BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 71 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

September 1, 2009

Does your smart-phone hold within it the future of real estate marketing?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Do you have a smart-phone like the iPhone, Blackberry or Palm Pre? How much time do you spend on it? Is it possible that your smart-phone is your primary interface for accessing the internet? If you’re not there already, can you foresee a day when that might be the case?

It’s certainly that way for us, and we see smart-phone surfing as the next big wave in internet use. Because of that, we’re devoting more of our marketing efforts to promoting real estate by smart-phone.

As an example, we just added SMS messaging from a company called Drive-Buy Technologies. If you happen to drive by one of our listings, you can text a short message to a pre-set SMS account number and you will get a return SMS message with a link to a mobile web site featuring property details, photos and a link to that property’s main web site.

I’ve never been a huge fan of video as a real estate marketing tool. But smart-phone technology is changing my opinion. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is so seamless that touring a home by video — as you sit outside in your car — is suddenly a viable option.

Another use for real estate video on smart-phones would be a sixty-second neighborhood tour — photos of houses, nearby stores and restaurants, schools and parks. And that video might link back to a Google map of the neighborhood, with each featured landmark shown on the map.

We’ve also just added the SmarterAgent smart-phone MLS client. This is a tiny app that gives you access to the full Phoenix-area MLS database. You can search for homes any way you want — by address, zip code, school district, MLS number. Even cooler, the app will use your smart-phone’s built-in GPS system to show you listings at your current location.

Is the smart-phone the future of real estate search? Maybe not, but when you spot the house of your dreams, won’t it be nice to find out all about it — right there on the spot?

 
Spread the word: Click here for Read more

September 1, 2009

Urf! We’re back up, kinda-sorta, but we lost a week’s worth of data

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Maybe a dozen posts are gone from BloodhoundBlog, along with around 400 comments, 300 of them about forced versus open registration. We lost a couple dozen engenu pages as well, along with the photos that make them up.

I treated this as a simple hardware swap, but it turns out that our incremental back-ups were failing all week. I was insufficiently paranoid, alas.

Contributors, if you have copies of your posts, you can re-enter them. If not, they’re gone.

Everyone: You have my apologies.

 
Further notice: We lost BloodhoundBlog.net, and I mean all of it. None of the backups of the database will restore, so it is gone for good. I’ve not been delighted with it, overall, for the past few months, so I think I’m not going to start over. If you had serious content there, I’m sorry but it’s gone. If you had an older Scenius scene running there (I had several), rebuild it at Scenius.net. Very sorry…

August 22, 2009

Unleashing the power of internet technology on real estate transactions

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

We’re wired Realtors, and we always have been. The very first thing I did as a Realtor was to set up a web site to attract clients. We made money on the internet from the very beginning.

Since then, we’ve adopted every new idea that’s come around, along with inventing quite a few of our own. We publish a national real estate weblog — BloodhoundBlog.com — to help other wired Realtors come to grips with technology.

Because I’m working with a lot of buyers right now — and because buying a home has become such an ordeal — I’ve been working to make my technogeek status even more robust. Good enough is not good enough any longer. If I want for my clients to get the home of their dreams, my offers have to be first, fastest and best.

To that end, I just bought a new Apple MacBook Pro, and I’ve been outfitting it with the software I need to do contracts from anywhere, in the fastest possible time.

The Arizona Association of Realtors gives us all a program called ZipForms as part of our dues. In the abstract, ZipForms makes filling out forms fast and painless. It falls somewhat short of that ideal in reality, but it will do for now.

But ZipForms integrates with a web-based service called DocuSign, which permits me to capture signatures on-line, in the form of e-signatures.

So I can whip out a purchase contract in ZipForms while standing in the kitchen of the house we’re buying. Mrs. Buyer might be at her mom’s house in Albuquerque, while Mr. Buyer is in New York on business.

No matter. I can set up DocuSign for each buyer to sign the contract in sequence, then have it come back to me for my own signature, then forward the whole package to the listing agent. We can literally do the whole job in a half-hour or less — a big improvement over printing and faxing and running documents around to get signatures.

