BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 48 of 84)

May 21, 2007

Like a Virgin

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

So I’ve spent the last hour trying to navigate Word Press — I’m going to bet it’s much easier than I’m making it — have written a terribly serious post on the allegorical link between Nordstrom and real estate, and decided that’s a really inelegant way to introduce myself.

Yes, thirteen years with Nordstrom in the late sixties and seventies, the perfect business education. Twenty five years as a manufacturer’s rep, until getting on planes and traveling salesman jokes simply got to be overwhelmingly dull. I got my real estate license nearly three years ago, and immediately wished that I’d done it years before.

Which means most here probably know more about real estate than I do. The reason I came to Bloodhound Blog in the first place was to learn.

What I do know is people. Why they buy, their motivations and reactions. I know that the Arizona Board of Appraisal is thoroughly nuts for thinking it can shut down Zillow, or even trying. I have a pretty good notion Redfin will be out of business in two years. Sixty Minutes is an anachronism.

And I’m certain the real estate business is changing. Much of the status quo is antithetical to anything I learned at Nordstrom: the industry gets much of its incentive from what’s best for the industry, not what’s best for the people we serve. I’ll never understand the first seminar I went to after I was licensed, where the instructor said good agents spend 90% of their time prospecting for new clients. 90%. If I spend that much time selling myself, what, exactly, am I selling?

Phil Knight said: “Nike is a marketing company, but our product is our number one marketing tool.” What I do for buyers and sellers is my product, and my interest is in being as good at that as I can be.

That’s why I’m here; I really, really look forward to it.

Thanks, Greg; I’m honored!

May 21, 2007

If lenders divorce the commissions, they’ll be divorced

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jim Duncan issues a battle cry for divorced commissions:

As a profession, we need to rid ourselves of Cooperative Compensation and the practice of the listing broker paying the Buyer’s Agent.

Cooperation between Brokers need not go away. In fact, without cooperative compensation, the practice of real estate representation will be enhanced, as the perceived collusion between Realtors will be mitigated significantly. What needs to disappear is the inherent conflict of interest that comes from the Listing Broker paying the Buyer’s Agent.

Jim argues for legislative changes, but my thinking is that lenders could effect this change overnight, without new laws.

How?

By refusing to honor the terms of the Listing Agreement.

If mortage underwriters disallow any commission over 3% or 3.5% from the seller, with all of that going to the Listing Broker, while simultaneously allowing a commission of up to 3% or 3.5% from the buyer, with all of that going to the Buyer’s Broker — what will happen? The brokers will immediately rewrite their employment agreements. We are always changing language to get it past the underwriter — and the smart ones among us write the language their way from then on.

The simple fact is, except for all-cash sales, we’re going to do what the lender tells us to do. No loan, no transaction. If lenders decide to divorce the commissions, they’re going to be divorced.

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May 21, 2007

Shuffling the pack: Two new Bloodhounds on the trail

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re adding two new contributors today:

Lani Anglin is the Texas-proud provocateuse at the spunky Realtor Wives weblog. By day, she works as a rainmaker for Single Pointe Realty. With two kids, three cats, a dog and her husband, she finds a way to stay busy.

Jeff Kempe knows a thing or two about Nordstrom service, having sold for them and to them for many years. Jeff has been selling real estate in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, for the last three years.

Norma Newgent hasn’t had the time to give to BloodhoundBlog lately, so I’ve moved her off of the main rotation for now.

We’re heavy on Realtors, and I think this is a great strength. But we are necessarily at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the real estate market. When the market turns hard, we’re going to need a tire iron to pry extra hours out of the day.

In any case, Lani and Jeff are both very interesting writers, and I know they’ll bring new insights to us. Lani’s in a tough spot, though. Lexically, she lands above Kris Berg on the list of contributors, but my bet is that no one can eclipse Kris in the weblogger’s art.

When will BloodhoundBlog stop growing? When we run out of things to howl about…

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May 19, 2007

RE.net waist-loss challenge: Mid-term report cards

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re about half-way through the RE.net waist-loss challenge, so it seems like a good time to pull out the scales and the tape measures. This was the plan I laid out for myself in March:

My goal: A 34-inch waist by August 1st.

My plan: A half-hour a day on the stationary bike, while reading nothing work-related. Eat half as much, twice as often — or less. Add real bicycling as the weather warms up. Add free-weights and crunches as appropriate.

No crunches at all yet (O, the pain!), but everything else proceeds apace. I got sick a little while ago, and I haven’t yet reintegrated the weights before bedtime. I finally got onto my mountain bike a couple of weeks ago. I hate anything like cold weather, so I won’t ride if the outside temperature isn’t what most people would think of as blistering. Anyway, I found out right away that the recumbent bike is a vigorous way of sitting down. By now I can do 45 very hard minutes on the bike, but I haven’t yet found myself tempted by any of the nearby mountains. Eating less and better has been no problem at all. Food has always bored me, but the weights and the bike lead me to a certain fascination with protein.

Consequences? I’m down 30 pounds from the start of the year, but that doesn’t really matter. I care a lot less about weight than about converting fat to muscle. That much seems to be working well. I’ve burned two inches off my belt, but that vast beach ball above my belt is much deflated. Riding a mountain bike is an excellent workout for every muscle from toes to glutes (plus some upper body stuff), so the biggest muscle groups in my body are getting substantially stronger. Plus which, while free weights are beyond excellent for building fat-burning muscle, working out with weights is blindingly boring, where riding the bike is always interesting.

Even so, there is a degree to which all exercise sucks. There is nothing quite as pleasant as laying down on the sofa and sinking into another fascinating Read more

May 18, 2007

Where is the epicenter of real estate weblogging?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Arizona, of course.

Want proof? Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy really is the phoenix real estate guy. I’m getting him in sixth place in Google organic results for that keyword, with nowhere to go but up.

John L. Wake at Arizona Real Estate Notebook takes us through the five stages of grief for months-on-market home-sellers.

Wally Neal of Metro Phoenix Real Estate (watch out, Jay) gives Redfin a nice filleting.

Down in Tucson, Dave Smith at the Real Estate Blog Lab drops a dime on the Clean Archives plug-in, which I immediately installed. Now you can visit our new Archives page to discover just how hyper-loquacious we really are.

Finally, honorary Arizonan Brian Brady is threatening to put together another convocation of Phoenix-area real estate webloggers. Let him know by email if you want to come along.

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May 17, 2007

Defending Redfin: Sweet Digs weblog buried by inane MLS rules

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t like Redfin.com. Its “business” model consists of quietly diverting its agency responsibilities to listing agents while loudly rebating its largely unearned commissions to buyers. My experience of the president of the company, Glenn Kelman, is that he is an oily liar who will say anything to draw the fawning attentions of a gullible mainstream media. I don’t care about discount real estate brokerages in general — let the market sort them out — but Redfin’s modus vivendi is to exploit defects in the real estate industry — that it cannot get along without — while decrying those same defects in its tendentious and mendacious PR.

However: I believe in liberty before everything. Although Redfin will never enter most real estate markets — this being forbidden by a cost-structure that loses money on even the priciest of homes — it nevertheless has a valid complaint when it draws attention to anti-rebating and minimum-service real estate laws. The National Association of Realtors is an anti-capitalist cartel, as are state and local Realtors’ associations and local MLS systems. They are liars just like Kelman, loudly proclaiming their protection of the consumer’s interests while quietly enacting every Rotarian Socialist scheme they can think up.

Today John Cook’s Venture Blog reports that Redfin is being fined and forced to shut down one of its weblogs for violating one of those schemes:

The Northwest Multiple Listing Service has fined Redfin $50,000 and asked them to stop publishing a popular blog in which contractors for the online real estate brokerage posted reviews of Seattle area homes.

Redfin is appealing the fine, though it took steps this week to shut down the reviews on its “Sweet Digs” blog. With about 3,000 e-mail and online subscribers, the blog was written by 15 freelance reviewers who over the past five months posted reviews on about 1,000 homes in Seattle and San Francisco. The company says it plans to maintain the blog as a source of information on pricing trends and recently sold homes.

Redfin Chief Executive Glenn Kelman said he had no choice but to comply, noting that the NWMLS had threatened to Read more

May 16, 2007

Not to be missed: Marlow (The Hammer) Harris on the Redfin hustle

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eminently worth waiting for:

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at those meetings with the investors and venture capitalists. Pie charts, graphs, facts, figures. Lots of talk about disintermediation and volume of scale and that sort of thing.

When Redfin fails, they won’t blame themselves, the business model, lack of planning, poor management skills or bad judgement. They will blame the NAR, the “real estate industrial complex”, and the “real estate monopoly”.

