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Month: June 2008 (page 3 of 7)

June 26, 2008

Estately.com in San Diego: Map-based search in a land without rain

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Estately.com starts operations in San Diego today, the third city to be served by the Seattle-based map-based real estate search start-up. Considering that the company has so-far only raked in a modest six-figures in venture capital, this would seem to argue that Estately’s software scales easily. No news on finances, but, seriously, there must be some boot-strapping money to permit this rapid growth.

This is from an email from Estately.com co-founder and BloodhoundBlog contributor Galen Ward:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, June 26th, over 19,000 San Diego homes and condos will be added to Estately.com’s 105,000+ properties for sale. Given the rapid changes in San Diego’s market, we are especially excited to give consumers the ability to track price changes on individual homes and across searches and areas.
Here are some example searches Estately makes into a snap:

  • Homes in La Jolla priced between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and sorted from cheapest to most expensive
  • Homes between $350,000 and $450,000 in Chula Vista
  • Homes including the words “motivated” (as in “motivated seller”) in the San Diego area

Additionally, we have revamped our “nearby information” information, plotted local schools and school scores, parks and transit stops on a map, and integrated it into the listing page.

I tried to run a search on “smug, slow-talking beachbums bragging about all the money they scam off of Arizona tourists with trained fish acts” — but that turns out to be everybody in San Diego.

Next stop: I’m betting on Oakland, but that’s only because I peeked. What’s not next: Phoenix — more’s the pity.

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June 25, 2008

Custom Signs and Brake Lights

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Recently experimented with one of the countless ideas that pour out of BHB like water from a hydrant.  Created a single site blog page and a custom sign for a listing.  The idea, of course, is stolen from Greg Swann and some of the other brilliant minds that visit here.  The purpose is this: be so much better as an agent (which is to say: so much better at marketing), others will have to increase their value proposition markedly… or get out of the game.  Here are a couple pictures of the sign:

The first one is an overview and the second one is a close-up.  I think they turned out nice and I was VERY happy with the process.

But that is not why I am posting.

Here’s the really interesting part.  After hanging the sign I started to pull away and had to stop and get my camera out again.  Three cars in a row stopped to look at the sign and one actually sent their child out to get the flyer.

 

So… within minutes of hanging the sign I had eyeballs from three cars and conversion on one; you have got to love that kind of impact!  BTW, the first thing my clients said was they loved the sign.  I remarked how standard signs only tell people a house is for sale while marketing for the brokerage.  One of the ideas behind a custom sign is to encourage people to stop the car and get out to read the sign (thus increasing the possibility of interest).  They replied: “This should do it.  You know… every agent in the area is going to stop and read it!”  Just love that.

June 25, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Apprehending all of the marketing objectives of single-property web sites

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.

That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.

Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.

There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.

And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.

This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.

Start here: Read more

June 25, 2008

Down Payment Gift Programs: Yea or Nay?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

On June 9th, in a speech to the National Press Club, FHA Commissioner Brian D. Montgomery announced that his agency plans to create new regulations banning the use of down payment gift programs.  The most popular of these programs is The Nehemiah Program and you can go to their site for more details, but the gist is this: seller contributes 3.5% to this charitable organization, which then contributes 3% to the buyers purchase, serving as their FHA downpayment.  Appears to be a win-win: the seller gets their home sold, the buyer gets into a home with no money down and a charity gets .5% for helping.  The problem, according to Montgomery, is that loans using this type of problem are defaulting at two and three times the rate of their traditional down payment loans.

There is no question that this type of program gets more people into homes than would otherwise be possible.  But… what of the ethics?  Although legal and within the bounds of FHA’s current guidelines, is there any question that this type of program also eviscerates the very spirit of the guidelines?  FHA allows charitable gifts with the understanding that there is an implied vouching for the client.  Whether it be family, employers or a city program, the idea is that the donor has some knowledge, purpose or interest in seeing the buyer succeed.  But with the down payment gift programs, the donor is the seller and their only interest is in selling their home.  (In fact, at times the home’s value is inflated to cover the 3.5% donation creating a circular interest of the buyer for the buyer.)

A down payment gives the buyer some “skin in the game” and creates within lenders a sense that the buyer won’t walk away at the first sign of trouble (which sense was confirmed as we watched homeowner after homeowner walk away from their mortgage recently when there was no equity to protect – not an ethical consideration, purely business).  Without downpayments, rates would climb to cover the inherent risk.  Maybe that type of loan will come back once the risk can be assessed, Read more

June 25, 2008

As a personal favor…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

When I was putting together TEAM ERIC for the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World Contest, I was pretty specific in how I built the team. There was a reason that Greg Swann was on the team. There was a reason for EACH member. Many of the team members did not talk to each other much in the emails that went flying everywhere, but individually they all talked with me. Everyone who was on that team was VITAL to its success. One of the things that united our whole team was that they are all “givers” and “doers”. There were (and are) no “show dogs”. The team was comprised of dogs who know how to hunt or pull a sled.

