If your weblog isn’t on this list, speak up…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Marketing (page 145 of 191)
I really don’t like Dual Agency. I think that’s pretty well established. Even so, Russell Shaw convinced me — in person, not on BloodhoundBlog — that BloodhoundRealty.com would have to offer Dual Agency if it is to list effectively in the historic districts of Downtown Phoenix.
Right about the same time, we undertook the Dual Agency Smack-Down, an attempt to explore the issue in detail. At a certain point in that debate, I hit what I thought was an insuperable wall. The problem was the complexities of a represented real estate transaction:
The only workable way even to achieve Disclosed Dual Agency is by repeated, overt agency violations against either the buyer or the seller, or each in their turn. In other words, you would have to hint at them what to “order” you to do, and each one of those hints would be a betrayal of the interests of the other party.
The problem, as I came to see it, was the word “detriment” in the Arizona Association of Realtors Consent to Limited Dual Representation form. If a broker could not act in any way detrimental to either party, then he could not offer any meaningful or useful advice to either party.
As it turns out, that word “detriment” turns up in Dual Agency disclosures from all over the country. I had a Realtor in Florida send me a disclosure for Transactional Brokerage (that is, no agency for either party) and the word “detriment” even appears there.
Interestingly, the statute law of Dual Agency in Arizona is not nearly so restrictive. The law requires disclosure and informed consent, but it does not insist that the Dual Agent cannot act in ways that might be perceived as being detrimental to one party or the other. Obviously the common law dictates of agency come into play, but the point of a Dual Agency Disclosure form is to modify agency for both parties in such a way as to permit the transaction to take place.
The problem — in Arizona, take careful note — was not Disclosed Dual Agency but, rather, the impossible restrictions that were being imposed by Read more
Back when I used to have a job, I was a complete Insufferable Bastard of a boss. I wouldn’t let people take notes about jobs to be done or how to resolve hardware or software problems. “If you don’t know it in your brain, you don’t know it.” Nobody bought me cupcakes on my birthday, but the people I didn’t fire learned their jobs inside out.
Well, that’s not very nice, is it? Plus which, you don’t work for me, so you don’t have to take grief from me. Here’s my bottom line: If you’re new to real estate weblogging or if you’re thinking about starting a real estate weblog, this book will teach you a lot, and it will help you avoid a lot of nasty pitfalls.
And: The Amazon price on this book is low enough that you could buy a copy for your broker — for his birthday…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Business Week’s Hot Property wrote yesterday about the NAR’s having gotten into bed with Hillary Clinton — who is “sponsoring a bill that bars commercial banks from hiring real estate brokers/agents” — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The National Association of Realtor is routinely, habitually, congenitally anti-free market.
I’m doing the prep work to defend the traditional practice of real estate, but this is my radical yelp: The original and on-going purpose of the NAR is anti-capitalist. The organization was formed to limit entry into the residential real estate business — to push Chester the Barber and others out of the business. The NAR wrote the original state real estate laws to achieve this goal — however poorly. This on-going legislative campaign against banks competing for real estate transactions is just more of the same: “Protecting” mediocrities from fair competition.
It seems never to end. If you’re a member of the NAR, you get hit with spam about once a month about some vitally important piece of anti-free market legislation: Coerced health insurance for real estate brokerages, keep WalMart out of banking, keep banks out of real estate. The NAR is hardly alone in making appeals for legislation, so it is perhaps easy to forget that legislation is imposed by force of arms. What the NAR is doing is taking control of the massive firepower of the Federal government and deploying it to hijack potential competitors.
It’s a protection racket — vicious, awful, evil crime — dressed up in Brooks Brothers suits.
We are apt to think of Communism as being Capitalism’s natural enemy, but there is another, perhaps more insidious foe to unfettered laissez faire. I call it Rotarian Socialism, just to give it a name. Rotarian Socialism is legislation written by and for the membership of a politically-powerful elite. Most of the criticisms you hear about Capitalism are in fact criticisms of Rotarian Socialism.
Truly free markets require freedom, not laws. I have argued before for getting rid of the real estate licensing laws — or, at a minimum, eliminating the broker level of licensing — and for eliminating the real Read more
This is the third of three podcasts of Dustin Luther’s Real Estate Weblogging Seminar.
The recordings for these podcasts were made by Rudy Bachraty of the Sellsius Real Estate Weblog.
Dustin is best known as the founder of Rain City Guide. Dustin works as a technology evangelist for Move, Inc. As evidence to his commitment to weblogging, he has a weblog devoted to internet real estate marketing, and this particular series of seminars are sponsored by Top Producer.
Rudy’s initial recordings suffered from some quality issues, most notably his distance from Dustin and some random electronic interference. BloodhoundBlog’s intrepid audio engineer Allen Butler (himself a top-producing Realtor) was able to scrub the audio to bring Dustin’s voice forward. The recordings still suffer from some defects, but 99%+ of the intellectual content has been preserved.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at ReyEstate. This week’s winner is a fanzine article about Emmitt Smith, who is Dancing With The Real Estate Stars.
We entered Kris Berg’s podcast interview with Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman. I have an inkling the podcast went unaudited at ReyEstate:
The “Kissing Booth” was in full operation this week and Redfin’s CEO Glenn Kelman was charming the crowd. You can find the fluff slappy happy write-up on BloodHoundBlog…
That sounds just like us.
We have actually listened to the podcast, so we know why Kris deserves to win this week’s Carnival of BloodhoundBlog.
As a reminder, we’re hosting next week’s Carnival of Real Estate Investing.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Years ago, long before I met Cathleen the Leggy Blonde and came to be so joyously entwined if not actually entombed in matrimonial and connubial bliss, I wrote an essay about personal ads at the dawn of the age of five-hundred-channel television. But now, in the blink of a decade, we are on the verge of five-hundred-thousand-channel television, a net.wise video niche for every conceivable itch.
That goes for BloodhoundBlog, too, by inches and hours, in fits and starts. By tomorrow, we will have published ten audio and video podcasts in the few scant weeks since the start of the year. And there are many, many more to come. On top of everything else we might do, mega-producing Realtor Russell Shaw has committed to doing a complete step-by-step mega-production course in podcast form. You’ll be able to download his hard-won advice and review it until Russell’s expertise becomes your own.
Our podcasting prowess made news twice this week. First, Kris Berg posted a forty-five minute podcast with Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman, asking him the kinds of tough questions only a seasoned real estate professional would know to ask.
Our Redfin coverage was robust and then some. I wrote a companion piece to Kris’ interview, and her husband, San Diego Realtor Steve Berg posted a great list of follow-up questions for Kelman. The next day, I wondered What if Redfin gave a PR offensive and nobody came? And Redfin.com ended up winning this week’s Cheez Whiz Prize: Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman: “What if the parasites had to eat the parasites?”
Our second bit of podcasting news came from recordings of Dustin Luther’s Real Estate Weblogging Seminar. The original recordings for these podcasts were made by Rudy Bachraty of the Sellsius Real Estate Weblog. Dustin is best known as the founder of Rain City Guide, although he works as a technology evangelist for Move, Inc. Rudy’s initial recordings suffered from some quality issues, but BloodhoundBlog’s intrepid audio engineer Allen Butler (himself a top-producing Realtor) was able to scrub the audio to bring Dustin’s voice forward.
So far, Part I and Part II of Dustin’s seminar have been posted. Read more
This is the second of three podcasts of Dustin Luther’s Real Estate Weblogging Seminar.
The recordings for these podcasts were made by Rudy Bachraty of the Sellsius Real Estate Weblog.
Dustin is best known as the founder of Rain City Guide. Dustin works as a technology evangelist for Move, Inc. As evidence to his commitment to weblogging, he has a weblog devoted to internet real estate marketing, and this particular series of seminars are sponsored by Top Producer.
