BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 98 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

June 7, 2008

Is ePerks.com’s Ben Behrouzi, infamous for trying to censor a real estate weblogger, stealing content from Mervyns and Chevron?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

At his new web site, BrokerScience.com, Trace Richardson is on a tear. Trace got his teeth into the story of ePerks.com’s attempts to silence real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy with a cease and desist letter. Starting with an analysis of how ePerks has managed to achieve an orderly self-destruction, Trace has uncovered one irregularity after another in Ben Behrouzi’s internet businesses.

The latest snafu? Behrouzi added “Values” and “Culture” pages to the ePerks.com web site. The only problem is: The content seems to have been taken, in large measure, from Mervyns.com and Chevron.com.

Here’s the full run-down on Trace’s stories on Behrouzi’s start-ups:

At this point, I’m thinking Ben Behrouzi is beyond redemption. From the evidence, he seems to be much more interested in pushing people around than in making money on the internet. My hope is that other internet entrepreneurs following this train wreck can manage to catch a clue: For the first time since Athens — for the first time in history, really — ordinary people have equal access to the Agora. You cannot shout Vlad Zablotskyy or Russell Shaw or Trace Richardson or me down. Our voices are at least as loud as yours, and we will not be silenced by threats, intimidation or dirty tricks. You can learn to live by cooperation and conciliation, or you can master the art of starving alone.

Technorati Tags: , ,

June 5, 2008

Planning to retire at 50? Good on ya! Have you made plans for living a hundred years beyond that? In a world that changes like dreams?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Unless you come down with a fatal disease or find yourself in a gun battle, you’re probably going to live a lot longer than you ever imagined. This week’s news is interesting, but life-extension is a secondary consequence of everything associated with free markets. That trend is centuries old by now — better food and water, personal hygiene, continuous improvements in medicine, the widespread availability of something as mundane as fresh cow’s milk.

And just think how much longer and richer your life could be if you weren’t carrying 50% or more in parasitic government weight on your back. The interesting thing is that the rate of change is increasing far faster than governments and other misanthropes can drag it down. My own personal dictum has always been, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.” The literate third of the globe is at that point now. The other two thirds are just a few years away. If we can navigate the next few years without blowing ourselves up, we will reach a point where the average middle class household in the United States will control more real wealth than entire countries would have owned just a few centuries ago.

I’m sure I’ve cited this before, and this version of the film is an antique by now — it’s almost a year old — but this is a very compelling presentation:

Of course you cannot make any detailed plans about living decades longer than you expected with everything changing constantly — and at an ever-accelerating rate of change. The truth of the matter is, if you live to be 150 years old, you have a decent chance of living forever. The even more startling truth is that the ever-accelerating rate of change in all branches of technology is racing us toward a singularity, a point where all of our models of understanding break down and we have no rational means of predicting what will happen.

No one can predict the future more than a few years out, but what you can do is reprogram your mind. In omnia paratus — prepared for everything. If Read more

June 4, 2008

An Unchained expostulation: Guess who is not coming to Inman?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We made a ton of video clips at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. BrokerIPTV.com made a bunch more, and theirs feature strange and esoteric production elements like good lighting and audible sound. The difference is, ours were on YouTube right away, and theirs took a while to gestate. One that I’ve been waiting for finally hatched today, yours truly on the subject of being Unchained:

If you watch that clip, this should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: I don’t tell people what to do. There are no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors. I don’t like rules, but I also don’t like working with people who need to be told what to do — and I really don’t like working with people who try to tell other people what to do.

That paragraph is predicate to this one: Since there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on anything, it should be obvious that there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect. Bloodhounds have been invited to speak at the last couple of events, and I, personally, have no feelings about this one way or another.

But, oddly enough, for this summer’s event, only one Bloodhound has been invited to speak, Estately.com’s Galen Ward. That’s not completely true. Just after Unchained, Brian Brady was approached, perhaps as a ham-handed divide-and-conquer strategy. But Cheryl Johnson was not invited to teach PhotoShop, Eric Blackwell and Eric Bramlett weren’t invited to teach SEO, Geno Petro wasn’t invited to teach the art of mesmerizing an audience. Mike Farmer, Sean Purcell and Jeff Brown are, each in his own way, reinventing the real estate brokerage, but this is not a topic of interest at Inman Connect.

In other words, there does seem to be an Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect, but it doesn’t originate here.

So be it. We care a lot. As is discussed in the clip, BloodhoundBlog Unchained set a new standard for training events in the wired world of real estate in our first swing at the ball. We dropped the ball completely on the drinking and partying and killing time in the hallways categories, but I know we traded a Read more

June 3, 2008

What does Zillow.com understand that Trulia.com is missing? “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think that there may have been a time, in the blue-sky days of gray-skyed Seattle, when people with two-digit badge numbers at Zillow.com actually thought they might be able to disintermediate Realtors — much as Expedia.com had disintermediated travel agents. No one at Zillow will admit to this, but I suspect that a notion like this could have been in the original design parameters for the hypothetical software they were brainstorming in those days.

If this is true, then, to their credit, they came to their senses. Presumably, they realized, first, that the National Association of Realtors is a ferocious criminal mob that will do anything to destroy perceived competition, and, second, that, as simple as it might seem from the outside, real estate representation is too complicated to be automated cost-effectively, at least for now. Instead, Zillow.com made a conscious and thorough-going decision to partner with real estate agents and lenders, offering them exposure on its platform in exchange for building out its content.

You could argue that Trulia.com made a similar resolution, but it seems more likely to me that the San Francisco start-up is simply aping Zillow’s partnership with individual practitioners without really understanding it.

From a distance, the differences in the partnering relationships of the two companies could not be more stark. At Trulia, the most important kind of partner is the one who can deliver the most listings. The hierarchy runs from brokerage chain to brokerage to broker to agent to seller.

Zillow’s hierarchy is the other way around: The most important source of information about a home is that home’s owner. Next comes the agent, followed by the broker, the brokerage and the brokerage chain.

In both cases, higher parties on the hierarchy have the power to override — and thus usurp — the contributions of lower parties. What this means in practice is that sellers and their listing agents are regarded as being the least authoritative sources of information at Trulia — and therefore the last in line to receive practical benefits from the leads that might be generated by the on-line reiteration of the agent’s listing of Read more

June 2, 2008

Phoenix real estate market news: May rocked

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I tend not to cover local market news at BloodhoundBlog, but this is big, and I expect it might be replicated across the country. I’ll be writing about it tomorrow for Saturday’s Republic, but it won’t be news-pages news for another ten days or so.

Here’s the news, in any case:

May was a very strong month for clearing bread-and-butter inventory in the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market. We track sales of newer suburban tract homes, with records going back to January of 2004. May was the strongest month for those homes since May of 2007, with the best month before then being November of 2006.

Price are down, month over month, and not just a little, so May’s results no doubt reflect the sale of a lot of lender-owned properties. But inventories of these same homes are down 7% from April and over 14% from March. The implied absorption rate from May’s results is 5.2 months, down from 8.4 months for April.

The lender/title month ended on a Friday, so it will be Wednesday or Thursday before I’ll be willing to commit to solid numbers. As a matter of anecdotal evidence, I called yesterday about a very market-weary short sale. After months of no activity, three offers came in over the weekend. The seller multiple countered, with the current high-bid being $17,000 over list. We won’t know for sure for two or three months after the fact, but May or June could be the bottom of the market in Phoenix.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

June 2, 2008

BloodhoundBlog in the terrible two’s and the me-me-me meme

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had mail last night from a sweet kid who wanted to tag me in what she called a MeMe game. I thought that by itself was nice take on the idea of memes as represented in the wired world of real estate, but it also put me in mind of a promise I made a while back:

Inlookers: I will be happy to entertain any other What would David Gibbons do?-type questions. You can email me; I’ll shield your identity. Or you can use the “Ask the Broker” button — if you fudge the email address field, it’s completely confidential. If your question is obnoxious, don’t waste your time — because I don’t waste mine. But if you have a sincere question about BloodhoundBlog or me or whatever […] fire away. I am surely also the most forthcoming — and loquacious! — person any of you are ever likely to meet. If you want to know something, just ask.

