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Category: Marketing (page 119 of 191)

July 24, 2007

First the Starpower Conference in Phoenix, then Inman Connect in San Francisco: Posting frequency may be down for a little while

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Starting tomorrow and running through Saturday, Cathy and I will be at the Starpower Conference. Russell Shaw is one of the Stars, so he’ll be there as well. I may write about some of what transpires there, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my output is curtailed.

Almost immediately after that is Inman Connect. Kris Berg, Brian Brady and Dan Green will be in attendance, so you might get a chance to meet them there. Even so, I don’t think they’ll be live-blogging the event.

But: Brian Brady will be presenting at the Show Me The Leads event. And Dan Green will be a part of 10 Tips From Bloggers.

I’m not going to Inman, but I’ll be monitoring every little breathless announcement of useless new sucker-bait for Realtors and lenders. I have no use for trade shows, but I had a great time last summer making fun of all the goofy crap vendors try to peddle at these things.

In any case, if posting is a little light over the next seven or eights days, you’ll know the reason.

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July 24, 2007

A Realtor’s Guide to Creating A Market Through Lease Options

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Realtors can increase business by solving problems. This twenty minute presentation is a recording of the lease option webinar I hosted on Meet Brian Brady, my webinar site.

We teach Realtors how to use lease option financing as an alternatve financing method. Of course, we didn’t invent this simple idea. We stole it from here and perfected it here, back in the late 1990s.

July 24, 2007

Ask the Audience: How do you defend your own paycheck?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in as an Ask the Broker question:

Thanks for having this site.

We found the house we like and we made the offers and counter offers, finally getting to a place where we got stuck. The seller does not want to came down on her price and we cannot pay more. We are $20,000 apart.

What I would like is for all parties involved — the buyer, the seller and the two agents — to come to the table to make up the difference.

Have you heard of a situation like this?

Alas, I have.

I can be pretty free about using commission dollars to solve problems with transactions, but there are constraints. I will rebate every cent of an untoward commission or bonus, and I don’t hesitate to pay out of my own pocket to make problems go away.

But: My money is mine to do with as I choose.

I can address the problem posed by the question with a very simple analogy:

If your employer decided to buy a company car for his own use, would he be justified in asking you to kick in $1,000 toward the purchase price?

That clarifies that.

But take up the problem as a Realtor or lender: What would be the optimal response to an appeal like this?

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July 23, 2007

Missing links? Playing idea-tag leads to a Web 2.0-ish way of improving BloodhoundBlog posts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, start here. I had an idea for an organic method of collecting arguments, pro and con, about divorcing real estate commissions. Using a PHP form, I could collect user-submitted links to apposite articles, then show them all in an “included” PHP file in each post about divorced commissions. That PHP file would be available to be included on other sites, as well, although I don’t think anyone has done this.

I’ve manually built this kind of file before, for ongoing news stories and for breaking news stories we cover in multiple posts. The difference here was eliciting contributions from readers in a semi-automated fashion.

Last night in a comment, Barrett Niehus of 4MySales – Real Estate Investment and Marketing commended me for having added a Wiki to BloodhoundBlog.

Except I hadn’t done that. I wasn’t even sure what Barrett was talking about. By email, I asked for clarification, and this was his response:

The Wiki comment just relates to the Bloodhound’s ability to add posted links from your online form to the list that you are creating on your blog post. For your readers (me included) this adds another way for them to participate in your blog. I think it is a great feature that few other bloggers use which makes your blog even more unique.

For a one-off post, it made a certain kind of sense. But imagine the same idea expressed globally, for every post. Now that’s an insanely great idea.

I planted a seed, really just a way of seeking something like permanence in the evanescent world of weblog posts. Barrett saw more than I did, a little bit of that Web 2.0-ishness, and his email led me back to see a tiny sprout springing up from the earth. Tonight I’ve nurtured it into a little sapling. I honestly don’t know if people will use something like this, but it seems to me to be a fantastic way to make BloodhoundBlog’s posts more comprehensive and informative.

