Category: Blogging (page 49 of 84)

May 11, 2007

Trulia.com versus Zillow.com revisited: Are your end-users temporary or permanent?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

This is me last month, at the time of the Zillow.com’s most-recent software release:

In the world of Trulia.com — and other listings.bots focused on evanescent listings — users come and go. On the idealized Planet Zillow, users come and stay.

Home buying is at most an 18-month effort undertaken every seven to ten years, on average. Home ownership is continuous. Zillow attracts a lot of sellers, and it seems certain that it hopes to attract a countervailing cadre of buyers. But what Zillow is really doing, I think, is aiming at the 100 million-plus Americans who own their own homes. Some may come every day — to see new listings, to see new home photos, to ask or answer questions. Some may come only once in a while, when they have a particular need.

But its databases are permanent and accretive, constantly improving. I think Zillow’s goal is not to compete with Trulia or Google Base for home shoppers in the short run. I think its goal is to suck every bit of oxygen out of the residential real estate space as a vertical market. I’m not implying malice. But where others see this opportunity or that opportunity, I think Zillow.com sees the information marketplace for homeowners as a single unified whole, and I think the company’s goal is to dominate the whole thing in its entirety.

Today’s changes have the potential to make Trulia.com a stickier experience. But will it retain end-users after their homes have closed?

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

May 7, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

…is up at Lansner on Real Estate at the Orange County Register. Writing from The San Diego Home Blog, Kris Berg took fifth place for her playful rant on open house signs. Russell Shaw came in second place with his not-at-all-playful rant on the folly of real estate discounting.

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at the Real Estate Investing Blog. We entered a great Jeff Brown post, but Jeff and the CoREI are writing the other chapters of The Secret — The Law of Mutual Repulsion — so he didn’t win. He’ll be crushed if he ever does, so here’s to his unbroken streak of ratifying if not totally gratifying disappointments.

Technorati Tags: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing

May 5, 2007

Renovation Project

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Never one to sit idly by, Greg has come up with another of his “Insanely Great Ideas”. A video tour essentially hosted by the seller, to me, is shear genius. The fact is, we are selling not a bunch of sticks and stucco but a lifestyle each time we market a property. What better way to make it personal than to bring the potential buyer into the home through video, not as someone panning and zooming their way through a bunch of lifeless rooms but as an invited guest to a conversation over coffee?

Now, Greg’s video deals with a renovation, so it is hard to achieve the warm-and-fuzzies where this particular home is concerned, but I think the possibilities are exciting. The problem for me becomes one of time and time management.

I would venture a guess that most of us here have a hard time with delegation. The fact that we are participating on blogs would suggest that we have some grasp of the power of the technological tools at our disposal, and anyone with a feedreader knows that forty-seven hundred (give or take) new spiffy ways to advertise our properties and ourselves are born every nanosecond. Unless I am a Realty.bot with an arsenal of tech geniuses at my disposal, I have to value engineer my way through the maze of exposure opportunities.

Take the process and importance of having killer property photos. I finally had to acquiesce and admit that photos taken by a true professional are superior to any I can take with my own, albeit very expensive, digital camera. All of our properties, from the one-bedroom condo to the multi-million dollar estate now enjoy professional photos. True, there is an added cost involved, and I still cling to the notion that given the right equipment and time commitment I could achieve somewhat comparable results, yet there is a cost savings… of time. My forty or so photos are now delivered to me within 24-hours in hi-res and web-sized format. No more resizing, no more hours on end of Adobe fun, which frees me to do other things. And Read more

May 3, 2007

If you were the cutest dog at the dog show, would you work for world peace, or would you just go for the contact info?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Give Shaun McLane of EKDAY.com credit for self-promotional skills, anyway. He has started a new site called Posh’d, which is — I kid you not — a beauty contest for real estate web site.

