…at The Real Estate Zebra. How easy is it to set up WordPress? Daniel Rothamel has a working weblog, just like that…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 69 of 84)
Sellsius° wrote this morning about tabbed browsing, but they have no idea. I live my normal life with over 100 tabs open at any time, and right now I have many more than that. I’m going to do a bunch of links, because I want to close tabs I’ve been opening since last week.
(What about crashes? I use Saft for Safari. My Mac never crashes anyway, but if Safari starts to get cranky, I Force Quit then relaunch. Saft reopens all my previously-opened tabs.)
Joel Burslem at the Future of Real Estate Marketing cites some stats from Redfin. Not to be contrary, but I think 131 total transactions ain’t bad for a new brokerage. It’s nothing for the head-count of 35, to be sure, but most of those heads are useless eaters. Divided by 12 agents, that’s almost 11 sides per agent over six months, just short of two sides a month. At full-commission, they could live on that. But at one-third commission, before the broker’s cut, its pretty lousy money, so I guess Joel is right in the end.
The Property Monger shows how to use inspections as a negotiating tool. The post is pretty Massachusettscentric, but the general principles travel.
Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets takes on buying real estate during a divorce. The specifics might be Land of a Thousand Lakes-local, but, again, the principles are ubiquitous.
My favorite math gods, Altos Research, take on the media’s flavor of the month: The unaffordability of housing. Alas, the last time math persuaded a reporter is when it persuaded him to major in Journalism.
Local to Arizona, Todd Tarson at moco real estate news details how Mohave County was able to hang onto it’s land use traditions. It turns out you can fight City Hall…
John Keith at The Boston Real Estate blog weighs in on the idea of flat-fee buyer representation.
Want to sell to wired prospects? Mike’s Corner has bad news and good news, with a review of Waiting for your cat to bark? (Mike’s feed is broken, so you’ll need to visit his blog to keep up with his thinking.)
Daniel Rothamel is swapping over to WordPress, and other people have told me that they are, too, so here, for canonical purposes if for no other, are the WordPress plug-ins BloodhoundBlog is currently using:
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. Hat tip: Michael Hampton and Chris J. Davis for help with the plugin.Customizable Post Listings (I’m not doing anything with this yet)
Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things. By Scott Reilly.Filosofo Comments Preview
Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. It’s highly configurable from the admin control panel, including optional captcha and JavaScript alert features. By Austin Matzko.Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog. By Alex King.Related Posts
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry By Mark Jaquith and Jennifer (ScriptyGoddess).Search Meter
Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog. By Bennett McElwee.Google Sitemaps
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. By Arne Brachhold.
Lee Ovington, a real estate appraiser who works and blogs in Elgin, IL has successfully reverse-engineered Zillow.com’s Automated Valuation Method:
The above examples give us some indication of how Zillow arrives at its value estimates (or Zestimate). Quite simply, the Zestimate relies on a calculated relationship of assessed value to sale price. Zillow merely takes selected transactions and calculates the relationship between the Assessed Values and the Sales Prices. It then applies that ratio to the subject’s assessed value (plus or minus some adjustments) and “whala”, you have Zestimate!
The above examples show that even when Zillow has a large margin of error in its Zestimate of 10-15%, the Zestimate is still highly correlated with the Assessor’s Values. We can conclude from this analysis, that the Zestimate is a derivative of the Assessor’s Values. Zillow may be slightly modifying the data by some weighting or factor like time or distance. That “tweaking” of the data could be the “secret” part of its formula; but clearly, the Zestimate is based on the underlying Assessor’s Values as indicated by the high correlation coefficient.
This is not surprising, by itself. It’s how AVMs work, after all. But by deconstructing Zillow’s results, Ovington demonstrates how little sauce there is in the vaunted “secret sauce”…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at YoChicago.
Don’t forget that BloodhoundBlog is hosting the Carnival next week. Hit us with your best shot…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is from a comment by Jeff Brown, responding to an earlier post. I’m only showing a snippet here, but Jeff’s ideas are worth apprehending in full and pondering at length.
Once and for all, the money paid for representing a buyer OR a seller is based upon only one factor: The ultimate value perceived by the client. Is the client better off being represented by you than not represented period? Is he better off with you vs. another agent?
Here’s the thing: The market will bear what it knows about. This is the purpose of marketing, to educate your own buyer.
So think of it this way:
I personally can sell about a house a week. More than that, and I can’t juggle all the eggs. But even assuming I have enough ready, willing and able buyers to sell a house a week, the effort involved for some transactions can exceed the time I can afford to spend on it. Because we don’t relate costs to compensation, sometimes we make good money, and sometimes we take it in the shorts. No other personal services/consultation business works this way — except for contingency-fee attorneys.
So: In ideal circumstances, I can sell a house a week at $250,000 each, on average, earning $7,500 each, on average, for a gross income of $375,000. Not bad. My marketing costs and other expenses are huge, and, practically speaking, some of those transactions were under-performing: Either the deal didn’t close at all or my costs exceeded my return. And, of course, I don’t always have a buyer to work with every week. Unused Realtor capacity is a hidden cost in this business, one that would be accounted for in the books for in any other business. But still, after everything: Nothing to sneeze at.
But suppose I can structure my business a different way. What if I were to charge a flat fee to represent a buyer in exchange for a non-refundable retainer. My marketing costs just plummeted, especially for the high-end clients whose homes we want to list — now and also when they move again. My exposure for under-performance just Read more
I finally made time today to read all of my posts in the Sellsius 101 Blogoff Challenge, correcting any errors I spotted and commenting where I had something to add to the conversation.
Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato had asked me which posts I thought were my best and worst. I didn’t think any were horrible. There were plenty that I would not have done were it not for the contest, and others I might have done at greater length in different circumstances. I was gratified to show off many of my columns from the Arizona Republic, because they present a very hands-on approach to real estate.
Here are a few that I think stand out:
Blogoff Post #1: Cry, ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the war of blogs: “So, although there may be a lot of blog entries posted in this contest, I don’t think there will be any wasted entries. Your attention will be repaid with knowledge, insight, wisdom and, one hopes, grace.”
Blogoff Post #39: Work for passion, not money: “An admirable poverty is only admired from the outside. From the inside, eventually, it can come to be a tailor-made hell.”
Blogoff Post #45: Real estate weblogging? Yo, Shlomo! Cut back on the promo: “The bottom line is, if you start to look like spam to me, I’ll start to treat you like spam. How is that to your advantage…?”
Blogoff Post #50: Real estate weblogging? Write about blogging: “We become a forum, an agora — blog to blog, within a blog and within our own minds, solitarily engaged in the most blaringly public of debates.”
Blogoff Post #90: Stupid mistakes of the newly self-employed: “The only benefit I can think of to having a job is that there’s always someone to tell you to get busy. Not so for the self-employed. If you don’t learn to monitor and manage the hours of your days, you’ll be back on the clock in no time.”
Truly, time will tell: I link back to earlier posts all the time. We’ll know how these hold up by how I reference them in the future.
Thanks to everyone for being Read more
There are still over 400 unanswered emails in my inbox. Plus I have a bunch of Arizona real estate news I want to talk about. Plus I have tabs and tabs of real estate weblog posts I want to link to.
But… BloodhoundBlog is three months’ old today. A three-month-old Bloodhound can move your furniture and mow through a pair of shoes in three minutes flat. A three-month-old BloodhoundBlog is but barely aborning — well begun, but half-baked, at best. Four-hundred-twenty-five posts, but they add up if you do a few dozen in a single day…
But part of working hard is knowing when to stop. There is a bottle of Old Bushmills in the cabinet over the refrigerator that demands at least three fingers of my attention this night. Irish Whiskey is an acquired taste, particularly if you’ve scorched your tongue with Scotch. But — for tongue-scorching — Cathy has laid in the stuff for me to make a Hatch chile salsa, and last night a client gave us chile rellenos and some other muy caliente delectables. Mere liquor is nothing compared to the endorphin rush that comes from eating really hot food.