One of the members of our team is Charles Richey and his wife Jacqui. Charles does the webmastering and marketing support while his wife does the selling in Las Vegas. Charles is a giving, caring soul who is now faced with battling Guillaume Barre Disease and has been in the ICU for the past few days. The good news is that the outlook is positive. Many make a full recovery (after an extended stay in the hospital and physical therapy). This will be a long battle. One that ANY of us here could find ourselves in. But, like many REALTORS, Charles and Jacqui are battling without health insurance.

I am capitalist through and through, but that comes also with the fact that I am a loyal friend to a teammate and believe in helping fellow travelers and paying it forward. One does not truly work without the other. And as REALTORS we are all teammates to a large extent.

A fund has been set up here. If you can spare some, it is greatly needed and would be appreciated big time. Many REALTORS and more than a couple of vendors have offered support. I will chronicle their efforts down the road a bit.

Thanks a bunch for whatever you can do. I know times are tough right now and purse strings are tight. Even a small donation from a large number of folks would Read more

June 24, 2008

Housing Rescue Plan Passes Senate Smell Test

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Ever see what you thought was a pragmatic idea bastardized?  I’m no politician but I love throwing mock legislation up to the Bloodhound Congress.  If you’ve ever watched C-SPAN, The Bloodhound Congress resembles The British Parliament much more than our domestic legislative body.  Boos, hisses, and cheers abound in the rough and tumble world we live in.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Madames Porter and Schlicke and Messrs. Kerr, Purcell, Ashby, and Johnson keep me honest and get the old grey matter working.  As Bloodhound Blog approaches its second birthday, I salute the folks who really make it such a special place for me; The Bloodhound Congress.

Y’all remember this plea to Senator Dodd to leave well enough alone?

I oppose individual originator licensing in its proposed form. It doesn’t demonstrate true expertise and might induce a false sense of security to the consumer. This very act may very well damage the consumer by perpetuating the adolescent approach to financial planning the average American exhibits. It transfers the responsibility of prudent money management from the consumer to the license issuing body; sadly, those bodies are not up to the task.

I made the mistake of giving The Distinguished Chairman an inch:

I am recommending a NASD-type licensing model, with comprehensive education and testing standards. Originators should have education in financial planning, loan programs, and consumer suitability- that license will look a lot like a Series 7, General Securities Representative. Loan Processors should be proficient in loan programs and suitability, like the Series 6 license for mutual funds and variable annuities. Finally, managers and underwriters should have supervisory jurisdiction like the Series 24, General Securities Principal license. These licenses should be required for any and all participants, regardless of their employing company, and include federally-chartered banks. The effect will be higher costs to the consumer but expertise has its price.

Be careful what you ask; you might get exactly what you want.  Good Grief!  I didn’t really MEAN it!

This one riled everyone up. I reversed course and recommended yet another bailout.  I actually thought this was a pretty cool idea, exposing the Social Security system as Read more

June 24, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: A marketing quiz to shed light on the full value of the Coffee Table Books we make for our listings

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about the Coffee Table Books we make for some of our listings, and I talked about them briefly at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I wanted to go into the idea in greater detail, because I think this is a case where, if you don’t understand all of our thinking, you could easily miss the big picture by focusing on the pixels.

Cathleen Collins invented the idea of doing Coffee Table Books for listings. She knew what we wanted, and then she searched the internet to find a way to do it. (We use Apple’s iPhoto, but you get get similar products from Shutterfly. H/T Cheryl Johnson.) We’re not always this lucky. We knew what we wanted in custom yard signs years before we were able to find a vendor who could do it.

To understand our marketing objectives, we need to start at the top. A Coffee Table Book is an objet d’art. It is only secondarily a book. It is primarily a statement about the subject of that book. By its nature, a Coffee Table Book says, “This is important. This is no mere casual, ordinary thing. This is an object or event that deserves to be heralded, celebrated, honored.” That’s why these books can only work for certain homes, and, why, incidentally, I think it’s a mistake to violate the format. If you turn your Coffee Table Book into a hard-cover version of the kind of comb-bound listing books produced by title companies, you cheapen your impact — possibly to the point of anti-marketing — and frustrate your objectives.