Say that again: He is finding the least ugly of — let’s face it — the ugliest stuff on the web, and featuring it on a one-page gallery site, which links back to the designated beauty queens. I can’t but think that this will win Shaun the Mister Congeniality award, but the idea is still kind of a stretch.

For example: BlueRoof.com is featured first and should be. It is a stunning site. But right next door is Realtor.com, looking as dowdy and dated as the Yellow Pages.

(For younger readers, the Yellow Pages is a big, useless book perfect for exhausting landfills. The Council of Residential Specialists publishes its own version, which is even stoopider.)

The rest of the dog show, including BloodhoundBlog, is not awful. But it’s not great, either. Better than average, maybe, but that’s hardly an accomplishment. I know there are some sightly sites among the Realty.bots. For example, Eppraisal.com has the coolest Web 2.0-like Weebils. My guess is that there is more and better to be found in The Undiscovered Country, the world beyond weblogs.

So: Here’s for everyone except BlueRoof getting kicked out of the dog show by ever-prettier dogs. Even better: Here’s to clinging by claws to our vaunted status by revising our sites into something useful and beautiful — with no movies, no MIDIs and an absolute maximum of 937 links on the home page. Who ever heard of anything like that in real estate?

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

May 2, 2007

A picture of The Third Career: If we’re not blogging for business, what are we blogging for?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

By way of ProBlogger, this image is from 901am. It nicely illustrates the idea I called The Third Career when the BloodhoundBloggers were interviewed by Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide:

Q: How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

A: [….] Greg Swann: Practically speaking, it doesn’t, but I don’t think that way. What we’re really up to is an idea I call The Third Career. Most of us came to real estate from something else, and, as we are wise, we know this is not our last stop in the world of work. My immediate goal for BloodhoundBlog is to make it the best-read, most-rewarding real estate weblog in the RE.net. Further out, I want for our contributors to be so well known that they can pursue other opportunities: Public speaking, freelance writing, books, seminars, television shows, etc. I don’t know that we will attain this, necessarily, but the goal itself is definitely attainable: Witness Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.

None of this is of immediate importance. Right now, we are dancing as fast as we can to do the jobs we get paid to do — even as we build this weblog, becoming better and more widely known with each passing day. Witness: BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will be speaking at Inman Connect. That’s two of us — so far. The chart illustrates the opportunities we can hope to exploit as we become better and more widely known.

Muestrame el dinero? It can wait. I’ve mentioned that I’m interested in repurposing the Weblogging 101 content as an ebook. I expect that, once I’ve done it, that will turn into speaking opportunities. Whether or not those are worth any money is less interesting to me than the opportunities themselves. If I can do a job often enough to get good at it, I can find a way to make it pay.

Here’s another, similar example: Steve Leung, whom I have praised in the past, has released a free 69-page “Silicon Valley Home Buyers Book”. The book is in PDF form, hot-linked throughout, so it’s actually more practical as a net.wired document, rather Read more

May 1, 2007

Estonia when you’re trying to be so good, Estonia just like they said they would

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Wit is easy, much easier than writing a real joke. But wit, even more than poetry, may be the bright-line dividing mere knowledge from true fluency in a language. To unpack the very dumb headline of this post, you have to know not just English, by far the richest human language, but the lyrics of Bob Dylan. And the richer your cultural context, the better your ability to apprehend slippery wit.

(He did it again, this time with Latin: Hendo literally means I hold in my hand, I grasp.)

(Incidentally, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 is about amphetamine, not marijuana, as all your stoner friends thought. Likewise Subterranean Homesick Blues (obvious, now, in the age of meth labs, yes?) and Visions of Johanna.)

But: All that is beside the point. Here’s something I think is marvelous: In response to yesterday’s post about the de facto confiscation of Steve Job’s house, BloodhoundBlog was linked by a weblog in Estonia:

Apple’i boss Steve Jobs tahab oma kinnistul asuvat 1929 Hispaania stiilis villat lammutada ja krundile midagi v&228;iksemat ehitada. Pilt siin.

Huvitav lugeda kuidas &252;ks kinnisvarablogija USA muinsuskaitseameti t&246;&246;sse suhtub. Swann BloodHoundBlogist arvab, et muinsuskaitseamet on &252;ks m&245;ttetu amet.

Of course, I have no idea what this says — although I love that double-o with the double-umlauts — but it doesn’t even matter. The post ends with, “Nojah aga pikas plaanis, mees,” and, whether that means “Damn straight!” or “What a buffoon!”, I think it’s beyond cool that this conversation is not only multi-national but multi-lingual.

In other blognews, The Real Estate Tomato brings us 10 ways to get all defensive and paint yourself into a corner. We are positively crawling with weblogging advice right now, not alone because of Project Bore-From-Within.

It’s completely plausible to me that much of this advice is utterly useless, but that doesn’t even matter. Learning to write a weblog is like learning to drive — a huge number of rules that seem best adapted to making you nervous and flustered, which in turn makes you make mistakes. Get over it. In due course you’re cruising at 23 over posted, fishing for french fries with one Read more

April 30, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

…is at TransparentRE. I can’t tell who won, so I’m left with the assumption that Kris Berg did not win, either with Sensible Flats and Social Responsibility or Houses Grow on Trees – Redfin Continues Quest for World Domination. O, cruel fortune!

Sadly, Jeff Brown, with An Example — How To Answer A Client’s Question, was also an also-ran at The Carnival of Real Estate Investing. Without intending to criticize, this Carnival comes off to me like a sort of hobby forum, something involving elaborate power tools and several exotic varieties of adhesives. Jeff writes about investing, so he’s always wide of the mark. The available categories in the entry form don’t even address what he does. Go figure…

But: In the somewhat-less-subjective world of “objective” journalism, Kris Berg emerges as a star Realtor in San Diego. More on this coup at The San Diego Home Blog.

Technorati Tags: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing

April 30, 2007

My Life as a Dog – Author 12

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

As Teri continues her march toward the prize and is no doubt putting the finishing touches on her acceptance speech, I have reached a milestone of sorts myself. It has officially been five months and one day since my smiling likeness was added to the sidebar of the Bloodhound. Why choose this random milestone to reflect on my contributions here, rather than a more logical breakpoint on the Greg-orian calendar (say, five months and seven days)?

Just maybe, I am messing with Greg. This being Monday morning, I am sure that what he really wants on his front page is the link to the Carnival or an update on SB 1291. I have always suspected that this sort of fluff post really riles Greg, he being the Big Thinker. While he is trying to have meaningful dialogue on issues of national import, I invariably pop in at the most inopportune time with my vacation journal or a picture of my client’s cat. I always envision him pounding furiously and red-faced at the keyboard to bury my contributions with something more worthy of a site with Authority. “Fox News? Greg Swann here. I will be a little late to our interview. She’s posting again”.

Okay, I confess I am not clever enough to be that ornery, at least not intentionally. You see, I have no master plan. I have no plan at all. The fact is, I’ll just never be as global or deep in my reasoning and analysis as our Top Dog. I often imagine Greg posting from a home office which is a scale model of the White House Situation Room, complete with a host of monitors displaying feeds from around the globe. Conversely, my workspace involves a computer, mounds of steaming contracts, the cat’s most recent hairball “offering”, and the Hawaiian Death Idol acquired on our 2004 vacation. (Don’t try to cross me, the Idol has tremendous get-even powers).

