There’s always something to howl about.
Surely fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one, but just try getting them to admit it! David Platt makes an interesting argument about why the iPhone will fail, but, even stipulating his entire case, it seems reasonable to suppose that most early-adopters will be stout fans for at least two years — the length of the service contract with AT&T.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
I’m writing about the Apple iPhone for Friday’s Republic, putting me in an august company of gushing fans. Reviews appeared today from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Newsweek. So far, everyone loves it, with some reservations.
Engadget has a run-down of the caveats turned up so far. Chief beef from all over: No AT&T, no iPhone. You can’t buy the device as a wi-fi enabled pocket-sized Macintosh with a video iPod and a 2MB camera — but without contracting for a cellular phone and data plan. On the plus side, the Applefied monthly plans are robust and reasonably priced.
Biggest unnoticed beef? Perhaps because fish are not aware of the waters they swim in, no one in the enblogged globe seems to have complained that, because the device is activated and synced through iTunes, you cannot use an iPhone if you don’t own a Macintosh or Windows computer. Lachrymose Luddites and Unix eunuchs need not apply.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
My father manufactures mens’ outerwear — overcoats, raincoats, jackets. He was with Windbreaker and London Fog for many years, but for the last couple of decades he’s been a private-label vendor: He supplies the goods, the designer or department store supplies its label. One year Consumer Reports reviewed mens’ raincoats and my dad took first, fourth and fifth place with the same raincoat. Different labels, different price points, same coat. The winner was sold by J.C. Penny for $99. Second place went to a $900 Aquascutum.
The Bloodhounds made a run at winning that decisively at this week’s Carnival of Real Estate, but judge Mike Simonsen was smart enough to see through us. I entered three times, and Kris Berg and Brian Brady entered from their home weblogs. A small demonstration of the volume at which we can howl, when we want to. These are the entries I know about (there may have been others from other BHB contributors):
Alas, we didn’t win, although all three of us were mentioned in Mike’s post.
Truly, you can’t win ’em all, but we have won the Carnival of Real Estate more than any other weblog:
Meanwhile, Michael Cook has won Read more
That’s the short list, not the short bus.
We are among the nominees for the Inman Innovator Awards — Most Innovative Blog category. These are the other nominees in our category:
Looks like somebody likes bubble blogs…
My own immediate reaction to our nomination is colored by three mental filters: First, I have a fundamental contempt for any sort of beauty contest. Second, I cannot stand the thought of not winning — decisively, by an incontestable margin — any competition I happen to find myself in. But third, I have no confidence that I will win any competition where the results are based on anything other than my own performance. If it’s an objective race, I will win by force of savage will. But I know from bitter experience not to put too much faith in subjective judges.
(I swear there are times that it’s like Fyodor Frolicking Dostoevsky inside my mind…)
Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we win. It doesn’t even matter to me if we get thrown out of the competition for insufficient obsequiousness. All that matters is that we kicked ass this first year of BloodhoundBlog — decisively, incontestably. Whatever the hell “innovation” might be in a real estate weblog, if it’s not us, it’s not worth worrying about…
Technorati Tags: blogging, Inman, Inman Connect, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at Altos Research Real Estate Insights. Plenty of great reading, including three posts from BloodhoundBlog contributors.
And… The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is up at The Flipping Pad. Michael Cook one with The Real Risk in Real Estate Flipping, one of the five posts he wrote last week that could have taken first prize.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Zillow blog. Advertise yourself as a lister in the neighborhoods you farm in a venue we know is strongly appealing to sellers. This is so smart it makes my brain ache…
Later: Adopted. Whole-heartedly and with alacrity. I need for you to be shopping for what I’m selling, or else my advertising dollars are wasted. But I need to be selling you what you are actually shopping for, or I am wasting your time. This idea beyond brilliant…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
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“Brian Brady is that mortgage guy in the suspenders on the internet.”
Good or bad, that’s my brand on the internet. That goofy picture was taken at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on a free Kodak machine. I emailed myself the picture and have been using it for the past two years in all of my online marketing efforts. And while I’m not necessarily the best user of photoshop, I’m a pretty damned good viral marketer.
I met Rudy of Sellsius earlier this year and he said “You’re all over the internet.” I dropped my daughter off at school last month and one of her schoolmate’s parents said “I saw you on Zillow.” My neighbors have told me that they read my articles on MySpace. I organized a coup to take over the Trulia Voices section.
I guest author on BloodhoundBlog, NELA Live, Long Beach Real Estate Home, Sacramento’s Real Estate Voice and maintain an active profile and weblog on the Active Rain Real Estate Network. Lately, I’ve started experimenting on Gather.com.
To the untrained observer, I appear to be on an ego trip. To bloggers, I’m eschewing SEO for a viral marketing approach. I’m not going to wait for a customer to find me on the long tail search. I’m going to insert my goofy little suspenders picture in every imaginable place they might search for real estate related advice.
Does it work?
Well, I’ve received over 1,000 inquiries in the past 12 months from my efforts. Many are from borrowers, so my answer is, “Damn, Skippy, it works!” I’m slowly building up a database of people who have connected with me on the internet. My long-term goal is to have over 10,000 people in my permission-based email marketing database, receiving a newsletter each month. I’m at 1,012 today and I think I’ll be there in about 3-5 years.
Here are five tips to help you build an audience for your budding real estate weblog:
This past week our company had its annual sales rally, for lack of a better term. It consisted of the requisite motivational speaker who was charged with inspiring us to achieve greatness, greatness which apparently can only be realized after purchasing $600 worth of inspirational tapes, a State of the State address by our CEO, and a State of the Union address by our parent company’s CEO.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I generally abhor these things. My mortgage bill, my ongoing desire to eat a periodic meal, and the constant pressure to keep feeding the offspring those iTunes credits are motivation enough for me.
When I do find myself, through happenstance, momentary lack of good judgment, or as a result of being hog-tied and stuffed in a colleague’s trunk, at one of these pep rallies, I always apply the “one thing” rule. If I can leave having gleaned “one thing” that can be of value to me and my business, I feel it was worth the price (rope burns and the imprint of a spare tire on my forehead).
This time, I gleaned two things. Today, I’m Rocky Balboa at the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Live and Breathe Your Goal – Check!
Our motivational speaker spent much time reminding us that successful people are the ones that have a goal, are unequivocally committed to that goal, and never, ever stop thinking about how to achieve that goal. Yep, that’s me.
When I am not worried about something, I tend to worry about why I don’t have something to worry about. When I am not thinking about real estate, I am dreaming about it. I had a college English teacher who once said that people who are creative during the day don’t dream. Hogwash!. Last night, for instance, after a rich and full day of Sunday fun which included showing property, sitting an open house, drafting a marketing piece, writing an offer on another house for a client, a half-dozen phone calls made and another dozen or so taken, I worked (“created”) all night. In my sleep, I sold two more homes, Read more
This is the second half of the Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, including my presentation and the question and answer session. The sun had started to go down, so the light in the room was a little better. Cathleen built the slides you’ll see in the video. I had handed out a bookmark to the people who came, and your very own virtual copy of that is shown above.
To get to the punch line, of course.
Continuing our celebration of BloodhoundBlog’s first birthday, we take up this very serious question:
Who is funnier, Russell Shaw or Kris Berg?
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is the first half of the video from the Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference. Jay Thompson is featured here, making his presentation on the marketing power of real estate weblogging. The light in the room was not our friend, so Jay spends much of the film in silhouette.
Looking for the best web presentation possible
As the importance of video becomes increasingly apparent, learning to use this tool will be helpful in the successful marketing of median to upper-end properties.
I have been searching for a way to present video that would be better than the methods we often see in current use.
Apple Quicktime (mov) is a very good format, but its market penetration is not as high as other options like Windows Media Player or Flash.
Windows Media Player (wmv) is a good format… and it is widely used. Windows media can make a very clean video file when using very high bit rates… but the result is a very large file, which we would like to avoid.
Flash is the most widely accepted format right now. The trouble with Flash (in my experience) is that you get a boost in contrast that makes some of the subtle differences in shades difficult, if not impossible, to discern.
So what format should you use?
I have been busy learning some new (new to me, at least) video software over the last few weeks… and I’m almost into overload. While video production is a complicated issue – good web delivery of video doesn’t have to be.
Services like YouTube and WellcomeMat are great for a low-cost approach to hosting your video project… and they both use Flash.
But what if you want to kick the quality up a notch?
Well, then you might want to consider getting your own web hosting account that will give you the kind of space you need to host your videos.
Bringing a new player to the game
A recent entry on the scene is DivX… and it has some great features. The quality is very good; file sizes are small; and many DVD players can play this format.
As a test, I went to stage6.divx.com and downloaded Roger Waters performance of “The Wall” in Berlin. The video streams nicely on broadband, and the quality is very good – even in full screen mode.
I then brought this 699MB file into the TMPGEnc DVD Author to create a DVD of the performance. TMPGEnc created a 4 Gig set Read more
BloodhoundBlog is celebrating its first birthday this coming Friday, so I wanted to take a little time to highlight some of the best work we’ve done over the last twelve months.
There is a limit to how much primary reporting a real estate weblog can do. The webloggers are each stuck in one spot, for one thing, plus we all have day jobs.
But if we choose to, we can do exemplary work at evaluating new product releases. We’re end-users of the products we report on, so we already know what we like, what we don’t like, and what we wish were different. In our own particular case, BloodhoundBlog contributors like Brian Brady tend to go over new products in exhaustive detail, wringing out every conceivable facet and implication. We’re eager to know what the vendor thinks we’ll find in a new tool, but we’re even more avid to unearth the capabilities their software engineers had not foreseen.
So: Watch us work. Here are some of the breaking news posts we have generated over the last year:
Michael Cook’s post on Private Equity investing was picked up as a related-info link by The Wall Street Journal Online. We’ve been linked from a lot of interesting places, but I think this is the new high-water mark…
Technorati Tags: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing
This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
State rethinks crackdown on online home appraisals
The move by the Arizona Board of Appraisal and Attorney General Terry Goddard to prosecute Zillow.com, and potentially other Internet-based home valuation services, may be at an end.
Last June and November, the board ordered Zillow to cease and desist offering its free “Zestimates” in Arizona. The Attorney General’s Office followed up with a letter of its own, threatening prosecution. No other Automated Valuation Model was targeted.
Arizona Senate Bill 1291 was drafted earlier this year to fortify the board’s argument, redefining “appraisal” to mean any opinion of value, not just a paid evaluation contracted from a professional appraiser.
Rep. Michelle Reagan initiated the process of amending the legislation to permit AVMs to operate in Arizona. Her amended version passed the House and was subsequently further amended in a joint House-Senate conference committee.
The Senate voted Monday night to approve the amended version of SB 1291. Among the amendments was an exemption for free Web-based AVMs from regulation under the state’s appraiser licensing laws. The House approved the amended language Tuesday.
As the Web site LittlePinkHouses.com notes, the amendments also undid other changes that had been sought in the bill. The composition of the Board of Appraisal will not be changed to include a majority of professional appraisers and the legal definition of an appraisal will conform to a common-sense understanding of the term.
As originally drafted, the bill would have outlawed virtually any estimation of value, possibly even including the casual conversations of neighbors. This is the amended definition of an appraisal:
“A person who produces a statement that is provided to any other person concerning the estimated value of real property through an Internet Website, automated valuation or other software program or other means of comparative market analysis and who discloses that the estimate is not an appraisal.”
This language absolves not just Zillow but also real estate licensees producing Broker Price Opinions for lenders and, presumably, other methods of evaluating homes.
The amended bill awaits only the signature of Gov. Janet Napalitano to become law.
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