Two sightings, at least, in Ciudad de Los Ángeles…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Author: Greg Swann (page 163 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
We had quite a week at BloodhoundBlog. If you haven’t had a chance to stay abreast of the trail we’re running, here’s a summary of the week’s most significant weblog entries.
We added three new contributors this week, starting with real estate investor Michael Cook, who brought us The Right Time to Buy: An Investor Perspective, Out of State Investing: All Sizzle, no Steak and A Different View of Diversification.
Our second new arrival, Jeff Turner, is an entrepreneur producing video tour commercials for listing agents. His inaugural post was Lessons Learned While Watching American Idol, followed by a post exploring issues facing Realtors in the age of Realty.bots like Zillow.com: Disintermediation? Not For Me. Not Yet.
Our third new contributor is Norma Newgent, a Realtor working out of Tampa Bay, Florida. Her first post to BloodhoundBlog is Pack Up Your Toys and Go Home.
But don’t get the idea that our tricks are all a matter of new dogs. Every member of the pack did exemplary work this week.
As her reward for having won the Carnival of Real Estate, Kris Berg is honorary Queen of the Pack. With typically regal comical rigor (try saying that out loud), she brings us A New Agent Guide to Getting the Listing… and Getting Over It.
Jeff Brown is completely disgusted with blog carnivals, but that doesn’t stop him from producing first-rate investment advice. This week, he brought forth Your Retirement — A Few Questions, Is There Any Diversifying Alternative To Real Estate Investing? and Ben Stein Says Real Estate Is Easily Inferior To The DOW.
Dan Green presents an object lesson in the destructive consequences of seemingly harmless weblogging practices: Anonymous Posters Can Be A Destructive Influence, or How Communication Is The Difference Between Good PR and Bad PR.
Doug Quance is on a tear: It’s High-Time To Do Away With Referral Fees! Kris Berg weighs in with her own thoughts on the subject from The San Diego Home Blog.
Brian Brady posted another of his excellent interviews, this one with The X Broker, Jeff Corbett. Brian also brought us Mortgage Origination Is A Contact Sport.
Mega-producing Realtor Russell Shaw was interviewed Read more
…you’re not alone. The problem is at the host, and we’re working on it. For now, indulge us with your patience…
Further notice: Fingers crossed, we’re back to normal…
Today we added about twenty more weblogs to the potentially canonical list of real estate weblogs. Cameron also added code to permit you to mirror this list if you want to, although it’s not as much mirror as I want. I also want an OPML version of the list, along with a form on the page for suggesting missing weblogs, but Cameron gets mad at me when I pay him to do too much work in one day.
(Entre nous, right now he’s a Microsoft-style programmer. He believes it would be easier to engineer people than software. In essence, our plan is to engineer him to a Macintosh level of quality. Inches and hours.)
Anyway, look it over and let me know about any errors, duplications or omissions.
Further notice: Cameron has built a true live mirror link (for sites that have PHP available). See the list for details…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
HouseValues.com is laying off 60 employees. Why? Zillow.com.
Year-over-year, mainstream media job cuts are up by 88%. Why? Ahem…
The question I asked was: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?
But, but, but! Surely the work product of professional journalists is worth more than the random output of pajama-clad amateurs!
Worth more to whom?
An even better question, the first question I posted on BloodhoundBlog: If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?
Here’s an even better question: Taking account of the Russell Shaw podcasts — Parts I, II and III — and reflecting that there will be many more such podcasts, here and elsewhere, how much are you willing to pay for products like those sold by Nightingale Conant…?
And this is the third of our podcasts with mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw. This segment is a freeform colloquy between Russell, my wife and business partner, Cathleen Collins, and myself. We hit a vast array of topics, including Russell regaling us with a story about how he once confounded 18,000 “stoned hippies.”
The language in this podcast is significantly saltier than the other two, so a word to the wise should be sufficient.
