BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 148 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

May 10, 2007

Hey, can I hop a train to that shack? ShackPrices.com introduces proximity to mass transit as a search criterion

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the most innovative of the map-based real estate search portals is ShackPrices.com. A house is a house and a neighborhood is a neighborhood, but a home is a lifestyle, and ShackPrices is doing more than anyone else to integrate lifestyle data in its databases.

The latest innovation is showing proximity to present or future mass transit services in its search results:

Beginning today, home buyers can search from thousands of homes for sale near bus stops along one or more King County Metro Bus lines or near Sound Transit Rail stops. Home buyers can combine their search for homes near mass transit lines with a variety of other factors including price, size, and keywords using ShackPrices’ intuitive map search.

“By letting home buyers search for properties near current and future transit stops, we are giving the public a valuable tool to find homes that fit an environmentally friendly lifestyle,” said ShackPrices.com co-founder Galen Ward, “Most importantly, we’re giving home buyers the opportunity to find a home that should substantially increase in value when transit lines are complete. Homes within 500 feet of rail lines are worth as much as $40,000 more than similar homes just a little farther away.”

I, personally, don’t like taxpayer-subsidized mass transportation, but “people like pie.” In the urbanosphere, proximity to mass transit is a very common question. Answering this question visually and automatically would seem to be painfully obvious — except no one else is doing it.

My frank assessment: ShackPrices.com should post a “Make Me Move” price to see if anyone in Seattle has brains enough to write an eight-figure check.

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May 10, 2007

A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We saw a performance piece called “Love, Janis” last week. It wouldn’t do to call it a play. It was more of a fictionalized chronicle of Pearl cavorting with her inner child while blasting through her greatest hits at top volume. The music was beyond excellent, and the interstitial crap was no worse than Ray or Walk The Line or The Doors — no act of evil or self-destruction is ever your fault if your records chart well. Creepy and dopey (no pun intended), maudlin and mopey, but ultimately nothing. If they had cut all that and doubled up on the music, it would have been a knock-out tribute show.

Here’s the beef: Was this raucous rock ‘n’ roll encomium performed at an Indian casino, alternating with the Tina Turner and Michael Jackson impersonators? No, alas. Was it the 8 and 10 o’clock headliner act at an off-Strip locals resort in Las Vegas? Guess again. No, “Love, Janis” is part of this season’s “drama” from The Arizona Theatre Company, one of eight “plays” to be presented this season to audiences of rich white people, whose seats will be graciously subsidized by poor black and brown people.

This is “theauhtuh, dahling,” an allegedly high-brow undertaking undertaken in that high-brow “performance centre” downtown — itself graciously subsidized by people who only make it downtown when they are dispossessed by fate and taxes. And although I am speaking of Phoenix, particularly, everything I’m saying goes for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America. “We can’t be a true city without theauhtuh, dahling,” even if that “theauhtuh, dahling” turns out to be a complete joke.

What’s the real point of this ugly charade? Wealth is waste, but how can one justify the indulgence of a thousand-dollar gown if there is no “theauhtuh, dahling?” No symphony? No opera? No ballet? None of these boondoggles is profitable, and that by itself is an excellent argument for doing away with them. Mozart can’t make money, but neither can “pops” music conducted by TV’s Doc Severinsen. Cage fighting turns a buck, as do rodeo and tractor pulls, but how can one wear a designer Read more

May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

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May 8, 2007

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves Read more

May 7, 2007

Pachelbel versus Warhol: Taking desktop real estate video to the streets

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I stand accused of being the “Andy Warhol of real estate video”. I’m pretty sure them’s fightin’ words, but, rather than exacting my vengeance by making a nine-hour film of a dripping faucet, I have chosen instead to assert my classical roots.

Vide: I had planned to do a video for this listing, but it sold before I could get it done. So I did one now for practice. This is just another randomized slide show with music, but it works better for me than the kind of slow, blurry pan and stammer we see too often in real estate videos: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.”

