There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
Hey! Maybe it is!
Uh… Maybe not…
Assuming you don’t have an intemperate climate where you live, WalkScore.com will tell you if your neighborhood is walkable.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at Sacramento Real Estate Voice. The theme is a Monopoly tournament, but I can’t tell who won. Kris Berg triumphed at her table with I’ve Been Working Too Hard! Ask the Wall Street Journal. Brian Brady, writing from his home blog, took over the real estate on his table with San Diego Mortgage Advice: Call to ARMs. There are five other table winners to be seen, so get yourself to Sacramento Real Estate Voice to check them out — without passing GO, of course.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Here’s my final evaluation of the StarPower Conference in four short words: I didn’t hate it. The intellectual content of the thing was oversold by a hefty percentage, and virtually everything in the curriculum was an upsell for something else. We were entreated all week to gather “pearls” from the presentations, but the best I was able to come home with are grains of sand from which we will craft pearls of our own. The event was stage-managed with precision and flair, although a little cheerleading goes a long way with me.
This post is largely a critique. In the coming weeks, I want to detail some of the pearls Cathy and I will be assembling around the gritty sand we brought home. Here I want to enumerate what I considered to be important defects in the StarPower Conference. I don’t know that this will do anyone any good. Most of the companies I take on seem not to spring into action to address my concerns. But I find myself taking an anti-vendor position again and again, and my four days at StarPower served only to reinforce that redoubt.
However: I think it’s important to note that the StarPower organization is not unique in exhibiting the defects I will catalog, nor does it come even close to being the worst specimen of the milk-the-Realtor industry. I could have wished for a lot more — and more-rigorous — information in exchange for my time and money, but I did not come away empty-handed, and I may yet succumb to one of this week’s incessant upsells.
First, with a couple of exceptions, StarPower is stuck at about 1999. Web sites, lots of web sites, all of them static, almost all of them templated, most of them mindlessly mimicking the me-me-me meme. There is weblogging, sort of, substantially worse than what I’ve been bitching about and yet utterly invisible to Technorati and the Googlesphere. In the StarPower universe, there is no Web 2.0, nor any derivative implications of Web 2.0. I heard the words “long tail” out of my own mouth only. This thing that we do Read more
From ProBlogger:
I met a blogger recently who had a blog with a very local focus. His Guerrilla Marketing Tactic was to do a deal with three internet cafes in his area to make his blog the home page on all of the computers. In return for this he gave them some free advertising on his blog. The same blogger made a similar deal with the local library who also made his blog the home page of their public internet computers. This worked particularly well for him as his blog was on his local area.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is me in Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
By-owner home seller is no match for a skilled listing agent
We’re about to list a home for sale in a fairly pricey neighborhood, so we are very aware of our competition.
We knew a similar home was ready to go on the market, but we were convinced it would be marketed as “for sale by owner,” so we didn’t feel threatened.
Why not? Because a by-owner seller is no match for a skilled listing agent.
I’m willing to concede that there are some unskilled listing agents, but that doesn’t matter to us. We compete against professionals, not amateurs.
In fact, the seller instead went with a limited-service listing, which is slightly — but only slightly — more likely to succeed.
By now, go-it-alone sellers are thin on the ground. You can get a true MLS listing at a range of discount prices, from $3,000 down to $99.
So why is a limited-service listing unlikely to succeed? In this market, a home must be marketed perfectly from Day 1 or it will sell slowly and at a deep discount, if at all.
Except for the MLS listing itself, the home will be offered by owner in every respect: priced wrong, prepared wrong and inaccessible to buyers and agents.
This is not a necessary consequence, but it is very common.
In the case of our newly listed competition, the home is offered at $200,000 over its market value. It will not be a threat to our listing.
But it wouldn’t be a threat even if priced right. A professional home marketer will bring too many weapons into battle for an amateur, no matter how dedicated, to compete.
Even worse, a limited-service listing shouts out a warning to buyers’ agents to stay away.
Why? Because it is being marketed by an amateur. The seller will have no one to turn to for advice, exposing the buyer’s agent to double the legal liability in the transaction.
There’s nothing wrong with negotiating the best price you can get for a full-service listing. But in our opinion, limited-service listings are a false economy in this market.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, Read more
From Howard Brinton’s closing remarks tonight at the StarPower Conference, here are Gregg Neuman‘s Top Ten Reasons for Optimism:
Realtor optimism, yes. For sellers, not so much. But it is a real improvement over crying in your beer that times are tough.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This will have to be brief, because I’m crushed for time, but we’re promoting Real Estate Weblogging 101 at the StarPower Conference this morning, so it’s a topical topic.
The premise: The commercial value of real estate weblogging comes from making a visceral connection with future clients, ideally leading to viral results, not spam-trolling for short-term leads. In other words, where keyword-packed tapioca content may score well for now on search engines, and may bring in filled-out web forms, it will not create the kinds of enduring connections that result in repeat and referral business for generations. Certainly none of the people brought in by search engines will become loyal readers or subscribers to the weblog: There’s no there there. Even worse, spamvertising in weblogs surely repels at least as many people as it seems to attract, and the people repelled are very probably the ones most likely to yield significant viral results over the years. You’re not only not building bridges, you’re blasting the bridgeheads.
There’s more: What happens when Google changes the rules? When a vendor crows, “Ha, Ha! We tricked Google!” the demise of that particular trick is foreseeable. When Google discovers that favoritism towards weblogs is bringing spam to the top of its results, it will change the way it weights weblogs. Locally-focused webloggers like Jay Thompson who have made the effort to build a following will chug on unabated. Keyword-packing spamvertising weblogs will dry up and blow away.
This morning’s post from Jay is good example of how to do this job: The keywords are there, but they’re there because the post wouldn’t makes sense without them. Jay is providing real value to his readership, practical, relevant advice. Even so, the post should search very well. But here’s the interesting part: Even though Jay is writing about the news of the day, if someone should happen upon this post by search a year or two from now, it will still be serving the visceral, viral function: Jay Thompson cares about his clients, and he is working to provide meaningful benefit to them with his weblog. That’s a very powerful Read more
VCs are professional nit-pickers. Give them something to find fault with, and they’ll do it with abandon. I generally tell people to come to pitch meetings with less information rather than more. Sure, you’ll get pressed for more, but finesse it. Presenting a full and detailed plan is, nine times out of ten, a path to a “No” — or at least more time-consuming than having said less.
Profits are a different issue. Being profitable too soon gives investors, rightly or wrongly, an idea of what the margins are on the business, as opposed to what they could be in some perfect world. As a result, it takes a mighty force for them to not start wading in with discounted present value worksheets, and the like, thus hammering your valuation and generally making funding much more complicated (and equity consuming) than if you were wildly unprofitable.
How could a story like this not have a happy ending?
Technorati Tags: investment
Comes news today that a keyword-packed fake weblog is every bit as attractive and satisfying as an inflatable spouse. I don’t doubt it for a minute, but if the objective is to snare random morons by deception, I think a “stealth” web site is a better-yielding joy-doll.
I swear to god it’s Groundhog Day in the real estate industry — 1974 every damn day, over and over again. Does real estate weblogging offer a path to transparency? Not if it’s just another sleazy gimmick.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
A tuxedoed Russell Shaw holds forth at the newcomer’s reception at tonight’s opening session of the StarPower Conference. An important principle of the StarPower method is the idea that success is contagious, that highly-motivated Realtors can hoist themselves to the next level not just by learning new skills and techniques, but also by learning from and modeling the behavior of mega-producers like Russ.
I’m skeptical of anything that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but I do love the idea of learning new skills and techniques, and I deeply admire many of the people StarPower has brought to Phoenix.
As an example, we got to meet Joe and JoAnn Calloway tonight. In Phoenix, they’re famous as Those Calloways, another team, like Russell’s, that does hundreds of millions of dollars in business every year. As much as Russ is big, blustering and brash, the Calloways are small, gentle and very quiet. You would never, ever peg them as Realtors, yet they completely dominate some of the richest zip codes in Scottsdale.
Immediately to Russell’s left in the photo is Richard Pomisel, with whom I took pre-licensing more than six years ago. Do the math: A class of around 30 students. Many didn’t pass the school test. More didn’t pass the state test. Still more didn’t get licensed. The failure rate for new licensees is 85% in the first year, very high thereafter. And yet two people out of one pre-licensing class are still working.
I don’t want to oversell StarPower. This is very much old-school real estate. Even where they think they’re being hi-tech, they talk about things like “stealth” web sites, marketing-by-trickery. But the bulk of the curriculum is a devout belief in the power of business-like systems for organizing and growing a real estate practice. Cathy and I have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to the classes to bring home the most new information.
I don’t know if success is contagious, and I don’t have much truck for mumbo-jumbo. But I will tell you one “law of attraction” that never fails: Nothing brings out immediate real estate needs like a real estate class. StarPower runs all day Thursday, Friday Read more
Today, in its Existing Home Sales report for June 2007, the National Association of REALTORS noted that mortgage rates are lower by 0.02% than in June 2006.
I guess I knew that, but wasn’t paying attention to it. I had wrongly assumed rates were higher because this recent run-up was so long and extreme.
B. Fear harder:
A lot of media, including BusinessWeek, reported that large numbers of mortgages would reset at higher rates, potentially forcing huge numbers of borrowers into default. A popular number widely reported was that $1.5 trillion worth of loans was due to reset in 2006 and 2007, according to the researchers at Economy.com. That’s about a quarter of all mortgages outstanding. Mozilo says that in reality more than two-thirds of the borrowers with adjustable mortgages refinanced their loans before their payments spiked. For example, the company notes that only 26% of prime mortgages that were due to reset to higher rates in 2007 are still active. Among subprime loans, 36% are still active. That suggests that most people have, in the words of analyst Samuel Crawford, “refinanced…out of the way of danger.”
Of course it’s easy to blame the media and analysts like Economy.com for suggesting there may be problems with adjustable mortgages. The reality is that even if many folks with toxic loans did refinance, there are still millions of other borrowers getting squeezed right now.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Starting tomorrow and running through Saturday, Cathy and I will be at the Starpower Conference. Russell Shaw is one of the Stars, so he’ll be there as well. I may write about some of what transpires there, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my output is curtailed.
Almost immediately after that is Inman Connect. Kris Berg, Brian Brady and Dan Green will be in attendance, so you might get a chance to meet them there. Even so, I don’t think they’ll be live-blogging the event.
But: Brian Brady will be presenting at the Show Me The Leads event. And Dan Green will be a part of 10 Tips From Bloggers.
I’m not going to Inman, but I’ll be monitoring every little breathless announcement of useless new sucker-bait for Realtors and lenders. I have no use for trade shows, but I had a great time last summer making fun of all the goofy crap vendors try to peddle at these things.
In any case, if posting is a little light over the next seven or eights days, you’ll know the reason.
Technorati Tags: blogging, Inman, Inman Connect, Starpower, real estate, real estate marketing
This came in as an Ask the Broker question:
Thanks for having this site.
We found the house we like and we made the offers and counter offers, finally getting to a place where we got stuck. The seller does not want to came down on her price and we cannot pay more. We are $20,000 apart.
What I would like is for all parties involved — the buyer, the seller and the two agents — to come to the table to make up the difference.
Have you heard of a situation like this?
Alas, I have.
I can be pretty free about using commission dollars to solve problems with transactions, but there are constraints. I will rebate every cent of an untoward commission or bonus, and I don’t hesitate to pay out of my own pocket to make problems go away.
But: My money is mine to do with as I choose.
I can address the problem posed by the question with a very simple analogy:
If your employer decided to buy a company car for his own use, would he be justified in asking you to kick in $1,000 toward the purchase price?
That clarifies that.
But take up the problem as a Realtor or lender: What would be the optimal response to an appeal like this?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Okay, start here. I had an idea for an organic method of collecting arguments, pro and con, about divorcing real estate commissions. Using a PHP form, I could collect user-submitted links to apposite articles, then show them all in an “included” PHP file in each post about divorced commissions. That PHP file would be available to be included on other sites, as well, although I don’t think anyone has done this.
I’ve manually built this kind of file before, for ongoing news stories and for breaking news stories we cover in multiple posts. The difference here was eliciting contributions from readers in a semi-automated fashion.
Last night in a comment, Barrett Niehus of 4MySales – Real Estate Investment and Marketing commended me for having added a Wiki to BloodhoundBlog.
Except I hadn’t done that. I wasn’t even sure what Barrett was talking about. By email, I asked for clarification, and this was his response:
The Wiki comment just relates to the Bloodhound’s ability to add posted links from your online form to the list that you are creating on your blog post. For your readers (me included) this adds another way for them to participate in your blog. I think it is a great feature that few other bloggers use which makes your blog even more unique.
For a one-off post, it made a certain kind of sense. But imagine the same idea expressed globally, for every post. Now that’s an insanely great idea.
I planted a seed, really just a way of seeking something like permanence in the evanescent world of weblog posts. Barrett saw more than I did, a little bit of that Web 2.0-ishness, and his email led me back to see a tiny sprout springing up from the earth. Tonight I’ve nurtured it into a little sapling. I honestly don’t know if people will use something like this, but it seems to me to be a fantastic way to make BloodhoundBlog’s posts more comprehensive and informative.
What am I talking about? New code that will permit you to amend any post on BHB with supplemental links. If you look at Lani’s post from earlier Read more
This is me from last Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price
I looked at houses with a long-time client last week. We shopped ten houses, of which two were actually in turn-key condition. Two others were fix-ups in every way but price. Three of the homes had front-yard landscaping so overgrown they were virtually inaccessible. And the prices were all over the map.
The resale market is not as dire as it is portrayed to be, but it’s not great, either. There are a lot more homes for sale than there are qualified buyers. For a home to sell in this market, it has to be priced right, perfectly prepared and properly presented to the marketplace. Miss on any one of those factors — especially price — and the buyers will take the home up the street instead.
Consider the Terracina floorplan at Ashton Ranch in Surprise. I’ve sold several these, and I really like them. They’re bright and spacious, with wide-open sightlines. Without pools, there are seven of these available right now. Two are priced at $199,000, then they shoot up all the way to $231,900.
The two lower priced homes will probably sell first, even if the others have better landscaping and better interior amenities. Only one of these models sold in June, for $200,000.
A few miles east, at the Sundial subdivision in El Mirage, there are 25 units of the 1,238sf Zocalo floorplan available. Prices run from $166,900 to $213,900, a huge spread.
Three of these homes sold in June, and it would be reasonable to argue that the market value of this model is $185,000. The problem with that is that ten of the 25 listings are offered below that price — and they’re still not selling.
In any subdivision, I would have to look at the listings house-by-house to tell you which ones will sell soonest, and for how much. But it’s a certainty that if a home is not marketed properly, is not cleaned and repaired to show-room condition, and, especially, is not priced aggressively to the current market, it will not Read more
