BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 90 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

September 6, 2008

August was a great month for real estate sales, but when 40% of buyers are pushed off the playing field, home prices could plummet

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
August was a great month for real estate sales, but when 40% of buyers are pushed off the playing field, home prices could plummet

We won’t have reliable numbers for a few days,* but preliminary results leave no doubt that August was a huge month for real estate sales in the Valley of the Sun. Not for prices, alas, which continued to slide by around 1.5% last month. But, of the bread-and-butter suburban tract homes we track, around 200 will have sold, a two-year high.

September promises to be a banner month also, with nearly 280 homes currently under contract. Not all of those homes will make it through the escrow process, but most of them will.

What accounts for all this activity? The single greatest factor is seller-paid down-payment assistance programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah. An FHA loan requires a 3% down-payment, and these grant programs permit the seller to fund the grant, along with up to 3% more for closing costs. The upshot is that buyers can take possession of the home for “nothing down.”

In recent months, down-payment assistance programs have accounted for as much as 40% of sales of resale homes, and as much as 90% of new-build sales.

Here’s the catch: Under the mortgage relief act recently signed into law, seller-paid down-payment assistance will be forbidden. The restriction takes effect on October 1st, but most lenders have already closed the window on new AmeriDream and Nehemiah loans.

It’s possible these programs will be reinstated by future legislation, but, even if they are not, it’s not the end of the world. It’s no great challenge to find a decent starter home for $100,000. And if buyers cannot manage to save up $3,000 for a down-payment ($3,500 after October 1st), acquiring a huge new debt may not be the best solution to their financial problems.

But the short-run prognosis seems pretty obvious: When 40% of resale buyers are forced onto the sidelines, the downward pressure on prices should accelerate.

The bottom line: If you’re prepared to buy a house in the Phoenix area, either Read more

September 3, 2008

RealtyBaron.com comes up with something new: Commission hedging

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Has SellsiusRealEstate.com (“Just like Craigslist, only not free!”) hit the Dead Pool? The weblog rages on, but the main site doesn’t even 404. The “About” page for the weblog has been re-rendered as yet another those-who-can’t-teach pitch, and, of course, Sellsius was a pioneer in the suddenly-popular practice of making net.friends in order to sell them out to advertisers. Perhaps these business models are enough to keep the wolves at bay. Sic transit gloria mundi.

But despair not. Even today, there is something new under the sun. RealtyBaron.com is introducing an idea it calls “risk management for Realtors.” What it is is a hedging strategy — akin to an insurance bet in Blackjack — whereby listing agents pay a premium to insure that listings are profitable whether or not they sell.

Worth a thousand words:

Oh, wait. That is a thousand words. 😉
 
This is not quite stoopid, although it shares some genes with stoopid. It’s a Realtor-milking scheme, beyond all doubt. It’s not quite as scurvy as some scams, but it does amount to you betting on your own failure, hardly the food of a good attitude.

I don’t completely hate the idea. But, assuming it takes off in sufficient numbers to matter, it seems to be misaligned to rational market incentives.

As I’ve discussed in the past, we charge a non-refundable retainer to sellers for similar reasons, to cover our front-loaded costs if the rug is pulled out from under us. But the primary reason for the retainer is to impose a meaningful cost on the seller for pulling the rug out from under us. We want for our sellers to have some skin in the game, to make cancellation an unattractive prospect — and to make sure they’re completely committed before we start working. The hedge bet does nothing to assure the commitment of the seller.

Moreover, as above, the entire plan is built around a bet on failure. If you as the lister know your ass is covered both ways, are you as likely to do the whatever-it-takes to get your listing sold? And if you are not, what direction should you expect the Read more

September 2, 2008

Tech talk: Chrome, a theoretical MacTablet, session tracking and a cheap and reliable phone-based amanuensis — is that too much to ask?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Chrome: Yawn. Firefox, OTOH, is coming along nicely. I now run it side-by-side with Safari on my Mac. Safari is still my fave, but I don’t rail at Firefox like I used to.