This is not a vanity on my part. People who have met me in person will tell you that I don’t ask many personal questions. I see them as bring not so much impertinent as irrelevant. All I care about is work — mine, yours, ours. But if there’s something you’re just dying to know, don’t suffer in ignorance, and, for goodness’ sakes, don’t gossip. Ask away. I will conceal nothing.

BloodhoundBlog will be two years old on June 29th. The world of real estate weblogging has exploded since we got started — but my argument is that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re doing everything we can do expand this world we live in, to help more and more real estate professionals understand the implications of Web 2.0 marketing. In the coming weeks, I plan to revisit some of the underlying philosophical issues that drive BloodhoundBlog — to illustrate where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.

Louis Cammarosano sent this along yesterday:

Was going over our google analytics re the HomeGain blog and was checking sources of traffic. Someone came to our site from a Google search excellent real estate marketing. Click on the Read more

May 31, 2008

Imagineering Unchained Orlando: The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything about taking BloodhoundBlog Unchained to Orlando is in flux until we find out what we can do about meeting rooms. Even so, I’m swimming in ideas for how I want it to work.

As before, as always, I want for there to be a ton of hard-headed content. We set a new high-water mark for real estate conferences in Phoenix, and I want to bump that mark quite a bit higher.

Here’s how my thoughts run right now, all subject to amendment by cruel reality and subsequent brainstorms:

This is a one-day affair, and so it has to be a concentrated dose of that Unchained attitude. We also have to accommodate the comings and goings of the conventioneers, since it seems less than likely that they will all be available for the same one huge block of time.

What I thought we might do is run the circus from 8 am to 8 pm, with Brian and I doing a four-hour show three times or a three-hour show four times — thus to deliver the most that we can to the greatest number of people. An even better idea: Two different three-hour shows, each delivered twice. Unchained in Phoenix was eleven-plus hours of content, but we could condense that down to a very highly-concentrated six hours of material.

Then, in the next room over we could have a trade show floor with vendors we trust having an opportunity to present their value propositions and give away tee shirts and frisbees.

And then in a third room, this one cut into three or four breakout rooms, we could offer hour-long breakout sessions aimed at every level of geek, from infra to ultra. We need beginner sessions. We need expert sessions. This is a way we can meet a multitude of needs. Twelve hours times three rooms could accommodate up to 36 unique class sessions. I would expect many sessions to be repeated through the day, but 36 class slots presents a lot of teaching opportunities.

In the end, we end up with a sort of All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Show up when you can, stay for as long as you Read more

May 31, 2008

Looking for the bottom? Real estate speculators are establishing the bottom-dollar price for lender-owned homes in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Looking for the bottom? Real estate speculators are establishing the bottom-dollar price for lender-owned homes in Phoenix

If you’re looking for the bottom of the real estate market in Phoenix, chances are it’s right up the block. It’s that house with the jungle of overgrown weeds in front.

It used to be for sale. Then it was a short sale. By now it’s lender-owned. A year ago it might have been listed for $250,000. Now the price has been slashed to $120,000 — maybe less.

That’s a sad story, particularly if you knew the owners. And now, as you watch the parade of investors checking it out, you might feel a certain anger toward them.

If so, your anger is misdirected. Between syrupy books and movies and high-strung high-school-teachers, we have been indoctrinated to despise speculators. But the truth is, speculators are the garbage collectors of capitalism. They come in and clean up messes they did not create, returning productive value to underperforming assets.

It you’re looking for a villain in these stories, look to the borrower, to the lender or just to the vicissitudes of life. But it is the speculators who are going to bring the real estate market back to a viable state.