When I was a young kid working in New York, I had a boss who would stroll through the office at about 4:50 on Friday afternoons. “Why don’t you take the rest of the week off?” he would say. He never got tired of that joke. And I never have, either.
So here’s a toast to you all, as we take the rest of the week off. Thanks for being here with us!
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Ardell raises some questions at Rain City Guide about my column in this morning’s paper on negotiating the buyer’s agent’s commission. I’m going to address some of her remarks here, but my fullest statement on the topic is quite a bit more comprehensive. In the newspaper, I get 350 words a week, with the result that I am splitting this one topic over 5 (or possibly more) weeks. I’m thinking, too, that we should create a category for these weblog posts, because both Cathy and I are writing quite a bit on the subject.
And thus to Ardell’s points:
“I find that most consumers would like we in the industry, to lead the revolution and win that battle for them, rather than being involved in the process of that change in the industry.”
I’m sure that would be nice, but I don’t expect it to happen that way. One of the reasons agents are so close with the co-broke information is that they’re giving up so much on the listing side. Buyers are the last sheep to be shorn — even though buyer representation is getting easier, not harder, and even though the prices of homes have risen dramatically over the years.
I don’t see any way for this to change across the board without buyers becoming educated and putting their education to work. One market segment who could help a lot are the For Sale By Owner sellers. They could implement my idea of conceding funds directly to the buyer, to be used at the buyer’s discretion for representation or other costs, with none of the risks a listing agent might face.
“Has anyone seen the Buyer Agent fee show on the Buyer’s Closing Statement when the transaction closes?”
This is the only way a HUD-1 is produced in Arizona. If it’s not being done that way in Washington — one HUD-1 for everyone — I can’t imagine why. In any case, the buyer can negotiate for full disclosure of all funds.
“Seller pays his agent and buyer pays his agent, is the only rational answer…”
But it’s not actually true. For a represented home, the seller sets Read more
Responding to Dustin’s offer to help Ardell during the Sellsius 101 Blog-a-thon (Yikes, Dustin! I know it’s the home team and all but 1. that woulda been cheating; and 2. you shoulda had more faith in Ardell; and 3. you don’t write like Ardell; and 4. that woulda been cheating!), Ardell nobly responded that she was so busy she never even saw his offer till after she had reached her goal, and even had she seen the offer she wouldn’t have accepted.
The risk of having RCG go down in the middle of competition was weighing heavy on me. Also, it wouldn’t have been fair to Greg, unless he allowed Christine in, and then we’d have to deal with Dustin wrote 35 % and Christine wrote 33% translating into something that would cloud the achievement.
She was right, of course, even if she did get my name wrong ;). But for my part, I wouldn’t have tried to help Greg out even if Dustin disguised as Ardell (picture that in your mind’s eye!) had peppered himself throughout Ardell’s Seattle Area Real Estate Blog. Why not?: 1. that woulda been cheating; and 2. I have absolute faith in Greg doing what he says he’ll do; and 3. I don’t write like Greg; and 4. somebody had to do some money work around here on Tuesday.
Actually, beyond helping out with his desk work on Tuesday, I did pitch in to wash the puppies out of the Technorati tags when those pesky critters showed up instead of Sellsius 101. But at about the time Greg was posting his 72nd entry, I was walking out the door to go to an inspection.
And about the time he was writing his 76th post, I was sitting on the side of the freeway, praying that today of all days, I wouldn’t be carted off to jail!
