BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 134 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

August 22, 2007

Easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I built a quick and easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal competition. You can continue to use the BlogCarnivals entry form, but I put this together to make it easier to nominate posts written by other people.

The form lives at the top of The Odysseus Medal information page, which is overdue for a rewrite. If you want an even quicker solution, go here and drag that URL into your toolbar. Copy the URL of the page you want to nominate and click on that link. Autofill then paste then submit. Duck soup.

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August 21, 2007

A first crack at custom real estate directionals

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I wrote about this before, but I don’t think I have what I want even yet. These will print 18″x12″, but I may go to 24″x18″ the next time. My design skills are not the best, but I arrived that this because I wanted three things on the sign, and this seemed like the best way to get them. I wanted the name of the brokerage, the web address for the house, and the maximum amount of photo I could get. This is what I ended up with for a first attempt:


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August 21, 2007

Google’s new embedable map says, “Buy this house on Friday!”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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And now for some bazillion-dollar arm–twisting in behalf of a forthcoming listing:


View Larger Map

I wanted this from my sullen teenager a year ago, but he’s been busy trying to portray the subtle distinctions between indifference, ennui and anomie — it ain’t easy! In any case, let me feed this from a DB file and I’m done with Zee Maps, too.

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August 21, 2007

Seth on business cards — of particular interest to Realtors and lenders

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Seth Godin on business card mistakes:

  • Don’t print your own cards. Just because Avery and others make those little perforated sheets of paper doesn’t mean you should use them.
  • Don’t use big type for the address and contact info. The #1 way we can tell if a business card is cheesy is with a glance at the type size. Really.
  • Don’t buy those color business cards with your face on them. You’re not an ordinary real estate agent, so there’s no sense in acting like one.
  • Don’t go with metal business cards. It might work for Steve Wozniak, but everyone else wants to bring your cards on an airplane.
  • You might think it’s a great idea to do a full color card with a big (lousy) picture on it. It’s not.
  • I like rounded edges. But only if you leave plenty of margin. (as below)
  • Margins matter. Anytime your type gets anywhere near the margin, you’ve blown it.

However: For real estate promotion, the business card form factor is a tiny little workhorse. Here’s a Black Pearl that’s not in that post: People fear commitment. Taking a flyer from your flyer box can seem to them to be too much like risking being “sold” by you, you Loki-like trickster. We buy flyer boxes that have a little pocket at the top for business cards. If someone won’t take the flyer, they just might take the much smaller, less threatening business-card-sized flyer we make for the home. After the “Sold” rider goes on, we swap out to our business cards or to a card promoting us as listers.

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August 20, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: A challenge to the mind and a challenge to the-way-things-have-always-been-done

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We had a lot of truly great posts this week. I’m not the kind to pick three posts for first place and six for second place, but I do understand the temptation. Steven Groves, for instance, has much to teach us with MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings? Is the market turning? There are good reasons to say no, but what if it is? Then Patrick Kapowich has news for you with Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip. There are other truly outstanding posts in the short list of entries, and the truth is, I could go on about them all day.

But: There can only be one best. This week, that honor and The Odysseus Medal go to Michael Cook with Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors? I know many Realtors reading here disagree with Michael’s argument. That’s fine. The question is, what are you doing about it? It were well if you were able to defend your value proposition well enough to best Michael in a fair debate, but you don’t have to set the bar the high. Here is what you do need to do, though, and what you need to get better and better at doing: You have to create and be able to defend your value proposition with your own clients. What is it that you are bringing to your transactions that exceeds your cost in sales commission? If Michael’s post — and others like it — lead you to internal turmoil, that’s a good thing. Pain is nature’s gentle way of letting you know there is a flaw in your thinking. Ruminating on the challenges a thoughtful man like Michael Cook puts before you will make you better at what you do — and better able to defend your value to your clients.

And if that’s not unsettling enough to our sensibilities, The Black Pearl this week goes to Carl Drews with How real estate commissions work. Drews is not a professional, he’s Read more

August 19, 2007

The People’s Choice Award: Pick the best of this week’s real estate writing

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Here is the (not very) short list of this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal. You can vote for one of these posts for the People’s Choice Award.

These are this week’s entires:

Voting ends Monday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. We have file permissions issues with the new server, so you definitely can vote more than once, and I definitely will catch you. So don’t.

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August 18, 2007

Drive On: We’re back, but DNS resolution can be flaky

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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If you’re seeing this post, you’re finding BloodhoundBlog on our new file server. A word of caution: Domain Name Servers attach like Velcro, at little at a time. You may yet see Delia’s Gone again before we’re done. By Monday or Tuesday, any flakiness should be gone. I’m just warning you, that’s all.

I know, too, that email to me has been bouncing since yesterday as a consequence of this switch. If you got something back, send it through again, if you would.


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August 18, 2007

How to take away the objections to drawbacks in a home

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
How to take away the objections to drawbacks in a home

I was looking at the web site for a For Sale By Owner home the other day. In the site menu was a heading called, “Drawbacks.” I thought this was an excellent idea at first blush, the kind of inspired salesmanship I almost never see.

The fact is, everything is a trade-off. Everything has advantages and disadvantages. This is not a secret. Buyers already know that every home they look at will have drawbacks.

What is inspired — what could have been inspired — is calling the drawbacks to the buyer’s attention. Why? Because then you can take away the objections.

Like this: “We know this room is small for a bedroom, so we pre-wired it for digital cable and two phone lines. That way, you can use it as a home-office and also as a guest bedroom.”

The buyers will see that the room is small, but by acknowledging and addressing the defect in advance, you can help them see around the problem.

I said the idea of a “Drawbacks” page could have been inspired. Instead, when I clicked through to the page, I saw this:

“There are no drawbacks! Come and buy this house right away!”

This is far beyond being uninspired marketing. This is the kind of ham-handed ignorance and arrogance we associate with Hollywood’s idea of a venal Realtor.

Since you know exactly what objections buyers are going to raise with your home, your best strategy is to acknowledge and address them in advance. This communicates that you are honest, that you are not trying to pull one over on your buyer, and it also gives you a chance to reframe objections in a way that can help to sell the home.

If you don’t want to admit that your home has drawbacks, say nothing. Every buyer’s biggest objection is the fear of being hustled into a bad decision. If you go out of your way to look like a hustler, you will scare buyers away even if your home really is close to perfection.

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August 17, 2007

Is opportunity knocking in the real estate market?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I tell people we live in the last affordable ghetto in North Central Phoenix. We live right on the edge of the neighborhood, the place where $400,000 makes its leap to $750,000 on the way to a million. We moved here knowing what the neighborhood had to do, and, so far, it has not disappointed us.

This morning, I’ve been drooling over this listing. The comp value of this home in turn-key condition should be around $600,000, maybe more. Sad for the sellers, and I could kick them for letting the house go to hell, but this is a sweet opportunity that will bear fruit right about the time Persephone comes back from Hades.

This is my friend and client, investor Richard Nikoley, writing yesterday:

Probably not what everyone is thinking, right now, but if I’m going to keep my head about me and keep a market perspective on the market, then I have to consider that when some people sell out of fear, panic, to preserve diminishing profits, or to stop losses, there’s always someone on the other side of that trade. So the question arises — and one should always, always try to discern the motivations behind each side of a transaction — why are an equal number of people buying, right now, what so many are selling, right now? Could it be because others are selling at cheaper and cheaper prices and those buying are seeing bargain-basement prices? If you had to guess, who would you suspect is likely getting the advantage?

For some reason, people don’t tend to think of the stock market like they do most other things. In other areas, it’s called a sale. There’s always someone, somewhere, wanting to get out of an asset — for whatever reason — and depending on their motivation, they’ll take less and less for it. Others lie in wait for such opportunities in order to accumulate assets at relatively low prices.

Everyone is welcome to their doomsday, economic collapse, chickens-coming-home-to-roost scenario, or whatever. But do keep in mind that what is going on is essentially and mostly an exercise in total freedom and Read more

August 17, 2007

Growing pains: BloodhoundBlog is moving to a more-robust server

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.

In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.

Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.

I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.

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August 15, 2007

Where can a good girl go to meet a skeezy divorced high school drop-out who works part-time at the public library?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Central Phoenix, of course, but your boy doesn’t actually work at the library, he just hangs out there from 9 am to 9 pm. This is from Zillow.com:

Central City residents are distinct from people in surrounding areas because:

  • A larger number did not complete high school.
  • A higher proportion of them are divorced males.
  • There’s a higher percentage of people who work in education, training, or library occupations.

Sorry, Zillovians, I just can’t get enough of this astute counter-marketing. Surprisingly enough, there have been no contributions to the neighborhood discussion fora. Maybe if Zillow offered free cigarettes — or booze — in exchange for real estate questions.

Here are some listings from this creepy neighborhood acrawl with divorced winos. The resident high school drop-outs can barely even get to six multiples of the median home value.

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August 15, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Some rule changes, and a clickable button

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.

Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.

This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.

So: The rules are changed to this:

The Rules (few and fair):

  1. The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
  2. The entrant need not be the author of the post
  3. More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
  4. More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
  5. No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies

Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.

I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:

You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:

That image links back to the information page for the competition.

We’re Read more

August 13, 2007

Congressional “leadership” on lending policies: What is “crisis-itis?”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, which should be in your feed-reader — especially right now:

What is “crisis-itis?” It is my own diagnosis. It is a form of dementia where the inflicted believes his or her own self worth rises as the situation he monitors worsens. In all cases, the inflicted greatly exaggerates his or her control over events, as well as the size, duration, and impact of those events. In extreme cases, the inflicted seeks to worsen the crisis to inflate his or her self esteem.

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