BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: January 2009 (page 2 of 4)

January 21, 2009

Selling real estate the engenu way: Because I can make content-rich web sites so easily, I can make my points more convincingly

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Can premium rental homes in suburban Phoenix throw off positive cash-flow at 75% of market rents?

An investor asked me that question the other day. It’s an academic problem, really, a matter of costing out typical homes to see how they perform under that scenario.

I can do that much standing on my head, but answering a question like that with a spreadsheet is not terribly satisfying. We live in a data-rich world, and I wanted for my investor to understand exactly what we were talking about. So not just the spreadsheet, but also MLS listings of typical homes. And not just the listings, but also detailed photos of those homes, with descriptions of what might be wrong with each one.

In fact, I could have answered the question any way I wanted, from tap-dancing on the telephone to an attempt to set a showing appointment. But I know from experience that the more questions I can answer in a completely credible fashion, the greater my chances of forging a long-term client relationship.

And that’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? How would I want to be treated if I were thinking of dropping some substantial fraction of a million dollars on investment real estate?

And this is where engenu comes in. I can shoot the spreadsheet across immediately, as an appetizer. But I’m not selling spreadsheets, I’m selling houses, so I put together a list of houses that I thought might be financially impressive. I toured each one, taking photos of everything, then came home and built an engenu web site from my findings.

I’ve been talking about engenu for nearly a year, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the point all the way across. We use engenu to build our single-property web sites and to provide supporting documentation when we blog about homes for sale. We use it as a way of previewing homes for out-of-town buyers and investors, and as a way of communicating staging advice to our sellers. The language of real estate is photography, and engenu enables us to build (and rebuild) large, photo-rich web sites with minimal effort.

So: I came Read more

January 20, 2009

Reading the signs and portents of Obama’s America

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow march to the top of the Capitoline hill at dawn, at the end of which the senior consul for that year would sacrifice a bull. Only then would the new consuls and the senators convene in the Curia to take up the Republic’s business for the year.

And Janus, for whom January is named, is the god of doorways, presiding not just over beginnings but also endings. Today marks not just the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but also the end of the Bush era in Washington.

Both Bushes, pere and fils, seemed to me to be fundamentally decent people, quite unlike the man who served between them. But Bush the younger, by being so roundly reviled as president, has nowhere to go but up from here. Someday Americans will have the fortitude to thank this man for calling Islamofascism by its true name: Evil. In the mean time, the bull is no longer his to slay.

I’m less afraid of Obama than I was on election day, but still I fear for capitalism and for individualism. The good news, always, is that socialism cannot work. The bad news, always, is that millions perish in the process of discovering that socialism cannot work. Janus may well be opening the door to a renewed appreciation for classical liberal virtues, but it seems likely that the glorious light we associate with ages of reason may be found at the end of a long, dark hallway.

The one hope I hold today is to be found in the photo at the top of this post: I hope that today is the beginning of a post-racial America. Everything we’ve done about race so far, for four hundred years, has been pretty stupid. I hope it turns out that electing a black president was the first Read more

January 18, 2009

A Tale of Two Paradigms

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

Glenn Kelman’s recent Call to Arms brought to light for me the two  paradigms that exist within the realm of transacting real estate – the traditional broker/agent-centric view and the evolving consumer-centric view.  Ultimately both paradigms attempt to better serve the consumer, however, the perspectives are very different.

Glenn’s post queries why traditional brokers, i.e agent-centric business model, don’t embrace the consistent measure of customer satisfaction on an agent by agent basis after the completion of a transaction.   The question is extremely valid – measuring customer satisfaction is a way to preserve the integrity of the broker and/or agents’ brand.

I question the validity of the metric – customer satisfaction – what is the criteria?  In fact Glenn asked, “how do you measure customer satisfaction?”   Defining the criteria is critical to measuring the ultimate value of the outcome – is 9 out of 10 a valid measure?  What does 9 mean?

I’ve held the QSC – Quality Service Certified – Certification for almost 6 years.  After each transaction, a third party administers a survey to measure how satisfied my clients were with the service level I provide.  Interestingly, never once in 6 years have I had a potential client or prospect contact me because of my rating.   In an agent-centric model, I measure customer sat by referral and repeat clients.  I get measured on a scale from 1 to 5 and have been able to maintain a high level of satisfaction, but ultimately my clients have spoken more effectively about my skills and knowledge rather than my score.

While it may be important to know whether or not a particular consumer may recommend or even use the services of an agent and/or broker, I believe I need to know the “why?”.

The question has been asked many different times – what do consumers want?  Again, Glenn asserts that consumers are seeking more metrics on agents.  Depending upon whether or not a client is buying or selling, their wants have remained fairly consistent.

Buyers want assistance finding the the right home.  They also want help negotiating the sales terms and price.

Sellers want to price their homes competively Read more

January 18, 2009

From Blogs to Klogs: How Blogging Will Become Useful

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

Blogging is a fad and by definition, it will eventually run its course and fade away to a small niche. Blogs will be the bell-bottom pants of Web 2.0. The technology of Blogging will not go away, but the style of what we now do on Blogs will change significantly and will be renamed “Klogs” (more on that later).

How can I make such a claim in the face of overwhelming statistics documenting the growth and popularity of Blogs? That’s an easy question. My answer: because this is a Blog post and I can spew whatever opinion I wish and the only thing you can do is try to out-spew me with your own opinion. But spewing opinions is not what is going to undo Blogging – lack of civility will keep Blogs out of the mainstream.  Simply put, corporate leaders have not embraced the Blogosphere because many Blogs often spiral down into a pit of venom and character assassination while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity. Many Blogs revel in being snarky because it gets them quick exposure and generates lots of readers and comments. It is all in good fun until someone gets their eye poked out.

Corporate leaders are fearful of Blogs because these freeform formats of fun are too risky for the image of the Company.  Sure, many corporations have started a Blog, but most are tame, humorless, boring sites used for product promotion and press releases.  The NAR Blog is a good example of that.  These are not real Blogs because the writers are not free to say what they think; rather, they must say what the company wants to say/hear.

Because there is not widespread adoption of Blogging on the corporate level – and VERY few individuals are making money off their Blogs – I can only draw the conclusion that Blogging will fade away to the fashion status of bell-bottoms, or at least not reach a significant level in business communications.  Without adoption by the business community, Blogging will not have sustainable cache’ and, I believe, has almost peaked in popularity.

Currently there are about 4 Blog readers Read more

January 17, 2009

BloodhoundBlog Radio: About Success With Jason Blackburn

by

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

Author website

Jason Blackburn of Laser Focus For Life was our guest on BloodhoundBlog Radio last week.  I “met” Jason on Facebook two months ago, when preparing for the “Power Of Twelve” seminar.  Jason wrote a referral script for my seminar and asked nothing in return.  That connection led to a number of telephone calls which made me realize that Jason had a lot to offer.

Jason points out that many of our actions are incongruent with our mission.  He explains that our actions need to be inspired by the “buy-in” from both our hearts and our minds.  Jason is not a “touchy-feely” success trainer. He’s a nuts and bolts sales pro with over twenty years experience.

I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from Jason.  You can hear our 40-minute interview with him here.

PS:  If you click only one link, click “referral script“.  Jason lays out a simple way to generate referral business in about 800 words.

January 17, 2009

Hittin’ Fat Fastballs — Diggin’ For Gold — Skinnin’ Cats

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I remember something a great football coach once said. He’d been asked about the vanilla offense he ran, and how defenses were shedding old fashioned ideas, and learning how to stop tradition offenses with ease. He said, “Let ’em do whatever they need to. If my guys block their guys, we win.” That coach was a 1.0 guy if ever there was one. 🙂 I bring that up only as a preface to what my point is today.

It’s still all about skinned cats. It’s amazing how many are still calling guys like Chris dinosaurs. I’m sure his feelings are mortally wounded as he cries his way to the bank every month. Much like USC football coach John McKay replied when asked about his ‘student body left, student body right’ running game. Said Coach McKay: “When they find a way to stop it, I’ll try something else.” His boring, predictable offense produced multiple Heisman Trophy winning running backs.

Chris Johnson stimulated some pretty productive give and take with his last couple posts. Chuck Marunde and I joined in with our own thoughts on the subject. Where Chris was in his glory talkin’ about his use of Ma Bell’s favorite toy, Chuck was lamenting his local market’s dreary numbers. And dreary might be an optimistic description. He was up to here with high maintenance owners on sloooow moving listings. Me? I think Chris is a born cold caller, one of those rare people who knows the percentages, shrugs his shoulders, then works ’em, all the while wondering why his competition can’t see the gold too.

Chris’s core message as I see it is this: If he told you that digging a 100 three foot holes a day would uncover a pot of gold a week, every agent with a pulse would be grabbin’ gloves, a pick & shovel and headin’ out the door. Why? Because they’d be thinkin’ of the year’s worth of gold they’d have by consistently diggin’ those daily 100 holes, right? You know that’s true. Yet in real life they don’t, do they? Those who won’t dig understand why, Read more

January 17, 2009

Bloggers. Transparency. Stimulus. and Laxatives.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

First off, the following blog post is NOT political. PLEASE do not try to turn it political. (If you do, you will be 301 (read: permanently) redirected to the fact that this is NOT political.)

It IS about bloggers trying to improve the world around them by shining light on a political process and making politicians more answerable to their constituents and less answerable simply to the power brokers inside the beltway. It is about my opinion that as long as there are bloggers who care enough to invest the time, they will have influence and authority.

In response to the House of Representatives’ proposal to spend $850 Billion on another stimulus package, a blogger (and a great new media consultant) who founded Kithbridge.com launched a new blog. ReadTheStimulus.org. What does it do?

Glad you asked. Here’s what it does. It takes the PDF documents of the draft spending bills that the government is known for spitting out and it converts them to searchable text and provides a search engine for folks (including the press, if they care to), to search terms and find how much of the bill is stimulative to the economy, how much is stimulative to certain lobbyists vs what is well just laxative so to speak.

Want to know if there is a bridge to nowhere in there? or funds for the mating habits of the iguana? Don’t think that will stimulate the economy? You can now find it within seconds.

I applaud the efforts of these bloggers to get the 335 pages out there, indexed and in a searchable form for the public so that folks on both sides of the political spectrum can debate it openly. (Note: they are going to post the various other proposed bills as well.)

Anyone want to make a bet with me as to how many of the politicians (from either side…again this is not political) have actually READ and UNDERSTOOD the implications of these 335 pages. If there were 10 of them in the whole House of Representatives who had personally read it cover to cover, it would surprise me.

One of the Read more

January 15, 2009

A Call to Arms

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

Why, in an industry in which customer service is one of only two ways to set yourself apart, have brokers been so wary of measuring customer satisfaction?

It isn’t because agents don’t care. I’ve never met a Realtor who didn’t care about his customers. In fact, when we talked about Redfin’s customer satisfaction goals last week, a broker immediately contacted us to ask how we measure customer satisfaction.

Will the Brokers Who Measure Customer Satisfaction Please Step Forward?
I was going to refer him to someone else in real estate who uses our scoring system — we’re just beginners — but then I couldn’t find anyone else. Which is surprising, given that it’s the same system used by Apple, Costco, FedEx, American Express, Dell, Vanguard and literally thousands of other companies in virtually every industry — except real estate.

The broker ended up scheduling a meeting with Redfin’s Matt Goyer at Inman Connect. It may have been one of the only Connect meetings explicitly about customer satisfaction all week. In looking over the otherwise dazzling agenda — I have been to both Inman and Bloodhound conferences, and both are very good — I noticed that every type of marketing under the sun was in the program — except the one that works best: customer marketing.

The Perils of Transparency Are Worth It...

The Perils of Transparency Are Worth It...

The reason measuring customer satisfaction wasn’t more prominent is because people think of customer testimonials as the old-school word-of-mouth that Realtors traditionally rely on, whereas Connect is all about the new school: YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

E-Commerce for Agents Not Houses
But the message matters as much as the new-fangled medium, and our message to the world has to be about the quality of our service. The same transformation in how consumers research listings will change how they choose an agent. Rather than meeting face to face to review listings, consumers now evaluate listings online. They can’t see or smell the house in person, so they bury their nose in numbers. When their first encounter with an agent is online, they’ll take the same approach.

Therein lies the great fallacy in many people’s original Read more

January 15, 2009

My 2 cents on Shawna’s Mall Metaphor

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

The use of design metaphors was one of the first things Web designers explored in the mid-90’s on the early commercial Web sites. A Southwest Airlines site used the airport ticket counter as a design metaphor, for example, and the mall metaphor itself was widely used by early eCommerce developers.

I did it, too. I designed a site for the RI Teacher’s union that used a ruled-paper background, and the homepage navigation was designed to look like stuff that was left on top of a notebook. I even had a coffee ring on there.

In the mid-90’s , most of the first Web designers were coming over from print. As Marshall Mcluhan pointed out, we tend to use a new medium the way we used the old one, so a lot of early Web design was driven by what designers knew from print, including the use of metaphor.

While you can make the argument, as Brian has, that a design metaphor can be used to make people feel comfortable with a user experience by basing it on something they already know, there are good reasons why Southwest and the RI Teachers no longer have metaphor-driven Web site designs.

If you really want to get into this, check out Jacob Nielsen’s book Designing Web Usability (where he dissects the Southwest ticket counter site), but it boils down to this: The Web has essentially become an operating system, and successful Web sites are basically apps that run on it. The reason your users come to your site is to complete a task using your app.

That means that Web design has morphed from print-based design principles to software user interface design principles, and the problem with metaphors in UI design is that they don’t scale well as you add functions to your app to enhance your audience’s ability to complete primary and related tasks.

You end up stretching the metaphor until it breaks, and something that started off  giving you a fresh and interesting way to look at a hierarchy of information becomes a drag on your ability to extend that hierarchy. Already on Shawna’s site, you have to Read more

January 15, 2009

The Wild Wonderful Web We Weave. How tightly wound it will be.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

Yesterday was Teri Lussier’s Birthday in case you missed it.  If you did, then by all means go and give her your well wishes already.

Aside from working on your birthday, Teri and I have a few things in common.  Beyond real estate, our shared interest might have a lot to do with why I’m writing on Bloodhound.   A little over a year ago, after reading this blog for probably a year-plus prior, she pulled me out of lurking and into commenting on this post about twitter. It was not the utility of twitter that was as much of interest, but rather the evolving way that we communicate with one another on the WWW.   Twitter, as we all knew was offering a new line of communication at the time in the micro-blogging arena, and Teri was sharing her thoughts on the concept by using a shared favorite film as a metaphor.

It was her use of something that was of great interest to me that attracted me to her post.   Timing, curiosity, and a shared interest can start relationships in a heartbeat. Since then, Teri and I have become friends on and offline.  Meeting last year at Bloodhound Unchained in Phoenix and again at REBlogWorld in Vegas.

I value her viewpoint and honesty as I do everyone I have come across that contribute to Bloodhound.   Being so, we occasionally message each other with ideas or join in what has been dubbed a scenius.

None of this is ground breaking except for the idea that it is becoming easier to connect.  Since I spend so much time in the machine, I rarely take a step back in reflection as I did yesterday morning.

What Teri said via email is what got me started:

” I’m quite partial to grainy B&W foreign movies… a joke… sorta…. Brad will laugh.

I went on YouTube to search for a trailer for Wings of Desire” to send to Teri in a message and what I came across was fascinating to me.   There is a whole sub-culture of people on YouTube that have edited different music over the top of parts of the Read more

January 14, 2009

Shopping For Greenwood, IN Real Estate? iShopGreenwood.com Is a Real Estate Mall

by

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

Author website

If you’re looking for Greenwood, IN homes for sale, what better place than a real estate “mall”?  It’s the PERFECT idea but there’s one problem; I hate malls.  I’m not an agoraphobiac but  I AM a gun-totin’ American male.  On Saturdays, I park the pick-up at the Mall and sneak into the Sports Bar while Mama Bear and Girl Cub go bargain-hunting.   A blog that looks like a mall makes me crave Buffalo wings and onion rings; call it a Pavlovian response.

Who cares? Greg Swann always jokes that ” Mama buys homes and Dad sells them” so Shawna may have created something very powerful with her blog design.   Think about your last ten buyers.  Mama was measuring, dreaming, and creating while Dad was crunching numbers with the local mortgage broker.   Let Dad read the pin-striped mortgage blog, Mama’s gonna dig the pastels (and mall-themed layout) of this real estate blog.

I concur with Greg Swann. Shawna has content…lots of GOOD content.  I love the “closed listings” and “client testimonies” categories- that is very smart marketing.  The numbers appeal to a clients’ desire for performance and the pictures, with the testimonials, provide social proof.  We talk about the fact that a potential client is looking for a reason to DIS-qualify you when searching online; I can’t find a reason to do that with Shawna.  Her site’s content sells me on every point.  Shawna appears to be a VERY busy and competent REALTOR which is exactly what I’d want.

How can Shawna promote this site so that it is a must-see for every potential Indy homebuyer?

The URL is great because it plays upon two themes:  the hip “i-” theme, made popular by Apple and the keywords are easy to remember while being Googlicious.  I’d take to the offline trenches to promote this site with Greg’s tiny little workhorse; the business card.  I think I’d want a stack of those cards in every hair salon, speciality store, and place where women visit.

Would T-shirts be a good idea?  I’m thinking ‘What Would Sarah Palin Wear?’ when designing the T-shirt line.  When I asked Mama Bear if she’d Read more

January 14, 2009

Shawna Ebersole’s iShopGreenwood.com is very rich in content — but it may be just a little bit too rich in color

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My apologies for my recent absence. I came down with a cold — a warning from god about going to Seattle in the Winter — then got bit in the ass by a long-standing Real Life Dilemma. I missed all of the vendorslut “news,” so I don’t even know how deeply inspired were the attendees by being yelled at by Gary Vaynerchuk. (“C’mon! People! It’s not customer service unless you emote from the throat!”)

Am I being hypercritical? I don’t think so. We’re all of us victims of bullshit now and then. The trick is to scrape it off your shoes before you track it all over everything.

Meanwhile, Brian Brady shot this to me by email:

Shawna Ebersole asked us to critique iShopGreenwood.com and give her some ideas for promoting her weblog.

Well. At the risk of seeming hypercritical, I will say that the site seems to me — a male specimen — to be girly and cluttered. The overarching them is High Concept — which means you have to figure it out. No, that’s not a collection of girly-colored boxes, it’s a mall, a big-city indoor shopping mall.

Even so, I don’t care. I don’t care for the colors and I didn’t like having to figure out what was going on, but I don’t think that hurts anything. I also don’t think it helps anything. There are a zillion much-less-clever real estate weblogs, and they probably do just about as well as this one.

But here’s something I really, really liked: The site is very rich in content. My take is that Shawna Ebersole predates real estate weblogging by quite a while, and she seems to have retained every bit of the content she had developed before she took the plunge with a blogsite from Jim Cronin’s RealEstateTomato.com.

