.com. People will watch videos, if only for the trill of watching “TV” on the computer. Poetic copy instills dreams. But nothing sells the buyer’s imagination on a home like a wealth of big, colorful, richly-detailed photographs.
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Niche Marketing in Action

Last night two separate thoughts took a moonlight swim through the gray matter, and when I woke up this morning things made sense.

One thing that stuck in my head was Brian Brady’s post on niche marketing. So well put- a recipe for success. The other thought was about my dad. I spent yesterday afternoon with my parents which wasn’t unusual, but was delicious because it was just the three of us and that is a rare occurance. At any rate, this morning I realized that my dad was an expert at niche marketing.

My dad has led a very interesting life. If Charles Dickens had written about Depression era babies growing up in the slums of Dayton, my dad would be famous. His childhood was the type that either beats you down or makes you smart. Since my dad doesn’t do “beat down”, he’s smart, and because of his childhood, he’s very resourceful. He made his living as a self-employed sales rep in the tri-state area. He drove a lot. To save money, he did his own car repairs. He became expert at engine work, transmission replacement, all sorts of major car work. He loves this stuff. He loves cars, working with his hands, and creating something from nothing.

Once his business began to run itself, more or less, he could focus on car work as a hobby. He started, well, flipping cars, so to speak, for fun and profit. He loves the challenge of scouring a salvage yard for the perfectly wrecked car, putting it in running condition and selling it; using the profits to buy a nicer wreck, fixing, selling, etc. Being an adventurous sort, he gravitated towards what might be considered SUVs, but this was in the 1970s. There really was no such thing as an SUV- there were only 4x4s and they were used to haul stuff on farms, or truly went off road. No one drove those big, noisy, hard riding behemoths around town, except my dad. Or so we thought, until he joined with other 4×4 and off-road afficionados. He began to network with the salvage Read more

Sez Me — Random Sunday Thoughts — The Duh Factor

We now hear empirical evidence about home prices across the nation. They rose (median) by 1%. They’re expected to rise by a tad more than that this year. Oh my.

Home builders also sold their new stuff last year for more than the year before. It’s also expected they’ll go up just a touch this year too. Oh my.

Developers are continuing to break ground on new projects all over the country. I guess they’re operating on the sound business principle that if they build it you will come. OR, they’ve done massive market research, analyzed the data within an inch of its life, concluding there’s still a thriving market for their product — at higher prices than the last project. Oh my.

Faster Than The Speed Of Stupid

This is the new bubble. You know, where reality bubbles to the top, assigning disaster theories to the writing room of The Tonight Show for Jay’s stand-up routine.

Lenders will lay low for a short while, (Captian Obvious Speaks) as they strive to create product that is attractive to both borrowers, underwriters, and their bottom line. Nothing trumps the number one axiom of real estate lending — lenders lend. Duh, Captain Obvious.

If you think we’re headed back to 20% down payments, then you’re also are still waiting for windmills to replace oil for energy. Why do you think we went from 20-30% down to 0-10% in the first place? Just maybe it was because lenders weren’t making enough loans to suit them. You’re on a roll Captain.

Idaho is the third fastest growing state in the nation. People are beating a path to their door. I wonder if that’s why the general Boise region is pegged to double in population in the next couple decades? Is it possible that the Phoenix area, which is also a population growth monster, will continue to prosper? Captain Obvious says — “Uh, yeah.” Duh

So here we are again poised to wet our collective pants laughing at all the Chicken Littles out there. And those laughing the loudest? The ones who looked at the real data, learned from history, and became disciples of Captain Obvious.

By the way, the Read more

Skewer you, Jack! You’re the guest of honor at a feeding frenzy

FBS Blog:

Think about this: Trulia’s brand is trumping the franchise brand, requiring payments to Trulia, and the franchise brand is trumping the brokers’ and agents’ brands, requiring payments to the franchise. At the same time, the brokers and agents in the field are building the business relationships that form the foundations of the all the brands. They’re doing all the work and they’re having to pay very dearly for lead generation that the web is supposed to be making more efficient. Efficiency for Trulia and Realogy, perhaps, but it doesn’t look very efficient for the brokers and agents.

Check. I think working Realtors need to work without ceasing at developing sources of business that do not require you to give up half of your own deal to cling to the other half. Forget commission relief. There are way too many mouths to be fed upstream.

These business models don’t work in the long run. There’s a fascinating post today on O’Reilly Radar about how Google and others, in their quest to “free” information, need to be careful not to destroy content creation. Here’ a quote from a Google employee, I find highly relevant to MLS today: “”Some think of Google as selling search. Some business types think it sells ads. I think it needs to be in the business of ensuring there’s something to sell ads around.” Yes, exactly. We need to protect content creation, especially the content that’s hard to create, like broad, deep and standard listing information.

Sooner or later, the brokers and agents will figure out that they are paying too much money to Trulia or their franchises for these leads and that they can do it more efficiently through cooperation. This brings me back to the MLS, back to local decisions in the best interest of all competitors. The MLS can and will figure out a way through these challenges. The specific business model for data aggregation and sharing on a broader scale may not exist yet, but the solution exists in a framework of trust allowing MLSs to foster a national non-advertising listing portal controlled by the brokers and Read more

The potentially-canonical list of real estate weblogs grows to a respectable level of inadequacy

The potentially-canonical list of real estate weblogs has grown again. I tend to maintain it daily in my own surfing, but I’ve been dealing with emailed additions in batches. I keep meaning to have Cameron write a form to streamline that process. In any case, look it over when you have a chance. I need to hear from you in any one of three circumstances:

  • A weblog should be on the list but isn’t
  • A weblog is on the list, but its details are in error
  • A weblog is on the list but shouldn’t be — it’s dead or a splog

There are 231 weblogs on the list right now, but I’m sure I’m missing dozens more.

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“If you make great stuff, people will find you”

Seth on SEO shortcuts:

The author said you should make sure that the keywords and title are perfect and limit outbound links so that you can be sure that people will only do what you want them to. Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags? What if I create some sort of ring so that the  spider won’t realize the scam?

Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.

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