BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 34 of 84)

November 23, 2007

A proud day for proud Bloodhounds: Jay Thompson joins the pack

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything’s all right until something goes wrong. You child takes a bad fall and broken bone tears through the flesh and skin. A jet engine on your vacation flight flames out. You took the wrong road in a driving rain and now you’re up to your hubcaps in mud.

Jay Thompson is a man out of Kipling, and I can imagine him in each one of those stories. Calmly setting and splinting a bone, then racing to the hospital. Exuding quiet confidence as he explains why the plane can fly safely on three jets. The man owns a Jeep, and I’d bet a large dollar he knows how to extract your sedan from the mud.

Jay is a man possessed of an unprepossessing competence, a man’s man who just gets in there and gets the job done. I’ve worked with him on half-a-dozen projects, and it has always made me proud to set my shoulder beside his.

And so I am very proud to announce that Jay is joining us today as a contributor to BloodhoundBlog:

Want to find Jay Thompson? Just Google for “Phoenix real estate” — he’s above the fold. Jay is a legend among real estate webloggers, but he’s also an incipient broker, a confirmed desert rat and a committed family man.

Make him feel welcome, if you would. He won’t even have to try to make you feel safe.

Technorati Tags: , ,

November 21, 2007

Dancing With Who Brung Me

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The first rule of organizations; he who speaks, volunteers. Actually, that’s the first rule of small, nimble organizations…guerilla units…we read Sun-Tzu and pounce on opportunities.

I’m jazzed, stoked, amped-up and psyched about the Guerilla Web Marketing Conference in May. We’re talking about Web 2.0 or for real estate agents and mortgage originators. Now, how do I promote it so that this place looks like this, in 2010?

First Campaign: Facebook.

Viral. That’s the gal who brung me to the dance.

November 20, 2007

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re adding another Bloodhound to the pound today, and this one is a real treat, Bill Leider of Real Estate Shows:

Bill Leider is the CEO of Real Estate Shows, a hosted virtual-tour solution. His background is in corporate and business management in publicly-traded and privately-owned mid-size companies.

Bill has won The Odysseus Medal and The People’s Choice Award, and Jeff Turner told me why when we met at the NAR Convention: The man simply will not stop trying to perfect his message.

I tell the contributors that there are no rules at BloodhoundBlog, but there actually is one rule: We’re not selling our products here. We throw off a lot of traffic to contributor’s sites, and I think that great thing. I want for people to prosper as a result of their work here. But the work we do here is about improving our minds — yours, ours, everyone’s.

I’m saying this because Bill is in the business of selling virtual tours, and I know he has strong feelings on what does and does not work in real life. If he touches on these subjects — and I think he might with his first post — understand that he is writing from his experience, not trolling for your business.

More announcements to come, believe it or don’t.

Technorati Tags: , ,

November 20, 2007

Want to stay ahead of the pack in your marketing? Come to Phoenix next May and master The Art of the Bloodhound

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are five current and former Bloodhounds — so far — on the faculty of Inman’s imminent Blogger’s Connect. That’s about fifteen Bloodhounds too few, but that’s not the only flaw I can think of. I told Joel Burslem when he was in Phoenix that the keynote address should be mine, but of course it won’t be. That would make entirely too much sense. Beyond that, the critical defect of the event is that the curriculum is established by people who aren’t doing this stuff. That’s why it’s a Blogger’s Connect, because it’s all about last year’s war.

Brian Brady had a better idea, a BloodhoundBlog Conference about truly contemporary guerrilla real estate marketing, the tactics real grunts on the ground are using right now in the jungles we find ourselves in. Two days in Phoenix, for a start, with intensive classes on how to make the stuff that really works really work for you right now.

David Gibbons, bless his eager mind, came up with this in a comment last week:

My primary takeaway from NAR was that the social media marketing opportunity in RE is misunderstood and largely ignored. Yet, I’m more convinced than ever that SMM can revolutionize real estate. I actually had a fleeting thought yesterday as I walked the expo floor that it would have been cool to have a booth dedicated to Real Estate Weblogging 101 and that “Bloodhound” might well become a premier REALTOR (or agent?) designation/qualification.

I don’t like it as a designation. Our world moves too fast. To say, “I have arrived,” is to announce that you have volunteered to be left behind. But an annual Bloodhound badge to put on your web site would be a potent testament to your valor as a guerrilla marketer.

We’re thinking Sunday, May 18, and Monday, May 19, 2008. After that, things get nebulous. But: All work and no play makes for a boring Bloodhound, so we’ll do something fun Saturday night, May 17, if you fly in early. Then maybe a networking/cocktail party Sunday night. There will be time for a round of golf on Monday morning. We might Read more

November 19, 2007

ActiveRain.com: Members Own Content But Can’t Profit From It

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Do members REALLY own the content on Active Rain?

I asked that question some 13-14 months ago, wondering whether the hours I invested would be worthwhile. I was satisfied with the explanation that the content was, indeed, the members’ property.

Move.com attempted to buy Active Rain, it balked, and conversations about a future revenue model led the idea of syndicating the user content to the mainstream media. Again, the question of who owns the content arose- the answer was identical to the 2006 answer; the members own their content.

Justin Smith (aka Damion Foxworthy) wrote a satirical post, which won the People’s Choice Award, in the Odysseus Medal competition, about “selling” his Active Rain profile. Justin, through diligent weblogging and contribution to the community, has amassed some 100,000 points on Active Rain. The entry was cross-posted on Active Rain and generated an overwhelming response from the membership in the comments section. As usual, I “read too much into” this comment from Top Rainmaker, Jon Washburn:

Great post Justin,

I sat reading it thinking, “Great, how should I handle this. I probably have to zero out the points on this profile now. But man, whoever bought Justin’s blog is going to be pissed.”

I think you all are right and we need to think through this issue and put some type of formal policy in place.

Did you catch that? He said that he would “probably have to zero out the profile”. This means that while Justin has ownership of the points, he has no right to transfer them. The points were a by-product of the contributed content. Ergo, the content is not really “owned” by the members, in the purest definition of the word ownership (the content can’t be transferred).

The policy being considered strips the most important right of “ownership” from the members and releases it to the Company. While the Company can lease the content to a third-party news source, for the implied quid pro quo of SEO, the only profiting that will be done will be by the Company.

I’m okay with that, too. I’m Read more

November 19, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: “Small pieces loosely joined”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My thought is that Michael Wurzer of the FBS blog doesn’t do anything badly. Certainly his weblog is ripe with first-rate content. Michael is this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal with Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem:

You see, whether it’s in an MLS or a social network, the value is in having the data together or aggregated. Yet, once you aggregate the data, in an MLS system or Facebook or wherever, the immediate question is how you can get it back out to be used elsewhere, by other applications, because choice is desired and the aggregation stifles choice.

This is a non-trivial problem. The ideal answer is in the web itself. As Tim O’Reilly puts it, “Small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the web, in its current form, doesn’t address all the concerns, because yet to be defined are permission or privacy or identity schemes. In other words, who owns the data, who can access it, and what can they do with it when they do access it? The answers to these questions so far have been defined by silos, like MLS systems and social networks, but we’re now seeing that isn’t the long-term answer, rather standards are.

In the real estate space, one part of the solution is to have a broad and deep agreement (standard) on the minimum data necessary to constitute a listing. This is close to reality with the RETS payloads. Equally necessary, however, is a standard for defining who can access the listing and the terms of use for doing so. The first attempts at some terms of use in the real estate space led to the lawsuit against the NAR by the DOJ, which necessarily but unfortunately has caused the conversation to grind to a halt as the status quo is sought to be preserved. But the work on these terms of use needs to continue, either to resolve the litigation or end-run it.

Ideally, the terms of use should be dictated by the owner of the data on an individual basis. Again, “small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the challenge is gaining broad enough Read more

November 18, 2007

BloodhoundBlog.TV debuts: NAR Convention survivors hold forth on Web 2.0 marketing in a scripted, refrigerator-magnet world

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Clearly, this is a star-crossed enterprise. The audio worked fine tonight, so the video started capturing out of phase about 17 minutes in. The video is short, but the accompanying audio podcast contains our full discussion.

Ignore all that. I fixed it. The video shown below is complete, and it is also linked as the first video at BloodhoundBlog.TV. Dan Green’s audio is a little weak, mine is a little strong, Jay Thompson is a little out of focus, but we’ve gotten to a place we’ve never been before, a do-it-yourself multi-camera remote interview segment. Many more to come — with steadily increasing quality.

This is Daniel Rothamel, Dan Green and Jay Thompson discussing their experiences at the NAR Convention, carrying forth from there to a broad discussion about how the benefits of Web 2.0-style marketing might be communicated to the 1.3 million members of the NAR.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

November 18, 2007

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eighteen nominees this week. I had a bunch of posts from Active Rain, and, while I didn’t pick any this week for the short list, I’d like to encourage y’all to continue to enter. There is some good stuff over there that I would not see otherwise.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

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 ( "Michael Wurzer -- Distorted advertising Moving From Distorted Advertising to Useful Information in the MLS”,
“Michael Wurzer — Data portability Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem“,
“Joel Burslem — NAR Reflections on NAR“,
“Robert Ashby — YSP Is Yield Spread Premium Good or Bad for Consumers?“,
“Steve and Kris Berg — Six months The Six Month Solution – Our New Deal“,
“Morgan Brown — Credit mess Top 10 Ways to Navigate the Credit Mess“,
“Brian Brady — Compensation How to Pay Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals For Their Advice“,
“Todd Carpenter — Keyword SEO Key word SEO is at best, a hedged bet.“,
“Doug Quance — Stay home We Can Just Stay Home And Go Broke“,
“Jay Thompson — Short sale The Short Sale From Hell“,
“Justin Smith — Active Rain How I Sold My ActiveRain Profile for $6,750.00“,
“Todd Carpenter — YSP Forget YSP, let’s just do away with Mortgage Brokers“,
“Tim Kane — YSP Let Brokers charge what they want. Do away with YSP.“,
“Kris Berg — Vista A New Operating Environment“,
“Geno Petro — Feng Shui Feng Shui… It’s All Chinese Math To Me“,
“Jeff Kempe — Bossy visionaries Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market“,
“Brian Brady — Federal banks HR 3915: Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR Working from within the NAR”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[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: , ,

    • November 18, 2007

    NAR Convention convocation: We live in a small world — for now

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    There are 1.3 million members of the National Association of Realtors. Of those, 30,000 descended on Las Vegas for last week’s NAR Convention.

    How many of those people, either the larger group or the smaller, know about our world, the world of Web 2.0, real estate weblogging, social networking — the world we think of as being “the conversation”?

    Almost none.

    BloodhoundBlog is big as real estate weblogs go, and we’re arguably the biggest of the blogs focused on real estate industry issues. We get around 1,200 unique visitors a day on weekdays, a steadily rising number. Many of those “hard clicks” are not Realtors, of course, but we have a large and growing population of RSS and email subscribers. I have no numbers for RSS subscriptions, but the email server demands kicked us from a shared-server account to a quarter-server to a full dual-core server in a little over a year. It would not seem unfair to me to estimate that we are talking to at least 1,200 dues-paying Realtors a day.

    It pays to do that math, doesn’t it. We are well-known, highly regarded, deemed influential — and we are talking to fewer than one in 1,000 members of the NAR on any given day. Not everyone reads everything on any given day, but, on the other hand, things get passed around. We might be seen by as many as 50,000 Realtors a month, perhaps as many as a quarter-million in a year’s time.

    But even then, for all but a few hundred Realtors, we are noise in the background. The others see what they see, with Debunking Zillow.com and What’s Wrong with zipRealty? being by far the two most popular hard clicks into the weblog.

    There is a over-arching message here and in other places we frequent, a message about our world, the world of Web 2.0, real estate weblogging, social networking — the world we think of as being “the conversation.” But who among the attendees of the NAR Convention — much less the NAR membership as a whole — knows anything about it?

