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Category: Marketing (page 150 of 191)

January 15, 2007

Not an iHouse but, rather, “I, House”: Tradesmen to Asimove over for robotic home construction . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Engadget:

“Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn’t make sense.” That’s word from Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, whose team at USC is getting ready to debut a $1.5 million robot designed to build homes with zero help from puny humans. The bot should have its first test run in California this April, where it will build the shell of a two-story house in 24 hours. The operation is akin to a 3D inkjet printer, with the robot moving about in three dimensional space, spraying out the home layer by layer. Part of the simplicity of the process comes from the simplicity of the materials: nearly the whole house is built with concrete and gypsum, obviously leaving a bit of work for the decorators, but allowing for complicated shapes and cheap construction — about a fifth of current costs.

Don’t know about the architecture, but I love the idea of a home that won’t burn, won’t rot, won’t warp and won’t look like Thanksgiving Dinner for insects…

Much more: Flash demo.

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January 15, 2007

NAR & DOJ – Russ & Russell Part 1

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Russ Cofano responded:

Hi Russell,

Happy to add some background here. You ask, “But aren’t the “anti-competitive policies” basically who has the right to decide how and where listings will be displayed?”

Kinda.

The initial DOJ complaint against NAR revolved around NAR’s initial Virtual Office Website (VOW) policy that allowed brokers to selectively “opt-out” by not allowing certain brokers to display their listings online. This would have allowed a “traditional” broker the right to effectively hand pick the firms that they don’t want to compete with online by eliminating any chance for them to have inventory to show to prospective buyers. From the DOJ’s perspective, the problem was that the under these same MLS rules, that same broker could not prohibit a particular “bricks and mortar” company from showing listings to a buyer who walked in off the street. The distinction being online vs. offline. NAR then amended the VOW rule and replaced it with the new Internet Listing Display (ILD) policy which changed the selective “opt-out” to a blanket “opt-out”. In other words, the broker could not selectively pick which brokers could display their listings online. Either everyone or nobody. Since the ILD policy applies across the board, NAR felt that it eliminated the anti-competitive concerns of the initial VOW policy.At or about the same time, NAR changed its definition of “MLS Participant”. The new rule defines an MLS Participant as a broker who makes offers of compensation to and accepts such offers from other brokers. Prior to the change, an MLS Participant had only to be capable of making and accepting offers of compensation.

This last issue is, I believe, the REAL issue in this case. NAR wants to define who can have access to and display listing information online as brokers who are actively working with buyers and sellers and sharing commissions via the MLS. DOJ believes this is too restrictive and that any licensed broker should be able to have such access. DOJ believes that such restrictions will stifle innovative brokers from assisting consumers in non-traditional ways.

Let’s face it. Most MLSs are powerful entities when it comes to aggregation of Read more

January 14, 2007

Apple iPhone round-up . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is nothing like everything, just a summary of news — and comic relief — of interest to the real estate community.

Dave Winer, among others, objects to the idea of the iPhone being a closed box. Okayfine. But it’s important for end-users to understand that the iPhone will run any server-side application that can run on the Safari web browser. Smart-phone apps are notoriously lame because of the memory restrictions of the device. We’re already using lots of server-based applications — our MLS system, plus all of the Realty.bots — and the immediate challenge is to get mission-critical web vendors to support Safari.

David Pogue at The New York Times weighs in with The Ultimate iPhone FAQ.

The Phoenix Real Estate Guy has a link to a fawning video from CBS News.

PressReal.com has heard the iPhone calling.

iFun: The Late Late Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live.

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January 12, 2007

Blogs can help Realtors connect with communities

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Sadly for the weblogs mentioned here, I did a much better job of linking than the newspaper did — even on-line.

 
Blogs can help Realtors connect with communities

The year just past may have been the Year of the Real Estate Blogger — or it may turn out that that title will belong to the year just begun.

We operate a site called BloodhoundBlog, and the Valley is considered by many to be the epicenter of real estate blogging.

What’s a blog? It’s a cross between a newspaper and an online journal, with entries exhibited in reverse chronological order. But more than that, a blog is a community, with posters and commenters creating a conversation within a blog, and, ultimately, a conversation among blogs.

About 20 Phoenix-area bloggers attended a real estate blogging forum hosted last Friday by BloodhoundBlog blogger Brian Brady at the downtown Phoenix public library.

The event was a sort of get-acquainted meeting, with the attending bloggers introducing themselves and talking about their blogging experiences. Brady anticipates coordinating events like this on a quarterly basis.