So the sine qua non of a BloodhoundRealty.com Coffee Table Book is an exceptional home. The book says, “This home is extraordinary,” so the home has to be extraordinary enough to justify the existence of the book.

And this comes back to the knock-their-socks-off idea of marketing a listing. The Coffee Table Book expresses your total commitment to your sellers, and it makes the same kind of impression on potential buyers. A Coffee Table Book will not paper over the defects in an ugly, dirty, decrepit home, but it will make your listing stand Read more

June 23, 2008

If you commit yourself to delivering a premium listing, trying to cheap it out will instruct you in the previously-unknown 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Idea-by-idea, house-by-house, we are writing the book on the art of listing premium-priced homes for sale. The things we do are often beyond useless at lower price points, and we’re not a part of the canapes and cocktails circuit where high-end homes are sold. But for executive homes, luxury homes, historic and architecturally-distinctive homes, the kinds of marketing tools we are perfecting are very effective.

Effective at what? At selling the house, of course. Everything we do is about selling the house. If we happen to make a strong impression on the neighbors or on other people who see the work we are doing, so much the better. Even so, that’s not the point. People should be impressed by the commitment we make to selling our listings, but our purpose in making that commitment is to get the house sold.

Here’s a true fact, apparently known to everyone except real estate agents: Consumers — the people we hope to make our clients — see us as being lazy and cheap. They think we’re overpaid, but it’s probably less that they think our paychecks are too big and more that they don’t see any effort on our part to justify those paychecks.

A typical listing is a lockbox and a sign. Is there a flyer? Or is there just an empty flyer box? Has the flyer been edited with a ballpoint pen to reflect price reductions? How many photos are there in the MLS listing — and are they any damned good?

The marginal cost of everything I’ve talked about so far is essentially nothing, amortized over a few dozen listings. The one exigent out-of-pocket cost might be the post for the sign, and I have seen real estate signs nailed to trees. I wish I were joking.

If consumers see us as being lazy and cheap, it’s only because far too many of us are lazy and cheap when it comes to servicing our clients. It’s comical, actually. The Realtor who pisses away $5,000 acquiring a client worth $10,000 in gross commission income can’t bring himself to spend fifty bucks out-of-pocket on that client.

There’s a Read more

June 23, 2008

Inmanically Incorrect: Vendors Are Tools

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

I think a little bit differently about marketing than Greg Swann does.  Not much, but we’re of slightly different mindsets.  I’m not scared to call a name a lead, a voice on the phone a prospect, a loan applicant a borrower, and a funded loan recipient a client.  I KNOW they’re people because I’ve always treated them as people. I don’t need a rip off of a Nike ad to tell me that.   Ain’t nuttin’ original about treating people who inquire about your services with respect;  Sister Brigid taught me that back in 1972.

Greg and I think a bit differently about vendors, also. While Greg envisions a world without vendors, I see them as a necessary evil.  My goal is to maximize the necessary (efficacy) while reducing the evil (money paid).  The problem with the whole vendor/practitioner relationship is that practitioners are looking for the little purple pill; the shortcut.  That’s what the charlatans prey upon.

We talked about this at Unchained. Mary McKnight taught us how the fish can find your bait,  Louis Cammarosano gave us a demonstration about how to cast our nets,  Steve Hundley taught us how to hook them, and Ron Cates taught us how to prepare them so that they’re edible. Moreover, David Gibbons taught us where the schools of fish are swimming so that you’re better prepared for the next big expedition.

All of them…”vendors”. Vendors inasmuch as they insert themselves in between the practitioner and the customer and get paid for it. They get paid for it because they deliver hungry people to your restaurant for less money than it would cost to do yourself.

Should Greg’s utopian prayer of zero acquisition cost be a virtue? Of course.  We should all strive for utopia.  His message, if I’m not mistaken, is that the brave new world is building pressure behind the dammed chokepoints so that the chokepoints have to evaluate their efficacy.  The smart ones are evolving their models to increase their efficacy while the irrelevant proclaim that we practitioners are all idiots.

Wanna know how I know this? I watched them call you “glorified delivery people, gatherers Read more

June 23, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Showing Beacon not only cures that nasty excess income problem, it makes you look even dumber than your clients had feared

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is magazine spam, but it came from an RIS magazine called — wait for it — Real Estate that is nothing but spam. Every ad turns into two ads, the ad itself plus the puff-piece editorial copy of the just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you products being pimped in the ads. This kind of thing might be offensive to real estate professionals if we had not been putting up for it for years from Realtor magazine and the Inman “News”.

