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Category: Blogging (page 51 of 84)

April 9, 2007

Who pays the buyer’s agent? Once we’ve divorced the commissions, we can stop worrying about it

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joke Number one:
Q: If you came upon the Buddha in the guise of a hot dog vendor, what should you say?
A: Make me one with everything.

Joke number two:
Q: Top Drawer Listing Agent, why do you charge a 7% commission to list a home for sale?
A: Because the lenders won’t pay any more than that.

Jonathan Greene at Real Opinionated invited me to participate in a debate he is having on the question of who pays the sales commissions in the transfer of residential real estate. Todd Tarson has already weighed in with an argument I consider unassailable, so I would rather veer off in another direction: Divorcing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listing agent’s commission.

I have written a ton on this subject, with my views changing over time, so please forgive me for digging into the archives:

There’s a lot more, but the Cliff’s Notes version is that I agree with Todd: Except in a Short Sale, the buyer brings every dollar to the closing table, so every disbursement of dollars comes from the buyer. The seller brings the house. The idea that the seller is paying anything is an vestigial artifact of sub-agency, a reflection of the fact that the seller hires the listing agent to market the property, and, therefore, in most cases sets the amount of the buyer’s agent’s compensation.

It is plausible to argue that the seller pays the lister and the buyer pays the buyer’s agent, and, while I don’t agree with that argument, it’s not worthwhile quibbling about it.

Instead, it would be much more worthwhile to completely divorce the commissions, so that what should now be true de facto will be true de jure: The seller would Read more

April 9, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy. The scheduled weblog had gone missing, so Jay Thompson jumped in to fill the void.

Brian Brady and I took top honors for our Zillow coverage. Brian wrote seven more entries on Active Rain and on his home weblog. Why so much coverage? Because, love it or hate it, Zillow’s new release has the potential to change the way real estate is promoted on-line.

Jay broke the rules to name us as this week’s winners, but I think he was right to do so. Whatever you think of Zillow.com, their announcement last week was big news.

But it wasn’t the only news, as you’ll see when you take a look at the other great entries. While you’re there, tip your hat to Jay for giving up part of his Easter weekend for the Carnival.

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April 9, 2007

More random notes on Zillow.com: Conquering fear, uncertainty and doubt to become the neighborhood superhero

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer and others are tying themselves up in knots trying to prove that they understand what Zillow is doing wrong. My take is that they don’t even understand what Zillow is doing, so, necessarily, it’s going to look wrong to them from their frame of reference.

I said this the other day, and I thought I did a nice job, twenty-five words on the nose:

Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

The important word is “community.” Wikipedia.org is not building a database of encyclopedia articles. Ebay.com is not building a database of merchandise.

Criticizing — or praising — Zillow about its databases is all but completely beside the point. They’re not building databases. They’re using databases — and incentives to user-initiated database maintenance — to create a self-sustaining community of users.

Ebay.com is not a reproducible phenomenon. Wikipedia.org is not a reproducible phenomenon. The technology is easy. Venture capital abounds. But the niches are already occupied, and neither of those two communities can be replaced as long as they are serving the needs of their members. It does not matter how much money you throw at the problem, they cannot be supplanted.

This is what Zillow.com is aiming for, in my opinion. The listing.bot traffic is nothing. It doesn’t amount to a fart in a gale of wind. Zillow’s own very impressive traffic is nothing, as we’ll see in a moment. What they want is a community of users as loyal as the Wikipedians, and potentially as profitable to its professional users as Ebay is.

Let’s look at the numbers: Zillow is getting four million hits a month, it says — with others saying otherwise. If each of those four million users is visiting three pages on average — which seems like a lot to me — then we’re looking at twelve million pageviews a month. It’s possible they do better than this, but it doesn’t much matter, as we’ll see. Assume three EZ Ads per page — where the average for now is probably closer to one. That boils Read more

April 8, 2007

Easter reading: BloodhoundBlog’s Top 50 posts

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a tough time with major holidays like Easter. Say the Mass, do the eggs and candy with the kids, choke down some desiccated ham — then what? It would be a relief to run to the net to read, but, of course, everyone else is doing the same damn things — some more graciously than others. You crave new content, but there won’t be any new content until Monday.