My wife and business partner Cathleen Collins and I were there, along with Jay Thompson of The Phoenix Real Estate Guy and Jonathan Dalton of The Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog. Many of the bloggers present wrote blog posts about the event.

I spoke at some length about the push toward local content and local interest for real estate blogs.

Until now, much of the focus of real estate blogging has been on national and industry-related issues. Bloggers are working hard to discover new ways to serve their local communities.

Afterward, Brian, Cathleen and I spoke about big-picture issues relating to real estate blogging. One thought we had was to emulate the “Bloginars” held in Seattle and other cities by Dustin Luther and Russ Cofano of Rain City Guide. The objective would be to help Realtors, lenders and other real estate professionals learn how to connect with the community through real estate blogs.

What’s the benefit for the consumer? Eliminating the risk of the unknown quantity. You can shop for your next Realtor or Read more

January 12, 2007

Russ & Russell?

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

In response to this post, Russ Cofano (of Rain City Guide fame) wrote:

“For a division of the United States government to allege some sort of Realtor price fixing in an industry that is so overloaded (sic) with competition that it almost defies belief IS breading hate and contempt.”

In the present suit against NAR, the DOJ is not alleging price fixing. They are alleging a violation of federal anti-trust laws because of anti-competitive policies that allegedly make it more difficult for non-traditional brokers to “play”, harm consumer choice and stifle innovation. Russ

Thank you for the correction, Russ. There may also be other false impressions for me on this issue. I would be very interested in having someone who is extremely articulate and well informed (like you, for example!) explain why the DOJ may be right to go after the NAR on this point. I’m all for a level playing field for anyone who wants to play. But aren’t the “anti-competitive policies” basically who has the right to decide how and where listings will be displayed?

If you’re game – either send anything you want to post to me or just put it in the comments section and I’ll get an email notice from BloodhoundBlog. It would be a LOT more fun than the agency smackdown.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

– Gerry Spence

January 11, 2007

What’s better than having a Realtor’s advice? Having a Realtor’s advice for free!

by

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

Last Friday, on January 5, our nephew Bryan celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Less than a week earlier, on New Year’s Eve, he wasn’t yet old enough to join in a New Year’s champaign toast at the club where’s he’s played gigs for the past few years. He graduated from high school three Decembers ago, last month he celebrated his second wedding anniversary, and later this month he’ll begin his fourth year in the US Navy, where he plays sax in the Navy Band Southeast’s Jazz Ensemble in Florida. And… he has already had three real estate transactions in escrow, every time without having been represented by a real estate agent. How has he fared in real estate? Not very well, despite being the favorite nephew of real estate professionals in Texas and Arizona. And why would that be? Because after having listened to the advice of his doting aunts and uncles, he followed the course that made the most sense to him and his young bride.

I don’t blame youth for real estate decisions that Bryan has made contrary to loving expert advice. I blame “human nature.” There is a reason that everyone who speaks English knows the old saw, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I began this post with Bryan’s bio to demonstrate that despite his tender years, he has made several life altering decisions. And I should also point out that Bryan actually solicited our opinions, rather than having them forced upon him, which is so often the lot of young people. So you would assume that he asked our advice so he could mull it over, weigh it and then make a better decision having had the benefit of expertise. There’s even a good probability that Brian no longer remembers that Aunt Denise suggested he not walk away from his first purchase contract and his $5,000 earnest deposit, nor Aunt Cathy’s caution against buying a much lesser property, a condo, six months later, during Florida’s bloated seller’s market, for the same price he would have payed for the first house. Read more

January 11, 2007

Real estate in Deadwood: How Fremont Street in Las Vegas became a ghost town . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My mother gives us money for Christmas every year. This year we used the lucre to buy seasons one and two of Deadwood, the acclaimed HBO television series about gold-mining, lawlessness and profanetasizing — a condition afflicting screen writers, who pretend to affect to believe that people in the past were even worse potty-mouths than they are. In any case, the show is filled with dubious real estate deals, just the thing to keep us entertained as we wait for the next purple outburst.

Here’s an example: In the first few episodes, laconic hero Seth Bullock and his more loquacious partner Sol Star rent a lot for their hardware store from Al Swearengen — pimp, faro hustler, saloon keeper and curator and conservator of the Deadwood Hall of Fame of Outrageous Profanity.

What’s the rent? Twenty dollars. A day.

