BloodhoundBlog

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Author: Greg Swann (page 79 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

February 20, 2009

If I could show you how to leverage your marketing efforts to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of added value, added reach, added impact and added sales — would you be willing try on some new ideas?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Pre-script: Here’s one of the secret benefits of working at BloodhoundBlog: If you screw up in really interesting ways, Direct Response provocateur Richard Riccelli will phone or email to tell you what you’re getting wrong. I’ve recast this post in response to a very instructive voicemail from Richard.

 
I had an email from Matt McGee — I had had it around Christmas, too, but Matt was kind enough to send it again. I’m going to deal with it as a colloquy.

Cari and I were chatting last night about Unchained ’09 and we’re both curious about the way you’ve been describing it on the blog:

We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

Can you provide some more detail on what you mean there — the stuff about not teaching, but doing? For example, if Cari’s there, she’s not going to be able to (nor does she want to, nor will I want her to) FTP in to her main web site or her blog and start rewriting pages, updating page titles and other SEO stuff, tweaking keywords, etc., on the fly.

Why wouldn’t she want to know how to do this? It’s easy to do, more unfamiliar than arcane, and we’re going to be right there, talking about what to do, how to do it — and what to do if something goes wrong.

BloodhoundBlog was less than a month old when I first wrote about the skills Realtors will need to compete in the age of the internet. We each of us should know how to do these things, both to solve our own problems, when we need to, and to make sure that hired vendors aren’t ripping us off. A big part of the work I have done here since then has been talking about the kinds of tasks Realtors and lenders can and should be doing on their own — to control costs and quality and simply to make sure these jobs are getting done Read more

February 19, 2009

The bad news: Obama’s housing relief plan is a giveaway to lenders, not homeowners. The worse news: It won’t work, anyway.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you read the news this morning, you’ll find Realtors all over the country rejoicing that President Obama has surged into the depressed real estate market on a white charger, bearing with him an heroic plan to rescue everyone — borrowers, lenders and especially Realtors. No discouraging words? To the contrary. Some Realtors think Obama’s promise of $275 billion in mortgage bailouts does not go far enough.

Here are two important questions to put the matter into perspective:

1. By how many dwellings will the standing inventory of housing be reduced under Obama’s plan?

2. By how many households will Obama increase demand for housing?

Since the answer to both of these questions is zero, we can predict with certainty that President Obama’s housing relief plan will do nothing to relieve the housing crises.

What will it do? The true essence of the plan is Rotarian Socialism for lenders. Obama’s hope — probably hopeless — is that if lenders take a lot of small hits now — by refinancing homes for substantially less than is owed on them — they can avoid a lot of much bigger hits later — by not having to foreclose on those homes.

But the real problem — in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Sacramento, South Florida, the Rust Belt, etc. — is that the residential real estate market is overbuilt. There are more houses seeking homeowners than there are homeowners (or tenants) seeking houses. The real estate crisis will not end until supply is reduced, demand increases — or both.

Obama is trying to shove a floor under home values. But since this does nothing to correct the systemic problem — oversupply — he is simply pissing away money while delaying the ultimate and unavoidable market correction.

Want a true housing relief plan?

Here in Arizona, we could do ourselves a huge favor by repealing the employer I.D. check law that drove all of our undocumented friends out of the state — just at the wrong time.

And it would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

But those Read more

February 17, 2009

A big heap of Heap goodness: Revising my universal contact form to create Heap records, assigning initial drip campaigns to them

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve rebuilt my universal contact form to be Heap-friendly. Now, in addition to emailing you and the prospect with a quick follow-up, as well as optionally epaging you, the form will also optionally create a new Heap lead with the contact information and with the name of an initial drip campaign to be assigned to that prospect.

The revised form draws upon a new initialization file, which is called “HeapInitialization.txt.” This file works along with “HeapContactMeForm.txt” to specify the unique variables that apply to your situation.

So, for example, the first line of “HeapInitialization.txt” will contain your Heap account name, which is used along with your email address to establish your bona fides when we are communicating with Heap.

The next lines of “HeapInitialization.txt.” comprise the menu of choices you will make available to your users. This is the default menu:

Buying a home|Buying
Selling a home|Selling
Relocating to Phoenix|Relocation
Acquiring income properties|Investment
Real estate advice|Consultation

To the left of the vertical bar is the menu text. To the right is the value that will be assigned to that choice — and which will be transmitted to Heap along with the contact record. Ideally, that value should also be the exact name of an existing event template in your Heap installation.

