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Month: December 2011 (page 2 of 2)

December 11, 2011

Buyers Are Clueless, And Why I Care

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

Buyers are clueless, and I’ll prove it in a minute.

First, let me explain why this conversation matters to you as a new or seasoned real estate blogger.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

Wife:

“It’s 2am, why are you still messing around on that computer?”

Me:

“I’m blogging for dollars, baby.”

Wife:

“That’s what you said last month.”

If you have chosen blogging as your primary business building model, get use to having that conversation for a year or more.

I made the decision to move my real estate and mortgage marketing activities online full-time in late 2006, and haven’t heard the end of it since… both good and bad.

It’s taken me several years to figure out how to make all of the moving pieces work in a manner that can pay the bills. Equally as challenging, was explaining to friends and family my motivation for the path I’ve chosen.

Many passionate bloggers cringe when they hear the terms “business building” or “lead generation” associated with the selfless act of pouring your heart into a blog post that should be meant to enrich the lives of others.

Unfortunately, financially motivated “Social Media and Relationship Marketing” tones have perverted the way outsiders view our true intentions.

I realize that I’m guilty for perpetuating this common belief that the web was invented so that real estate agents can make money online. Look at any of my past presentations or webinars, and you’ll find “build your business” somewhere in the title or description.

Even though it hasn’t felt right at my core, it’s a simple theme that most non-web related industry professionals can relate to.

It’s just been easier to fall into the trap of justifying my online efforts with an ROI, especially when the non-believers are so eager to offer their unsolicited opinions about how to be successful in business.

Keyword here is Non-Believers.

My friend Rene Rodriguez has been harping on me for years to explain why I care so much about the web.

“Yeah, but why,” he Read more

December 10, 2011

Who else wants some cheap and easy ways, to generate more purchase business from REALTORS?

by

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

Author website

I cleaned up my e-mail database this week and was pretty surprised.  The lion’s share of our business comes from real estate agents.  Many times, I don’t speak with nor hear from an agent for 5-6 months…then…WHAM—I get a loan call.  That call always seems to come within two weeks of one of my email newsletters.  I understand my numbers pretty well:

  • for every California agent, in my database, it results in .6 purchase loans/year
  • over 75% of that business comes from agents, in the database, who open at least 50% of my emails (that comprises just 20% of the total number)

Last year, I cleaned up the data base.  I whittled the number down to 70 agents.  15 of those agents accounted for 32 purchase loans and 55 agents accounted for 11 purchase loans.  If I want to close 72 purchase loans in 2012, I probably need 30 agents, who open at least 50% of my emails.  To add those extra 15 agents, I need to meet and add some 75 NEW agents to the database…pretty quickly.

I broke down the content offered, too:

  • the highest click-through ratio (55%) came from marketing ideas
  • mortgage tips (like how to get a VA offer accepted) generated a 35% click-through
  • mortgage rates reports were largely unread (10% click-through)

Agents want to hear how to get more business and then, how to do business properly.  Agents just don’t care about mortgage rates.  I’ll stop writing those onerous mortgage rates reports (nobody’s reading them and, because their time sensitive, they are more of a short-head).  I will start adding marketing ideas to my blog, then use those blog posts for my email newsletter content.

Here’s what I did last night:

  • I created a new list, of the serial readers, and named it the “top-gun file”.  I’ll add new agents there, check it every 90 days, and move the agents, who are not opening 50% of my emails, to the “general agents” list.
  • I pre-loaded weekly emails, for the “top-gun file”, out to April 15, 2012.  I want to insure consistency
  • The “general agents” file will get a bi-weekly marketing idea.  I pre-loaded that content, out to April Read more
December 10, 2011

Customer Service – Dealing With Lapses

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I was recently inspired one morning, and it turns out early afternoon as well, by the car dealership that does all my servicing. I wanted to break a 20 year hiatus from camping, so last year I got rid of the roadster. Found a great deal on an ’08 Veracruz, a Hyundai crossover. Think Honda Pilot for size. It’s been better than expected, an understatement. I take it to the neighborhood Hyundai dealership, Drew Hyundai.

Drew’s been around my neck of the woods since Moses’ son died. It’s reputation is solid, even excellent. My experience with their service department has been off the charts positive. Like many, they assign a service rep to each customer. Mine’s Mike, who on his worst day is outstanding. We should all be as good at what we do as he is. Which brings me to this recent anomalous experience.

