Just you wait until Brad Inman sees THIS! You know how he likes Realtors to charge less – well I’m prepared to cut my fee until Bradley says,”YES”.
Category: Marketing (page 129 of 191)
Eat their exhaust for only $300. Fifty photos at $300 a pop is $15,000 — America on $500 a day — not counting the vendor sponsorships. Good thing it’s all for charity. Otherwise, it might start to smell…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Can a prospective buyer be discriminated against because of the price range of home they are looking to purchase? For example I feel that an agent I recently visited would not help me because I was looking for a low-priced home. I am a young, single, first-time home buyer and basically just wanted a roof over my head to avoid paying rent. The agent flat out told me that I needed to spend more money. I have called and left messages for him and he has never returned my calls. I think he is avoiding me becuase he knows I will not spend a lot of money on a bigger home. Should I press the issue or is this just something I need to get over? Thanks.
This is an easy one.
This agent did you a great favor. It sounds like he doesn’t handle that price range. You want an agent who specializes in lower end homes, or better yet, first time buyers. There are many loans available just for first time buyers that most agents, (including me) don’t have a clue about. It’s not that I don’t know the answers for all of your questions. It’s more crucial than that. I don’t know the questions you don’t know to ask — much less their answers. And that’s not a position in which you want to find yourself.
Let’s reverse this situation. What if you had asked a first time buyer’s agent to find you a million dollar show place? Would you have felt discriminated against if they had turned you down? Here’s the principle — Don’t use a wrench when what the job requires is a hammer.
I’m an expert in real estate investment, yet I don’t know about every single kind of investment real estate. For instance, I’ve never known much about industrial property. If you came to me wanting that kind of investment, I’d immediately fess up, then refer you to someone who is a specialist in that kind of property.
Believe me, you don’t want an agent who needs to reinvent the wheel because he wouldn’t turn you down Read more
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at those meetings with the investors and venture capitalists. Pie charts, graphs, facts, figures. Lots of talk about disintermediation and volume of scale and that sort of thing.
When Redfin fails, they won’t blame themselves, the business model, lack of planning, poor management skills or bad judgement. They will blame the NAR, the “real estate industrial complex”, and the “real estate monopoly”.
VC’s out there reading this, please, use your head. At this rate, you will never see a dime returned on your money. It will just go down the same hole where the other $8M already went, subsidizing the 150 or so buyers who got their 2% refund from Redfin. That was YOUR money!
Redfin believes real estate agents are overpaid. They want to reduce commissions. If they succeed, THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO REFUND. Their whole M.O., their raison d’etre, their entire business model disintegrates.
Priceless. Read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, Redfin.com, real estate, real estate marketing
After the fur is done flying over the 60 Minutes piece what are we left with? What has really changed? Has Redfin “revolutionized” real estate? Well if offering rebates on commission is considered revolutionary count me among the witnesses. With 6, soon to be 8 markets, I think there is some time before everyone that’s not Redfin is out on the sidewalk with their hat in their hand.
But really, after the complaining of how UNFAIR it all was, it all is — what are YOU going to change?
In all of the complaints and defense I heard a favorite refrain. It seems everyone likes to toss the Nordstrom/Kmart analogy around whenever the full-service v. discounter argument arises. It’s like a broken record “Realtors offer Nordstrom-level service, Redfin is the Kmart of the real estate world” we all drone on. But do we really know what we’re saying; what we’re implying when we toss around our favorite analogy?
Because, truth be told, there ain’t that many Nordstroms folks. There just ain’t. So what makes you as a Realtor THE NORDSTROM REALTOR? Let’s look at some of the elements that helped the Nordstrom brand become synonymous with excellence and see how we stack up.
- Do we follow the motto: “Respond to Unreasonable Customer Requests”? How well do we respond to reasonable customer requests? When is the last time we left a truly remarkable memory with a customer? Do we relish rising to the challenge of unreasonable requests like Nordstrom does? Do we look at them with dread and think “How am I going to deal with this one?” or do we think “Here’s the opportunity to add another story to the growing legend of my customer service”?
- Do we “Use [our] good judgment in all situations”? Do we shirk responsibility when our gut tells us not too? Do we look at the phone at 4:59 on Friday ringing and not answer it? Do we start or end the day in a bad mood? Do we brush off someone because they don’t look like a potential customer? Do we skip the neighborhood mixer for the ballgame Read more
Thanks to Rueben Moore of BrickAndGarden.com, we were cited by the Freakonomics weblog today for beating up on the NAR.
BloodhoundBlog contributor Morgan Brown has a podcast interview with Rain City Guides’s Dustin Luther at BlownMortgage, his home weblog.
WordPress 2.2 is out. We’re running 2.1 on all our hosted weblogs except this one, which is still quivering in the corner under version 2.0.10. Time for some upgrades.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The attempted shakedown of Zillow.com that began last October — when The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaining that the nascent Seattle-based Automated Valuation Model (AVM) was misleading minority homeowners about the value of their homes — has come to stunningly banal conclusion.
In a letter dated May 4, 2007, the FTC elects to take “no further Commission action,” citing Zillow.com’s fortified disclaimers about the accuracy of AVM results and the need for site visitors to investiagte other sources of real estate evaluation.
The NCRC has since discovered the sub-prime mortgage melt-down as a more profitable mine to be quarried, since lenders can be faulted simultaneously for the foolish loans they made to minority borrowers in the past and for forbearing to be equally foolish in the present.
You can read the FTC’s letter here.
I wrote a great deal about this issue last fall, all of which is linked below. As with the State of Arizona’s persecution of Zillow.com, I see the NCRC shake-down as old-school criminality attempting to impose itself on the internet — trying to leverage off of Zillow’s fame or perhaps viewing AVMs as the weakest member of the new-economy herd in PR terms. In any case, this moral victory with the FTC will rob innuendo-wending reporters of a minor weapon to inveigh against the web start-up in stories about the on-going Arizona controversy.
These are my posts about the attempted NCRC shake-down of Zillow.com:
- Welcome to Race Piracy 2.0: Zillow.com is targetted for the crime of having deep pockets…
- Zillow.com shake-down: This is the first shoe dropping…
- Zillow.com shake-down: Creeping disclaimerism as a subject-changing gambit…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: How the other shoe will drop…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: BloodhoundBlog’s take so far — and a chance to win a BloodhoundRealty.com Tee Shirt…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: Preparing for the denouement…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: The piling on begins — and Spencer Tracy is nowhere to be found…
- Defending Zillow.com…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: At last a discouraging word about NCRC…
- Avid AVM aversion extends only to Zillow.com: NCRC off-shoot starts competing on-line valuation service…
- The Zillow.com shake-down: Deconstructing the NCRC complaint…
My friend Richard Nikoley dug this up, Admiral Jim Stockdale talking about his experience in a Vietnamese POW camp:
“I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Asked: “Who didn’t make it out?”
“The optimists. They were the ones who said we’re going to be out by Christmas. And, Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, We’re going to be out by Easter. And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. Then they died of a broken heart.
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
They can’t say “Yes” if you don’t ask — but they sure can say “No” if you do. Learning to surmount the fear of the “No” is how to get to the “Yes.”
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
A friend of mine, Matt Maret, passed this along to me. He and his company are hosting a seminar by Tom Ferry and I am passing this along to you first. The first 500 agents who call them attend for free. I am also sending an email out later tonight to about 36,000 Phoenix Area Realtors.
Here is the link with all of the info if you want to go.
This question concerns the Phoenix-area, but feel free to answer it for your own local market — just tell us where you are.
Which would be more attractive? The 8 month market or the 14 month?
I’m literally on the CUSP of being able to buy and with kids already transferring schools, the sooner the better in order to get some stability.
I’ve seen new home builders drop their prices pretty heavily or offer deep incentives. One of them has a home for around the 300k mark in Gilbert that’d be PERFECT. While I could make the payment now, I have been married to a house and that’s the worst type of one-way relationship. I don’t plan on doing it again anytime soon. Additionally, they just reduced prices 50k and are ALSO offering 20k in upgrades or a FREE Car/Truck (a Ford financed for 30 years is anything but free).
So with having settled on the fact renting the larger home I need and finishing another 6 month lease around 3/1/08 would put me at a greater financial advantage to tackle the home I have my eyes on, I question whether it’d be worth the higher payments for a shorter lease (as it’s on a home not an apartment), or if the market will be depressed enough to go the long haul at 12 months and spend more time preparing and saving.
I figured I’d shake my magic 8-blog (see what I did there? It’s a clever Monday!) and ask away. If you were advising a client on the buying side of life on how long to hold out if holding out was all they could do – Would you suggest holding on 8 months or 14?
Part of me says throwing money away on renting an additional 6 months is wasteful, the other part says that it’d allow me to save up for the stuff I’ll need to make the house a home. At a savings of around 500-600/month, that adds up to a few extra grand after 6 months.
The mention of a 40 year loan got me thinking more about affordability and financing. Read more
This is me from last July. Real Estate Wives has a post on Redfin and WalMart today, so I thought I’d bring this back to the top of the queue.
Are traditional Realtors being undercut? There’s always room at the top
Let’s see… Our customers are leaving us in a steady march. They’ve found an alternative that is easier to use, more convenient, overall just a better fit to their lives — and to top it all off, it’s much cheaper than our product.
What should we do?
Here’s an idea. Our customers are telling us in no uncertain terms what they want: More! Newer! Better! Faster! Cheaper! So let’s do the same things we’ve been doing all along, only less!