    This was one of the points Jeff Turner raised in Read more

    November 16, 2007

    BloodhoundBlog.TV an inch at a time: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    So: I have good news, bad news and worse news.

    The good news is, the video linked below, an interview with Jeff Turner of RealEstateShows.com about his experiences at the NAR Convention, is a full representation of the BloodhoundBlog.TV idea as I envision it. Video captured to the size of the image window on an Apple iPhone with a decent level of audio quality.

    The bad news is, this is probably as good as things will get for a while. We have something truly cool, and truly novel, but the level of quality we can achieve with existing tools is limited. A year from now we’ll be doing much better. Two years from now the flap-jaws on the Tee Vee News will be pontificating about the dangers of unfettered TV news. In other words, this is the world of desktop publishing or weblogging brought to the world of the multi-camera remote television interview. But: For now, this is as good as it gets.

    The worst news is that I hit yet another audio glitch about a third of the way into my conversation with Jeff, with the result that we lost more than we retained. This is truly tragic, because Jeff covered a lot of interesting ground.

    But: We’re getting there. Sunday night we’ll do a group interview with NAR Convention survivors, and this will be an even better test of this technology.

    In the meantime, we console ourselves with Tennyson:

    Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
    We are not now that strength which in old days
    Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

    BloodhoundBlog.TV is that much closer to being a reality.

    Technorati Tags: , , , ,

    November 15, 2007

    Video podcast with Daniel Rothamel from the NAR Convention

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I am too much chagrined. In building BloodhoundBlog.TV, I know what I want, but I keep running into technical glitches that leave me short of where I want to be. We are that close to getting a launch-quality product, but I’m not there yet.

    But: The video linked below is a big step in the right direction. Daniel Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra joined us to talk about his experiences so far at the NAR Convention, notably Seth Godin’s presentation and yesterday’s news from Zillow.com’s Rich Barton.

    Jeff Turner is running a NAR Updates site that gives a peripatetic commentary on events at the show.

    We will try to take another stab at BHB.TV content from the Convention before the Conventioneers are ground to a pulp by the irrepressible machine that is Las Vegas.

    Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

    November 14, 2007

    The Odysseus Medal: “Failure is a costly but cogent instructor”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Here are the Odysseus Medal winners, finally. My apologies for being two days late, but my little hop to Las Vegas put me way behind on everything.

    I run with a fast crowd here, but I don’t cut them any slack. I am never nice for the sake of being nice, and I don’t ever hesitate to tell what I believe to be the complete truth. Even so, I don’t love it when one of our wins the Odysseus Medal, because I don’t want anyone to even suspect that I might be swayed by personal considerations. But great work is where you find it, even if you find it at home. So this week’s Odysseus Medal goes to BloodhoundBlog’s own Brian Brady for HR 3915: Open Letter to Senator Dodd from a Veteran Mortgage Originator:

    Dear Chairman Dodd:

    Soon, HR 3915 will be endorsed by the House of Representatives and most likely referred to the Senate. The committee you chair, will have an opportunity to read, discuss, debate, and amend this bill before recommending it to the general Senate for vote. I am a 20 year veteran of consumer financial services with the last 14 years in mortgage lending. I have helped over 700 families finance their homes and closed some 1700 loan transactions. I humbly submit my expert opinion to you for consideration.

    The Libertarian in me begs you to do absolutely nothing; it’s the borrowers’ cavalier attitude towards financial planning that caused this mess. While my statement is true, it is but a component of the underlying malaise in the residential real estate industry; we adopted an even more cavalier approach to loan approvals and that irresponsibility is being felt by the investors who trusted us to perform adequate due diligence. Failure is a costly but cogent instructor; to discourage failure on both the borrower and investing lender sides of the equation might be more costly in the long run.