Deadwood is growing fast, and the bloom is barely off the boom. This is a seller’s market such as we have never seen. So when Bullock and Star offer to pay $1,000 to buy the lot free and clear, in fee simple — what should Swearengen do?

It’s worth $600 a month in rent. Potentially, it’s worth $7,200 a year. Why would Swearengen sell it at all? Why wouldn’t he lease it to the hardware store? They can improve it all they want, but those improvements and the underlying dirt would revert to his control when the lease terminated.

Better yet, why not write a participation lease? The hardware store planned to sell much-needed equipment to the prospective prospectors arriving by the dozens in Deadwood every day. Why wouldn’t Swearengen want to cut himself into a piece of that action, in exchange for surrendering for a term the right of possession to his lot?

If we stipulate that a gold rush is a short-term phenomenon, this would have been Swearengen’s optimal strategy for maximizing his own profit from the lot.

But what happens when a short-term windfall turns into a long-term travesty?

Last week I wrote about two multi-billion dollar multi-use projects being built on Las Vegas Boulevard — “The Strip.” Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM-Mirage will spend $7 billion to build Read more

January 10, 2007

Community Choice in Real Estate

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

“Interested” wrote:

What would be the disadvantage of listing a home with a Realtor who charges a flat fee based on services provided?

Brian Brady responded:

I’d like to take stab at this question:

It’s economics. There is a school of thought that suggests that Realtors are clerks; some are. It has been my experience (as a Lender working with Realtors) that you really do pay for pricing expertise when you hire a Realtor. If you hire a Realtor for a flat fee, it may remove the incentive she may have to negotiate upwards.

I have been a fan of incentive-based compensation that would actually raise the net fee to the Realtor if pricing and timing points were met.
http://activerain.com/blogsview/22686/Pay-For-Performance-A

If you’re selling your home to your cousin, you don’t really need a Realtor; you could hire a real estate attorney to insure that the state disclosures have been met, and contracts are compliant with state laws. Just accept the fact that you really didn’t try to get the “best price”.

There really is only one way to get accurate pricing and that is from a Realtor who knows the local market.

I liked Brian’s response so much I posted it here – instead of leaving it in the comments section.

__

Then “allen greenspan” wrote:

So let me get it right. If I don’t believe realtors are worth 30k + to sell my home, and if I sell my home myself (like I have several times) then I am making the world a bad place? Do I follow your logic? Saving myself 30k dollars = breeding hate and contempt.In that long list of tasks you do for your clients can be done by anyone with an ink jet printer and a telephone number of an escrow agent. But we don’t want the public to know that! Why does the Justice Department say that NAR is the last Cartel? their words not mine, is the justice department breeding hate or breaking up a cartel?

Yes. The Justice Department (along with the FTC) IS breeding hate. That is exactly what they are doing. I really don’t give a crap who you list your home with Read more

January 9, 2007

Time mag on the iPhone . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Very worth reading.

Does this phone obsolete the Zune? Duh. The iPod line? Much of it. All other smart phones? Ancient history. Tablet computers? Most. Laptops? Lots of them. This is the first expression of the convergent mobile device — maybe the practical expression of convergence, period.

Next: Mad scrambling to knock off a device protected by 200 patents.

Then: Better versions of the iPhone from Apple.

If vertical markets were not infested with mental midgets who write MSIE-only crap, this might have been the silver bullet for Microsoft. It may turn out to be that yet.

This was a big day…

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January 9, 2007

Feed the starving Realty.bot: Zillow.com is underwhelming, so far, as a National Property Listings Service . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think I have to back off — for now, at least — from my earlier expectations for Zillow.com as an incipient National Property Listings Service. To this date, anyway, Zillow’s appeal to sellers and listing agents has been underwhelming, at best. As I write, there are 19,250 homes listed for sale on the system. An additional 10,381 are listed under the “Make Me Move” option. By contrast, at the time that Zillow.com released these changes to its software, Trulia.com announced that it had achieved one million on-line listings.

At that time, I had written Trulia and other on-line listings aggregators off as dinosaurs, and I still believe this is true. But if Zillow.com represents the coming of the mammals, the first mammalian species to have evolved must have been the sloth.

What’s the problem?

No XML feed.

When these software upgrades were made, Galen Ward speculated that Zillow had skipped the feed to capture agents’ eyeballs for its advertising. If this is the actual reason Zillow elected not to permit listing by XML feed — as is done by the other Realty.bot listings aggregators — then the strategy has backfired.

Whatever Zillow’s reason not to have a feed, that reason is wrong. In making these changes, Zillow.com voluntarily surrendered the fearsome mojo of it’s Delphic Automated Valuation Method. Overnight, it transformed itself from every Realtor’s favorite bette noir to… just another listings bot. And as exciting as it might be as a listings bot, it’s but one more of what are already too many listings bots — and the only one of the bunch that can’t be fed from PostLets or vFlyer or one of many proprietary Realtor web site vendors.

That is: It went from being potentially threatening to Realtors but fundamentally useless to potentially useful but fundamentally a pain in the ass to Realtors.

This turns out not to have been an improvement, especially as Zillow.com prepares to roll out an advertising product targeted to Realtors. Zillow.com has always been able to deliver potential sellers — even as it delivers wildly inaccurate Zestimates to them. But without a significant number of homes listed for sale, Read more

January 9, 2007

More on the iPhone . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Apple. TUAW. Engadget. TechCrunch. Sign up to be the first one in your area code to get one.

Realtors should raise hell right now with MLS systems and computerized forms vendors: You have six months to support this device. I’ve been a Treo user since before Palm reabsorbed Handspring. This is the best Realtor phone yet…

Think about live-blogging with this phone… Think about conference-call podcasting… This is laptopia reborn…

January 9, 2007

Apple TV will present on-line videos in big chunks . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Unofficial Apple Weblog, live-blogging from Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote address:

Apple TV Price $299. I want one. Ships February. Taking orders today. “Enjoy your media on your big-screen TV.”

Okay…

This is Carmen Sandoval from today’s episode of Flipper Nation — blown up to display on the 70-inch Sony Bravia LCD HDTV announced yesterday at CES. Yes, this will look better at living room distances — but how much better? Somehow, I don’t think this the last word in convergence technology.

On the other hand… Jobs is demoing the iPhone — with OSX on-board. More about this later…

Further notice: Tabbed browsing — on a phone!

Further, further notice: This is a rockin’ phone. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM, EDGE, SMS, email, video voicemail (selectable, like email!), tabbed Safari web browser, iPod, OS X with syncing to everythng via iPod sync, 5 hours phone, 16 hours audio, 2MP camera, touchscreen keyboard (one hardware button), widescreen iPod movies, iPhoto support. How much? $499 for a 4GB unit, $599 for 8GB. Both require a 2 year contract with Cingular (exclusively). My take has been that the next generation of mobile phones would eliminate the laptop from the real estate world. This might be the one…

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January 8, 2007

Dual Agency Smack-Down: Arizona Association of Realtors General Counsel Michelle Lind on Dual Agency . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Arizona Association of Realtors has just published Arizona Real Estate: A Professional’s Guide to Law and Practice by Arizona Association of Realtors General Counsel Michelle Lind. I don’t know what is planned for this book, but it is comprehensive enough to be used as one of the texts in a pre-licensing or broker’s licensing class.

I got my copy today, and I thought I’d highlight the material on Dual Agency. This rendering is not hugely different from the material Lind has had on the AAR website, but I think the statute law makes it plain that, in Arizona, the parties to a Dual Agency can consent in writing to terms less stringent than those specified in the current “AAR Consent to Limited Dual Representation” disclosure. I haven’t gotten around to writing a disclosure that describes Dual Agency transactions as they actually occur — in part because I’ve been waiting for this book to be published — but I’ll put a form together and take to Lind to see how it flies.

Nota bene: This is interesting reading, but if you are not licensed in Arizona, it does not apply to you. Your local laws may be radically different.

 
DUAL REPRESENTATION (DUAL AGENCY)

Dual representation (dual agency) occurs when one broker individually, or two salespeople within the same brokerage firm, represent both the buyer and the seller in a real estate transaction. Dual representation is lawful with prior written consent. The ADRE Commissioner’s Rules provide that: “A licensee shall not . . . represent both parties to a transaction without the prior written consent of both parties.” See, R4-28-11O1(F). Consequently, the ADRE may sanction a licensee if the licensee has “[a]cted for more than one party in a transaction without the knowledge or consent of all parties to the transaction.” A.R.S. 32-2153(A)(2).

Dual representation involves inherent conflicts. Therefore, in most residential resale transactions in which a broker acts as a dual agent, the broker obtains the consent of the parties on the AAR Consent to Limited Representation (12/02) form. This form is not mandated by statute, but is helpful in explaining dual agency and its consequences Read more

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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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