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Category: Marketing (page 130 of 191)

May 11, 2007

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

May 11, 2007

Heads Up All NASCAR Fans

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

An email I received today:

NOHASSLE uploadno hassle listing was not my experience. Your representative sent to install my sign refused to put the sign where the realtor and I agreed to. He was too busy talking on the phone to listen to
me. And when I asked for the 5th time to move the sign the crack head acted like he was going to attack me with a 5′ foot steel pike. I promptly told your sign installer to get the sign and his self off my property. Regardless of weather he was a contractor or not he is your representative. I expect anyone involved in the listing of my home to be drug free, not tweaking on speed and making threatening gesture. AND I QUESTION THE PROFESSIONALISM OF YOUR COMPANY even considering sending this company
back to install my signage. The experience was more than a hassle. It was a nightmare. I have wasted valuable time and effort dealing with Russell Shaw to list my home. Also the lack of
response to correct the matter was simply unacceptable.
I will be filing complaint’s with board of realtors, State of Arizona , better business bureau, and all of the local TV investigative reporters.
I also plan to use my 24′ enclosed racecar hauler and racecar to advertise to the valley my experience with no hassle listing. Look for me at the fall nascar event…
May 11, 2007

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.

Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.

But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.

What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 11, 2007

Trulia.com versus Zillow.com revisited: Are your end-users temporary or permanent?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me last month, at the time of the Zillow.com’s most-recent software release:

In the world of Trulia.com — and other listings.bots focused on evanescent listings — users come and go. On the idealized Planet Zillow, users come and stay.

Home buying is at most an 18-month effort undertaken every seven to ten years, on average. Home ownership is continuous. Zillow attracts a lot of sellers, and it seems certain that it hopes to attract a countervailing cadre of buyers. But what Zillow is really doing, I think, is aiming at the 100 million-plus Americans who own their own homes. Some may come every day — to see new listings, to see new home photos, to ask or answer questions. Some may come only once in a while, when they have a particular need.

But its databases are permanent and accretive, constantly improving. I think Zillow’s goal is not to compete with Trulia or Google Base for home shoppers in the short run. I think its goal is to suck every bit of oxygen out of the residential real estate space as a vertical market. I’m not implying malice. But where others see this opportunity or that opportunity, I think Zillow.com sees the information marketplace for homeowners as a single unified whole, and I think the company’s goal is to dominate the whole thing in its entirety.

Today’s changes have the potential to make Trulia.com a stickier experience. But will it retain end-users after their homes have closed?

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May 11, 2007

Podcast interview with Trulia.com’s Heather Fernandez: “Real estate professionals are going to be able connect directly with consumers”

by

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

Author website

Linked below is a podcast interview I conducted with Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez, Trulia.com’s Director of Marketing. Heather takes us through all of Trulia’s new functionality. At the end of the recording, I raise the idea that Heather might be getting a lot of email about the upgrade, so it seems appropriate to share her email address: heather@trulia.com. Let her know what you thnk of the new Trulia.com.

May 10, 2007

The NAR’s Operation Tip-Off: How to make yourself look guilty by protesting your innocence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Matthew Hardy of Real Estate Success Tools sends along a copy of the NAR’s press release on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes Redfin PR puff piece.

We are led by buffoons, avidly drawing attention to the stuff they want everyone to ignore. Two words is too many in reply to this crap: So what? Discount Realtors are nature’s perfect revenge on people who crave real estate discounts. The intelligent response is not to shout, like Redfin, “We’ll do nothing for even less!” but to offer a quality product at a fair price — and then actually deliver it.

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May 10, 2007

Hey, can I hop a train to that shack? ShackPrices.com introduces proximity to mass transit as a search criterion

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the most innovative of the map-based real estate search portals is ShackPrices.com. A house is a house and a neighborhood is a neighborhood, but a home is a lifestyle, and ShackPrices is doing more than anyone else to integrate lifestyle data in its databases.

The latest innovation is showing proximity to present or future mass transit services in its search results:

Beginning today, home buyers can search from thousands of homes for sale near bus stops along one or more King County Metro Bus lines or near Sound Transit Rail stops. Home buyers can combine their search for homes near mass transit lines with a variety of other factors including price, size, and keywords using ShackPrices’ intuitive map search.

