There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
Thanks to Rueben Moore of BrickAndGarden.com, we were cited by the Freakonomics weblog today for beating up on the NAR.
BloodhoundBlog contributor Morgan Brown has a podcast interview with Rain City Guides’s Dustin Luther at BlownMortgage, his home weblog.
WordPress 2.2 is out. We’re running 2.1 on all our hosted weblogs except this one, which is still quivering in the corner under version 2.0.10. Time for some upgrades.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The attempted shakedown of Zillow.com that began last October — when The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaining that the nascent Seattle-based Automated Valuation Model (AVM) was misleading minority homeowners about the value of their homes — has come to stunningly banal conclusion.
In a letter dated May 4, 2007, the FTC elects to take “no further Commission action,” citing Zillow.com’s fortified disclaimers about the accuracy of AVM results and the need for site visitors to investiagte other sources of real estate evaluation.
The NCRC has since discovered the sub-prime mortgage melt-down as a more profitable mine to be quarried, since lenders can be faulted simultaneously for the foolish loans they made to minority borrowers in the past and for forbearing to be equally foolish in the present.
You can read the FTC’s letter here.
I wrote a great deal about this issue last fall, all of which is linked below. As with the State of Arizona’s persecution of Zillow.com, I see the NCRC shake-down as old-school criminality attempting to impose itself on the internet — trying to leverage off of Zillow’s fame or perhaps viewing AVMs as the weakest member of the new-economy herd in PR terms. In any case, this moral victory with the FTC will rob innuendo-wending reporters of a minor weapon to inveigh against the web start-up in stories about the on-going Arizona controversy.
These are my posts about the attempted NCRC shake-down of Zillow.com:
My friend Richard Nikoley dug this up, Admiral Jim Stockdale talking about his experience in a Vietnamese POW camp:
“I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Asked: “Who didn’t make it out?”
“The optimists. They were the ones who said we’re going to be out by Christmas. And, Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, We’re going to be out by Easter. And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. Then they died of a broken heart.
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
They can’t say “Yes” if you don’t ask — but they sure can say “No” if you do. Learning to surmount the fear of the “No” is how to get to the “Yes.”
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This question concerns the Phoenix-area, but feel free to answer it for your own local market — just tell us where you are.
Which would be more attractive? The 8 month market or the 14 month?
I’m literally on the CUSP of being able to buy and with kids already transferring schools, the sooner the better in order to get some stability.
I’ve seen new home builders drop their prices pretty heavily or offer deep incentives. One of them has a home for around the 300k mark in Gilbert that’d be PERFECT. While I could make the payment now, I have been married to a house and that’s the worst type of one-way relationship. I don’t plan on doing it again anytime soon. Additionally, they just reduced prices 50k and are ALSO offering 20k in upgrades or a FREE Car/Truck (a Ford financed for 30 years is anything but free).
So with having settled on the fact renting the larger home I need and finishing another 6 month lease around 3/1/08 would put me at a greater financial advantage to tackle the home I have my eyes on, I question whether it’d be worth the higher payments for a shorter lease (as it’s on a home not an apartment), or if the market will be depressed enough to go the long haul at 12 months and spend more time preparing and saving.
I figured I’d shake my magic 8-blog (see what I did there? It’s a clever Monday!) and ask away. If you were advising a client on the buying side of life on how long to hold out if holding out was all they could do – Would you suggest holding on 8 months or 14?
Part of me says throwing money away on renting an additional 6 months is wasteful, the other part says that it’d allow me to save up for the stuff I’ll need to make the house a home. At a savings of around 500-600/month, that adds up to a few extra grand after 6 months.
The mention of a 40 year loan got me thinking more about affordability and financing. Read more
This is me from last July. Real Estate Wives has a post on Redfin and WalMart today, so I thought I’d bring this back to the top of the queue.
Are traditional Realtors being undercut? There’s always room at the top
Let’s see… Our customers are leaving us in a steady march. They’ve found an alternative that is easier to use, more convenient, overall just a better fit to their lives — and to top it all off, it’s much cheaper than our product.
What should we do?
Here’s an idea. Our customers are telling us in no uncertain terms what they want: More! Newer! Better! Faster! Cheaper! So let’s do the same things we’ve been doing all along, only less!
From Reuters.com:
The New York Times Co. plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.
The changes, set to take place in April 2008, include the closure of a printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company will sublet the plant and consolidate its regional printing facilities at a plant in Queens, the paper said.
The newspaper will be narrower by 1 1/2 inches. The redesign will result in the loss of 250 production jobs, the company said.
The New York Times said it expected the changes to result in savings of $42 million.
The narrower format, offset by some additional pages, will reduce the space the paper has for news by 5 percent, Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the article.
The Times will join a list of several other papers from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times that have reduced their size as they cut newsprint and other production costs and try to stem a loss of readers and advertising to the Internet and other media.
It might be fun to chortle about someone else’s troubles — and who doesn’t love seeing the New York Times get it good and hard?
But what they are doing is what the real estate industry, in general, is doing. In both cases, the consequences Read more
…is up at RSS Pieces…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Who says the old media is dead? In the hour just ended, Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing had over 400 hits from organic search. Just think what might happen if the NAR made reasoned arguments instead of trying to club reality into shape with legislation…
(This search is why we’re getting the traffic. As with Zillow.com, we are the highest-ranking discouraging words on the topic. It’s up to you to determine where the intellectual leadership of the real estate industry resides…)
More: real estate 2.x emerges from its Howard Hughes-like seclusion to comment.
Further notice: Well. That was pretty lame. You can see the video here. Wouldn’t it be cool if a reporter could ask an intelligent question? Wouldn’t it be cool if both sides of a story were actually presented? Even so, the bottom line is: Big deal.
Still more: I commented on the TechCrunch.com post, not that anyone other than insiders cares about accuracy on these issues.
My initial comment:
[Quoting Michael Arrington]> Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.
This is incorrect. Redfin’s cost “savings” consists of pushing the cost of buyer representation off to the listing agent and the buyer. It “saves” money by not doing the work the buyer’s agent’s commission is intended to compensate. The net consequence, if no other changes are made in the real estate industry, is that sellers and listing agents are likely to change the way they provide for the buyer’s agent’s compensation. Redfin.com has never turned a profit, and, if its business model actually gets traction, the money it “rebates” will no longer be available to it.
This was Arrington’s response:
Greg – the fact is that the real estate market is seriously screwed up and needs to be disrupted. Agents are overpaid and often do little more than underprice a house to ensure a quick sale. The model needs to change, and Redfin is changing it. Good for them.
That rejoinder is devoid of any actual response to what I had said, but people are rarely Read more
Cathy brought this up this morning, so I thought I would look into it. A version of this went out as email to BloodhoundBlog contributors earlier today.
Cathy’s question: What is the Google impact of being a BloodhoundBlog contributor?
We have a Page Rank of 5 on the main landing page — the “top” of the weblog. I expect us to be PR6 at the next recalculation.
Either way, the link to each contributor’s web site in the landing page should be hugely beneficial, since that page has such a high Page Rank.
A contributor’s spot in the list of Frequent Contributors also puts that person’s link on a huge number of other BloodhoundBlog pages: Each post, each category, each month, each author, each indexable page of posts, etc. The actual number of pages Google is “seeing” at BloodhoundBlog may be as good as infinite. Most of those pages will have a much lower Page Rank, of course, but every time Google spiders one of them, each web site it “sees” will be queued to be spidered.
Plus: We get spidered dozens of times a day, by Google but also by Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.
We have a Technorati Authority of 463 as I write, putting us within the top 7,000 blogs overall — third place among Technorati-tracked real estate weblogs. We have 3,868 total links from other weblogs — second place — which argues that many weblogs are linking to us multiple times.
There’s more: After I started thinking about this, I realized I could go the whole thing one better. I’ve changed the way the meta-entry information is presented, post-by-post, to put the link to each contributor’s home web site there, as well.
We’re already delivering a lot of clicks back to contributor’s sites, but this change should yield even more. Plus, every post is now that much more Googlejuice-enriched — with the link being very high within the content, from Google’s point of view. Even better, every theme change is retroactive: All of our past posts, going back forever, will have this link, also.
I changed the date entry, too, so people can figure out Read more
Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.
I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.
For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:
(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)
Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.
This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more
This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely
This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.
Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.
There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.
But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.
What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.
Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.
This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more
This is me last month, at the time of the Zillow.com’s most-recent software release:
In the world of Trulia.com — and other listings.bots focused on evanescent listings — users come and go. On the idealized Planet Zillow, users come and stay.
Home buying is at most an 18-month effort undertaken every seven to ten years, on average. Home ownership is continuous. Zillow attracts a lot of sellers, and it seems certain that it hopes to attract a countervailing cadre of buyers. But what Zillow is really doing, I think, is aiming at the 100 million-plus Americans who own their own homes. Some may come every day — to see new listings, to see new home photos, to ask or answer questions. Some may come only once in a while, when they have a particular need.
But its databases are permanent and accretive, constantly improving. I think Zillow’s goal is not to compete with Trulia or Google Base for home shoppers in the short run. I think its goal is to suck every bit of oxygen out of the residential real estate space as a vertical market. I’m not implying malice. But where others see this opportunity or that opportunity, I think Zillow.com sees the information marketplace for homeowners as a single unified whole, and I think the company’s goal is to dominate the whole thing in its entirety.
Today’s changes have the potential to make Trulia.com a stickier experience. But will it retain end-users after their homes have closed?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Come with me to the newly-reconfigured Trulia.com, freshly emerged from beta status. Let’s search for an ideal house. The criteria we can use are limited — location, type of structure, price range, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage — but we can still scare up some results. Plus which, if you really know what you want — for instance, by winnowing the location down to a particular zip code — you won’t have a huge number of listings to sort through.
My search turned up four houses. Not a big number, but all of them are reasonably well-suited to my needs. But: None of them is a perfect fit. Here’s the cool part: I can instruct Trulia to send me email updates or an RSS feed of changed data in that particular search. When a new home matching my criteria is listed at Trulia.com, I’ll learn about it right away. Or, if I like a particular house, but I don’t like the asking price, I can subscribe to get an email notification of future changes made to that one listing.
I can set up any number of tightly focused searches, each with its own email alert or RSS feed. That much is not news to Realtors. We do this every day, with much more robust search tools. But we do it for clients. The clients themselves don’t have direct access to the MLS system. Some added-cost IDX systems permit saved searches with email updates, but then the search is not terribly more robust than Trulia’s.
But wait. There’s more. The new improved Trulia.com, will alert me when the house of my dreams becomes available. This is essentially the complementary counterpart to Zillow.com’s “Make Me Move” feature. Using a database of tax records, you can select a particular residence and ask Trulia to inform you by email or RSS feed when that home comes on the market.
Neither of these features is without problems. For example, where Trulia turns up four homes that match my criteria, either Realtor-listed or For Sale By Owner, the Arizona Regional MLS system unearths 146 active listings for the same search. And, at Read more
Matthew Hardy of Real Estate Success Tools sends along a copy of the NAR’s press release on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes Redfin PR puff piece.
We are led by buffoons, avidly drawing attention to the stuff they want everyone to ignore. Two words is too many in reply to this crap: So what? Discount Realtors are nature’s perfect revenge on people who crave real estate discounts. The intelligent response is not to shout, like Redfin, “We’ll do nothing for even less!” but to offer a quality product at a fair price — and then actually deliver it.
Technorati Tags: compensation for buyer representation, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
How long is The Long Tail? Long enough, even, for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, ten long years after its theatrical release. I despair for the state of staged drama, and not just in the chip-on-its-shoulder burgs, but this, in Horace’s phrasing, is “a monument more lasting than bronze.”
The news: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is to be released on DVD, at last.
We’ve been on the waiting list at Amazon.com for years, and I’d like to hope that this is a vindication of the waiting list idea, a social tug-of-war to stretch The Long Tail.
I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The Cameron you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet‘s theatrical release.
Hamlet past his bedtime
I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting — or buying.
My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.
Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked Read more