What am I talking about? New code that will permit you to amend any post on BHB with supplemental links. If you look at Lani’s post from earlier Read more

July 23, 2007

What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from last Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price

I looked at houses with a long-time client last week. We shopped ten houses, of which two were actually in turn-key condition. Two others were fix-ups in every way but price. Three of the homes had front-yard landscaping so overgrown they were virtually inaccessible. And the prices were all over the map.

The resale market is not as dire as it is portrayed to be, but it’s not great, either. There are a lot more homes for sale than there are qualified buyers. For a home to sell in this market, it has to be priced right, perfectly prepared and properly presented to the marketplace. Miss on any one of those factors — especially price — and the buyers will take the home up the street instead.

Consider the Terracina floorplan at Ashton Ranch in Surprise. I’ve sold several these, and I really like them. They’re bright and spacious, with wide-open sightlines. Without pools, there are seven of these available right now. Two are priced at $199,000, then they shoot up all the way to $231,900.

The two lower priced homes will probably sell first, even if the others have better landscaping and better interior amenities. Only one of these models sold in June, for $200,000.

A few miles east, at the Sundial subdivision in El Mirage, there are 25 units of the 1,238sf Zocalo floorplan available. Prices run from $166,900 to $213,900, a huge spread.

Three of these homes sold in June, and it would be reasonable to argue that the market value of this model is $185,000. The problem with that is that ten of the 25 listings are offered below that price — and they’re still not selling.

In any subdivision, I would have to look at the listings house-by-house to tell you which ones will sell soonest, and for how much. But it’s a certainty that if a home is not marketed properly, is not cleaned and repaired to show-room condition, and, especially, is not priced aggressively to the current market, it will not Read more

July 23, 2007

Stuck in the middle – Real Estate Business Basics and Clearing the Cobwebs

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

To Do Post ItMy life is a series of Post It notes. They are stuck to my computer screen, they clutter my desk, and they litter my backyard when a light wind kicks up in the vicinity of my patio table. They can be found in the floor of my car, at the bottom of my purse and, more than occasionally, on the foreheads of my children.

My organizational skills are not so hideous that they would be the subject of the next Lifetime family movie, but my life (we will call it my “back office”) is certainly, at this point in time, in a state of disarray.

I could read a book about organization and time management, but I simply don’t have the time. I think I will make a note to do that tomorrow. In the meantime, I will come to my own defense – It’s not my fault!

Lani’s Internet which has become such an essential part of our lives, Greg’s Internet which is well on its way to replacing the paper book, and our collective Internet which births eighty-seven more ways each day to make our lives easier has simply made me numb.

My frying pan runneth over with fish. Jeff Brown turned me on to Jott awhile ago, thinking it would be useful to a girl on the go. Call the toll free number, speak your message, and the next morning you will be emailed a transcript. A virtual To Do list. Now, I have to remember to Jott.

And I have to remember to blog and comment and trackback and linkback, to be a Trulia Voice and a Zillow neighborhood specialist, to log onto Meebo when I am “in” and off when I am “away”, and to download and study my Altos charts. The list goes on. With each of these exciting opportunities comes an email reminder, and each of these “to dos” involves a brave new world of email inbox populating never before seen. So much so, that I find myself “saving” these messages for another time, a time that often never comes. So large is my inbox, that it has lost Read more

July 20, 2007

Prometheus unbound: Books are dead, but ideas are forevermore unchained from the tyranny and avarice of atoms

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth Godin:

Five hundred year old technology (books) is just too slow for the Net. The act of printing, storing and shipping millions of books takes too long for a secret to ever be in a book again.

More.

Books are souvenirs. No one is going to read Potter online, even if it’s free. Holding and owning the book, remembering when and how you got it… that’s what you’re paying for. Books are great at holding memories. They’re lousy at keeping secrets.

Someone recommended a book to me yesterday, and it was fun for me to watch my own revulsion at the idea. I grew up in the thrall of books, literally a worshipper.

