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Category: Blogging (page 68 of 84)

October 15, 2006

Pinocchio made flesh: Crafting a real business from the splintered ruins of the real estate industry . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had email late last night night from Mark Nadel, author of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center white paper on real estate commissions that has been cited lately by the Freakonomics blog and by weblogs all over the RE.net:

Greg,

I wish I had discovered your BloodhoundRealty blog earlier. If so, I would have referenced you in many of the footnotes of my 75-page law review article (including almost 400 footnotes) criticizing the traditional broker commission rate structure. If and when you have the time, I would love to get any criticisms, corrections, suggestions, etc., that you (or any of your readers) might have to my piece.

It is posted [here] and has been recommended by the Freakonomics blog.

Keep up the good work and I will be including appropriate references to your work in the revised version of my article.

Take care,
Mark S. Nadel

That’s very sweet, and I hope he’s writing notes like this all across the enblogged globe, most particularly to Our Lady Ardell.

For my own part, I think we are about to witness a revolution. BloodhoundRealty.com is at a de facto flat fee for buyer representation right now, and we’ll be rolling the idea out in stages starting tomorrow. In the short run, I think we’re gong to take a lot of business. In the long run, I think the co-broke is going to settle down to a flat fee for everything or nearly everything — and from the high-end first. In other words, my view is that we’re buying a short-term advantage and we’ll have to be ready with even better ideas when the market responds.

This is where we’ve been since we’ve been here: If there is any room left in the real estate marketplace for personal-service representation, it will have to be insanely great personal-service representation. One of the things we’re always looking for, as a business strategy, is the way to attack on two flanks: We bring much better service and benefits at a much lower cost. Whichever argument you want to make against us, you’re already beat.

What’s left — three years out, five years out, ten years out? Read more

October 14, 2006

Thinking outside the sandbox: Paradise found again, for now . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, I’m officially flummoxed. I’ve been sand-boxed, sand-bagged, sand-blasted, quick-sanded and burnished to the Olde World Glow of Burled Walnut: My searches are back, kindasorta. Not as many results as I had before, and not the same sequence. The heavy-hitter on “214 South 122nd Av” is BloodhoundBlog, but my reference to “214 South 122nd Av” on our listings page is nowhere to be found so far.

This might confound our friends at Free The Drones, who ferry us across the desert sands to The Google Sandbox Revisited. My take for now: A link to a custom weblog from BloodhoundBlog is probably more findable than building the website as a subfolder on our main website.

Google findability doesn’t matter to me as much as the “Wow!” factor of a custom website/weblog, but, from a completely useless one-off sample, linking from a weblog to anything else is findable faster than building anything into a static website. Next time out, I’ll register the new site at Technorati and cross-link from the new weblog to BloodhoundBlog to see if we can make things happen even faster.

For now: I concede. All of this was very quick, less than seven days so far. But Free The Drones has done better than I have at predicting events. My hat is off.

Further notice: By one standard, the new weblog isn’t really findable yet: Even though it’s been splogged at least twice now, there have been no spam comments yet…

Further further notice: Now everything we were seeing a few days ago is back — but still nothing from my listings page…

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October 14, 2006

The Big Linkowski: Catching up in the hopes of getting no further behind . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m hugely far behind, but I want to do my best to catch up over the weekend, because I think I’m about to get very busy. I’m linking as much for my own future benefit as for yours, so, if you’ve already taken note of some of these posts, forgive my redundancy. If you haven’t seen them, though, please do. This is good stuff.

Like this: The Phoenix Real Estate Guy teaches you how to catch a CLUE report. I don’t know how serious this is outside Arizona, and it was much worse here two years ago than it is now, but since it is by now enshrined in our standard contract, we have to know how to deal with it like it or don’t. Also: An excellent discussion of disintermediation and a smart take on this week’s Phoenix real estate news. Cliff’s Notes: The sky remains unfallen.

Two of note from Daniel Rothamel at The Real Estate Zebra: Working with clients before the real game starts to make sure they understand the process and some unsavory games being run north of the border.

Holy Cow! PressReal.com has been reading our mail! No, not really, but the advice they offer to sellers is remarkably like the things we do for our sellers. (Realtors: Would you like to know how to justify your commissions? Doing more for the money goes a long, long way.) But wait. There’s more. Plummeting costs for building materials suggest it may be wiser to build than buy. And How to prime the referral pump. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the PressReal feed. These are serious folks with a very professional approach to real estate commentary.