There are more new technologies we’re playing with. I’ll talk about some others next Read more

August 21, 2009

DriveBuy listings: Plug-n-play procedure, knock-out presentation

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We use the term “drive-by listing” to refer to the kind of listing you get with almost no human contact: “The key’s under the doormat. Look it over and tell me what we can get. Email me the paperwork.” I have five of these right now, investor-specials that came in over the transom.

DriveBuy Technologies makes a cooler use of the “drive-by” sound, though. BloodhoundRealty.com is an official DriveBuy client as of yesterday. I had built a sign on Wednesday, and I put the ad for that sign together today.

Here’s the sign for the property:

We’re in a sign-restrictive HOA, so we had to do things differently. On our normal signs, the DriveBuy ad-code would go on the big sign, along with the phone number and the URL for the web site.

The editing process on the DriveBuy web site was a piece of cake. Everything is template based, so, while your choices are limited, so are your opportunities for screwing things up. If you’re more adventurous than I’ve been, so far, you can learn the DriveBuy CSS and build your own mobile-browser pages.

But: If you do work with the templates, adding or revising your SMS ads and their respective web pages is a chore you can offload to whomever is already doing your Zillow and PostLets stuff. There is nothing there to to flummox your assistant.

This is the main web site for 1946 East Vista Drive, and this is the DriveBuy site I built this morning. Obviously, the mobile-browser site is a lot more limited (and you’ll note that it looks a lot like the demo page Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy made for us). But Cathleen had no trouble pumping in a dozen photos, and the page features all the mission-critical information, along with a link back to the main web site.

I’m in love with this already, and the DriveBuy folks are interested in hearing ideas about how to improve the product. Over the weekend, I’m going to play with building a page for my investor-special listings. My rating so far: Totally rocks.

August 19, 2009

Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies used the Bawldguy technique to promote SMS marketing by social media — and sold his product to the biggest-nosed sneezer in the RE.net

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Not to undermine Chris Johnson’s message about salesmanship, which is spot-on and very-much-needed, but Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies, in agreeing with Chris, demonstrated the value of social media marketing to the sales process.

How?

By posting a comment to Chris’ post, he drew attention to his product — a product we have been actively shopping for.

SMS promotion is next on my radar. I want to be able to add SMS marketing to our signs: “For more information about this property, text HOUND7 to 88000.” We got this from SmarterAgent for our MLS client (text HOUND to 87778), and we knew at once that it would be wicked cool to have as a tool for promoting our listings.

As with our signs, we knew what we wanted before we knew it even existed. Over the weekend, I web-shopped some generic SMS marketing vendors, but I hadn’t moved beyond the window-shopping stage.

And then today Ian posted his comment. And the product is precisely what we need, precisely the way we want it. The price is sweet — eight bucks a month per ad-code — and the codes are reusable. We’ll start tomorrow with five ad-codes, then grow as the business grows. For $40 a month, paid monthly, I’ll have something way better than IVR that delivers tons of value to our listing clients and to our buyer prospects. That totally rocks, and it’s a nice proof of the Bawldguy technique of comment-based marketing.

I have a feature request, of course: We’re moving to SalesForce.com as our CRM — probably next month — and I would love it if DriveBuy would devote some attention to direct integration with SalesForce. They’re already there with TopProducer.

Ian Greenleigh works on commission, just like us. If you buy his product, reward his enterprise by buying from him. The link at the start of this paragraph is his email address. His direct phone number is 512-410-0282.

(As a matter of disclosure, I have no financial stake in promoting DriveBuy. But they’re doing a job I want done, so I want to help them and Ian make more money. If you bristle at the Read more

August 15, 2009

Fishing for the details takes all the fun out of real estate fish stories

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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“You won’t believe the deal my buddy got on his house. He paid thirty cents on the dollar!”

“You’re right. I don’t believe that.”

“I’m not fooling with you. The house was worth $300,000, and he picked it up for a hundred grand.”

“It was worth $300,000 when?”

“Huh?”

“He got it for $100,000 in what condition?”

“Huh?”

“The house might have been worth $300,000 four years ago. And it might have been in great condition back then, too. What was the list price when your friend put the house under contract?”

“It was listed at $97,500. But the original listing was for $300,000!”

“I don’t doubt it. A lot of homes have been on the market for years. What kind of shape was it in when your friend saw it for the first time?”

“It was great! I mean, there were some holes in the walls, and some of the doors were missing. But it just needed some touch-ups on the paint. And the carpets were hardly stained at all!”

“What was the kitchen like?”

“Cherry! All it needed was a range, an oven, a dishwasher, a microwave and a fridge.”

“In other words everythng but the kitchen sink.”

“No, that was gone, too. But the counters and cabinets were in great shape, just missing a few knobs.”

“So some nice folks bought more home than they could afford during the housing boom. They couldn’t make their payments, so they put the home on the market for more than it was really worth, even back then. It sat on the market for four years, through a normal listing or two, through a short-sale listing, and then it finally sold to your friend as a lender-owned home. Is that about right?”

“You bet! He got a smokin’ deal!”

“Except he didn’t pay thirty cents on the dollar, he paid $2,500 over list.”

“Oh, whatever. Did I tell you about the trout I caught last week at Lake Pleasant? I swear, it was bigger than my arm!”

“Now that I believe.”

 
Steal this book: If you want to use this column on your real estate weblog, feel free. Just give me a link back to http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/

August 13, 2009

Hey Zillow, hey Trulia, hey SmarterAgent: Here’s what I really want in a smart-phone app…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Not for me — for our lenders…

Until lately, lenders and title people never really lived in our world. You could get ’em on the phone all day long — so long as it wasn’t Sunday, so long as it wasn’t 9:30 at night.

That’s changing, thank goodness, especially with lenders.

But: If I need a Loan Status Report (that’s Arizonan for a pre-qual form) at 9:30 on a Sunday night, I need it.

So here’s what I want for one (or more) of y’all to make for lenders:

1. Give them whatever kind of pre-qual calculator they need — with internet access, of course.

2. At the lender’s option, issue the pre-qual information in any extant state association of Realtors form, along with something generic and an auto-generated cover letter.

3. Email as a PDF or send an e-page with a URL to a PDF on your server.

As dumb as these forms are, and as perniciously useless as they sometimes can be, it’s getting to be impossible, in Arizona at least, to submit a contract without one.

So: If you would, please make it easy for lenders to make loan commitments.

Feel free to charge ’em for the app, of course. We all know they’re loaded… 😉

August 12, 2009

Introducing Tony Gallegos: The Mortgage Cicerone as guide dog

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Joining us today is mortgage expert Tony Gallegos. You’ve known him for years as The Mortgage Cicerone. Tony has just left the cloistered confines of corporate lending and struck out on his own. As a secondary benefit of making this move, he promises to tell BloodhoundBlog readers the unvarnished truth about the world of mortgages.

He’s been a friend of BloodhoundBlog for a long time, and he’s personally acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, so I know y’all will have no trouble making him feel welcome.

August 10, 2009

The National Association of Realtors, in perfecting the idea of Rotarian Socialism, not only sanctified the criminal violation of the property rights of innocent people, it also robbed us of the highest and best uses we might have achieved with our real property…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Kicking this back up to the top because it fits so well with the recent posts from Al Lorenz and Doug Quance. –GSS

 
I’ve understood since I was 18 or so how real estate develops organically, in a truly free market, so I have known all my adult life how horribly the real estate market has been disrupted by the idiotic intrusions of Rotarian Socialism. It’s all about who can steal a few bucks by strong-arming his neighbors, and no one ever stops to wonder what gets mucked up in the process.

So: I said:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

And Brian Brady said, in a comment to that post:

When it’s a 1-4 unit property, held for investment purposes.

Ten words. What am I missing?

What he’s missing is the definition of commercial real estate. If Brian owned 1-4 rental tuxedoes, should he call that his personal wardrobe? Just because the tax laws engender dumb distinctions, we don’t have to ignore reality, do we? Rental property — including a solitary rental house — is commercial real estate. It is owned in pursuit of profit, not as the residence of the owner.

So again:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

The answer is that it should not. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are going to suffer because — at the bidding of the National Association of Realtors — they took their eye off the ball. There is nothing rare about a tract home. If it gains in value ahead of other consumer goods, there has to be a cause — usually one that originates in the criminal use of force against people innocent of all wrong-doing.

As we have discussed, the precipitating cause of the real estate boom in the southwest was criminal land-use restrictions in the costal metroplex of Southern California. The land there is not inherently scarce, but governments made its development difficult or impossible, driving prices up faster than they would have gone otherwise. Investors falsely believed Read more

August 9, 2009

From The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell: Who is Socrates, Now That We Need Him?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Quoted from Mark Alexander’s wonderful Richard Mitchell web site:

 
When Benjamin Franklin was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decided to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he chose Jesus and Socrates. One of his self-assigned rules for daily behavior was nothing more than this: "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

I suspect that few would disagree. Even most militant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, of course, that they admire him for the right reasons. Even those who have no philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although exactly why, they can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young Franklin that he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for instance, or Francis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be imitators, although they do seem to disagree among themselves as to how he ought to be imitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any there be, are hard to find. For one thing, if they are more or less accurately imitating him, they will not organize themselves into Socrates clubs and pronounce their views. If we want to talk with them, we will have to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves become, to some degree at least, imitators of Socrates, we will not know enough to want to seek them out. Indeed, unless we are sufficiently his imitators, we might only know enough not to want to seek him out, for some of those who sought Socrates out found reason to wish that they hadn’t. Unlike Jesus, or, to be more accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine, Socrates often brought not the Good News, but the Bad.

Nevertheless, people do from time to time come to know enough about Socrates to be drawn into his company, and to agree, with rare exceptions, that it would indeed be a good thing to imitate him. The stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche was one of those exceptions, for he believed, and quite correctly, that reasonable discourse was the weapon with which the weak might defeat the strong, but most of us often do think of ourselves as weak Read more

August 5, 2009

Prometheus without forethought: Using the Bloodhound meme to bring clients around to a conversation about quality in real estate

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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My mind is alive with themes for BloodhoundBlog posts that I’m not writing — the Principle of the Yes Man and the Elephant on the Balcony and Prometheus the Mind-Giver. I’d write more, except my having written so much over the past three years is paying off in spades — in diamonds, as it were.

But in the comments to Chuck Marunde’s marvelous post on the ubiquity of the part-time Realtor, the idea of improving the quality of practitioners came up again.

We’ve been through all of this many times before, and a search of the archives on the terms “licensing” should prove enlightening. But this is the Cliff’s Notes on my own position on the topic: Licensing laws serve only to enshrine mediocrity by implying that minimum standards are adequate and sufficient. To the contrary, a higher standard of care among real estate professionals will be achieved not by stricter licensing laws, and not by the National Association of Realtors, but by the persistent application of market-borne pressure. In other words, a higher quality of service among real estate professionals will come about when superior practitioners raise the bar — and tell the world they have done so.

To which sentiment I will amend this addendum: Ahem!

This is the BloodhoundBlog mission, of course, and, at our third anniversary, I wrote about how proud I am that the word “Bloodhound” has become a de facto meme for quality in the practice of real estate.

And: Nothing exceeds like excess. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. So I’ve made a little button you can put on your web site or weblog, if you like, to spark a Bloodhound-like conversation. That much is the Elephant at the Dining Room Table: Your clients aren’t thinking about quality because the state and the NAR have schooled them to look for meaningless imprimaturs instead. If you want for your clients to be able to identify the better from the worse, you have to initiate the conversation with them. The buttons you see below can help you get that discussion started.

Witness:

160 pixels square:

We're Bloodhounds. We teach our clients to demand better service from real estate professionals.

July 29, 2009

Want a free GPS-aware smart-phone client to search the complete Phoenix MLS? BloodhoundRealty.com has one, thanks to SmarterAgent

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We signed up for our own version of the SmarterAgent smart-phone MLS client. We’ve been live since Monday, but it proved its value and then some yesterday afternoon.

Cathy was out with buyers, and they asked the most dreaded question of all: “What about that one?” Not every house with a sign is for sale, and, even then, most homes for sale don’t meet your search criteria. That’s why we don’t have that listing with us. But Cathy whipped out her iPhone and did a GPS-based search on her own location. Voile! Three bedrooms. Too small.

That’s not in the SmarterAgent marketing patois, but it doesn’t have to be. The software rocks in anyone’s hands. We had been looking at pure iPhone solutions, but the SmarterAgent tool is simultaneously more robust and more broad-based: It provides a GPS-aware MLS search from virtually any smart-phone. You can also search by map, by address, by MLS number, by neighborhood or subdivision, etc. The user interface is easy to navigate, and the level of detail on the listings exceeds many desktop-based IDX systems.

I wouldn’t want to use this client for showing purposes, but it’s a nice tool for buyers to use as they explore neighborhoods. And, as above, it’s very useful to working Realtors to deal with on-the-fly questions about properties. The best part is, if you follow through and inquire about a property, the phone call — and an email — comes to me. We have the email set up to echo to all of our mail clients, so we don’t miss anything. And the email includes the listing agent’s phone number, so we can track down specific information quickly, no matter where we might happen to be.

If you’re a Realtor working anywhere but Phoenix, I think you should get this thing. It’s a pain in the ass to get in Phoenix, and, besides, my plan is to suck all the oxygen out of the SmarterAgent space in Phoenix.

To that end, here’s how you can help: Write a post on your own weblog about how you intend to look into this cool new tool, and Read more

July 25, 2009

Why should you enlist a buyer’s agent to help you buy a home? Because you’ll get a much better deal — even if you pay full price

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Are home-buyers best served by the vigilant efforts of an experienced buyer’s agent? Consider a transaction we have in play right now.

The buyers are a young couple, about to be married. They have about $10,000 in cash.

With a conventional loan, they could put 20% down on a dismal starter home. Or, with Private Mortgage Insurance, they could put 10% down on a nicer home.

But with an FHA loan, $10,000 is 3.5% down on a $285,000 home. We can argue the wisdom of making so small a down payment, but the FHA loan program is the path to homeownership for millions of Americans.

And $285,000 is too much house for our buyers. They found a nice lender-owned two-story home in the suburbs selling for $169,000. The down payment on that home would be $5,915. But the closing costs would probably run to another $5,000 — which comes to more money than they have.

They qualify for the $8,000 first-time home-buyer tax credit, but they won’t get that until they file their tax return. They also qualify for a state-funded grant program that will contribute up to 22% of the purchase price — but which can’t be used for the down payment or the closing costs.

Here’s the deal we put together. We offered $175,000, $6,000 over list price. In exchange, we asked the seller to contribute 4% of the full purchase price to defray the buyer’s closing costs.

The down payment will be $6,125, leaving the buyers $3,875 in cash to pay for the endless expenses of moving into a new home.

And there will be about $2,000 left over after the closing costs are paid. This will be used to buy down the interest rate. The buyers will end up with just over 25% equity in the property for a cash outlay of $6,125 — all at a very low monthly payment. And they’ll still have their $8,000 tax credit to look forward to.

This is the kind of outcome a skilled buyer’s agent can achieve.

 
Steal this book: So far I’ve written two columns on this theme. If Read more

July 18, 2009

Unchained melodies: Stumblin’ onto the heart of Tom Waits

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’ve been tormenting Teri Lussier with Leonard Cohen. We can plumb for a new pain threshold with a selection of classics from Tom Waits. I don’t love everything about the sentiments behind this music, but I will always give it my highest score for having ambition, for daring to be something different from all the other crap that flows through your ears without ever penetrating your mind. The art that matters most to me is about splendor, where much of Waits is about squalor — but at least it’s about something. Give it your attention and see if it is repaid.

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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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