There’s always something to howl about.
This was sent to me today. When I see something this important I want to share it with the world.
You can see the original article on AZCentral. This is a Realtor named Anna Kruchten who has a company named Anna Banana Realty.
This has already given me an idea that is going to make a huge difference in how people see me.
I’ve been saying this for a long time: Buyers are temporarily interested in listings. Owners are always interested in their homes. Zillow.com wants buyers, hence the move to accept listings feeds. But what they really want are owners, people who will come back to the site again and again, potentially to be sold new stuff every time they come back.
Remember 13 months ago when Zillow opened up and let sellers create Do-It-Yourself Zestimates, detailing all the unZestimated changes they had made to the home?
Today all that data gets put to use. Zillow has a brand new advertising program called Home Direct Ads that will use every bit of the data it has collected to target market ads to particular buyers, to vendors like movers or remodeling contractors — even to visitors to specific homes in the Zillow database.
From the company’s press release:
Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow® Home Direct Ads, a new set of patent-pending tools that enables advertisers to identify and connect online with homeowners who are on the verge of making major home-related purchases such as moving or updating the home they currently own.
The sophisticated toolset capitalizes on Zillow’s most compelling asset: data-rich, individual Web pages for more than 70 million U.S. homes that attract regular visits by the homeowners themselves. Zillow Home Direct Ads helps advertisers target ads to these homeowners by individual address, by value of their home, by psychographic cluster such as urban families with children, or even by whether they are planning to move. This type of intent and address-specific targeting has never before been available for advertisers online.
“What we’re offering advertisers is pin point accuracy on the purchasing intentions of homeowners, including the ability to forecast that they are highly likely to move or remodel well before they start the process,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow vice president of ad sales. “Our advertisers can target ads down to the specific address or home value, or learn other facts about the neighborhood and locality that will allow them to tailor ads directly to this audience. As a result, advertisers are Read more
I have no idea if published Letters to the Editor are covered by copyright protection – if they are I will need to stop doing this. If someone were to suggest that there was a pattern to the types of letters Inman News chooses to publish (say, for example, that I’ve made assertions like that in the past) a person wouldn’t have to wait very long to find examples of that pattern. This one is from today:
Higher commissions are ‘anti-consumer’
Dear Editor:
Are semantics clouding the real issue? When you have thousands of real estate agents competing for a limited amount of business this is construed as competitive, just as Realogy and RE/MAX suggest. However, this does not equate to competitive real estate models, which should — but do not — benefit consumers.
In this agent’s opinion, the issue is not whether there is competition between agents to obtain business — it is the competition as it relates to commissions that have these companies on edge. This should be considered “anti-consumer,” not necessarily an anti-competitive issue, which is simply a case of semantics.
These companies readily admit and demonstrate that they will do and say almost anything to thwart competition with regard to commission dollars.
How many times do they have to say that they are worried about the pressures of lower commissions? It is well documented and stated by these companies that they spend inordinate amounts of money to attract business, thereby placing them in a position where they cannot compete with other models that use pricing (commissions) to compete with the “anti-consumer” real estate models that hire thousands of agents and spend millions of dollars to obtain market dominance.
Ironically, these “anti-consumer” companies are honest about the reasons they continue to frustrate a decline in commission rates. They cannot “compete” within these confines. This is about commissions, not competition to attract business.
What the public should consider is whether they want to do business with companies that knowingly take advantage of their mere size as opposed to finding ways to lower the costs and becoming more efficient when it comes to actually selling homes. Besides higher Read more
Take a look at this map:
That’s the route from my home, in North Central Phoenix, to Johnson’s Ranch, a master-planned community in Queen Creek, AZ. The distance is 55 miles by the odometer, but travel time is more like two hours. It’s a brutal, awful trip, over two-lane roads for the last third of the ride, interrupted once a mile by four-way stop signs. In traffic, each one of those four-way stops could account for ten minutes of your travel time. An accident or an over-heated car could drive your trip time up to three hours or more.
What can we say with absolute certainty about Queen Creek?
How about this? It isn’t in Phoenix.
Johnson’s Ranch isn’t even in the same county as Phoenix.
So why, when the New York Times wanted to slime the Phoenix real estate market — why would it do so from Queen Creek?
How about because the real estate market in Queen Creek is astoundingly bad, and — unless you live here — you won’t know you’re being had.
Don’t confuse yourself. Skyharbor Airport is eleven minutes from my house, right in the heart of town. No one could fly into Phoenix, then drive through mile after mile of cattle-scrubbed desert to Queen Creek, and manage to confuse the two. The purpose of the article was deception, the same kind of slimy deception “professional” journalism has been able to pull off forever — until now.