Anyway, this dumb product, called Showing Beacon, is a strong contender for Dumb Product of the Year:

I can’t figure out how much this stupid thing costs, but it doesn’t matter: Nothing would be too much. But don’t get the idea that you’ve milked this joke of all its yucks until you stop in at the Showing Beacon web site. Scroll down the page and click on the celebrity photos. What should you do when you come to fear that your product might be too cheesy? Add more cheese…

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June 23, 2008

BHB and Real Estate’s OODA Loop.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

The reason that I became a part of BHB was because BHB wants to matter most.  I don’t agree with everything Greg says or does (and he doesn’t always agree with me), but the core ethos at BHB is peerless.  It’s the same reason why I dug the Smashing Pumpkins so much.  Like him or not, Billy wanted to be the best rock band that rock and roll has ever seen.  He took title shot after title shot.  He didn’t make it, but we are all enriched for his efforts.   BHB is full of people that want to raise the bar so high that everyone benefits.  BHB wants to be the best RE blog ever, and we’re doing it, and I get to be part of it.  Oh, the fun.

But why to we have a head start?  It’s about the ideas, and it’s about the ethos of being independent, fierce, smart and fast.  Getting ideas out here quickly, with no rules, no committee is the best thing we do here.  And so, for those (few) of you that aren’t familiar with the OODA loop, I had to call it to your attention.

This is what BHB is doing doing, and it comes from a famous fighter pilot.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  Repeat.

From wikipedia:

By observing and reacting to events more quickly than an opponent, you can ‘get inside,’ their decision cycle and gain advantage.

An image:

Zillow was the most obvious example. 

When you’re inside the loop, you’re disrupting others and forcing them to react to you.  Zillow got inside the NAR’s loop with the Zestimate, and changed the industry.  The NAR reacted, but now has to consider Zillow (and all transparency implications that come with free data) in everything they do.  Everyone benefits when we crash the loop of a bad actor, and we’re all in Zillow’s debt because the NAR has to get better–or else they risk being irrelevant.

We benefit when we crash anyone’s loop because once we can do that once, we can repeat the process ad infinitum, and Read more

June 22, 2008

The world you find is the world you’re looking for…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Associated Press has a story this morning on on how weak and powerless people feel when they spend too much time obsessing over the news and not enough time pursuing their values.

I thought I’d share with you a photograph that seems to me to be a perfect expression of how weak and powerless humanity really is:

(Many more here.)

The universe, by definition, is everything there is. But your every experience of the universe starts and ends inside your mind. Your experience of life will be precisely as splendorous or as squalid as you want it to be. Do you want to change the universe, forever, for the good? Start by changing the way you think.

June 22, 2008

WordPress Security – More important these days.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

As in most things…the guy who throws up WP blogs by the dozen is the last guy to check his own. (the cobblers kids have no shoes, et al).

Confession Time:
EricOnSearch is my blog. It also is my business site. My site disappeared from Google’s radar about a week ago. Still indexed, but did not rank. How do you know it is a penalty? Typically, it won’t even rank for search terms like ericonsearch …not many people going for that one! (grin)

While search engine traffic is not the be all and end all for my blog, (most people who come there come from a post I have written or a comment on another site), since search engine work is a big part of what I do, getting no Google love is not cool.

Time to Investigate:
What I found was that my site had been hacked. And neatly inserted into my footer file were about 300 links to meds, poker and porn! How do you find it? In your blog, you can go to either “presentation” or “design” and then click on “Theme Editor”. If you look at BOTH the “header.php” and the “footer.php”, but there is a SIMPLER method. Here is a link to an “outbound link checker”. The reason that spammers spam is to get hidden links from your site to theirs. Go to this link checker and enter your url into it and run it… (Note: Eric Bramlett is working on a NEAT little plugin that will monitor OBLs and let you know via email before it becomes a search engine issue.)

If you see a bunch of links to bad neighborhoods, then you have an immediate issue.

Even if you don’t have an immediate issue, you still need to take action.

One of the best posts that I have found with an actionable list of what to for Word Press security is this one. I recommend taking the steps indicated here and in following the needed links from this page to find more info. As it says in the comments, step #9 can cause some grief.

An easier way for those not Read more

June 21, 2008

Technorati 599? Now they’ve got my attention…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We stopped running the Technorati widget a while ago. They went through some kind of hosting nightmare, and they were dragging us down on page loads as we waited for their software to time out. But they did some kind of recalculation this week, and suddenly I’m loving them a whole lot better.

We might not have Google right now — not that that matters — but we’re within striking distance of being one of the top 5,000 weblogs in the Technorati universe. How cool is that?

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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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