VC’s out there reading this, please, use your head. At this rate, you will never see a dime returned on your money. It will just go down the same hole where the other $8M already went, subsidizing the 150 or so buyers who got their 2% refund from Redfin. That was YOUR money!

Redfin believes real estate agents are overpaid. They want to reduce commissions. If they succeed, THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO REFUND. Their whole M.O., their raison d’etre, their entire business model disintegrates.

Priceless. Read the whole thing.

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May 15, 2007

Speed links: Freakonomics, podcasting Dustin and WordPress 2.2

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Thanks to Rueben Moore of BrickAndGarden.com, we were cited by the Freakonomics weblog today for beating up on the NAR.

BloodhoundBlog contributor Morgan Brown has a podcast interview with Rain City Guides’s Dustin Luther at BlownMortgage, his home weblog.

WordPress 2.2 is out. We’re running 2.1 on all our hosted weblogs except this one, which is still quivering in the corner under version 2.0.10. Time for some upgrades.

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May 13, 2007

60 Minutes’ Redfin.com story delivers 400 hits in 60 minutes flat . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Who says the old media is dead? In the hour just ended, Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing had over 400 hits from organic search. Just think what might happen if the NAR made reasoned arguments instead of trying to club reality into shape with legislation…

(This search is why we’re getting the traffic. As with Zillow.com, we are the highest-ranking discouraging words on the topic. It’s up to you to determine where the intellectual leadership of the real estate industry resides…)

More: real estate 2.x emerges from its Howard Hughes-like seclusion to comment.

Further notice: Well. That was pretty lame. You can see the video here. Wouldn’t it be cool if a reporter could ask an intelligent question? Wouldn’t it be cool if both sides of a story were actually presented? Even so, the bottom line is: Big deal.

Still more: I commented on the TechCrunch.com post, not that anyone other than insiders cares about accuracy on these issues.

My initial comment:

[Quoting Michael Arrington]> Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.

This is incorrect. Redfin’s cost “savings” consists of pushing the cost of buyer representation off to the listing agent and the buyer. It “saves” money by not doing the work the buyer’s agent’s commission is intended to compensate. The net consequence, if no other changes are made in the real estate industry, is that sellers and listing agents are likely to change the way they provide for the buyer’s agent’s compensation. Redfin.com has never turned a profit, and, if its business model actually gets traction, the money it “rebates” will no longer be available to it.

This was Arrington’s response:

Greg – the fact is that the real estate market is seriously screwed up and needs to be disrupted. Agents are overpaid and often do little more than underprice a house to ensure a quick sale. The model needs to change, and Redfin is changing it. Good for them.

That rejoinder is devoid of any actual response to what I had said, but people are rarely Read more

May 12, 2007

Peeing on your own tree with Bloodhound-enriched Googlejuice

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy brought this up this morning, so I thought I would look into it. A version of this went out as email to BloodhoundBlog contributors earlier today.

Cathy’s question: What is the Google impact of being a BloodhoundBlog contributor?

We have a Page Rank of 5 on the main landing page — the “top” of the weblog. I expect us to be PR6 at the next recalculation.

Either way, the link to each contributor’s web site in the landing page should be hugely beneficial, since that page has such a high Page Rank.

A contributor’s spot in the list of Frequent Contributors also puts that person’s link on a huge number of other BloodhoundBlog pages: Each post, each category, each month, each author, each indexable page of posts, etc. The actual number of pages Google is “seeing” at BloodhoundBlog may be as good as infinite. Most of those pages will have a much lower Page Rank, of course, but every time Google spiders one of them, each web site it “sees” will be queued to be spidered.

Plus: We get spidered dozens of times a day, by Google but also by Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

We have a Technorati Authority of 463 as I write, putting us within the top 7,000 blogs overall — third place among Technorati-tracked real estate weblogs. We have 3,868 total links from other weblogs — second place — which argues that many weblogs are linking to us multiple times.

There’s more: After I started thinking about this, I realized I could go the whole thing one better. I’ve changed the way the meta-entry information is presented, post-by-post, to put the link to each contributor’s home web site there, as well.

We’re already delivering a lot of clicks back to contributor’s sites, but this change should yield even more. Plus, every post is now that much more Googlejuice-enriched — with the link being very high within the content, from Google’s point of view. Even better, every theme change is retroactive: All of our past posts, going back forever, will have this link, also.

I changed the date entry, too, so people can figure out Read more

May 11, 2007

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

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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.

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