This podcast tends to roam all over the internet, so here are some links you can use to roam with us:
- The ActiveRain real estate weblogging community
- MyHouseKey.org
- Real estate sales trainer Tom Hopkins
- Russell Shaw’s main web site
- Number 1 Expert web sites
- Greg Swann on digital real estate photography
- Searching Google.com for the best cameras for digital real estate photography
- Debunking Zillow.com
- Searching Google.com for Zillow.com
- A BloodhoundRealty.com single property web site that won a CRS promotions contest
- BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady
- Brian Brady’s home weblog
- BloodhoundBlog contributor Kris Berg
- Kris Berg’s home web site
- BloodhoundBlog contributor Michael Cook
- Michael Cook’s home weblog
- Brian Brady’s interview with XBroker Jeff Corbett
- XBroker Jeff Corbett’s web log
- About Rain City Guide’s Russ Cofano
- Russell Shaw’s DOJ v NAR argument summarized on Inman Blog
- About Rain City Guide’s Dustin Luther
- About Rain City Guide’s Galen Ward
- Everybody Wins, the story of Dave Liniger and the founding of Re/MAX
- Homes Illustrated magazines
- Harmon Homes magazines
- Susan Ramsey’s web site
Thanks again to Russell for sharing so much of his thinking and his experience with us. Cathy and I delight in his company, but the man is such a geyser of great ideas that no one can spend time with him and not come away enriched. If I might presume to offer advice to you as a listener, I think you might be profited by revisiting these podcasts again and again. I know we will…
Nota bene: Mike Price of Mike’s Corner taught us an easier way to subscribe to our podcasts, either directly (for faster results) or through the iTunes store.
Today we add another fine contributor, Norma Newgent, who works from The Dog That Bit Me:
Norma Newgent is a Realtor who lives and works in Tampa Bay, FL — and has never lived anywhere else. She has a degree in Public Relations, but prefers helping people buy and sell homes.
Norma has a dry wit and a very engaging style. Plus which, she’s a Florida Realtor, where agency laws go to take a vacation. It could be she can teach us what agency will look like everywhere fifteen years from now.
That makes eleven of us, which means we have enough for a football team. Lookout Bears, lookout Colts — the Bloodhounds are taking the field…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Here is the second of our three podcasts with Phoenix-based mega-producing Realtor Russell Shaw. In this segment, Russell discusses the effect the StarPower training program had on him. He relates this to the outrageously high failure rate afflicting real estate licensees and offers ideas about how Realtors can better commit to their own success.
Russell mentions a number of web sites, some of which are linked here:
- StarPower
- Greg Swann’s earning goals
- The anti-social personality
- Brian Brady’s interview with Bryant Tutas
- Denver’s “The Group”
- The Council of Residential Specialists
Nota bene: We’re under review by Apple to make these podcasts available for no cost from the iTunes store, but, for now, you can subscribe to our podcasts directly from iTunes by doing this:
- From iTunes, go to the “Advanced” menu
- Select “Subscribe to Podcast…”
- Paste in the link to our RSS2 feed, which is
https://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?feed=rss2 - Click “OK”
We’ll have one more podcast from this interview tomorrow, a freewheeling colloquy, with Russell, Cathleen and me taking on everything from the enblogged globe to real life for Realtors.
This is me in this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).
Recent refinancing can make selling a house costly
A buyer e-mailed me a question about a house she might be interested in.
At first glance, it looked promising: A newer west-side home in good condition. The price wasn’t awful, maybe $10,000 over what it should be, and it was well within what she could afford to pay.
The house has been on the market for more than two months. The seller was transferred and has moved out. These are harbingers of a motivated seller. The listing even says so: “Motivated seller.”
This is the prologue to a story that should have a happy ending, right?
Probably not.
The seller should have had plenty of equity in the home, which from our point of view means plenty of wiggle room on price. We know going in that homes like this are selling now for about the same prices we would have seen in June or July 2005.
Regardless of what the seller might want, the price the home will sell for will be set by the prevailing market — a buyer’s market.
So what’s the problem?
The seller refinanced the home in August 2005, taking out most or all of the accrued equity.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with this. Homeowners can convert high-interest debt on taxed income into low-interest, tax-deductible debt.
But if the homeowner has to sell soon thereafter, particularly in a down market, we can hit an iceberg.
The seller borrowed $235,000 in the refinancing. That will have to be paid, along with the marketing costs of the home, plus closing costs. The absolute minimum the seller can accept for the house, without bringing his own money to the closing table, is at least $5,000 more than the home is worth.
In this circumstance, sellers are apt to say, “But where’s my equity?” The answer: You already spent it.
We may pursue this house anyway, but if we do, it will have to be as a “short sale,” with the seller paying the shortfall between the purchase price and what is owed on the home.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, Read more
So: We’re hitting all 12 cylinders, with two grand slam introductions this week. I should think we would be a slam dunk for next week’s Carnival of Real Estate.
