BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 154 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

April 2, 2007

Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I am a hardliner on the subject of reform in the real estate industry. Over the last nine months, I have written at great length about, among other things, the skill-set required to survive in the future of full-service real estate, empowering buyers, dual agency, how the NAR makes war on the free enterprise system, divorcing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listing agent’s fee, rebuilding the MLS without the co-brokerage fee, eliminating the IRS safe-harbor for real estate brokers to induce them to take responsibility for managing head-count, and getting rid of real estate licensing laws — or at least the broker’s level of licensing — to promote better competition among agents and better due diligence among consumers in hiring agents. There’s all that, plus much, much more.

Why am I going through my bona fides as a reformer? Because I am about to denounce a failed, flawed, fractured, false reform that is to be proposed today by Redfin.com. At first blush, this “Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights” sounds like a good thing — and it easily could have been a good thing. Instead, it uses a treacly moral suasion and calls for new legislation to ram the corrupt Redfin style of doing business down everyone’s throats.

Start at the beginning. Yesterday, Kris Berg, Ardell DellaLoggia, Kevin Boer and I had this email from Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman:

Hope you’re having a good weekend. We wanted to let you know, under embargo until tomorrow at 9 a.m. (or whenever Inman goes live with the news), that we’re launching a program on Monday called the consumer bill of rights.

It doesn’t argue the issue of commission rates; we don’t consider it our business what others charge. It mostly focuses on simple reforms that would ensure that consumers get complete and open access to information about properties and the process of buying or selling properties.

The reason we’re asking you guys about it is that we want other brokers to support these rights. This is something constructive and positive, not antagonizing and negative — which itself is a result of coaching you’ve given us.
Read more

April 1, 2007

Ask the Broker asks the audience: What should a brand new agent do to get traction?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is another Ask the Broker question best thrown out to everyone:

It looks like I did Project Blogger one better. I actually hired on a new agent yesterday. As in brand new. The guy is an attorney, formerly in-house counsel for a non-profit, he just got his real estate license and wanted to hang it with us.

So what things would you say to a brand new agent in this market? What are the “New Basics”? I plan to tell him BloodhoundBlog is must reading. But whither from there?

I’ll lob a softball to get things started: I don’t want to seem to endorse Tom Hopkins, because too much of his real estate sales advice turns on what I consider to be deceptive tricks. But something he said has stuck with me forever:

Am I making the most productive possible use of my time right now?

That may not be an exact quote. The point is to make sure that, when you’re working, you’re working on things that will improve your present or future income potential, not spinning your wheels. The other end of the argument is, when you’re not working, make the most productive possible use of that time, giving your spouse, family and friends your undivided attention.

There’s much more than this, of course. What say you? Should a new agent go hi-tech — or go door-to-door. Farm and pray for rain or pay for leads? Go it alone or fill a hole on somebody’s team?

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March 31, 2007

My short list of real estate carnival candidates

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I am continually amazed at the people who write for BloodhoundBlog. Day after day they knock me out, but it’s always late Saturday or early Sunday when I am most impressed. Why? That’s when I have to make my short-list of candidate posts for the week’s real estate carnivals. Cathleen normally makes the final choices, thank goodness, but all of the contributors have a chance to nominate their favorites. Here are my picks for the week:

That’s nine, and there are more I might have included. If you missed some of these, give them a look. Only one will be entered in each carnival, and there’s no telling if we’ll win. But win, lose or draw, we are good and ever better. Go see for yourself…

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March 31, 2007

Ask the Broker says: Ask the audience: Is now the time to jump into the housing market?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This came in as an “Ask the Broker” question, but it’s really a wide open pitch for any informed observer. (That would be you.)

So should second-home buyers buy now, or wait? Will lending rates go lower soon? Or is this the time to strike?

Have at it, if you like, but back it up with a reasoned argument. I have no idea where our interlocutor is located, so respond for your own market.

My own take: If you’re willing to buy aggressively and hold for at least three years — five would be better — this might be the ideal time to buy a turn-key home in the Phoenix area. Values could continue to slip over the short-run, but interest rates are unlikely to stay this low in the long-run. Waiting out the bottom on price could result in a worse buy overall, where hammering hard now on price while rates are still very low could put you in an excellent position to prosper when values start to rise again. Nota bene: Never invest money you can’t afford to lose.

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March 31, 2007

Want to make sure you can defend yourself from internet bad guys? Aim for the body, not the head . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is Tim O’Reilly on the Kathy Sierra persecution:

There’s an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so.

