There’s always something to howl about.

Month: August 2010 (page 2 of 3)

A weblogging strategy for non-writerly Realtors. Or: How you can learn to stop worrying and love your blog.

I was on the phone yesterday with Chris Johnson, talking with him about Realtor weblogs. He mentioned that some of the buyers of his real estate weblogs are having trouble coming up with regular content.

I have a solution for them.

What should they do? Stop worrying about it — and solve the real marketing problem instead.

Instead of building a blogsite around a regularly-updated weblog, it would make more sense to me for reluctant writers to build the blogsite around the mission-critical content instead.

Here’s the deal: There are a finite number of topics that you absolutely, positively need to cover. Whatever target-marketed niche the blog is concerned with, you need to document that niche in a fairly comprehensive way.

How many articles would that take? Five? Ten? Surely not twenty. If you’ve done what you need to do, you can ignore the blog except when you’re burning up with something to say.

A WordPress theme like Equilibrium would give your weblog a magazine-like look and feel. The “featured” section could highlight the three or six or nine posts that are mission-critical for your niche. And the “latest post” section can document your more-recent musings. If you write something crucial later on, you can rotate it into the “featured” section.

Here’s the thing: Everything so-called weblogging experts (including me) have told you about real estate weblogging is probably wrong.

You are not trying to build long-term relationships with regular visitors who will wait for your latest pronouncements with bated breath. Instead, the objective of your blogsite should be to provide mission-critical information to people who will find you by Google when they need you and who will be happy to forget you just as soon as they no longer need you. The magazine-style blogsite fits that approach perfectly.

The purpose of your weblog is not to be available for lonely people looking for friends. It is not to make you one of the cool kids, so that Realtors from all over the world can show up at your place to grouse about how awful the real estate market is. The purpose of your blog is certainly not to make Read more

Lucha Libre Mortgage Reform

Last week there was some discussion about what was to have happened today in Washington. This discussion centered around whether the government would or would not take certain steps to protect the housing market through a mandated deficit funded mortgage bailout.

Today, we have some new information on what Tim Geitner and a host of invited banking executives chit chatted about.

Seems that much of the talk in a few of the posts here centered on whether we could expect the Obama administration and industry executives to continue along socialistic lines, (Wall Street still knows better than Main Street), or whether lightning would strike and we’d decide to take our lumps now.

The answer’s in.

Obama administration invited banking executives Tuesday to offer advice on changing the government’s role in the mortgage market. Their response: stay big.

While the executives disagreed on the exact level of support needed, the group overwhelmingly advocated the government should maintain a large role propping up the nearly $11 trillion market.

Bill Gross, managing director of bond giant Pimco, said the economic recovery required more government stimulus, particularly in the housing market. He suggested the administration push for the automatic refinancing of millions homes backed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac.

Refinancing those homes at the lowest mortgage rates in decades would give Americans more money each month. That would boost consumer spending by $50 billion to $60 billion and lift housing prices by as much as 10 percent, he said.

Without such stimulus in the next six months, Gross said, the economy will move at a “snails pace.”

Treasury officials have said they have no plans to enact such a plan, which has been the subject of intense rumors on Wall Street in recent weeks.

So it was just a rumor after all????? But wait….there was more…

Geithner did not offer a specific exit strategy for Fannie and Freddie. He agreed that the government could remain involved in the mortgage system by guaranteeing investors in mortgage-backed securities get paid, even when borrowers default.

There is a “strong case to be made” for such an arrangement, Geithner said.’

This is just like a professional Read more

Master Seller-Financing To Beat The Mortgage Market Freeze of 2011

I’m not so sure I want to play hockey against Bryant Tutas.  He thinks like Wayne Gretsky.

I cautioned about the coming mortgage freeze and asked what agents might do to prepare for it.  I’m a mortgage guy so I think in terms of institutional financing.  I completely forgot about seller-financing.  Bryant Tutas answered:

I’m ready for it. I just listed my 3rd property this month where the seller is offering financing. Seller financing is going to be very popular over the next few years. I’ve also been marketing to foreign investors with cash to spend. Once they purchase a home we turn right around and offer it for sale with financing. It’s a win all the way around.

Are you kidding me?  It’s so time-tested but underutilized it’s brilliant.  I forgot all about it!

What do you know about seller-financing?

First, you have to have a seller with some equity but…. ain’t nobody got no equity no mo’.  What’s a hustler to do?

Foreigners are looking to pay cash for U.S. homes and are finding great bargains at auction.  In San Diego, we see investors buy properties at auction and sell them for 20-35% higher, 60-90 days later.  The problem with some of those properties is that they aren’t appraising.  Seller financing doesn’t require an appraisal nor does it have  those pesky underwriting guidelines.  Bryant Tutas mentioned that he is prospecting foreign investors, to buy properties and sell them with financing terms.

This is the ultimate form of private financing.  Before you embark on this strategy, you might advise your sellers to require the following when considering offers:

  • a tri-merged credit report– you definitely want to check for tax liens, judgments, and large charge-offs.  All of those can become liens on title
  • It’s a good idea to require some income documentation– if your buyer’s housing expense doesn’t exceed 50%, you’re kosher in California but it’s probably a good idea to make sure that all of his/her debts don’t exceed 50% of gross monthly income
  • A down payment is going to assure your buyer has something to lose if the deal goes sour.  I might suggest Read more

Nobody Cares About Your M.O. ‘Till They See It’s Skinnin’ Cats Big Time

In almost every baseball game you’ll ever see, there comes a point when the starting pitchers run into a situation on which the game’s outcome will likely pivot. Take last night for instance — the Padres/Cubs game in Chicago. Padre’s starting pitcher Keven Correia had a rocky first inning. The first two batters hit safely, resulting in men on 2nd and 3rd with nobody out, and the heart of the order now due up.

Nobody scored.

Kevin went on to pitch shutout ball ’till lifted for a pinch hitter in the seventh inning. That first inning could’ve gone either way. But he skinned that cat in short order. He’s not Bob Gibson, in that he can’t overpower hitters. He gets batters out the old fashioned way — by pitching, not throwing. When the season’s over, Kevin will have won 13-15 games, a total which is distinctly in the upper echelon of major league results.

HIs fastball can be hit by high school players if not located well. His curveball reminds nobody of Sandy Koufax. Yet he keeps skinnin’ more of his share of cats. Why? Cuz even though his ‘stuff’ ain’t hall of fame caliber, he knows how to make the best of what he has, and consistently does what all winning pitchers do, regardless of what they’re throwing. He disrupts batters’ timing. I know this first hand, as I had the pleasure of havin’ the dish once when he was a junior college pitcher in San Diego.

It ain’t rocket science– but a helluva lot easier said than done. It’s analogous to success in real estate brokerage. Those who do what produces consistent results — skin the most cats — win. And to quote all of our grandpas, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Last Thursday I wrote a post about a guy on the east coast who’s been skinnin’ cats at a pretty impressive clip, almost all on the buyer side. (He’ll close 70 sides this year.) Exclusive of any referrals, 100% of his business comes directly from his online efforts, which generate about 7-8,000 leads Read more

The End Product of Appeasing the Collective: Chris Pearson, GPL and Matt Mullenweg

This post contains a Bawld Guy axiom, some tech wank, and more.

For those people that do what I do (what is it that I do–if anything?  I often wonder), there was kind of a big debate this past month.  It involved WordPress–open source GPL software–Thesis, formerly proprietary software that capitulated to no avail.  Matt Mullenweg, an unstable genius that seems hell bent on harming his community (more on that in a moment), Chris Pearson, a narcissistic genius that seems hell bent on blowing a hole in his leg because you can’t tell him what to do.

The gist: the Thesis theme (a theme that I deliver something like 60% of my sites in) was not GPL.  Despite the fact the only lawyers that claimed that it needed to be worked for a free software foundation, AutoMATTic was pursuing them to become GPL.  Ma.tt started calling Chris out on Twitter, not suing, no, just acting like a goon.  There was a delightful Mixergy where Chris Pearson and @@photomatt fought amongst themselves.

I love me some good wank as much as the next guy, so I had to chime in.   I didn’t add much new–the whole situation was utterly ugly all around and very unfortunate, but some of the WP types dropped in to comment (and I love posterous for its simplicity.  But I digress.)

Our dear friend WP Tutorial god Ben Cook summarizes it better than I do for those of us  that love a nerd war.

The Point, If I have One: Don’t Comply With The Hive, They Never Stop.

So after a lot of wrangling–and even a Mashable write up, Copyblogger Brian Clark (who dissolved his partnership shortly after this incident) got Pearson to stop it already and adopt GPL–and probably that should have been done to begin  with for practical reasons.  Note: I hate when people try and force my hand.  Huzzah for Harmony, and Ma.tt was initially thrilled.

But not so fast, last week (meant to post this a while ago, left Macbook in Seattle)  opened another salvo against a compliant opponent, and like France in WWI, Matt is  demanding reparations.   This Read more

Batting Averages for Listing Agents

Redfin just published MLS data from seven counties across the U.S. on the likelihood that a listing activated in 2009 sold by August of 2010. It turns out that the listing agent got a sale 47% of the time, a number that seemed surprisingly low to us, particularly since staging, photographing and marketing costs can add up.

It’s a pointed question for us. Having spent years focused on buyers, we are just beginning to learn how to make listings profitable. Today we still make more money from our home-buyers than our sellers, and our sellers are more work.

In thinking through the target success rate for our business, we’ve wondered if the 2009 data are aberrational. Have success rates been significantly higher in past years? In 2009, were listings just loss leaders for agents to meet new clients and build their brand? Or do you think that the 2009 rate is what a brokerage should expect every year? What do you think the customer expects?

Maybe a hard year is a necessary prelude to a good year. Adam Wiener, a licensed agent who runs new business initiatives and analytics at Redfin, emailed me this morning to note that many listing agents prefer to catch listing customers on the rebound from their first agent, after their listing has failed to sell. We are getting some of that business, and giving some of that business away to others too; hopefully for everyone the second time will be a charm.

NAR and ALTA further attempt to stifle private enterprise on Private Transfer Fees

When the National Association of Realtors and the American Land Title Association claim to be doing something to benefit consumers, those same consumers can expect to be fleeced once again.  Currently, they are trying to ban private transfer fees by getting the Federal Housing Finance Agency to amend rules so that almost defunct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can no longer back properties that have private transfer fees covenants recorded against them.

I’ve written about private transfer fees on Bloodhound before. At the time, I promised to do more work with them and report back.  Since then I have looked at them, and received proposals from Freehold Capital, on implementing them on two of my own projects.  I haven’t recorded their instruments on my projects even though I do like the concept.  As a developer, private transfer fees would be great if they could be securitized so the money was available up front to pay for infrastructure costs.  My issues with the Freehold proposal is they currently do not have a securities market for the instruments and I believe their cut of the action is too rich for what they are providing.  So, I have made a private decision that I do not see enough value in their proposal.

That does not mean that I think Private Transfer Fees should be banned.  It does not mean that a competitor, or Freehold themselves, might not have a proposal in the future I would like to be able to do.  The concept, used as I described it, could be fantastic and help create more valuable properties we can all sell!

Jeremy Yohe, spokesman for the American Land Title Association, claims that “The casual homebuyer would have no clue that these fees are even attached to the property that they’re going to purchase” as his reason that these fees should be banned.  He forgets to mention that the members of his association have the job or providing accurate title information for things recorded on the title, like covenants.  I just love it when people argue their own incompetence is a reason that something should not be allowed.

There Read more

Me and Claudia and PHP: Using internet real estate marketing to — you know — sell real estate…

So, the Arizona Republic ran an article yesterday on on-line real estate marketing and you will never in a million years guess who they did not call. I never get called for any of those kinds of things — the RaiseTheBarTab kinds of events — even though we’re doing cooler stuff than anyone I know of. I’m not weeping. I’m always very forthcoming with everything I know, but if there is going to be a cadre of Realtors dead set against learning how to do the work I do, I’m more than happy to have them working in my own market.

And I’m not bragging, either. We’re going to have a banner year, for us, in terms of volume of transactions, and we’re kicking the asses of all the canned-software Twitter-fidgets named in the article. But we are digging our way out of a deep hole, and we’re a long way from where I want us to be. I like to brag that we spend almost nothing on marketing, but the fact is that we almost never have any money to spend on marketing. I will put every Realtor in Phoenix on notice: When we have money and staff, we are going to be a force to contend with.

So, even though I don’t issue any Twitter spasms, at least not non-robotically, of late I am putting paid to a lot of new and interesting real estate marketing ideas.

What’s changed? Cathleen is giving me some Claudia time. Claudia Couts is the housekeeper I made Cathleen hire last year. She’s with us for two hours a day, six days a week. She keeps the house down to a manageable level of chaos and takes care of all the pet-maintenance duties. The idea was to open up the time that Cathleen was spending on those chores, and this has been a win-win all around.

Lately I’ve been buried in paperwork, at which I’m horrible, and I had marketing ideas that required small amounts of rote labor — at which I’m also horrible. I thought we might hire a virtual assistant, but Cathleen suggested giving Claudia a Read more

Innovation now: I’ve stopped taking buyer’s checks for earnest money, but now I want to stop worrying about wire transfers, too.

I’m living much of my time right now with my nose pressed right up against one tool or another — listings, DocuSign, the steering wheel, et endlessly cetera. That’s cool, we need the dough, and we can’t make it rain hard enough, fast enough. But by this point I have no idea if something I’m doing is an innovation or not. I’m just dancing as fast as I can.

This topic just came up, and I’m passing it along because I haven’t done that here yet. I know this because I hadn’t done it with my wife and business partner until just now.

Here’s the scoop: I’ve all but stopped taking earnest checks. I’m having almost all of my buyers wire their earnest money deposits directly into title. I never touch anyone’s else’s money — the only known way a real estate broker can be assured of escaping imprisonment.