More interesting than Harry Potter is the phenomenon of The Cult of the Amateur, whereby Ludditism becomes a Shaker cult, doomed not by the book’s (and the movement’s) effete idiocy but by its inability to engender new acolytes. Even so, the book should prove especially popular on library shelves and remainder racks, where the most passionate book worshippers are to be found.

In the planning stages for Real Estate Weblogging 101, I made an effort to find ways of connecting electronic publishing to paper publishing. But then I had an epiphany: The work of the mind is documented on the nets. Publishers desperately cling to the idea of holding ideas for ransom by chaining them to atoms, but the Djinn is already out of the bottle — to call to mind another cult desperately clinging to the past. Prometheus has broken his chains — to recall our own future-loving creed — and the gift of mind surges forth in pandemic pandemonium.

On the nets, a new idea is published instantaneously across the globe. It is accessible to billions, if they seek it, at a negligible carrying cost. It can be linked to every discoverable supporting and countervailing resource and vetted by the intense scrutiny of thousands of hypercritical experts. Net-based “books” are revisable and extensible at will, with no delay and no lingering inventories of obsolete stock.

Shed a tear at graveside, if you will, but facts are facts: Books are a dead letter.

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July 19, 2007

Zillow.com’s wacky no-one-owns-a-wiki policy promotes no one’s name, brand or image — except its own

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Drew Meyers from Zillow commenting on a post last week:

Please note the real estate guide (which is a wiki) is VERY different than a blog. Since wikis are collaborative, no one person “owns” any of the content.

That turns out to be not quite true.

Zillow Blog featured two of my wiki contributions yesterday. Both had been clobbered, if that’s the past tense of collaboration. No mention of me in the idyllic land of wiki, even though both ideas are very good — and no one at Zillow came up with them. Even so, guess who was promoted in the wacky world of no-one-owns-a-wiki.

Oh, yes, Zillow.com happily promotes itself on the sweat of my labor. What genius! Who ever thought of such things? That Zillow, boy howdy!, you gotta get up purty damn early…

Nice. They stand on the shoulders of giants. They just bury them in dirt so it looks like a hilltop. To top it all off, guess who’s going to profit from the inbound links?

Here are the unmolested — er, un-wiki-perfected — original articles, if that matters:

I think this is a good example of how Zillow’s hoped for social networking scheme is self-defeating. It’s understandable that they would want to keep their pseudo-encyclopedia free of spamvertising. This they could achieve simply by accepting or rejecting submissions. But my only incentive for coming up with and sharing good real estate ideas is to promote my own name, brand and image. Why would I do that if I know that my hard work is going to be expropriated?

This is just dumb on Zillow’s part. I’ll have a lot more ideas. But I won’t be sharing them with Zillow.com and it’s sticky-fingered wiki. I think Wikipedia is an amazing accomplishment, but I don’t care what Jimbo Wales thinks a wiki should be like over there. I don’t write for Read more

July 19, 2007

Have another cookie? Targeting content to two different kinds of first-time visitors to a WordPress.org weblog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin had a post last night that made me rethink the ideas I posted the other day on using a cookie to modify a WordPress.org weblog’s default behavior for first-time visitors.

Clear as mud?

Starting with version 2.0, WordPress introduced the idea of an optional intro.php file that would be a sticky first post. In other words, the file, truly a pseudo-post, could be shown first to every reader who landed on the top-level page of the weblog. That way, you can do all your welcoming house-keeping with new users.

Too cool. What’s the problem? Most people showing up at your weblog are not new users, so you’re going to hammer that intro.php nail into their heads again and again.

And Dustin raised another problem: Many people arriving at your weblog for the first time will be coming in from search engines, from your RSS feed or from deep links on other sites. Those folks are never going to see intro.php, because they won’t enter the weblog from the top level.

The code I wrote the other day solved both of these problems, but with a one-size-fits-all solution. What if you want to issue a special introduction only to top-level first-time visitors? What if you want to address only those people coming in via deep links into your weblog? What if you want to say something different to each type of visitor?

I amended the code today to take account of these two different entry scenarios. Using this version you can have an intro.php file for people who enter your weblog for the first time through the front page. The cookie associated with that expires in 60 days, so that only people who have been away for a long while will see it more than once.

You can also have another file called singlePostIntro.php (or whatever) for people who come in via a hard click from a search engine, an RSS feed or another web site. That cookie lasts for two weeks. The point is to address infrequent visitors who come in via deep links differently, in the hopes of persuading them to become subscribers.

You can see this Read more

July 18, 2007

Make no mistake, without the thoughtful, dispassionate accuracy of professional journalists, the world itself would crumble

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From VentureBeat:

For this, Redfin has been banned [false] from operating in Oregon [false], New Jersey [false] and now Tennessee [false]. Additionally, the site has been fined by the National Association of Realtors [false], which owns the Multiple Listing Service [false], a national database [false] of home listings.

That’s two sentences, seven errors of fact.

Redfin can operate all it wants in Oregon, New Jersey and Tennessee. Those states ban commission rebates, which is vicious and wrong, but that doesn’t forbid Redfin from working there. In general, you will not find Redfin in any market where homes are affordable, because its cost-structure can only work — if it can work at all — on high-priced homes.

The second sentence is so rife with errors, I’m not going to bother trying to fix it. If you want to know what really happened, it’s here: Defending Redfin: Sweet Digs weblog buried by inane MLS rules.

Nevertheless, I am so glad that there are fearless guardians of truth willing to take money for this level of ineptitude. It would be an awful curse if we had to depend for news on people who care about facts and are actually paying attention.

Jeesh!

So as not to be unrelentingly negative: Newspapers got some bad news this morning, but for-pay journalism is not dead. But if journalists hope to portray themselves as “trusted professionals,” they need to catch a clue. The audience in the aggregate may net out dumb enough to buy crap like this, but the audience in particular contains individuals who know a lot more than you do about whatever you happen to be writing about. In the past those people were silenced by circumstance. Now each one of them can stand at the narrow end of an international megaphone. Not coincidentally, the best of the for-pay journalists are becoming webloggers, like John Cook, who broke this story and who managed to get it right in the first place.

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July 17, 2007

Redfin cops another $12 million, raising investors’ stake in the discount realty.bot to $40,000 per closed transaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The indefatigable John Cook:

Redfin has raised an additional $12 million in venture funding, money that the Seattle discount real estate broker will use to enhance its Web site and expand into new markets.

First up for Redfin are the Washington D.C and Baltimore areas, which are being unveiled today. Next on the agenda are Sacramento and Chicago, which the company hopes to open later this year. Redfin, which refunds two thirds of its commission to home buyers and offers a flat listing fee of $3,000 to sellers, already operates in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles. Since its launch 17 months ago, more than 500 homes — valued at more than $350 million — have been bought and sold through Redfin.

To put things into perspective, Russell Shaw’s team of around ten people sold approximately 600 houses in the same span of time. With a head-count of 75 people — so far — and a capital investment of $40,000 cash-American per closed transaction, Redfin.com is somewhat less efficient.

But: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Redfin will be profitable any day now. Scout’s honor!

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July 17, 2007

Project Blogger: An objective post-mortem analysis — I hope

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Project Blogger is over — I think. Truly the fun never starts, but the drama never stops. I mostly ignored everything except the work Teri Lussier and I did here, at TheBrickRanch.com and at RealEstateWeblogging101.com. The contest pretty much ignored me, too, an unexpected delight.

We didn’t win — as nearly as I can tell. We developed a full-blown viral marketing strategy for locally-focused real estate weblogs, then codified the frolicking thing in a blogbook — itself something new under the sun. Teri understood what we were aiming for, but she understood it in her bones before we got down to business. To my knowledge, none of the other contestants paid the slightest bit of attention to what we were doing, even though we did it all in public.

All that’s as may be. I personally have been less than enthralled by the writing on the contestants’ blogs, but I confess to not having much tolerance for local blogs. To write about things of small importance, you really have to be able to write. I picked Teri to suffer through this with me because she writes so engagingly.

