I’m showing right now (I wrote this post earlier), so I won’t be posting The Short List for a while. My apologies.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 20 of 84)
Bloodhound is an astounding blog. Now before I’m accused of buttering up to Greg, let me explain I’m not that type. What I find astounding about Bloodhound is the consistent quality of the work here. It’s amazing a real estate blog can generate such rich material for the imagination, and one reason I think it does is that it transcends, on many occasions, the limits of basic real estate information.
That’s not to say that all types of RE blogs don’t have their place among the RE blogosphere and much valuable information is transmitted all over. Bloodhound itself transmits valuable nuts and bolts information. Along with other sites, Bloodhound transmits good technology tips and is in the loop of the latest news going on in the industry. I think, though, what raises it above other efforts is the transcending part.
I like the fast, informative style some sites have, with a few pithy words, neat pictures and links to good information, but they lack the substance that I think makes a place like Bloodhound stand out. That’s what I’m getting at – rich content, substance, mind food, sparks to fire the imagination. We often praise the informative aspect of Bloodhound, but seldom do I see the content given appropriate praise.
In order to stand out among a field of writers, substantive content is critical in my estimation. Allan Bloom, the great literature critic, feels that being “strange” is what sets great writers apart and makes them immortal. By “strange” he meant that writers like Kafka, Shakespeare, Pynchon and Cervante are different, on the edge, that their content fires the imagination. Not that I’m comparing Bloodhound to canonical writers, but relatively speaking, the concept is the same – in the arena of RE blogs, Bloodhound has the “strange” factor which sets it apart, makes it noticeable, whether you agree with Greg and the contributors and like them or not.
This powerful form of branding is what all businesses, and other efforts to be seen and heard, search for, yet few fully succeed in finding. I think it entails taking a risk, having the courage to express Read more
A tiny trophy, a huge victory — to come.
We had a helluva week last week, our best ever — until now. So what did we do this week to top last week’s numbers? How about almost double?
The real estate category on BlogTopSites is the home of truly competitive real estate webloggers. We’ve always held our own there — the respectable low teens until lately, in the higher single digits so far for 2008. The top of the list has almost always been dominated by bubble blogs, but BloodhoundBlog has been among the top RE.net blogs — and almost always first among real estate industry weblogs — for quite some while.
But we’ve never been first overall before, and the chances are good that we won’t be again, not for a while. But first place on that list is ours to earn and ours to keep — eventually. We deliver so much more content — so much better content — that we will own the top of that list in due course. Just not yet.
So what gives? How did we get to be number one at the start of this brand new week?
Earlier this week, Brian Brady gave us all a practical demonstration in how to dominate a Google search. On Thursday, he wrote a post about Ashley Alexandra Dupree that was first, fastest and best — from Google’s point of view. He’s spent the past three days on the first page of Google for a number of Ashley Dupree-related search terms — sitting squarely atop major news organizations and A-list webloggers. As I write this, Brian’s post is second for ashley dupree — and first place is off-topic.
So what happened? With that first Ashley Dupree post and a follow-up about Ashley’s singing career, Brian by himself brought over 14,000 unique souls as hard clicks into BloodhoundBlog this week. He beat all of last week by himself. Yesterday we had over 8,132 unique visitors, of which at last 6,000 were brought here by Brian Brady alone.
Yeah, but, but, but– It’s just an SEO trick. No, it’s not. It’s an SEO demonstration. Brian Brady Read more
…that’s why.
More tonight.
Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
I don’t know what to do. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “It is not my function to be a fly swatter.” And yet every time I turn around I find myself reading abject nonsense from technology vendors who have never in their lives sold real estate — who have never sold much of anything but hot air.
Should I just wince and move on to the next article in my feed reader? Or do I have a duty to point out obvious, bone-headed errors, so that y’all don’t repeat them, not knowing they are errors?
I sat on this one earlier today, but it just keeps bugging me. If you think I’m being mean for calling the author out, all I can think of to say is, “Dang!” I myself never, ever forget the ninety-and-nine. If I can spare just one person one dumb mistake, I’ll call that a win and ignore everything else.
So: Joel Burslem’s advice to build single-property widgets is truly bad counsel. The future of real estate weblogging is not widgets, and widgets are not valuable replacements for single-property websites.