You see, I recently got new plates for my car. My new Pet Friendly plates cost more than the old plates. The difference goes to a fund to help defray the cost of spaying and neutering cats and dogs whose owners are having trouble affording Read more
I fully expected Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide to file a post replete with 101 links at midnight last night. I thought it would be a nice commentary on the absurdity of what Ardell and I were doing, and a nice pastiche on his lists-of-10 posts. In fact, he delivered a hugely link-filled post later in the night, most of which still sits on my nightstand, undigested.
I finished my money-work today with nearly 1,000 unread posts and comments in my feed reader (hundreds were me and Ardell, of course) and over 400 unread emails that accumulated through the day yesterday. The emails endure, a glaring accusation, but the feed reader is clean.
Here’s proof in 102 links:
Ardell is back in good form, rocking boats and rattling cages. I think I speak for both of us when I say that there are always plenty enough words to be spoken, to be written, to be weblogged. What is evermore in short supply are ears to hear, minds to wonder, souls to take flight and soar. Welcome to Real Estate 3.0: Ethical, evangelical — all but ethereal…
Marlow Harris at 360 Digest and Kevin Boer at In the Trenches have been zeroing in on the accuracy of Zillow.com’s Zestimates. This has been Kevin’s project from the beginning, and a visit to his weblog is very instructive.
My mind was elsewhere, so I don’t know if Marlow was in the lead with news about Trulia’s nationwide expansion. She’s certainly been all over the story, though, along with Trulia’s own weblog, Ubertor, The Real Estate Marketing Blog, Real Central VA and Marlow herself again. Two days later, she followed up with news that Windermere has gone Google. More from Joel on this move. My take: Okay, but an MLS is a tool wherein I can distinguish a slate roof from a tile roof and a true swimming pool from an above-ground pool. By that standard, we do not have and may never have a national MLS.
And from Galen Ward at Rain City Guide comes a discouraging word on Trulia and the virtue of moral consistency. To give the Read more
If the real estate market continues downward, do you think Zillow’s traffic will go up? I am pretty sure that Zillow’s traffic will be directly related to property prices. Everyone loves to see how much money they are making — it is fun, but most people are not going logon each day to watch their zestimate go down (accurate or not). Personally, I find the site quite boring…one visit seems like enough.
My fourth question would be — if the validity of their purpose has been picked apart, and their revenue model is full of fatal flaws — when do they run out of money?
Maybe we should start a pool?
I’m thinking they probably have a business, if only because Realtors will always throw away money on advertising that is easy but useless. On the other hand, I’m suddenly flush with play money…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Homethinking has a new Digg-like social bookmarking service called RealEstateVoices. Once you register, you can submit real estate news stories or weblog posts that you like, vote for links submitted by other people, or RSS-syndicate the results.
I haven’t had time to play with it (I have to run to Mesa), but the site is clean and understated, as you would expect from Homethinking.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
They laughed when I sat down at the keyboard, but, when I know what I want to say, I can write faster than my fingers can type.
When my son was younger, I used to drive around with my car full of kids. Once I taught a bunch of four-year-olds to sing Tell me what’d I say, the Ray Charles classic.
But our all-time favorite car game was called “Who’s the most competitive?”
“I’m the most competitive.” “No, I’m the most competitive.” The game could last for hours.
This is post number 102. Who’s the most competitive? I’M the most competitive…
Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing
We have the graphite version, very elegant. I buy the beans out of the silver bag at Starbucks, never the pre-packed stuff. Number 2 grind. Number 1 (Turkish) works, but it’s too easy to pack down, and then it burns. The number 2 grind is on the edge of being too loose, so sometimes the crema is a little foamy, but the flavor is excellent. I make double-shots, two of those for me, plus half-a-cup of steamed milk. A very eye-opening cup of coffee…
Thanks to everyone who came to watch us play. If you’ve left email or comments for me, I’ll get to them Wednesday.
Thanks Ardell.
Thanks Sellsius°.
Thanks Kevin.
Thanks Jon. The Property Monger Rocks!
Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing