Category: Blogging (page 38 of 84)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin’s financial underbelly, the top-bazillion-bloggers and leftovers from last week’s ActiveRain thunderstorm. These are just some of the topics addressed in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition.

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:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Pat Kitano -- Active Rain What Active Rain should do now”,
“Kris Berg — Soledad Mountain “They made such a beautiful home.”“,
“Dan Green — Jobs Report Measuring The Statistical Insignificance Of The Monthly Jobs Report (October 2007 Edition)“,
“Jim Watkins — Lenders When Lenders Mess Up, Everyone Suffers!“,
“Dan Melson — Foreclosure Scam The \”We’ll Keep You In Your Property\” Scam“,
“Jay Thompson — WordPress 2.3 Upgrading to WordPress 2.3“,
“Jonathn Dalton — Weblog Comments Why Do We Allow Comments?“,
“Sandy Kaduce — Redfin Financials Dr. Kelman–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redfin“,
“Michael Seguin — Central v. Distributed Central vs Distributed – a familiar cycle“,
“Kevin Boer — Redfin Financials How Come Redfin’s P&L Looks Distinctly Unlike That Of A Traditional Real Estate Brokerage? Because Redfin Is Actually A Brokerage, Not A Landlord!“,
“Brian Boero — Online Marketing Online real estate marketing made simple“,
“Alex Mather — NAR REALTOR This, REALTOR That, An Open Letter to the NAR“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — FHA Reform FHA: A Siren Who Just Might Break Your Heart“,
“Michale Wurzer — Phoenix MLS Big News“,
“Glenn Kelman — Redfin Financials Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup“,
“Lani Anlgin — Aaron Anglin “Thank You” is not enough“,
“Kris Berg — The Inman 25 The Honor is All Mine!“,
“Greg Perry — Buyer Turnoffs The TOP 10 Most Offensive Buyer Turn-Offs“,
“Greg Tracey — Real Estate Market Things I Like About the Current Market“,
“Kris Berg — Birthday Brass in Pocket”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

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

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sitting on a long list of over 60 nominations, so there probably won’t be a detailing of the long list this week, at least not this morning. But there’s still time to make the short list: Deadline 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 you’re thinking about it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog is addressed to real estate professionals. We won’t reject anyone who wants to come and play, but we made a conscious decision very early on that we would be talking to Realtors, lenders, investors and other professionals, with a special emphasis on real estate webloggers. In that respect, we’re probably a pretty bad example for real estate webloggers to follow. We write about things that are of interest to you, but they aren’t likely to be interesting to ordinary people.

We’re leading into a discussion of last week’s ActiveRain fiasco, so here are two items that I think are very important to real estate webloggers — meaning webloggers who are not writing for the benefit of real estate professionals.

First, the MyBlogLog recent readers widget is not your friend. It visually convinces you that you are writing for the amusement of your real estate weblogging buddies, when in fact you should be writing for your target market, the people who can put money in your pocket.

Second, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not be your primary traffic-building strategy. Search engines will bring you unique visitors, which can be useful for advertising monetization business models. But search engine traffic comes with a truly gargantuan bounce rate: They land, they see that what they hit wasn’t what they wanted and they’re gone. Search engines can bring you visitors who will come and stay, some of whom might do business with you. But other traffic generating strategies — better targeted and much more viral — will make you a lot more money in the long run. I know I’m shouting down a well because everyone wants to believe SEO is a magic bullet, but facts are facts.

What does this have to do with ActiveRain? The sweet folks at ActiveRain have managed to convince themselves that talking about inside baseball to their good-time buddies will result in SEO traffic that will turn into money for them. This might actually be true, but it seems certain to me that, erg for erg, their energies could have been much better spent. ActiveRain argues that its search results prove it Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was a great week. It wasn’t easy getting to a short list of twenty nominees, and I think it’s going to be particularly tough to pick an ultimate winner. I can’t imagine it will be any easier for you to vote for the People’s Choice Award.

What gets a weblog entry onto this list? Good writing, serious content — and especially both. There’s always room for something light-hearted if it’s very well written, but if you’re taking on a matter of true moment, I’m pretty forgiving about the niceties. My admitted bias is toward a deeper understanding of this thing we’re doing, real estate in the twenty-first century.