The user interface of the iPhone is actually a hugely subversive paradigm shift in computer design: Tapping, multi-touch, micro- and macro-spatial awareness — these are all new things under the sun. Cathleen has been hearing interesting rumors about this UI being the basis for a MacTablet computer. And Apple has an event scheduled for next week…

I mentioned a week or two ago that I’m having Cameron build a session-tracker for our web sites. What he’s working on will live at the top HTML level of our server, so that, if necessary, he can track activity from the same one IP address across multiple domains. In other words, if someone follows a link from here to BloodhoundRealty.com, then from there to one of our single-property web sites, we should be able to see every movement.

I find myself wanting something like Jott without the limitations. When I’m previewing a house, I’d like to be able to dictate my impressions on the spot. I’d also like to be able to dictate emails, weblog posts and miscellaneous memoranda. Is there anything out there like that, ideally phone-based like Jott?

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September 1, 2008

It’s September 1st: Do you know where your next paycheck is?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Time is physics, the stately transit of the stars and planets. Time is space is mass is energy, four faces of the same one thing, elegant in its simplicity.

The passage of time — or, rather, the awareness of the passage of time — is a human artifact, a man-made thing. The Greeks or their forebears gave us seconds and minutes and hours — elegantly composed of factorials. Days, weeks, months, decades, centuries, millennia — time marches on, don’t it?

Here’s my thing, and it’s something I don’t think I’ve ever talked about with other people: I am constantly aware of the passage of time. It matters to me that I get things done, so I am always measuring my performance against the clock.

Even moreso if I have set aside time to complete a task.

Even moreso at the end of the workday.

Even moreso on Friday afternoons, when I look back to see what I accomplished for the week.

And much, much moreso at the start of a new month, when I not only look back at what got done in the month just past, but also look ahead to what the coming month promises.

If you’re in straight commission sales, you live out of a pipeline, that’s understood. It’s nice to watch those paychecks coming out of the pipeline, but the haunting question — always — is what am I doing right now to put future paychecks into the pipeline?

Like many people reading here, August was a great month for us. I won’t know until I see the final numbers, but it may have been our best month ever. Certainly it’s in the top five.

September shows real promise, both because lenders are getting back on their bicycles and because Phoenix is suddenly very appealing to all-cash buyers.

But still… I look at the calendar and I think about that pipeline…

I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got to go to work.

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August 31, 2008

With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). There is a fuller review of this new technology here.

 
With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia.com or Zillow.com? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but this week marks a decisive change in the game: Trulia just released an iPhone application.

Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of other smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.

It’s hard to argue with the design premise: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database?

The ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency transactions, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.

But here’s the bonus that popped out at me when I heard about Trulia’s iPhone application: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. I like anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients.

The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus Read more

August 30, 2008

Living in the cloud, Part I: Rethinking our email strategy

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other day I went through our cloud-centered email strategy:

I have my mail set up like this: From my iMac in the office, certain categories of email — initial client contacts plus mail from anyone in my Address Book — are redirected to a unique iPhone-only gmail account. That way, I get echoes of the mail that matters to me, with zero spam. The iPhone’s mail account won’t honor my gmail Reply To setting, which sucks, but, as above, the advantage is that I have my important email wherever I happen to be working.

I thought it was adequate at the time. But then the power failed…

In circumstances like these, I have fallen back to SquirrelMail, a Unix-based server-side mail client. That turns out to be less than ideal.

We got the power back today, and I was ready at once to implement our new email strategy.

Note that this little episode illustrates why it is so useful to control your own web hosting, at least at the mail-server level.

Here’s what we’re doing, as of this afternoon:

At the file server, my main email account (GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com) is being echoed to a new gmail account I created today. That account is simply intended to be a duplicate catch-all for all my inbound mail.

My iMac continues to receive my mail and to process it according to the rules discussed above — provided my iMac is working.

Under normal conditions, my email will be handled just as described above. But in the event of a power failure or serious crash, I will still have access to all of my mail from any computer anywhere, including my iPhone, without having to screw around with SquirrelMail.

Our cloud strategies are all about redundancy. I don’t care that I might have to react to up to three copies of any piece of email. My fear is that instead of three copies I will have zero copies to work with.

I worked out a redundant cloud-based fax strategy, too, that I’ll be talking about later.

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August 28, 2008

Every picture tells a story: Orphaned lockboxes…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I see this all the time lately. The blue lockboxes are Supra boxes. They cost about $75 each.

The vendor box and the front blue box belong to the current lister of the home.

We do our homes this way, too, with a Supra box for Realtors, appraisers and inspectors and a vendor box for any tradesmen we send into the house — and also to have a spare key on the property. For reasons that seem obvious to us, we don’t put the two lockboxes in the same place.

The blue box in back belongs to the last listing agent, for whom the home didn’t sell.

I’d have to run the lockbox to know for sure, but when I see more than one blue box on a property, my assumption is that the previous agent has left the business. Otherwise, why leave a $75 asset hanging on the hose bib?

We’ve thought about offering $20 for the release codes for these orphaned lockboxes: A little dough for you, and we’ll pick up the lockbox.

A sad story, but it’s not the liquidator’s job to weep over the mess, but simply to clean it up.

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August 28, 2008

Five for the road: iPhone apps for the real estate road warrior

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jott. Jott is preternaturally useful, since you can just phone yourself notes from the road and have them waiting for you when you get back to the office. Here’s an iPhone strategy: Install the iPhone app, but continue to use Jott by phone. That way, your Jotts will show up on your home email account, but they will also sync wirelessly with the iPhone client. You’ll have your notes with you wherever you happen to be working.

NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is by now the de facto category-killer feed reader. The desktop version syncs wirelessly with the iPhone client, so you never see the same news twice: If you read it on your iPhone, it won’t show up on your home client and vice versa.

Mail. A built-in app? You bet. I have my mail set up like this: From my iMac in the office, certain categories of email — initial client contacts plus mail from anyone in my Address Book — are redirected to a unique iPhone-only gmail account. That way, I get echoes of the mail that matters to me, with zero spam. The iPhone’s mail account won’t honor my gmail Reply To setting, which sucks, but, as above, the advantage is that I have my important email wherever I happen to be working.

Maps. Another built-in app — and it made me look look smart twice yesterday. I’m very kinesthetic. I rarely get lost, and I can remember any route I have ever traveled. Even so, directions in real estate listings can suck. Having on-demand GPS mapping is a life-saver for a working Realtor.

Where. If Where did nothing but find the nearest Starbucks, I would still love it to death. But Where finds and maps anything that can be found — with a fast, clean interface.

Cathy has four pages of iPhone apps so far. I am very conservative by contrast. But I have two voice dialers that I’m trying to find time to train. If one or the other does the job, I’ll be sure to talk about it, because hands-free dialing would make the iPhone that much more valuable — to a Read more

August 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: If your web site sucks — fix it

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As I’ve mentioned, I’m building a dedicated direct-response web site devoted to pre-selling listing clients. Our main Phoenix real estate weblog does a good job selling to buyers, sellers, investors and relocators, the four markets we target there, but it is my belief that I can build a sales engine that can pre-sell and pre-condition homeowners in such a way that, by the time they contact us, we will be completely Beyond Competition.

I talked about a number of these ideas at Unchained in Phoenix, and we’ll be doing quite a bit more on this topic in Orlando.

Consider this:

21:28:40 http://distinctivephoenix.com/
21:29:43 http://abetterlisting.com/
21:32:18 http://abetterlisting.com/Presentation/
21:46:29 http://distinctivephoenix.com/
21:50:33 http://abetterlisting.com/

That’s a set of visits from one unique IP address. I built minimal session tracking into the site, but I have Cameron working on a much more robust solution. But what you’re seeing is at least 22 minutes of someone’s life. Not counting search engine spiders, this site draws fewer than six unique visitors a day — but they’re all like this. Twenty-two minutes is a short visit. People have stayed for over an hour. Others have come back for three or four days in succession. The site is not converting as well as I want it to — yet — but I’m seeing exactly the kind of user behavior I want.

There are points I want to make, but I’ll have to be brief. This site and our others are converting well enough that I’m short on time all the time.

But let’s hit this much, at least:

  • Your web site or weblog is a perfectible selling tool. If it sucks now — and sucks only means something with respect to a commercial metric, not because of some emotional aversion — fix it. Good marketing is targeted at specific prospects, presents them with a unique selling proposition and rewards the desired behavior. It ain’t rocket science. It just takes effort and testing.
  • Your web site is potentially the most efficient sales tool you have in your sales toolbox. It might not convert at the same rate as other tools, but its cost per conversion is incredibly low, and it sells for you Read more
August 26, 2008

Clash of the Titans: Women shriek and children cower in blood-spattered suburban enclaves — when Realty.bots collide…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s news and then there’s news. Consider:

A real estate industry study released today shows that most popular consumer real estate search engines, including Trulia, Zillow, Google and Yahoo!, offer home seekers only a small fraction of the homes actually available on the market — and that many of the listings are inaccurate or out of date. Real estate searches on these popular sites in three sample markets — Miami, Dallas and San Diego — failed to provide users with as much as 92 percent of available listings in their home searches.

“Holy cow!” you might think. “The mainstream media is writing something actually factual about the defects of venture-capital-funded Realty.bots! No puff, no fluff, just the straight dope!”

Contain yourself. This is not news. Like most “news,” it’s a regurgitated press release. “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?”

The study, commissioned by Roost.com and conducted by the WAV Group, points out the stark contrasts between different online property search methods available today and concluded that the most accurate source of listing information is the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The WAV Group specifically researched how popular consumer real estate search sites including Trulia, Google and Yahoo!, among others — which aggregate listings from a variety of third-party sources — stack up to sites like Roost.com, which are enabled by the MLS. The MLS is the real estate industry standard database for sharing information on local homes for sale and is available only to licensed real estate agents and brokers; all the listings on the MLS are derived from local agents and brokers. To serve the needs of agents wishing to make MLS property search available to consumers, MLS boards nationwide have deployed a standard called Internet Data Exchange, or IDX.

This again is obvious, of course, so it’s perfectly understandable that mainstream media mavens seem not to know it. But it’s completely self-serving on Roost’s part. The actual news in this “news” would be:

Trulia/Zillow available everywhere (even on your phone), Roost unknown to founders’ mothers

But when would you ever expect to find news in the newspapers?

In fact, in the cities where it operates, Redfin.com has the most Read more

August 24, 2008

With a new iPhone application and support for other mobile devices, Trulia.com is pushing the Realty.bot race into the cloud, but its new free weblogging platform may put ActiveRain under a cloud

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Who’s winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? There is a constant flurry of new press releases from the two companies, but their boastful claims often sound like a pair of garrulous amputees agreeing with each other that the two-legged world is off its rocker: “Five million visitors! Ha-ha!” “A hundred thousand new listings! So there!”

Does any of this mean anything? There are wonderfully useful metrics for judging net.behavior. Unique visitors, for example. Pageviews per visit. Time on site. Even better: ROI per visit. But these measures are not independently verifiable, and the guides we do have available to us are inherently suspect.

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? Neither company has gone IPO. Neither company has gone belly-up. Beyond that, your guess is as good as anyone’s.

But: Tonight marks a decisive change in the game: Truila.com is releasing a fairly robust iPhone application as a part of a site-wide upgrade.

What’s new?

  1. Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of Lightpole-enabled smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.
  2. Trulia is adding a higher degree of user participation in the form of a new, free weblogging platform. Any registered user of the site will be able to start a blog.
  3. Finally, Trulia is offering greater personalization of the user experience in the form of a self-customizing home page. Your home page will reflect “new property listings, home prices changes, upcoming open houses, median sales price trends, recently sold properties,” all of these based on your past search history, along with “relevant blogs and Q&As from our Trulia Voices Community.”

In truth, personalization might Read more

August 24, 2008

BloodhoundBlog sports new iPhone theme: All the dog, half the drool

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I installed an iPhone-only theme this morning. If you land on BloodhoundBlog from any browser except Safari for the iPhone, you’ll see our normal theme. If you come in from the iPhone, you’ll get a theme optimized for the iPhone’s (or iTouch’s) screen size.

This is the way BHB looked on an iPhone until this morning:

This is how it looks now:

The theme rotates as you would expect it to, so you can get to a wider, shorter, easier-reading page if you want to.

The normal sidebar stuff is entirely omitted, so you’ll have to come in from a desktop browser to see that content.

Remember that you can easily add a BloodhoundBlog button to your iPhone home page.

I have to work out an algorithm, but, last night, in a fit of ecstatic romantic frenzy, Cathy and I worked out how to produce engenu-like pages on-the-spot. If I can figure out how to move iPhone photos to a file server, we could produce previewing web pages from within the house we are previewing.

Sufficient unto the day: If you have an iPhone, the new theme should make BloodhoundBlog easier to read on the run.

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August 23, 2008

Buy low? Sell high? You can’t sell high for now, but prices are low enough that a buy-and-hold strategy could pay off handsomely

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Buy low? Sell high? You can’t sell high for now, but prices are low enough that a buy-and-hold strategy could pay off handsomely

Last week I met with a potential real estate investor. She’s an investor because she’s got the money, the credit and the will to dip her toe in the water. She’s a potential investor because she hasn’t yet been a landlord.

With new investors, I talk about premium suburban single-family rental homes. This is normally the safest, most economical way to start a real estate investment plan in Phoenix. That’s especially true right now, when the right rental home will be cash-flow positive from the outset.

But I also talk about other income opportunities in real estate, if only because land-lording is not for everyone. I would not advise a first-time investor to take the plunge in a large multi-family community or a strip mall, but there are plenty of other ways to take advantage of our current market conditions.

An example? Flipping. There never was heard a more discouraging word, but flipping has a horrible reputation because a horde of TV-educated tycoons bought at the top of the market and sold their refurbished masterpieces at auction. Now, when entry prices are low and trending lower, a slow flipping strategy promises nice rewards.

Here’s one slow strategy: Find a great flip candidate at a rock-bottom price. Buy it to own as a rental. Hold it in that state — with the monthly cash-flow covering your costs — until prices recover to your satisfaction. Then do the refurb and sell.

Here’s another one: Buy your cheap refurb candidate and move into it. Redo the home slowly, room by room, especially when the materials for doing a particular room are very cheap. Sell it after you’ve owned it for five years or more and take the capital gain tax free.

There is a common investment idea behind these strategies: Buy low. Sell high. You can’t predict when you’ll be able to sell high, but you know for sure you can buy low right now. If Read more

August 22, 2008

One for the dogs, one for my baby and one more for the road

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In the weeks before Unchained in Phoenix. I stopped reading my feed reader. I was wall-to-wall with Unchained work and wall-to-wall with money work and something had to give. I’ve read this and that since then, but I’m over 16,000 posts behind in my reading. Oh, well…

When I knew for sure that we would be getting iPhones this Summer, I switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire as my feed reader, this because the desktop and iPhone clients will sync to each other. Same subscriptions on both, but what I’ve read on the iPhone won’t show up on my Mac and vice versa.

So I added the feeds I really wanted to NetNewsWire, but I also kept the old set running on Vienna. Interestingly to me, since I made the switch BloodhoundBlog has added over 200 posts, an astounding accomplishment. Something in WordPress or a plug-in is wasting post numbers, but we are over 3,000 posts, total, on the blog in just a couple of years. Even more impressive is the depth of our posts. If your goal is to understand the world of hi-tech real estate, reading here will be more beneficial than reading everything else put together.

So let’s hear it for the dogs: The best, the brightest and by far the loudest voices in the RE.net. It’s an honor for me to write in such a company.

So far, 2008 has been very, very good to our tiny little real estate brokerage, but it certainly didn’t start that way. Q4 ’07 and Q1 ’08 were plenty scary for anyone in real estate, and I’m sure they contributed to putting a lot of people out of the real estate business. We normally go to Las Vegas at Independence Day for our wedding anniversary, but this year we did not. We were busy with money work, which was most welcome, but we were also gun-shy about spending money.

July rocked, August rocked, and we’re picking up buyers if not listings with alacrity. It’s time for Greg and Cathy to have some alone time. Even so, we’re still more than spooked about money, and we both have 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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