You can edit either the menu text or the menu values at will, to reflect your unique circumstance.

If you elect to omit the menu lines, the form will revert to a text box in that position, and whatever text the prospect enters will be transmitted with the emails and epages. If you leave “HeapInitialization.txt” empty or delete it from your server, everything will work as before and nothing will be transmitted to Heap.

You can see the Heap-specific form live at our Phoenix real estate weblog.

If you want a copy of your own — guess what? Fill out the form:

< ?PHP $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/SendTheFormForm.php"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?>

It’s a pure geek thrill, but everything that happens after this is automated via Heap, untouched by human hands…

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February 16, 2009

Piling onto Heap: I’ll trade you a big bunch of CRM development ideas for an affiliate link click-through

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If your contact information is on any of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained interest lists, I spammed you last week with a form email that pitched the then-upcoming Seattle Unchained preview as well as the still-upcoming BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix event.

The form letter was sent out as bulk email from the Heap CRM software application, and I played a few games with the software: The letter asked recipients to click on a link that opened a web-based form that in turn solicited them to complete and update their contact information — not just name and email but also phone numbers and snailmail address. That form in turn fed its input back to Heap, in effect semi-automatically scrubbing our Unchained database.

The response rate is over 25%, so far, which is just astounding to me, but the essence of the thing was to put Heap through its paces. As I discussed a little while ago, I want a highly-programmable CRM solution that I can use to automate our databases. Heap seems to be the best solution for the work we need to do, as a compromise between power and cost–per-user.

I’m going to be talking about everything I do with Heap, going forward. I’ll make the tools I build with it available, starting with a new version of my universal contact form that will not only create new contact records within Heap but will assign those contact to the appropriate drip email campaign.

After that, I want to build code that will do a truly robust round-trip contact scrub, because I’m thinking you can get people who really want to do business with you to tell you anything you might want to know.

For now, I need some help from you:

If you are signing up for Heap, I’d appreciate if you would use this link. I will get credit in Heap’s affiliate program. We’ll donate the affiliate fees to charity, but with each new sign-up, I will gain clout with the developer. As always, I’ll be sharing every new idea I come up with, but if we can demonstrate that wired real estate professionals are a significant portion Read more

February 16, 2009

The ActiveRain hokey pokey: You shoot your left foot off, you shoot your right foot off, you shoot your left hand off — and then you present the audience with an invoice…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What costs $360 a year and puts you in touch with vast hordes of sweet people who cannot do business with you? Starting today, Active Rain will cost $30 a month for new members.

That’s a load of dough. If you want to host your own WordPress.org weblog, a perfectly adequate hosting account at HostGator.com will run you $4.95 a month. Toss in ten bucks a year for the domain and you’re still less than $70 a year. For $7.95 a month, you can host unlimited domains, which puts two domains at $116 a year, three at $126, ten at $196. For $360 a year, you could host 26 unique domains. Or you could get a BloodhoundBlog.net blog for free, aliasing it to your own domain name for free.

The demurrer from ActiveRain will be that they are delivering added value. But most of that added value comes from selling the membership to each other — all with advertising and extra-cost features piled on top.

I met many of the AR folks in Seattle last week. Very nice people, fun and enthusiastic. But if your idea of a productive use of your time is schmoozing with other Realtors, Twitter is (still) free…

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February 15, 2009

Making the Scene: How to create new public Scenius scenes

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about Scenius scenes, but, until lately, we’ve kept the scene creation praxis fairly close to our vests. I had documented the process very early for the folks who were involved in the original discussion of the Scenius idea, then shared that video how-to with other folks by email.

But we’re doing things differently than we were last November. And I took up the topic of scene creation in public in Seattle both Thursday and Friday. On Friday, I promised to cook up newer, better documentation by Monday.

I’m a day early. Click on this link to be swept off to a comprehensive site on how — and why — to create a public Scenius.net scene.

The site features three videos, including a link to the one made by Jim Reppond at Friday’s presentation.

There are also links to some of the pages mentioned in the first video, which is intended to be the canonical scene creation reference, as well as links to BloodhoundBlog posts on the how and why of Scenius scenes.

Let me know when you create a new public scene and I will add it to the index at Scenius.net.

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February 14, 2009

Living that Seattltude: Bloodhounds listening above the Sound

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Still recovering from two exhausting days in Seattle. Brian Brady and I both had a great time. Taught a ton, learned a ton and met a lot of truly wonderful people.

The Zillovians were excellent hosts, pulling out all the stops for both the BloodhoundBlog Unchained event and for REBarcamp Seattle. They basically gave an entire floor of their offices to the RE.net, with spaces big and small for people to get together.

Zillow’s offices are on the 41st and 46th floor of a vast office tower. I would marvel that the building has its own Starbucks, but so does every other structure in Seattle. Here’s the view, looking north and east over the Puget Sound:

Here’s a panel from the Unchained conference featuring Rhonda Porter, Marlow Harris, Brad Coy and Rich Jacobson.

We capped off the day with a debate featuring Glenn Kelman and me. The photo shown here was taken by Marlow Harris. Marlow also shot some video clips, and I may post those later today.

REBarcamp Seattle was a lot of fun for me, mostly because I just did my own stuff and didn’t worry about it. Here’s Zillow’s Drew Meyers delivering the convocation:

On Thursday night, Scott Cowan approached Brian, asking him if he thought I might have time to talk to him on Friday. Brian laughed at the question saying, “If I know Greg Swann, he’s not going to go to any classes. Just grab his ear and ask what you want to know.”

Brian knows me better than I know myself. He signed us up to lead a session on group blogging, then later sent me off to teach a class on setting up Scenius scenes (for which I will provide better documentation Real Soon Now). Other than that, I spent my day in small offices (with incredible views) going at things one-on-one with anyone who wanted to talk to me.

Notably…

Al Lorenz is building a media empire in bucolic Lake Chelan, Washington. He wanted to learn how to build a Scenius scene, but he ended up teaching Brian and me a ton of juicy tidbits about Joomla.

Al later drove the computer Read more

February 12, 2009

The Way of the Farmer in Downtown Seattle

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll be doing a different version of The Way of the Farmer in Seattle today. I know we won’t be able to do a lot of hands-on stuff, but still I’m keen to take on some practical, real-life marketing problems.

Here’s my syllabus, for which I have about a zillion open tabs:

  • Expired package, physical and PDF
  • Listing card, physical and PDF
  • Set up a Scenius scene
  • Engenu
    • Set up a single preview page
    • Incorporate that pages into a site
    • Add a day of previews to the site
    • Add another day of previews
    • Completely recast the structure
    • Build a site composed of PDFs
    • Engenu and real estate weblogging
      • Historics
      • Investors
    • Illustrate Beryl sites
  • Listing praxis

I don’t know what we’re doing in the way of recording today’s event, so my advice is to be there if you can. See y’all later today.

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February 12, 2009

Has real estate reality taken all the fizz out of FSBOs?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been fun dealing with years-old academic studies of the real estate market insisting that For-Sale-By-Owner marketing is just as good as listing with a Realtor.

It might have been, during the boom, when any idiot could sell a house. But it’s been kind of sad to watch people in our current declining market trying to sell by themselves — or trying to sell with the Help-U-Fail style of discounters — or trying to sell with the usual crew of spelling-impaired white shoe Realtors.

For owner-occupants clinging to the last of their equity, there is no substitute in this market for actual real estate marketing. The white shoe boys will shine you on, and the rape-and-run guys will beat you up on price once a week, but to actually sell a premium-quality home at a premium price, somebody has to make a sales effort.

This is what FSBOs normally do worst, of course. Even the typically-clueless rain-dancing Realtor at least gets the basics right, when many by-owner sellers are busy finding unique and original ways to get in their own way.

But the market tells, doesn’t it? A short bit in Fortune hints that the fizz may be gone from the FSBO highball:

“I used to get a phone call a day from people interested in FSBO Web sites,” Zwiefelhofer says. “Now it’s maybe one call a week.”

So were FSBO sites just flashes in the pan? Murray says that with properties harder to sell these days, sellers are returning to brokers for professional marketing help, causing the unassisted slice of the market to slip to around 15%. But he expects the FSBO market to bounce back – eventually.

Not all by-owner sellers stink at the job. BloodhoundBlog Contributor Richard Riccelli is scary-good at marketing his own properties — witness 214Calhoun.com — and here in Phoenix, the people most likely to adopt our style of listing tactics are FSBOs — a sad commentary on the so-called “professionals.”

But in a market where even well-prepared, well-priced, well-promoted homes are taking a long time to sell, doing everything you can to make things hard on buyers is obviously a sub-optimal strategy. Read more

February 11, 2009

How can you benefit from the sexiest search site in the Real Estate 2.0 world without becoming an employee? Redfin.com is going into the referrals business

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had this news last night, under embargo, but I was tied up with geek stuff. The Cliff’s Notes: In areas where Redfin.com has MLS reach but does not have its own agents on the ground, starting today it will begin offering client referrals to agents it has screened and whose performance it will monitor and publicize on its website.

What follows is a piece of an email sent me by Redfin.com CEO (and BloodhoundBlog contributor) Glenn Kelman:

Maybe this seems like deck chairs on the Titanic because it doesn’t fix sub-agency – which I agree needs to be fixed — but it seems like a step forward to us. I mentioned it when we increased our prices and offered unlimited tours, that we had one more rabbit in the hat.

Starting tomorrow Redfin is going to start connecting folks in outlying areas to real estate agents who work for other brokerages. This has been done many, many times before, and it’s something Redfin could have done years ago, given all the traffic we have in outlying areas.

The Redfin twist – and the reason we waited so long — is that we wanted to do in a customer-centric way that also works for agents. Here’s what that means:

  1. Data: We suck in data about all the agents’ deals for the past year and we survey all their clients and then we publish *everything* — reviews, deals – on a continually updated web page. We survey every new deal too. The reviews we got are mostly good – too good right now – but that’s because response rates are low for long-past deals with only happy people replying. We do show every no-response, and every deal where the agent did not provide an email address for a past sale (they can’t do that going forward).
  2. Consumer in charge: The consumer is in charge, choosing the agent he wants to work with based on all this performance data (see attached screenshot) & he can fire the agent any time – no procuring-cause, no leads, no fees for leads, & the consumer always knows what he’s signing up for.
  3. Referral fee Read more
February 10, 2009

Swanepoel’s Top 10 Real Estate Trends matter to me — and to real estate — quite a bit less than my own list of burning issues

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stefan Swanepoel sent me a copy of his Top 10 Real Estate Trends Report, which was gracious of him, considering that neither me nor any of the Bloodhounds nor BloodhoundBlog itself are mentioned anywhere in the book — at least as far as I could detect on a cursory examination. I don’t mind, mind you. I’d be amazed if we were cited. That kind of attention is reserved for the likes of Sellsius and Agent Shortbus — the biggest little PR3 weblogs in real estate. Every pundit or entity even remotely connected to the official world of real estate honors us by ostentatiously affecting to ignore us. And: Even then: We care a lot.

I did surprise myself by actually cracking the book. I had it last year, too, but I don’t remember if I looked at it. And I don’t want to seem to be hyper-critical of Swanepoel’s effort. It ain’t for me, that much should be obvious. I can’t think of anything in the tome that strikes be as being either important or non-obvious — or non-trivial. The whole thing, and everything and everybody in it, seem like deck chairs on the Titanic to me — but so does everything else even remotely connected to the world of official real estate.

Here are the issues Swanepoel takes up:

  • Nightmare on Elm Street: What if Your E&O Insurance No Longer Existed?
    If the tenth biggest issue in real estate is a FUD factor, we’re in better shape than we knew. Excellent reason for getting rid of the broker’s license, but, of course, that doesn’t come up.
  • The “Real” Energy Crisis: Factors Shaping Housing Values and Development
    Predictions about energy are as reliable as predictions about the weather.
  • Winning the Gold: Green Movement Gains Grassroots Support
    If we assume an energy problem, much of the green issue will concern money, not the environment. For now, I read it all as a fad.
  • Information Highway Congestion: Too Much Traffic Creates a Virtual Parking Lot
    More FUD, in this case I suspect fuddy-duddy FUD. We are overwhelmed by information. Our only hope for salvation will come from Luddite real estate brokers who can’t Read more
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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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

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