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Category: Marketing (page 126 of 191)

June 6, 2007

Redfin discovers Earth: “It was wetter than we were expecting…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You just can’t make this stuff up. Redfin’s Glenn Kelman:

At lunch with Cynthia and a local real estate baron, we heard about a new tactic for getting a deal on a property. Rather than offering a lower price, ask the seller to handle closing costs, which can run up to $10,000 or more.

How long have they been doing real estate? And today they discovered that they can negotiate the closing costs?

Recall that Kelman claims that Redfin agents are better negotiators. I mentioned closing costs when discussing why that claim might not be true:

A complicated negotiation might result in a higher reported sales price but a better overall deal for the buyers — for example, repairs or even remodeling, seller concessions, no out-of-pocket costs, etc. These are the types of arrangements more likely to be made by more-experienced agents.

A question their clients — and their clients’ attorneys — might ask: What else don’t they know?

In a word: Yikes!

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June 6, 2007

Jay Thompson and Greg Swann to speak at First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference on June 21st

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and I will be speaking the Phoenix Area Active Rain Gathering and First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, to be held on Thursday, June 21st, at 3pm.

If you’re going to see Russell Shaw speak at Arizona Real Estate Commissioner Sam Wercinski’s event, you’ll probably still have time to make the Blogging Conference. The Commissioner is providing lunch and we’ll be having drinks after the Conference, so you can make a day of it.

The event is being put together by Shailesh Ghimire of CTX Mortgage. Visit Arizona Mortgage Guru for more details.

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June 6, 2007

Third thoughts on real estate video production: Marketing Mind-to-Mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another clip from the discussions Cathy and I had Sunday at open house. This film explores ideas for the focused marketing of specific types of real estate products — for example, how we might take different approaches with historic versus ultra-modern versus mid-century homes. Amazingly enough, there is some actual visual interest in the movie — all of it added in post-production.

June 6, 2007

The style of your soul: The fundamental virtue of conscientious real estate weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” –Victor Hugo

The Russell Shaw entry What’s wrong with Zip Realty?, written in February, was the most clicked-upon post on BloodhoundBlog on Tuesday. Debunking Zillow.com, which was written last July and which often comes in first, took second place.

I’m making note of this because there is a celebration of mental indolence going on just now, reflexively offered up as the rationale and justification for mental indolence. This by itself is meaningless: Erg for erg, laziness is the hardest job there is.

But it occurred to me that the RE.net has undertaken efforts, formal and informal, to instruct novices in the art of real estate weblogging — and laziness is very bad weblogging advice.

The job is what it is. It takes what it takes. If you don’t feel up to taking on the world, that’s fine. But don’t affect to pretend to believe that goofy pictures and bold subheads can take the place of rational discourse. It is actually possible to destroy a specious pose with one onomatopoeical word, but, most often, the work of the mind requires a greater effort.

This matters because you are not writing solely for the day and the visitors thereof. If there is any importance at all to the work that you do, it will be linked and searched. The post that gets only nine hard clicks today may someday get ninety clicks every day — if it deserves them.

What you do is your business, and most of weblogging is ephemeral — of moment for substantially less than a moment. We work the way we do here because we don’t affect to admire the half-assed. If you choose instead to indulge your worst appetites, arguing that that this is the path to popularity among people seeking to indulge their own worst appetites — rave on. It means less than nothing. The work of the mind in real estate will go on — in links, in searches, in perpetuity — without you.

But: If you actually care about improving your own mind Read more

June 5, 2007

Katy Couric, Redfin, and the Predictability of Markets.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

There was a delightfully obtuse article in yesterday’s Oregonian lamenting the abysmal ratings of Katy Couric and CBS Evening News. The writer’s reasoning was that it’s our fault for not watching, that we’re a country of misogynists not ready for a serious female anchor. Damn us.

The fact is that, like most markets, the ratings were entirely predictable. Not that prediction is easy — obviously some people can’t even predict in hindsight — but those who are best able to infer behavior from given cause are those most likely to succeed in whatever they do.

Some suggestions:

1. Trust your first impression.

It’s the first advice I give to buyers: You’ll know it when you see it; if you have to be talked into it it’s probably not right. Same with ideas: if it sounds nutty on first hearing, chances are it is.