And, the Real Estate Tomato says I’m doing it all wrong. They recently talked about the biggest blogging blunders one can make. Reading their top ten mistakes list, I could give point by Read more

April 29, 2007

Boston Globe on the enblogged globe: Brokers in Blogsville

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

The Boston Globe has a feature on RE.net webloggers today. Nothing that will seem to be news to regular real estate weblog readers, but a nice chance to shine for a lot of familiar names. No mention of RCG, Matrix or BHB, but that’s perfectly understandable. When reporters finally resolve to pay attention, they become webloggers.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

April 27, 2007

Seth Godin book-tour dates announced: Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Santa Clara, Ann Arbor and Phoenix

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

The big picture. The tour. The Phoenix event.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

April 27, 2007

Sailing the Red Oceans: Real estate start-ups, weblog shut-downs and getting Google to trust your site in advance

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I have news, but some of it is getting a little stale. My apologies. I have been buried, not that this is unusual.

As Kris Berg reports in her inimitable way, Redfin has relaunched, rebranded and all but reinvented itself, establishing a beachhead in Boston in the process. As far as I can tell, the big news is the company’s new logo, which features an image of Eve acting on the bad advice of a snake. Every picture tells a story, don’t it?

Sellsius has also launched its product offering, a kind of searchable, semi-permanent, for-pay Craigslist. This looks to me like a Red Ocean, but what do I know?

That much has been reported elsewhere. This hasn’t: Territory Real Estate has launched its flat-fee buyer-brokerage in Boston and greater Massachusetts. Proving the appeal if not the merit of the Red Ocean strategy (first explained to me by Zillow.com’s David Gibbons), Territory immediately goes on the attack — against Redfin.

But: Screw all that. There are matters of greater moment.

For instance, is weblogging headed for an icy, entropic death? TransparentRE says not, at least not for real estate weblogs. This much is obvious: Weblogging is a fad, like CB radio in the seventies. Anyone who didn’t expect it to fall off dramatically was self-deluded. But there are two important differences between weblogging and the ordinary Rubik’s Cube style of fad: First, viral blogging is a new communications medium, the backbone of the alternative media. And second, owners of commercially-motivated weblogs have an enduring interest in persistence beyond fad appeal. The number of weblogs doesn’t really matter, nor does the number of putatively “active” weblogs. Sites that draw a decent number of evanescent eyes from search traffic may generate income for their owners. But, in the long run, the only weblogs that matter are the ones that can attract a stable population of repeat visitors.

Two more and I’m out of time: A WordPress Theme Generator, so you can express yourself with unborrowed tastes. And the irrepressible, irreplaceable Dave Smith with a strategy to suss the Google Sandbox with a Trustbox instead.

To close, here’s a quote for Read more

April 23, 2007

Now My Space really IS MY SPACE

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Am I popular with young people? Hell, I’ve got my own page(s) on My Space. I just found out about these pages today – Greg sent me the links via email. Here is a link to the first page Greg sent me. After I wrote him back insisting I have NO idea who posted the page, he sent me this link. Have your speakers on the get the full experience. Of course I am flattered that someone cares enough to do something like this – even using one of my favorite quotes from L. Ron Hubbard. “Art is a word which summarizes the quality of communication.” But to prove they didn’t really know anything meaningful about me, the person who posted as me on My Space (attributing it to me) said, “I’m Russell Shaw and I’m not a fan of popular music, or any music for that matter. When you’re in the business of selling homes, you don’t have time for other things.” Actually, I obsessively find and listen to new music, as I’ve been doing this most of my life. They also shaved four years off my age and got my “sign” wrong, as well. But you have to give them (deranged) credit for trying. Hopefully, by the time anyone reading this blog a few days from now sees this the pages for me on My Space will be gone. But in the meantime I’m quite confident my message of how to take more listings and supercharge your business will no doubt be quite a hit with hundreds of thousands of preteens.

I have lots of other friends too. For example, just today, my big fan, Jef Rice wrote to me (here is Jef’s email, in case you would like to write him for me jef@gumiyo.com). Here is the entire text of the email Jef sent me:

Hi Russell,

I really enjoyed reading articles on your real estate blog. You have a good point of view. I would love to hear your opinion on our new service – www.gumiyo.com. Let me give you the quick rundown. We are the latest and greatest Mobile-focused Read more

April 23, 2007