Rudy’s initial recordings suffered from some quality issues, most notably his distance from Dustin and some random electronic interference. BloodhoundBlog’s intrepid audio engineer Allen Butler (himself a top-producing Realtor) was able to scrub the audio to bring Dustin’s voice forward. The recordings still suffer from some defects, but 99%+ of the intellectual content has been preserved.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
This is the first of three podcasts of Dustin Luther’s Real Estate Weblogging Seminar.
The recordings for these podcasts were made by Rudy Bachraty of the Sellsius Real Estate Weblog.
Dustin is best known as the founder of Rain City Guide. Dustin works as a technology evangelist for Move, Inc. As evidence to his commitment to weblogging, he has a weblog devoted to internet real estate marketing, and this particular series of seminars are sponsored by Top Producer.
Rudy’s initial recordings suffered from some quality issues, most notably his distance from Dustin and some random electronic interference. BloodhoundBlog’s intrepid audio engineer Allen Butler (himself a top-producing Realtor) was able to scrub the audio to bring Dustin’s voice forward. The recordings still suffer from some defects, but 99%+ of the intellectual content has been preserved.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Russell Shaw is eager to do more podcasts, and I think we’re all eager to hear more from him. His plan, essentially, is to offer a full-blown training regimen — without the fees, without the seminars and without the extra-cost upsells.
We’ll do these in audio podcasts, although we may also shoot some video. At some point, we may put together a mini-symposium so that Russell can take questions from the audience.
Here’s the cool part: You can have what you want. If there is a particular topic you would like for Russell to address, say so in a comment.
We’re building lists of topics that we will knock out four or six hours at a time. We’ll chop those down into topical chunks, and then I’ll build an index of everything.
It’s possible that a sales training seminar will have more rah-rah-rah enthusiasm. But these podcasts will emanate from the real-life experience of a working mega-producer, and they’ll be yours to listen to as many times as you want — for free.
So: Do please get busy. Russell is working on his own list of favorite subjects, but you will think of topics that everyone else will miss. In the end, we’ll all be richer for the experience…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
The Sunday New York Times will have a feature on hi-tech real estate, but you can see it today through the miracle of Google.
Not hugely interesting, more a catalog of press releases. Kristal Kraft gets a chance to strut, which is fun.
And: Zillow.com says you have to take their Zestimates with a grain of salt, which must be why none of them ends with three zeros.
The gist of the article is that information is more valuable to home buyers than pumpkins (who knew?), but, taking account of that, there is a huge omission: ShackPrices.com, the leader of the pack in deep info. Zillow should just buy them so they can get the kind of press attention they deserve…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).
Sellers: Ready for cherry-picking time?
We can’t grow cherry trees in the desert, but it’s cherry-picking time in the Phoenix real estate market.
Why? Because even though the buyers seem to be coming out in normal numbers, there is still a large surplus of inventory for sale.
The implication? Buyers are going to shop for the best overall value — price, preparation, presentation. In other words, they’re going to pick the cherries and leave the rest.
From the buyer’s agent’s side of the transaction, we’re going to look at a lot of houses. If buyers have a very tight set of criteria for their home search, normally they might have four or six or eight choices on their short list of candidates. In this market, the short list of possibly acceptable homes might run to 10 or 20 houses.
One would think that would make it easier to choose, but, in fact, no one house will have everything buyers might want. They can end up with a short-short list of homes that might work, each one of which falls slightly short of abstract perfection.
The consequence can be analysis paralysis, the inability to make a decisive choice among two or three cherry-picked homes.
But what happens to all the others?
From the seller’s point of view, the frustration can be huge: “My home is showing — finally. Why isn’t it selling?”
If the home isn’t a cherry waiting to be picked, or if the price is not very aggressive, the marketing effort might be hopeless. If buyers are dithering over two nearly perfect choices, then the other 18 houses they looked at are already out of the running.
But even that perfect cherry of a home — priced right, staged beautifully and in perfect repair, broadly marketed — can languish on the market. Your home can be the second choice again and again before some buyer falls deeply in love.
In the long run, things will settle down. In the nearer term, if you want your home sold, make sure it is the cherry buyers will want most to pick.
We pulled out all the stops for Redfin.com’s announcement yesterday because we thought it was important news. Such insiders we are, like Obscure Sports Quarterly subscribers glued to ESPN-8 for the Women’s Curling Semi-Finals. On and off all morning, I combed Google and Technorati for news, linking to what I found. Bottom line: Big yawn.
Redfin employee Matt Goyer provides a similar rundown, catching a few that I missed. Goyer also does the kind of stupid Realty.bot math trick that we have learned to expect from fawning news coverage of stupid Realty.bots: In adding three agents, Redfin.com grew by 340%. No, the number of MLS listings on its stupid Realty.bot grew by 340%. Redfin grew its head-count and its burn rate.
The only truly amazingly stupid math I saw, though, was at The Real Estate Economy, which cannot tell an apple from an orange, but which knows they must be equal if there are a million of them:
When Redfin gets up to six cities, it should carry a total of about a million listings on any given day, roughly the same that rival Trulia currently stocks.
It would take an hour to sort out every idiocy in that one sentence, and that may be the actual problem: The Realty.bot revolution is being fomented by geeks who can’t do the math and is being heralded by dinks who can’t think at all.
Marlow Harris, by pointed contrast, shows us what can be done with a fully-functioning mind and an insider’s insight:
One of the problems I have with Redfin is their continual commoditization of the bad-boy stance, their claim of being the outsider, the renegade ready to fight against The Man, ready to defend their clients against the Real Estate Industrial Complex, when in reality the business is made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals. There’s no cartel. There are thousands of little real estate offices all across the U.S., with 100’s of MLS’s, each with their own rules. Redfin has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of non-conformist youth and tech/geek culture. By inserting themselves into the real estate equation, Read more
And if Redfin’s trip to SoCal wasn’t enough of a distraction today, Zillow issued their Quarterly Home Value reports for 2006. Alas, so much “material” and so little time.
You can see their “Zindex’s” for 75 metro area both on their website and at their blog. I begin by stating the obvious; their median “home values” are based on their own Zestimates, which agents largely agree are (sometimes significantly) flawed. Like a bad wreck, I had to look however.
Surprisingly, Zillow’s quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year numbers for San Diego and its various neighborhoods are not far off compared to recorded sale price changes. I guess when you are talking averages, you can be consistently bad or consistently good, so long as you are consistent.
Edited to add a thank you to Amanda Hoffman at Zillow for sending me the links to the info this morning. They have put together a staggering amount of statistical data which I admittedly haven’t had time to give more than a cursory glance yet.
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and his Senior Communications Director, Cynthia Pang. Let me begin by saying that I waltzed into my local Starbucks anticipating a date with the devil. While I exited no more enamored with their business model, I have to admit that both Glenn and Cynthia were a delight. No horns, no forked tails and no speaking in tongues (well, not exactly).
My impression of Glenn was one of a passionate entrepreneur who genuinely believes in his work. He struck me as honest and sincere, and I thoroughly enjoyed our brief time together. Having said that, I don’t get the impression that he entirely understands the depth of our business or of our duties as agents and fiduciaries. Some of his core premises strike me as fundamentally flawed from the standpoint of end game success or, worse, as ingredients in a recipe for future liability claims and outright failure.
I could be wrong. Divergent opinions and perspectives are what make our world go round. So, I would like to thank Glenn and Cynthia for their time. It may surprise some to know that I honestly wish them much success, as I believe their success will only be found (if it is truly realized at all) in a niche market sense.
So, Redfin, welcome to San Diego!
More: Kris Berg’s husband, Steve, has a very thorough Redfin post at The San Diego Home Blog. Los Angeles Times. Redfin.com’s weblog. (Ahem. Gertrude Stein’s ungrateful whine about Oakland was “There is no there there.”) Kevin Boer at The San Francisco Bay Area Real Estate Blog illustrates the demographics of Redfin’s move. The Future of Real Estate Marketing. More from Kevin Boer.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing