BloodhoundBlog

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Month: March 2008 (page 2 of 10)

March 28, 2008

Arizona Short Sales Not For The Faint of Heart

by

Realtor, Audio Engineer

Author website

 

I’ve commented before about short sales on this blog, but not to much extent, and I haven’t seen many of the other contributers do it either. I wonder why? Does everyone abhor them? Are they afraid of them?

I have taken a lot of advice around here, and one of the best pieces of advise I have gleened is to write about something that interests me, and build a long tail. Well, the long tail has actually been working. I have written on my home blog about The Ins & Outs of Arizona Short Sales,  and lo and behold, people started coming out of the woodwork. And I don’t mean a few. Let us just say it’s been a fabulous return on investment.

I have agents calling me from around the country asking for short sale help. I have homeowners calling me (from around the country, no less) about the possibility of doing a short sale on their home. I refer them out. (Incidentally, if you are from some other state than AZ, and you are familiar with short sales, send your contact information to me, I may have clients for you.)

I would like to first give a shout out to the new Barry. His Real Estate Radio USA  has been very cool and helpful for me professionally, and is entertaining to boot.

When I say that short sales are not for the faint of heart, I mean that in two distinct ways: for realtors, and for sellers.

 

Realtors are running up against brick walls with “The Gate Keepers.” That’s what I call the people who protect the actual “loss mitigators” like the Swiss Guard protects the Pope. Loss mitigators are behind bullet-proof glass, tucked away somewhere in a bunker under the Potomac river, without email, without phone lines, without fax machines; they are completely incommunicado. They send messages between the bunker and the outside world by carrier pigeon. The particular brand of pigeon they use is not one of the kind where you separate it from its home turf by a thousand miles, thow it up in the air, where it circles a few times and Read more

March 28, 2008

What’s Your Six Month Plan?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Every now and then I get to talk to someone just coming into the real estate business or contemplating the move.  My initial response is often a surprise to them but I bet many of you would agree with me when I tell them, “Great!  This is the best time to get into real estate.  If you come in with a good plan, establish the right habits and market consistently you will become a producer while times are tough and a star when times are good.”  They usually look at me a little crooked and then smile.  I guess they have a lot of people telling them they should have their head examined for going in when so many are getting out.  Maybe they should, but I always found the party a lot more fun after the wanna-be’s and coulda-beens were done posing and said their good-byes.

The Three Questions 
Following my response the potential new agent will inevitably tell me about their past experience and how it gives them a great sphere of influence in which to market.  They share with me their personal motto about discipline and the pledge they gave their cousin – the copier salesman – to never stop marketing.  I applaud all of this.  Mottos and pledges and enthusiasm are all important, maybe even indispensible.  But the first admonition about coming in with a good plan, the one they missed, is the most important.  Where is your business plan?  I have yet to hear: “I agree with you Sean.  I have a business plan written out and I am excited to begin.”

So here are the three questions I pose to all new agents:

  1. Why do you want to become a real estate agent?
  2. Do you have a written business plan?
  3. What is your six month plan?

The first question is really just a leading question designed to get people to open up and talk about their passion.  If you do not have a passion for some aspect of this business it is going to be awfully tough to work through the rejections.  The second question is meat and potatoes.  I call it Read more

March 28, 2008

Want to join the cool kids at Bloodhound Blog Unchained? How about the freaks and geeks?

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

There have been some fantastic posts on BHB this week. Alas, this isn’t one of them.

I whined about conferences, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been to one.  I’ve been to enough conferences and conventions to know that what happens outside the conference can make the difference between having a good experience and a great experience. For the record, I never have a bad experience- I simply don’t allow that to happen.

I’m not picky about hotels because I don’t spend time in them. My criteria is this: No roaches, no bed bugs, and no DNA left by previous guests. That covers any cleanliness issues and that’s my biggest concern in a hotel. On the other hand, I do like to be around the people I like, so a few weeks ago I sent out a tweet asking if anyone had started looking at hotels. I have enough experience with this to know that since my hotel needs are fairly spartan, if someone else wants to do the research, I should step aside and let them. So I did.

Brad Coy and Andy Kaufman were on it, and they have more narrow criteria: They wanted free wifi, and walking distance to the Heard Museum. They talked to Brian Brady who told them about a hotel with a lovely outdoor pool- if this is a family vacation, that might be worth looking for- but I’m from Ohio and have the tan to prove it. No pool for me.

I don’t mind staying alone, but I really fall into the more-the-merrier category with these things. Packing a lot of people comfortably into a hotel room makes things interesting, if not fun, so I was game when HouseChick, Kelley Koehler, and I decided to share a room. We both conceded hotel research to the cool kids, who just this week made an executive decision: Fairfield Inn. Free wifi, walking distance, breakfast, Fairfield Inns work for me- they are not notoriously dirty. I read the Trip Advisor comments, always with a grain of salt, and the reviews were mixed, which is typical. Noise issues mostly, but no one who booked a suite complained. Sweet- they have suites. Read more

March 28, 2008

Geno’s Wrong (bang a gong)

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’ve heard tell that a baby’s first post-partum sensation is a visceral experience of himself and his mother as One. Thus, being too new in Life to yet separate himself from the outside world, little baby Geno mentally concludes mommy and he are the exact same entity. And when the light bulb finally does go off in the infant’s bald little noggin a few months down the lifeline and he realizes he’s been maternally duped by Nature, the very first ‘Separation Anxiety’ is then experienced and all future disappointments in his ensuing  mortal journey can be traced back to that very instant. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Either that or I dreamt it in one of my other, more enlightened lives when I wasn’t so monetarily attached to my livlihood.

I’ve also read somewhere that when one person moves to thumb down, and snap the mutual wishbone, ending a personal or business relationship abruptly, that the mental decision was made long before the actual ax hit the proverbial turkey’s neck; that the severing party (axer) grieving period had already begun long before fatal action was actually taken and thus, comes off as being the more ‘heartless’ of the separated duo. The turkey (axee), on the other hand, is cast immediately into a state of shock and is forced to run around ‘headless’ and very quickly come to terms with his own extremely short future as a team member in this world.  Somewhere between these first two paragraphs lies my point (allow me a few moments to dig it out as I simultaneously fret over a handful of my difficult Listings with a combined market time of almost 3 years) but I can tell you right now; headless, heartless, whatever…I’d rather be the axer than the axee.

I thought about this quite a bit as I escaped the silent treatment market torture in Chicago and flew home to visit with my 80 year old parents over Easter weekend. As I walked through their front door I was instantly greeted by a lifetime of childhood reminders, familiar tastes and nearly forgotten episodes. I sat there for hours keeping company with the two people I’ve known longer than any two souls on this earth, wondering where all the time went. I told them I felt so different lately, with barely a speck of child left in my psyche. They Read more

March 28, 2008

Surreal Times: Election 2008

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

Every day around the world there are brilliant people going to work performing complex tasks that make all our lives better. There are companies developing and implementing service oriented architecture (SOA), information technology solutions more sophisticated than the world has ever known. Few people outside the inner workings of these companies know what is happening, because it isn’t reported. The leaders in industry building incredibly complex systems that respond with such a high degree of flexibility that reaction time to market changes is almost immediate are mostly unknown — they aren’t sexy and they aren’t political.

There are brilliant people making discoveries around the world: scientists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, programmers, biologists — they are mostly unknown. There are entrepreneurs with vision reshaping the way we do business in a 2.0 world. These people take chances and gamble on innovative ideas — they step forward, yet most people don’t notice them.

Every day there are improvements to the cars we drive, the medicine we take, the homes we live in — online search makes information easy and useful to access, buying and selling goods and services is offered up improved and less expensive, medical procedures extend our lives and add to the quality of our lives, entertainment is offered in diverse packages that make our lives more enjoyable, private charities are getting help to needy individuals in more creative and efficient ways. It’s all due to the myriad individuals who use their minds daily and development better and better management and delivery. The real leaders of the world, for the most part, go unnoticed.

Not only do they go unnoticed, they are disparaged directly and indirectly by politicians building power bases. It’s especially noticable this election year. You would think the world revolves around and depends on the choice between three people. Government has positioned itself in the hearts and minds of many people and in the press as the true leadership that will reshape the world and improve mankind. If this idea wasn’t so dangerous, it would be hilarious. All one has to do is sit back objectively and consider the brilliant people at work each day building, innovatiing, managing and delivering Read more

March 28, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Jeff Brown, discount lister?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other morning, Bawldguy Jeff Brown left this note in a comment:

I’m jumping back into the San Diego investment property market as a lister. I’ve been ignoring my home folks since late ‘03.

I’m gonna be offering a broadly different choice for the seller. I’ll charge NO listing commission, but a small monthly fee for ongoing marketing, and my carrying costs at Starbucks.

Now that’s intriguing, ain’t it?

It’s been gnawing at me, so I called Jeff to talk to him about it. He explains it in his own words in the podcast linked below, but stop for a moment and generalize, if you will.

If you’re in a market with a surfeit of inventory, sellers are not the kind of blue chip asset they might have been a few years ago. Qualified buyers on the other hand…

If you can sell your sellers on the idea that, like Jeff, you will give them a knock-your-socks-off listing at a price that will save them some money, you will have acquired inventory you can use to attract buyers. I think you would have to list like Jeff plans to, totally turn-key — and you’ll have to decide where you stand on dual agency. But if listing stronger for less attracts more buyers, what do you have to lose?

Since he’s working with investors, Jeff’s strategy is even more intricate than that. Give a listen and see what you think.

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March 27, 2008

Urbanologist Joel Kotkin: Why growth-oriented cities like Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta reflect the future of global commerce

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin is the only American urbanologist who can tolerate actual living human beings. In consequence, he can write about the organic growth of cities as they really are, rather than as he might remake them with enough tax money and firepower. This is a long extract from a much longer article about Houston’s emergence as a world-class city, this despite the scorn that might be heaped upon it — at tax-payer expense — by urban monument-builders like Richard Florida. In this section of the article, Kotkin discusses what makes young, growth-oriented cities so dynamic by comparison to older, more-typically-urban urban environments.

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.

Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.

Chicago, the great growth city of the late Read more

March 27, 2008

Eyeball Marketing – Are You a Pioneer?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

What do running shoes, firefighters’ air tanks and cordless drills have in common? They are all direct spin-offs from the Apollo Space Missions (and before anyone comments, neither Teflon nor Tang was a spin-off from the Apollo missions or NASA in general).  Why is this important to practitioners of the 2.0 arts? Because Social Media Marketing is, at this time, a lot like the Apollo Space Mission.  It is young and unexplored.  It is obviously a new way of doing something and most would agree that it is quite powerful, but many more question its real use.   Apollo was questioned.  Many accused the entire program of being a boondoggle: powerful, but of little practical use.  “What is the point, even if you do succeed?”  Sound familiar?

The Eyeball Marketing theory is simple: if you can put enough eyeballs on you, someone will pay to access the brains (and wallets) behind those eyeballs – might even be you.  There is no shortage of people with products or services to sell that will gladly pay you to get in front of your group.  This is the basis of most large, multi-day seminars.  (You didn’t think they were paying those big names full boat to come and hock their books did you?)  Lots of people have something to sell, but few have the ability, the reach and the vision to put butts in seats and eyeballs facing forward.  Quick self quiz: how many of you have paid for leads in the past?  If you have then you are someone with a service to sell willing to pay someone else for the eyeballs they generate.

I suggest that there are two basic forms of marketing.  When we talk about past clients, sphere of influence and a community of raving fans we are talking about marketing to a target.  When we talk about hyper-locals, mass mailings and Google juice we are talking about marketing for eyeballs.  They are not mutually exclusive; in fact, the goal of eyeball marketing is to gather enough people into a specific group that you can market to a target.  Blanket an area with Read more

March 27, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Using the synergy of the internet and low-cost printed promotions to sell your product, build your brand and give you an affordable — testable — marketing strategy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the first of a series of Black Pearl Marketing Minute podcasts that Brian Brady and I will be putting together. We want to take marketing ideas that we have discussed on BloodhoundBlog and flesh them out to real-life strategies while connecting them to other synergistic tactics.

In this inaugural episode, we start by talking about my post on using the business card form factor for doing low-cost broadcast door-to-door promotion. We talk about some ways that we deploy custom-made business card-sized promotional pieces, how we make and print them, and our distribution plan.

Brian then connects that idea to a marketing plan that emerged from our comments threads, partnering with local merchants as an online/offline farming technique.

Earlier today, someone known only as Jacksonville Real Estate posted a comment on my post about using low-tech promotional schemes to bring traffic to a single-property web site:

It’s an old idea and it’s not mine … but if you are targeting just a certain areas then getting your flyer on the local pizza delivery box can work wonders.

Brilliant! Never thought of it, but that’s why I love this place: We bring bright minds together and set off a blinding brilliance. My reply:

Oh, very cool. I tend to think in terms of things we can do on our own, but this is actually an interesting cross-promotion:

“Visit our custom web site for 123 Mulberry Lane and your next pizza is on us!”

Build a PDF coupon in the site and redeem them with the pizza joint once a week. Meanwhile, your contact info is on the fridge for weeks or months.

