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Category: Marketing (page 106 of 191)

October 15, 2007

Want to make a real difference — in real estate prices and in everything else? Stop pushing innocent people around by force

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Why is housing so much more expensive in Los Angeles than it is in Dallas? Higher demand? No so much. The reason is that building new housing in Dallas is easy, while building anything at all in California is a nightmare of absurd regulations. Virgina Postrel explores a study that shows the marginal cost, in land prices, of pushing innocent people around by force with land-use restrictions. (HT Dan Melson.)

Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I’m reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather. Some of the price reflects the productivity advantages of being near others doing similar work (try selling a screenplay from Arlington, Texas). All of these benefits—and the negatives of traffic and smog—are reflected in the price of land.

But what exactly is that price? Consider two ways of computing the price of a quarter acre of land. You can compare the value of a house on a quarter acre with that of a similar house on a half acre. Or you can take the price of a house on a quarter acre and subtract the cost of the house itself—the price of construction. Either way, you get the value of an empty quarter acre. The two numbers should be roughly the same. But they aren’t. The second one is always bigger, because it includes not just the property but the right to build. Expanding your quarter-acre lot to a half acre doesn’t give you per- mission to add a second house.

In a 2003 article, Glaeser and Gyourko calculated the two different land values for 26 cities (using data from 1999). They found wide disparities. In Los Angeles, an extra quarter acre cost about $28,000—the pure price of land. But the cost of empty land isn’t the whole story, or even most of it. A quarter- acre lot minus the cost of the house came out to about $331,000—nearly 12 times as much as the extra quarter acre. The difference between the first and second prices, around $303,000, was what L.A. home buyers Read more

October 15, 2007

The Odysseus Medal — Stamping out white shoe corruption, with or without pay-per-click advertising

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What is your broker doing when he’s not milking you for overpriced business cards and overpriced letterhead with overpriced envelopes? He’s milking your buyers for overpriced loans, overpriced title services, overprices inspections, home warranties and hazard insurance policies. For some brokerages, there is never enough money to be squeezed out of a transaction. This is white shoe corruption — technically lawfully but oozing sleaze. Someday there will be a successful class action suit and it will all go away just like that.

Until then, heed the advice of attorney Joshua Marks, who wins this week’s Odysseus Medal with Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!:

A recent class-action lawsuit filed in the state of Minnesota is bringing to light a long-standing issue that affects buyers of residential real estate throughout the country—alleged steering of home buyers to affiliated title, settlement and mortgage companies by large realty brokers. This widely utilized practice often leads to consumers incurring a considerable amount of extra fees and costs when compared with fees and services offered by non-affiliated competitors.

Many real estate brokerages rely on the income generated by clients using mortgage and title companies that are affiliated with them. Brokerages often attempt to maximize their “capture rates” – the percentage of all home-sale transactions that use the affiliates’ services. A consumer typically ends up paying more fees than if he/she selected a non-affiliated competitor. The brokerages justify the additional expense to consumers by claiming that even if the affiliates’ fees or mortgage rates are not the lowest available, the quality and dependability of the affiliates’ services more than compensate for any price differences.

Over the past several years, many cases involving financial relationships between brokerages and their affiliates have withstood legal challenges. So long as the financial arrangement was properly structured to comply with federal anti-steering and anti-kickback rules, the Courts have been reluctant to intervene in these arrangements.

In the Minnesota lawsuit, two buyers filed claims against Coldwell Banker Burnet Realty Inc., one of the largest realty firms in the state. The Plaintiffs Read more

October 14, 2007

Relax, The Department of Justice is solving the real estate commission problem

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Last Wednesday the citizens of the United States became a lot better off. I was surprised that no one publicly popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate. This is not some small thing, it is exciting news. The Department of Justice, Anti-Trust Division launched a website that is going to make the world a better place. The nice lawyers who worked on the research for the site and wrote the copy spent considerable time compiling the information.

This is my favorite page on the site. I liked it a lot because the page it linked from had this quote:

“Brokers typically charge a commission based on a percentage of the home’s sale price. Over the past decade the average commission rate has remained relatively steady between 5.0 and 5.5 percent. As a result, the actual median commission paid by consumers rose sharply along with the run-up in home prices.

Unless broker costs were also rising sharply during this period of time, competition among brokers should have held commissions in check even as home prices were rising.”

The word, “costs” was bold on their site, as well. Unless broker costs also went up (where the brokers could actually prove they had to spend more) competition SHOULD have held commissions in check. My costs have gone up in the past nine years.  Way up.  My acquistion cost per listing and my costs to service each listing has gone up, as well. What they may be shooting for is the correct amount of profit a Realtor should be making.  I wonder if they plan to subsidize those agents and companies who can prove they are making less (like Foxtons)?

I’ve included a link here for any stray DOJ lawyers reading this post to help them. There are many calculator sites on the internet, I choose this one because it came up first when I did a Google search for “consumer price index calculator”. Try it. Type in 1998 = $1.00 and then put 2007 in the year you want to check. I got $1.26. I think you will too.

If you are a Realtor going to a grocery store or a Read more

October 14, 2007

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had been doing a short list of 20 nominees, but I had the idea that that was an overwhelming number. (It was for me.) This week I cut the short list to 12, and it’s not only more manageable, it seemed to be easier to distinguish the exemplary posts from the many notable entries that had been nominated.

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 PDT/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 ( "Daniel Rothamel -- Social media How your business can benefit from social media right now”,
“Sean Broderick — Google Basewide Google Basewide? One Step Away in California“,
“Brian Boero — On-line real estate Online real estate: It’s anybody’s ballgame“,
“Jim Cronin — Pay-per-click Kick the Pay Per Click Habit: 7 Reasons Why Real Estate Blogging Is Better For Your Business“,
“Joshua Marks — Broker affiliations Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!“,
“John Cook — Pete Flint A Q&A with Trulia CEO Pete Flint“,
“Jay Thompson — Zolve Zolve – One Agent’s Perspective“,
“Eric Blackwell — Realtor.com How to Stop getting hosed by REALTOR.com…“,
“Michael Price — Secret sauce Mmmmm…..Secret Sauce“,
“Teri Lussier — Viral marketing Web 2.0: Catching a virus at the local dance“,
“Cathleen Collins — Columbus Christopher Columbus… a top producer for the ages!“,
“Brian Brady — Professionalization Trim The Fat…No, Throw Away the Meat and Get a New Cow”
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    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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    • October 13, 2007

    Big Trouble Brewing at Google…

    by

    Real Estate Rainmaker

    Author website

    3stooges-pic.jpgRecently, we discussed Google blocking ads against MoveOn.org which has led to much negative talk in the blogosphere about Google. 

    As if their PR department wasn’t working overtime already, ProBlogger alleges Google’s AdSense is committing what appears to be conversion fraud.

    I’ll say it again- Google is invincible today, but if the entire world decides that their shady methods won’t fly, they may be moving to a lower rent building for their headquarters.

    October 12, 2007

    Realtor.com Pencil Sharpener

    by

    Mega-Producing Realtor

    Author website

    Last year I paid Realtor.com about $3,300 to enhance my listings. Now they want to charge me $14,000 for the same thing. Dean Selvey’s rate went from $3,800 to $30,000. Those numbers are not typos. Dean no longer does business with them. I told my sales rep that I would not pay it and that I did not want “a special deal for me”. I wanted their rates put back where they were for everyone. They were supposed to call me. They didn’t call and I don’t believe they are going to call.

    I’ve been through this with them before. Several years ago I flew to Homestore and met with them and got them to put the rates back for everyone. It was the bizarre rates they wanted for posting virtual tours that time. The people I met with then are not there any longer. It is now called “Move”.

    They have a pattern of doing outrageous things to Realtors with their prices – this isn’t new. It is despicable.

    Realtor.com Pencil Sharpener

    October 12, 2007

    Google Blocks Anti-MoveOn.org Ads? Disturbing…

    by

    Real Estate Rainmaker

    Author website

    angry-cat-2.jpgAccording to Mashable, Google may be blocking anti-MoveOn.org ads.  What? I mean… wait, what?  Google should tread lightly- they say that the Republican ad campaign against the MoveOn site violates Google policy, yet MoveOn ads do not.  In fairness, my argument may be in vain- MoveOn may have requested removal for trademark violation which is a deal breaker, but even so-  regardless of my political affiliation, this just doesn’t smell right.

    That said, how many of us place Google ads?  If someone at Google closely follows real estate blogs and finds a sword duel between two bloggers, do they arbitrarily take a side and suddenly block the ads belonging to the dueler they disagree with? 

    Not only is Big Brother acting unfairly, they are damaging their business.  It seems to me that Google should steer clear of taking sides because it could severely hurt their bottom line.  Google is invincible today, but if the entire world decides that their gestapo style political selection process of advertisers won’t fly, they may be moving to a lower rent building for their headquarters.

    October 12, 2007

    Weblog documents, supports transition to new MLS system

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

     
    Weblog documents, supports transition to new MLS system

    This could get complicated, so put on your thinking cap.

    Here’s the scoop: Beginning last Friday and culminating on July 1, 2008, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) is going to be switching from Marketlinx/Tempo, our current on-line MLS vendor, to the flexmls system developed and marketed by FBS Systems.

