Read, learn, mark and inwardly digest. If you weblog, it matters…
Technorati Tags: blogging
Category: Blogging (page 62 of 84)
…is up at Seattle Real Estate Professionals. Moderator Marlow Harris presents awards in three categories.
BloodhoundBlog is a Carnival unto its own. Here are eleven entries from the last week that I thought were exemplary:
Russell Shaw: Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?
Kris Berg: When It Clicks
Cathleen Collins: Punch and Pie At This Week’s Carnival of Real Estate
Dan Green: Why The Fed Matters to Real Estate
Greg Swann: Who needs Realtors . . . ?
Russell Shaw: Making Predictions, Cowards & Lies
Kris Berg: Between Rock and a Hard Place
Greg Swann: Everybody loves Ramen . . .
Russell Shaw: Anonymous Posters Who Hate Lereah
Jeff Brown: How Much Is An Excellent Assistant Worth? Are You Kidding?
Richard Riccelli: There’s no business like show business, like no business I know
Dan Green’s Why The Fed Matters to Real Estate was our entry in the Carnival of Real Estate, the Carnival of Real Estate Investing, the Carnival of Business and the Carnival of Marketing.
Cathleen Collins is the judge of our Carnival entries, but her Punch and Pie At This Week’s Carnival of Real Estate got the most votes from our contributors, so it is my honor to declare her the winner of the Bloodhound Carnival.
Marlow Harris hosts the Carnival of Real Estate at her own 360 Digest on January 15, 2007 — a week after Elvis Presley’s birthday. She threatens to have a category devoted to Elvis posts, which should be fun…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Eagle-eyed Kevin Boer of Three Oceans Real Estate was the first to catch it: BusinessWeek.com quoted me in an article on “supersized commissions”:
There’s nothing wrong with incentives, even sizable ones, if they’re disclosed and buyers fully understand what’s motivating the agents who are showing them around. But in many states disclosure is poor or inconsistent. In Arizona, for example, brokers who show houses are encouraged to sign agreements specifying how they’re compensated. But the agreements aren’t required.
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
Also, they can be signed after someone has already fallen in love with a home and isn’t looking at the fine print. And the compensation can be explained as generally as, “3% and up,” meaning the sky’s the limit. Add it all up, and, “I don’t have to disclose to you how much I’m getting paid,” says Realtor Greg Swann, the designated broker of BloodhoundRealty.com in Phoenix, who says he voluntarily imposes stricter rules on his own agents. By offering extra-high commissions without informing customers, he says, “the builders are trying to bribe me to sell their houses.”
That whole section of the articles relies on BloodhoundBlog contributions: Contributor Doug Quance and frequent commenter Dave Barnes both kicked in examples that were used in the article, but, alas, they were not mentioned by name.
BusinessWeek Economics Editor Peter Coy first called me about last week’s Zillow.com news, and we talked in very broad terms about Realty.bots, disintermediation, the valued-added services a good Realtor brings to the table and commission structures in general. We’ve covered a lot of that here, so I sent him quite a few posts from our archives.
The implication of the article is that buyer’s agent’s incentives are the rule rather than the exception, but, even so, I don’t think it is a bad idea to caution buyers about the risks:
Advice to consumers: Start with the assumption that the nice person showing you around is not your ally. Ask up front how much the person would be compensated if you bought a place. If possible, sign a buyer-broker agreement before you start looking at houses. This guarantees that the agent is working Read more
The universe of map-based listings portals was upended last week with the announcement that Zillow.com was coming into the game, along with 58 million of its little green friends. Whatever long-term effects this might have, the short-term consequence has been a deafening silence from all directions. We haven’t even heard the blustering ‘guy talk’ one might expect in these circumstances (“Two legs?! Only losers need two legs!”).
But there is in fact a place even harder than the hard place the Realty.bots found themselves in last week: Imagine being on the verge of rolling out your brand new map-based listings portal when Zillow made its announcement.
This is the predicament Galen Ward and Doug Cole found themselves in last week as they prepared to go live with ShackPrices.com, a brand new listings portal based in and (for now) devoted to Washington state.
Here’s the company’s official press announcement:
ShackPrices.com is a snappy Google maps-based real estate search site that makes finding a home better by augmenting each real estate listing with data about what is nearby, including the distances to nearby landmarks, nearby schools and nearby bus stops. ShackPrices also helps home buyers learn about cities and neighborhoods through links to reviews, statistics and photos.
We cover all of Washington State right now and we plan to expand to other states in the coming year. As part of our mission to make finding and buying real estate easier and better, we will be introducing a service to help home buyers find the best local real estate agents in the coming year.
Readers here will know Galen Ward from his contributions to Rain City Guide. And the site is everything we would expect from Galen, fast and robust, esthetically beautiful and rich in practical details. The fit and finish is beyond excellent, in stark contrast to Zillow’s offering, and the extra features — neighborhood details, nearby amenities, etc. — are the best I’ve ever seen.
The site draws upon MLS listings, so the inventory is very large from day one. The browser window is tab-based for maximum information density with a minimum of confusion. The underlying AJAX programming makes Read more
“Mike” writes:
A lot of the current level of vilification is because of people like David Lereah, ostensibly the public voice of all realtors in the US, who is now perceived by many as somewhere between a buffoon and a baldfaced liar.
The man simply cannot tell the truth and every monthly and quarterly revision the NAR issues highlights that problem.
You are correct about one thing: David Lereah is often wrong in some of his predictions. I don’t think he is the only economist who makes non-stop predictions (that are published and posted on the internet) who is wrong on some of his pronouncements. In fact, he has a lot of company. To my knowledge almost every economist who makes predictions about the direction of “the market” is often wrong – it just goes with the territory. In all of history there is NO person who consistently always accurately predicted the future of any financial market (real estate, bonds, stocks, art, etc).
This is also true for people who – on a daily basis – predict the weather. They are often wrong. But most people don’t tend to characterize the meteorologist who said, “No rain this weekend” as a baldfaced liar. Most people seem to understand that anybody who makes predictions all the time will not be right all the time. Unlike you (and the other gleeful I-hate-everything-about-NAR-and-all-Realtors), David Lereah actually uses his real name when he makes a prediction – and his past predictions are readily available for anyone to compare with the actual statistics that did occur. Based on the fact that Mr. Lereah uses his own name – just this one point – makes anything he might have to say FAR more credible than anything you (or any of the other nameless and spineless cowards who anonymously snipe) might have to say. I have NO respect for the opinion of someone who is too spineless to even use a real email address.
How about YOU bother to do some real research yourself before you call someone a liar? How about posting specific statements made by Lereah and the specifics Read more
In my world, I need order, rules. This may be hard to believe when you consider I manage a household that includes thirteen rescue animals and a colony of about a dozen feral cats in our side yard. Ever hear of “herding cats”? This is something I try to effect every single day. I was the one, for example, who asked Greg to modify his open-forum policy on BHB comments, by removing extreme profanity. I understand that trash talk needs to be trashy or it loses its flavor, but sometimes comments on this site go beyond the pale. For a standard of what’s acceptable I like to use South Park. I realize this is a pretty low standard, but IMHO Matt Stone and Trey Parker are so spot on philosophically that I’ve learned to accept the verisimilitude of the vernacular of their eight-year old characters. If Comedy Central is up to it, then I suppose BloodhoundBlog can be, too.
All of this to get to why I would even care to paraphrase a quote from South Park – Bigger, Longer & Uncut. This is a very clever parody on, among other things, Les Miserables. Greg’s teenaged children have demonstrated to us that we’ve garbled the Eric Cartman quote, “people like pie,” but we remembered this quote by implication. There’s a scene in which the boys are trying to figure out how to get people to care about a meeting they’ve called to save the world, and Cartman suggests “more people will come if they think we have punch and pie!” Actually having punch and pie isn’t important… it’s only important that the people think there will be punch and pie, and people like pie (I still believe this must be an actual quote in one of the ten-seasons-worth of episodes), so give them what they want.
And it’s with this in mind, that I commend you to this week’s Carnival of Real Estate, which is up at ActiveRain, for some punch and pie.
More on me and rules… When BloodhoundBlog hosted CoRE this past October, we set up a system for ourselves to judge Read more
Paging Doctor Tufte.
Richard Riccelli snagged this from Three Oceans Real Estate, but he’s too busy posting his FSBOs on Zillow to write it up…
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing
Chickens? Eggs? How about poached eggs on toast…?
BloodhoundBlog’s team coverage of the Zillow.com upgrades:
- Greg Swann: 2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive national MLS system…
- Greg Swann: Early morning Zillow news round-up…
- Greg Swann: Zillow redux: A post-diluvian retrospective…
- Kris Berg: Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution
- Greg Swann: You were saying…?
- Cathleen Collins: In the trenches with Zillow.com: A working Realtor’s first-hand experience listing a home…
- Greg Swann: Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of great tree…
- Russell Shaw: Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate marketing
Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution. That is what my daughter told me she would be learning about in her high school European History class. Right war, wrong Louis.
On the morning after the Zillow news, I had my own knee-jerk reaction. I subsequently took it upon myself to contact a preeminent real estate reporter for my local rag, the San Diego Union Tribune. I referred him to the many on-line discussions that were taking place, and suggested there might be a story here. Also, in an enlightened moment of shameless self-promotion, I suggested that on his next slow news day, he might investigate the real estate blogging phenomenon and perhaps even the surprising dearth of serious San Diego-based blogs. (Jeff, yours is an exception, of course).
Regarding the Zillow debate, and I will paraphrase, he indicated that they would not be pursuing the story at this time. Message being, no news here. Funny, I thought, as yesterday morning’s business section included the following headlines: Aeromexico begins nonstop flights from S.D. to Mexico City; Food is family’s matter (Chick-fil-A founder’s grandson opens a new local restaurant); and Yahoo! reshuffles top management. Okay, I’ll give them that last one. But, Zillow isn’t news? It took me an embarrassingly long time (one coffee refill) to grasp the underlying reason for his reluctance to acknowledge and address my issue.
The Sunday Homes section is gasping for breath. Newer, less experienced agents can’t afford it, and the more experienced, knowledgeable agents have all but value-engineered it out of the marketing equation. Print media no longer provides the results, the return on investment, that can justify this as a significant marketing dollar investment. In-line classified ads have become a component of our advertising arsenal only as they serve to placate our home selling clients, utilized almost entirely to “buy” our listings. The newspapers have their on-line counterparts, of course, in an attempt to compete in the IT revolution, but an announcement such as the one by Zillow yesterday serves as a painful reminder that they can’t.
I expect and hope that there will always be a place for the printed Read more
Drew Meyers is doing an excellent job of cataloging the Zillow coverage. My plan is to ponder issues arising in posts and comments, here and everywhere. No guarantee that I’m not missing something, so it would be a great favor if you would point out my lapses.
Zillow understands PR. They’ve had company bigfeet out doing media drop-ins for a while, and, for the weblogging community, David Gibbons separately briefed Ardell DellaLoggia, Cathleen and me, and a third weblogger in San Francisco, identity undisclosed. The point of all this was to spread advance news of the upgrade, but to have it embargoed until 10 PM last night. I’m sure the resulting blog-frenzy suited them just fine, but, even knowing what was going to happen once news broke, there was no way I was going to miss this show.
But: This is why I wanted to go at the thing in the greatest depth I could achieve, right from the beginning. The fact of the matter is, the center of gravity in the real estate world shifted last night — away from Chicago and toward Seattle. It was only a partial shift, and it might turn out to be only temporary, but the professional porcupine that is the National Association of Realtors lost a double-hand-full of quills last night. If it continues to lose more than it manages to grow back, soon enough it will be nothing more than a naked rat. Then what?
The person I was most interested in hearing from last night was Galen Ward, and I said so right away at Rain City Guide. He didn’t disappoint, delivering a trenchant analysis without the advance notice Ardell and I had:
Zillow has the best shot at getting the chicken or the egg (you need one to get the other). Most non-MLS sites (Trulia, Propsmart, ForSaleByOwner, etc.) have had the nasty problem of beginning with no listings and no searchers (no chickens or eggs). Each has tried a novel and somewhat successful way of getting searchers or listings – crawling sites for listings, offering free listings, pay-per click ads to lure searchers, etc. None Read more
BawldGuy Jeff Brown was in Phoenix yesterday, and he made time to sit down with Cathleen and me before he flew back to San Diego. We had a wonderful time talking about real estate and inhaling Cheesecake Factory desserts.
I’d tell you more, but I accidentally sold a house today, so I have to open escrow and then go buy 93,000 packages of Top Ramen.
In any case, I’m showing this picture for two reasons. First, the BawldGuy really is that bald. And second, he really is that much fun to be around.
I like him so much I may even share some of my Top Ramen with him…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
I have a walk-through this morning, so this is just a list of what I’ve seen out there this morning. I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing, and the real news will come when people have had time to play with the new feature set. No particular order, no presumption of agreement or endorsement, just wall-to-wall coverage.
Drew Meyers’ list of links has been expanded.
Ardell has a list of her own going.
Much more: ZillowBlog, LA Times, Ardell’s other weblog, MSNBC, Seasttle Post-Intelligencer, HotPads, SocketSite, TransparentRE, Ubertor, Three Oceans Real Estate early and later, Sellsius, Galen Ward at RCG (cited last night, also), Real Central VA, Matrix, 360 Digest, BlueRoof.com.
BloodhoundBlog’s team coverage of the Zillow.com upgrades:
- Greg Swann: 2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive national MLS system…
- Greg Swann: Early morning Zillow news round-up…
- Greg Swann: Zillow redux: A post-diluvian retrospective…
- Kris Berg: Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution
- Greg Swann: You were saying…?
- Cathleen Collins: In the trenches with Zillow.com: A working Realtor’s first-hand experience listing a home…
- Greg Swann: Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of great tree…
- Russell Shaw: Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
I got back to my desk late this evening. I had an Inman News Flash email with a time stamp of 10:21 PM announcing the new features on Zillow. Naturally I thought I would pass it along to the Phoenix resident expert on all things Zillow – Greg Swann. The last two times I tried “helping Greg” by passing something along to him I was surprised to find that he already knew about it. This time I thought it might be different as it was about 11 PM and I knew he didn’t have a paid subscription to Inman News. But just to be sure, I went to Bloodhoundblog to catch up first. As you will see below – if you haven’t already, Greg not only knew all about it – he had known all about it for days, and had been interviewed by the folks at Zillow so they could find out what he had to say about it!
Damn! What an amazing group has been assembled here. Good thing none of us suffers from stage fright, as I suspect the spot lights aimed here will only get brighter. On that note, I need to admit several errors on my part. I don’t have all of the correct facts yet, but I received a call last night from my good friend, Marge Lindsay – Bob Wolff had called her. Most of today Bob and I played phone tag and I have not spoken to him yet. Bob is the top selling Re/Max agent whose name I mentioned in my post about Steve Ozonian’s home sale. I believe the specific statements I made which are not true are: his house was not located in Laguna Niguel, there was no dispute regarding commissions – in fact Bob Wolff HAD the listing but later canceled it, and it was not a Coldwell Banker agent who later sold the house. I was also told that Steve Ozonian had sent me an email to let me know about this but I did not receive one from him. I did reply via email to a comment from Read more
Today we add a tenth member to our team of webloggers, Dan Green of The Mortgage Reports:
Dan Green is Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist working out of Chicago. In an industry too well known for its churn and burn methods, Dan and his team take a thoughtful, deliberative approach to mortgage lending.
We’re delighted to have Dan with us. If you’ve followed his weblog, you know that he writes in a way that makes arcane topics not just clear but fascinating. And he certainly plugs a gap in our line-up, bringing us an expertise in the lending side of the real estate transaction.
I was email-interviewed yesterday by Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato. We went through the history of BloodhoundBlog and our goals for the future. The advent of Dan Green is hinted at, and it is by adding great webloggers like Dan that we will achieve those goals.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Or rather, most mornings I greet the day with the eerie feeling that in one nanosecond I just may become one. If you can follow my stream of consciousness, I will explain.
In 1989, Steve and I left our condo at the beach and bought our first “grown-up” house in the ‘burbs. Those were the good old days in San Diego, and our purchase required that we camp out at the new home sales office to assure we would beat the thundering herd to the holy grail of mass-produced, cookie-cutter stucco living. Actually, we had a guy named Bradley camp out for us. (Honestly, I don’t remember his name, but he could have been a Bradley). Bradley (if that is his real name) was apparently younger, dumber, and hungrier than we; he spent 48 hours in Steve’s little backpacking tent on the sidewalk of Frank Daniels Way to hold our place in line. After two days of delivering Breakfast Croissants?, Happy Meals?, and Whopper Combos? to our employee (Bradley was a big eater), we were able to waltz into the sales office on Phase Opening Day (behind the Stevens-Family-from-the-Winnebago) to secure our Dream Home. Of course,
we have since sold it.
Our 1989 Dream Home had stylish bleached oak cabinetry reminiscent of the, well, late eighties and, most importantly, white tiled counter tops. I’m sure granite had been invented, but it was not a builder option. Fast forward to today when a buyer in the builder “design center” is subjected to information overload. The buyer can customize just about everything but the foundation. At some point, and I am not sure precisely when this occurred, certain “upgrades” became viewed by home buyers as a divine right, as critical to the home as, say, the insulation. This is particularly true of granite counter tops. Today, a home with them is not considered enhanced. Conversely, the home without them is considered deficient.
Which brings me to real estate (finally). Last week, Toby Boyce wrote an excellent article (and a Carnival favorite) which identified information overload as one of the big paralysis-causing buyer plagues. I am the victim Read more