“By letting home buyers search for properties near current and future transit stops, we are giving the public a valuable tool to find homes that fit an environmentally friendly lifestyle,” said ShackPrices.com co-founder Galen Ward, “Most importantly, we’re giving home buyers the opportunity to find a home that should substantially increase in value when transit lines are complete. Homes within 500 feet of rail lines are worth as much as $40,000 more than similar homes just a little farther away.”

I, personally, don’t like taxpayer-subsidized mass transportation, but “people like pie.” In the urbanosphere, proximity to mass transit is a very common question. Answering this question visually and automatically would seem to be painfully obvious — except no one else is doing it.

My frank assessment: ShackPrices.com should post a “Make Me Move” price to see if anyone in Seattle has brains enough to write an eight-figure check.

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May 8, 2007

What Barenaked Ladies Taught Me About Scripting And Delivery

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

The most important part of my job as a loan officer is helping clients understand how mortgages work.

It’s a tall order sometimes and that’s why I spend a ton of time crafting answers to common questions and then rehearsing them until I can recite them backwards, forwards, and from any point in the middle.

This is called Scripting and Delivery.

Why do I do it? Because over the course of my career, I have heard the same questions from my clients thousands of time. Naturally, that’s fine with me. The more times I am asked a particular question, the more I know just how important it is to people.

  • “I’ve heard that interest only loans are dangerous. What do you think?”
  • “Our family is about add another baby. How should we incorporate that into our mortgage plan?”
  • “I just paid off a credit card. Should I close the card?”

Each of these questions is a springboard to bigger, more important discussions about mortgage planning. That’s when I am thankful that I know what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. A carefully-crafted answer makes a far greater impact to my clients that if I just spoke off the cuff.

But, scripting alone, though, doesn’t cut it. It has to be backed up with flawless delivery, too.

This is where a lot of mortgage and real estate professionals fall short. They rely on their experience/expertise and just figure that they’ll wing it when the time comes to respond to a client’s question.

Look: It doesn’t matter if you know what to say if you don’t know how to say it clearly. And I’m going to prove it.

Below, are the lyrics for the Barenaked Ladies tune “One Week”, courtesy of Rock It Old School. Look them over, print them out, put them on an adjacent screen, whatever — just get a copy you can reference while you watch the embedded YouTube video above.

You’ve got the “script” in-hand so how hard can it be to just sing along?

If you failed on your first go around, try again. If you fail on Read more

May 8, 2007

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves Read more

May 8, 2007

A Case (by Case) For and Against Dual Agency

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Trevor Smith’s answer to Dual Agency?

Let the buyer represent himself, and give him the commission regularly paid to the Buyer’s Agent. (Granted, this would still leave the buyer relatively unprotected, but at least if something goes bad, its his own fault and not the agents).

Your obvious question is, “Where are the customary apostrophes to indicate a contraction or possessive noun?” No, wait, that is just me. What you are really thinking I suspect is that this sounds suspiciously like a Redfin philosophy, but then, Trevor is not so coincidentally a Redfin agent from Seattle.

By the way, according to Trevor, Redfin’s Blue Collar Spokesmodel, they are gaining market share there at warp speed. In 2006, it was reported that Redfin closed over 200 transactions. Now, it seems they are putting those deals to bed at a clip of 90 a week. I feel a press release coming on!

In light of Trevor’s recent remarks, I’ll take the opportunity to open old dual agency wounds. Is dual agency truly the root of all evil? It depends on who you ask. Even here at the Kennel Club, we have two camps. Now, let’s make that three.

I fall somewhere in the middle on the subject. Steve and I have acted as dual agents in many transactions. We do not like it, and we do not seek it out, but at times it is so very appropriate that any argument suggesting we are compromising our agency duties is simply ludicrous.

BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS ME

Greg Swann is a well-known critic of dual agency transactions.

Disclosed Dual Agency cannot possibly be effected — in reality — without repeated, overt agency violations.

I will offer one example of how this statement is not only wrong but offensive to those of us that bend over backwards to protect the rights and interests of our clients – all of them. We closed escrow recently on a transaction involving our listing and our buyer. The reasons dual agency worked in this situation relate back to Russell Shaw’s contention that we have less control over our client’s decisions than one might imagine.