The same goes for us, too, I expect. I have some numbers I may want to post about later, but I doubt that there will be a lot of other new stuff.

But: How about a lot of old stuff? Friday night I ran our stats, and Saturday Cathy built an Excel tool to combine them into something meaningful. Not canonically meaningful, mind you. What we can calculate are hard clicks on specific posts. Most people read BloodhoundBlog by RSS feed. Many more read from the front page, seeing some or all of the most-recent 15 posts at any given time. Hard clicks, clicks into specific posts, denote a special interest from feed readers, an off-site or on-site link, a desire to comment or to read comments, a Google search, etc.

What we end up with is a list of our 50 most popular posts as expressed by people who pulled the trigger on their mice. This is a reasonably reliable if not perfect measure of popularity. In any case, it’s what we have, so it will have to do.

Many of these posts were written by me. I write a lot, and I’ve been writing on BloodhoundBlog longer than anyone else. As you’ll see, many of these entries have enduring appeal, so our other contributors will account for more and more of our Top 50 as we go along.

Anyway, if you’re as bored as I am on Easter, divert yourself onto the paths of our past. Just remember, it’s not an escape from tedium, it’s professional development.

April 7, 2007

TheBrickRanch.com: As warm and fuzzy as an Easter Bunny

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We finally settled on the WordPress theme and look-and-feel for TheBrickRanch.com. There’s more work to come, particularly the sidebar, but the site is ready for Monday’s official start of the Project Blogger competition.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a reasonable example of what I’ve been talking about. We’re selling real estate, yes. But we’re selling to people, and I think it is important to connect with people immediately on an emotional — even visceral — level. Not: I am a good Realtor. Rather: I am like you. I share your values. I want for you what you want. Yes, I want for your family to be safe, protected from the weather, financially secure. But much more than that, I want for all of you to live the life of quiet, undoubted serenity you see in that child’s face. I want your children to feel that safe in our chaotic and sometimes hostile world. And I want to communicate every bit of that in a glance, without saying a word. I’m not selling houses. I’m selling the idea of a better life — because that is what you’re buying.

Can we do all that with warm colors and one photograph? Probably not. But the first close is to keep them from clicking away, and I think our theme can do that job. If we can keep them for ten seconds, we can keep them for ten minutes. If we can get them to come back once, we can get them to come back twenty times. If we can get them to agree that Teri Lussier is the Realtor to help them find that better life, we’re done. The playing field is cleared of competitors.

Can we do all that? Sufficient unto the day. For now we have a visual theme. Take a look at what we’ve done so far. The weblog is as warm and inviting as a dozen pastel Easter eggs — without all the indigestible hard-boiled chicken embryos inside…
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April 7, 2007

Caveat lector: BloodhoundBlog’s Amazon Affiliates earnings might someday fund a war of global conquest

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a snippy comment, clipped for flame-baiting, that in part complained that our participation in the Amazon Affiliates program is not disclosed. The beef is stoopid, but it’s nevertheless accurate, so I have added this text to our About page:

Amazon Affiliates information: When Greg Swann set up this weblog, he joined the Amazon Affiliates program for what seemed like good reasons at the time. Amazon Affiliates is a promotional program whereby websites are paid commissions in the forms of cash or same-as-cash Amazon merchandise credit in exchange for promoting and brokering the sale of Amazon.com products. Does this affiliation produce income for BloodhoundBlog? Yes. How much? A little over $5.25 a month, on average (much of which is occasioned by our own personal purchases). Our pro-rated hosting cost, excluding domain costs, is around $37.50 a month, so our Amazon.com windfall has us on the dot.com path to profitability. It seems absurd to make this disclosure, but we heard from a rancorous busy-body who wanted to make a big deal about it, so there it is. So far, we have used our vast Amazon.com earnings to buy a book about Robert Moses for a young real-estate-tycoon-to-be whom we know and admire. God alone can guess what nefarious ends we will finance with future earnings. So: Don’t say you weren’t warned.

That notwithstanding, we’ve sold some cool books, some genuine make-a-difference tomes of self-improvement. Among them:

  • Broker to Broker: Management Lessons From America’s Most Successful Real Estate Companies
  • Everybody Wins: The Story and Lessons Behind RE/MAX
  • Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
  • Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
  • Real Estate Agent’s Business Planning Guide
  • Real Estate Rainmaker: Guide to Online Marketing
  • Realty Blogging
  • Small Is the New Big: and 193 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
  • The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
  • The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
  • The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It’s Not About the Money…It’s About Being the Best You Can Be!
  • The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
  • Unleashing the Ideavirus
  • What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Read more
April 4, 2007

Andy Sernovitz Has Signed On To Speak at SOBCon07!

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Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

This blogger conference was already going to be one of the killer opportunities of the year, but adding Andy Sernovitz seals the deal. His landmark book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, a nuts and bolts guide so effective, Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki wrote the foreword and afterward respectively.

Being able to listen to Liz Strauss AND Andy Sernovitz in the same conference? Get outa here!

SOBCon07 is the only blogging conference I plan to attend this year.

I can’t wait to hear Andy in person. And if you haven’t heard Liz Strauss before, you’re in for a very special treat. Everyone talks about how to raise blog readership while she quietly became one of the most read bloggers worldwide in a very short period of time. She is simply one of the best.

I’ll be in Chicago May 11-12.

If you wonder what you need to do to bring your blog to the next level, SOBCon07 is a no-brainer. It’s also one of the best deals you’ll see for awhile.

I’ll say it one more time – Liz Strauss AND Andy Sernovitz speaking at the same conference.

If I wanted to learn how to throw a great curve ball I’d go to Sandy Koufax. And if I wanted to learn about blogging and word of mouth marketing I’d be at SOBCon07.

SOBCon07 — Already nominated for a 2007 Bawldy.

March 31, 2007

My short list of real estate carnival candidates

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am continually amazed at the people who write for BloodhoundBlog. Day after day they knock me out, but it’s always late Saturday or early Sunday when I am most impressed. Why? That’s when I have to make my short-list of candidate posts for the week’s real estate carnivals. Cathleen normally makes the final choices, thank goodness, but all of the contributors have a chance to nominate their favorites. Here are my picks for the week:

That’s nine, and there are more I might have included. If you missed some of these, give them a look. Only one will be entered in each carnival, and there’s no telling if we’ll win. But win, lose or draw, we are good and ever better. Go see for yourself…

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March 31, 2007

Want to make sure you can defend yourself from internet bad guys? Aim for the body, not the head . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Tim O’Reilly on the Kathy Sierra persecution:

There’s an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so.

I’m not crazy about some kind of quasi-official clean comments pledge, presumably accompanied by a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The more webloggers look like Babbitts, the less I like them.

However: Policing comments in your own weblog is not censorship.

With the bogus legal standard, “Shouting fire in a crowded theater,” Oliver Wendell Holmes did incredible violence to two fundamental American liberties — the right of free speech and the right to private property.

You have every right to free speech at your own expense on your own property or on public property. Holmes invented his specious standard to outlaw activities that should have been — and since have been — upheld as constitutionally protected speech. Not surprisingly, the perverse standard he proposed is used ubiquitously by thoughtless people to justify all manner of suppression of private property rights.

The owner of a theater has every right to shout, “Fire!” on his own property. He has every right to host a “Shout Fire!” party on his own property. If someone is injured in consequence, he’s subject to lawsuit — but none of this has anything to do with free speech. It would make no difference if the exhortation had been, “Excelsior!”

But: You do not have the right to free speech at someone else’s expense or on someone else’s property. The issue in that circumstance is not the speaker’s right to self-expression but the property owner’s right to condition his hospitality on the behavior of his guests. You do not have the right to shout, “Fire!” in the theater because you are a guest of the owner, not because your right to free speech is being suppressed.

In other words, if someone is acting like a jackass in your living room — or in Read more

March 29, 2007

Nine months on the trail: Whither BloodhoundBlog?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t like mission statements, but I’ll give you one for BloodhoundBlog:

Everything you wish were in Realtor magazine but isn’t.

That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or the Specialist — would ever take on. We have three lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have two investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, weblogged or printed.

And we are nine months old today.

Our traffic grows month-by-month. In addition to the folks who see our work by RSS feed, we are routinely attracting more than 1,000 unique visitors a day on weekdays. We’re slower on weekends, but we’re right on the verge of hitting 30,000 visitors a month. Our readers take in just short of two pages each, on average, so a lot of what we write is getting read. We throw off at least 500 outbound clicks every day, which means that the sites we link to are seeing quite a few Bloodhounds in their kennels.

This is all great, but I want more. We’re building the Russell Shaw Sales Success curriculum, and, by the time we’re done with it, we should have something that will provide tremendous value to Realtors and other sales professionals for a long time to come. I have no expectation that Teri Lussier and I will win the Project Blogger contest, but I plan to make the course material I’m developing available via ebook to any Realtors who hope to join the burgeoning RE.net. Our contributors are becoming steadily better known, and this cannot but produce interesting opportunities for them in the long run.

Even so, I want more. I am very proud of everything we have done so far — and a week’s worth of BloodhoundBlog content is an over-scale pound of meaty reading — but I want to come to the place where a day’s work is of that weighty scale. I know we can do this. There are days when we do it already. Read more

March 29, 2007

Late-night random notes . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I finished moving the last of our 29 hosted web sites today, and, so far, I am 98% delighted with the choice me made. The pages just snap, including BloodhoundBlog — which is one fat, data-sodden dog. We have some kind of DNS problem that is intermittently affecting some of our PHP programming. Until now, I have been prepared to write this off to slow or flaky DNS servers out in the world. As of today, I’m thinking we have a problem in-house. By Friday, I’ll have it worked out, and then I expect to be 100% happy.

I’ve had poor Cameron working for two days to solve a problem that may not even be his problem. It is biologically ordained, I think, that fathers and manling sons must quarrel, but Cameron and I spar not about cars or curfews but about software — right now about Unix environment variables. Tonight’s South Park was aimed right at both of us — family togetherness in the form of rude comedy peppered with net.references.

Todd Tarson’s MOCO Real News celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. Todd deserves accolades every which way. The depth of responsibility he feels for other Realtors is without parallel. Because he’s in Arizona, Cathy and I will get to watch him as he becomes one of the Grand Old Men of the Arizona Association of Realtors.

We’re at StarPower tomorrow, so I have a couple of entries set up in advance, to be posted by the scrupulously punctual WordPress bot. Because of all the work I did to keep the foul-mouthed flamers out, quite a few comments are being captured by the moderation bot, or even the spam bot. I won’t be around to deal with those until late in the day. My apologies.

I have many more thoughts on the subject of local real estate weblogging for dollars. Now that I have this hosting issue (mostly) off my plate, I can begin to implement some of them, as well as talk about them.

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March 28, 2007

Resource recourse: For the budding real estate weblogger, opportunities for self-improvement are everywhere — and every where is right here

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth says to write an ebook, and I think this is a fine idea. When we start to look like we’re done with the Weblogging 101 curriculum, I’ll go back and whip together something that can work on dead-tree media. This would not be the ideal way to work with it, though, since an ebook can be rich in links — including a “check for the latest edition link.”

One thing I would want to do with something like this is make it link out to richer resources. I can gloss topics, but there’s a lot of deep-think stuff that is much better handled by other people. At the ante-penultimate stage of revision, I’ll put it out for link suggestions. Real Estate Weblogging 101 could end up being an iterative resource, the half-way point between a legacy-style book and a piece of software: Work through the big print first, then pursue the links, then work through the arcane but massively edifying sidebar links. That could be very cool.

On the subject of resources, or perhaps the unexpected serendipity ensuing from web-based resources: Two nights ago before bedtime, I wrote How to make Google your weblog’s best friend. It was a small idea that I had been wanting to hit. I had the time to take care of it, and I wanted for there to be something new on the weblog. I don’t ever do anything half-way, but if ever there was a just-knock-it-out post, that was it. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and it took me no time to to compose and post it.

Serendipity came in the form of Mike Levin of HitTail.com. HitTail is a web site/weblog stats service that will monitor your incoming traffic and tell you what keywords are bringing people in. You can use this information to SEO optimize your site, to plan AdWords campaigns, etc. Anyway, Mike Levin coming here was cool, but what was even cooler was that he cited my post and its comments thread on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site similar to Digg or Del.icio.us.

Hundreds of people came to read that post. 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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