When we list, as late as I have to…
Author: Greg Swann (page 126 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
The poet gets the girl — and sells the house:
Our homes are structures, shelters, domiciles. But the idea of a residence encompasses so much more than mere tentage, mere respite from heat and cold and wind and rain and the relentless summer sun. If all we needed was a place to escape the elements, we might just as well live in insulated barns.
But your home — your residence — is much more than that. It’s love and marriage and family, of course, home and hearth, kith and kin. But at a more fundamental level it is a reflection of who you are, an enduring stake stuck into the earth that declares to all: This is who we are, this is what we believe in and stand for and cherish.
This is not where we live, not how we live. This structure, this shelter, this domicile — this home — is our lives, as much an essential part of what we are as our heads, our hands, our hearts.
Home is where the heart is? A home like this is the beating heart of lives lived wisely and well.
Like love poetry, if you’re not right there, it’s treacle. But for people swept up in the swirling emotions of a home search, this is warm butterscotch syrup for the soul. This is the kind of stuff that puts us completely beyond the reach of the listers we compete against.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). I’m posting it now in the hopes that Realtors reading this will email it to all their sellers. I’m showing a lot lately — curse this slow market! — except I’m not because I can’t get into the houses:
Your house can’t be sold if it can’t be shown
Here’s a simple fact about the sale of your home:
If I can’t show it, I can’t sell it.
When I’m working with buyers, the ideal home is listed this way: Available, lockbox, vacant. The house is empty of occupants — although it would be great if it were staged — but there’s an MLS lockbox so I can get in with my party. I don’t want to have to call the lister, and I don’t want to talk to the seller. I just want to show the house.
The next easiest homes to show are not very easy to show: Alarm activated. Now I have to talk to the listing agent — who may be unavailable. I can’t go into the house until I hear back from the lister, which might be hours too late. This is not the worst form of seller self-sabotage, but it can be more than enough to sell another home instead.
What’s worse than an activated alarm? How about no lockbox? Now I not only have to make contact with the lister, we have to coordinate with each other. By-appointment-only listings might make sense at $3,000,000. At $300,000, you’re getting in your own way.
Buyers hate occupied homes. They feel they are invading your privacy at the same time you are invading theirs. Occupied homes are almost always stuffed with stuff, which makes it difficult for buyers to imagine their own stuff in its place. Still worse, half the time, the sellers will be hovering around. Even if they’re not trying to eavesdrop, buyers will feel that they are.
Pet advisory is another obstacle to be overcome. Now, even if the sellers have sense enough to be out of the house, I have to protect my party from the pets — Read more
The stakes are high, as Brian has pointed out. You yourself have been smart enough to build a Web 2.0 marketing strategy, but now you’re faced with the possibility that your broker, with or without the help of the brokers’ cartel, the National Association of Realtors, may try to take it all away. Here are some things you can do to pursue independence now:
- Get rid of the licensing laws. A minimum standard enshrined in law becomes the de facto maximum standard. Consumers have been deluded into thinking that the fog-a-mirror license denotes quality, so they don’t dig deeper for the added-value you bring to the marketplace. Even better, if there are no licenses, there are no brokers to tell you what you can and can’t do.
- But: That won’t happen, so work in your state to get rid of the broker level of licensing. This is already the law in a few states. Every agent can fly his or her own flag as an actual entrepreneur. Even if you should elect to affiliate with a Keller 21Max franchise, you’ll be at liberty to take flight whenever you want, since all your contracts will be your own.
- But even that is probably a long-term proposition. What will happen if your broker tries to shut down your weblog tomorrow? You need your broker’s license now — or as soon as you can get it — if your state still makes the distinction between salespeople and brokers. Even then your contracts aren’t your own, but you will have the ability to plan an orderly exit. And, having that mobility, you will have the power to negotiate with your broker as an equal.
- I mean no slight to our vendor friends, but take and keep control of your marketing technology. Of particular importance: If your broker controls your marketing, your broker controls your business.
- I despise laws, so I have complete contempt for “reforms.” The only reform that matters to me is repeal, which never, ever happens. Even so, a “reform” that would make a remarkable difference in the way the real estate brokerage business is conducted — even Read more
Why is housing so much more expensive in Los Angeles than it is in Dallas? Higher demand? No so much. The reason is that building new housing in Dallas is easy, while building anything at all in California is a nightmare of absurd regulations. Virgina Postrel explores a study that shows the marginal cost, in land prices, of pushing innocent people around by force with land-use restrictions. (HT Dan Melson.)
Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I’m reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather. Some of the price reflects the productivity advantages of being near others doing similar work (try selling a screenplay from Arlington, Texas). All of these benefits—and the negatives of traffic and smog—are reflected in the price of land.
But what exactly is that price? Consider two ways of computing the price of a quarter acre of land. You can compare the value of a house on a quarter acre with that of a similar house on a half acre. Or you can take the price of a house on a quarter acre and subtract the cost of the house itself—the price of construction. Either way, you get the value of an empty quarter acre. The two numbers should be roughly the same. But they aren’t. The second one is always bigger, because it includes not just the property but the right to build. Expanding your quarter-acre lot to a half acre doesn’t give you per- mission to add a second house.
In a 2003 article, Glaeser and Gyourko calculated the two different land values for 26 cities (using data from 1999). They found wide disparities. In Los Angeles, an extra quarter acre cost about $28,000—the pure price of land. But the cost of empty land isn’t the whole story, or even most of it. A quarter- acre lot minus the cost of the house came out to about $331,000—nearly 12 times as much as the extra quarter acre. The difference between the first and second prices, around $303,000, was what L.A. home buyers Read more
What is your broker doing when he’s not milking you for overpriced business cards and overpriced letterhead with overpriced envelopes? He’s milking your buyers for overpriced loans, overpriced title services, overprices inspections, home warranties and hazard insurance policies. For some brokerages, there is never enough money to be squeezed out of a transaction. This is white shoe corruption — technically lawfully but oozing sleaze. Someday there will be a successful class action suit and it will all go away just like that.
Until then, heed the advice of attorney Joshua Marks, who wins this week’s Odysseus Medal with Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!:
A recent class-action lawsuit filed in the state of Minnesota is bringing to light a long-standing issue that affects buyers of residential real estate throughout the country—alleged steering of home buyers to affiliated title, settlement and mortgage companies by large realty brokers. This widely utilized practice often leads to consumers incurring a considerable amount of extra fees and costs when compared with fees and services offered by non-affiliated competitors.
Many real estate brokerages rely on the income generated by clients using mortgage and title companies that are affiliated with them. Brokerages often attempt to maximize their “capture rates” – the percentage of all home-sale transactions that use the affiliates’ services. A consumer typically ends up paying more fees than if he/she selected a non-affiliated competitor. The brokerages justify the additional expense to consumers by claiming that even if the affiliates’ fees or mortgage rates are not the lowest available, the quality and dependability of the affiliates’ services more than compensate for any price differences.
Over the past several years, many cases involving financial relationships between brokerages and their affiliates have withstood legal challenges. So long as the financial arrangement was properly structured to comply with federal anti-steering and anti-kickback rules, the Courts have been reluctant to intervene in these arrangements.
In the Minnesota lawsuit, two buyers filed claims against Coldwell Banker Burnet Realty Inc., one of the largest realty firms in the state. The Plaintiffs Read more
I had been doing a short list of 20 nominees, but I had the idea that that was an overwhelming number. (It was for me.) This week I cut the short list to 12, and it’s not only more manageable, it seemed to be easier to distinguish the exemplary posts from the many notable entries that had been nominated.
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 PDT/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:
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$AltEntries = array (
"Daniel Rothamel -- Social media How your business can benefit from social media right now”,
“Sean Broderick — Google Basewide Google Basewide? One Step Away in California“,
“Brian Boero — On-line real estate Online real estate: It’s anybody’s ballgame“,
“Jim Cronin — Pay-per-click Kick the Pay Per Click Habit: 7 Reasons Why Real Estate Blogging Is Better For Your Business“,
“Joshua Marks — Broker affiliations Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!“,
“John Cook — Pete Flint A Q&A with Trulia CEO Pete Flint“,
“Jay Thompson — Zolve Zolve – One Agent’s Perspective“,
“Eric Blackwell — Realtor.com How to Stop getting hosed by REALTOR.com…“,
“Michael Price — Secret sauce Mmmmm…..Secret Sauce“,
“Teri Lussier — Viral marketing Web 2.0: Catching a virus at the local dance“,
“Cathleen Collins — Columbus Christopher Columbus… a top producer for the ages!“,
“Brian Brady — Professionalization Trim The Fat…No, Throw Away the Meat and Get a New Cow”
);
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
…but you still have time. Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I have lived in Phoenix full-time since 1993, but, until tonight, I have never once been to a Phoenix Suns game. Other than poker, basketball is the only sport I like, and I love the Suns, I’ve just never made time to go see the home team play. Tonight’s is an exhibition game. My niece is part of the half-time show, and she scored us free tickets. I’m not all that big on crowds and noise, but we saw the world-champion Phoenix Mercury under similar circumstances this summer, and it turned out to be painless and fun.
The painful part about the Suns is their flawless talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The fans live in a perpetual state of heartbreak, crestfallen by past disappointments but still somehow convinced that this time will be different.
