BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: September 2010 (page 2 of 3)

September 15, 2010

At What Point Does an Agent Become a Criminal?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I wrote an offer for a young couple who wished to purchase the home they were renting.  The buyer and seller had already discussed a price of $400,000 before agents got involved.  (The seller thought it wise that both parties be represented, which is when I came into the picture along with an agent for the seller.)  I comp’d the home and the area: $400,000 was a stretch. But the buyers liked the property, wanted an extra large master bedroom (which this home had) and wanted to avoid the cost and hassle of moving.  Fair enough; I’ve fulfilled my responsibility of providing accurate and professional counsel regarding value and the buyers have made an informed and justifiable decision.

We wrote the offer for $400,000 with 3% seller concessions for the repairs that the seller had already acknowledged.  The listing agent scoffed.  It seems she had advised her client the property, with a little cosmetic improvement, would sell for the mid $400s.  Brilliant.  Real Estate is by no means rocket science, but the ability to properly value a property and understand comparables is a skill and not every agent is adept.  I sent along a 3 page analysis of comparables and pricing to buttress our offer.  Seller came back at $410,000 with $10,000 in concessions.  Once again I advised my clients that, in my professional opinion, the price was greater than the value, but the mitigating factors were enough for them to justify accepting the contract.  Which they did.  I agreed to a 2% commission as my work load was less and the listing agent admitted to me that she was working for only 1% as her work load was greatly diminished.  And we all lived happily ever after, right?  No…

In California, the standard contract calls for the loan contingency to be removed in 17 days.  (This bit of paint-by-numbers idiocy came about during the hey-day of real estate when anyone with a pulse could get a loan.  In the current economic market, it’s only purpose is to expose which agents are inexperienced and clueless enough to put their clients at risk.)  The buyers needed roughly three weeks for their funds to fully season so Read more

September 13, 2010

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sorry if I seem to be neglecting folks here, but I’m sure you can guess why. Plus which, at Day 13 of our goal-questing, I’m five for five most days, and days without appointments are the only holes on the calendar. But I’m done for the day, and I’m bound for bed, and I lay me down with a will. Meanwhile, I’m having lots of ideas as I work — ideas both global and granular. This is one I’m gnawing on pretty hard:

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

That’s working two ways for me, but the second — call it Actions Sell Louder Than Salespitches — I can think of a zillion ways to work with an idea like that.

September 11, 2010

Google Instant – Does it REALLY change anything SEO-wise?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

For those who want the Campbell’s Soup version of this post:

Not Really. It actually makes keyword research a little EASIER. 😉

For those inquiring minds who want to know why I am saying that, here’s my take. Google Instant does one thing and does it pretty well. As a person enters in a keyword phrase into Google, it suggests possible phrases based on the most common searches that have been done to date AND it shows the relevant results for that search on the fly. Here’s a screen shot or two of what I am talking about.

and then this one:

Okayfine. Let’s look at the finer details. I asked more than a few people to go to a search engine and start looking for a home in the Louisville area. Here are some things that I found out that they typically do. Mind you, I told these folks IN ADVANCE that Google had made a change and was suggesting phrases (and providing results) as they typed them in…

The results? The main behavior difference among them was that they would stop after a WORD and look to see what Google had suggested. NOT after a letter. That makes sense to me. So when someone starts typing “Louisville r “into the search bar in pursuit of Louisville real estate, they see Louisville Riverbats (our AAA team). When they type in the complete word Louisville real, it shows them the search results (and they REMARKABLY similar to Louisville Real Estates’ results)

So this would tend to suggest the effect that Chris Johnson indicated in his comment on John’s post…heading for shorter, more expensive KWs for those doing PPC. For those optimizing their site this is WAY too micro of a thing to worry about. The one percent of folks that truncate their search isn’t going to make or break more than a few clicks at most and CERTAINLY nothing in my opinion to sweat.

Let the dogs bark, the caravan moves on.

