BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 65 of 81)

April 20, 2009

How to sell every house in the neighborhood — except your own…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Even with as much grief as I lay on practitioners, I feel myself obliged to confess: I do not believe that any so-called professional real estate salesperson could come with with a marketing strategy quite as repellent as this:

Tipped by Barry Bevis: “Drove by this yesterday while showing clients homes in the same neighborhood. Average house in this neighborhood is $175,000. Nothing the age of the FSBO home selling for $200K. My clients laughed. We just put their house on the market ‘Bloodhound Style” and had it under contract in four days. I wonder how long the FSBO will be for sale!”

(PS: Our friendly visitors from the cute little yellow school bus have taught me that one cannot possibly be too obvious, so it is incumbent upon me to point out that the phone number and email address are not obscured on the original sign.)

April 18, 2009

Mortgage Market Week in Review….

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

Well it’s hard to believe, but another week has flown by.   Rather than spending a Saturday working on mortgage stuff and writing about mortgage stuff, I spent the day taking my 8 year old to a birthday party, cleaning out the garage and getting the pool ready for the season.  It was a good day for that.

But enough about me, it’s time to take a look at what’s happened in the financial markets this week.   Let’s look at a couple of key economic reports/financial news items:

Foreclosures – for the first three months of this year, many of the big banks and Fannie and Freddie had foreclosure moratoriums on.   What does that mean?   Basically that they stopped foreclosing on homes.  But, many of the big banks lifted the moratorium shortly after the 105% refi plan was announced and Fannie and Freddie lifted their ban on March 30.  The reports that I’ve read (and written about on Straight Talk About Mortgages ) show that foreclosures are spiking way up again.    What does that mean?  A couple of things: 1) Our inventory problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.   2) Bank earnings problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.

New Construction –Housing starts and permits both came in at pretty close to historical lows.   But frankly that’s not a horrible thing from a long term standpoint.   Let me explain: We have too much inventory.   In virtually all price ranges and virtually all markets, there are too many houses for sale.   So we don’t need builders building more houses right now because it adds to the inventory problems.    Also, we have a situation where in most markets, the number of foreclosures that are on the market is raising the discrepancy between the cost of existing homes and the cost of building a new home.  According to many of the developers who I’ve talked to, it’s almost impossible, in many markets, to sell a brand new home at a profit because of the pricing pressures.   So, until we can work through the inventory and also address the jobs issues Read more

April 18, 2009

Sometimes It’s Good to Go Home

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

I just returned from a brief respite – short of 2 weeks – in Dallas.  I went home.

I needed to get away from the day-to-day grind that my life had become, seemingly caught up in the negative energy that seems to have taken over.  My dad just had knee replacement surgery and I thought it would be a great opportunity to help out and reconnect with my folks, my brother and his family.  I also wanted to spend some time refocusing my efforts on my business plan to create a web-based community for do-it-yourself buyers and sellers of real estate as well.  I had a full plate.

While I did get a plan down on paper regarding my new business idea, I realized I accomplished so much more – quite honestly, it was a significantly more valuable exercise.

I became grounded again.

Ever feel like you’ve lost your mojo?  Needless to say, many of us are facing really troubling circumstances, but it so important to keep perspective on our lives.  Sometimes when we take a brief moment in time to step away from our crazy lives, we get to experience timeless treasures.

I consider myself blessed to have wonderful, loving parents.  My folks are getting older – edging into their late 70’s.  Still in great health and active, but beginning to show the signs of lives entering into dusk.  I wanted to be around to help out – let my mom have some time to do her own thing.  Just be there.

But something both unsettling and comforting at the same time happened.  I saw for perhaps the first time my dad completely vulnerable.  This is a man that never cracked.  A West Point Grad – a man who served his country.  Raised 7 seven kids.  Proud, disciplined, smart, kind, but a tough son-of-a-bitch.  He’s mellowed over the years for sure – but my brothers and sisters and I often laugh that he’s gone from a Type A++ personality to maybe an A-.  The surgery seemed to have broken him – just a bit.  I wasn’t prepared to see him like that.  I felt like I Read more

April 17, 2009

The epistemology of open-mindedness…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In email to me this morning, someone said, “Your site is major-league high-brow.” I thought that was a funny observation, but I also know there is some truth to it. I don’t know that we’re all that high-brow-civilized, but we do try to take up ideas in a very penetrating way.

Epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge — how can you verify and validate your knowledge? — is an idea I’m always bringing up. There is no limit to how much better we can get at thinking.

This is a video I saw yesterday at Little Green Footballs. This is on-topic for BloodhoundBlog only in the absolute broadest sense, but BloodhoundBlog is all about looking at things in the absolute broadest sense. In any case, this is a very nice example of video doing an intellectual job that would be much harder to pull off in prose.

April 17, 2009

Shop Talk: How Are You Collecting on Bad Debt?

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

Seeing that 2007-08 were extremely rough years in our industry, we at Top of Mind experienced a significant rise in slow-pays and no-pays.  Ultimately, we found ourselves with high-five figure 90-day+ receivables.  Anyone who’s ever been in this position surely is aware of how uncomfortable it can be calling clients and asking for past due payments.  After all, if we’re doing our jobs right – our clients ultimately become our friends.

There are basically two common approaches to collecting on receivables – and they’re polar opposites of each other:

Approach #1)  The aggressive, finger-pointing, condescending way: I think this is the way most businesses pursue bad debt.  Heck, when I was young and ignorant, I let a few personal account balances go late.  The increasingly frequent calls I received from my debtors became threatening and borderline obnoxious.  Certainly I wanted to make good on my debt, and ultimately I did.  My motivation in paying the debt, however, wasn’t to please these bill collectors – it was simply doing the right thing and paying my bill as soon as I could.  As far as my debtors were concerned, their tactics worked.

Approach #2)  The compassionate, understanding and communicative way: I’d like to share how I’ve handled our bad debt over the past couple years.

  • I do not delegate collection calls to my employees.  In my opinion, this is the kind of s**t work that causes employees to dread coming to work.  It isn’t my employees’ fault that we let some of our clients get behind on their bill, why should it be my employees’ work to clean up a mess management created?  99% of collection calls come from me as the President of our company (with the other 1% coming from my partners).
  • I have one ground rule on how I treat a debtor – if they’ll communicate with me, I’ll bend over backward to help them.  Clients who owe us money aren’t treated as “B-class” clients.  I use my CRM system to take copious notes on all phone conversations and email threads – and I set reminders to check the status at reasonable intervals (depending on Read more
April 15, 2009

“Americans today are taxed at levels most of our forebears would have considered unthinkable. By our own nation’s historical standards, we are outrageously, insanely overtaxed. And yet we shrug our shoulders and say, well, at least we’re not France…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The American Spectator:

How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government a third of its income? How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government half of its income?

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Americans had never before experienced direct taxation. They rebelled. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which levied taxes on an array of British goods. The colonists responded by boycotting British imports. Parliament repealed most of the Townshend Acts in 1770 (except the tax on tea), and in 1773 passed the Tea Act, which essentially told Americans they had to buy their tea from the East India Company through government-approved merchants. Though the act actually lowered the cost of British tea, Americans were so outraged at Britain’s assertion of authority that they forbade tea-bearing ships from docking. And, of course, in Boston they threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

All of these taxes, by the way, were passed to finance the British Army. The newly independent United States taxed its people directly to pay off the war and ongoing conflicts with France, but in 1802, under President Jefferson, all direct taxation upon the American people was ended. That lasted for a decade, until we had to finance the War of 1812. That war was paid off by 1817, and Americans experienced no direct taxation from their federal government until 1861.

That means that “Manifest Destiny,” including James K. Polk’s war with Mexico, and the expansion of the country from coast to coast, was financed without a single direct federal tax being levied upon the American people.

The federal income tax imposed to finance the Civil War had two tax brackets — 3 percent and 5 percent — and was repealed in 1872. It remained off the books until 1913, when the 16th Amendment was ratified. The federal income tax rates in 1913 ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent. That highest rate applied to people earning $500,000 a year or more. Today, a married couple earning that much would pay a federal income tax rate of 35 percent, Read more

April 14, 2009

If you want to learn what we know — and to learn what we are learning — you’re coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, this is my last pitch for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. If you can’t figure out which side of the bread has the butter on it, you’re just going to have to wear a bib.

Here’s the deal: What we’re going to teach you, nobody teaches. We’re going to go hands-ons, step-by-step through the things you need to be doing to create a state-of-the-art marketing profile. By the time you leave Phoenix, punch-drunk and exhausted, you will have built yourself a brand new marketing profile — just in time for the real estate market to make its rebound.

We’re going to be together for 72 hours, and out of that you might sleep 15 hours. The rest of the time we’re going to be working — in eight three-hour hands-on labs and in between-class and after-class sessions where we can learn, think and grow together.

The goal is to build a scenius, a shared genius among the bunch of us, so that we all come away smarter and better-equipped to take on the wired world of real estate.

What are you going to get for your money?

State-of-the-art weblogging techniques, photography and graphic arts expertise, social media marketing acumen and the salesmanship skills necessary to make belly-to-belly conversions. (Excuse me: To Skin cats.)

On my side of the quad, you’ll learn search engine optimization and search-engine marketing, lead generation and management techniques, landing pages and a whole lot more.

Taken together, we’ll be covering every step of the real estate marketing process from the customer’s first tenuous investigations through first contact, incubation, the sales cycle and conversion.

And these classes will be taught by actual working real estate professionals who are actually doing this work in their own practices.

Like who? Mister Ubiquitous, Brian Brady, is the Dean of Marketing. He’ll be leading Linda Davis, Kristal Kraft and Sean Purcell on the content side of the campus. I’ll be serving as the Dean of Geeks, working with Eric Blackwell, Kelly Kohler and the inmimicable Ryan Hartman.

There will be other people speaking, including Mark Green giving a presentation on CRM marketing. And there will be a support staff of experts to Read more

April 14, 2009

Susan Boyle shows us how to skin a cat

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Something light for a Tuesday afternoon.

I’m a sucker for the underdog. I’m a sucker for delightful surprises. I’m a sucker for big dreams and never giving up and making things happen when everyone else tells you it can’t happen.

Do you remember Paul Potts, who brought us to tears? In that tradition comes Susan Boyle, who dreamed a dream. I can’t embed the video, but please click over to watch. I dare you to tell me that you are not feeling inspired, uplifted, ready to take on the world, and empowered to Battle Back after watching this.

What’s the real estate connection? Oh honey, to me the connections are many, but please feel free to tell me what connections you find. I suspect different people will be able to pull different things from this performance.

May the Susan Boyles and Paul Potts of the world continue to show us how it’s done.

April 13, 2009

“Let’s just say that Jim and Dustin are going to be working on a secret project…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…and it’s called “Dining on your dime.”…

Eighty-two comments as I write this, and not one Active Rainier can enunciate the obvious: The emperor is naked.

My take, for what it’s worth: The new hires are charged with the duty of lining up yet another sucker to buy Active Rain. It could work, too. There is no better time to buy tech companies than when they’re going broke. Dandle ’em long enough and you can buy whatever value remains for pennies on the dollar. There won’t be much to pick over among the bones, but there comes a point in life when dinner is a daily dilemma.

Now if you feel an urge to post a snippy comment about how cruel this all is, take a moment to reflect that I told you exactly what was going on with Active Rain when everyone else was lying to you. The world works the way it works no matter how much you’d rather it did not. When Inman or Trulia or Active Rain buy up big-name real estate webloggers, what they’re actually buying is you.

Breathe deep. There’s a clue in the air. If you get lucky, you just might catch it…

April 11, 2009

A fertility celebration from a dying city

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

An Easter egg hunt in Dayton Ohio?

There is a name for it: Detroitification. The slow urban decay and decline that leaves once glorious buildings to crumble into a state beyond disrepair. What do we do with abandoned buildings? Neglected neighborhoods? Desolate cities? This is not rhetorical, I’m asking a real question. We don’t know the answer. Bloodhound Realty would like us all to move to Phoenix. Sorry Odysseus, that ain’t happening.

I love my little city. Somewhat dejected, and neglected, and confused as it is, it’s home. It’s got an ebb and flow here that I get. It’s got a history that ebbs and flows through my blood and drives my heart and focuses my mind. It’s part of me and Phoenix will never be part of me. Or San Diego. Or any other boom town.

If you bailed out of flyover country as soon as you were mobile, you won’t understand why I would choose to live here. Without sun half the year. With the possibility of snow for 4 months. With an uncertain future for the city. Why? Why not move to where the sun shines so often you only notice when it isn’t there? Or jobs are so plentiful you are shocked at the first round of layoffs. Boo hoo. Yer best bud has to make his own damn coffee? Man up, Sparky, things are tough all over.

Dayton is a few months from double digit unemployment. We don’t flinch at this news. We aren’t boo hooing into our Starbucks, we are rolling up our sleeves. We know what y’all don’t know- that things change and you can be happy and you can survive, and there’s life and love and joy and home is any damn place you call home.

If Detroitification is your darkest fear, if none of this makes any sense to you, I can’t help you. These are extraordinary and unprecedented times- exciting in their own right, and ripe with opportunities that haven’t been invented yet. I don’t have all the answers, but something here is happening, and I feel so fortunate to live in a city that needs Read more

April 10, 2009

How India Made Me a Better Agent

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

The following is a true story.  The names were not changed and only the mistakes were innocent.

Not too many years ago I took a month off and traveled to India (for those new to the real estate profession, there was actually a time one could take a long vacation and still be successful).  India was not so much a destination of choice as it was obligation:  I was married at the time and my wife’s family is from there.  In any case, I found myself in India.

It is common for foreigners traveling in India to become sick the first week (the malady even has a name: New Delhi belly).  When I began feeling better I wanted to go for a run.  From the tenth floor window of our hotel room I looked down upon a large, undeveloped space bounded on all sides by city streets – roughly the equivalent of a city block.  I guesstimated a lap to be just short of a half mile and headed down to get in an hour’s worth of exercise.  Seemed simple enough from the tenth floor.  Strange thing though: once on the ground the loop was not nearly as obvious and that third left turn just never appeared.  I was quickly lost:

Lesson 1: No matter how great or simple or brilliant your marketing plan, things can and will go wrong.

I decided that I would keep going, counting on the innate, natural sense of direction all males possess… (I’ll pause for a moment while the women stop laughing).  Two and half hours later I decided I was really lost.  Nothing looked familiar and I was no longer even in town.  It was also at this point that I stopped and took a good hard look at my situation: “I am lost, I don’t speak the language, I don’t have any ID with me and I’m not carrying any money.  Hmmm, this is not good.”  I decided to enlist some help; I was pretty much all-in after running for over two hours and imagined everyone back at the hotel worried sick.  Plus, there was the ‘spectacle’.  Read more

April 9, 2009

The failed listing revisted: What the hell do sellers need you for…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I keep meaning to come back to Barry Bevis and his discussion about what to do about “stale” listings, but I’ve got too much on my plate right now. In the mean time, let’s talk about this house:

Killer, huh? I mean, it’s a totally breathtaking expression of what modern architecture can be. Here it is looking back the other way:

The view is Camelback Mountain. It’s not just an incredible house, it sits on almost an acre of some of the priciest land in Phoenix.

A house to die for, not? Well, not to die for, but certainly to live for, to scrimp and save for, to dream that, one day, you might be able to own this home.

But look closely at those photos… They seem a little… schmutzy… Don’t they?

The listing for this home expired yesterday. There were a total of six photos for the listing — I’m not making this up. And all six of the photos were like the three I’m showing here.

That’s not quite true: The other three were worse.

What’s wrong with them? They’re scans… At some time or another, some magazine wrote up this home — easy to understand why. And then the listing agent made the photos for this listing by scanning from the magazine. That’s why they’re schmutzy — it’s dust on the scanner surface or perhaps damage to the paper on which the images were printed. That’s why there are moires in the images, as well. It’s the scanner’s grid of pixels creating an interference pattern with the half-tone dots of the printed images.

But wait. There’s more. This is the descriptive copy from the listing — on my honor absolutely sic:

Remarks: cHECK OUT THIS AWESOME CONTEMORARY LOCATED IN THE HEART OF ARCADIA WITH THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE VIEWS OF CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN. THIS SUPER CONTEMPORARY WITH SURLY IMPRESS YOUR CLIENTS. VERY FEW HOMES LIKE THIS ARE AROUND, AND WITH LOCATION, VIEWS, AND FINISHES. GATED COMMUNITY AND GATED FRONT DRIVE WILL ENSURE YOUR CLIENTS PRIVACY REAR DRIVE OFFERS ACCESS TO GARAGE AND MULTI-CAR PARKING. AWESOME KITCHEN, KILLER MASTER SUITE, AND 3 ADDITIONAL SUITES THAT OFFER BATH AND PRIVATE Read more

April 8, 2009

Do Clients Spell Service R-E-S-U-L-T-S? Bet They Do

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Lately I’ve wondered if some of you have noticed the same thing I have. I’m talking about the how the concept of service has been elevated to somewhat of a deified state. Giving superior service is always part of an excellent business plan, but it seems to me it’s reached critical mass as it relates to the profitable use of our time.

For the record, one of the most repeated observations we hear from prospects and new clients is how much time we spend with them answering questions, both asked and unasked. Or for how quickly they receive responses to emails or voice mails. How we take care of Murphy when he shows up. Though we do serve some damn fine coffee in our office, our clients understand where our real value resides. We get them from Point A to Point B — a lot easier said than done. They don’t waste our time, and we freely give them ours. They know we’re available to them without explanation, and it’s much appreciated. When there are problems, we don’t look for who to blame, we solve it. Then we locate the culprit. 🙂

Last week I wrote a quick post about The Eight Hour Day which generated comments taking the topic on a side trip — not an uncommon occurrence here. It was a worthy detour, as some Bloodhound contributors chimed in with their thoughts. The spinoff topic was time spent servicing ongoing clients. Tom Vanderwell asked this question — How do you balance the “maintenance” of clients with the need for marketing time?

Sean Purcell jumped in with this answer.

You don’t.

I know that sounds flippant, but the two do not balance. One is an absolute necessity, like breathing, and the other is something you do as part of your job — for now. They truly are that far apart in importance.

Marketing is the life blood of your business… (emphasis mine)

I don’t know how to say that any better. Truth is what it is.

But my gripe with all the talk about giving ‘world class’ service, or, ‘we spoil our clients’, is that in 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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