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Author: Greg Swann (page 105 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

March 30, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have 13 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 74 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, again this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Barry Cunningham -- Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson? Are you a Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson?”,
“Barry Cunningham — Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale“,
“Chris Johnson — Rapport Rapport: You Don’t Matter. You Are Here To Add Value“,
“Daniel Rothamel — Getting Myself Organized Getting Myself Organized (with a little help from Chris Brogan)“,
“Darren Rowse — Should I Change My Website Into a Blog? Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?“,
“Jeff Turner — Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705 Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705“,
“Jim Cronin — Blogging SEO All You Ever Needed To Know About Blogging SEO, But Were Afraid To Say So.“,
“John Coley — Talk Like a Woman? Can My Real Estate Blog Help Me Talk Like a Woman?“,
“Mark Collier — 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic“,
“Mary McKnight — 1 Month of blog topics 1 Month of blog topics: Ultimate guide to building real estate blog content that gets results“,
“Mary McKnight — Real Estate blogs are stores Real Estate blogs are stores, not newspapers – so blog like you are selling houses, not writing for your local paper“,
“Sean Purcell — What’s Your Six Month Plan? What’s Your Six Month Plan?“,
“Tony Schuricht — Make your buyers Read more

March 30, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Everything we do to list historic, architecturally-distinctive and luxury homes for sale

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is a detailing of the things we do to list a home for sale. We don’t do every one of these things on every home. For example, we know that if we list in a newer tract-home subdivision, much of the noise we try to make will fall on deaf ears. If I am listing a tenant-occupied investor-owned home, we won’t do much beyond the normal MLS, lockbox and sign kind of listing. But this is what we do when we pull out all the stops for those homes that are likely to excite the most attention among buyers.

  1. Setting the stage for staging. Cathleen Collins will go though the house with a fine-tooth comb, often taking many photos. She will make lists of repairs, touch-ups and redecorating she wants to do, and she will plan her staging strategy.
  2. Home-warranty pre-inspection. We put a home warranty on our listings covering the listing period and the buyer’s first year in the home. We use ServiceOne, and they do a fairly rigorous pre-inspection so that any pre-existing conditions can be addressed.
  3. Repairs, painting and cleaning. This can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week. Everything’s a trade-off, and we can’t always do everything we might wish for, but we want for our homes to be as clean, as homey, as livable and as turn-key as we can possibly make them.
  4. Staging. This is Cathleen, and she is a master at it. We own about three houses worth of furniture, and she is always trawling Craigslist to find more — period, modern, eclectic. She has tons of art and decorator items as well, and her modus vivendi is to take everything she thinks she might need to the house, then move back what she doesn’t use.
  5. Professional photography. We have just switched to Obeo for our virtual tours. They send in a local professional photographer to do hi-resolution and panoramic photos. In addition to forming the basis of the virtual tour, the hi-rez photos are also used for Obeo’s Style Designer, virtual remodeling of selected spaces.
  6. Floorplan measurement. We put an interactive floorplan on the Read more
March 29, 2008

If you don’t have to sell into the current Phoenix real estate market — don’t. But what if you do have to sell…?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
If you don’t have to sell into the current Phoenix real estate market — don’t. But what if you do have to sell…?

Here’s a piece of real estate marketing advice that should be obvious: If you don’t have to sell your house right now, don’t.

If you are living in your home — or if you are an investor and you have a tenant — and you are making your payments and don’t have any exigent need to sell — sit tight.

We are probably nearing the bottom of the downturn in Phoenix, but the path to the bottom is likely to be pretty steep. If you don’t have to compete against deeply-discounted lender-owned homes, don’t.

Will the market go back up after we hit bottom? Eventually, yes. How long is eventually? It could be a long while. But prices should stabilize after the bank-owned inventory has cleared the market. What you can get for your home may not be all you want, but you won’t be facing competition priced 20% or 30% less.

But suppose you do have to move right now. You’ve taken a job out of state or you have a pressing financial need and need to tap your equity. How can you compete effectively against the lender-owned homes in your neighborhood?

The bad news is, the price pressure on you is still downward, and probably will be for longer than you can afford to wait. That means you cannot set your price above the market and hope for an offer anyway. If you price your home above the recent high sales for your floorplan — where recent means the past 60 days — your home might not show at all. There is simply too much inventory for buyers to bother with an overpriced home.

The good news is that the lender-owned homes are almost certainly trashed. Filthy, in bad repair, with overgrown lawns. Investors know those problems are easily addressed, but owner-occupants want turn-key homes.

That works to your advantage. If you are willing to put your home in turn-key condition — Read more

March 28, 2008

Don’t blog your listings? How about this? Don’t try to pass sales call reluctance off as social media marketing expertise

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I know, I know — I owe, I owe.

I owe Jeff Brown a discussion of every little last thing we do to launch a new listing with maximum impact.

And I owe The Lovely Wife a discussion of the role of self-promotion in real estate weblogging.

But…

We listed two homes today — Mutt and Jeff, $400,000 and $60,000 — go figure. And, while the prep work leading up to a listing can be time-consuming, the actual day of listing is often an 18-hour blur of activity.

Part of my effort was to write weblog entries about both of these homes. My primary reason for doing this was simple: I want them sold! But I also wanted to demonstrate that weblogging about listings is not only an appropriate use of a real estate weblog, if it is done right it can be a very effective sales tool.

So: In both cases, I am explicitly telling the readers that I am selling them on the home I am talking about — and I close, in both posts, with a bald-faced call to action. Take that, wannabe social media marketing experts rationalizing your sales call reluctance!

Witness:

I say a lot of memorable things — so many not even I can remember them all. 😉 But there are two precepts that came out of this extended discussion of whether or not to blog listings that I think are worth remembering:

  • The purpose of real estate marketing is to sell real estate.
  • Nothing sells houses like houses.

I love new things because I have a young and eager mind, but I don’t confuse new with better. Nor old with better, for that matter. What I’m interested in — all I am interested in — is better, pure and simple and clean and cool and quiet and breathtakingly elegant. I know that good promotional copy sells homes. Imagine how effective it Read more

March 28, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Jeff Brown, discount lister?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The other morning, Bawldguy Jeff Brown left this note in a comment:

I’m jumping back into the San Diego investment property market as a lister. I’ve been ignoring my home folks since late ‘03.

I’m gonna be offering a broadly different choice for the seller. I’ll charge NO listing commission, but a small monthly fee for ongoing marketing, and my carrying costs at Starbucks.

Now that’s intriguing, ain’t it?

It’s been gnawing at me, so I called Jeff to talk to him about it. He explains it in his own words in the podcast linked below, but stop for a moment and generalize, if you will.

If you’re in a market with a surfeit of inventory, sellers are not the kind of blue chip asset they might have been a few years ago. Qualified buyers on the other hand…

If you can sell your sellers on the idea that, like Jeff, you will give them a knock-your-socks-off listing at a price that will save them some money, you will have acquired inventory you can use to attract buyers. I think you would have to list like Jeff plans to, totally turn-key — and you’ll have to decide where you stand on dual agency. But if listing stronger for less attracts more buyers, what do you have to lose?

Since he’s working with investors, Jeff’s strategy is even more intricate than that. Give a listen and see what you think.

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March 27, 2008

Urbanologist Joel Kotkin: Why growth-oriented cities like Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta reflect the future of global commerce

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Joel Kotkin is the only American urbanologist who can tolerate actual living human beings. In consequence, he can write about the organic growth of cities as they really are, rather than as he might remake them with enough tax money and firepower. This is a long extract from a much longer article about Houston’s emergence as a world-class city, this despite the scorn that might be heaped upon it — at tax-payer expense — by urban monument-builders like Richard Florida. In this section of the article, Kotkin discusses what makes young, growth-oriented cities so dynamic by comparison to older, more-typically-urban urban environments.

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.

Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.

Chicago, the great growth city of the late Read more

March 27, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Using the synergy of the internet and low-cost printed promotions to sell your product, build your brand and give you an affordable — testable — marketing strategy

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Linked below is the first of a series of Black Pearl Marketing Minute podcasts that Brian Brady and I will be putting together. We want to take marketing ideas that we have discussed on BloodhoundBlog and flesh them out to real-life strategies while connecting them to other synergistic tactics.

In this inaugural episode, we start by talking about my post on using the business card form factor for doing low-cost broadcast door-to-door promotion. We talk about some ways that we deploy custom-made business card-sized promotional pieces, how we make and print them, and our distribution plan.

Brian then connects that idea to a marketing plan that emerged from our comments threads, partnering with local merchants as an online/offline farming technique.

Earlier today, someone known only as Jacksonville Real Estate posted a comment on my post about using low-tech promotional schemes to bring traffic to a single-property web site:

It’s an old idea and it’s not mine … but if you are targeting just a certain areas then getting your flyer on the local pizza delivery box can work wonders.

Brilliant! Never thought of it, but that’s why I love this place: We bring bright minds together and set off a blinding brilliance. My reply:

Oh, very cool. I tend to think in terms of things we can do on our own, but this is actually an interesting cross-promotion:

“Visit our custom web site for 123 Mulberry Lane and your next pizza is on us!”

Build a PDF coupon in the site and redeem them with the pizza joint once a week. Meanwhile, your contact info is on the fridge for weeks or months.

That’s a Brian Brady-style idea. I must be channeling…

It’s a Guerrilla Marketing kind of idea, actually, a Duct Tape Marketing kind of idea — maximum bang for minimum bucks. It’s most completely a BloodhoundBlog kind of idea, in the sense that it combines (and recombines) physical with online marketing.

But nothing’s perfect in the first draft. My correspondent thought springing for the whole pizza might be too expensive as a “pay per click.”

Okayfine. How about this?

Buy the soda instead, then. It’s an upsell for the pizzeria — bigger Read more

March 26, 2008

Did you miss out on the super-low Guerrilla-only price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained? The price is still low, but you need to act fast — Brian Brady wants to raise it again soon

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Here’s a valuable question for the Web 2.0 world: Can people really appreciate a bargain? Everybody loves “free” — but do they love it at full value? My thinking is that LinkedIn would be a much more valuable place to network if it charged members $350 a year, but would anyone pay a buck a day for Facebook?

This is a question that has been bugging Brian Brady — gnawing at him as only a good marketing problem can. We priced BloodhoundBlog Unchained at $149 and sold a bunch of tickets. We bumped the price to $199 and sold a bunch more. We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to make seating distribution choices — and Brian wants to raise the price to our estimated retail — dollarized — value: $350.

We know that amount is low. The next time we do this, the early-bird price will be more than that, and the last-minute price will be more than double that amount. We’re going to give you a year’s worth of ideas to deploy, so, even at $350, we’re still only a buck a day. If you do just one extra deal as a result of something you learn at Unchained, the ROI could be 20-1 or more.

Looked at that way, Brian is right: It’s plausible that, by charging too little, we’re encouraging people to set their expectations too low. I find that amazing, considering how much value we deliver here at BloodhoundBlog every day. But I was stunned to discover that people didn’t know that Unchained will not be the typical buy-me! buy-me! vendor show. I would have thought that my own graduated hostility to vendors would have made that plain.

In the other corner, there is me, slugging it out for the starving grunts in the trenches. No one is really starving — I hope! — but our lean months have become our lean years, and there ain’t too many of us getting fat off the fat of the land just now. I would rather keep the price as low as we can for as long as we can, Read more

March 25, 2008

Redfin.com beats the field again, this time in both Seattle and San Francisco: Buyers pay less and reap commission rebates, too

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Redfin.com has news this midnight, but it’s the sort of thing I would normally ignore: It’s basically the kind of rah-rah-for-us stuff I leave for the vendor cheerleaders and the mainstream media. But: I gave Redfin a lot of grief last year when they made a similar announcement, so today I’ll give them a bit of their own back:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today published an analysis of the last 12 months’ public real estate records in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area that shows its buyers and their Redfin agents negotiated a better price than buyers who used other brokerages. Redfin’s average negotiating advantage was $5,048. The company also reported a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate for users of its home-buying service, and an average commission refund of $10,520.

This is the actual news, which you will not find in any news source: Redfin beat the field for the second year in a row. Is it plausible that particular agents beat Redfin? Not just plausible, highly probable. I don’t know of any teams of buyer’s agents like the kind of team Russell Shaw runs for listing agents, but a team like that would be much more useful for comparison purposes than the entire field of Realtors in three MLS systems. But give Redfin its due: The company deploys the kind of task specialization common to every sort of business except residential real estate brokerage. It’s very hard to resist the idea that specialist negotiators, more often than not, could out-dicker ordinary jack-of-all-trades Realtors.

And all of that is caviling, and wasted caviling at that. Stand in awe as Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman illustrates the high art of PR triangulation:

“Why do Redfin customers consistently tend to negotiate a better price, in different markets and different market conditions?” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Last year, we concluded it was because of our agents, whom we pay bonuses based on customer satisfaction rather than commissions. Others argued that it was because of our deal-savvy customers, who benefit from Redfin’s transparency to take a more active role in the deal. Today, we think it’s Read more

March 24, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The Odysseus Medal this week goes to another truly amazing essay from outside our little RE.net cloister. I knew when I saw this on Saturday that it had won. Teri Lussier convinced me on Sunday that I have a leadership opportunity with the ten dozen people following me on Twitter — so I led them to this article. What is it? You weren’t meant to have a boss by Paul Graham. Ostensibly he’s writing about programmers, but that’s a superficial characteristic. What he’s writing about is the nature of human beings. What he’s writing about it you:

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company.

So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We’ve now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder.

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed.

So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn’t just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it’s not so much that Read more

March 24, 2008

In the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market, our long, slow slide in home prices is finally encountering demand

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
In the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market, our long, slow slide in home prices is finally encountering demand

If you’ve been looking for the bottom of the Phoenix real estate market, it might well be upon us.

The world beyond our control — Washington and Wall Street — is so volatile right now that it’s hard for anyone to make plans.

The Federal Reserve Bank is determined to keep markets liquid, so its own interest rates are heading back toward record lows. The investment banks that brokered the mortgage-backed securities that made sub-prime loans possible are in turmoil. Meanwhile, Congress is desperate to do something — which will almost certainly make things worse.

The interesting thing about all that chaos is that it seems to be isolated to the real estate market. The larger economy is growing so fast that the twitterpated monetary policies of the Fed seem not to have had much of an impact.

That’s a good thing, and let’s hope things stay that way.

Meanwhile, in the world we have some control over — the local real estate market in Metropolitan Phoenix — our long, slow slide in prices is finally encountering demand.

Because so many people wanted to buy houses in Phoenix, our builders gleefully over-built the Valley. This caused the glut of inventory we have been trying to absorb over the past nine quarters.

Many of the resale homes that have languished on the market are by now short sales or have been taken back by the bank. Lenders don’t want to own houses, so they’re cutting prices until the homes get sold.

At the same time, our reliable inflow of population, along with investors and second-home buyers, is there to absorb these newly-affordable homes. The snow belt just got belted with its worst winter in memory, which will bring even more newcomers to Phoenix.

It could be we’ll be back to normal inventory levels fairly soon. The bad news? If your home is for sale, the price it will sell for right now is probably quite a bit lower than you think it Read more

March 23, 2008

The Short List goes to the dogs: Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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By the time I had time to deal with The Odysseus Medal last week, it was pretty late in the week. The week had been pretty light on nominations, and we were heading into Easter, so I made a command decision to combine these two weeks into one award.

Then today, when I went to look at The Long List, I found a whole lot of Bloodhounds in there. There were a total of 70 unique posts from 17 of our current contributors. Just short of 40% of all of the nominated posts were written by Bloodhounds.

You can say what you want about this weblog. It seems to be some sort of badge of dishonor to make snarky remarks about BloodhoundBlog or its contributors. About this I have one thought only — predictably a marketing issue: If your clients observe you talking trash about us behind our backs, might they not reasonably conclude that you are also spewing bile about them behind their backs? Everything you do establishes your character in the eyes of your clients — now more than ever before. That’s a Black Pearl — and the more you want to reject it, the more valuable it is.

In any case, I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone says, but I care a great deal about what people can demonstrate. The quality of work our contributors do, here and at their home blogs, is a potent demonstration of its own — a demonstration of the quality of minds who work here, and, I think, of the quality of thought we inspire in each other.

In consequence, this week’s People’s Choice is given over to BloodhoundBlog contributors, to one post from each of them who made this week’s Long List.

We end with with a total of 17 People’s Choice nominees. You can vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array 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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