BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 106 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

March 22, 2008

SplendorQuest: Jesus Christ Superstar

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[I wrote this at Easter in 2003, just short of five years ago. –GSS]

Tomorrow is Easter, and all good Catholics will go to Mass. In our parish, every Mass will be packed, and there will be overflow Masses in the school cafeteria. But Catholic or not, Easter calls our attention to Jesus Christ Superstar, one of the best of the rock operas, and certainly the best of the filmed rock operas.

Director Norman Jewison delivers what is very self-consciously a film, with elaborate use of long lenses, slow-motion and stop-action photography. The central character is Judas Iscariot, played by Carl Anderson, with the Nazarene cast in the role of a loud foil, always the reactor, never the actor. This cannot be pleasing to doctrinaire Christians, but it is very effective in the film. In the same way, the turmoil of Annas and Caiphus, of Pontius Pilatus, and of Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter add drama.

But the moments of highest drama are reserved for the Nazarene. First, on Palm Sunday, the massed disciples sing, “Hey, J.C., J.C., would you die for me?” Jewison freezes for just a second on actor Ted Neely’s horrified expression. Later, on Maundy Thursday, the prayer of the Nazarene from Gethsemane is excruciating, no pun intended, all but unbearable.

But the star of this movie is always the music. There are places where the lyrics clunk, a curse of rock opera, but the rock is hard and convincing, and the voices, particularly Anderson and Neely, are fantastic.

Inter alia, apparently Jewison had some kind of anti-Vietnam message in mind when he made the film, but for the life of me I can’t see it now.

For an alternate take on the same material, you might pick up Jesus Christ Superstar–A Resurrection. This is a studio-recorded double-CD crafted by a cadre of Georgia musicians who love the rock opera and wanted to make a rock recording from it. Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers sing the parts of the Nazarene and Mary Magdalene, respectively. The voices come and go, but the instrumentation is inspired.

In the Passion, Saint John bends over backwards to Read more

March 21, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Virtual remodeling

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I wrote about Obeo’s virtual remodeling feature when first I discovered it (they call it Style Designer). As far as I’m concerned, this one feature is a total category killer among virtual tours. Panoramas? Check. Ken Burns zooming tricks? Check. Cheesy music loops ripped-off from CHiPs and Charlie’s Angels? Check. But to give the buyer the ability to re-envision the home — that’s worth talking about.

I’ll talk about the full tour when we’re done with it, but here’s a before-and-after example of virtual remodeling:

Before:

Cathy and Mark Deermer, our factotum-like handyman, worked hard to make this kitchen pop. My contribution: The white walls. They had been a custard yellow, and I thought they were making the room too warm and dark. Now this kitchen looks like candy — the elaborate girly kind of candy.

After:

I agree with Cathy and Mark that kitchens should be girly, but, even so, I really like masculine kitchens. This is how I redesigned that kitchen in Obeo’s Style Designer.

How long did it take? Less than two minutes, although I could see people spending hours remodeling our homes. I want for people to spend hours remodeling our homes.

Note the reflections along the left-most face of the cabinets. Compare the surfaces underneath the microwave oven. I feel like we should be paying royalties to Pixar for results like this.

I invest a lot of invective beefing about vendors, but I am delighted to be able to rejoice when a vendor gives us a feature we have wanted for years — in a slick, fool-proof interface at a reasonable price. I promise to be astounded if Obeo does everything this well, but they are doing this perfectly.

This is the kind of technology that sell houses. And to that I can add but one carefully-considered sentiment: Hot damn!

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March 21, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Photography

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I read somewhere the other day, I forget where, about a web site for a listing that had 47 pictures. The author of the post clearly thought that was a lot of photos.

Cathy organized her first batch of photos for the web site I will be building today. We will be adding other photos later, but this is by far the biggest batch.

How many? Not a huge number for Cathleen — only 221, about 28 megabyte’s worth. The finished web site probably won’t have many more than 300 photos — not counting the virtual tour and the video we have planned.

Is that overkill? We don’t think so. Everybody knows how to turn off the TV, but if you want to know everything about the home, we want to show you everything about the home.

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March 20, 2008

Hubcaps on breadcrumbs? How BloodhoundRealty.com builds single-property web sites — and why they sell homes

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Vance Shutes left a comment to my post about how we use web sites and web pages about particular houses as “breadcrumbs” to lead potential clients back to BloodhoundRealty.com. My response to him is long enough that I’m turning it into a post of its own.

Vance:

I’m intrigued by this concept. Will you be expanding on it during Unchained?

At BloodhoundBlog Unchained I will show you two different ways to leave a breadcrumb at every home you might ever want to sell. Each of those ways will result in a different kind of market penetration, but each should make you very easy to find and very hard to miss in your target markets.

Put into practice, these two ideas are worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in gross commission income just by themselves. I don’t normally keep secrets, but I wanted a big blow-out for Unchained. We have been quietly testing one of the two ideas and the results are coming in quite a bit better than I had predicted.

Are you setting up a separate page for each listing at BloodhoundRealty.com, or are you setting up a separate domain for each address?

For homes we are previewing for clients or photographing for other reasons, we host the pages on on Phoenix real estate web site, on our main file server. I don’t even know how many we have out there. Hundreds, certainly, possibly over a thousand. Someday I want to create a database of links so we can find them without having to hunt too hard.

For listings, we do a single-property web site on a separate domain. These are pretty elaborate, usually running to 60-100 megabytes of content before we’re done: Dozens of photos, an interactive floorplan of the house, a live Google map of the neighborhood, PDFs of the listing and the flyer, along with any historic photos or documents we have of the house, etc. If there is any question we can answer about the house on the web site, we do it.

Then we promote the home’s URL with everything else that we do: The custom yard sign, the business-card-sized open Read more

March 20, 2008

What’s the future of residential real estate signage? I think it’s like the recent history of digital printing — only much, much bigger

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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“The Barrys” on Real Estate Radio USA have a burning yearning to know just what it is that listing Realtors do to earn their commissions.

It’s a question that plagues me, too. As much as I talk here about on-line marketing, we draw a lot more attention from sellers with our real-world marketing efforts. We’re all about selling the house, and, oddly enough, this makes an impression on other people who want their houses sold.

But we’re deliberately not listing very much right now. We’ve turned down a bunch of houses we would have liked to have handled, but we will not list a house for sale if we don’t feel certain we can sell it. There was a span of eleven days when we turned down over $3 million in new listings — but every one of those homes is still unsold, despite repeated price reductions.

We’re gearing up to list 1322 East Vermont Avenue in North Central Phoenix. The house doesn’t go live until March 28th, but, because of an Easter-egg hunt in the neighborhood, we’re holding it open this weekend in advance of the MLS listing.

We’re going to be documenting everything we do to list this home for sale, both as an enduring record of the kinds of efforts we undertake for our sellers and as a step-by-step guide for Realtors who follow BloodhoundBlog.

The house has been repaired, touch-up painted and and staged. Some of the photography has been done, but I have not yet built the home’s single-property web site as I write this.

But because we want to have our yard signs up by the weekend, I built the signs today:

I’ve built an engenu page with bigger versions of the signs along with a link to an engenu site discussing our sign philosophy in detail.

Our yard signs are just one part of our listing strategy, but they form at least a piece of the answer “The Barrys” are looking for. We believe in marketing our listings, and we do everything we can think of to get them sold quickly and for top dollar. As we build out the engenu site Read more

March 20, 2008

Destination: Vertical. Zillow houses “hot or not” for homes

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Dig this. Dumb but fun. A sticky way to see a lot of ads — but fun anyway.

Serious reflection #1: Another way for Zillow to be a sticky, top-of-mind vertical search portal. Get ’em there. Keep ’em there. Satisfy all of their real estate needs.

Serious reflection #2: The design sense in this new feature is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from Zillow so far. I’m talking about a much higher standard of graphic elegance. Not jaw-dropping, but much better.

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March 19, 2008

Looking for long tail search results from your on-line real estate marketing efforts? Don’t clean up your breadcrumbs

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:

Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.

This is the web page I had built for 1415 East Flower Street in the Cheery Lynn Historic District of Central Phoenix.

That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.

We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.

What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?

Nothing.

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.

We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine Read more

March 19, 2008

RealEstateRadioUSA.com’s Barry Cunningham is going to show us all what it sounds like when a big dog howls

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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If you’re not listening to RealEstateRadioUSA.com, you’re missing out on the most entertaining real estate education your money cannot buy. You can listen live at 1/2/3/4pm, west to east, but the show is also available every day by MP3, so you can take “The Barrys” with you in the car or to the gym.

Today Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham joins us as a Bloodhound:

What’s that big, booming voice, piling comedy upon careful calculation? It’s Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham, who with co-host Barry Johnson teaches a daily master class on real estate and investing.

Barry is a big man with a big voice, a big personality, and a great big heart. But, ignoring all that, he’s a serious real estate investor with a wealth of hard-won experience. It will be interesting to hear how a really big dog can howl.

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March 19, 2008

Zillow.com makes its first MLS-wide feed agreement and, in the process, disintermediates its first IDX cartel

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Here’s the PR, which the vendor cheerleaders will have reported:*

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com and MLS Property Information Network today announced a partnership to feed listings from the New England area MLS to Zillow.com on a daily basis. This partnership initiates the first participation at the MLS level in Zillow’s Listings Feed program, which launched in November 2007. To date, the Zillow Listings Feed program has attracted several top brokerages for participation, and now allows all customers of MLS PIN to automatically gain free marketing exposure for their listings on one of the most-visited real estate sites in the country, while providing Zillow’s users with a more robust search experience.

That is, rather than having made yet another feed agreement from a brokerage or a franchise of brokerages, Zillow will be taking a feed of every listing from MLS PIN — a fairly big MLS system.

Okayfine. Now here’s the actual news:

Each listing will include a description of the property with multiple photos and contact information for the listing agent, including links back to the listing brokerage’s Web site where they can find more information and connect with a sales associate to guide them through the home buying and selling experience.

That is to say, whatever form the IDX agreement takes at MLS PIN, it is being cast aside for the Zillowfied listings. The IDX-like policy of concealing the listing broker’s and agent’s contact information will not be the policy for Zillow’s echo of the MLS PIN feed. (I find this so amazing that I’m avidly listening for some back-peddaling.)

There’s more. If a listing agent creates a profile on Zillow.com, that will be linked through from that agent’s listings. The MLS PIN feed will provide information for Zillow’s Virtual Sold Sign program, which is another way of promoting individual listing agents. This is all of a piece with Zillow’s general policy of promoting individuals rather than organizations.

But the important fact is that Zillow’s agreement with MLS PIN splits up the clubby conspiracy against the consumer that is the MLS philosophy. If buyer’s agents are squealing in Massachusetts today, the proper target of their Read more

March 18, 2008

Sean Purcell: A mind that glows, a passion that burns, a wit that sparkles — a life that pops

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Another new hound in the pound today, Sean Purcell, whom you will recognize from our comment threads and from his weblog, A Life That POPs. He’s on pace to become Jeff Brown’s favorite hyper-local weblogger, and Sean has been working on BloodhoundBlog Unchained warm-up events with Brian Brady. It’s time and past time that we brought him into the pack.

What happens when a Princeton psychology major goes to Wall Street? Sean Purcell came to his senses and moved to San Diego to train as an Ironman and establish himself as a Web 2.0 real estate success coach.

I have one more Bloodhound to add, but, right now, he’s spinning and spinning in front of a digital camera, praying to god that, somewhere, he as a good side.

We are always interested in adding new voices, but it is getting harder and harder to make the cut. I’m turning down nineteen out of twenty, by now, but that’s not a very good standard to judge by. Most of the people who approach us want to use our popularity to promote their businesses, which is not what we’re doing here. I am endlessly interested in points of view we don’t already have. But, even then, you have to be able to keep up with this pack of wild dogs — which means you have to be swift enough to run with us, but you also have to accept that at BloodhoundBlog we are each of us free to run as we choose.

In any case, Dave Phillips set such a blistering pace yesterday that I’m interested to see what Sean can do. Nothing like a little pressure to bring out the best in a man, right?

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March 18, 2008

Your rental home in Phoenix will generate positive cash flow — but will it appreciate significantly in the coming years?

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

 
Your rental home in Phoenix will generate positive cash flow — but will it appreciate significantly in the coming years?

It’s still a buyer’s market out there, but is it an investor’s market? The answer to that turns on three other issues: Vacancies, values and cash flows.

Lenders get all the blame for the downturn in home values, but that’s not entirely fair. Another big share of the blame goes to the builders, who built new homes far beyond any reasonable estimate of demand. So, even though folks who might have gotten home loans two or three years ago are stuck renting for a while longer, is there enough tenant demand to keep a rental home profitably occupied?

Even if there is, will the prices of Valley homes continue their decline? This seems likely, at least in the near term. There is still a tremendous amount of inventory in the MLS system. The best bargains, though, are houses that are in the foreclosure process. These can be hard to wrest away from lenders, but they may be a leading indicator of the bottom of the market.

More significantly, will a rental purchased at a bargain price throw off positive cash flow? Unequivocally: Yes. To qualify for an investor loan, you will need to have great credit and a 20% down payment. But interest rates are still very low, and rents have held up just fine through the downturn.

So the big bet boils down to this one question: If you buy a rental home in the Phoenix market now, will you be able to sell it at a significant profit eight or ten years from now?

Alas, no one can predict the future. If you pick the right rental home — good house, good location, good orientation, easy access to schools, playgrounds, shopping, freeways and jobs — it should rent well now and resell well later. If you get the right loan and don’t refinance, your income property will actually produce income — which means it will pay for itself and still throw off a Read more

March 17, 2008

Introducing Dave Phillips, taking the lead role in a reenacted historical drama: St. Francis Xavier and the Bloodhounds

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That headline is a Jesuit joke, y’all. In fact, Dave Phillips, CEO of one of the most interesting Realtor associations in the United States, may be bravely putting his head into the Bloodhound’s mouth. (Ooh! The drool!)

We’ll find out. Behold the man:

Dave Phillips is the CEO of the Charlottesville (Virginia) Area Association of Realtors, a national pace-setter. He describes himself as “a writer, speaker, and facilitator on all things real estate.”

I hope Dave doesn’t try to convert us with the sword, but, again and again, Francis Xavier took the contest to the contestants, an exceptionally courageous act. My hat is off to Dave for exhibiting a similar valor.

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March 17, 2008

How to use engenu to reinforce your blog posts about listed homes you would like to sell, to build single-property web sites, and to achieve total global hyper-local long-tail search domination

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This is my response to a comment that Jennifer Castillo left on my post about the benefits of blogging about real estate listings you would like to sell.

Jennifer said:

My questions to you arise from this quote of yours, “For each house you preview, build an engenu page. That way you can show all the photos, captioned as needed, if someone wants to see everything. You can also link to appropriate offsite resources. This engenu page will be a permanent asset in your inventory of on-line content.”

Being a total n00b in this business I am very excited about what you have written in this particular post. My question to you is how do I build an engenu page? I have a blog at wordpress so can this even be done with my existing blog? Do I need any particular software?

Hi, Jennifer. I like your weblog. You have en eye for striking images.

engenu is software written by me. It runs on Apache web servers, or it will once I release it. It’s all but finished, but I keep finding small things I want to change. I’ll be releasing it as a public beta shortly.

I’ve written about engenu on BloodhoundBlog. In that post, I talk about a house we know and love. Cathy blogged about that house, and her weblog post linked back to the engenu site I built for 101 West Seminole Drive.

That’s an illustration of how you can use engenu to support a weblog post about a house. The post can highlight the features and photos you are interested in talking about, then you can link back to you engenu site for the folks who want to see everything. The post and the engenu site are mutually-reinforcing, both in terms of immediate marketing and in future long-tail search results.

The point of all this is that engenu permits ordinary people to build rich, elaborate, highly searchable web sites very quickly and without knowing any HTML or other coding languages. If you do know how to code, you can build almost anything you want, but the kind of sites we build every day to 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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