First: Off-site resources are bad, m’kaaaay? If you watch where your pages drag when they are loading, you will see that your problems are almost always the result of calls you are making to other servers. In this context, it doesn’t matter if you are calling Flash, Javascript, PHP, PERL or plain vanilla HTML. What matters most is that the other servers you are calling often will not work as quickly as your server. Even if those servers are very sprightly, there are still going to be delays from hand-shaking. Flash and Javascript can madly exacerbate these problems, since they require processing power in the client computer also. As cool as the free stuff you can get from vendors can seem to you, much of it is white noise, at best, of absolutely no benefit to advancing your marketing message. And if those widgets, gizmos and gadgets are slowing down your pages, they are acting against your marketing objectives — by coming between you and your clients.
Second: Flash and Javascript do not search. Read more
The last time BloodhoundBlog scored this high on BlogTopSites was May of 2007. At the time, I said: “It may not happen again for a while…”
What’s going on? Brian Brady is showing you why you will reap huge benefits by attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained. This is just the beginning…
Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Memo to Ashley Alexandra Dupree: America is the land of “reinventing yourself”. Ask Sidney Biddle Barrows, Vanessa Williams, Donald Trump, or even Daryl Strawberry how forgiving the American public is. Americans crave drama, revere celebrity, and have a sense of justice about them.
Mac Daddy El abused the public trust, as did Pete Rose; that’s a tough obstacle to overcome. Martha Stewart did the same but carefully atoned and controlled her public image to turn the greatest of haters around; that’s what we’ll discuss today.
How can Martha Stewart’s case study teach Ashley Dupree how to become America’s Next Sweetheart? More importantly, what can you learn from Martha’s PR/Marketing strategy to boost your online marketing efforts?
Who is Ashley Dupree and why do we care about her? Ashley is a budding songwriter and singer with a compelling story. She was cast into the limelight as Eliot Spitzer’s paramour; taking a few large a month for companionship. Now I don’t want to comment on the morality of prostitution; in 49 states, it’s illegal. Whether you’re an Emporer’s Club “provider” or a sex worker trolling Grand Central, the State of New York considers prostitution a crime. The allegations against Ashley have not been proven in a court of law and frankly, I don’t care if she did it or not. Why?
Most Americans view her actions as a private matter; one look at her MySpace profile shows that 5 million people have shown an interest in her. Many well-wishers have sent messages of support. Ash is getting some eyeballs. Let’s look at Martha Stewart’s case study to see how Ash can go from being just another R&B wannabe to America’s Sweetheart.
Martha Stewart built an empire selling crafts and lifestyle. The “ultimate homemaker” lifestyle turned into OmniMedia Corporation, selling magazines, producing television shows, and creating her own “lines” of products. That almost came crashing down some 4 years ago when she was convicted of insider trading.
I was in Las Vegas, with my securities trader friends, when the decision Read more
In a world without middlemen, no one can prevent you from discovering anything you want to know. That’s a freedom more complete than humanity has ever known, until now.
The counter-proposition is that no one can protect you from derision, if you insist on trying to communicate with your head up your “community.”
All of the dinosaurs are extinct.
Update: Todd Carpenter has a hammer:
This is beside my point, but now the whole of our little world is watching.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
There is a debate on dual agency going on at VARbuzz. This is my contribution to the conversation.
I abhor dual agency — notoriously so. I make no distinction between one licensee or two in the same brokerage, and I am more than prepared to be suspicious if there is any relationship that might seem more important to the practitioners than the fiduciary relationship to the client.
Even so, Russell Shaw convinced me in person that there could be circumstances in which I might have to do a dual agency, like it or not.
What circumstances?
Like this: I’m at open house at my listing, some buyers come in, fall in love with the house and insist they have to put it under contract right away. I would prefer they got their own representation, but my fiduciary duty to my sellers is clear: I owe them the best possible chance at these buyers.
The question is, what duty do I owe to the buyers? The state and federal governments have so gummed up the process of transferring real property that ordinary people cannot competently represent themselves. Moreover, the due diligence process demands expert oversight and advice.
In short, if both parties are unwilling to countenance the idea of separate representation, I’m stuck. I cannot betray the seller’s interests, and I cannot in good conscience permit the buyers to betray their own interests. (And it is plausible to me that I have created an Implied Agency with the buyers in any case.)
This has nothing to do with compensation, and, if we ever have to do this, we will probably split the buyer’s agent’s commission three ways — a point each to the buyer and the seller, in consideration for suffering with limited representation, and a point to us for the extra work. But even that would be at Close of Escrow. My Buyer-Broker Agreement would specify that the buyers could obtain separate representation at any time, even down to the last minute, and I would joyfully pay the buyer’s agent’s commission.
But wait. There’s more. We had a multi-party debate about dual agency at BloodhoundBlog, and, while I would Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…
Okay, so you’ve built a custom weblog to help sell your home, and you’ve dressed it up with photos, a map, a floorplan — every bit of content you could think of. Now what?
Your home now has a twenty-four-hour salesperson on the internet. How do you go about getting potential buyers to visit your blog?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not search engines. For one thing, your site is brand new. The search engines don’t even know it exists. Even if you manage to get indexed, you won’t have the kind of popularity to bring you to the top of search results for your keywords.
But there is an even more compelling reason why search engines won’t be much help to you: Visitors brought in by search engines are very loosely motivated. Many will have been looking for something else entirely, so they will bounce right back off your site in seconds flat.
Your objective in promoting your weblog is to target people who are motivated to buy your home — or who know someone who is motivated to buy your home. Your job is not to broadcast your appeal to everyone but to narrowcast to just those people who can do you the most good.
You’ll put notices about your weblog anywhere online that you can — Zillow.com, Trulia.com, CraigsList.com, local weblogs supporting nearby schools, little league teams, etc. But your primary promotional strategy is going to be offline — person to person.
We print business card-sized promotional pieces to advertise our open houses. These are distributed to every house in the neighborhood, since the neighbors may know someone who wants to live nearby.
During the school day, there will be more than 100 cars in the school parking lot, most of them driven there from out of the neighborhood. Some of those folks are sick of commuting.
Most local retailers will have some kind of bulletin board. Your cards belong there.
Your buyers probably won’t Read more
I was talking to Teri Lussier in email last week about Desert Daisies, an annual wildflower you find in the Sonoran Desert. People harvest the seeds and bring them home, and the flowers will eventually take over the whole yard — for the few weeks they’re around.
Beautiful little clarions of Spring, announcing in advance the blossoming of the citrus trees — when Phoenix is at its ultimate perfect best and god himself is green with envy.
When I picked Teri to be my partner in last Spring’s ProjectBlogger competition, I chose better than I knew. I admired her spark, her spunkiness — what the Irish might call the soul of a poet. But I could not have foreseen her depths — although I have been more than delighted to discover them over the last year. I hope BloodhoundBlog has been good for her. I know she has been very good for BloodhoundBlog. Working here and at TheBrickRanch.com, she has blossomed into a powerhouse weblogger.
So it’s a delight for me to announce that Teri Lussier is the first person to win The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl Award and The People’s Choice Award all in the same week.
The winning entry? Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, of course.
I know some poor benighted soul will have to go digging for evidence of corruption, so I will tell you now that the fact that Teri and I happen to be on the same side of the issue of real estate licensing had nothing to do with my choice. She hit not just a home run but a grand slam with her essay, and the position she took says nothing at all about the quality of her work — except insofar as writing the heartfelt truth puts the writer at one with the gods.
I normally quote from winning entries, but, in this case, I want you to go and read Teri’s whole post. Print it out and tape it to your monitor. Inscribe it into your mind as a particularly worthy example of the truth Read more
Right Now – More Than Ever – You Need To Make Every Dollar Count
One of the services that agents should provide to their clients is photography. Some perform this service, themselves; others hire professional photographers; while most perform this service, themselves – but should hire professionals, instead.
I enjoy photography, and joined a photography group last year here in Atlanta. They use Flickr as a means to communicate the groups conversations and show off their member’s works. Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) is a huge group of photo enthusiasts where you can find pretty much any kind of like-minded photographers and their works imaginable.
One of the groups on Flickr is the Photography For Real Estate group of which I am a member. The group focuses on the challenges of real estate photography. Although most of the members are photographers who contract their services to agents – many are agents, themselves, learning to improve their skills.
You can set up an account on Flickr for free, which will allow you to upload and share photos with the world. That’s free – as in no cost. Nada. The big goose egg. There are some limitations to a free account, such as only being able to create three groups of photos… but a pro membership is just $30/year, should you desire.
As many of you are progressing into setting up your own blogs, you might be looking at different ways to insert images into a blog post. While Flickr does have the capability to compose code that you can use to insert images into your blog, a Swedish company called Admarket created an application called FlickrSLiDR, which takes a group of your Flickr photos and creates a slideshow for your blog.
It is easy to use… and the application delivers the goods. The viewer can mouse around to set the speed of the slideshow, pause it, or go to a particular image.
To help demonstrate this cool application, I have solicited the talents of famed photographer Scott Hargis, who is based in the Oakland California area. Scott is the most admired photographer in the Flickr Photography For Real Read more
My take is that the most important news this week was Zillow.com’s announcement that it will be doing background checks on the loan originators it will be referring to consumers as a part of its forthcoming mortgage product. In consequence, this week’s short list is all about Zillow’s announcement and its implications.