But: I’m learning a lot by playing with this software. I have this same slide show in a rock video-style presentation, Ken Burns-style fauxtion with angled cuts and dissolves — completely MTV-creepy. What I want to learn how to do is supplant the images from recorded video, retaining the audio, so that the kind of interview I put together last Friday becomes more visually appealing and more informative.

This is doable. As with high-end graphics production, the software is takin’ it to the streets. Neither desktop publishing nor desktop video are necessarily as high in quality as a professional might achieve. But the price is right, and, most often, close enough is good enough.

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May 7, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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…is up at Lansner on Real Estate at the Orange County Register. Writing from The San Diego Home Blog, Kris Berg took fifth place for her playful rant on open house signs. Russell Shaw came in second place with his not-at-all-playful rant on the folly of real estate discounting.

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at the Real Estate Investing Blog. We entered a great Jeff Brown post, but Jeff and the CoREI are writing the other chapters of The Secret — The Law of Mutual Repulsion — so he didn’t win. He’ll be crushed if he ever does, so here’s to his unbroken streak of ratifying if not totally gratifying disappointments.

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May 7, 2007

What’s the antidote for a dubious statistic? A countervailing dubious statistic

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Seventy-seven percent of home-buyers start their home search on the internet. Except, sixty-nine percent of Americans think the internet is a pain in the ass. What’s the real truth? I like to say that forty-seven percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. It’s not true, but, unlike all the other dubious statistical “news”, it’s funny.

May 5, 2007

The Almeria Files: 318 photos in 60 seconds

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I made another short movie to demonstrate that real estate videos don’t have to be small and crappy and void of colorful details. Better than this, it seems to me to illustrate the real life of the wired listing agent. Believe it or not, the film features every photo we took for the Almeria listing — in 60 seconds.

This is for your eyes only. I’m not sharing it with potential buyers. If I can impose a theme upon it, it’s about the accelerated crush that goes into putting one of these listings together. I think the music — Midtown by Tom Waits — sets just the right tone…

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May 4, 2007

Not-ready-for-HGTV: My alternative to the listing video

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I am not hugely in love with the idea of video for listings. My problem is simple enough to state: I think 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 geek-appeal to geeks and age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if video overcame its crappy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

However: I do want that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more than our competitors can on our listings. And: If I can soak up another twenty minutes of a potential buyer’s time, that’s twenty minutes that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with our listings, even if video competes poorly with digital photography.

So what I wanted was a video format that made sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. This film was made this week — and, yes, I know: I suck as a videographer. The particular home is an extensive restoration, so taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch — this is a way of turning video into a true added-value asset in the listing package.

The next time this seller refurbs a house, we’ll shoot video all along, memorializing the major changes. It might be slick to mount a web-cam from the ceiling to snap a picture every five minutes while work is going on: Time-lapse remodeling.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images — there’s luck! — but we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 4, 2007

Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

Here’s the brutal truth about the real estate market in the Valley of the Sun: There are nine homes for sale for every motivated, qualified buyer.

So what should you do to make sure that your home is the one in nine that will sell this month? Everything you can.

For our listings, we’re pushing our way up the technology ladder as fast as we can. We’re doing custom yard signs for each listing, custom Web sites or Weblogs, interactive floor plans, virtual tours, even video tours featuring interviews with the sellers.

It goes without saying that the homes are priced right, in perfect repair and staged to encourage buyers to move themselves in mentally. Ideally, we want an inspection report, with the repairs documented, and an appraisal to demonstrate that the price is fair — and that an offer will make it through loan underwriting.

Not everyone can do all this work, but there is a simple technology available to everyone that can make a huge difference in marketing your home.

What is it? Digital photography.

An MLS listing can have up to six photos, but many have only one — or none. A flier can have even more pictures, and a simple Web page can feature photos of everything that matters in the home. Photography hasn’t been expensive since the days of George Eastman, but digital photography is virtually free.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Good real estate photos should be taken with the widest-angle lens you can lay hands on. And while multiple mega-pixels sell cameras, for a real estate photo to be useful it needs to be a small file size: 640 x 480 pixels is perfect. Fill the frame, showing what’s important, omitting what isn’t, and be sure to work with plenty of light.