From Reuters.com:
The New York Times Co. plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.
The changes, set to take place in April 2008, include the closure of a printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company will sublet the plant and consolidate its regional printing facilities at a plant in Queens, the paper said.
The newspaper will be narrower by 1 1/2 inches. The redesign will result in the loss of 250 production jobs, the company said.
The New York Times said it expected the changes to result in savings of $42 million.
The narrower format, offset by some additional pages, will reduce the space the paper has for news by 5 percent, Executive Editor Bill Keller said in the article.
The Times will join a list of several other papers from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times that have reduced their size as they cut newsprint and other production costs and try to stem a loss of readers and advertising to the Internet and other media.
It might be fun to chortle about someone else’s troubles — and who doesn’t love seeing the New York Times get it good and hard?
But what they are doing is what the real estate industry, in general, is doing. In both cases, the consequences Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I interviewed Robert Ashby, a Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist, in this 15 minute podcast. Robert’s background is also in securities sales so he and I have much in common.
Robert was the first CMPS in Florida and is President of Solid Rock Mortgage Corporation. He runs a site called Mortgage Meds and is an airline pilot (he still flies 5 days a month for American). Links to follow the podcast include:
Solid Rock Mortgage Corporation
Certified Mortgage Planning Institute
How to Earn Money Borrowing at 6% and Investing at 4%
Home Equity: Risky During Hurricane Season
I appreciate Robert’s participation and encourage you to listen to someone who is practicing the “Strategic Equity Positioning” approach.
…is up at RSS Pieces…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Who says the old media is dead? In the hour just ended, Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing had over 400 hits from organic search. Just think what might happen if the NAR made reasoned arguments instead of trying to club reality into shape with legislation…
(This search is why we’re getting the traffic. As with Zillow.com, we are the highest-ranking discouraging words on the topic. It’s up to you to determine where the intellectual leadership of the real estate industry resides…)
More: real estate 2.x emerges from its Howard Hughes-like seclusion to comment.
Further notice: Well. That was pretty lame. You can see the video here. Wouldn’t it be cool if a reporter could ask an intelligent question? Wouldn’t it be cool if both sides of a story were actually presented? Even so, the bottom line is: Big deal.
Still more: I commented on the TechCrunch.com post, not that anyone other than insiders cares about accuracy on these issues.
My initial comment:
[Quoting Michael Arrington]> Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.
This is incorrect. Redfin’s cost “savings” consists of pushing the cost of buyer representation off to the listing agent and the buyer. It “saves” money by not doing the work the buyer’s agent’s commission is intended to compensate. The net consequence, if no other changes are made in the real estate industry, is that sellers and listing agents are likely to change the way they provide for the buyer’s agent’s compensation. Redfin.com has never turned a profit, and, if its business model actually gets traction, the money it “rebates” will no longer be available to it.
This was Arrington’s response:
Greg – the fact is that the real estate market is seriously screwed up and needs to be disrupted. Agents are overpaid and often do little more than underprice a house to ensure a quick sale. The model needs to change, and Redfin is changing it. Good for them.
That rejoinder is devoid of any actual response to what I had said, but people are rarely Read more
Cathy brought this up this morning, so I thought I would look into it. A version of this went out as email to BloodhoundBlog contributors earlier today.
Cathy’s question: What is the Google impact of being a BloodhoundBlog contributor?
We have a Page Rank of 5 on the main landing page — the “top” of the weblog. I expect us to be PR6 at the next recalculation.
Either way, the link to each contributor’s web site in the landing page should be hugely beneficial, since that page has such a high Page Rank.
A contributor’s spot in the list of Frequent Contributors also puts that person’s link on a huge number of other BloodhoundBlog pages: Each post, each category, each month, each author, each indexable page of posts, etc. The actual number of pages Google is “seeing” at BloodhoundBlog may be as good as infinite. Most of those pages will have a much lower Page Rank, of course, but every time Google spiders one of them, each web site it “sees” will be queued to be spidered.
Plus: We get spidered dozens of times a day, by Google but also by Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.
We have a Technorati Authority of 463 as I write, putting us within the top 7,000 blogs overall — third place among Technorati-tracked real estate weblogs. We have 3,868 total links from other weblogs — second place — which argues that many weblogs are linking to us multiple times.
There’s more: After I started thinking about this, I realized I could go the whole thing one better. I’ve changed the way the meta-entry information is presented, post-by-post, to put the link to each contributor’s home web site there, as well.
We’re already delivering a lot of clicks back to contributor’s sites, but this change should yield even more. Plus, every post is now that much more Googlejuice-enriched — with the link being very high within the content, from Google’s point of view. Even better, every theme change is retroactive: All of our past posts, going back forever, will have this link, also.
I changed the date entry, too, so people can figure out Read more