Cheryl Johnson ran a video of this tune yesterday, and below you’ll find a different version. The songwriter is Jim Steinman, who wrote all of those teutonic anthems for Meatloaf. For the Suns and all they will do to us again this year, this is Bonnie Tyler expressing Steinman at his heartbreaking best:
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Weblog documents, supports transition to new MLS system
This could get complicated, so put on your thinking cap.
Here’s the scoop: Beginning last Friday and culminating on July 1, 2008, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) is going to be switching from Marketlinx/Tempo, our current on-line MLS vendor, to the flexmls system developed and marketed by FBS Systems.
Bored yet? You shouldn’t be, because, although the primary beneficiaries of this switch will be Realtors, there will be quite a few interesting answers to your own “What’s in it for me?” questions.
Tech-savvy agents like us are dancing in the streets. At Bloodhound, we have a profound hatred for the kinds of buggy vertical market solutions foisted off on Realtors, so we have built our business on commodity and horizontal software tools. What that means is that systems like Tempo are so hard to work with that we have built our tools around their bugs.
So that’s the first benefit of the switch for Realtors and consumers alike: FBS is committed to working with the user base to achieve the greatest possible satisfaction. How do I know they’ll follow through? Because FBS President Michael Wurzer is an active participant in the real estate weblogging community. He can afford to lead with his chin because he’s prepared to effect this transition in the most public possible way.
But what’s in it for you? Here are a couple of teasers, with plenty more to come. If you’re out with your agent next summer and you see a house that sparks your curiosity, your Realtor will be able to look up the listing on the fly by smart-phone. Even better, by next November, your agent will be able to set you up with direct access into the MLS system. You’ll be able to run true MLS searches from your den.
Some of the geekiest Realtors in the Valley have set up a new weblog to celebrate and document this transition, The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange (PRETexchange.com). Feel free to join and advise us as we make the leap Read more
It’s Milk the Realtors week on the RE.net — with the shilling appeals for useless new “solutions” getting pretty close to actual sleaze — so I wanted to revisit a couple of themes we’ve hit before. Inherent in the Web 2.0 idea is a de-verticalization of real estate marketing. Big-budget interruption marketing doesn’t work, but intimate viral marketing does. Because of the Web 2.0 revolution, Realtors are free — at last — to control their own marketing — and their own costs.
“So,” say the shills and wannabe shills, “how can we cash in on that?” And the result is the Web 2.0 industry for Realtors: Vertical-market weblog vendors and vertical-market social marketing schemes.
Here’s a hint: You don’t need to pay someone money to “network” for referrals and agents to refer business to. All you need to do is network. If you’re paying attention to the RE.net, you already know three agents in every town in North America.
Here’s another hint: There is no such thing as an interesting amalgamation of hyper-local real estate weblogs. A hyper-local weblog is interesting because it’s hyper-local. Combining eight hyper-local weblogs is seven-eighths boring to every possible reader — as boring as the “Neighborhoods” section of the local newspaper, but harder to slog through.
You don’t need vendors to control your marketing, and getting in bed with vendors is potentially disastrous. These are my three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors:
- Avoid hosted software systems
For dedicated web site vendors, dedicated weblog vendors, dedicated virtual or video tour vendors, dedicated customer relationship management vendors, the money is in the blades — the monthly hosting fees — not the razor, the ostensible product. The initial outlay might be steep enough, but the gravy comes from taking money from you month after month for “services” for which the added incremental costs are almost nothing. Okayfine. Everybody’s gotta eat. The trouble with hosted software systems is not the pricing but, rather, who owns the data and what happens to it when you elect to take your business elsewhere. Is your data yours to take with you? Worse, is your confidential information truly Read more
This is philospher David Kelley in the Wall Street Journal. I think BloodhoundBlog presents a nice reflection of this argument, a joyous, fearless, unapologetic pursuit of new ideas.
Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production. Her point was stated by one of the minor characters of “Atlas,” a musical composer: “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes. . . That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels — what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor?”
As for the charge, from egalitarian left and religious right alike, that the profit motive is selfish, Rand agreed. She was notorious as the advocate of “the virtue of selfishness,” as she titled a later work. Her moral defense of the pursuit of self-interest, and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard, is at the heart of the novel. At the same time, she provides a scathing portrait of what she calls “the aristocracy of pull”: businessmen who scheme, lie and bribe to win favors from government.
Economists have also known for a long time that trade is a positive sum game, yet most defenders of capitalism still wrestle with the “paradox” posed in the 18th century by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith: how private vice can produce public good, how the pursuit of self-interest yields benefits for all. Rand cut that Gordian knot in the novel by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice. Precisely because trade is not a zero-sum game, Rand challenges the age-old moral view that one must be either a giver or a taker.
The central action of “Atlas” is the strike Read more