Virtual tours draw eyes at Realtor.com. People will watch videos, if only for the thrill of watching “TV” on the computer. Poetic copy instills dreams. But nothing sells the buyer’s imagination on a home like a wealth Read more

May 4, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #5

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Linked below is the fifth of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 3, 2007

If you were the cutest dog at the dog show, would you work for world peace, or would you just go for the contact info?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Give Shaun McLane of EKDAY.com credit for self-promotional skills, anyway. He has started a new site called Posh’d, which is — I kid you not — a beauty contest for real estate web site.

Say that again: He is finding the least ugly of — let’s face it — the ugliest stuff on the web, and featuring it on a one-page gallery site, which links back to the designated beauty queens. I can’t but think that this will win Shaun the Mister Congeniality award, but the idea is still kind of a stretch.

For example: BlueRoof.com is featured first and should be. It is a stunning site. But right next door is Realtor.com, looking as dowdy and dated as the Yellow Pages.

(For younger readers, the Yellow Pages is a big, useless book perfect for exhausting landfills. The Council of Residential Specialists publishes its own version, which is even stoopider.)

The rest of the dog show, including BloodhoundBlog, is not awful. But it’s not great, either. Better than average, maybe, but that’s hardly an accomplishment. I know there are some sightly sites among the Realty.bots. For example, Eppraisal.com has the coolest Web 2.0-like Weebils. My guess is that there is more and better to be found in The Undiscovered Country, the world beyond weblogs.

So: Here’s for everyone except BlueRoof getting kicked out of the dog show by ever-prettier dogs. Even better: Here’s to clinging by claws to our vaunted status by revising our sites into something useful and beautiful — with no movies, no MIDIs and an absolute maximum of 937 links on the home page. Who ever heard of anything like that in real estate?

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May 3, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #4

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Linked below is the fourth of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 2, 2007

Got back-up? Entire issue of Business 2.0 lost two weeks before press time

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From TechCrunch:

The June issue of Business 2.0 magazine was inadvertently deleted from the editorial server on April 23, according to a number of sources. And the backup server wasn’t working properly. The result? An entire issue down the drain just two weeks before press time.

[….]

A 2003 article in Business 2.0 likened backups to flossing – “everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.” I guess Business 2.0 forgot to floss.

Ouch!

One can only hope that the Chief Technology Officer’s resume was on another computer. It seems likely he’ll be needing it…

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May 2, 2007

A picture of The Third Career: If we’re not blogging for business, what are we blogging for?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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By way of ProBlogger, this image is from 901am. It nicely illustrates the idea I called The Third Career when the BloodhoundBloggers were interviewed by Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide:

Q: How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

A: [….] Greg Swann: Practically speaking, it doesn’t, but I don’t think that way. What we’re really up to is an idea I call The Third Career. Most of us came to real estate from something else, and, as we are wise, we know this is not our last stop in the world of work. My immediate goal for BloodhoundBlog is to make it the best-read, most-rewarding real estate weblog in the RE.net. Further out, I want for our contributors to be so well known that they can pursue other opportunities: Public speaking, freelance writing, books, seminars, television shows, etc. I don’t know that we will attain this, necessarily, but the goal itself is definitely attainable: Witness Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.

None of this is of immediate importance. Right now, we are dancing as fast as we can to do the jobs we get paid to do — even as we build this weblog, becoming better and more widely known with each passing day. Witness: BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will be speaking at Inman Connect. That’s two of us — so far. The chart illustrates the opportunities we can hope to exploit as we become better and more widely known.

Muestrame el dinero? It can wait. I’ve mentioned that I’m interested in repurposing the Weblogging 101 content as an ebook. I expect that, once I’ve done it, that will turn into speaking opportunities. Whether or not those are worth any money is less interesting to me than the opportunities themselves. If I can do a job often enough to get good at it, I can find a way to make it pay.

Here’s another, similar example: Steve Leung, whom I have praised in the past, has released a free 69-page “Silicon Valley Home Buyers Book”. The book is in PDF form, hot-linked throughout, so it’s actually more practical as a net.wired document, rather Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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