So: We have just eight entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 115 posts. You can vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
< ?PHP
$AltEntries = array (
"Brian Brady -- Mortgage Complaint? Mortgage Complaint? Welcome to The World Of Consumer-Policing at Zillow Mortgage”,
“Brian Brady — Zoriginators Delight Zillow Mortgage: Zoriginators’ Delight or Bane?“,
“Michael Wurzer — Who Holds The Bigger Gun, NAR or Zillow? Who Holds The Bigger Gun, NAR or Zillow? How About Tomorrow?“,
“Mike Farmer — Zillow Nation? Zillow Nation?“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Launches Mortgage Lender Sign Ups Zillow Launches Mortgage Lender Sign Ups – Points to a New Way of Consumer Control of Mortgage Process“,
“Teri Lussier — Zillow creates the end of the world Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine“,
“Todd Carpenter — Zillow Mortgages Zillow Mortgages to give loan originators \”absolutely free and unlimited access to consumers looking for a mortgage\”“,
“Sean Purcell — Success in Disbrokeration? How Do You Find Real Estate Success in Disbrokeration?“,
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++)
{
$pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]);
$radioGroup .= "
$shards = explode(” — “, $pieces[0]);
$radioGroup .= “$shards[0], “;
$radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
}
echo (“
- $radioGroup
“)
?>
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
BloodhoundBlog has had one record-breaking week after another in 2008, but this week was the first time we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, an average of 2,000 “uniques” a day.
Nothing exceeds like excess: We add new subscribers every day, our Technorati links are on the upsurge, and we are pushing 100,000 backlinks. If the RE.net is like the Roman Republic, then we are like Gaius Marius, Caesar’s uncle: New on the scene, rude, crude, vulgar — and very powerful. That’s a role that suits me just fine. I’m happy to leave the Patricians squabbling amongst themselves over emoluments and honors. I’m much more concerned with the work-a-day Plebeians — and with the Barbarians at our gates.
Why are we the biggest? Because we deliver the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. How are we going to grow even bigger? By delivering the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. It ain’t rocket science.
Russell Shaw is convinced we have reached the “tipping point”, the point past which everything we say here can have an impact on the way our business is conducted. I retain my doubts, but I do not doubt for a moment that our words have a deep, a penetrating and an enduring reach. And to that notion, I cannot but shout out some slightly edited sentiments from latter-day America’s greatest satiric philosophers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker:
America! [Heck] yeah!
In the Web 2.0 world — in the disintermediated world — in the world without middle-men — delivering the goods is all that should matter. The BloodhoundBlog idea is simple enough — keeping the wealth that you alone produce in your own pocket — but it is in a sense a very ancient idea, a very Greek idea. The Hoplite Greeks were their own men, and this is why they fought better — and why they thought better — than any human beings who had come before them. The BloodhoundBlog idea is but a small reflection of the Hellenic revolution, but it is an idea that should win, that should prosper in a world where no middle-man can squelch an idea or Read more
As I mentioned on Real Estate Radio USA yesterday, Mary McKnight of RSSpieces.com will be joining us at BloodhoundBlog Unchained for a session called Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover. What we’re going to do is take a look at web sites and weblogs of audience volunteers and talk about how they might be improved — to be more attractive to visitors, stickier, better-optimized for search engines, etc. It should be a very robust, fast-paced overview of what does and doesn’t work in real estate web sites.
Here’s a news flash: The purpose of a real estate web site or weblog — the purpose of real estate marketing in general — is to sell houses. Pull-based marketing is still marketing.
With that much as preface, consider this: Russell Shaw is one of the biggest newspaper publishers in Northeast Phoenix. By way of Custom House Publishers, Russ prints and distributes almost 50,000 newspapers a month — distributed as the 85022 News, the 85024 News, the 85028 News and the 85032 News. These are the zip codes of Russell’s geographic farm, of course, and the newspapers are one way he has of “dripping” on sellers in his farm.
Russ also has four domains for those four zip codes, each one running a templated web site built and hosted by Superlative Web Systems, one of our local — and lame without exception — IDX vendors. These are the four sites: 85022News.com, 85024News.com, 85028News.com and 85032News.com. As with all templated web sites, if we examine everything with a critical eye and then work up every ounce of salesmanical enthusiasm we can muster, we can dig deep and bring forth a hearty: “Eh…” Not absolutely awful, but nothing that is insanely great.
Now it could be that Russ has that kind of frail and fragile ego that regards every bit of professional criticism as a grave and grievous insult — but not on this planet! Instead, Russell Shaw is the kind of phlegmatic, pragmatic, practical guy who understands that, no matter how well he might be doing today, he can always do even better tomorrow. My kinda guy. So instead Read more