BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 94 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

July 16, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Custom yard signs in English and Spanish

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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These signs don’t exist yet; they won’t be finished until Friday at the earliest.

This is the first time we’ve done this, custom signs with one side in English, one side in Spanish. The flyer is done in both languages, also, one on each side of the sheet. I may echo some of the copy on the web site in Spanish, also.

Just because we can, we’re using four unique photos on each side of the sign. The sign printer is digging this stuff beyond all measure. We came to them two years ago with these ideas, and, so far, no one else has even bothered to ask them what we’re doing. Meanwhile, we keep coming up with new things to try. I want for them to enter our work in sign-makers’ competitions.


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July 16, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Teaching home sellers how to pay attention to marketing techniques, tactics and results

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This started out at a response to Jeff Brown in John Rowles’ “dinosaur” post, but it grew to take on a life of its own.

Jeff Brown:

Sellers, at least in my experience, have been excellent at discerning one thing — who produces results.

Oh, would this were so! I can take you through Phoenix, neighborhood by neighborhood, and show you in which neighborhoods the sellers are paying attention and in which they aren’t. We compete very aggressively in the neighborhoods where sellers are wide awake, but there are places we are called upon to go where the neighbors could not care less who sells what for how much in how long a time. It’s just not on their radar — nor is any tactic or technique for optimizing results. We only work with sellers who care, so it makes a huge difference to us.

The brokerage — not agent — we are most likely to lose business to has done an excellent job of promoting its long-standing reputation. For the most part the agents do nothing that we would consider exceptional, and their time on market and LP/SP ratios are horrible right now, but we can only penetrate that marketing veil if the seller is paying first-hand attention.

I had a surprise yesterday. The Arizona Republic column brings me a small number of deals, but they tend to be very interesting. We’re working one now, two listings and a purchase. One of the listings is in Sun City, a Del Webb original, unmolested, on the golf course. We listed it our way last Friday, because that’s what we do. Yesterday I was out there to deal with the sign and almost all of the flyers were gone. When our flyers seem to evaporate, it almost always means that the neighbors are interested — not in the house, but in us as listers. I’ll be interested to see if the sellers out there really are paying attention. The houses don’t sell for huge amounts, but if the sellers are willing to work our way, it might be worthwhile to pioneer a second niche out there.

Our timing Read more

July 15, 2008

Don’t learn all the wrong lessons about creative mortgages

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

 
Don’t learn all the wrong lessons about creative mortgages

Arguably, the Phoenix real estate market is in a state of incipient recovery. Will there be more bad news? Certainly. There are still thousands of homes stuck in the foreclosure process. But prices are low enough, by now, that our surplus inventory will be absorbed — by investors, new-comers and second-home bargain-hunters.

The bad news is that, at the end of all this, we will have learned all the wrong lessons from the real estate market downturn.

Are Adjustable Rate Mortgages a bad thing? People learned to hate the first generation of ARMs, so lenders built in guaranteed flat starter rates, fixed adjustment periods, maximum adjustment caps. But even with all that, ARMs came through the down market with a sullied reputation. With fixed rates still riding so low, ARMs don’t make a lot of sense right now, but that doesn’t mean they never make sense.

How about stated-income loans? Many of the foreclosed homes in the Valley were bought on stated income. But the problem wasn’t the loans, it was the buyers — who lied about their income — and the lenders — who let them get away with it.

Negative-amortization loans were another source of foreclosures, even though the idea behind the loan product itself is perfectly sound — in an appreciating real estate market.

The problem with all these loan products — and other “exotics” — was not the particular loan program. The problem was the profligacy of a surging real estate market — coupled with the securitization of mortgages.

Everyone acted as if the party would never end, that home prices would continue to rise indefinitely. Still worse, lenders had socialized the risk of their poorly-vetted loans to securities investors. Ultimately, lenders didn’t have to care if their loans were properly secured by good credit, steady income and valuable assets.

You can blame the people involved if you want, but don’t blame creative mortgage programs. Everything’s a trade-off, and it could make sense for you to get a stated neg-am ARM for your next Read more

July 14, 2008

Realty dreams: Moving wisely ever cloud-wise, we approach the day when we can do anything from anywhere without lugging anything

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Attend, if you please: OmniFocus for the iPhone. It will not only help you Get Things Done, it will tell you when to do them. No kidding. If one of your tasks is to ship a parcel at the post office, OmniFocus will sound an alarm when you are near one. Approaching the supermarket? Here’s your shopping list.

That much is just the idea of a PDA coupled with a GPS system. Still, it’s cool. But my dream for a hand-held computer is much larger than that.

Consider: I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have LowePro belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my car keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key. All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, so I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a freakin’ cop — which is not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone — and for later iterations of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even the Canon and HP rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. You might have a laptop and printer in your trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but you don’t have that computing power on your person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I want to be able to carry my entire real estate business with me, every time I leave the house. This implies cloud computing, of course, since I will Read more

July 11, 2008

Google may not love BloodhoundBlog, but Technorati does

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The Erics and I have been trying to figure out why Google has been holding out on us for coming on two months now. We tripped some trigger, obviously, but we can’t figure out which. The upshot is that we’re losing between 500 and 1,000 hard clicks we would have gotten every day — most all of them with a uselessly-high bounce rate. The other end of the stick is that, because we’re seeing nothing but serious visitors, our pageviews and time on site are way up.

And at the other other end of the stick, there is Technorati, the gift that keeps on giving. Our rank is 615 as I write this, as high as it has ever been. I don’t know how many more links we will need to make it into the Top 5,000 weblogs — but I would love to find out.

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July 11, 2008

I don’t need to show you any stinking badges! I’m a Zillow All Star!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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About a month ago, Zillow started showing the number of contributions you have made to their data base in your profile. Up at the top you see the total number of contributions, and down below you get a running total of recent contributions.

It was obvious where they were headed, a de facto ranking system based on user contributions. In the co-branding information released earlier this week, Zillow made mention of “badges,” and one of the pix they released showed a badge in the co-branding area.

But… I didn’t actually dare to think that I would qualify as a Zillow All Star…

There’s a point at which it’s kind of funny — does it come with a secret decoder ring? But even so, I don’t hate the idea. Active Rain built something that might someday be a business on a completely brain-dead points system. There is no way to make a brain-dead contribution to Zillow. Everything matters.

And thrusting everything associated with the sale of real estate to the side, I love the idea of Zillow becoming fully-populated with data. There may come a day when the Zillow data base is the de facto museum of residential real estate. Hundreds of biz school PhD theses could emerge from that vast store of information.

In the mean time, your Zillow All Star badge is another co-branding trinket you can put on your weblog.

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July 10, 2008

The iPhone 3G goes live tomorrow — with over 500 dedicated apps already available at the iPhone store

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Apple. John Cook with a nice Jott for the iPhone video. Most popular apps so far. TechCrunch’s picks. LifeHacker’s picks. Continuous fanboy fanaticism at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Here is a sweet built-for-the-iPhone iPhone User’s Guide.

I know Cathy wants to buy tomorrow — the 16GB white monsters with Jawbones. We’re listing tonight, so who knows when we’ll get any sleep.

 
Addendum: Not so fast…

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July 10, 2008

Estately.com is now the San Francisco treat

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Map-based web search start-up Estately.com has uncanny timing for launching new cities and services. No matter what dates they pick, it seems that either Zillow or Redfin will have news on those days.

Here’s the news, which I sat on to get Estately out of Zillow’s glare:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, July 10th, over 40,000 San Francisco homes and condos from four Bay Area MLSes will be added to Estately.com’s 115,000+ properties for sale. The Bay Area marks our fourth major market – Seattle, Portland, and San Diego are all live on Estately right now – and the third major market we have entered this summer.

As always, Estately will provide the richest kind of map-based search experience: All MLS listings plus neighborhood-based searches, local schools mapped with the homes, search by transit availability, etc.

