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Category: Marketing (page 115 of 191)

August 20, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: A challenge to the mind and a challenge to the-way-things-have-always-been-done

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a lot of truly great posts this week. I’m not the kind to pick three posts for first place and six for second place, but I do understand the temptation. Steven Groves, for instance, has much to teach us with MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings? Is the market turning? There are good reasons to say no, but what if it is? Then Patrick Kapowich has news for you with Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip. There are other truly outstanding posts in the short list of entries, and the truth is, I could go on about them all day.

But: There can only be one best. This week, that honor and The Odysseus Medal go to Michael Cook with Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors? I know many Realtors reading here disagree with Michael’s argument. That’s fine. The question is, what are you doing about it? It were well if you were able to defend your value proposition well enough to best Michael in a fair debate, but you don’t have to set the bar the high. Here is what you do need to do, though, and what you need to get better and better at doing: You have to create and be able to defend your value proposition with your own clients. What is it that you are bringing to your transactions that exceeds your cost in sales commission? If Michael’s post — and others like it — lead you to internal turmoil, that’s a good thing. Pain is nature’s gentle way of letting you know there is a flaw in your thinking. Ruminating on the challenges a thoughtful man like Michael Cook puts before you will make you better at what you do — and better able to defend your value to your clients.

And if that’s not unsettling enough to our sensibilities, The Black Pearl this week goes to Carl Drews with How real estate commissions work. Drews is not a professional, he’s Read more

August 19, 2007

The People’s Choice Award: Pick the best of this week’s real estate writing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here is the (not very) short list of this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal. You can vote for one of these posts for the People’s Choice Award.

These are this week’s entires:

Voting ends Monday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. We have file permissions issues with the new server, so you definitely can vote more than once, and I definitely will catch you. So don’t.

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August 18, 2007

Drive On: We’re back, but DNS resolution can be flaky

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re seeing this post, you’re finding BloodhoundBlog on our new file server. A word of caution: Domain Name Servers attach like Velcro, at little at a time. You may yet see Delia’s Gone again before we’re done. By Monday or Tuesday, any flakiness should be gone. I’m just warning you, that’s all.

I know, too, that email to me has been bouncing since yesterday as a consequence of this switch. If you got something back, send it through again, if you would.


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August 18, 2007

Redfin: Lessons in How NOT to Succeed

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

No apologies for the topic. As many problems as exist in the real estate industry — many more than the practiced elites would like to acknowledge, many fewer than the bubbleheads need to satisfy their tantrums — Redfin has made itself a prominent example of how not to improve things.

A few days ago in a comment section I wrote that Glenn Kelman’s a phony. It was the heat of the moment and I only wrote it because, well, he is a phony. He has to be.

On the one hand he has to corral capital and customers by feeding the realtor stereotype of the venal do-nothing narcissist, exemplified here in the Sixty Minutes shtick. But on the other he desperately needs the cooperation of the very people he’s trashed if his model has any chance of succeeding, thus the apparent charm exuded at Inman Connect. He creates a crisis of disdain for the full service agent, sets himself up as the champion of the little guy to quell the crisis, then calls on the full service agents to help him do it. Quite a dance, that.

But.

I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time on the Redfin website. It’s not in my market, and I’ve read and seen enough to know it’s a model that’s not likely to succeed. I’ve left the particulars to others and the market to its natural flow.

But I never thought the champion of the little guy would be dumb enough to try to con: the little guy. The following comes from a BHB reader, Leonard Wallace, who…I’ll let him tell it:

I’m a broker in Maryland where Redfin arrived last month. I’ve read many of your [BHB] posts about Redfin, but I haven’t seen anyone comment on their blatantly false advertising. Here’s a screen shot of a listing in the Washington area:

Leonard goes on to point out:

Redfin’s minimum commission on any buyer transaction is $3000. That never came out in the Sixty Minutes piece or anything else I’ve seen: note here, the first page of the ‘how to buy’ section. That’s why, I suppose, a $500,000 selling price Read more

August 18, 2007

How to take away the objections to drawbacks in a home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
How to take away the objections to drawbacks in a home

I was looking at the web site for a For Sale By Owner home the other day. In the site menu was a heading called, “Drawbacks.” I thought this was an excellent idea at first blush, the kind of inspired salesmanship I almost never see.

The fact is, everything is a trade-off. Everything has advantages and disadvantages. This is not a secret. Buyers already know that every home they look at will have drawbacks.

What is inspired — what could have been inspired — is calling the drawbacks to the buyer’s attention. Why? Because then you can take away the objections.

Like this: “We know this room is small for a bedroom, so we pre-wired it for digital cable and two phone lines. That way, you can use it as a home-office and also as a guest bedroom.”

The buyers will see that the room is small, but by acknowledging and addressing the defect in advance, you can help them see around the problem.

I said the idea of a “Drawbacks” page could have been inspired. Instead, when I clicked through to the page, I saw this:

“There are no drawbacks! Come and buy this house right away!”

This is far beyond being uninspired marketing. This is the kind of ham-handed ignorance and arrogance we associate with Hollywood’s idea of a venal Realtor.

Since you know exactly what objections buyers are going to raise with your home, your best strategy is to acknowledge and address them in advance. This communicates that you are honest, that you are not trying to pull one over on your buyer, and it also gives you a chance to reframe objections in a way that can help to sell the home.

If you don’t want to admit that your home has drawbacks, say nothing. Every buyer’s biggest objection is the fear of being hustled into a bad decision. If you go out of your way to look like a hustler, you will scare buyers away even if your home really is close to perfection.

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August 17, 2007

When Russell Shaw Speaks – You Should Listen

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Fellow BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw is a fountain of practical real estate knowledge… so when Mr. Shaw recommended a Xerox Phaser color printer to us – I took him up on the offer.

The street price for this particular printer is $1100, so I had to think hard about this purchase. There are so many other things that I could spend a thousand bucks on… but after all – it was a highly recommended purchase by Russell.

After checking out Ebay, I found a seller with a few of these printers brand new in stock at a [gasp] shockingly low price. So… I jumped on it.

The printer arrived a few days later (all 60 pounds of it) and it installed very easily. It’s nice having a network printer, for a change. I can send it a print job from any of my computers without worrying about a particular computer being on.

The prints are great – regular magazine quality… all nice and glossy.

The next day, I went to print some flyers and – nothing. No power lights, no indicators, nothing. I checked Xerox’s website to follow their troubleshooting guide… but to no avail. It would appear that I now had a rather large paperweight.

So I called Xerox, and they were nice as they could be. They contacted the local service representative and he came out the next day to install a new power supply. When you buy one of these printers, you get a full year of on-site service including parts and labor… a nice benefit. Russell advises us to purchase the extended warranty, as well.

Well I am tickled with this purchase… and I would like to publicly thank Mr. Shaw for his recommendation.

Now if any of you might be thinking about following Russell’s advice, perhaps I can save you a few dollars. Here’s another one from the same seller on Ebay for $599 (or $629 with Buy It Now.)

http://tinyurl.com/2z5qbo

You can thank me after you thank Russell. 🙂

August 17, 2007

Is opportunity knocking in the real estate market?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I tell people we live in the last affordable ghetto in North Central Phoenix. We live right on the edge of the neighborhood, the place where $400,000 makes its leap to $750,000 on the way to a million. We moved here knowing what the neighborhood had to do, and, so far, it has not disappointed us.

This morning, I’ve been drooling over this listing. The comp value of this home in turn-key condition should be around $600,000, maybe more. Sad for the sellers, and I could kick them for letting the house go to hell, but this is a sweet opportunity that will bear fruit right about the time Persephone comes back from Hades.

This is my friend and client, investor Richard Nikoley, writing yesterday:

Probably not what everyone is thinking, right now, but if I’m going to keep my head about me and keep a market perspective on the market, then I have to consider that when some people sell out of fear, panic, to preserve diminishing profits, or to stop losses, there’s always someone on the other side of that trade. So the question arises — and one should always, always try to discern the motivations behind each side of a transaction — why are an equal number of people buying, right now, what so many are selling, right now? Could it be because others are selling at cheaper and cheaper prices and those buying are seeing bargain-basement prices? If you had to guess, who would you suspect is likely getting the advantage?

For some reason, people don’t tend to think of the stock market like they do most other things. In other areas, it’s called a sale. There’s always someone, somewhere, wanting to get out of an asset — for whatever reason — and depending on their motivation, they’ll take less and less for it. Others lie in wait for such opportunities in order to accumulate assets at relatively low prices.

Everyone is welcome to their doomsday, economic collapse, chickens-coming-home-to-roost scenario, or whatever. But do keep in mind that what is going on is essentially and mostly an exercise in total freedom and Read more

August 17, 2007

Growing pains: BloodhoundBlog is moving to a more-robust server

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.

In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.

Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.

I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.

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August 15, 2007

Where can a good girl go to meet a skeezy divorced high school drop-out who works part-time at the public library?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Central Phoenix, of course, but your boy doesn’t actually work at the library, he just hangs out there from 9 am to 9 pm. This is from Zillow.com:

Central City residents are distinct from people in surrounding areas because:

  • A larger number did not complete high school.
  • A higher proportion of them are divorced males.
  • There’s a higher percentage of people who work in education, training, or library occupations.

Sorry, Zillovians, I just can’t get enough of this astute counter-marketing. Surprisingly enough, there have been no contributions to the neighborhood discussion fora. Maybe if Zillow offered free cigarettes — or booze — in exchange for real estate questions.

Here are some listings from this creepy neighborhood acrawl with divorced winos. The resident high school drop-outs can barely even get to six multiples of the median home value.

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August 15, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Some rule changes, and a clickable button

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.

Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.

This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.

So: The rules are changed to this:

The Rules (few and fair):

  1. The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
  2. The entrant need not be the author of the post
  3. More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
  4. More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
  5. No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies

Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.

I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:

You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:

That image links back to the information page for the competition.

We’re Read more

August 13, 2007

Congressional “leadership” on lending policies: What is “crisis-itis?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, which should be in your feed-reader — especially right now:

What is “crisis-itis?” It is my own diagnosis. It is a form of dementia where the inflicted believes his or her own self worth rises as the situation he monitors worsens. In all cases, the inflicted greatly exaggerates his or her control over events, as well as the size, duration, and impact of those events. In extreme cases, the inflicted seeks to worsen the crisis to inflate his or her self esteem.

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August 13, 2007

The Odysseus Medal Awards, week #1: An exposition of excellence in real estate weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you will have seen from yesterday’s short-list of entries, we had a lot of very high-quality posts among our contestants. This seems to augur well for the future of the contest. If you didn’t make the cut, soldier on. For the most part, even the posts that didn’t make it to the People’s Choice competition were very, very good.

But: It’s plausible to me that you’re reading this post to hear about winners, so let’s talk about those:

The People’s Choice Award, the winner of the popular voting yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning, goes to Michael Cook, with Realtors, Wake Up and Start Helping Consumers.

The Black Pearl is awarded to the entry that presents the best practical, technical or marketing idea of the week. This week that award goes to Benn Rosales for Mortgage drama, real estate bubble, tech crash, dotcom disaster. Here’s the winning idea:

So now that we know it’s coming, what shall we all do about it?  I’m doing a few things like; creating a shortsale team to assist sellers, offering move-down programs to those who aren’t so much in a bad way-yet, talking about it with sellers that call, offering advise on when to get out, and when to stay, talking to lenders about refinance options for those who might not need to move if we can do something now before they begin missing payments (not charging for that by the way, just guiding),  calling past clients to see how they are, and that they’re okay.

And the first Odysseus Medal in this new competition, the overall best post of the week in my opinion, goes to Kevin Boer with The Innovator’s Dilemma In Real Estate: Beware Of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You. I’m a Grand Opera kind of writer, and Kevin is a just-the-facts kind of guy, but the journey he took us on in this post is simply extraordinary.

I’ll be making the three ‘badges’ shown here available to the winners as ornaments to be used with their winning posts or on their sidebars. (And if a real artist wants to volunteer to make better versions, Read more

August 13, 2007

Hating Selling through the Art of Sales

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

The friend of the son of a very good friend — an exceedingly polite young man just out of high school — came by late Friday afternoon to sell me some cutlery. I explained when he called to set the appointment that I was already doing some business with the company he was representing in the form of monogrammed house-warming gifts, but he said he’d like to come by anyway. To practice.

He arrived, carefully unsheathed his samples, and pulled out a three ring binder. He opened his presentation with a hand drawn graph of his progress toward his summer goal; if reached, he said, he would win a scholarship. Then he launched into a rote monologue, cribbed nearly verbatim from his notes. Per the script he handed me each utensil as he talked about it, wasn’t sure what to do with his hands after I refused the third one, and was flustered when I asked about something out of turn. All the sales-guy 101 feints were in play: “If you could choose between one of the two sets today, which would you pick?”; “Just for sitting down with me today, I’m authorized to offer you, for no extra cost, these kitchen shears. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

At which point I stopped him. I’ve sat through thousands of presentations and delivered thousands more. I didn’t need another to confirm what I’ve known forever: I hate sales. And salespeople.

So I waxed parental:

“Why, David, didn’t you ask what I was already using, what about it I liked and didn’t? Turn your head: five feet away is a full set of Wusthof; you should have known that before you came to the door. Why didn’t you ask about the sets I was already buying? Clearly there has been a need.

“Selling isn’t about glib one liners, happy hour entertaining or pat answers to pre-conceived objections. It’s considerably less about form than substance. It’s about having the knowledge and developing the trust in order to fill the real needs of your customers, better than anyone else.” LOVE parental mode.

Since this has a lot to 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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