How? By establishing the bottom-dollar price.

What is your home really worth right now? It’s worth as much as the lowest-price lender-owned comparable plus the cost of returning that home to turn-key condition plus a small convenience premium. In other words, if the lender-owned house sells for $120,000, and if it will take $10,000 to make it as nice as your home, then your home is worth $135,000 — $140,000 at most.

And if you’re not willing to sell you home for that price? Get it off the market right now. It will not sell for more, but the surplus of over-priced inventory is a false signal to buyers that the market has not found its bottom.

If you must sell into this market, you’ll sell at the market price. If you can afford to wait, you will almost certainly do better Read more

May 30, 2008

Are you a professional practitioner or just an order-taking lackey? How to list a home for sale like you own the damn place

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about how we list homes for sale (and not just in that post; surfing the archives repays effort). At Unchained I illustrated some of our ideas, and you can catch this show on the DVDs if you missed it live. Everything we do is about selling the house — not selling us as a brokerage or as agents and not attracting buyers for other listings. We reap a substantial secondary marketing benefit from listing as hard as we do — both the efforts we undertake and our victory dance when we succeed — but our entire focus is on selling the house.

There is more stuff I could talk about, and we are always playing with new ideas. It’s fun — for me at least — to work with buyers, but listing is a perfectible praxis: By the assiduous application of thought and effort, we can get better and better at it the more we do it. But there is a limit to that proposition: You cannot sell a house that won’t sell, and that’s what I want to talk about.

But first: Listing in Phoenix right now, and in many other markets, can be a heart-breaking endeavor. There is too much inventory and there are too few buyers, and even the most perfect home can come up second-best again and again. “If you list, you’ll last,” but it could be that you’ll last a little better right now if you focus your attentions on motivated, qualified buyers, rather than speculating on sellers. You don’t have to blow off sellers, but I think you might be wise to reschedule listing appointments in favor of showing appointments, if one has to give way for the other.

Here’s the real meat of the matter, though: How much will you get paid for a listing that does not sell?

We charge a $1,500 non-refundable retainer when we list, but that doesn’t begin to cover our costs before we even hit the MLS. I’ll come back to this idea, but the point for now is that we actually lose money if our listings don’t sell. Read more

May 29, 2008

Damn-straight department: “Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Real Estate Success Tools CEO Matthew Hardy speaking on BrokerIPTV.com:

Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now. Greg has a perspective on understanding that this is a bottom up industry, that the individual real estate agent, their ability, their ability to own their own technology, to own their own systems, to own their own approach to business, is what is changing the entire industry. It is wrapped up in this thing called Web 2.0, but it is all based upon the idea of control and the power for the individual real estate agent to do what they want to do for their business.

You bet. We’ve known Matthew for more than a year, and his approach to business is very much like ours. If your income depends on milking underlings you think you have hypnotized into believing they need you, I cannot wait for the hammer of justice to fall on your head…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

May 29, 2008

Agent branding is good, but Trulia.com is still deliberately hi-jacking street addresses, frustrating the interests of sellers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m still digging out from Unchained, so this is not as timely as it might have been.

First, I think we might have gotten distracted by whatever cozy arrangement does or does not exist between Trulia.com and Number 1 Agent.

Second, I think Trulia’s recent announcement that agents can “brand” their own listings is a move in the right direction. Trulia has always seemed to me to play favorites with the White Shoe set, and giving the grunts on the ground a chance to compete with their bosses for their own business is… damned near decent.

But: I am not prepared to yield on the main issue. When Trulia.com puts a “nofollow” on the link back to my single-property web site for my listing, it is depriving my sellers of the natural dominance they should have in Google over their own street address.

The issue is one of canonicity. If Truila were giving my URL an ordinary HTML anchor link, then Google would know that my site is canonical and Trulia’s is derivative — which is undeniably the truth.

By putting the “nofollow” tag on what is in fact a JavaScript link, Trulia is falsely implying that it is the canonical resource for information about that property.