Want proof? The Associated Press pulled the same stunt earlier this month.
I’m not being a pollyanna. The real estate market is rough right now in Phoenix. But it is a whole lot better than it is in Pinal county. Conflating the two is not an error of knowledge, it is a deliberate falsehood — just exactly as false as talking about single-family homes in New York selling for $350,000 — which I would imagine you could obtain 55 miles southwest of Times Square.
In any case, I’m not talking about these particular lies but about the pattern of lying, about the pre-canned story lines mainstream journalists try to foist off as “news” — until very lately with no Read more
Here’s the thing: I am a complete sucker for good writing. I like big ideas, I like radical ideas (ya think?), I especially like profoundly and transparently ethical ideas. But if you can write entrancingly about just about anything — I am duly entranced. We live and learn by telling stories, and all of the arts, at their best, are most fundamentally literary. The burnished word is the reflection of humanity’s godhead, the breath of the sublime made manifest in speech, in poetry, in prose, in the drama, even in the cacophonous news of our everyday lives. We are animals, and so we sleep and scratch and snuffle. But we are a spectacular genetic accident, a thing of nature that cannot exist except as an artifact, a man-made thing. By dint of our conceptualization, given form in speech and in abstract notation systems, we are a thing apart from nature, the god-like consciousness that gives nature meaning beyond mere randomness. In our words, in the works of our unprecedented minds, we celebrate all we are and all we can become. And so it would not be wrong to say that I am continuously in the thrall of human life well celebrated.
Hence: 
This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Geno Petro for Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar:
I won’t promise ‘lightning in a bottle’ to a potential client but I will pledge to use my resources (spend my own money) in the most efficient manner I see fit. Let’s face it, the Listing Agent is in the hole the minute he walks out the door with the Exclusive and only collects when the property actually sells–correction: …when the property actually sells under his watch. Phone calls from Vegas are never good under any circumstance, I’ve found.
I’ll try not to promise the Moon no matter how much I allow myself to be manipulated by the situation (potential paycheck). And that is why we do it, you know. We Realtors are ironically, the easiest people to manipulate because we count the money before it’s printed. We may say we don’t but most of us secretly Read more
Joel Burslem, writing from The Future of Real Estate Marketing, a multi-author weblog, this past week posted an extended complaint about multi-author weblogs.
Okayfine. It struck me as a beef about form over substance, but — what the heck? — there’s no accounting for taste.
The one kvetch that is surely valid is this:
I’d love to be able just to get Mike Arrington’s perspective on TC or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s posts from RWW or Pete Cashmore’s contributions to Mashable for example and cut out all the rest.
To use a (loose) analogy – I’d liken many multi-author blogs right now to my local cable company. They’re bundling an awful lot of channels in my cable package that I don’t want.
One thing that would help if more multi-author blogs feeds aped the a la carte cable model (which is sadly lacking right now too), or like podcast subscriptions in iTunes. These blogs ought to clearly let me pick and choose the authors I want and bundle a unique feed for me based on my selections – not just stuff everything down a pipe at me.
This is actually easily done in WordPress, and it’s something I’ve thought about doing for a long time.
And today is that day. It’s been possible for a long time to get a BloodhoundBlog author’s archive of posts by clicking on that author’s picture. Beautiful people like Kris Berg, Cathleen Collins and Dan Green are consistent beneficiaries of this feature. That would seem to suggest that the feature is being discovered mostly by accident of impulse, so now, in any particular post and in the Frequent Contributors section of the sidebar, “Post Archive” and “RSS Feed” are also supported by text links.
From my point of view, anyone who would subscribe to a Michael Arrington feed and skip Duncan Riley doesn’t get technology, but the essence of capitalism is that each of us should be able to have exactly what we want and nothing else.
In the mean time, we will continue to grow — in contributors, in scope, in importance, in reach, in influence. As with the best of group weblogs in the larger Read more
A dozen nominees again, which is boiling down to one entry out of five. Already you’re looking at what I view as the cream of this week’s crop.
We are slaves to the news, of course. This week’s fires in Southern California dominated our attention. Congress seems desperate to do something ruinous to the mortgage industry. Microstoopid spent way too much to buy a small piece of a big fad that will be gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe three years from now. I ignored almost everything about this. Likewise for Zillow’s announcement that their ERA deal makes them Trulia player in the on-line listings game. RE/Max has a national real estate listings portal. The Realty.bots have PR departments, at least so far. The RE.net is temporary, like all news, but I try to filter for what is actually important and not just noisome.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
< ?PHP
$AltEntries = array (
"Geno Petro -- Lightning in a bottle Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar”,
“Michael Wurzer — Living history Living History“,
“Jay Thompson — Negative news As a fellow Realtor I am disappointed that you post such negative news“,
“Kris Berg — Healing Healing“,
“Dan Melson — Lending reform \”Fixes\” for the Mortgage Meltdown – You Can’t Keep A Bad Idea Down“,
“Morgan Brown — Lending reform Barney Frank – Broker’s Worst Nightmare“,
“Kevin Boer — Move/Active Rain What The Microsoft-Facebook Deal Means For Real Estate — Part 2: Revisiting Move.com Vs. ActiveRain“,
“Krista Baker — Negotiating buyer’s commissions Negotiating Commissions with Buyers“,
“Gary Elwood — Credibility The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You“,
“Brian Boreo — Real estate weblogging Waking from my blog reverie“,
“Jeff Brown — San Diego Fires San Diego Fire Update — It’s Now Approaching Historical — 10% of Population Evacuated“,
“Jeff Kempe — Socratic dialogue Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++)
{
$pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]);
$radioGroup .= "
echo Read more
Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
In 1991, I was approached by Garry Fairbairn (he must have been a beautiful baby) of the Western Producer in Saskatoon (or maybe it was Regina), Saskatchewan, Canada to write a simple batch global search and replace utility that the paper could use to translate American wire service copy to King’s English spellings — color to colour, favor to favour, etc.
That was the birth of Torquemada the Inquisitor. Ultimately it came to be much more powerful, but, in the beginning, it did nothing but search for and replace string literals. I was developing a reputation as a Macintosh software developer who was interested in big text-processing problems. There was a good reason for this: I had big text-processing problems and I wrote software to solve them. Torquemada used the then-new drag-‘n’-drop technology in the Mac OS to permit users to run an unlimited number of pre-saved search sets on an unlimited number of text files. If you could write well-defined, error-trapped searches, you could automate a big chunk of your workflow.
Subsequent versions added wildcard searches, type-casting, wild strings, case-conversion, etc. Torquemada was pattern matching along the lines of the Unix GREP utility, but it was optimized for repetitive tasks common to text-processing, word-processing and typography. It was very useful in the early days of web-page creation, as well.
I named it Torquemada because I had already written a utility called XP8 (expiate, get it?). This was built to correct a huge number of defects common to word processing files in those days. In addition, it would pre-code text to be imported into QuarkXPress — then and now high-end Macintosh desktop publishing software — with many typographic refinements coded into the text on the fly. XP8 would remove the excess white space from around the numeral “1,” for instance, intelligently ignoring the lining figures in tables. It did quote-conversion better than any software before or since.
These two utilities had fairly similar objectives, and both were built expecting to do huge batch jobs by drag-‘n’-drop. XP8 was a brute-force front-end to Quark, though, where Torquemada was a general purpose text revisionist. In practice, for Read more
Daniel Rothamel has managed to set up an event called NAR BloggerCon. I can’t figure out who’s getting conned, but I’m eager to find out.
Cathy and I are flying in and out for the event — my favorite way of going anywhere.
Date and Time: Monday, November 12th, 2007 @ 5:30pm.
Place: The NAR Bloggers’ Lounge – Venetian Hotel, 4th Floor, Room 4605
Be there if you can. If not, I predict there will be video…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is my column this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). I’m not grave-robbing San Diego, but every big-news disaster turns out to be good news in the long run for the Phoenix real estate market. This was written on Tuesday, so the specific details are a little dated.
Phoenix has it’s problems, but they’re small compared to those in other cities
At BloodhoundBlog.com, we’re tracking the fires in San Diego County. Business is business, but a world-class disaster commands attention. Three of our fifteen contributors are in the fire zone. Two of the three have already been evacuated as I write this. Our hearts and prayers and donations go out to the victims of the blaze, even as we know that whatever we can do can never be enough.
But at the same time, we in the Valley of the Sun should take a moment to count our blessings.
As you approach Phoenix from California, you see them, one after another, vast warehouses, acres in extent. The space should really be measured in cubic feet, but the numbers would quickly become astronomical.
Why are they there? Because Phoenix is the perfect place in North America to build trans-shipment warehouses. No winter, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no mudslides, no uncontrolled fires. We do have a brutal summer heat, but that’s just so much hot air.
For these same reasons, Phoenix is an increasingly popular destination for server farms and colocation facilities. Critical commercial data must be stored or mirrored in places where it won’t be lost to acts of god or other freak events. Phoenix has a talented workforce, great air and ground transportation, a first-rate communications infrastructure and a tremendous surplus of electrical power. Major companies and major airlines park their data and their airplanes here because they know they’ll be safe.
Plus which, Phoenix is sunny all the time and it’s a great place to raise kids. We don’t necessarily think about everything when picking a place to live, but, as life expectancies increase, what we might call the marginal futility of death by accident soars. Your kids could live a lot longer than you Read more
We’re about to grow to be a much bigger dog. We’re a media play to begin with — news and views, not sales and service. People lecture us all the time that we don’t get real estate weblogging, a point we might dispute. Weblogging about the real estate business, on the other hand, we do better than anyone.
What we have coming is a new idea on a new domain, BloodhoundBlog.TV. (There’s nothing there yet; we’re too busy building the underlying technology.)
Yawn! Yet another claque of clamorous real estate videos?
Not on your life.
We’re going at this BloodhoundBlog way, as webloggers: Serious about important ideas, always, but never stuffy or stilted — and never in anyone’s thrall. We’re going to do the same kinds of things we do here — in streaming, iPod-ready video.
Here are some kinds of content we might take on:
We are planning to do a weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast, combining the first three types of segments with a group discussion about those segments, about the real estate news of the week and about our particular favorites among Read more
Bruce Hahn writes another letter to Inman News. Of course it gets published, Bruce’s letters always get published on Inman News. I’ve posted about Bruce before, in this post and
in this one. It is a big secret who pays Bruce. He likes to advance the idea that it doesn’t matter who pays him, only the viewpoint he is forwarding is what matters. I don’t buy it. Say what you will about NAR (I do:-) but how they get their funding isn’t a secret. What agenda they are pushing, or why, isn’t a secret either.
I want there to be a record of Bruce’s letters. Some day it will eventually be obvious who has been paying Bruce to write these letters and paying him to not tell anyone who they are. In the meantime, here is his latest:
Dear Editor:
Given NAR’s concerns about the objectivity of the Justice Department’s competition and real estate Web site, I checked the consumer education section of NAR’s Web site to see how NAR’s descriptions of the features of the various real estate brokerage business models compared with those of DOJ. I couldn’t find any information at all on any of the real estate brokerage business models on the consumer education section of NAR’s site. This is curious since you would think educating home buyers and home sellers about the various types of real estate brokerage business models and their features would be a great fit for NAR.
I think NAR should stop beefing about DOJ’s and FTC’s efforts to educate consumers about the various real estate business models until it has something superior to offer. NAR has among its membership traditional and minimum-service brokers, EBAs and many other business models. It should appoint task forces, with every segment equally represented, which would be asked to work together to develop objective consumer education materials on the various alternative brokerage models home buyers and sellers might wish to consider.
For even greater balance NAR might also seek input from some of the other real estate brokerage associations and consumer organizations interested in this area. This would give NAR the opportunity to both Read more
Prologue: My initial post on this subject, was widely read, and seemed to generate responses on one side or the other, not many in the middle. That makes sense. One commenter came at me full throttle, remaining civil, detailing why, a hyper-local farm not only wouldn’t work, but wouldn’t be any more productive than what he’s doing now, offline.
We both, no doubt, think the other is partaking of herbs not meant for cooking. 🙂 In short, I think he’s a good guy, harboring an honest difference of opinion. The following is how we have disagreed.
I think I’d really like Spencer Barron. In fact, judging by our give and take in the comments of my most recent post, I like him and respect him. We have respectfully disagreed on the concept of the hyper-local farm site, but it’s been fun. He’s obviously a pretty smart guy.
Can you feel the butter, Spencer? 🙂
Spenser — The next time I’m in Denver, I’m buying. We gotta meet, cuz it’s always fun to talk with guys who disagree with me so much, yet so well, and stay so wrong. 🙂
Your VW just passed me? To extend the metaphor, you’re driving a VW because your approach can’t generate enough money to acquire a Ferrari. 🙂
Let’s count the ways you are, in my view, not only dead wrong, but worse, basing your thinking on absolutely false premises — a mistake that almost always proves fatal.
You said — Since you will be continuously marketing them to go to your blog, why don’t you just tell them why they should use you. You could try to appeal directly to the people your trying to reach, home sellers. Why all the coy games?
False Premise #1 — Wait a minute, let me write that one down. 🙂 You mean, I should actually tell them why I’m the best agent for them? Well I’ll be dogged.
I’ll be continuously marketing them to go to my blog. All that will be done in the infancy of the site (blog? website? hybrid? who cares?) because that’s what’ll make it go. Read more
I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.
Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.
Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.
But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.
A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.
“The world sorts itself out” is what Read more