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:

< ?PHP $entries = array ( "Dan Melson -- Sellers pays commissions Why the Real Estate Buyers Agent’s Commission is Paid by the Seller”,
“Brian Brady — Advertising to Ashley Advertising to Ashley“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Real estate 2.0 Real Estate 2.0 and the Phoenix Real Estate Consumer“,
“Dustin Luther — Make an impact 7 Ways to Make an Impact“,
“Jay Thompson — Aaron Anglin Tragedy Begets Triumph: Why I Love this Community“,
“Jay Thompson — Refrigerator service How to Save $94 on Refrigerator Service“,
“Joel Burslem — ActiveRain/Move Move.com Tried to Buy ActiveRain“,
“Michael Wurzer — Standards and monopolies Good Standards Break Monopolies, Not Make Them“,
“Daniel Rothamel — Facebook Why Your Answer to, “Are You on Facebook?” Will Determine the Fate of Your Business in 10 Years or Sooner“,
“Jim Watkins — Down market? Down Sales Market? Think Outside the Box“,
“Bill Leider — Opportunity costs Internet Marketing And Opportunity Cost – Connecting The Dots“,
“Steve Leung — Hidden factors Hidden Factors When Calculating a Home’s Value“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — Deceptive advertising Deceptive Radio Advertising in Mortgage Lending“,
“Patrick Kapowich — Realtor licensing Inside the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors’ Convention. Buyer beware? No. It’s Licensees Beware.“,
“Jeff Brown — Double-edged sword Double-Edged Sword — OR — Planning & Discipline — What Does Your Retirement Look Like?“,
“Dan Green — Data is granular Why Real Estate Data Is Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a lot of news this week, some tragic, some comical. All of it and then some is represented here. This is “the long list” — the total list of nominees that made the cut to be considered for the short list, the nominees available for voting for The People’s Choice Award.

What gets cut from this list? Posts that are too short, too stoopid, too much local or too much other people’s work. Even so, making this list of entries is an achievement, as you’ll see as you read them. There are some very serious minds out there, and it’s a delight to be able to showcase them.

For Aaron Anglin, may he rest in peace, the Ave Maria:

Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum,
benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus.
Sancta Maria mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen

And for all the ActiveRainers who may yet find themselves left out in the cold, here is a link to Roger Miller singing The Ballad of Waterhole #3 (The Code of the West).

With that, the long list:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Dan Melson -- Sellers pays commissions Why the Real Estate Buyers Agent’s Commission is Paid by the Seller”,
“Brian Brady — Debunking Guttentag Debunking Guttentag“,
“Dan Green — Fed Funds Rate How Setting The Fed Funds Rate Is Like Shooting Free Throws With Your Eyes Closed“,
“Kelly Roark — Agent 2.0 Agent 2.0: not-so-clever play on ‘Web 2.0’ or the future of real estate marketing?“,
“Brian Wilson — Redfin [Redfin] “I coulda been a contender…”“,
“Erik Hersman — RealUmbrella Creating the Ultimate Real Estate Disintermediator“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — Deceptive advertising Deceptive Radio Advertising in Mortgage Lending“,
“Ron Ares — Rent vs buy Addressing the Rent vs. Buy Conundrum“,
“Patrick Kapowich — Realtor licensing Inside the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors’ Convention. Buyer beware? No. It’s Licensees Beware.“,
“Jeff Brown — Double-edged sword Double-Edged Sword — OR — Planning & Discipline — What Does Your Retirement Look Like?“,
“Dan Green — Visa credit scoring How Visa USA Tried To Scare Us All Into Using Its Credit Scoring Web Site“,
“Morgan Brown — Housing glut Housing Glut, Lennar Revenue off 44%, Other Goodies“,
“Dustin Luther — Make an Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jay Thompson fingered this comment from someone named Brandon writing at TechCrunch:

If “the good guys” succeed in “fixing the most screwed up industry in America”, their business model will collapse. Redfin’s success depends SOLELY on the real estate industry STAYING the most screwed up industry in America.

Without a co-broker fee of 2-3% to the buyer broker, Redfin will not have anything to refund to their buyers. Using the example on the Redfin home page, if the home is for sale by owner or listed with Redfin for $3000-$4000 flat fee, they have no way to refund the buyer the $10,000 they’re using in their “typical” example.

Go lookup Bloodhound Blog if you want really insightful info on the real estate industry (including how screwed up parts of it really are) and how Redfin’s model falls down. An no, I am not affiliated with Bloodhound in any way – just a loyal reader.

Ah, well, we have a lot of interesting ideas for changes in the real estate industry, but I can’t imagine that any of them will be implemented in the next couple of days. Even so, get your Odysseus Medal nominations in now. Deadline 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 — and before the entire universe is upended.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing