This is the 2nd in the series. I am just getting started – you will want to collect the entire set.
Category: Blogging (page 37 of 84)
If you don’t comment on others’ blogs, you are missing a core element of blogging. Bulk up on your blog muscles before NAR Big Brother bans blogging.
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Broker-controlled blogging was a hot topic this weekend. I tried to raise some eyebrows (and awareness) with my speculation about the internet land grab the employing brokers and banks might try.
I think a few things might have gotten lost in the translation. While I said that the brokers and banks will claim that it is a compliance issue, I believe that the REAL reason will be that they want to control the marketing channel to the consumer. Here’s what I said, over on Active Rain:
That will put pressure on the large companies to provide higher compensation to the more effective sales agents. That, will be the problem. Large real estate brokers and banks will severely curb the weblogging efforts of the individual sales agents in the name of “compliance”. In short, the behemoths will say that they can not adequately protect the consumer from the unsupervised local messages being offered by its sales agents. That, will be bunk.
The end-game play, the brokerage firms and banks will make, will always be about the money. Control of the customer has always been a competitive advantage for a large broker or bank. If that competitive advantage is lost, the value proposition of a large firm is lost. They won’t tolerate that loss.
What I’m saying is “The Compliance Argument is Crap- They Just Want Your Money“. I’m telling you this so that you are prepared when the NAR comes at you with the “Internet Compliance Memorandum” from their convention next month. I have no inside information, it’s pure conjecture on my part. This is, as Greg Swann would say, “evil dressed up in a Brooks Brothers suit”. My opinion isn’t biased against big brokerage firms, it will be even worse for the mortgage originators. Our evil is dressed up in custom made suits with Italian loafers- there is no way the big bank Presidents will allow their “salespeople” to live better than they do.
Look at the follow up articles on Active Rain:
Why is housing so much more expensive in Los Angeles than it is in Dallas? Higher demand? No so much. The reason is that building new housing in Dallas is easy, while building anything at all in California is a nightmare of absurd regulations. Virgina Postrel explores a study that shows the marginal cost, in land prices, of pushing innocent people around by force with land-use restrictions. (HT Dan Melson.)
Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I’m reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather. Some of the price reflects the productivity advantages of being near others doing similar work (try selling a screenplay from Arlington, Texas). All of these benefits—and the negatives of traffic and smog—are reflected in the price of land.
But what exactly is that price? Consider two ways of computing the price of a quarter acre of land. You can compare the value of a house on a quarter acre with that of a similar house on a half acre. Or you can take the price of a house on a quarter acre and subtract the cost of the house itself—the price of construction. Either way, you get the value of an empty quarter acre. The two numbers should be roughly the same. But they aren’t. The second one is always bigger, because it includes not just the property but the right to build. Expanding your quarter-acre lot to a half acre doesn’t give you per- mission to add a second house.
In a 2003 article, Glaeser and Gyourko calculated the two different land values for 26 cities (using data from 1999). They found wide disparities. In Los Angeles, an extra quarter acre cost about $28,000—the pure price of land. But the cost of empty land isn’t the whole story, or even most of it. A quarter- acre lot minus the cost of the house came out to about $331,000—nearly 12 times as much as the extra quarter acre. The difference between the first and second prices, around $303,000, was what L.A. home buyers Read more
What is your broker doing when he’s not milking you for overpriced business cards and overpriced letterhead with overpriced envelopes? He’s milking your buyers for overpriced loans, overpriced title services, overprices inspections, home warranties and hazard insurance policies. For some brokerages, there is never enough money to be squeezed out of a transaction. This is white shoe corruption — technically lawfully but oozing sleaze. Someday there will be a successful class action suit and it will all go away just like that.
Until then, heed the advice of attorney Joshua Marks, who wins this week’s Odysseus Medal with Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!:
A recent class-action lawsuit filed in the state of Minnesota is bringing to light a long-standing issue that affects buyers of residential real estate throughout the country—alleged steering of home buyers to affiliated title, settlement and mortgage companies by large realty brokers. This widely utilized practice often leads to consumers incurring a considerable amount of extra fees and costs when compared with fees and services offered by non-affiliated competitors.
Many real estate brokerages rely on the income generated by clients using mortgage and title companies that are affiliated with them. Brokerages often attempt to maximize their “capture rates” – the percentage of all home-sale transactions that use the affiliates’ services. A consumer typically ends up paying more fees than if he/she selected a non-affiliated competitor. The brokerages justify the additional expense to consumers by claiming that even if the affiliates’ fees or mortgage rates are not the lowest available, the quality and dependability of the affiliates’ services more than compensate for any price differences.
Over the past several years, many cases involving financial relationships between brokerages and their affiliates have withstood legal challenges. So long as the financial arrangement was properly structured to comply with federal anti-steering and anti-kickback rules, the Courts have been reluctant to intervene in these arrangements.
In the Minnesota lawsuit, two buyers filed claims against Coldwell Banker Burnet Realty Inc., one of the largest realty firms in the state. The Plaintiffs Read more
I had been doing a short list of 20 nominees, but I had the idea that that was an overwhelming number. (It was for me.) This week I cut the short list to 12, and it’s not only more manageable, it seemed to be easier to distinguish the exemplary posts from the many notable entries that had been nominated.
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 PDT/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:
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$AltEntries = array (
"Daniel Rothamel -- Social media How your business can benefit from social media right now”,
“Sean Broderick — Google Basewide Google Basewide? One Step Away in California“,
“Brian Boero — On-line real estate Online real estate: It’s anybody’s ballgame“,
“Jim Cronin — Pay-per-click Kick the Pay Per Click Habit: 7 Reasons Why Real Estate Blogging Is Better For Your Business“,
“Joshua Marks — Broker affiliations Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!“,
“John Cook — Pete Flint A Q&A with Trulia CEO Pete Flint“,
“Jay Thompson — Zolve Zolve – One Agent’s Perspective“,
“Eric Blackwell — Realtor.com How to Stop getting hosed by REALTOR.com…“,
“Michael Price — Secret sauce Mmmmm…..Secret Sauce“,
“Teri Lussier — Viral marketing Web 2.0: Catching a virus at the local dance“,
“Cathleen Collins — Columbus Christopher Columbus… a top producer for the ages!“,
“Brian Brady — Professionalization Trim The Fat…No, Throw Away the Meat and Get a New Cow”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
…but you still have time. Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Last year I paid Realtor.com about $3,300 to enhance my listings. Now they want to charge me $14,000 for the same thing. Dean Selvey’s rate went from $3,800 to $30,000. Those numbers are not typos. Dean no longer does business with them. I told my sales rep that I would not pay it and that I did not want “a special deal for me”. I wanted their rates put back where they were for everyone. They were supposed to call me. They didn’t call and I don’t believe they are going to call.
I’ve been through this with them before. Several years ago I flew to Homestore and met with them and got them to put the rates back for everyone. It was the bizarre rates they wanted for posting virtual tours that time. The people I met with then are not there any longer. It is now called “Move”.
They have a pattern of doing outrageous things to Realtors with their prices – this isn’t new. It is despicable.
Greg Swann sent this to me. I guess he knew I would post it.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/12/how-to-become-a-famous-blogger/
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Weblog documents, supports transition to new MLS system
This could get complicated, so put on your thinking cap.
Here’s the scoop: Beginning last Friday and culminating on July 1, 2008, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) is going to be switching from Marketlinx/Tempo, our current on-line MLS vendor, to the flexmls system developed and marketed by FBS Systems.
Bored yet? You shouldn’t be, because, although the primary beneficiaries of this switch will be Realtors, there will be quite a few interesting answers to your own “What’s in it for me?” questions.
Tech-savvy agents like us are dancing in the streets. At Bloodhound, we have a profound hatred for the kinds of buggy vertical market solutions foisted off on Realtors, so we have built our business on commodity and horizontal software tools. What that means is that systems like Tempo are so hard to work with that we have built our tools around their bugs.
So that’s the first benefit of the switch for Realtors and consumers alike: FBS is committed to working with the user base to achieve the greatest possible satisfaction. How do I know they’ll follow through? Because FBS President Michael Wurzer is an active participant in the real estate weblogging community. He can afford to lead with his chin because he’s prepared to effect this transition in the most public possible way.
But what’s in it for you? Here are a couple of teasers, with plenty more to come. If you’re out with your agent next summer and you see a house that sparks your curiosity, your Realtor will be able to look up the listing on the fly by smart-phone. Even better, by next November, your agent will be able to set you up with direct access into the MLS system. You’ll be able to run true MLS searches from your den.
Some of the geekiest Realtors in the Valley have set up a new weblog to celebrate and document this transition, The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange (PRETexchange.com). Feel free to join and advise us as we make the leap Read more
It’s Milk the Realtors week on the RE.net — with the shilling appeals for useless new “solutions” getting pretty close to actual sleaze — so I wanted to revisit a couple of themes we’ve hit before. Inherent in the Web 2.0 idea is a de-verticalization of real estate marketing. Big-budget interruption marketing doesn’t work, but intimate viral marketing does. Because of the Web 2.0 revolution, Realtors are free — at last — to control their own marketing — and their own costs.
“So,” say the shills and wannabe shills, “how can we cash in on that?” And the result is the Web 2.0 industry for Realtors: Vertical-market weblog vendors and vertical-market social marketing schemes.
Here’s a hint: You don’t need to pay someone money to “network” for referrals and agents to refer business to. All you need to do is network. If you’re paying attention to the RE.net, you already know three agents in every town in North America.
Here’s another hint: There is no such thing as an interesting amalgamation of hyper-local real estate weblogs. A hyper-local weblog is interesting because it’s hyper-local. Combining eight hyper-local weblogs is seven-eighths boring to every possible reader — as boring as the “Neighborhoods” section of the local newspaper, but harder to slog through.
You don’t need vendors to control your marketing, and getting in bed with vendors is potentially disastrous. These are my three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors:
- Avoid hosted software systems
For dedicated web site vendors, dedicated weblog vendors, dedicated virtual or video tour vendors, dedicated customer relationship management vendors, the money is in the blades — the monthly hosting fees — not the razor, the ostensible product. The initial outlay might be steep enough, but the gravy comes from taking money from you month after month for “services” for which the added incremental costs are almost nothing. Okayfine. Everybody’s gotta eat. The trouble with hosted software systems is not the pricing but, rather, who owns the data and what happens to it when you elect to take your business elsewhere. Is your data yours to take with you? Worse, is your confidential information truly Read more
Pardon my gushing: I adore the Bloodhounds. It’s a honor, and yeah still a shock, to see my goofy real estate picture on the contributor’s panel, but I sometimes wonder what unique thing I can bring to the Bloodhound table. I’m not a top producer, I’m not the world’s most opinionated blogger, I’m not a big thinker, I’m not the funny Bloodhound, or an expert in my field, and I’m not Grumpy, although I have shown signs of being Dopey. Alas, I’m past the age of being either cute or perky, I’m not a geek, or even a new guy. But none of this matters anyway, as I do despise labels.
What do I bring to this table? Since there is a bit of anarchy here, I could bring whatever I want to the table, but in the end I’m gonna shake what my mama gave me and dance with them what brung me. Today I’m bringing hyperlocal blogging.
Somewhere someone is reading this who is a new-ish Realtor, learning the business, and learning blogging, and working in a bit of a broken down market. Am I the only real estate agent in this situation? Hardly, although I am the only Bloodhound in this situation. Am I speaking of you? You are working to set yourself apart, to improve your odds of lasting in this business, and wondering how to work it in your market? This post is for you.
Greg’s advice for local RE weblogging has always been to remember the people we write for, who are not neccessarily the people who comment, and certainly not the other Realtors who show up on MyBlogLog widgets. He also advised me to find local bloggers and link early and link often. All this advice is beginning to pay off for me, and in the Bloodhound spirit of sharing, I’m here to encourage the other hyperlocal bloggers to stick to your Be-the-Community guns.
In my neck of the woods, few people know what a blog is, nor do they care, and that disturbed me at first as I had some niggling thoughts about using a blog in Dayton to generate leads. On occasion, it was tough to hear about thousands of hits per day to some blogs, and still keep my Read more
When I installed the BlogRush widget, Tom Royce teased me that it’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t do. That’s true, and that was why I did it, because, as much as I might trust my instincts about goofy net stunts, it’s always possible that I’m wrong.
Not this time. BlogRush just plain sucks. I’m sure the developers are working gamely to produce the product they should have built before they launched it, but I don’t care. From my end, I rack up thousands of exposures they can never possibly deliver back to me — not that any of those turn into hard clicks anyway. As I might have foreseen, the BlogRush widget is like a commercial on television, instant eye repellant.
It’s off the sidebar. I have a downline of folks who followed me into this maze of twisty, turning passages, all alike, and I leave them to keep their own counsel. BlogRush may be doing something for somebody. It ain’t doing anything for me. And now it’s gone.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Let’s play a little game of practical morality.
Imagine that you’re the Mozart of real estate webloggers, the Jimi Freakin’ Hendrix of the RE.net. Winner of the Carnival of Real Estate more than any other writer, winner of the Odysseus Medal, three-time nominee in a field of twenty nominated posts in this past week’s Odysseus Medal competition. Imagine that you are such an amazingly great writer that you can get away with anything, that you can get people to read everything you write, avidly, to the very last savory word. Imagine that even among the rivalrous best, you are acknowledged as the best of them all. Imagine that.
Now let’s reward your greatness.
First we will isolate you by sex, so as to imply that your lack of testicles disqualifies you from the real competition.
Then let’s group you among eleven ciphers, so as to dilute your greatness not to one-twelfth strength but to 1/144th, or possibly to 1/12^12, an infinitesimal residue of everything you are in your unique state of perfection.
Just to gild the lily, let’s ignore the worthy women who write with you, writers who, at their best, can see their way to the pinnacle you alone have pioneered.
What could possibly be missing from a celebration such as this?
Music, of course:
Congratulations, Kris. You’ve been “recognized”…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Meet Dr. Glenn, CEO of a radically different venture-capital-funded real estate start-up. He’s charming, witty, self-deprecating, baldly transparent about his means, ends and motives. The people who saw him speak at Inman Connect were amazed at how engaging he could be.
Why amazed? Because his reputation has suffered from the verbal savageries of his alter-ego, the coarse and flippant Mr. Kelman, a vulgarian who cannot come within shouting distance of a mainstream media maven without shoving one or more of his plentiful feet into his vast, cavernous mouth.
It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup, in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:
Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.
We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.
When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.
Say what you want about the cretinous Mr. Kelman — I know I do — this article is a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate few of us Read more