That’s a Brian Brady-style idea. I must be channeling…

It’s a Guerrilla Marketing kind of idea, actually, a Duct Tape Marketing kind of idea — maximum bang for minimum bucks. It’s most completely a BloodhoundBlog kind of idea, in the sense that it combines (and recombines) physical with online marketing.

But nothing’s perfect in the first draft. My correspondent thought springing for the whole pizza might be too expensive as a “pay per click.”

Okayfine. How about this?

Buy the soda instead, then. It’s an upsell for the pizzeria — bigger Read more

March 26, 2008

Did you miss out on the super-low Guerrilla-only price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained? The price is still low, but you need to act fast — Brian Brady wants to raise it again soon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a valuable question for the Web 2.0 world: Can people really appreciate a bargain? Everybody loves “free” — but do they love it at full value? My thinking is that LinkedIn would be a much more valuable place to network if it charged members $350 a year, but would anyone pay a buck a day for Facebook?

This is a question that has been bugging Brian Brady — gnawing at him as only a good marketing problem can. We priced BloodhoundBlog Unchained at $149 and sold a bunch of tickets. We bumped the price to $199 and sold a bunch more. We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to make seating distribution choices — and Brian wants to raise the price to our estimated retail — dollarized — value: $350.

We know that amount is low. The next time we do this, the early-bird price will be more than that, and the last-minute price will be more than double that amount. We’re going to give you a year’s worth of ideas to deploy, so, even at $350, we’re still only a buck a day. If you do just one extra deal as a result of something you learn at Unchained, the ROI could be 20-1 or more.

Looked at that way, Brian is right: It’s plausible that, by charging too little, we’re encouraging people to set their expectations too low. I find that amazing, considering how much value we deliver here at BloodhoundBlog every day. But I was stunned to discover that people didn’t know that Unchained will not be the typical buy-me! buy-me! vendor show. I would have thought that my own graduated hostility to vendors would have made that plain.

In the other corner, there is me, slugging it out for the starving grunts in the trenches. No one is really starving — I hope! — but our lean months have become our lean years, and there ain’t too many of us getting fat off the fat of the land just now. I would rather keep the price as low as we can for as long as we can, Read more

March 26, 2008

The NAR Is A Sex Offender’s Best Friend

by

Real Estate Broadcaster and Investor

Author website

“Hello Mr. Agent, I like this house. I could see my family living here. Just one question, are there any sex offenders nearby”? A simple question that based on information from the National Association of Realtors does not have to be answered by the agent.

The answer the NAR wants agents to proffer is, “Well Mr. homebuyer you’re just going to go look that up yourself”.

Ralph Holman, associate general counsel for the NAR says “What agents should do is tell buyers about their states’ registries.”

Go look it up yourself! That’s the answer that the NAR wants agents to give. An individual who is held out in NAR advertising and lobbying as a professional on par with doctors and lawyers wants their rank and file members to dodge this question as much as possible.

This certainly bestows credibility and trust with the American consumer doesn’t it? This surely will make the public more sympathetic to the plight of Realtors shouldn’t it? You would not expect a “professional” who is being paid upwards of 6-8% to facilitate the sale of a housing purchase to actually tell the truth would you?

If not for information and said coordination of the sale what exactly is the agent being paid such a hefty commission for? Why would any agent or the NAR encourage a culture of deceit? If not deceit, then call it ignorance and unprofessional. In any event, if you are selling a product as important as where someone wants to house their wife and children, then is it not too much to expect that the consumer is relying on the agent to inform and disclose all defects, not the ones they choose to disclose?

Has the NAR declined in credibility so far as to instruct their agents to actually feign ignorance or have there agents slid so far as to actually buy into degrading their “profession” by bamboozling the consumer?

A professional should not have to question whether such information is pertinent. A professional should deliver the information willingly and should openly and freely desire to offer full disclosure.

USA Today recently ran a story wherein a spokesman for the National Association Read more

March 26, 2008

Jerry Rubin Died A Stockbroker

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

The point of my title might not be obvious, and it’s not meant to discount youthful exuberance — God knows we need youthful exuberance. However, Peter Pan and Michael Jackson aside, we all grow up. What does that mean — grow up? I take its meaning as maturation, becoming wiser, thinking long term, becoming responsible to self and others.

Organizations, even countries, like individuals, seem to go through the growing up process — from infancy, to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to the twilight years. If companies and countries can continuously reinvent themselves between young adulthood and middle age that’s a good thing. The analogy with individuals breaks down here, for the most part, because individuals can only “remodel” so much before the realities of age take over completely. However, individuals can stay fresh in mind and spirit for quite a long time through constant learning, reflection and openness. This freshness of mind and spirit coupled with maturity and wisdom is an attractive combination in individuals — these are the people I gravitate towards.

RE internet companies seem to be in their mid twenties. There is an emphasis, a feel, a persona, if you will, of “youth” with companies like Redfin, Zillow, Trulia and the rest. What is their phiolosphy? It’s like most 20 somethings; it’s a mixture of style, doing good, distrust of tradition, worship of change, but very little mature, rational long term vision. Unlike Realtor.com, they play their music loud, dress in t shirts and jeans, talk funny and love to give stuff away to their buds.

They are the RE version of Google starting out, just doing stuff with no business model, having fun, being different with an attitude and declaring like grandiose young mini-gods they will “Do No Evil“. Oh, I’m sure there are grown ups developing plans and thinking about making money, but this is the sense, the feel, I get from these companies.

Do they have to “grow up”? Can they survive in the business world by hanging out with their friends, creating stuff and giving it away? They will make more and more friends, that’s for sure, but Read more

March 25, 2008

Less is More

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

If I asked you “what business are you in” and your answer is “the real estate business,” you (like 98% of REALTORS®) are wrong according to Michael Russer of Russer Communications.  Michael is a genius of sorts; he claimed the title Mr. Internet before we even found out that Al Gore invented it.  Russer was tech before tech was cool. He made quite a name for himself in real estate circles back in the 90’s with his Mr. Internet moniker and a passionate belief that the Internet is not about technology, it is about connecting people. Now he flies all over the world telling real estate and other businesses how to use the Internet to market themselves and connect with clients and customers. 

So why does Michael Russer think 98% of agents don’t know what business they are in?  Actually, he asks his classes a different question.  He asks attendees at his seminars if they have a specific target market that would be recognizable by visiting their personal web site.  98% do not have such a specialty or niche market.  In other words, only 2% of REALTORS® are NOT generalist.

I am not a REALTOR®, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, and that empowered me to come up with a few niche market suggestions for those of you who might want to stand out from the 1.3 million other REALTORS®.  One of my strong beliefs is that if you try to be everything to everybody, you will end up being nothing to nobody.  This is as true for an association of REALTORS® as it is for each individual member.  It is also true in every other part of our lives.  Remember High School?  If you did not find your niche (band, AV Club, football team, etc.) you really struggled to fit in – to be relevant. 

Why then, do 98% of REALTORS® fail to develop a niche within the overall real estate industry?  For the same reason many other businesses fail to find a target market – they fear that limiting the pool of potential clients will Read more

March 25, 2008

Redfin.com beats the field again, this time in both Seattle and San Francisco: Buyers pay less and reap commission rebates, too

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin.com has news this midnight, but it’s the sort of thing I would normally ignore: It’s basically the kind of rah-rah-for-us stuff I leave for the vendor cheerleaders and the mainstream media. But: I gave Redfin a lot of grief last year when they made a similar announcement, so today I’ll give them a bit of their own back:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today published an analysis of the last 12 months’ public real estate records in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area that shows its buyers and their Redfin agents negotiated a better price than buyers who used other brokerages. Redfin’s average negotiating advantage was $5,048. The company also reported a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate for users of its home-buying service, and an average commission refund of $10,520.

This is the actual news, which you will not find in any news source: Redfin beat the field for the second year in a row. Is it plausible that particular agents beat Redfin? Not just plausible, highly probable. I don’t know of any teams of buyer’s agents like the kind of team Russell Shaw runs for listing agents, but a team like that would be much more useful for comparison purposes than the entire field of Realtors in three MLS systems. But give Redfin its due: The company deploys the kind of task specialization common to every sort of business except residential real estate brokerage. It’s very hard to resist the idea that specialist negotiators, more often than not, could out-dicker ordinary jack-of-all-trades Realtors.

And all of that is caviling, and wasted caviling at that. Stand in awe as Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman illustrates the high art of PR triangulation:

“Why do Redfin customers consistently tend to negotiate a better price, in different markets and different market conditions?” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Last year, we concluded it was because of our agents, whom we pay bonuses based on customer satisfaction rather than commissions. Others argued that it was because of our deal-savvy customers, who benefit from Redfin’s transparency to take a more active role in the deal. Today, we think it’s Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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