There’s always something to howl about.
There are already a couple dozen nominees for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition. What are we missing? Only you know for sure. The deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something orbiting the skirts of perfection, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
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Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Blogging for business is NOT the most efficient use of your time. Your time is better spent mining your database. This is a topic near and dear to my heart; my database is a mess. Had I properly maintained it these past 7-8 years, I’d probably be retired today. If I employed the 33-touch system, suggested by Gary Keller, I’d not be hunting for the next batch of loans. I certainly wouldn’t be, as one online marketing vendor called my strategy, “puking all over the internet” , sifting through inquiries, to find serious borrowers.
That is not to say that blogging doesn’t have it’s place; it does. As Greg suggests, it is an excellent way to connect “viscerally” with your database. Creating a cozy community may be the focus of my online marketing efforts once I practice the “Law of the Broom” and clean house. This is not a reversal of my claim that keyword-rich text gets search engine results; it most certainly does. Blogging for your customers, employing a few basic keyword search terms, can attract more like-minded people which makes your business proposition more efficient (READ: I want more people that are just like my best clients). By playing to your strengths, you can hit more balls out of the park because you’ll start seeing the same kind of pitches.
Enter someone like Ray Cobel. Ray runs an outfit called Cobel Target Marketing. I met him on Active Rain and realized that he knows a helluva lot about mining databases. Ray has agreed to let me interview him for a podcast, to be hosted here on Bloodhound Blog. I’m still working on my questions so you can e-mail me if you have one for him.
I have some advantages as I start to apply the Law of the Broom. I’ve been in business for some twenty years, thirteen as a loan originator. I have a lot of people’s name in the computer, on business cards, or on cocktail napkins from Durant’s or the Poseidon. Read more
It is my honor and privilege to work with some of the best writers in the RE.net. There are other folks I deeply admire but whom it would be unseemly for one reason or another to recruit. But the people who write for BloodhoundBlog are first among the first rank, whether they are writing here or at their home weblogs. The Odysseus Medal competition gives me a chance to savor great writing from other great writers, so I am not twice-blessed but dozens-blessed every week — as are you.
Here are the winners of this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:
This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Kris Berg for News You Can Use – Real Estate is a Business:
Any new agent who steps foot in the Broker’s door without basic technology skills or a strong desire to learn and embrace technology, should ahead of anything else be given a 2.0 crash course. A canned, unmanned page on your Broker’s site is not good enough; yourname@aol.com is not good enough. What they need to teach and you need to possess is a commitment to continuing education and an aching hunger to understand as much as you possibly can about the countless technological tools at your disposal in the big, wide world out there. Your business depends on it. Eighty-six your planned recipe card mailer, and reallocate that money and time to establishing and growing an online, relevant presence.
This post is a string of stunning Black Pearls all on its own.
But: This week’s Black Pearl Award belongs to Jonathan Dalton for Sell Your Phoenix Real Estate in Two Weeks. Not as local as the title makes it sound:
Take your home’s value back in November 2004 before the run began. Compute what your home’s value would be based on 5% annual appreciation. Then take the last sales price (or prices for currently active homes) and find the midpoint between that price and your adjusted home value.
For example: your home was worth $200,000 in 2004. Assuming 5% annual appreciation, your home would be worth roughly $231,000 now. If currently active homes are selling at $270,000, split the difference – $250,000.
Congratulations. You Read more
The short list just keeps getting longer. I’d apologize, but I’m cutting ruthlessly. We’re just getting a lot of truly excellent entrants.
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 nominees.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I changed the graphic at the top of the page for the better part of last week, an homage to Kris Berg’s excellent post, but I don’t think anyone noticed.
We have a bunch of great entries for The Odysseus Medal, but only you know what we’re missing out on. Deadline is 12 Noon PDT/MST, so make your nominations now.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Wanna hear something amazing? Twenty-one months into the downturn, and the NAR is still adding new members. Not much growth, mind you — not cancerous growth — but growth is growth.
I want to get back to the idea of alternatives to the NAR, but I’ve been busy — that’s because the real estate market is bad.