That much is a lie, but it gets worse: If someone Googles the street address for my property and finds my single-property web site, my sellers — through me — have an uncontested opportunity to sell their home to that potential buyer.

If instead that potential buyer finds Trulia’s link to that home, the buyer is thrust into a vast supermarket of real estate, and the sellers are deprived of their opportunity to sell their home and their home only.

This is not a dual agency issue here, this is simply a matter of giving sellers the best advantage they can possibly have from searches on their own street address.

Because Google would regard a normal link as leading to a more canonical resource — regardless of differences in Page Rank — by putting a “nofollow” tag on its links to agent- and broker-supplied real estate listings, Trulia.com is deliberately hi-jacking the street Read more

May 27, 2008

All roads lead to Rome, but where three roads converge, the trivia that is yet another meme game is to be found

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eight questions, eight mostly inadequate answers:

1. Who is your favorite musical artist? (post a youtube video)

I like so much stuff that this becomes completely unfair. If you watch my choices of videos on BHB, those doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of my tastes. The folks at Unchained got to hear songs from my iTunes library, which includes a lot of bootlegs and otherwise unobtainable stuff. All that notwithstanding, if I had to pick one first-among-equals favorite, it would be Bob Dylan. But just writing that feels like a betrayal, because everything I love in art comes from a kind of visceral honesty that Dylan almost never achieves — mostly studiously avoids. But take a look at this:

The real Blind Willie McTell was a fairly ordinary early blues musician. He was nothing compared to Skip James, in my opinion. And why is Dylan celebrating the blues in a ballad? I think McTell is a cypher for Dylan in this song, and I think this is as close to an auto-encomium as we can ever expect from the man. In any case, this is great art from the first note to the last, an Apollonian frenzy made more violent because it is so tightly constrained.

2. Who is your favorite artist (post a flicker photo)

I don’t have a favorite visual artist. Of everything I’ve seen, Rodin is the most interesting to me, this because he is truly in love with humanity. I’ve worked in photography most of my life, at one time very seriously. I hate almost everything associated with the visual arts.

3. Who is your favorite blogger?

Again I must disappoint. Everything I love in art is a form of literature — even the music I love best. Almost no one in the history of literature was able to write both very quickly and very well. Shakespeare could, as could Mencken, but they don’t update their blogs that often. There’s no one in the world of weblogs who makes me crazy like the great writers of the world’s literature. How could there be? That’s an unfair standard to judge by. To have Read more

May 27, 2008

NAR/DOJ settlement: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

After years of song and dance, the DOJ reached a settlement with the NAR that seems to have achieved absolutely nothing — except the waste of a bunch of tax and dues money. At least that’s what you would think if you read nothing but the NAR’s spin. In fact, the NAR lost the major point of contention, the attested right of brokers to withhold listings from Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). From eWeek.com:

The Department of Justice said May 27 it has reached a settlement in its long-running legal dispute with the National Association of Realtors. Under the terms of the settlement, the Realtors will enact a new policy that guarantees Internet-based brokerage companies will not be treated differently than traditional brokers. 

Under the new policy, Realtor-affiliated brokers participating in multiple listing services will be prohibited from withholding their listings from brokers who use virtual office websites, generally known as VOWs. The Realtors agreed to a 10-year settlement to ensure the group continues to abide by the requirements of the settlement.

“Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The Realtors also agreed to adopt antitrust compliance training programs that will instruct local associations of about the antitrust laws generally and about the requirements of the proposed settlement. The National Association of Realtors is a trade association of more than 1.2 million residential real estate members who operate in local real estate markets nationwide.

That sounds like something, but it ain’t. For one thing, the NAR gets to define what a VOW is. From its own press release:

The terms of the proposed final order validate NAR’s position – that MLS members must be actively engaged in real estate brokerage by actually helping people buy or sell homes. This will ensure that MLSs are used for what they were originally intended to do – to help real estate professionals find Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts