The video:
Time at a premium? Summaries here, here, here and here. Even a transcript.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 41 of 84)
I built a quick and easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal competition. You can continue to use the BlogCarnivals entry form, but I put this together to make it easier to nominate posts written by other people.
The form lives at the top of The Odysseus Medal information page, which is overdue for a rewrite. If you want an even quicker solution, go here and drag that URL into your toolbar. Copy the URL of the page you want to nominate and click on that link. Autofill then paste then submit. Duck soup.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Sometimes when I write a post, it is done in little bits at a time- a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Then news or shift happens and oh bloody hell, it changes my post, or horrors-I just trash the whole thing. Take this post for example: It sat in draft mode growing old and stale for about two weeks. This morning I took it out, shook the dust off, spruced it up, and was going to give it one final proof read this evening before posting. Now thanks to Seth, it’s a few hours worth of old news and I’ve rewritten some of it. I hate it when that happens, but for better or worse it’s going to print.
I recently switched brokerages and have been up to my eyeballs in changing my marketing materials, creating new information, ordering new business cards. Yes, I ordered business cards last week, and after some discussion with my husband and much research, I took the big leap of faith and listened to my market. I now have business cards without my photo on them. And now I see that Seth approves- if only I had posted this morning.
No picture on my business card. This goes against everything I’ve been told to do by Realtors and “experts” but in addition to Seth questioning this, both my market and my husband have asked me “Why do Realtors put their photos on their cards?” My husband, Jamie, who kinda sorta likes the way I look, was thrilled that my photo isn’t on my cards, “It’s more professional” says he. While I don’t market directly to my husband, I do market to people like my husband, so it’s probably safe to say that if he likes it without the photo then people who think like Jamie will prefer the photoless cards as well. Even my teenagers prefer them- “Yeah, it’s different”. High praise, indeed. In truth there are other things about my cards that Seth would probably hate but what do I care, I’m not marketing to him.
Recently I received an email telling me that I am missing opportunities by not being more aggressive about promoting myself. The email was referring to my blog and it came from another Realtor. I have Read more
We had a lot of truly great posts this week. I’m not the kind to pick three posts for first place and six for second place, but I do understand the temptation. Steven Groves, for instance, has much to teach us with MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings? Is the market turning? There are good reasons to say no, but what if it is? Then Patrick Kapowich has news for you with Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip. There are other truly outstanding posts in the short list of entries, and the truth is, I could go on about them all day.
But: There can only be one best. This week, that honor and The Odysseus Medal go to Michael Cook with Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors? I know many Realtors reading here disagree with Michael’s argument. That’s fine. The question is, what are you doing about it? It were well if you were able to defend your value proposition well enough to best Michael in a fair debate, but you don’t have to set the bar the high. Here is what you do need to do, though, and what you need to get better and better at doing: You have to create and be able to defend your value proposition with your own clients. What is it that you are bringing to your transactions that exceeds your cost in sales commission? If Michael’s post — and others like it — lead you to internal turmoil, that’s a good thing. Pain is nature’s gentle way of letting you know there is a flaw in your thinking. Ruminating on the challenges a thoughtful man like Michael Cook puts before you will make you better at what you do — and better able to defend your value to your clients.
And if that’s not unsettling enough to our sensibilities, The Black Pearl this week goes to Carl Drews with How real estate commissions work. Drews is not a professional, he’s Read more
Here is the (not very) short list of this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal. You can vote for one of these posts for the People’s Choice Award.
These are this week’s entires:
- Dan Green — How Sub-Prime and Alt-A Mortgage Markets Are Behaving Like NFL Draft Picks
- Patrick Kapowich — Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip
- Erik Hersman — When You Should Consider Using Property Specific Domains to Sell Your Home
- Johnpaul Moses — Real Estate Investing Guru Goes to Prison
- Steven Groves — MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings?
- Brian Brady — It’s A Lenders’ Market
- Jeff Kempe — Hating Selling through the Art of Sales
- Lani Anglin — Consumer’s View on What Bloodhound Blog Is…
- Michael Cook — Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors?
- Kris Berg — What’s love got to do with it? Shopping for a commodity instead of a home.
- Brian Brady — The Countrywide Federal Bailout Act of 2008
- Kris Berg — The extinction of the pterosaur – If your goal is long-term profitability, skimming the surface can kill you.
- Jeff Kempe — Redfin: Lessons in How NOT to Succeed
- Russell Shaw — Is is Stupid to Hold An Open House – Or is it Great Marketing?
- Dan Green — What Trader Joe’s And Yogurt Taught Me About Home Loan Scarcity
- Lani Anglin — A Call for ALL to Participate in Blog Transparency
- Carl Drews — How real estate commissions work
- Artur Urbanski — Is your income below $12,000 per year?
- Jeff Turner — The Problem With Alexa Rankings – Accuracy
- Jeff Brown — A Billion Here, A Billion There, And Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Money
- Robert D. Ashby, CMPS — Will the Mortgage Industry Follow the Likes of the Airline Industry?
- Steve Leung — Considering One HOA Versus Another
Voting ends Monday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. We have file permissions issues with the new server, so you definitely can vote more than once, and I definitely will catch you. So don’t.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The short list is no shorter — twenty posts so far — but there’s still room for you — or for someone whose work you think deserves attention. The entry form is here.
Voting for The People’s Choice Award will start just after Noon PDT/MST.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
If you’re seeing this post, you’re finding BloodhoundBlog on our new file server. A word of caution: Domain Name Servers attach like Velcro, at little at a time. You may yet see Delia’s Gone again before we’re done. By Monday or Tuesday, any flakiness should be gone. I’m just warning you, that’s all.
I know, too, that email to me has been bouncing since yesterday as a consequence of this switch. If you got something back, send it through again, if you would.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.
In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.
Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.
I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.
Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.
This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.
So: The rules are changed to this:
The Rules (few and fair):
- The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
- The entrant need not be the author of the post
- More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
- More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
- No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies
Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.
I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:
You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:
That image links back to the information page for the competition.
We’re Read more
As you will have seen from yesterday’s short-list of entries, we had a lot of very high-quality posts among our contestants. This seems to augur well for the future of the contest. If you didn’t make the cut, soldier on. For the most part, even the posts that didn’t make it to the People’s Choice competition were very, very good.
But: It’s plausible to me that you’re reading this post to hear about winners, so let’s talk about those:
The People’s Choice Award, the winner of the popular voting yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning, goes to Michael Cook, with Realtors, Wake Up and Start Helping Consumers.
The Black Pearl is awarded to the entry that presents the best practical, technical or marketing idea of the week. This week that award goes to Benn Rosales for Mortgage drama, real estate bubble, tech crash, dotcom disaster. Here’s the winning idea:
So now that we know it’s coming, what shall we all do about it? I’m doing a few things like; creating a shortsale team to assist sellers, offering move-down programs to those who aren’t so much in a bad way-yet, talking about it with sellers that call, offering advise on when to get out, and when to stay, talking to lenders about refinance options for those who might not need to move if we can do something now before they begin missing payments (not charging for that by the way, just guiding), calling past clients to see how they are, and that they’re okay.
And the first Odysseus Medal in this new competition, the overall best post of the week in my opinion, goes to Kevin Boer with The Innovator’s Dilemma In Real Estate: Beware Of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You. I’m a Grand Opera kind of writer, and Kevin is a just-the-facts kind of guy, but the journey he took us on in this post is simply extraordinary.
I’ll be making the three ‘badges’ shown here available to the winners as ornaments to be used with their winning posts or on their sidebars. (And if a real artist wants to volunteer to make better versions, Read more
Sorry, Michael, but sometimes plumbers gotta talk about pipes. This is Teresa Boardman writing at The Real Estate Tomato:
In my humble opinion it isn’t about how many people read me. It is about who reads me and why. It is about speaking directly to the clients you prefer working with. A ton of leads can mean a ton of work and little business. Some of my blog readers are exactly the kind of person I want as a client and others are not. Not all leads are equal. The type and quality of the content does have an impact on the type of leads a blogger attracts.
I think this is dead-on. By pursuing real estate weblogging with a long-term strategy, you can grow your business in the way you want it to grow.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Okay, the live version of the People’s Choice Award voting interface is on-line. My short-list isn’t all that short, alas — 18 entries total, including seven from BloodhoundBlog. I’ll do a better job of eliminating posts in the future.
The selections are shown in random order in the voting interface, this because being at the top or the bottom of a list like this is a decided advantage.
These are the posts, in no special order, except the BloodhoundBlog entries are shown last:
- Steven Groves, “Virtual Tour” takes on a whole new meaning – using Second Life as a presentation tool for a home sale
- Dan Green, Barry Bonds and Mortgage Bonds: Are They So Different?
- Jeff Brown, Is Everything Going To Hell In A Hand Basket? Will Lassie Save Timmy? And Other Questions
- Patrick Kapowich, How Can Brokers Protect Themselves From Agent Promotion?
- Kevin Boer, The Innovator’s Dilemma In Real Estate: Beware Of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You
- Josh Hohman, Overpricing and Effect on DOM
- Jonathan Dalton, What Have We Taught Our Clients?
- Jeff Kempe, Realtor’s Dilemma
- Morgan Brown, Your Credit is Crucial – It Determines Your Refinance and Home Purchase Options
- Lani Anglin, Obsession With Youth? I Think Not!
- Benn Rosales , Mortgage drama, real estate bubble, tech crash, dotcom disaster
- Teri Lussier, Connect the dots: Who’s buying, who’s selling, and what is being sold
- Brian Brady, The Mortgage Tax Act of 2007
- Jeff Kempe, In Search of Excellence
- Michael Cook, The National Association of Realtors is Simply Outrageous
- Jeff Brown, Real Estate Bloggers — Why Are You Blogging? What Currency Does Your Banker Accept?
- Kris Berg, “They are conniving and con artists” – Redfin launches Southern California Sweet Digs
- Michael Cook, Realtors, Wake Up and Start Helping Consumers
Go here to view the entries and to vote. I’ll accumulate votes until 12 Noon PDT Monday. I’ll post the winners of The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl and The People’s Choice Award Monday afternoon.
Technorati Tags: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing
I have a dummy version of the People’s Choice voting interface for the Odysseus Medal competition up and running. I used five of my recent posts for examples, since I’m excluded from the competition. Play with it, if you’re of a mind to. See if it makes sense to you. See if you can get it to break. The live version will go up later today.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’ve posted the rules for The Odysseus Medal competition, but there aren’t so many that I can’t also show them here:
The Rules (few and fair):
- The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
- The entrant must be the author of the post
- More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
- More than one entry from the same person is also fine, provided that you have multiple personality disorder
- No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies
The Prizes:
Three awards will be given weekly:
- The Odysseus Medal, for the overall best post of the week
- The Black Pearl, for the best practical, technical or marketing idea of the week
- The People’s Choice Award, selected by popular voting on Sunday evenings
The Deadline: Sunday at 12 Noon MST — which is 12 Noon PDT, 3 pm EDT, etc.
Entry form: It’s here.
No doubt this will change somewhat with time, but probably not by much. I really don’t like rules, making them or, especially, complying with them. Entries that I’ve already received will be grandfathered, of course. Fair is fair.
Anyway, get crackin’. Either Cameron or I will build a voting bot for the People’s Choice Award, and I’ll put together graphic trophies for the winners. I want for this to be an enduring tribute to quality weblogging. But the truth is, I’ve got the easy job. You’re the one whose going to have to do the hard work…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Jeff Brown’s, Real Estate Bloggers — Why Are You Blogging? What Currency Does Your Banker Accept?, has evoke a ton of comments and emotion over the past few days. As an outside observer I find it interesting during these crazy times in the real estate market, people get so worked up over SEO, but don’t seem to carry that same passion over to the market.
While I have no real interest in SEO, I thought I would mention that if (and when) the real estate market tanks, it wont matter how many people are coming to your site if they aren’t able to buy. While the point of Jeff’s article got lost after about the 20th comment, I think that it is really unfortunate. Blogging for business is fine by me, but what about the consumer? There will be a point very soon when consumers will be looking for advice on how to approach and handle a down market. It would seem like everyone’s time would be better spent having these discussions.
I am probably one of the few non-real estate agents writing/reading here, but as a current home shopper, a Realtor could really differentiate themselves by understanding the market and providing helpful advice. In a world where good content is king, I am spending my time reading and understanding where the market is going, so that I can provide readers support as things go from bad to worse.
A major knock on Realtors is the fact that they are always selling, not necessarily with their client’s best interest in mind. The National Association of Realtors makes this perception worse with every rosy real estate forecast they send out to the market in spite of overwhelmingly negative information. Interestingly, two days after I wrote this piece about the NAR forecast, the stock market had the second worse day of the year.
Looking at a variety of the real estate bloggers blogs, who have been commenting here, I have seen very little content on many sites that could really help consumers deal with this changing market. Now Read more