Dan Green and Tom Royce are all over the idea, but, among other things, I’ve been busy selling a Russell Shaw listing. Definitely no-hassle on my end. His team members are as sweet and thoroughgoing as the man himself.
Meanwhile, Apple’s stock price is down for three days running, so Robert X. Cringely hints that it’s time to buy. What did he miss? The show-stopper at the end of the Leopard product release is going to be a 16GB iPhone for $499. You heard it here first.
Why would you need that much memory in a mobile phone? So you can watch the Compleat Russell Shaw on the flight home from Christmas at Grandma’s, of course.
But: Until then, there is an Odysseus Medal competition to consider. Deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something insanely great, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I was at a party Saturday night, and everyone kept telling that it’s a great time to buy. I’ve been showing all weekend, so, who knows?, maybe it’s true. In any case, I’m short on minutes, so we’ll do this week’s awards on horseback.
The Minnesota Association of Realtors has a peculiar talent for inviting scorn and ridicule. This year’s fun-fest, the winner of our People’s Choice Award, was kicked off by Teresa Boardman, with Has MAR forgotten who pays the bills?
I would love it if half of the agents in the twin cities quit. That would mean more money and more business for me. It just doesn’t work that way and it never will. When it gets easy everyone wants to do it, and they do. When the going gets rough they quit.
Glen, your letter is just another example of how an industry in turmoil has started eating it’s young to protect old business models instead of innovating to better serve the consumer. Real estate is a self eliminating market driven profession. It works on the principals of supply and demand, as does the housing market. When agents can’t make ends meet they will seek employment outside the industry and maybe they will sell a few homes too. We call our economic system capitalism and I just love the almost endless opportunities the system brings. Anyone can start their own business, how cool is that?
You don’t get to decide who will stay and who will go based on earnings and years in the business. Each of us will make that decision on our own.
The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Morgan Brown’s Taking advantage of convertible home equity lines of credit, which teaches us how to encumber a Jumbo-priced property without a Jumbo loan:
Instead of taking the whole loan balance as a 1st position HELOC, take a conforming 1st mortgage up to $417,000 and then take the remaining as a convertible HELOC. Once you sign the loan documents you can convert the HELOC to a fixed rate and achieve a blended interest rate (the effective interest rate of Read more
The voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open. The short list is not short — 24 entries — but it’s rich in quality writing.
Voting will run until Monday at 12 noon PDT/MST. The ballot form will permit you to read every article, but here are the links to the nominated posts:
The Odysseus Medal competition is a weekly carnival of the very best weblog posts in the RE.net. If you would like to compete — or to nominate someone else’s excellent work — this is the nomination form.
I’ll announce this week’s winners tomorrow early afternoon.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Cathy just made me think of this, bless her beautiful soul. Deadline for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. The People’s Choice voting is Sunday afternoon as usual, so take a break form your end of summer reveling to cast a ballot. But take care of those nominations now, before you forget. You can nominate yourself or any post you admire here or, more easily, here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
If they’re ain’t no margin, there ain’t no mission. Active Rain has released it’s revenue model to the network of 43,000 members. My only question is, “What took you so long?”
In the interest of fairness, Jon Washburn, Caleb Mardini, & Matt Heaton are tech-guys. They always felt that if they build it, the money will come. And build it they did. In the course of 13 months, Active Rain has grown to over 43,000 registered members and has established a community blogging platform that is unparalleled in the RE.net.
The idealistic approach of MyHouseKey.org was a great one but it failed because of a lack of participation. No points? No interest.
Gather.com is another approach to communal blogs outside of the RE.net. Gather also uses the point system and offers rewards of free Borders’ gift cards for serial contributors. It seems to attract a sort of pseudo-intellectual Myspace user and doesn’t get the communal participation Active Rain does.
The boys of Active Rain have done a great job of balancing the fragile egos often associated with top-producing Realtors and loan originators. They’ve established community guidelines and let the members pretty much police themselves. Their Localism.com portal is an interface with consumers. They won the coveted Inman Innovation Award in San Francisco. earlier this month; it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys.
The climb to revenue wasn’t an easy one. Rumors abounded of lead poaching, black hat SEO, and other conjecture about the unbeleiveable and meteoric rise in the RE.net; none of it was true. Strategic alliances, partnerships, news sharing with mainstream media, and rumors of a buyout were all bandied about as the boys toiled away. They kept their focus and rolled with the punches.
Now, they want to get paid. Bravo! The success of the Active Rain Real Estate Network comes from the collaboration among its members. Members refer business back and forth, share marketing ideas, and help change the way we do business with the consumer. It is, without Read more
I am in love with this idea, The Odysseus Medal competition.
We judged ordinary Carnivals several times, and I was persistently underwhelmed with the overall quality of the entries. We judged hard, so the winners were truly worthy of their honors. But too many of the also-ran entries were just link-bait, entered solely to get the link back from the judging weblog.
We have none of that. I cut pretty ruthlessly to get to the short list, but we get nothing that is wildly off-topic or trooly stoopid — or stolen from another site. Instead, we’re seeing some insanely great posts, and picking just one winner is proving to be a very welcome but very difficult task.
It’s that way for you folks, too. I can tell by the People’s Choice voting, which is always broad and deep.
Together as writers, readers and judges, we are building something that matters, something that calls enduring attention to works of the mind that might otherwise just scroll away. The winners are worthy of note, to be sure, but simply to make the short list in this competition is a mark of excellence. If you make it this far, you’re keeping pace with a very fast crowd, an achievement hard to match.
And with that, to the winners:
Jeff Turner wrote an excellent post on why real estate video is unlikely to supplant virtual tours. I agree with his take and then some, and it’s something I’ve been meaning to write more about. But there are other, better uses for video in real estate. I’ve discussed a couple — videotaping your first tour of a home at the listing appointment, or taping the final walkthrough as a gift to the buyers. Russell Shaw brings us another, using video as a real estate sales training tool. Russ is just getting his sea-legs in the oceans of do-it-yourself video podcasting, but his initial effort won him this week’s People’s Choice Award.
Who is not rapt paying attention to the world of mortgage lending? Yesterday at open house, seemingly, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. As the Times rundown on Countrywide makes Read more
Another not-very-short list of posts. We set out to attract the best, and we’re seeing it and then some.
These are this week’s nominees:
Voting will end Monday at noon, and I’ll announce the winners soon thereafter.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Damn straight. And it is pure agony to get a horse shod, too.
The headline is quoted from a luddite’s lament in The Age — in Melbourne, Australia. Technology threatens the jobs of the farriers of our age, newspaper reporters, and there is nothing for it but to weep incessantly from — literally — halfway around the globe.
Suck it in, suck it up and move it on down the road. Such horses as there are needing shoes are shod, and — to the exact extent that anyone at all is interested — school board meetings are being overseen and documented. How much education do you have to have in order to fail persistently to understand that broadcasting was a low-tech economic compromise? In the world of narrowcasting, everyone gets exactly what he wants, nothing that he doesn’t, and no one is obliged to pay for school board notes in order to see the horse-racing results.
Reporters have always been demagogues in debate, masters at deploying the logical fallacies they never learned in school. Even now, when they want to scare their vanishing audiences with the bogeymen of the internet, they pick the weakest of straw men to pick on. In the case of the article I’m citing, the designated victim is Wikipedia, which, because it lacks editors, could at any moment deceive you into believing that Wednesday is a vegetable.
Do you want to see the future of professional journalism? My pet example is John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His “Venture Blog” is a beat blog: He covers venture-capital-funded start-ups as his beat and as the exclusive focus of his weblog. His work is also printed in the newspaper, but that’s anticlimactic — hours or even days late. Cook is a blogger who happens to work for a newspaper.
It seem unlikely to me that anyone is going to pay for weblogged coverage of school board meetings, but weblogging is the future of school board reporting. Content producers who want to get paid for their efforts will have to expend those efforts on content people are willing to pay for. Just about a century Read more
After Sunday at noon PDT/MST, you’ll have to wait another week. Nominate posts here or use the old school form here. Remember that you need not be the author of the post. If you’ve seen something truly great this week, share it with the rest of us.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
