No kidding. Buy gas.
Here’s the Black Pearl: When you put a buyer in your car, make your first stop the gas station to top off the tank.
The marketing objective? To communicate to your buyer that showing cost real money.
Author: Greg Swann (page 93 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
One of the factors that unites the vendors who annoy me is that they tend to do things that are fast, cheap and obvious, then market them like manna from the heavens. Still worse is doing something fast, cheap and obvious as a hosted solution, charging start-up fees, per use fees and monthly hosting fees — which can turn into a boatload of money real fast.
The back side of doing things that are fast, cheap and obvious is that the product category quickly becomes a commodity, with the corresponding free fall in prices. The dipshit thing may not be worth having, but at least it doesn’t cost much.
Today the economy of abundance comes to Ken-Burns-style virtual tours. Documentarian Ken Burns and others perfected a style of cinematography that lends motion to still photos by panning across and zooming in on the images. This turns out to be a fast, cheap and obvious way to build cheesy little faux-video virtual tours.
The good news: These kinds of tours have always been pretty cheap.
The bad news: They’re video, even if there is no actual live motion, so they occupy huge amounts of disk space and consume big bunches of bandwidth.
The worse news: They suck. As with true video, they only work as virtual tours as the secondary tour, the back-up or the teaser. All virtual tour solutions suck, but the faux-video photo-based virtual tour sucks big time.
The purpose of a virtual tour is to get the viewer to commit to the home, and the only way to do that is by way of the commitment of time. Any real estate promotion that excuses the buyer after a minute or two — as all video solutions do — is sub-optimal. The ideal virtual tour will offer the buyer more and more tools to play with, more and more ways to “try on” the home.
All virtual tours suck to one degree or another, but the best of the breed right now is Obeo.com. You get the panoramas and the pro-photographer photos, the neighborhood information, all that stuff. But what you get with Obeo and no one Read more
So far, in 30 months since Zillow.com launched, precisely one client has shown me a Zestimate. I mention the site all the time, just as a matter of casual conversation, but only the INTx types know what the hell I’m talking about. Last night on the the phone with Brian Brady, I equated the Realty.bots with model trains: We fool around with these model train layouts because they’re interesting and fun — and then we get up and go back to our real jobs on the railroad.
That’s not completely fair. I’ve been using Zillow more and more in my own real estate practice, as one of my pre-listing tools. Because our current MLS system sucks so bad — it’s gone on July 28th — often I will go to Zillow first.
One thing I’ve wanted and missed at the site is Google’s Street View.
Guess what we’re getting today? That link is dead for now, but I’m not under any embargo, so here’s the news:
Even though it uses Microsoft’s satellite imagery, Zillow will also be adding Google’s Street View technology for exterior elevations of homes and views of the streets and surrounding areas.
The other bit of Zillow news this week was the announcement by Zillow.com CFO Spencer Rascoff that the start-up will not be going IPO in 2008.
The problem? All of Zillow’s services are built on an advertising-based revenue model, and it is struggling to sell enough ads.
“There’s an online advertising recession right now, and we are not immune,” said Rascoff. He did not show any signs of departing from the company’s advertising-based business model, or its eventual plans for an IPO.
Street View doesn’t seem to be turned on yet, as I write this. The IPO spigot may be turned off for quite a while.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology, Zillow.com
In a comment to my Parliament of Whores post, Erion Shehaj asks:
I’m having a hard time differentiating between an event such as Connect and BHB Unchained[….] Is there any real difference between them charging for a conference and you doing the same?
Now that’s an excellent question.
Have you been to events like Inman Connect, StarPower or the NAR Convention? Are they charging you for a conference? You bet.
Is that their sole or even their primary objective? To the contrary.
A trade show exists to deliver you to its sponsors. The conference curriculum will consist of sponsored presentations, with the sponsors attempting to sell you their products. Are these the best tools for your business? No. The sponsors you hear from will be the highest bidders, and the hosting organization — Inman or StarPower or the NAR — will actively prevent anyone from pointing out that the sponsor’s products are inferior to others available. In other words, a trade show like Inman Connect, StarPower or the NAR Convention is nothing but a shillfest, a carnival for bilking dupes, who come there to be bilked on their own nickel.
I know you haven’t been to the one Unchained event we have had so far, but what we do is nothing like that. We had one sponsor, Zillow.com, which bought nothing but naming rights — practically speaking as a much-needed subsidy. No other sponsors, no sponsored presentations at all, no trade-show booths. The bulk of the program was Brian Brady and I teaching the theory and practice of Social Media Marketing. We interviewed a few vendors as a means of pinning them down and putting the screws to them. Everything about Unchained is contained in that one word: Achieving the greatest possible independence for the grunts on the ground.
You highlighted this text:
rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income
Everything that Brian and I do is aimed at helping working Realtors and lenders hang on to every cent they earn. If you come to see us live, you’re going to pay. Electrons are almost free but atoms cost money to move Read more
I heard from a young military couple in Augusta, GA, looking to buy their first home. They have very good, very detailed questions, and they’re looking for straight answers. Obviously, a familiarity with the GI way of owning real estate is going to help. No fee on my end. Let me know by email if you can run down the game.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
The Unofficial Apple Weblog. It’s for posting only, but you should be able to handle most admin tasks from Safari. There are alt.themes out there that will reformat your weblog for the iPhone/iTouch screen. I’ll have more to say about these if we ever actually lay hands on a 3G iPhone. More at WordPress.org.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
I’m way behind on introductions, but time marches on. Today we’re adding Thomas Hall to the roster. He is the creator of a weblog called It ain’t all Big Hair and Cadillacs, and that little bit of insolence by itself is more than enough to qualify him for membership in the pack.