    I oppose individual originator licensing in its proposed form. It doesn’t demonstrate true expertise and might induce a false sense of security to the consumer. Read more

    November 13, 2007

    “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” — Howard Aiken

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    The quote comes from WorkHappy.net this morning. Yesterday — plane-bound, casino-bound, Twitter-bound — unable to post — I reflected upon why it’s all just so much waxed fruit — for now:

    Rusting in irony. I really, really want to post and I have 140 chars to work with.

    That’s Jeff Turner and a newly-shorn Dustin Luther checking out Jeff’s camera at last night’s BloggerCon event at the NAR Convention in Las Vegas. The event was a lot of fun for me, much more fun than I had anticipated, but we were just so much waxed fruit to the NAR, a minor constituency to be placated.

    So be it. A year ago, there was nothing of our world at the NAR Convention. This year, amidst the pageantry for MS FrontPage and MS Publisher, Dustin Luther spoke on “Understanding Your Online Competition.” Seth Godin is speaking, too, although I think he might go over like The Great Gazoo.

    And: So be it. What I was ruminating on, unable to post, was Jim Duncan’s optimistic take on working within the NAR. My thoughts run in the other direction — working without the NAR — and my honest belief is that the NAR is destined to go the way of the Typographer’s Union — marching stoutly and steadfastly into an unlamented irrelevance. Sic semper tyrannosauris — thus, ever, to dinosaurs.

    Organizations don’t change because they should. They don’t change because the world has changed on them. The don’t change because glib ideologues like me persuade them to embrace their better angels. Organizations change — if they do — when they have to: When a sufficient power-bloc within the group forces a change or when a force from outside the group proves irresistible. Most dinosaurs change — to a state of perpetual demise — when they get hit by a meteor.

    Are we — the RE.net, the Web 2.0 world — are we that outside force for the NAR? Are we that meteor? Don’t kid yourself. We’re waxed fruit for now, up from barely negligible a year ago. But a year from now…?

    I live in a very long-term world, but I live Read more

    November 12, 2007

    Day of the delay of The Odysseus Medal . . .

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I’m getting ready for the BloggerCon event at the NAR Convention and I’ve run myself out of time. I’ll post the judging for The Odysseus Medal tomorrow morning. I’ll leave the voting open for The People’s Choice Award until I’m ready to post.

    In the mean time, although I’ve shown this before, Cathy thought I should post it again. This is going on all around you, and, if, like certain hide-bound centenarians, you want to pretend you can avoid this fate — think again.


    Technorati Tags: , ,

    November 11, 2007

    The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Fifteen nominees this week, although ten are from BloodhoundBlog contributors, writing either at BHB or at their home weblogs. I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t think I’m being biased. The one thing I could suggest is that y’all nominate more posts from a broader range of sources.

    Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

    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 $AltEntries = array ( "Dan Green -- Flux capacitor Happy Anniversary, Flux Capacitor”,
    “Kris Berg — Boomerang     Warning: Boomerang may cause injury to others“,
    “Geno Petro — Big, hungry beast Big, Hungry Beast“,
    “Kris Berg — Trulia Make checks payable to Trulia.com“,
    “Jim Watkins — True equity True Equity – In the Real Estate Sense“,
    “Joel Burslem — Facebook Advertising Your Real Estate Business on Facebook“,
    “Jillayne Schlicke — HR 3915 Mortgage Brokers and Loan Originators Should Support HR3915“,
    “Steve Leung — Reverse offer Considering the Reverse Offer“,
    “Kevin Boer — Curbed Curbed.com = HomeGain Redux; Is History Repeating Itself? Will Curbed.com Start Selling Leads?“,
    “Sean Broderick — Rubik’s Cube Reasons Come First“,
    “Brian Brady — HR 3915 HR 3915: Open Letter to Senator Dodd from a Veteran Mortgage Originator“,
    “Kris Berg — SEO Chasing My Long Tail – My Truth About SEO“,
    “Geno Petro — First in, last out First In, Last Out“,
    “Jim Duncan — Green building Green building will soon be invisible“,
    “Kris Berg — Snowboarding I may see you on the way down”
    );
    shuffle($AltEntries);

    $radioGroup = “”;
    $num = count($AltEntries);
    for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[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: , ,

    • « 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