Isn’t that a bad thing? I don’t think so. I’ve written before — and should write more extensively — about the idea of satisfaction — feeling full. When people are sampling any of your marketing, they need to be able to consume enough to “feel full.” No one acts before they’re ready to, and you have to hang Read more

January 13, 2009

More Arguments in Favor of Ma Bell.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Guess who woke up full of passion, piss and vinegar?

Shiver me timbers, it’s GenuineChris.   So, let’s talk 1.0, 2.0 and stuff.

NEVER did I say–or advocate–that it’s acceptable to burn through clients.  You can AFFORD to when you have 1.0 skills.  But it’s wasteful, stupid and inefficient.  So, get this: I said I’ve been wasteful stupid and inefficient in the past.  Who hasn’t?  Who admits it?  You find people to honor.  To help, to serve.

NEVER do I say that you list anything, work with anyone.  INITIATING a conversation doesn’t obligate you to take junk listings or work with mentally ill drama queens.  You’re looking for the BEST AND MOST PROFITABLE people to sell to.

NEVER did I–or will I–say that “cold calling was the ONLY way that I generate business.”   Fact is, I adovocate “deliberate connecting,” first, THEN cold calling.   Connect with, and build a Brian Brady proof fence around EVERYONE that you know.  EVERYONE that you interact with.  (By the way, a Brian Brady proof fence would be a magnificent thing).   Connect, DELIBERATELY.  A call to your top 400 people once a quarter.  That’s just: 133 calls/month.  Or ~40 calls a week.  Or ~8 calls a day.    And it’s unobtrusive, and if you do it serving them…

…you’ll never starve.

Most people won’t even do that.   I dig the drama, the tension, and that’s why I like honing myself as a “cold” caller.  I do it to build my ability to connect with people as much as anything else.  Fact is, I’m persistent, I’m Rocky Balboa.  I get my face beat in but I keep coming back for another round.  And the fact is, I call people, in roughly the order:

-People that know, like trust and seek me out: every 30 days.  There are 45 people on this list.  And I talk to them as often as I can, and I make it a point to honor all of them.  Never forget the people that have helped.  Be present and ready to give them a %%^& referral.

-People that know me and recognize me. Every 90 days, a CONVERSATION.   Today?  We’re at about Read more

January 12, 2009

Please No More Listings! I Can’t Afford Them!

by

Realtor, Attorney

Author website

We’re in a slow real estate market, I get that.  The peak where I practice was 2005 when any Tom, Dick, or Jane could list and some dorky agent in the MLS would sell it.  The rule was “List as many homes as you can, cold call, advertise, mail, whatever, but list and it will sell.”  Badda bing, badda bang!

But let’s admit it, this market has dramatically changed how we play the game.  We had about a dozen total closed transactions in my entire county last month, so there is almost no volume to speak of, and certainly not enough volume to keep 327 agents alive.  Okay, 70% of those agents are practically dead, but that still leaves 98 agents clawing each other over the scraps.

Here’s the dilemma as I see it.  Clients tend to be high maintenance these days.  They are frustrated.  They want to know what’s going on, why their neighbor sold their house in 10 minutes at full price, and explanations for 100 other mythological rumors.  Listing maintenance is extremely time consuming, more so now than in many years.  I applaud Chris’ 1.0 argument for going back to basics, and Jeff’s diplomatic affirmation, but my argument is that lots of listings may actually be a great way to go broke right now.

Okay, I admit I don’t have Jeff Brown’s IQ, Chris Johnson’s stamina, or Greg Swann’s common sense, but I am a genuine bald buy who spent some time in Arizona, and so I feel some affinity with these guys.  Let’s just see how sharp these guys are.  Yes, I’m looking for wisdom, and I’m dumb enough to admit that.  But I think this is an issue that Realtors around the country are grappling with, and the answer has major implications for our clients.

Here we go:  When it would take about 100 listings here (and many other places around the U.S.) to sell one house every other month, at least statistically, and when an agent cannot manage more than about 20 listings with such high maintenance clients right now, it seems to me an agent can easily go 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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