Here’s Thomas speaking in his own behalf:
I am truly a frustrated management consultant who sells real estate. I am at a certain point in my “career” in that I want to be more involved in the mindshare of real estate technology while continuing to be a practitioner. I have clear ideas about the role of technology in real estate — I believe the basic model needs a rework, but I am firmly entrenched in finding better ways for realtors to work with consumers. I don’t think technology replaces the role of an agent — it should enhance it.
Smart guy. Good writer. A Bloodhound kind of attitude. Let’s see how he howls.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Q: What’s the difference between cows and Realtors?
A: When they get the urge to be milked, cows don’t fly to trade shows at their own expense, wandering from booth to booth with their udders out.
Well. I certainly feel vindicated. The RSSPieces clusterfrolic is further proof of the advice I gave about dealing with vendors a year ago:
1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices
BloodhoundBlog has been vindicated much more than I expected this year. On issue after issue, we’re the only national real estate voice to be heard on the topic:
- The NAR cartel and how to supplant it
- Trulia.com’s butt-surfing of its own listing partners
- The attempted censorship of Vlad Zablotskyy by ePerks.com
- The vendorslut venality of Inman.com and Realtor magazine
- Realtor.com’s simultaneous betrayal of listing agents and its forfeiture of the preeminent position in real estate search
- The continued predation of Realtors and lenders by Chokepoint Charlies who bring nothing but their toll booths to the real estate transaction
In March, I noted that much of the RE.net had gotten in bed with Brad Inman. Minions of the NAR — I called them the “nice niche” and Teri Lussier is turning it into a meme — have made their incursions as well. The result is that, at the national level, we are the only consistent voice left for consumers and for the grunts on the ground, the people who actually do real estate — rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income.
We are what we are, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I just didn’t expect to have the entire battlefield abandoned to us. Obviously we can more than bear the load. I worried for a while about Vlad’s Legal Defense fund, but we’ve more than covered what we’ve needed so far. For a time I was mildly dismayed that too much of the wired world of real estate seems, per Emerson, “to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression” — but that certainly doesn’t describe anything that happens here.
Real estate is a vendorslut industry, Read more
I mentioned the Saturday Afternoon Marketing Circle yesterday. Richard Riccelli, Jeff Brown, Teri Lussier and I have been talking about an ugly marketing problem and how to get around it. I left off last night with this:
You can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error. You can only persuade people who are listening to you.
I could go further than that to say that people only change their behavior in significant ways when the pain of their errors exceeds their inertia in emending them. In that respect, this real estate market is a good friend to Realtors like us, who intend to do a whole lot more to earn the business. In a normal market, no one is listening. Right now, a lot of people are tuned into the idea of better and worse results.
That notwithstanding, Teri offers up this observation to the idea that “you can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error”:
Why not? I’m not being a snot, I really don’t understand why you’d say this. Can’t great (legendary) marketing overcome a wide variety of objections?
We want to teach salesmanship at Unchained in Orlando, and this question illustrates why we want to cover this stuff. To wit:
An objection is a buying sign.
If someone raises an objection to something you’ve said, they’re not only already listening to you, they’re listening hard. If you can pull out every objection and address them satisfactorily, you’ll make a sale. In many ways objections are better than placid acceptance, since the placidity may be masking unstated objections.
But that’s not what Teri and I are talking about. The issue is this: How do you get the attention of people who are already consciously or subconsciously convinced that they don’t want to hear what you have to say?
Teri put it this way in our discussion:
So your weakness is not marketing listed homes, but marketing to convince the seller to do things your way from the beginning.
But exactly. Our efforts are remarkable. Our results, even in this market, have been very strong compared to the agents we compete against. But as I discussed with Jeff the other day, Read more
Dan Green is a great believer in the power of the media to promote a business, where I am quite a bit more skeptical. He asked me once about the commercial value of my column in the Arizona Republic. Quoting former Vice President John Nance Garner on the value of that elective office, I said, “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Dan loves the mot juste — and I will promise you that, in reality, Garner was more redolent in his retort. But: We just did the math lately and it turns out I’m wrong. The Republic column is worth $1,800 an hour — while I’m writing it.
The essence of good writing — the gist of the mot juste — is to sweep the reader along with you as you go. The corpus of writing is enshrouded in rules, but the rules don’t mean anything if the reader doesn’t care enough to participate. It’s a tragedy to be ignored entirely, but it seems to me still worse to be missed — to be skimmed and scanned and dismissed without ever having been read. I play the way I do, when I write — not as prose, not even as poetry, but as a kind of scat music where the sounds and the meanings of the words play off of each other like kittens and a butterfly on opposite sides of a window — I play this way both to reward attention and to penalize inattention. If you don’t read me with your whole mind, you won’t get it — and that’s the idea.
This is writing about writing, the most perfectly human action there is, and this is the one place you can turn to in the RE.net where the minds are serious enough to write about writing. Teri Lussier was talking about our archives, and I wish we had some organization to them. I wish I could send you off just to all of the many posts we have written about writing — some our own work, some extended quotations from giants of English literature.
There’s this, at least, Read more
“The shame of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue onely thereby were disgrac’d: But as the Image of a King in his Seale ill-represented is not so much a blemish to the waxe, or the Signet that seal’d it, as to the Prince it representeth, so disordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his Elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties. Negligent speech doth not onely discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance. If it be so then in words, which fly and ’scape censure, and where one good Phrase asks pardon for many incongruities and faults, how then shall he be thought wise whose penning is thin and shallow? How shall you look for wit from him whose leasure and head, assisted with the examination of his eyes, yeeld you no life or sharpnesse in his writing?” –Ben Jonson