The idea that the Read more

May 7, 2007

Pachelbel versus Warhol: Taking desktop real estate video to the streets

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I stand accused of being the “Andy Warhol of real estate video”. I’m pretty sure them’s fightin’ words, but, rather than exacting my vengeance by making a nine-hour film of a dripping faucet, I have chosen instead to assert my classical roots.

Vide: I had planned to do a video for this listing, but it sold before I could get it done. So I did one now for practice. This is just another randomized slide show with music, but it works better for me than the kind of slow, blurry pan and stammer we see too often in real estate videos: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.”

But: I’m learning a lot by playing with this software. I have this same slide show in a rock video-style presentation, Ken Burns-style fauxtion with angled cuts and dissolves — completely MTV-creepy. What I want to learn how to do is supplant the images from recorded video, retaining the audio, so that the kind of interview I put together last Friday becomes more visually appealing and more informative.

This is doable. As with high-end graphics production, the software is takin’ it to the streets. Neither desktop publishing nor desktop video are necessarily as high in quality as a professional might achieve. But the price is right, and, most often, close enough is good enough.

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May 7, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at Lansner on Real Estate at the Orange County Register. Writing from The San Diego Home Blog, Kris Berg took fifth place for her playful rant on open house signs. Russell Shaw came in second place with his not-at-all-playful rant on the folly of real estate discounting.

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at the Real Estate Investing Blog. We entered a great Jeff Brown post, but Jeff and the CoREI are writing the other chapters of The Secret — The Law of Mutual Repulsion — so he didn’t win. He’ll be crushed if he ever does, so here’s to his unbroken streak of ratifying if not totally gratifying disappointments.

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May 7, 2007

What’s the antidote for a dubious statistic? A countervailing dubious statistic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seventy-seven percent of home-buyers start their home search on the internet. Except, sixty-nine percent of Americans think the internet is a pain in the ass. What’s the real truth? I like to say that forty-seven percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. It’s not true, but, unlike all the other dubious statistical “news”, it’s funny.

May 7, 2007

The lead to loan cycle of an Internet lead aka Distrust Mountain

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

My mortgage company works primarily with Internet leads — we’ve found it far more effective than direct mail, telemarketing or any other of the dying mass marketing techniques. We’ve developed and implemented systems and processes to effectively convert Internet leads in to customers and those customers in to repeat and (hopefully) long-time clients. As the marketing guy at our company I spend a lot of time looking at Internet leads and where and how we are converting them. I look at our successes and our failures and try to build marketing to support our chosen business channel.

I wanted to share with you all the lead to loan cycle that is typical with an Internet lead in terms of trust. Everyone talks about being a trusted advisor to your client, but what does that mean and really look like through the loan cycle? I’ve developed a (crude) graph that I show to all of our sales people to explain the challenges of working with a person who has solicited a refinance or purchase quote via the Internet. I call the graph Distrust Mountain.

Distrust Mountain

While I’ve documented the Internet lead here, you can apply this with varying levels of correlation across all lead sources. It also does a nice job of documenting how much better referrals or repeat business are, because that initial hump is so much lower.

As an originator, when you first receive an Internet lead, you must understand that although that person has expressed a varying degree of interest in some part of the refinance or purchase transaction they haven’t expressed any interest in you or your company. When you conduct the first phone call you are faced with a very high barrier to earning the person’s business. You are calling them (one of four or five people) and soliciting your services. They may have talked to others before you and will definitely talk to people after your initial conversation. Their defenses are up and they are looking for any reason to not continue the conversation with you.

This is the most difficult part of the transaction for inexperienced loan officers. The Read more

May 5, 2007

The Almeria Files: 318 photos in 60 seconds

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made another short movie to demonstrate that real estate videos don’t have to be small and crappy and void of colorful details. Better than this, it seems to me to illustrate the real life of the wired listing agent. Believe it or not, the film features every photo we took for the Almeria listing — in 60 seconds.

This is for your eyes only. I’m not sharing it with potential buyers. If I can impose a theme upon it, it’s about the accelerated crush that goes into putting one of these listings together. I think the music — Midtown by Tom Waits — sets just the right tone…

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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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