BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 33 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

September 5, 2020

The sweet spot: Pricing real estate the guerrilla marketing way, to maximize the seller’s net – as soon as possible.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The sweet spot is the place on the bat that makes baseballs change zip codes.


I am a passionate lister, and I have argued forever that everything matters in the listing praxis – but nothing matters more than the listing price. And: As you may have noticed, I could go on forever about pricing, but there is one idea that matters to me above all others:

The sweet spot.

Deny me sports and gambling metaphors and I could not write, but metaphors inform by their manifestation: If you know your business – if you have a true empathy for the machine of your praxis – you know where the sweet spot is.

In real estate pricing, the sweet spot is here:

I arrive at a number that, when I see it, I say, “But of course.”

And at at the listing presentation, the seller says, “But of course.”

And on listing day, all the experienced Realtors working that area look at their hotsheets and say, “But of course.”

And the buyers who see that house on the first few days of the listing all say, “But of course.”

The sweet spot is the number that everyone knows is right-on-the-money, as soon as they see it.

What’s the benefit? A bird – or six – in the hand. If you hit the market in the sweet spot, your seller should have one or more excellent offers to work with right away. When you get the price just right, everyone knows they have to jump or miss out.

And the benefit of that is to surface the optimal offer. I believe that a well-represented home should incite multiple offers overs its first weekend on market. I list on Thursday early morning, just after midnite, to maximize my debut on saved searches – thus to invoke reactions like “Must see Saturday!” As I’ve noted, I disclose the state of play for cash, conventional and FHA offers in the Private Remarks (Realtor-only) section of the listing.

My objective is to identify the highest, safest, soonest offer. The FHA offers will all be higher, even allowing for the closing-cost contributions, but FHA borrowers often Read more

September 4, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Timing Is Everything” – except so is everything else.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Garrett Hedlund, who played Patroclus in Troy, doing one of the gut-wrenching songs from Country Strong – which is free just now on IMBD.

I love the granularity and particularity of the images, but you get to see the song being improved in the movie:

They’re arriving at the lyrics used in the the Garrett Hedlund recording, which are a substantial improvement on the original:

I could cite a number of examples, but the one that stands out is Gwyneth’s turn:

Original: “I remember that day when we first met.”

Country Stronger: “I remember that day when our eyes first met.”

That’s how good poetry gets better, and that kind of focus on mission-critical improvements is how everything gets better.

September 3, 2020

Guerrilla real estate marketing for immediate results: How to be young, hungry – and compensated.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.

Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”

I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.

I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.

So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.

I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.

The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!

We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive Read more

September 2, 2020

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

September 2, 2020

Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Got content?”

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of Read more

September 1, 2020

Unchained Melody: Whose heart is breaking in “Seven Year Ache”…?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve always loved this song, and I finally figured out why: The narrator is actually male – just as the actual narrator of “Angry All The Time” is female. This is not Roseanne bitching out Rodney for his adultery, this is the lamentations of the cheated-on guy.

Big duh, right? Who writes poetry? Why?

Listen for the games of the tempters, referenced repeatedly. Those are men pulling proto-PUA stunts. This is a beta-boy bitching about the sad consequences of marrying a hot-crazy woman.

I recast the lyrics to swap the sexes, and it makes sense to me. My guess is that this was a trunk song – written by Rodney Crowell to some degree of completion much earlier, then pulled out of the trunk later and polished for Roseanne Cash. An argument in support of that contention is the extreme simplicity of the chord structure, Texas Doo Wop.

I would love to see a slow, yearning cover of this by a male country singer. The story hangs together better, IMO, and the pain is more convincing. Built-in market, too, composed of all the people who love the original.

Seven Year Ache (as adapted)

You act like you were just born tonight
Face down in a memory but feeling all right
So who does your past belong to today?
Baby, you don’t say nothing when you’re feeling this way

The boys in the bars try to capture your eye
But you don’t say nothing when they’re telling you lies
You look so careless when they’re shooting that bull
Don’t you know heartaches are heroes when their pockets are full?

You tell me you’re trying to cure a seven-year ache
See what else your old heart can take
The girls say, “When is she gonna give us some room?”
The boys say, “God, I hope she comes back soon”

Everybody’s talking, but you don’t hear a thing
You’re still uptown on your downhill swing
The boulevard’s empty, why don’t you come around?
Baby, what is so great about sleeping downtown?

There’s plenty of dives to be someone you’re not
Just say you’re looking for something you might’ve forgot
Don’t bother calling to say you’re leaving alone
’Cause there’s a fool on every corner when you’re trying to Read more

September 1, 2020

The trick to pricing real estate? It ain’t comping houses…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You: “Where should I price this house?” Me: “How much are the buyers willing to pay?” You: “How am I supposed to know about the buyers?” Me: “Precisely!”

For a year-and-a-day, I was an iBuyer pricing algorithm.

When Zillow announced they were going into the cash-incineration iBuying business, I looked for opportunities to find out more. Amazingly, I lucked into a job doing CMAs for Zillow’s pioneer broker on the ground. What’s amazing? Until then, I had never done a CMA in my two-decade career as a Realtor.

I could and can price to the dollar, but I never did anything beyond reading the comps like tea leaves. Zillow was a huge gift to me that way. I got to work with appraisers, and I learned why their comp selections always look so alien to me. I did my best to teach them my way of comping, but I only made a real dent in two of them.

Their tricks were great, and I had fun playing with them. I had never in my life adjusted for anything, for one thing, but I had never ever crossed an arterial street to get a comp before, either: It was – and still is – a great big deal to get me to leave the subject property’s subdivision.

My biggest influence on them was time. Until March of this year, the price trajectory in the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun had been steady as a clock since 2014 or so. They were going back three months for comps, adjusting for time. I rocked them to a year, and I did not hesitate to go back longer than that. Better to have closer comps, adjusted, than a false confidence in more-recent but less-comparable sales.

Zillow was a hoot. The appraisers would do things I think are crazy – like comping one- to two-story homes – but Zillow’s minions would not understand why wildly divergent product lines – Ikea kitchens versus Sub-Zero kitchens, for example – cannot be compared for pricing purposes. If you’re looking for defects in any AVM, it’s there, the inability to reconcile proximate Read more

August 31, 2020

Unchained Melody: Telling the brutal truth about “Take It Down.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It has been claimed that John Hiatt wrote this song about cancelling the Confederate flag – but that’s plainly bullshit. This is a brutal divorce song, excruciatingly simple.

It’s amazing, anyway. I play it on the guitar, sometimes for hours, late at night. The lyrics work, and that’s why the song works so well, but the music works – brutally – just by itself.

Here’s a sweeter take from Patty Griffin:

And this is my favorite cover, from The Wailin’ Jennys:

We’ve always talked about music here, but I don’t intend for every Unchained Melody to be a tussle with a lying poet. But it’s amazing that anyone could miss the ugly divorce being dissected here.

Take It Down, by John Hiatt

Take everything that we have
Take it and burn it to the ground
Some things were never meant to last

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

I’m still married to it all
That ain’t no place to hang around
My love is 50 feet tall

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

I’ve grown accustomed to the way
You hurled us into space
I’ll never make that trip
Tears all rusted on my face
And I’m just an empty place
Where your love used to fit

South Carolina where are you?
We were once lost and now we’re found
The war is over, the battle’s through

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

August 31, 2020

The money-making secret to real estate? Socialize the risks to the seller. The #iBuyers are just now catching that clue – ineptly, as always.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Yes, I’m taking a cut on the sale of an asset I didn’t have to buy, first. But you are getting a real estate marketing expert you don’t even have to pay for until I’ve already delivered the goods.”

This has been a slow-rolling epiphany on the part of the iBuyers. I’ve snarked about it here and there, but that’s all, so far. I wrote a ton about iBuying last Summer, but by now it all seems quite a bit less urgent. There are a lot more of them now, for one thing, and they sell like a niche offering – Ug-buys-ugly-houses with swankier web sites. Much worse, dumbasses who already could not evaluate properties are all at sea trying to price into dizzyingly volatile, madly divergent markets. And I thought they were screwed before 2020 came along…

So what’s their solution?

Socialize the risks to the sellers, of course.

After only eight years of pissing away investor funds brokering real estate without a business model, OpenDoor has discovered real estate brokerage: I sell it but you own it, and all I get is a sales commission – and even then only if I get the property sold and the transaction closed. Sucks to be the broker? It can – if the broker sucks. But the upside is that the broker pays only his marketing costs, with the seller bearing all of the ongoing carrying costs.

I sell fast with almost no costs on my end, so this matters less to me that it might to, say, iBuyers, who have demonstrated repeatedly that they can cling to inventory long after buyer feeding frenzies have devoured everything else. Offloading months and months of carrying costs onto the seller might actually point OpenDoor to a path to profitability – someday.

In passing: OfferPad is already cross-selling traditional listings, and, of course, this has been Redfin’s iBuying pitch all along.

And that pitch is what?

“You can either sacrifice your equity for quick cash, or you can risk your time, money and equity on the MLS.”

They won’t say it that way, but that is the actual alternative being Read more

August 30, 2020

Torn from today’s headlines? Here there be monsters – everywhere! – but why?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy. Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.”

I swear I have sound reasons for talking about Nine Empathies – specifically the idea of an empathy for the transaction, which could not be closer to any closer’s heart. But today I read Chapter 8 – Empathy for the monster – and it whispered to me in ominous tones. I’ve documented the origins of human character, but this as close as I have come to explicating the monstrous malice we are seeing everywhere just now.

tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:

The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.

This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.

Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:

Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is Read more

August 29, 2020

My 7 magic laws of done: How to finish the things you start – quickly, completely and with style.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Genius is fueled by midnight oil – by hours and hours of focused, solitary effort. 
 
Photo by: Raffaele Camardella

There is a book of mine that I am going to bug you to read – Nine empathies. Here’s something funny about that book:

I wrote it on a Saturday, six years ago today.

It’s not very long, only about a 90-minute read, and I only wrote about two-thirds of the revised length of the book on that Saturday. But I wrote the whole book, start to finish, with subsequent revisions all being interstitial – additions between the lines. I wrote a book that I could have shipped on Saturday, and in fact I did ship it to Amazon’s servers on Monday, long before I was all-the-way happy with it. I shipped successive revisions twice a day after that, until I called Thursday morning’s version the golden master. Then I said, “Hey look. I’m done!” – but in my mind I had been done since the day I started.

What is it that I’m telling you?

I don’t work like you. Most of the people who read me are going to be Cs or Ss in the DISC system. I’m much too wordy for my fellow Ds – and I’m only wordy because I see words as a currency, rather than as a distraction. Even so, I would much rather write a book than read one. I tend to work more outrageously even than other Ds, but my style of working is completely alien to Cs.

I wrote in ten hours what a high-C would have agonized over for ten months – or ten years. Worse, I took off with almost no plan – twelve lines of notes – knowing that I was at least two full epiphanies short of a revelation. “Welcome to Seat-Of-Our-Pants Airlines. If we can’t get you there on time – you’ll never live to tell about it.”

To say the truth, my kind of productivity annoys high-Cs, because it shouldn’t be possible to do this much this well this quickly. They are equally alien to me, in that I can’t fathom Read more

August 29, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Sisters of Mercy” – because Leonard Cohen deserves better than this.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So: Leonard Cohen wrote a song called “Hallelujah.” People hear what they want to hear, so they think it’s a religious song, when in fact it is a distant and self-absolving lamentation of a broken relationship. Cohen later rewrote the song as a much sexier despairing of what would seem to be an ongoing divorce. Arousing gonad references in the second act, but no religion. The version of the song you are probably familiar with is a mashup of the two, associated with Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and many others: A more mature fatalism about all sexual relationships, but still no religion.

So you hear it everywhere as if it were a hymn: Church and funerals, of course, but anywhere people want to be solemn together. (Heads-up, y’all: “If It Be Your Will.”) Just this week, we heard it as a part of the opera performances bookending Donald Trump’s acceptance of the GOP nomination Thursday night.

Opera!

I love Leonard Cohen, and I love every version of that song – especially the juicy ones. But: No religion. And literally for heaven’s sake, please: No opera.

It gets worse.

While Leonard Cohen was an unfailingly kind man – wry and fatalistic but gentle and loving with everyone – the crypt-keepers who presume to speak for him from beyond the grave are made of different stuff.

The Daily Mail:

The estate of Leonard Cohen said on Friday it was considering legal action over the use of the Canadian singer’s ‘Hallelujah’ at the Republican National Convention, calling it a brazen attempt to politicize the song.

First, I’m sure the Trump campaign is on sound legal footing. All of these commercialized artists bitch about the generic-whore contracts they sign with ASCAP/BMI, but they are nevertheless generic whores, open-for-business to all paying customers. If you don’t want your content licensed, don’t license it.

Second, there is no advantage to Leonard Cohen’s cashiers to pissing off half his audience. I see zero upside to these futile displays.

The laid back Tom Petty turns out to be pretty bitchy in death, too, and Neil Young didn’t even have to die to manifest his inner harridan. But it Read more

August 28, 2020

Why would Zillow abandon the all-time perfect real estate marketing tagline?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to hear my most perfect real estate marketing image? I’ve never seen this anywhere, except in my mind’s eye. It goes like this:

A little girl and her golden retriever are racing out the front door of their home. Why? Because “Daddy’s home!” – that’s why.

That’s it: Kid, dog, dad, with mom smiling proudly from the doorway. That’s The American Dream, circa 1955, but that is still the idyll we imagine when we think of home. It’s not simply a structure, not even merely a domicile. It’s Christmas and Independence Day, new babies and new puppies, tire swings and bedtime stories. Home is hope, the place where everything we love can thrive.

So tell me, if you can, what gives with Zillow?

Current tagline: “Home has never been more important.” That’s COVID FUD, I guess. The image is of a split-ranch home inhabited by vaguely visible people living widely-separated lives. I doubt anyone thinks that’s selling anything.

Recent tagline: “Reimagine home.” Say what? That dollop of word salad was intended to explain The Incumbent’s iBuyer business – by which Zillow reimagined profitability with a flame-thrower. The word “reimagine” itself has creepy Marxist connotations: As we have learned of late, “reimagine policing” turns out to mean “shut up or else!” Even leaving college-acquired SJW-ism aside, what needs to be “reimagined” about home?

So what did they have before that?

“Find your way home.”

And that would be simply perfect.

I Googled up old images with that tagline, and the photos are all pretty generic. But the tagline itself is beyond improvement: The aspirational quest is the literal function of the website. You simply cannot do better than that.

Why would they walk away from that? And why don’t they do a better job of selling that idea with images?

My takeaways? Billionaires are boobs. And marketing is for guerillas.

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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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