When a network news division with serious credibility problems hires as an anchor someone famous for her teeth and entertainment value — and with credibility problems of her own — it’s nutty.

When a company — Redfin — launches on the supposition that buyers will rush to be represented by someone they’ll never meet in their most important purchase of their lives, it’s nutty.


2. The corollary to (1): Don’t project your own bias.

Manifested in the notion that “If I think it, so must everyone.”

The Oregonian is obsessed with global warming (full disclosure: I am not obsessed with global warming). When our local MLS decided to add a ‘green’ search mechanism, apparently intended to pick up those properties with Energy Star or other ratings, The Oregonian devoted sixty column inches to the news. (See here). I still haven’t ever had a buyer ask me to find a green property, a seller who’s asked how to get a ‘green’ rating, nor have I ever talked to anyone else who has, and I live in the greenest state in the US. As of right now, there are 304 green listings in the MLS; out of 12,741.

Redfin’s (and Sixty Minutes’) bias is “Stick it to the Man!” CBS’s bias is: gender trumps merit.

Caveat: It’s Read more

June 5, 2007

Second thoughts on real estate video production: Video Verite — what video can and cannot do

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a piece of the video we shot on Sunday. There’s another segment, on marketing, that I may post, also.

This film is a discussion of the nature of discursive prose as an art form, and why video, for all its strengths, cannot supplant prose in weblogging.

This could easily be the most hirsute real estate video you will ever watch. We trip lightly between art and philosophy, taking a moment to reflect upon the Swan of Avon along the way. I started out thinking that the exercise was a complete waste, but, in the end, I think you’ll find that the content, static thought it may be, repays your time.

June 4, 2007

Game Time: What Are Your Favorite Real Estate Slogans?

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

Vacuuming pun from Cambridge NowI’ve always liked good puns in marketing because they’re cerebral and that’s the arena in which I like to engage my clients.

You can understand, therefore, why I am partial to my own mortgage-related tagline:

You’re not a loan with The Dan Green Team

Joke grenades work on Madison Avenue and at The Improv. I love when I get a call from a client months after our relationship starts and he says: “I just got the ‘You’re not a loan’ thing!” That kills me.

What are your favorite real estate-related slogans?

(Image Courtesy: Cambridge Now!)

June 4, 2007

First thoughts on real estate video production: Stuff that works

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I took the Bert and Ernie movie to YouTube to see how it would translate. I had read that much of the YouTube quality issue, that awful blocky MPEGulation, was caused by the quality of the source video, and I wanted to put it that notion to the test. Whatever B&EbtUSA lacks in cinematic art, it is decent-quality NTSC video. In other words, if you drove it into your television, it would look like TV-quality video. Bottom line: Not great, not awful. YouTube clearly is imposing its own compression on the source video, resulting in a significant loss of quality. Even so, the results are not nearly as bad as we resign ourselves to accepting from YouTube. My guess is that worst YouTube videos are being scaled up from iPod-sized source videos.

I think it’s funny to make a video about weblogging, so Cathy and I had our revenge yesterday at open house: We made a two-shot talking had video about video. It’s actually deeply philosophical, which is what poor Cathy has to live through when she lets me talk. But I haven’t cut it together yet, so that will have to wait.

Another project is to recut the Almeria video to try to make it a little less visually disquieting.

Recall that the original idea behind that film was to come up with an alternative to the “this… is… the… master… bed… room…” style of real estate video. In the film Cathy and I shot yesterday, we spend some time talking about the Greek idea of historia — the notion that history is not just a chronicle of events but, rather, an interpretive context — a story. I believe that real estate video works when it works as a story and not just as a visual summary of the MLS listing.

As a separate expression of that same kind of idea, BloodhoundBlog contributor Doug Quance brings forth A Study In Staging A Home In Atlanta. The home is shown to full advantage, but, by making the film about the story of the staging of the house, we don’t feel Read more

June 3, 2007

Do you want your real estate weblog content to be highly searchable on Google? It helps to let things go to your head

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tom Royce of The Real Estate Bloggers has always been a good friend to BloodhoundBlog. We talked earlier today about the New York Times article I cited this morning. Out of that conversation came an email I shared with all the BloodhoundBlog contributors. Not to hold out on you, I’ll post a version of it here.

Headlines make a huge difference in how weblogs entries are indexed. Many times I will write a long headline just because it amuses me, but something like this:

Could anything be sleazier than Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman? How about the Tennessee Association of Realtors?

does this — just like that.

The post is insanely short and it doesn’t even mention Redfin in the body copy.

We don’t rank well where we don’t compete, but the single most important Googlegredient in weblogging is a relevant, noun-rich headline.

This holds true for static web pages, too, although they won’t be indexed as often. Expressed as a formula:

relevance ~= (title ~= headline ~= text)

If the title of the page corresponds to the headline, and both correspond to the body text, especially the text near the headline, then the page is going to index well for the keywords in the title. At that point PageRank, etc., are going to matter, but you can completely dominate long tail searches by wisely invoking the formula above in your local market. Like this:

What makes a Scripps Ranch home sell? Price, preparation, presentation — and a buyer

That should slay dragons on “sell a home in Scripps Ranch”. More of the same is better, and the right mix of content can completely kill the category. In other words, write enough about Scripps Ranch and you will score in the first three searches on anything Scripps Ranch-related.

I’m emphasizing headlines here, but my presumption is that the title tag will duplicate the headline. In some — but not all — WordPress templates, it’s done that way by default. If your theme is among the exceptions, I wrote a post in March that tells you how to fix the problem. When you write static web pages, copy the headline into the title tag. Read more

June 3, 2007

Blogwisdom: Be found, be relevant, don’t be spam-tossed and don’t even think about being evil in the Church of Google

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lorelle on WordPress has advice on using the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress.

Invisible Inkling has good news for newspapers: Weblogs won’t make you irrelevant if you breathe deep and catch a clue.

From my own mailbox there’s this: Along with millions of other people, I whitelist emails composed entirely of images or with images in the signature area as spam. I’ve been doing this since the financial and sex-drug spammers switched to image-based emails. What this means is that if you have a logo or a head shot attachment in your email, many, many people are throwing away your email without seeing it. Interestingly, lately my SMTP server (cox.net), is not accepting emails with images attached in the sig. In other words, if I fish your email out of my spam folder and reply to it, I have to cut your pix out of the sig in order to get my own email server not to regard it as spam. Verbum sapienti sat est.

Seth on The New York Times on Google’s top-secret search algorithm lab:

Being first in the Google rankings is more important than it ever was. And getting there is now more straightforward (but not easier) than ever.

It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

The Times article is fascinating.

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June 2, 2007

The potentially-canonical list of real estate weblogs has grown, but not as fast as the RE.net

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The potentially-canonical list of real estate weblogs has been updated, the first time I’ve gotten to it in about two months. I’m sure it’s not growing as fast as the RE.net, so I need to come up with a more streamlined way of maintaining it.

Robert Melton at Pittsburgh Home Daily has a list of around 750 real estate weblogs, but he knows for sure that some of those are dead. All of ours have been vetted to be alive within the past few months, but new blogs come on line every day.

In email, Maureen Francis wonders if this list might be considered a link farm by Google. It’s possible, I suppose, but it doesn’t share the essential characteristics of a link farm. While it’s possible to echo our list in a static or real-time form, very few weblogs do this. However, if we’re linking to you, it would be gracious of you to link back to us.

In any case, look it over when you have a chance. I need to hear from you in any one of three circumstances:

  • A weblog should be on the list but isn’t
  • A weblog is on the list, but its details are in error
  • A weblog is on the list but shouldn’t be — it’s dead or a splog

There are 269 weblogs on the list right now, but I could be missing hundreds more.

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June 2, 2007

Do you think real estate reporting stinks?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You’re not alone:

The media coverage of housing is horrible. When the housing market was booming, we were warned of a “bubble.” When the boom finally slowed, we were warned it would be a disaster. It’s like the housing market is never good. It’s either bad or it soon will be. Even as a strident pessimist, I can’t muster that much negativity. And that “bubble” talk actually started before 9/11. If you had paid attention to it, you would have missed quite a boom.

The Arizona Republic is ever at the ready with local examples, of course. Especially on Saturdays, it seems, thus, possibly, to try to kill the busiest day of the real estate week.

Today is no exception, with a girthsome celebration of FSBObesity, but Jonathan Dalton and Jay Thompson have the paper’s number.

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