I’m not crazy about some kind of quasi-official clean comments pledge, presumably accompanied by a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The more webloggers look like Babbitts, the less I like them.

However: Policing comments in your own weblog is not censorship.

With the bogus legal standard, “Shouting fire in a crowded theater,” Oliver Wendell Holmes did incredible violence to two fundamental American liberties — the right of free speech and the right to private property.

You have every right to free speech at your own expense on your own property or on public property. Holmes invented his specious standard to outlaw activities that should have been — and since have been — upheld as constitutionally protected speech. Not surprisingly, the perverse standard he proposed is used ubiquitously by thoughtless people to justify all manner of suppression of private property rights.

The owner of a theater has every right to shout, “Fire!” on his own property. He has every right to host a “Shout Fire!” party on his own property. If someone is injured in consequence, he’s subject to lawsuit — but none of this has anything to do with free speech. It would make no difference if the exhortation had been, “Excelsior!”

But: You do not have the right to free speech at someone else’s expense or on someone else’s property. The issue in that circumstance is not the speaker’s right to self-expression but the property owner’s right to condition his hospitality on the behavior of his guests. You do not have the right to shout, “Fire!” in the theater because you are a guest of the owner, not because your right to free speech is being suppressed.

In other words, if someone is acting like a jackass in your living room — or in Read more

March 30, 2007

Success is contagious: Russell Shaw and the StarPower experience

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw insists that “success is contagious.” He backed up that argument at yesterday’s StarPower seminar in Phoenix. Russell spent much of his day surrounded by Realtors eager to infect themselves with his 400-transaction-a-year mojo. As we have good cause to know, Russell is boundlessly generous with good advice, so it could be a few dozen new millionaires came down with an incurable case of success yesterday.

Russell was one of the seminar speakers, and he did a killer 25 minute presentation on how to price listings — or how to price listings that will sell — or how not to take listings that will never sell. His overarching thesis is that successful people think differently, and his presentation stood as good evidence of that argument: He told the audience nothing they did not already know, but he forced them to look at it from such a different frame of reference that he had the rolling in the aisles.

StarPower CEO and Ringmaster Howard Brinton has agreed to share the audio recording of Russell’s talk with us, so we’ll make it available as a podcast when we get the file.

Cathy and I were both hugely impressed with the intellectual content of the event. Despite my first name, I am not a terribly gregarious specimen, so I am much more likely to catch success from a book. But every one of the eight presenters was bursting with good ideas. Cathy was particularly impressed with Tami Spaulding from The Group in Denver. So many good ideas seem to come out of The Group that I may want to devote some concentrated attention to what they’re doing.

Cathy fell in love with Spaulding’s ideas for a pre-listing package, and I immediately saw how such a thing could be done on-line as well as in print. There were a lot of other ideas like that, things that we think we can adapt to our way of going at things.

This year’s StarPower Annual Conference is in Phoenix. If you come to town, we’ll buy you a beer. And there’s an excellent chance you’ll catch Read more

March 30, 2007

Skilled Realtor bargain of lifetime

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

 
Skilled Realtor bargain of lifetime

We own 65 Internet domains so far. Of those, 29 are actually hosted on the Internet, sites you can visit with your Web browser. The others are “pointed” at the hosted sites.

If you forget that I work for BloodhoundRealty.com but remember my name, GregSwann.com will take you to our main Web site.

We build custom sites for our higher-priced listings, which accounts for many of the hosted sites. We also have sites for our Weblogs and a site we use to test new versions of our software to make sure it’s ready to deploy.

We are a high-tech real estate brokerage trying to stay ahead of the curve in a high-tech era.

Looking over one shoulder, we compete against traditional Realtors. But looking over the other, the Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded Internet real estate start-ups — make the traditional real estate marketing message harder and harder to deliver.

Is Zillow.com, or another automated valuation method, a useful tool for pricing homes? No, but I have to be prepared to show why, perhaps first overcoming my client’s skepticism.

Is a $199 Internet listing as effective as the full-service marketing package we bring to the table?

My view is that a skilled, experienced Realtor is the bargain of a lifetime. Under one hat, you get pricing and sales expertise, advice about staging and repairs, an expertly executed marketing campaign, a professional negotiator, thoughtful and knowledgeable hand-holding through the escrow process — and more.

Unlike a Realty.bot, your Realtor has actually bought and sold houses — dozens or hundreds of times. With expertise that stretches from little things, like hiring a landscaper, to topics as big as the Internet itself, the professional advice you will get from a good Realtor cannot be matched by canned Realty.bots, no matter how much fun they are to play with.

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March 29, 2007

Nine months on the trail: Whither BloodhoundBlog?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I don’t like mission statements, but I’ll give you one for BloodhoundBlog:

Everything you wish were in Realtor magazine but isn’t.

That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or the Specialist — would ever take on. We have three lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have two investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, weblogged or printed.

And we are nine months old today.

Our traffic grows month-by-month. In addition to the folks who see our work by RSS feed, we are routinely attracting more than 1,000 unique visitors a day on weekdays. We’re slower on weekends, but we’re right on the verge of hitting 30,000 visitors a month. Our readers take in just short of two pages each, on average, so a lot of what we write is getting read. We throw off at least 500 outbound clicks every day, which means that the sites we link to are seeing quite a few Bloodhounds in their kennels.

This is all great, but I want more. We’re building the Russell Shaw Sales Success curriculum, and, by the time we’re done with it, we should have something that will provide tremendous value to Realtors and other sales professionals for a long time to come. I have no expectation that Teri Lussier and I will win the Project Blogger contest, but I plan to make the course material I’m developing available via ebook to any Realtors who hope to join the burgeoning RE.net. Our contributors are becoming steadily better known, and this cannot but produce interesting opportunities for them in the long run.

Even so, I want more. I am very proud of everything we have done so far — and a week’s worth of BloodhoundBlog content is an over-scale pound of meaty reading — but I want to come to the place where a day’s work is of that weighty scale. I know we can do this. There are days when we do it already. Read more

March 29, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar scheduled for Tuesday, April 17

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw is is hosting the second in his series of Sales Success symposia for striving Realtors. The first event was a huge success.

The purpose of the seminars is to establish the most vitally-important points to be covered in a sales training curriculum, to be produced in the coming months in audio and video podcasts. Russell will address larger meta-topics and then entertain questions from the audience to unearth smaller but still important sub-topics to be addressed in the podcasts.

The second of these events will be held on Tuesday, April 17, 2007, at the offices of North American Title, 3200 East Camelback Road, Suite #150, Phoenix, AZ 85018. The event will run from 6:30 PM to approximately 9:30 PM, and refreshments will be served. There is no charge to attend. Russell will handle two meta-topics, followed by question and answer sessions, with a short break between. North American Title and Worldwide Credit Corporation are sponsoring the event and will make short presentations.

Who should come? A striving Realtor is one who has learned how to stay afloat in this business but wants to learn how to build a bigger, more profitable business. In other words, if you’re a brand new agent or if you’re happy with your current level of production or if you’re already a top-producer, these symposia are not for you. Because Russell is building the curriculum for a full-blown Sales Success training course, his goal is to hear from the Realtors who want most to learn the lessons he has mastered in his career.

Click here for a poster you can hang up in your office to let other agents know about the seminar. All the details plus driving directions.

If you want to attend, we’d love to have you, but space is limited. This is an opportunity to learn a whole lot even as you help other Realtors learn a whole lot — for years to come. Plus which, it should be a lot of fun…

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March 29, 2007

Late-night random notes . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I finished moving the last of our 29 hosted web sites today, and, so far, I am 98% delighted with the choice me made. The pages just snap, including BloodhoundBlog — which is one fat, data-sodden dog. We have some kind of DNS problem that is intermittently affecting some of our PHP programming. Until now, I have been prepared to write this off to slow or flaky DNS servers out in the world. As of today, I’m thinking we have a problem in-house. By Friday, I’ll have it worked out, and then I expect to be 100% happy.

I’ve had poor Cameron working for two days to solve a problem that may not even be his problem. It is biologically ordained, I think, that fathers and manling sons must quarrel, but Cameron and I spar not about cars or curfews but about software — right now about Unix environment variables. Tonight’s South Park was aimed right at both of us — family togetherness in the form of rude comedy peppered with net.references.

Todd Tarson’s MOCO Real News celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. Todd deserves accolades every which way. The depth of responsibility he feels for other Realtors is without parallel. Because he’s in Arizona, Cathy and I will get to watch him as he becomes one of the Grand Old Men of the Arizona Association of Realtors.

We’re at StarPower tomorrow, so I have a couple of entries set up in advance, to be posted by the scrupulously punctual WordPress bot. Because of all the work I did to keep the foul-mouthed flamers out, quite a few comments are being captured by the moderation bot, or even the spam bot. I won’t be around to deal with those until late in the day. My apologies.

I have many more thoughts on the subject of local real estate weblogging for dollars. Now that I have this hosting issue (mostly) off my plate, I can begin to implement some of them, as well as talk about them.

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March 28, 2007

Resource recourse: For the budding real estate weblogger, opportunities for self-improvement are everywhere — and every where is right here

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Seth says to write an ebook, and I think this is a fine idea. When we start to look like we’re done with the Weblogging 101 curriculum, I’ll go back and whip together something that can work on dead-tree media. This would not be the ideal way to work with it, though, since an ebook can be rich in links — including a “check for the latest edition link.”

One thing I would want to do with something like this is make it link out to richer resources. I can gloss topics, but there’s a lot of deep-think stuff that is much better handled by other people. At the ante-penultimate stage of revision, I’ll put it out for link suggestions. Real Estate Weblogging 101 could end up being an iterative resource, the half-way point between a legacy-style book and a piece of software: Work through the big print first, then pursue the links, then work through the arcane but massively edifying sidebar links. That could be very cool.

On the subject of resources, or perhaps the unexpected serendipity ensuing from web-based resources: Two nights ago before bedtime, I wrote How to make Google your weblog’s best friend. It was a small idea that I had been wanting to hit. I had the time to take care of it, and I wanted for there to be something new on the weblog. I don’t ever do anything half-way, but if ever there was a just-knock-it-out post, that was it. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and it took me no time to to compose and post it.

Serendipity came in the form of Mike Levin of HitTail.com. HitTail is a web site/weblog stats service that will monitor your incoming traffic and tell you what keywords are bringing people in. You can use this information to SEO optimize your site, to plan AdWords campaigns, etc. Anyway, Mike Levin coming here was cool, but what was even cooler was that he cited my post and its comments thread on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site similar to Digg or Del.icio.us.

Hundreds of people came to read that post. Read more

March 27, 2007

Egoism in action: How you can grow and prosper, at work and everywhere, even in the face of hostile criticism

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is email I had from Corey Hague, one of the founders of BuyerHunt.com. This is important to the philosophical issues I’ve tried to raise, and Corey agreed to let me talk about this in the weblog:

Well Greg, I am out of ideas, slowly becoming “zestless” and looking for some inspiration. A couple of months ago a friend and I created a website, www.buyerhunt.com. As agents ourselves, we designed the site with (progressive) agents in mind. Despite our best efforts, to date, most of the agent-derived response we get is negative and is often personal and unrelated in nature. And these agents aren’t giving the site a shot. They visit the homepage, make a quick decision and write scathing responses (usually in regards to the fact that we give joe schmoe buyer and seller access). All this after we got the “stamp of approval” from Inman News, who named us one of the best new web ideas for 2007. It just doesn’t seem right. I am a big fan of your blog, and am awe-struck by the manner in which you are able to hold your own in the face of often ludicrous and nonsensical banter.

Though I pride myself on being a young (25), determined, forward-thinking individual with plenty of family-infused and “real time” real estate experience, I am for the first time finding it difficult to brush off the aforementioned criticisms and personal attacks. I guess my question is simply this… How do you do it? You lay your heart, soul and ideas on the line and so often have them thrown right back in your face. And yet everyday, I wake up and see that you have written again, unscathed and unabashed. I want to continue to be a progressive, trailblazing agent… but am starting to see a side of the business that I would rather not be privy to.

Without intending to be flippant, I don’t notice things like that. In any sort of reaction to anything — positive or negative — all I am listening for is the resonance of reason.

There’s this first: The reaction, whatever it is, Read more

March 27, 2007

Going local? Why not go hyper-local?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Todd Carpenter at Inman News Blog:

A real estate agent’s idea of local my not be local enough. I mean really local. Not a state, not a metro area, not even a single city. Go hyper-local. Every real estate agent should have a prospect farm. You mail out newsletters to just these people. You focus much of your market analysis on the neighborhood. You might even walk each block, introducing yourself door to door. But hardly any agents bother to put that commitment online. Why? Doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve personally reviewed over 400 real estate blogs over the last couple months. Only a handful of them attempt to do this. I look at most real estate sites and see an all inclusive catch all net for Internet fishing. Thats a strategy that works for now, but why not take advantage of the unused Web hosting bandwidth you are renting to build a separate, hyper-local Web site or blog for your marketing area? The alternative is to let people from out of town, who know more about html code than real estate, set up as your competition.

I have at least three more killer ideas to explore on this subject, one good, one great and one insanely great. If you’re not playing along at home, there’s still plenty of time to get in the game.
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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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