Pat Kitano was the judge for the last week of the competition, and he got to bathe in all that Project Blogger drama. One of the things he did that I thought was very smart was running Technorati rankings on each of the contestant’s weblogs.

This just by itself elicited complaints, which I thought were kind of funny. We said for months that the important thing is viral networking, with SEO factors taking a back seat. So the folks who listened not a word when we were demonstrating how to make a family of your farm were quick to pump their fists and shout, “Linking doesn’t matter.”

That’s not quite true. I wrote this in email to Teri tonight:

Technorati Authority is not vital to your purposes, since the users you want will find you by other means — local blogrolls, comments you make on local blogs, face-to-face contact, your local advertising, etc. But significant linkage from other websites will help your Google PageRank, which will help potential clients Read more

July 17, 2007

How not to divorce the real estate commissions: L.A. buyer figures out who pays the commissions but seems not to grasp the nature of the listing agreement

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Freakonomics, the L.A. Land weblog at the Los Angeles Times has a shaggy-dog story about a buyer who came up with a brand new way to shoot herself in the foot: Pay all the commissions herself, regardless of the terms of the listing agreement and the HUD-1 procedures currently in place:

I thought it would be Super Smart to restructure the traditional home purchase offer. Traditionally, when you buy a house you just give the purchase money to the seller and the seller pays the 5% commission out of that. But when you think about it, you are agreeing to pay 5% more for the house, and that translates to a bigger down payment, a bigger mortgage and bigger property taxes every year. So I figured it would be brilliant to subtract the 5% off the purchase price and pay the agents’ commissions separately myself. Seems like no big deal, right? Wrong.

She actually worked it out to honest math, which is more than lenders and title companies can do. But of course the sellers couldn’t go along with this, even if they had wanted to, without being released from the listing agreement.

Per the purchase contract, the buyer would pay 5% of the full purchase price outside of escrow (a RESPA violation?), and the seller would pay an additional 5% at the closing table, per the terms of the listing contract. The agents might well have hated this idea — it is stoopid, after all — but not for financial reasons. Double-dips all around! Who could object?

Even so, just because the buyer made a thoughtless mistake — no doubt against the better advice of her agent — this doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Except in a short sale, the buyer pays for everything that gets paid for at the closing table. It would be a boon to consumers to make our processes reflect this fact.

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July 17, 2007

For pure home search, Terabitz puts all the cards on the table and all the icons on the map

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When first I read about Terabitz this morning, I was prepared to make fun of it. It looks and “plays” like an on-line video game. Instead of a simple check-box-based user-interface on top of a map, you drag out icons for the types of searches you want to run, then build a mashed-up map like the one shown above from the results. My guess is that the intent is artificially to limit the number of things you search for at one time, but the overall effect is at least as fun as an on-line video game.

From VentureBeat:

Terabitz is launching a comprehensive site for home buyers wanting to organizing and map information about their prospective homes.

Think of it as a cross between a personal homepage (like iGoogle or Netvibes, for example) and a real estate information site (like Trulia or Zillow).

You can drag and drop housing information from menu bars into a central dashboard with a set of data displays. With one click, you can map this data using the site’s Google Maps mashup.

Besides for-sale listings, there’s information like average local mortgage rates, average rental fees and other real estate information.

You can also find out all sorts of good things about a place that are harder to quantify, like nearby restaurants, libraries, schools, coffee shops. Even the FBI’s crime — and specifically sex offender — database gets included.

This non real estate data is what sets Terabitz, of Palo Alto, Calif. apart from sites like Zillow and Trulia, which also offer home profile pages that are limited mainly to real estate data.

You can customize your own page of data widgets about your prospective home. You can also make an image of your data collection and share it with other users or email to friends.

More from John Cook’s Venture Blog:

Yet another startup company is entering the online real estate category. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Terabitz — backed with $10 million in funding from Tudor Capital and originally conceived by 17-year-old Kamran Munshi — is attempting to create a site that will help home buyers or apartment hunters manage the process from beginning to end. Its 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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