    Bored yet? You shouldn’t be, because, although the primary beneficiaries of this switch will be Realtors, there will be quite a few interesting answers to your own “What’s in it for me?” questions.

    Tech-savvy agents like us are dancing in the streets. At Bloodhound, we have a profound hatred for the kinds of buggy vertical market solutions foisted off on Realtors, so we have built our business on commodity and horizontal software tools. What that means is that systems like Tempo are so hard to work with that we have built our tools around their bugs.

    So that’s the first benefit of the switch for Realtors and consumers alike: FBS is committed to working with the user base to achieve the greatest possible satisfaction. How do I know they’ll follow through? Because FBS President Michael Wurzer is an active participant in the real estate weblogging community. He can afford to lead with his chin because he’s prepared to effect this transition in the most public possible way.

    But what’s in it for you? Here are a couple of teasers, with plenty more to come. If you’re out with your agent next summer and you see a house that sparks your curiosity, your Realtor will be able to look up the listing on the fly by smart-phone. Even better, by next November, your agent will be able to set you up with direct access into the MLS system. You’ll be able to run true MLS searches from your den.

    Some of the geekiest Realtors in the Valley have set up a new weblog to celebrate and document this transition, The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange (PRETexchange.com). Feel free to join and advise us as we make the leap Read more

    October 11, 2007

    Third-party vendors pick up where the NAR leaves off: Milking the Realtors dry

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    It’s Milk the Realtors week on the RE.net — with the shilling appeals for useless new “solutions” getting pretty close to actual sleaze — so I wanted to revisit a couple of themes we’ve hit before. Inherent in the Web 2.0 idea is a de-verticalization of real estate marketing. Big-budget interruption marketing doesn’t work, but intimate viral marketing does. Because of the Web 2.0 revolution, Realtors are free — at last — to control their own marketing — and their own costs.

    “So,” say the shills and wannabe shills, “how can we cash in on that?” And the result is the Web 2.0 industry for Realtors: Vertical-market weblog vendors and vertical-market social marketing schemes.

    Here’s a hint: You don’t need to pay someone money to “network” for referrals and agents to refer business to. All you need to do is network. If you’re paying attention to the RE.net, you already know three agents in every town in North America.

    Here’s another hint: There is no such thing as an interesting amalgamation of hyper-local real estate weblogs. A hyper-local weblog is interesting because it’s hyper-local. Combining eight hyper-local weblogs is seven-eighths boring to every possible reader — as boring as the “Neighborhoods” section of the local newspaper, but harder to slog through.

    You don’t need vendors to control your marketing, and getting in bed with vendors is potentially disastrous. These are my three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors:

    1. Avoid hosted software systems
      For dedicated web site vendors, dedicated weblog vendors, dedicated virtual or video tour vendors, dedicated customer relationship management vendors, the money is in the blades — the monthly hosting fees — not the razor, the ostensible product. The initial outlay might be steep enough, but the gravy comes from taking money from you month after month for “services” for which the added incremental costs are almost nothing. Okayfine. Everybody’s gotta eat. The trouble with hosted software systems is not the pricing but, rather, who owns the data and what happens to it when you elect to take your business elsewhere. Is your data yours to take with you? Worse, is your confidential information truly Read more
    October 10, 2007

    Atlas Shrugged is 50 years old today: “All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes…”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    This is philospher David Kelley in the Wall Street Journal. I think BloodhoundBlog presents a nice reflection of this argument, a joyous, fearless, unapologetic pursuit of new ideas.

    Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production. Her point was stated by one of the minor characters of “Atlas,” a musical composer: “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes. . . That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels — what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor?”

    As for the charge, from egalitarian left and religious right alike, that the profit motive is selfish, Rand agreed. She was notorious as the advocate of “the virtue of selfishness,” as she titled a later work. Her moral defense of the pursuit of self-interest, and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard, is at the heart of the novel. At the same time, she provides a scathing portrait of what she calls “the aristocracy of pull”: businessmen who scheme, lie and bribe to win favors from government.

    Economists have also known for a long time that trade is a positive sum game, yet most defenders of capitalism still wrestle with the “paradox” posed in the 18th century by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith: how private vice can produce public good, how the pursuit of self-interest yields benefits for all. Rand cut that Gordian knot in the novel by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice. Precisely because trade is not a zero-sum game, Rand challenges the age-old moral view that one must be either a giver or a taker.

    The central action of “Atlas” is the strike Read more

    October 10, 2007

    Web 2.0: Catching a virus at the local dance

    by

    Rust Belt Realtor

    Author website

     

    Pardon my gushing: I adore the Bloodhounds. It’s a honor, and yeah still a shock, to see my goofy real estate picture on the contributor’s panel, but I sometimes wonder what unique thing I can bring to the Bloodhound table. I’m not a top producer, I’m not the world’s most opinionated blogger, I’m not a big thinker, I’m not the funny Bloodhound, or an expert in my field, and I’m not Grumpy, although I have shown signs of being Dopey. Alas, I’m past the age of being either cute or perky, I’m not a geek, or even a new guy. But none of this matters anyway, as I do despise labels.

    What do I bring to this table? Since there is a bit of anarchy here, I could bring whatever I want to the table, but in the end I’m gonna shake what my mama gave me and dance with them what brung me. Today I’m bringing hyperlocal blogging.

    Somewhere someone is reading this who is a new-ish Realtor, learning the business, and learning blogging, and working in a bit of a broken down market. Am I the only real estate agent in this situation? Hardly, although I am the only Bloodhound in this situation. Am I speaking of you? You are working to set yourself apart, to improve your odds of lasting in this business, and wondering how to work it in your market? This post is for you.

    Greg’s advice for local RE weblogging has always been to remember the people we write for, who are not neccessarily the people who comment, and certainly not the other Realtors who show up on MyBlogLog widgets. He also advised me to find local bloggers and link early and link often. All this advice is beginning to pay off for me, and in the Bloodhound spirit of sharing, I’m here to encourage the other hyperlocal bloggers to stick to your Be-the-Community guns.

    In my neck of the woods, few people know what a blog is, nor do they care, and that disturbed me at first as I had some niggling thoughts about using a blog in Dayton to generate leads. On occasion, it was tough to hear about thousands of hits per day to some blogs, and still keep my Read more

    October 10, 2007

    Will Zillow.com capture every MLS listing in Houston, the fourth largest metropolitan market in the United States?

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    From Houston RealNews:

    The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) may be a whisker away from providing listings data to real estate valuation site Zillow.com.

    HAR Chairman Rob Cook released a statement today:

    “Zillow receives four million visitors per month so we would certainly like to have our listings on the site…”

    HAR already provides its listings to Realtor.com, Google [as noted in this HRN report], Homes.com and more.

    So releasing them to Zillow would not be entirely unique.

    If RE/Max and Keller Williams make deals with Zillow, they will have half of the MLS, nationwide, in two strokes of the pen. We are as excited as we are about the advent of FBS Systems’ flexmls system in Phoenix because Realtors on the ground need to deliver a convincing value proposition about searching for homes on our sites, rather than on national listing.bots.

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    October 10, 2007

    Bye-bye BlogRush: You might suck, but at least you’ve got sucking down to an art-form

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    When I installed the BlogRush widget, Tom Royce teased me that it’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t do. That’s true, and that was why I did it, because, as much as I might trust my instincts about goofy net stunts, it’s always possible that I’m wrong.

    Not this time. BlogRush just plain sucks. I’m sure the developers are working gamely to produce the product they should have built before they launched it, but I don’t care. From my end, I rack up thousands of exposures they can never possibly deliver back to me — not that any of those turn into hard clicks anyway. As I might have foreseen, the BlogRush widget is like a commercial on television, instant eye repellant.

    It’s off the sidebar. I have a downline of folks who followed me into this maze of twisty, turning passages, all alike, and I leave them to keep their own counsel. BlogRush may be doing something for somebody. It ain’t doing anything for me. And now it’s gone.

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    October 10, 2007

    Firefox for phones: Bringing real browser power to your smartphone

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    TechCrunch:

    Get ready to throw out that WAP browser on your mobile phone (if you haven’t already). The iPhone, with its fully-functioning Safari browser, showed us that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. Now, the folks at Mozilla are working on a mobile version of Firefox.

    A Firefox Web browser already exists for the Nokia N800, but this effort will expand Firefox’s mobile reach to many more handsets, especially as they come standard with more memory. (64 MB of DRAM seems to be the minimum that will be required). Mobile Firefox won’t be available until next year, at the earliest. But just as on the desktop, it will be an open platform on top of which anyone can build add-on applications. And that’s good news for mobile computing.

    The decision to throw Firefox into the mobile ring is just one more piece of evidence for something that is becoming increasingly clear: The phone is the computer.

    I’ve never understood the appeal of Firefox for the Macintosh. I don’t use a lot of plug-ins, in any case, but the user interface feels kludgey and Windows-like to me. Even so, I love this turn of events, particularly if developers continue to have problems delivering pages to Safari. In the long run, I want to control my world from my phone. (In the long-long-run, I want my phone to be mounted at the occipital bone in my skull, with the display hanging in virtual space about nine inches in front of my eyes.) Having robust browser power on smartphones is one more step in my direction.

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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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