But that’s not my reason for coming to do things this way. I used to take the check, made out to Chicago or Fidelity or whatever, then schlep it around while I waited for the contract to be executed. Not fun but not onerous — just inefficient.

By now, I do a lot of REOs as rental home investments for out-of-state buyers. I don’t know the name of the title company when we write the contract, and the buyer is back home by the time we need to deposit the funds.

I don’t even talk about checks any longer. I tell the buyer how things work and that I will have title email wiring instructions when we’re ready to rock. Totally transparent, totally arm’s-length, and no one involved in the process says boo.

If the lister is a little too adamant about receiving a PDF of a fax of a scan of a photocopy of a useless check, I will add language like this: “Seller is aware that Buyer will deposit Earnest Money by wire transfer into Title Company, to be determined by Seller, within one business day after Seller’s final acceptance of this Purchase Contract and any incorporated addenda.” (Reminder: I am not your broker.)

It’s the perfect Read more

Unchained melodies: A danceable rebellion…

In my spare time I am more than a little annuckingfoyed at the state of whorebottery in the RE.net, which I had once hoped might be an antidote to the whorebots who have infested residential real estate since the advent of the NAR, at least. But: Teri Lussier advises me that the solution to all this annoyance is danceable music, so here do I deliver me of my frustrations.

First, Elvis Costello in an acoustic demo of Green Shirt that is better than the more-polished radio hit:

Second, live and acoustic, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with Chicago:

And finally, for Jim Klein and Don Reedy, Lyle Lovett puts everything in perspective:

Blood, sweat, and fears

Once upon a time, maps were marked HIC SVNT LEONES to denote unknown territory. Hic Svnt Leones means “Here are lions”. Scary. Uncharted territory is scary.

I’ve been paying very close attention to how I accomplish things: What I do and what I don’t do. Why some things are easy and I embrace them and why are somethings harder and I avoid them. I’m trying to improve my business and my productivity so it’s kind of nice useful critical to understand what makes me tick. Or tock. I need to figure out the internal roadblocks that keep me from achieving my goals. I want to recognize them immediately so I can overcome them as quickly as possible rather than letting them pile up to barricade levels.

There is stuff, for lack of better word, that I dislike doing, but when it’s up to me to do everything, and in real estate it often is up to me to do everything, I have to learn to just get on with it. I know this but still, there are things that I don’t like doing so I begin to waste my own precious time, using procrastination as motivation. An epiphany: It recently occurred to me that I would be furious with anyone else who wasted my time the way I so carelessly waste my own time.

Some of the habits I have fallen into are now clear even to me as red flags that I’m avoiding something. Twitter of course, is one example. What? Is it that obvious? Okay, so I use social networking to avoid doing some things that I find difficult. I recognize it now so I can overcome it, and that’s the thing. I once thought this was pain avoidance, but now I see it as fear. Of the unknown. As in Hic Svnt Leones. What is going to happen if I do this thing? What unseen beasties lie in wait to pounce on my soft under belly? I have a very fertile imagination and sometimes it grows weeds in the garden of the mind, but the only way to pull the weeds Read more

“…I knocked that transaction right on it’s…”

The Real Estate Ideal?

Sometimes the best part about being a real estate agent is the time it affords you to be with your family.  Of course, other times the best thing about being a real estate agent is the excuses it provides for doing exactly the opposite: “What’s that dear?  Your mother is going to be in town this Sunday and you want to spend the morning down at Begonias, Begonias and Tulips, then do a little shoe shopping?  Gosh darn it all, I’ve got an Open House that Sunday.”  You get the idea.  But if you really think about it, the best part about being a real estate agent is the opportunity to knock someone else right on their derriere – metaphorically speaking, of course.

Last week our local football team (the San Diego Super Chargers!) held an open practice at the stadium where they play their home games.  I took my two boys down there and we made an evening of it.  (Mostly because I wanted my boys to see what the inside of a professional football stadium looks like without having to drop a cool $500 on parking, tickets, popcorn and a great big Styrofoam finger that implies we’re #1 at something… I’m guessing it’s separating fools from their money, but I can’t be sure.)  Anyway, being there gave us an opportunity to watch Kris Dielman in action.  Man I like watching this guy play the offensive line.  Having been a defensive lineman myself, that’s saying something.  The difference in mind-set between the two is staggering, but that’s exactly why I enjoy watching him so much: he plays offensive line like a defensive lineman… and he plays football the way we should practice real estate.

He’ll often knock his guy 2, 3 even 5 yards back; sometimes he puts the guy right on his backside.  Now that’s what you call getting the job done.  Even more than that: it’s what you call getting the job done very, very well.  You might say he’s a Top Producer at what he does.  But here’s the thing: after he knocks that guy back one yard and two cheeks, do you Read more