Disclosure: Estately.com co-founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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July 9, 2008

As good as a link: How would you like to “co-brand” with Zillow?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Do you want to see something huge in the guise of something that might seem quite small at first?

Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. It’s supposed to go live at 9 pm PST, but it’s already working for me.

What’s different?

Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog.

Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com.

So what’s going on here?

As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches.

(We can take a moment to snicker behind our hands. Trulia.com is building its reputation on being niggardly and hostile toward ordinary working real estate agents, so what better way to throw the whole issue into the starkest possible contrast? I don’t think Zillow approaches things this way, but the irony can’t be lost on them.)

Why does this matter? Because it’s a very reasonable response to an objection. If someone says, “Providing or promoting content on Zillow.com improves their garden but not your own,” Zillow can offer up the perfect counter: If you shed attention to us, we will make you our partner for that entire visit, and we will entreat your guest to return to you with every page that person views.

This is brilliant every way you think about it, and, of the wannabe Web 2.0 players in the real estate industry, Zillow seems to me to be the only one who really gets the whole bundle of Web 2.0 concepts: You give to get, wealth is abundant, the expectation of good behavior yields good behavior, etc.

There’s more. Zillow.com is about to introduce a ton of new widgets and gadgets, each one of which will be co-branded to the end-user. You’ll be able to post real-time mortgage quotes, for instance, and anything built with the Zillow API will Read more

July 9, 2008

Content is king: The future of internet search is heuristic

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I worked this out in email this afternoon. It’s stone obvious, once you think about it, so I think it might be on the horizon now — if it’s not already happening.

What the hell are you talking about, Greg?

I think the next level of search engine algorithms is going to be based in an heuristic observation of end-user behavior to correlate keyword relevance to actual relevance.

Do you see? Google and other search engines identify patterns of keywords in static HTML documents to try to identify keyword-relevant content. They do this because it’s cheap. Before that, they used gunk like meta tags because that was even cheaper — because that had too little hardware and software and too many documents to index.

The hardware and software problems are gone, plus Google has a huge and growing database of user behavior that is has harvested from the many bits of Google software people load on their systems. Moreover, Google has learned to draw sophisticated inferences from user behavior.

So consider two web pages. One is very strong on relevant keywords, but weak on useful content. The other is not as strong on keywords, but it delivers an ocean of very useful data. When users click into the first page, they tend to click out right away — high bounce rate, short time on site, few pageviews per visit. Users of the other site stay for hours and read everything twice — low bounce rate, long time on site, many pageviews per visit.

Assuming Google or another search engine can measure all of this end-user behavior, which site is actually more relevant to real people?

This is so obvious that it has to happen. If Google doesn’t do it, its successor as the number one search engine will.

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. But more importantly: Now and forever, content is king. A highly-passionate, well-written, deeply-informative weblog is going to kick the ass of any site trying to get by on money and high-gloss lipstick.

If you deliver the goods, the search engines are going to find a way Read more

July 8, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs shipping; watch your mailbox

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The DVDs for BloodhoundBlog Unchained will ship tomorrow, at long last. I guess that’s only six weeks, but it seems much longer. If you live in Phoenix, you should have a package by Friday. Further out, you could be looking at next Monday or Tuesday. If you haven’t received yours by then, let me know.

As it happens, I have a few spare packages made up. Brian Brady has plans to take care of real estate webloggers shortly, but, if you don’t have a real estate weblog, you might slip over to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com and snag a set for yourself. You’ll get more than ten hours of hard-headed, practical real estate content, much of it unavailable anywhere else at any price.

The more I think about this, the more stark the contrast becomes. Monday May 19th at Unchained, in particular, is like nothing you have ever seen at any real estate event. Monday is represented on Discs One and Two, and, while I don’t want to take anything away from Tuesday’s presentations, the work Brian and I did on Monday is a year’s worth of homework by itself.

