There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 108 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

My take is that the most important news this week was Zillow.com’s announcement that it will be doing background checks on the loan originators it will be referring to consumers as a part of its forthcoming mortgage product. In consequence, this week’s short list is all about Zillow’s announcement and its implications.

So: We have just eight entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 115 posts. 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.

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 ( "Brian Brady -- Mortgage Complaint? Mortgage Complaint? Welcome to The World Of Consumer-Policing at Zillow Mortgage”,
“Brian Brady — Zoriginators Delight
Zillow Mortgage: Zoriginators’ Delight or Bane?“,
“Michael Wurzer — Who Holds The Bigger Gun, NAR or Zillow? Who Holds The Bigger Gun, NAR or Zillow? How About Tomorrow?“,
“Mike Farmer — Zillow Nation? Zillow Nation?“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Launches Mortgage Lender Sign Ups Zillow Launches Mortgage Lender Sign Ups – Points to a New Way of Consumer Control of Mortgage Process“,
“Teri Lussier — Zillow creates the end of the world Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine“,
“Todd Carpenter — Zillow Mortgages Zillow Mortgages to give loan originators \”absolutely free and unlimited access to consumers looking for a mortgage\”“,
“Sean Purcell — Success in Disbrokeration? How Do You Find Real Estate Success in Disbrokeration?“,
);
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    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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  • Another record-breaking week: Is 2008 the Year of the Bloodhound?

    BloodhoundBlog has had one record-breaking week after another in 2008, but this week was the first time we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, an average of 2,000 “uniques” a day.

    Nothing exceeds like excess: We add new subscribers every day, our Technorati links are on the upsurge, and we are pushing 100,000 backlinks. If the RE.net is like the Roman Republic, then we are like Gaius Marius, Caesar’s uncle: New on the scene, rude, crude, vulgar — and very powerful. That’s a role that suits me just fine. I’m happy to leave the Patricians squabbling amongst themselves over emoluments and honors. I’m much more concerned with the work-a-day Plebeians — and with the Barbarians at our gates.

    Why are we the biggest? Because we deliver the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. How are we going to grow even bigger? By delivering the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. It ain’t rocket science.

    Russell Shaw is convinced we have reached the “tipping point”, the point past which everything we say here can have an impact on the way our business is conducted. I retain my doubts, but I do not doubt for a moment that our words have a deep, a penetrating and an enduring reach. And to that notion, I cannot but shout out some slightly edited sentiments from latter-day America’s greatest satiric philosophers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker:

    America! [Heck] yeah!

    In the Web 2.0 world — in the disintermediated world — in the world without middle-men — delivering the goods is all that should matter. The BloodhoundBlog idea is simple enough — keeping the wealth that you alone produce in your own pocket — but it is in a sense a very ancient idea, a very Greek idea. The Hoplite Greeks were their own men, and this is why they fought better — and why they thought better — than any human beings who had come before them. The BloodhoundBlog idea is but a small reflection of the Hellenic revolution, but it is an idea that should win, that should prosper in a world where no middle-man can squelch an idea or Read more

    Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover: If we help Russell Shaw get even richer, he might buy us drinks at BloodhoundBlog Unchained

    As I mentioned on Real Estate Radio USA yesterday, Mary McKnight of RSSpieces.com will be joining us at BloodhoundBlog Unchained for a session called Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover. What we’re going to do is take a look at web sites and weblogs of audience volunteers and talk about how they might be improved — to be more attractive to visitors, stickier, better-optimized for search engines, etc. It should be a very robust, fast-paced overview of what does and doesn’t work in real estate web sites.

    Here’s a news flash: The purpose of a real estate web site or weblog — the purpose of real estate marketing in general — is to sell houses. Pull-based marketing is still marketing.

    With that much as preface, consider this: Russell Shaw is one of the biggest newspaper publishers in Northeast Phoenix. By way of Custom House Publishers, Russ prints and distributes almost 50,000 newspapers a month — distributed as the 85022 News, the 85024 News, the 85028 News and the 85032 News. These are the zip codes of Russell’s geographic farm, of course, and the newspapers are one way he has of “dripping” on sellers in his farm.

    Russ also has four domains for those four zip codes, each one running a templated web site built and hosted by Superlative Web Systems, one of our local — and lame without exception — IDX vendors. These are the four sites: 85022News.com, 85024News.com, 85028News.com and 85032News.com. As with all templated web sites, if we examine everything with a critical eye and then work up every ounce of salesmanical enthusiasm we can muster, we can dig deep and bring forth a hearty: “Eh…” Not absolutely awful, but nothing that is insanely great.

    Now it could be that Russ has that kind of frail and fragile ego that regards every bit of professional criticism as a grave and grievous insult — but not on this planet! Instead, Russell Shaw is the kind of phlegmatic, pragmatic, practical guy who understands that, no matter how well he might be doing today, he can always do even better tomorrow. My kinda guy. So instead Read more

    The Wile E. Coyote School of Mosquito Extermination — and why you need to put a condom on your trusting nature

    That headline is lousy for Googlization, but it got your attention, didn’t it?

    First, Russell Shaw unearthed an ugly little bug in WordPress that permits malware mechanics to hi-jack certain features of a weblog. If that sounds vague, you bet it is. I’m not going to tell you what happens, where, or how. It is sufficient to say that the exploit is possible in any currently-running hosted version of WordPress. Why did we get hit? Despite the scare stories in the newspapers, malware is almost-always devoted to some kind of quasi-legitimate commerce. Basically, the bug that bit us was trying to use our hosting and our traffic to conduct its business at our expense.

    Not cool.

    The exploit is recurrent. I can kill any particular instance of it, but since the trapdoor is in WordPress, the only way to keep this little mosquito from coming back is to keep slapping it dead — with the only alternative being to kill WordPress entirely.

    Enter cron, the Unix utility that will run any Unix process on the schedule you set. With luck, this exploit will be fixed in WordPress 2.5, which is due to be released shortly. In the meantime, once a minute we’re swatting that mosquito, leaving not so much as a bloodstain. Most of the time, it’s not there, of course. When it is, it has 59 or fewer seconds to suck our blood before it dies again.

    That much was easy, but I’ve had plenty of time to watch this little critter in action, and in consequence I’ve learned a ton about malware theory, as it were. So once every 15 minutes, cron is running a different job that combs our whole file server looking for suspicious files. And if anything else pops up, I already know how to kill it and keep on killing it.

    All of which leads me to say: I love the Apache web-server technology. Where else can you drop a ton of Acme DDT onto one little mosquito once a minute — like Wile E. Coyote at his most frenzied — without even breaking a sweat?

    Alright, that’s the first thing. Here’s Read more

    Kevin Kelly will teach you everything he knows about the economics of abundance — for free

    Mike Farmer is the gift that keeps on giving. Last night at his place, and today at our place, he takes us deep inside the mind of Kevin Kelly.

    I’ve been catching notices of Kelly’s name in the tech blogs, but I haven’t made time to read him. Big mistake on my part, corrected at some length this morning.

    Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans forms the basis for a survival manual for exemplary-service Realtors and lenders.

    His Technology Wants To Be Free is a much deeper discussion of the “free” economy than the Chris Anderson essay I talked about last week.

    I may go into greater detail later, but you don’t need to be bottle fed. Get yourself to the Technium and drink from the fire-hose.

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    Do you want to know the best Black Pearl of all? When someone offers you a valuable jewel, show up to collect your prize!

    During the ProjectBlogger competition last Spring, I advised the contestants to enter a writing contest Problogger.com was hosting. Of all the apprentices, only Teri Lussier entered, with the result that she finished the competition with a huge number of Technorati links and a Page Rank of 4 — truly astounding results for almost no effort.

    Say that again: “Truly astounding results for almost no effort.” That’s like a BloodhoundBlog mantra. That’s everything we’re looking for, the leveraged opportunity that produces the best benefits for the least effort at the lowest cost.

    Even so, I knew when I announced the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest that few people would enter. The effort was nothing, really, just another blog post. The Grand Prize is a full scholarship to BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but every winning entrant would get a link back to their site on our side-bar. This is possibly the most powerful link in the RE.net. It’s certainly the most powerful link anyone is offering you for free. And we had — count ’em — four entries.

    The good news is, they were four great entries. But before we get to them, I’d like to cite three honorable mentions:

    1. Mike Farmer brought us This is not for the contest — just tipping my hat, discussing his plans to create single-property weblogs for his listings.
    2. Teri Lussier took on the entire Social Media Marketing universe with Does the RE.net mean Real Estate or Resist Everything?
    3. And Todd Carpenter knocked my socks off last night with this simple Google search. For now, Todd is dominating the keyword zillow mortgages by sheer blog-power. It will be interesting to see if Zillow is able to take that keyword away from Todd, but, no matter what, he is demonstrating the search-engine leverage of weblogging.

    And now… on to the winners:

    Kevin Warmath weighs in with If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Video Must Be Worth a Million, a discussion of his odyssey through visual marketing media for his listings.

    Brian Miller offers up “…Vee have our vays. You vill sign zee papers…”, which details how he learned how to get more by demanding less.

    Colleen Kulikowski Read more

    My Real Estate Radio USA debut — and a reminder that the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets goes up at midnight tonight

    You can go to Real Estate Radio USA to hear the MP3 of my appearance today. I went into it expecting to kind of goofy and fun, but we actually ended up covering a lot of nuts-and-bolts real estate techniques.

    As Brian Brady announced when he made his own appearance on Real Estate Radio USA, the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets will be going up at midnight tonight. If you want to get the whole package — a $350 value — for the Guerrilla-only special price of $149, you need to make your purchase now.

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    Fred Flintstone speaks: Listen to me today on Real Estate Radio USA

    As a reminder, I will be on Real Estate Radio USA this afternoon at 2:30 pm MST. I’ll be talking about everything I can remember about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, plus, presumably, a lot of other stuff. I’m full of ideas and light on sleep, so I should be a fun listen. You can snag the MP3 later if you miss the show live.

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    Do you want some earth-shaking news? In showing us a first tentative glimpse of its new mortgage lending product, Zillow.com may in fact be reinventing — and perfecting — Capitalism

    I’m going to get the newspaper news out of the way first:

    Starting now, if you are a loan originator, you can register with Zillow.com to receive mortgage and refinancing referrals from that Seattle-based internet start-up, once it ramps up its full — but still Top Secret — mortgage lending product. From Zillow’s PR team, presumably in the form of a Zillow Blog post:

    To participate in this new product offering, lenders must have their professional status confirmed prior to connecting with borrowers, so we want to give lenders a head start on the process:

    1. Register with Zillow, if you haven’t already.
    2. Then apply as a lender, and answer a few questions about yourself.
    3. While access to borrowers is free, a one-time application fee of $25 is necessary to cover the costs of having an independent third party confirm your professional and employment status to Zillow. This is the only charge to participate; there are no other fees.

    Why register early? The confirmation process can take up to several days. By registering early, lenders ensure they will be among the first to be notified when the product launches and ready to service borrowers on Day 1. We’ll also send out an e-mail to all pre-confirmed lenders giving them notice immediately after launch.

    I don’t know what form Zillow’s lender referrals will take, but the important point — to which we will return — is that only duly-registered loan originators will be receiving them.

    Zillow takes some pains to take away your fear of future pain:

    While we’re not sharing more details right now, we can say that we’ve built our product around Zillow’s model of openness and transparency that is increasingly important in today’s home lending environment. And, consistent with our information-based model, we have no intention of being part of the transaction.

    There’s a sweet little teaser at the end:

    And if you happen to be in the market for a home loan, stayed tuned to this space as we announce an entirely new kind of mortgage offering built just for you.

    Brian Brady believes that what Zillow will offer as its sticky mortgage product is a sort of interest-rates Zestimator. In Read more

    No more web sites in the remarks section? ARMLS drops the hammer on the one little bit of the 21st century it was getting right

    I read about the outlawing of web site URLs in listings on the “Welcome to Tempo” page of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Services (ARMLS), but I wasn’t certain it meant what it seemed to mean. Since I have been a Realtor, we have promoted our single-property websites in the remarks section of the listing, as have many other agents. It seemed odd to me, given how anal ARMLS had been about contact information in virtual tours, but I thought it was a laudable concession to real life in the third millennium.

    We talk in web sites — Bloodhound Realty does, particularly. We live in webbed-wide world. This is news to no one. The appropriate way to talk about houses is in web sites. Hurray for ARMLS! It doesn’t really “get it,” but it gets at least some of it.

    Not so.

    Comes today this email:

    Thursday, March 06, 2008

    Gregory Swann ABR CRS GRI,

    Our new iCheck program identified the following Error. The Error and any related verbiage was removed on Thursday, March 6, 2008.

    MLS#: 0000000 TEMPORARILY OFF MARKET/RES
    Error: MLS Rule Error (000)
    Description: Prohibited URL

    No further action is required by you at this time.

    Thank you for complying with the ARMLS Rules and Regulations.

    I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. I understand, I just don’t approve.

    First, this is an artifact of the co-broke, the archaic practice of buyer’s representatives being paid by the listing agent. If commissions were divorced, all of the Top Secrets of the MLS system — every one of which is a violation of the buyer’s agent’s fiduciary duty to put the buyer’s interests ahead of all others (which most certainly includes the seller and the listing agent) — would be swept away like the dusty relics of the anti-capitalist era that they are.

    Second, the specific purpose of forbidding web site URLs in listings is to impose an artificial chokepoint on the free market. Buyer’s agent’s seek to hold their own clients hostage in the transaction. In order to secure their own compensation, they will withhold the fact of Read more

    Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent . . .

    [Russell Shaw taught a symposium today in Phoenix on Geographic Farming. Cathy and I were there, and Russell was sweet enough to give a plug to BloodhoundBlog Unchained. At the break, I was swarmed by people wanting more information on Social Media Marketing, especially weblogging — most regretting that they hadn’t gotten started sooner. Teri Lussier is a scorching read on those same kind of ideas today. Both events put me in mind of this post, which I wrote on July 23, 2006 — a Sunday — I can remember the day. This is flagship content for BloodhoundBlog, one of the posts that established who we are, our steady position in this discussion. But it’s amazing to me how timeless this advice has turned out to be — how much we are all still “situated at various points from painfully awful to Insanely Great on the continua for each one of these skill sets.” This one is worth studying — and worth pursuing the links. –GSS, 03/05/08]

     
    People leaving comments at BloodhoundBlog keep confusing Cathleen Collins for me, so I decided to steal an idea from Rain City Guide and put our photos beside each of our posts. That entailed revising BloodhoundBlog’s weblog template, of course, which also meant adapting its Cascading Style Sheet. A significant number of people reading this already don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll endeavor to lose most of the rest: I had to rewrite a few little bits of PHP to make everything work.

    Like this:

    That puts the pictures, which I had prepared in Photoshop, in place. This code:

    is the actual name of the photo. That dumb little bit of PHP says, “Get the ID number of the current author and replace everything from the < to the > with that number. The photos are named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc., so the PHP substitution makes the right photo show up for the right author.

    PHP is an amazingly robust and incredibly loose language, but the amount and kind of PHP you use to manage a WordPress weblog is minor and very simple — baby-steps PHP.

    But this occurred to Read more

    Tick tock: Time marches on at a Bloodhound’s lanky pace

    Just a reminder: The deadline for the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest is tonight at midnight.

    Also: I will be on Real Estate Radio USA this Friday at 2:30 pm MST. I think that means 1:30/2:30/3:30/4:30 pm, west to east, but you might check my math. If you miss it, their shows are always available as MP3s soon afterward.

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    Oh, for goodness’ sakes! Nothing sells houses like houses, so of course you should blog listings — your own and other Realtors’

    'Homey' feel is a lure for attracting women home buyersVery early on in BloodhoundBlog’s history, I argued against blogging listings. The argument actually concerned styles of anti-blogging that were common then: Stealing and reposting newspaper articles verbatim, for example, or posting listing after listing with nothing to engage the reader in any way.

    Later on, when I was working on the posts that became Real Estate Weblogging 101, I reversed that position in a big way:

    So what are we looking for? Hmmm… There’s no place like it, and, when you go there, they have to take you in…

    We’re looking for home, of course. If I could lay one blanket complaint against locally-oriented real estate weblogs — allowing for particular exceptions — it’s that they are way too much locale-oriented and way too little focused on — what? — on homes and families.

    Russell Shaw is beyond brilliant, and BloodhoundBlog is very lucky to have him as a contributor. But if no one learns anything else from Russell, please read, learn, mark and inwardly digest this sliver of his genius: Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

    The very first thing I want to see at your neighborhood/community/town-focused real estate weblog is a house. A nice, big, homey house, with a welcoming front door. I want to see a gleeful little girl on a swing-set and a Chocolate Labrador playing Frisbee with her brother. I want to see the Spring flowers and the Autumn foliage and the glowing of Christmas candles — all at the same time. I know you can’t do all that, but I want to feel that way anyway.

    I want for you to have made me feel instantly at home.

    At a minimum, that means adapting the stock weblog theme you’ve adopted. Okayfine. Get on it or hire it out. First impressions are lasting. If you don’t sell me on the idea that there is no place like your home on the web, I’m movin’ on. Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

    In truth, I think your target market should be sellers, not buyers, but it’s going to be people with their buyer’s hat on — even if they need Read more

    Redfin.com builds new listing oversight tools for sellers

    Here’s the news, snipped to the quick:

    Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released Redfin Listing Metrics, a dashboard for Redfin’s listing customers to analyze neighborhood inventory trends and recent sales, and to compare their listing’s online traffic to that of other listings in the neighborhood.

    That sounds slick, doesn’t it? A Redfin listing is a hybrid between a full-service listing and a for-sale-by-owner. This new software is a hybrid, too. On the one hand, Redfin is providing real-time access to information you wish you were getting to your sellers once a week. On the other, the Seattle start-up clearly intends for sellers to micro-manage their own listings:

    The Listing Metrics dashboard, currently available only to Redfin listing customers, graphs how key marketing and pricing trends change day to day and week to week:

    • Online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com as compared to the neighborhood average, so Redfin customers can determine if their listing is competing for online buyers’ attention;
    • Sources of online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com, so Redfin sellers can evaluate the effectiveness of promoting their listing on other sites;
    • The number of competing broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can evaluate supply and demand to determine if pricing conditions are changing; and
    • The average days on market for broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can determine if their property is taking too long to sell.

    The dashboard also provides an overview of nearby similar listings, so Redfin sellers can compare their listing’s pricing, photos and amenities to those of its competition, and an overview of recently sold properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin sellers can evaluate closing prices as well as listing prices. Using the dashboard, Redfin customers can also schedule and promote open houses.

    Okayfine. Few blessings come to us unmixed. Sellers will surely like the greater control, even though an experienced lister might try — and fail — to warn them about the unhappy consequences of “over-marketing” a listing. But, guess what? Their house, their money, their risk. Redfin might not be giving sellers what you or I might think they really need, but it is proving itself Read more

    The All-Spin Zone: The big news from the Inman News relaunch is that much of the RE.net is now in bed with Brad Inman

    I had mail from a vendor just lately asking me if I might be interested in a forthcoming story. This was my reply:

    Just so as not to disappoint, this is the way we work:

    Good for consumers, agents or lenders, we eat it up.

    Good for the vendor, we ignore it.

    I should think this would be obvious, but much of the RE.net has gone into pure PR mode — more high-fives than your kid’s soccer match — so I just wanted to be clear.

    As evidence of this phenomenon, witness the fawning coverage for Inman News’ relaunch this weekend. For all the hype, what actually happened was that they moved the furniture, and gave everything a coat of paint — hardly earth-shaking events.

    Interestingly, it’s still a for-pay site, but, as far as I can tell, the “news” is now free. Here’s an unencrypted telegram from Secret Agent Slobbering Dog to Brad Inman: Regulating access to the news was the chokepoint. No one should pay for ordinary information — mostly regurgitated vendor press releases, just like Realtor magazine. But no sane person has any reason to pay a hundred-and-fifty bucks a year for an official Inman News sippee cup.

    Of course, while everyone else was fawning over that boffo furniture-moving job, we were talking about strangling the last of the chokepoints in the twenty-first century marketplace. Oddly enough, we have the idea that what is important is what is important to you — not to the people we have drinks with — or hope someday to have drinks with.

    My take is that people can crave affection or admiration or companionship entirely too much. The same goes for prestige. What makes real weblogging work — and what makes most corporate or commercial or vendor blogging fail — comes down to spin, juice, PR. You either shun it or you embrace it, and there really isn’t any middle ground. It’s a nice thing that Inman News did a little sweeping up. But that ain’t news.

    On the other hand, there is ample room in these events to draw inferences. BloodhoundBlog has nothing to gain or lose. I set it Read more