Showed up for my 11 AM appointment right on time. Only one car in line ahead of me. Must’ve been a bit busy, cuz it was over 20 minutes before Mike got to me. No biggie, as a 20 minute wait happens in that industry when things pile up. No complaint from me. Mike takes care of me, then sends me over to the sign-up window for the shuttle back home.

10 minutes, 20 minutes, no shuttle. Go inside the office to inquire. The very nice woman manning the counter says it should be just a few minutes. It’s now over a half hour since I turned the keys over. No shuttle. Then it arrives. I’m a bit irritated, but if that’s the worst part of my day, it’s all good. The driver says he’s not takin’ passengers, he’s goin’ to the bank. 15 minutes later, a total of over 45 minutes waiting for the ‘courtesy’ shuttle, he returns. Turns out the bank visit was for dealer business, which apparently was more important than takin’ me home.

I walked back over to Mike’s island. Upon seeing me walkin’ up, he said, “You’re freakin’ kiddin’ me, right?” I said, “Mike, they sent the shuttle to do dealership banking. Read more

December 5, 2011

Hey, California Realtors: Are you making minimum wage for your efforts? If not, your broker just went into cardiac arrest.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier pointed this out to me last week, and I’ve been waiting since then for someone to plumb the implications. Ah, well, when there’s constabulary work to be done…

Here’s the news: The state of California is making ZipRealty pay it agents minimum wage for their time.

That’s huge. It’s just the thin edge of the wedge, for now, but the implication is that the real estate broker’s “safe harbor” exclusion from employment laws is about to be flushed into the Pacific Ocean.

The “safe harbor” argument is that real estate salespeople are independent contractors, and that brokers are not obliged to pay them any wages, nor to provide any benefits.

This is why brokers pile on as many hopeless, helpless, hapless idiots as they can: Virtually everyone has at least one transaction in him, and the cost to the broker for the eventual failure of 85%+ of the new “hires” is nothing.

I don’t want to seem to praise employment laws, since their sole effect is to destroy jobs. But no other business would — or even could — be as wasteful of human capital as virtually every real estate brokerage is.

Could that be changing in California? Take note of this:

“Employers who previously were not concerned with minimum wage issues are now put on notice to ensure they are providing those basic protections to workers.”

And this:

After learning of the Bakersfield cases, California State Labor Commissioner Julie Su in September filed a $17 million lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court on behalf of hundreds of other ZipRealty employees statewide. That lawsuit is pending.

Brokerages like Zip (and Redfin, etc.) have a greater exposure, because they operate too much like real businesses. But I can’t imagine what the 25,000 or so starving California Realtors might be thinking just now.

But I think I have a fair idea what their brokers are thinking…

The National Association of Realtors is propped up on three flimsy stilts: The real estate licensing laws, the “co-broke” — the cooperating brokerage fee behind the MLS system — and the IRS-sanctioned independent contractor “safe-harbor.”

Unheralded by anyone who knows why it matters, the “safe-harbor” took the first Read more

December 5, 2011

My address changes when I move. My phone number changes when I swap phones. My email address changes when I get buried in spam. But my name never changes — so it’s the perfect contact address.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. From PC World:

Forget phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The era of the Internet handle is emerging.

Instead of having to remember a phone number or an e-mail address, in a few short years we might simply find somebody remotely over the Internet via his or her handle, another word for an Internet nickname.

It would be similar to the way handles are used in instant messaging or Skype, except that the handle would apply to all modes of getting in touch, including a phone number or e-mail address (or several of each). In my case, my Skype handle, “MattaboyBoston,” could become the way you would reach me.

“People will no longer seek each other’s phone numbers or email address[es] when establishing personal or working relationships,” wrote Gartner analyst Adib Ghubril in a report on mobile predictions for 2012 and beyond. “Instead, they will ask each other, ‘What’s your handle?’ ”

Ghubril said that handles will have a huge advantage. They could remain unchanged for a long time, if not for life.

The idea is simply indirect addressing: If I depend on your physical address (or your phone number or email address), when you make a change, I am lost. But if I use an indirect addressing scheme — I address you by name, or by “handle” as this article avers — then the indirect address can always accurately reflect your current contact information, even if you change it twelve times a day.

The responsibility for maintaining accurate contact information moves from dozens or thousands of distracted and loosely motivated people to the one person most strongly motivated to make sure your messages get through — you.

As with all predictions, the ideas discussed in the PC World article are kludgy and stoopid. This all will actually happen as a beneficial side-effect of cloud-based data storage. We talked about this over the summer in discussions of a hypothetical CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as Read more

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