We want a lot more than that in Orlando — and Brian hasn’t cut off the early-bird price so it’s still available as I write this — and last night we started trading emails to talk about how to offer an exponentially greater product next May in Phoenix. I don’t know if we can afford it, and I don’t know if we can pull it off, but we’d like to put together a fully-realized scenius scene next year, a concentrated boot camp for the first generation of fully-wired real estate professionals.

My ambitions are unchained, unbounded. I want for the people working with us to become so much better than their competition — so much more in demand — that they put themselves beyond competition. As a secondary consequence, I want for that level of excellent performance to supplant everything else in the marketplace. I want for all of us working together to be the catalyst that makes real estate a profession at last.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix was Read more

July 7, 2008

Attention Realtor association wannabe geeks: All monopolies suck by definition, so you must open up our forms to multiple vendors

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I wrote a couple of times yesterday about using the iPhone as the laptop killer for real estate transactions. If my guesses about cloud computing play out, the iPhone and subsequent hand-held computers have the potential to replace our desktop machines as well — or at least give us every bit of the power we expect from a desktop machine no matter where we happen to be. This is all for real, a brand new world unfolding before our eyes.

What is not new, alas, are the monopolies of morons imposed upon us by the National Association of Realtors and all of its many tentacular sub-cartels. Where everything in business is about to change radically — in response to the iPhone, to Web 3.0, to the unforeseeable efficiencies of the cloud — everything in our business will change at its usual glacial pace — driven not by the pursuit of profit, not by the thrill of innovation, not by the ever-more-vast oceans of information available to us — driven only by the need of the NAR and its cabal of sleazy vendors to hold Realtors hostage.

In late May I bitched about the vast hordes of bugs that infest Zipforms, but I knew going in that this was a Sysiphean effort. The people who impose these awful products on us are not the ones stuck using them. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are off-budget contributions — subsidies for Realtor association parties, for example — written into the contracts, which simply introduces bribery into what is already a capricious decision-making process. Caprice, it is worthwhile to stress, is the opposite of reason.

Tom Farley, the new CEO of the Arizona Association of Realtors actually called me in response to that post, but I could not manage to convey to him the importance of multiple, competing vendors to a free — or even quasi-free — market. What he told me is that, instead of Zipforms, in the future we will be inflicted with a different hopelessly buggy Windows-only piece of crap software. I know the man was in deep earnest, and I know Read more

July 6, 2008

Head in the cloud: This week’s new iPhone is the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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As part of our breathtakingly romantic anniversary weekend, Cathy and I were talking today about all of the various types of digital storage devices we have actually used in our lives. I thought it would be a fun exercise at a conference, simply as a way of illustrating how rapidly technology changes while we’re not paying attention.

But stop for a moment and think: Right now, you’re probably using hard disks, CD- or DVR-ROMs and thumb drives for storage. You used to have Zip drives and streaming tape drives and flexi- and floppy-disks, but we are within a year or two of being rid of magnetic media altogether. Solid state hard disks will be hugely capacious, hugely fast, very secure and wicked cheap.

And then: What next?

It’s plausible to me that the next level of off-line digital storage will be the cloud itself — multiple, multiply-redundant, self-replicating, self-maintaining copies of your data, instantly accessible and virtually indestructible. I’m presuming the advent of Web 3.0, as well, but we are there already anyway.

I rank on Windows because it’s funny, but it doesn’t mean anything. In the cloud, Windows is a dead letter, and Apple only matters as a model of how to build elegant, functional software. The cloud is beyond operating systems, because, just as Web 2.0 is ideally browser-independent, Web 3.0 is operating system-independent. It will not matter how you address the cloud, since every way you have of doing that is simply a user interface — browser-, operating system- and device-independent.

This is why it is worthwhile for everyone — not just people in the real estate business — to think about the iPhone. It’s not a Mac OS computer, it’s the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing.

The ideal way to do forms on an iPhone (or any mobile device) is not by filling in the blanks on a PDF file, but, rather, filling in the blanks on a multi-page HTML form. The complete contract language could be there, in readable HTML, and the Realtor or lender could let the client type their own text fields and click their 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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