Except…
We’re hosting it. Not this Monday, a week from Monday.
We offered a long time ago to pick up the slack if a hosting blog had to beg off at the last minute. It happened.
This is a cool opportunity for us: Group blog, group judging. We have Cameron working on software we can use to manage the judging process with multiple judges.
We’re also hosting the Carnival of Real Estate Investing on February 19th, with Jeff Brown, Michael Cook and Brian Brady doing the judging.
Plan ahead. Be ready for us. We’ll be ready for you…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is the first of three podcasts we have made with mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw. Cathleen and I talked with Russell for around four hours, recording about two hours and forty minutes of that conversation. This particular segment starts with a discussion of Russell’s real estate career and ends with Russell discussing an effective goal setting strategy. He cites the film The Secret as an aid to understanding the issues.
Why Russell Shaw? Because he sells 400 houses a year — and plans to sell 2,000 houses a year. We all of us spend so much time looking for hi-tech magic bullets that we lose sight of the fact that real estate sales is face-to-face, belly-to-belly, door-to-door. Russell is nobody’s Luddite, but he is very proudly a champion of shoe-leather real estate. I think he has a lot more to teach us than pre-IPO poindexters who have never actually sold a house.
As a warning, Russell has a salty tongue. Children and people with delicate sensibilities are duly advised.
I’ve been building web pages and web sites for clients since I started as a Realtor. In the dark days of the early millennium, email services — especially AOL’s — were unreliable. Plus which, who wants to receive four megabytes of photos by email?
And while building a one-off web site to show off houses sounds like a lot of work, it really isn’t. If I had previewed ten houses, I would end up with a folder on my hard disk containing ten subfolders, each with the photos I had taken of a particular house.
In the Mac world, to get a list of files, you just Select All in the folder and Copy. When you Paste in a text file, you get the filenames in the order you had them sorted, one to a line.
From there it was easy to run two Search and Replace operations to recode the filenames as HTML img calls. Chop and drop that code into a standing dummy web page, type a headline and any needed body copy, and save the edited file under the name “index.html” in the same folder as the photos.
Voila! Instant web page. Do that in each of the ten folders of photos, then do it with those folders in the top level folder. In about twenty minutes’ time, I could build a web site full of photos.
Okayfine. But I can write all kinds of elaborate code from scratch. And, perhaps more importantly, I can catch my own mistakes. What about normal people, born into this world without a propeller beanie?
About fifteen months ago, I wrote a piece of software in PHP called SlideShowBob (I named it after Side Show Bob, Krusty the Clown’s sidekick on The Simpsons, and I am very far from being the first dink to think up this dumb joke).
Here is what the original SlideShowBob did: It took a folder full of photos already stored on the file server and built a web page from them, prompting for the headline and body text. We could do ten folders of photos in ten minutes or fewer. But SlideShowBob couldn’t handle Read more
Cathy and I spent about four hours with the incomparable Russell Shaw last night. We recorded around two hours of our discussions for podcasts I will be putting together in the coming days.
I have been planning for a week to do a podcast on the movement toward local content among real estate websites, but I hadn’t gotten the job done.
Fortuitously, Brian Brady phoned yesterday afternoon, and one of the things we talked about is an idea he has for generating locally-focused content. In the course of talking to him, I addressed almost everything I had wanted to cover, so I’ve chopped out a chunk of our phone call. Brian is very quiet in that section of the call, but it’s okay because I barely let him get a word in anyway.
A signal defect of audio and video, in the weblogged world, is the lack of links, so if you want to click through to the sites and pages discussed as you follow along, these are those:
- Teresa Boardman at the Real Estate Tomato
- Localism.com
- MyHouseKey.org
- Jay Thompson and Val Vista Lakes (I was wrong; he has four hits on the first page)
- Searching Google for zillow.com (we’re second today, sometimes third or fourth)
- Me on the idea of pursuing local interest to generate local leads
I haven’t even begun to sort out the recording we made with Russell last night, but I think it might break out into three chapters: I. The Horatio Alger Story, rags to riches. II. Why anyone committed to success in real estate can achieve it. III. A colloquy with Russell on hi- and lo-tech real estate marketing.
In the latter section, we’re going to come back to this same point: There is nothing you can do with passive marketing that will repay your efforts as well as active, person-to-person marketing.
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