There’s Double-Bubble trouble at 360 Digest and Rain City Guide, with cavitation echoes in San Diego and who knows where else. The ugly truth is, if you resolve to lay down with fleas, you had better be prepared to fight like a dog. The thread at RCG ran to 106 comments, possibly not including some that were deleted. My own best effort at bubble ballistics has only accrued 92 comments, but that may Read more

October 12, 2006

Out of the sandbox and into the ether . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The weblog for 214 South 122nd Av is live. Not as easy as it might have been, not as hard as it could have been. I’m not 100% thrilled with the weblog template, but my plan is to vary them to fit the house in any case. What I have now is maybe 70% of the up-front effort to do another one. Cameron has been iteratively rewriting our content engine to work in any environment, and winching it into place here was relatively painless.

No new search results for “214 South 122nd Av”, but when I search on the tagline for these pages, I find every one of them — when everything but index.php was created yesterday afternoon.

It will take two or three more before I can do these with dispatch, but this wasn’t bad…

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October 11, 2006

Real estate weblogs and the Google Sandbox of Doom . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a new domain going live tonight, the first custom web site we have done for a real estate listing built as a weblog instead of a static web site. When we talked about this before, Free the Drones wondered if custom web sites might get lost for a span of time in the postulated Google sandbox, a place where Google, at least hypothetically, exiles new domains to make sure they are not spam, scams, who knows what.

The weblog is far from being finished, but I have results to report. I registered the domain on Sunday, but, because of a MySQL problem, didn’t install WordPress until Monday. The first new post on the weblog showed up at blogsearch.google.com in less than hour. I blogrolled from the new weblog to BloodhoundBlog, but this was the only thing I did in the way of an outbound link — or anything else of a proactive SEO nature. That link showed up in Technorati within a few hours. I’ve been wrestling with content engines, so the weblog has bascially sat around doing nothing since Monday.

This morning it showed up on the main Google search engine, along with its own pet splog!

Three days from registration, two days from going live as a WordPress weblog, in a painfully retarded form. Free the Drones would argue that the Sandbox would keep this weblog from scoring high on searches, but the only searches people are likely to make will turn up this weblog, given that it’s there. And: I don’t know if a static web site would have become available as quickly.

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October 11, 2006

Candles, incense, bells and ashes: Redeeming The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been very gratified by all the comments we’ve had, both public and private, about raising the standards for The Carnival of Real Estate. We did what we did because we were behind the wheel. We had control of the Carnival for this one week, and it would have been difficult and unseemly to take it away from us. But we didn’t know, going in, if we were going to incite admiration or riots — or simply indifference. Cathleen and I have the advantage of being stridently devoted to doing what we think is right, damn the consequences, but we really do hope to make an enduring change in the way this competition is judged.

No, this is not rocket science, brain surgery, world peace or any other presumptively momentous endeavor deployed fallaciously to diminish every smaller endeavor. But anything worth doing is worth doing well, wisely, completely, coming as close as we can attain to the sublimely perfect. Excellence is ennobling, and to make a habit of excellence is to lead a noble life. And as far from the earth-shakingly momentous as a Carnival of Real Estate entry might be, is is nevertheless a piece of your life — whether you are the writer or the reader — an irreplaceable portion of all the forever you will ever have. Whyever would you waste it?

Even so, the test of all this, going forward, will be what ZillowBlog — owner of The Carnival of Real Estate — elects to do, and then how each hosting weblog interprets any rules ZillowBlog might lay down. Practically speaking, nothing may change, and I am ordinarily a proud advocate of changing nothing. But if nothing changes in the rules and standards of the Carnival, what will change is the quality of the entries. Bad work drives out the good. If people who are thoughtful, talented and assiduous know that they will be held as the nominal equals of competitors who actually bring nothing to the competition, they will stop entering. The Carnival will come to be seen not as the harbinger of excellence but of its opposite.

That Read more

October 10, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate: Creams and cheeses . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is our list of second-tier winners in the Carnival of Real Estate. Like those we exhibited yesterday, these are all well-developed ideas pertinent to the real estate industry. These are all very worthy posts, the kind I consider eminently link-worthy, because they advance the meta-discussion that is real estate weblogging.

Working from interviews with real estate webloggers, Drew Meyers from Zillow Blog asks Why Do You Blog?

Todd Tarson of MOCO Real Estate News uses a favorite movie quote to lead us on a grand tour of red hot real estate issues.

From True Gotham, Douglas Heddings shares his thoughts on the real estate market in the Hamptons.

Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato points a loaded question at real estate practitioners: “Why Have A Website At All?”

If we take a turn around Mike’s Corner, Michael Price will treat us to a review of Waiting On Your Cat To Bark.

Drop your keyboard and grab your game controller: Daniel Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra is a Blogger For Frogger.

Writing from his ActiveRain weblog, Jonathan Dalton chronicles Bigfoot, Open MLS and other myths.

David A. Porter of the Pacesetter Mortgage Blog advises us on the Top 4 Critical Questions when buying a Condominium.

Pat Kitano of TransparentRE.com, my kind of over-achiever, delivers a five-part tutorial on real estate weblogging.

From nubricks.com, A. Samuel asks Slough to get a new HeART time for Ricky Gervais to move office?

Renthuiast, a UK weblog, invites us to a Conversation with Nestoria.

Stephen Jagger of Ubertor.com brings an insightful list of Search Engine Keyword Tips.

Our outbound traffic to yesterday’s winners was huge, more than double our normal outbound/inbound ratio — on a very busy day. That’s great, and this is why I wanted to show these posts on a separate day — so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle. Let’s dig in and devour all these delicious creams and cheeses so that tomorrow we can self-flagellate in good conscience…

More: Carnival of Real Estate: Overture…, Carnival of Real Estate: The red meat…, Candles, incense, bells and ashes: Redeeming The Carnival of Real Estate…

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October 9, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate: The red meat . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The word carnival is devolved from Latin, carne vale, to bid farewell to meat. It refers of course to the French term Mardi gras, fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, when good Catholics were expected to either consume or dispose of any animal fats in their possession prior to the onset of Lent. Tomorrow we’ll devour the creams and cheeses. Today shall we feast on the red meat, the Carnival of Real Estate entries that best exemplify the standard of excellence to which every real estate weblog should aspire.

First, and by far best, is Bryan Tutas with The proof is in the puddin’ — Range Pricing part 1,275. Relevance and originality abound in this article, but the shear exuberance of the thing is what put it over the top.

Next comes Mike Simonsen from the Altos Research Real Estate Insights with Home Ownership and the Affordability Red Herring.

Dan Melson of Searchlight Crusade weighs in with Straw Buyer Fraud.

Jon Ernest, The Property Monger, is, as per usual, both factual and funny with Zillowblog sends some love to Boston Real Estate.

Greg Tracy from BlueRoof.com Blog brings us The Battle Between Appraisers and Everyone Else

Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, opines on The Ultimate Real Estate Portal.

And Dan Green from The Mortgage Reports Blog tells us that WaPo gets it all wrong about 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

The sequence from second to seventh implies nothing about quality. We felt Bryan Tutas was a cut above everything, but the next six are in a dead heat — but still much better than the next twelve, which in turn were much better than the remaining 24. But these seven are at the level of quality we all should be aiming for, in my opinion: topically relevant, important and fully developed, clear in meaning, purpose and direction, and possessed of that ineffable spark of stylistic genius that makes them not just readable but memorable.

So dig in to the red meat. Tomorrow the feast continues, and then Wednesday it’s sack cloth and ashes. Dominus vobiscum.

More: Carnival of Real Estate: Overture…, Carnival of Real Estate: Creams and cheeses…, Read more

October 8, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate — Overture . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re finished judging the entrants for the Carnival of Real Estate. I’m going to roll things out in four posts over four days. I have three reasons for doing this.

  1. I want to draw your particular attention to the posts that were particularly good, and I want for the entrants in the second tier — good but not quite great — to have their own day in the sun.
  2. I want to address in the first and last posts some issues that I think will make the Carnival of Real Estate better and more relevant going forward.
  3. I was accused today of having organized my own weblog posts in a logical sequence, an organizational feat I have never yet achieved.

My post tomorrow will highlight one entry of unsurpassed excellence and six more of surpassing quality. Tuesday morning, we will exhibit a dozen more entries that were very, very good. By Wednesday, I want to talk seriously about laying down some rules for this contest.

Here’s why: We had a total of 43 unique entries. Out of that number, 24 did not make the cut. We had multiple entries from the same weblog, in some cases from the same person. One entry consisted almost entirely of plagiarized text. Another offered advice on how to use constructive mortgage fraud to deceive new-home builders. Many, many, many entries were too short to warrant any sort of consideration. There is nothing at all wrong with writing a very short weblog post — I do it all the time. But a short riff on an undeveloped idea is not a contest entry, it’s a painful reminder to revisit the topic later — conclusively, in greater detail, in fuller mind.

I know the practice until lately has been to make note of every entry, but the number of entries is growing week-by-week, and I don’t think it is any favor to conflate serious attempts to push back the darkness with phoning-it-in cat-blog posts. It’s certainly a disservice to the people striving to do the most and best they can with their weblogs, and it strikes me as being unjust, also, to the Read more

October 8, 2006

A Sunday sermon: Let no sparrow fall from your blogroll or favorites menu…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a redemptive exercise for a Sunday morning: If you have a real estate weblog, update your blogroll. Otherwise, make some necessary changes to your favorites menu. Three key players have made some changes that require corresponding changes from you.

Kevin Boer, who was “In the Trenches” has migrated to a brand new, very blue WordPress weblog called Three Oceans Real Estate.

Daniel Rothamel, formerly of the “Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog,” is by now eradicating the notion of moral grayness as The Real Estate Zebra.

And Jay Thompson, “The Phoenix Real Estate Guy,” has become… The Phoenix Real Estate Guy. HUH…? Jay moved from a sub-domain on his real estate web site to a dedicated domain.

Now, of course, every devout weblogger is going to make these changes this morning. Non-weblogging readers are going to update their favorites menu. And everyone is going to put a dollar in the poorbox.

However: The lord helps those who help themselves.

Good luck in your new homes, gentlemen! You’re all looking great…

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October 7, 2006

The seller really pays for the buyer’s agent? Definitely not when the buyer pays out of pocket. But what if the buyer really did pay for the buyer’s agent from the buyer’s side of the HUD-1?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s a lot of discussion of Buyer Broker compensation going on around the RE.net, and I want to draw attention to it while I can. I have some further thoughts of my own, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to them today. It’s Saturday, after all. One of the reasons I’m re-thinking everything associated with buyer representation is the dreadful shortage of Saturdays in the week.

Pursue these links. This is interesting.

Kris Berg argues that it really is the seller who pays both agents. (For agents Back East: In Arizona, and I believe in California and Washington, we do not have sub-agency. The buyer’s agent represents only the buyer, but is paid out of the co-broke established by the listing agent.)

Jeff Brown suggests dropping the veil and having the buyer pay his own agent directly rather than through the escrow process. The key problem with that, of course, is that many buyers don’t have cash for earnest deposit, inspections, appraisal, down payment, closing costs and a buyer’s agent’s fee. Many buyers don’t have cash for any of those things.

ReyEstate has a summary of the latest episode of egg-tossing from Freakonomics. I’d be much more impressed by those boys if they actually worked in real estate.

Jim Duncan argues that the buyer can pay the buyer’s agent’s fee out of the buyer’s side of the HUD-1, rolling the fee into the mortgage, as it is done now from the seller’s side of the HUD-1.

All of this debate is good, I think. There is no doubt that sellers have a very high degree of control over what listing agents are paid. It seems completely reasonable to me for buyers to have that same level of control over what buyer’s agents are paid.

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October 6, 2006

Using weblogs for custom real estate listing web sites . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More than a month ago, I said that I was going to do the custom web pages for any new listings as WordPress weblogs. Lucky me, since then we’ve sold down our inventory of listings, but we haven’t added any new ones. That changes Thursday, and there are at least two more out there on the near horizon.

Couldn’t happen at a busier time, but I can’t be any busier than Danier Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra, and he’s already done two TypePad weblogs for his listings: 10 Tallwood Trail and 1179 Rustic Willow Lane. The sites are slick overall, but I think the links out to the vendors of upgraded features is an especially nice touch.

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October 5, 2006

If you want to play, you can’t delay . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

First, if you want to take a shot at The BloodhoundBlog Valuation Challenge, get your entry in soon. Judging will be tonight.

Second, don’t forget to get your Carnival of Real Estate entry in. We don’t control the deadline, so, if you’re late, your post gets shunted off to next week…

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October 5, 2006

Business is slow at the Arizona Business Blogs . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In the “Don’t Hate Me Just Because I’m Pitiful” sweepstakes, The Arizona Republic invites us to visit their brand new “Arizona Business Blogs”. They’re not new, but that hardly matters. First, there is no link to the not-new “Arizona Business Blogs” in the on-line article. Second, although there is a text representation of a link, it’s broken. Third, even if you fix the broken non-link, the “Arizona Business Blogs” aren’t there. (Seek elsewhere, intrepid info-seeker.) And fourth, these dingleberries know nothing about weblogging. For example, Senior Real Estate Reporter Catherine Reagor’s real estate weblog was last updated on September 19th. Of six posts visible on the first page (I didn’t dig deeper), there are zero links and three comments. That’s not a weblog. That’s a long-winded tombstone…

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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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