Another observation leading to this conclusion. Try typing in your city followed by homes. IF you hit the space bar AFTER homes, you will likely Read more

September 10, 2010

A Moment of Remembrance

by

Realtor, Surfer-in-Training

Author website

On the fateful morning of September 11, 2001, I was a student at New York University commuting to class (hungover, but well, tuition is too expensive to actually miss class). When we heard something was happening at the World Trade Center, a friend and I started jogging down Broadway to see what was going on. We were a few blocks away when the first tower started crumbling down. We didn’t know what to do, how to help, or even what was really happening. We just wanted to do SOMETHING. We ended up helping a local store owner as he was distributing water to emergency workers and met a number of heroes that day. It was a day that changed how we, as Americans, felt. For a while, there was a sense of patriotism that had been missing for far too long. Sure, with time, that sense of unity has faded (whether as a result of our foreign policy or leftist agendas or our fickle nature, it could be a million different reasons).  This anniversary, take a moment to remember where you were when you heard, how you felt, what you did. I know I will.

Sorry, this post isn’t about NAR politics or how to better convert leads or the future of SEO, it is merely a random rambling from a Bloodhound. Mahalo.

September 9, 2010

So you thought your listing Search Function sucked yesterday?

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Say hello to Google Instant, launched overnight.

Go to Google. Type the letter “R” and Realtor.com appears in the search result list.No button click required. Keep typing and the search results change on the fly.

My first impression as a user is positive.  It is just neat.  As a geek, I marvel at the engineering and infrastructure required to pull this off for millions of simultaneous users. As a guy who helps real estate companies with SEO and SEM — I’m still figuring it out.

What is clear is that Google has fundamentally changed search, and quite possibly has raised the bar for search user experience — unless the novelty wears off and it becomes annoying.

What is far less clear is what this means for SEO and SEM.

TechCrunch has one of the more level and least speculative write ups on that….

SearchEngineLand, on the other hand, seem to be trying  not to wet its pants…

September 8, 2010

Learning the art of selling consciously

by

Realtor, Newlywed

Author website

I do not contribute much mostly due to my fears of my writing not holding up well next to so many of the great writers here. However, the only way my writing can improve is by writing and submitting so with that in mind.

I sell real estate. Those four words do a great job of describing me as a professional. Of course there are other things I do with my life but the engine that powers the other areas is selling real estate. I have been on a path to living more consciously for the past few years.  One of the take aways from living consciously is that I need to be focused on whatever task I am working on when I am working on it. I cannot be thinking or worrying about anything else but the task at hand. I have found putting this into practice to be more challenging than I would have ever thought. It is a constant effort to be present in the moment and not be thinking about something completely different. While this has been a struggle it has had success too. When I find myself in the moment I often do not realize it until later when I realize that I just knocked several things off my to-do list and I did not even realize it. It is in that moment that I know I am growing and beginning to master being conscious.

Taking this concept and applying it to sales and prospecting is currently on the top of my to-do list daily. Learning how to sell consciously will allow me to grow my business and my professional abilities to levels that in months past I had only dreamed/wished of. When I committed publicly to prospecting six or more hours a day for the next 120 days I was really pulling out the last of the excuses I had so carefully crafted to keep myself from succeeding  at levels that frightened me. Now I have nowhere to hide. I have opened myself up to accountability and critique if I do not do what it is that Read more

September 7, 2010

How do you make the praxis of continuous goal-pursuit work in practice? It’s not a matter of avoiding the negative consequences of failure, but of celebrating the steady accumulation of successes.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think Jeff Brown and I are both thinking out loud, by this point, and I want to emphasize that I am not quarreling with him. It’s his hammering away on the topic of goal-achievement that induced me to think about the subject in a systematic way, and I am by his discourse and by his good example much enriched.

So here’s where I am tonight: You have to make the commitment, yes. Without a sincere resolution to do something different, you don’t have a goal, you just have a wish, a whim, a will-‘o-the-wisp wheedle issued for any reason or for no reason to a benignly indifferent universe.

But: Even so: Just having a specific plan is still not enough. You have to follow through. You have to do what it is that you have planned to do. But when we talk about the process of following through, too often we do it in a language that is inherently dis-motivating.

Like this: No pain, no gain. There is a truth to that cliche, obviously, and that’s why it’s such an easy sentiment to express. But by emphasizing the pain entailed by, in this case, exercise, the expression throws a formidable barrier in the way of actually digging in and doing the work required by the goal.

I keep thinking that for a serious resolution to change one’s behavior to be effective in the long run — to get fit or to lose weight or to learn to speak Spanish or to master a seven-figure state of mind in your career — you have to rethink the incentives. The reward — to yourself, in your own mind — for having made incremental progress toward your goal has to exceed both the cost of achieving that small success and the putative benefit of doing the opposite, instead.

Do you see? Eating is easy. It can be very satisfying, fun even. Not-eating is hard, and it’s hard to think of not-eating as being any fun. But if you cannot find a way to celebrate the victory of not eating the wrong foods, of not eating as much or Read more

September 7, 2010

The Goal of Achieving…Goals

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

“But a deed cannot be both wise and unintended.” Greg Swann

Substitute goal for deed, and it’s still a profoundly affecting thought. In the context of Greg’s post, one could reasonably assume deed could be construed as goal.

The thrust of the post talks about the tactic of exposing your goals to the ‘public’, or at least a person(s) you know. The thinking is that you will tend to be more motivated by the fear of others knowing you not only failed, but failed by lack of commitment or best effort.

Clearly their are two schools of thought on this.

One is the unstated but obvious conclusion that using fear in a positive manner, as a motivator, will keep some folks on track to achieve the announced goal. Others go farther than a mere announcement — they set up fiercely painful penalties for failure. One such case was the woman who’d failed spectacularly time after time to lose weight which was life threatening.

Apparently she gathered her closest friends together to tell them the penalty for failure — running naked down the street in front of her neighbors. In other words, she established a penalty so severe, that would cause so much pain, her motivation to avoid the pain superseded her motivation to extend her life by losin’ the damn weight.

Though not my approach, whatever works, right?

As I commented in Greg’s post, I am in some ways, almost, but not quite against my will, my father’s son. I’m a pretty private guy, but he was extremely so. When he set goals his wife was fortunate to be in the know. Not kidding.

It was his preference, and now mine too, that if one doesn’t have a strong enough desire to bring about what the achievement of any particular goal brings, they shouldn’t set the goal in the first place. It’s not a value judgment on others. It’s like losing weight, gettin’ in shape, and eating a healthy, well rounded diet. There’s no one correct way.

I believe in keepin’ my personal and business goals to myself because I don’t set goals Read more

September 5, 2010

Do you want to actually achieve your goals? Then make your commitment real by making specific, explicit, objective, detailed plans.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier turned me on to this TED talk on goal-achievement. The video makes the seemingly confounding claim that announcing your goals to other people makes you less likely to achieve them. As with every other seemingly confounding “argument,” the matter turns on the conflation of unlike things. What the speaker, Derek Sivers, is talking about are not actual goals but casual whims. What a huge surprise: Eating cotton-candy spoils your appetite for real food! Who knew?

I once worked with a woman who would issue random statements of desires completely unconnected to her real life. Like this: “I think it would be fun to be a flight attendant.” This is actually an easy goal to attain, but it requires a process of thought and effort and a significant amount of focused action taken over time. The same criteria would apply to any sort of meaningful goal.

Simply announcing to another person that you might like to lose weight, or you might like to see the pyramids, or you might like to be a better Realtor — these are all equally meaningless expressions of whims. They are the verbal equivalent of cotton-candy, a big pile of sugary nothing whipped up by your mind to confound itself into believing that it has been nourished — when you know without any possible doubt that it has not.

The TED talk turns on psychology, which should be warning enough that it’s pure bullshit. The “science” of psychology exists to “persuade” you to be “satisfied” with a lifetime of dull dissatisfaction. “Come on, now, you know that expressing your goals only makes them harder to achieve. Now take another pill and go back to sleep.”

No, thank you. And don’t make me say it again.

The problem is not expressing goals, but expressing empty whims and then doing nothing. Yes, that is self-destructive, but this is not something anyone needs to be told.

Here is what needs to be explored in detail:

Expressing your goals requires a very strong commitment. A true goal is detailed and specific, explicit and objective. It includes a list of serious actions that must be taken through Read more

September 5, 2010

Your Right to Say Nothing

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

I’m going to give everyone a little unsolicited information. It’s a free gift from me to you, partly paying you all back for all the great advice I receive on Bloodhound Blog.

Call it educational. Let’s just say I’m in a patriotic mood. Labor Day and all that. And when I get into a patriotic mood, I start thinking about all those rights that Americans have that they routinely throw away as if the Founders never existed.

If you are ever in a position where police officers are talking to you about your conduct, whether it be speeding, drunk driving, or something more serious, always be polite, but never speak to the police without an attorney present. You would be shocked at how, by showing restraint, you can dramatically improve your chances for a better outcome in your case.

You could be stopped on the side of a road and a police officer asks you if you know how fast you were driving. Instead of saying “I know I was speeding,” how about you just say, “Thank you, Officer, I appreciate your job.” And when the police officer asks, “How fast were you driving?” Maybe a good response might be: “I really appreciate the job you do, but I’d prefer not to answer any questions.”

Most police officers will respect you, and most police officers would do the same in your position. The ones who don’t respect you for asserting your rights weren’t going to let you off with a warning anyway.

I don’t handle traffic tickets, but I do handle everything from a DWI up to violent crimes. And – I know this is going to shock you – some defendants are innocent. Still more are innocent of the crime for which they’ve been charged. And still more would be found not guilty, but for statements they made to police.

It’s not your job as an individual to give to the government all the evidence it needs to convict you of a crime. And given that in the United States we’re all guilty of Read more

September 5, 2010

“Hi, My Name Is Jeff, and I’m a TechTard” – “Hi Jeff!”

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Back in the day I was in a perpetual state of frustration when it came to pretty much anything hi-tech. Not only because I couldn’t use it, or that it almost always failed to deliver anything close to the multiple miracles promised, but because I simply couldn’t understand — at almost any level. Outside of the computer in general, obviously the all-time best hi-tech tool for real estate agents, most of the so-called technological breakthroughs have been anything but.

I first used a computer effectively on the job back in 1987 or so. Leased an IBM 286 with a proprietary program installed. It allowed me to download property files via DataQuik using a phone connection. The only other task for which it had any value whatsoever was writing, and printing for mass direct mailings. The printer was a tractor feed. More fun than a hayride. 🙂

Lookin’ back, that piece a crap ‘puter was the best bang for the buck with which technology ever blessed me ’till about a decade later. You know the chronology after that.

What’s really happened though in the last 15 years or so? Sure, a buncha software has made our jobs incrementally easier. Don’t mistake that last sentence to mean I’m downplaying the value of a lotta those ‘incremental’ timesavers — I’m not. But real bona fide breakthroughs? Show me.

Agreed, getting leads online at the astounding rate some do, is indeed magnificent.

I guess what I’m tryin’ to say, and poorly at that, is if we look back at technology’s so-called breakthroughs, they pretty much, with the obviously rare exceptions, mimic the invention of the backhoe. Shovels could be engineered to the nth degree. Digging techniques could be honed to efficient perfection. Backhoes did the work of many men, more quickly, and uniformly. Though the backhoe isn’t nearly as versatile as the computer, you get the idea.

Here’s a technological game changer for me. My first set of hearing aids, bought five or six years ago, were digital, and pretty much state of the art back then. They reopened a world I’d almost forgotten. It was Read more

September 4, 2010

I can do better than this

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

A year ago last week I had just passed the bar. Today: some 90 clients later with some excellent results for those clients, and some excellent results for me not only in building a law practice, but in learning what I need to represent my clients effectively.

I started last year with a WordPress, a domain, and a dream. My wife was freaking out: you need to go “network”, by which she meant go to mixer-type bar events to meet other lawyers. I’m not the “networking” type.

I spent later September and all of October and much of November building out my website, and figuring out how to get it to the top of Google. I took to heart some of the concepts here – you should get people to your website, and get them to stick on your website by writing decent content.

That website, as I’ve written elsewhere, has produced more than 90 percent of my businesses. In a way, that worries me to be so heavily dependent on the web. In another way, it doesn’t given that the web isn’t going anywhere and other lawyers aren’t really cognizant of how important it is from a retail law perspective.

So atop (or close to atop) Google I sit, dominating keywords like criminal lawyer raleigh and raleigh criminal lawyer and on and on.

I’ve done it by brute force. Creating content and creating links to that content. I’m limited in what I can do in terms of soliciting – meaning, I’m not allowed to “solicit” – but I’m not limited in what I can do to try to build up my reputation online.

But now I want to make it better. I want the right people – people in need of a lawyer – to be compelled to call me. I also want the website to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, so that people who have questions, but don’t want to hire a lawyer, can find their answers without picking up the phone.

I need new ideas on what to Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts