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Category: Marketing (page 151 of 191)

January 8, 2007

Metro Brokers’ new map site: First we take Colorado, then — the world!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Colorado real estate brokerage Metro Brokers announced it’s new map-based search engine at Inman Connect. From the Denver Post:

Starting today, consumers will be able to go online to find all homes on the market in Colorado.

Denver-based Metro Brokers Inc. is launching ColoradoHomeStop.com at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York.

The company spent two years and more than $2 million to develop the site, which ultimately will incorporate the state’s 22 multiple listing services into one site, said Mark Eibner, chairman of Metro Brokers’ information technology committee. The initiative was paid for by the organization’s 2,000 members.

The advertising-free site takes the map-based real estate search to a new level of interactivity, building proprietary AJAX technology onto the Google Maps mapping platform.

Metro Brokers partnered with WhereToLive.com to integrate the company’s real-time SmartMap search technology into the website.

Among the features it offers are:

Street-level, aerial satellite and hybrid views of the property;

A photo tour of each property;

Neighborhood and school information specific to a property;

A map of each property and driving directions.

Users also can print property brochures, request additional information, schedule showings via the web and compare up to four properties side-by-side.

Metro Brokers has purchased the ColoradoHomeStop domain name in all 50 states in anticipation of launching the site – and the real estate company – nationally.

My take? Highly detailed. Kinda slow. The initial view if you don’t specify a search is every listed home in Colorado, so that’s gotta grind some gears. But zooming in takes a while per double-click, with more waiting for the map to re-render. The site makes very intelligent use of Ajax tabs to cram a lot of detail into one browser window.

(Hat tip: Dave Barnes)

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January 8, 2007

Hey, buddy . . . Wanna buy a Zip Code . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eppraisal.com and Zillow.com today both announced Zip Code based advertising programs to allow agents to display ads to people searching in their particular farm areas.

Under the Eppraisal.com plan, agents will sponsor particular Zip Codes for a fee of $20 a month.

If you are a real estate professional, you can sponsor any zip code in America and begin connecting with the eppraisal.com users who are eager to understand how much their castle is worth. You’ll be exposed to consumers who are ready to take action on buying, selling or re-financing a home. By sponsoring a zip code, or multiple zip codes, you gain exclusive access to users within the area as well as premium advertising opportunities to those targeted zones for only $20 per month.

Zillow’s plans are not as definite at this point:

Today at Real Estate Connect NY, Zillow president Lloyd Frink talked about a new advertising product coming during the first quarter of this year, one that allows agents and other real individual estate professionals to buy inexpensive, targeted advertising on the site.

We’re calling it EZAds — and it’s pretty simple — an easy, online way for individual agents and other real estate professionals to buy and customize ads on Zillow.com, targeted to specific searched ZIP codes. The ads show up on ZIP code-specific areas throughout the site, including map pages and home detail pages.

No word on pricing, nor availability.

Curiously, neither site elected to follow the Realtor.com business model of selling outrageously large farming areas to multiple, competing agents…

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January 8, 2007

Carnival of carnivals . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog is broadly represented in this week’s weblog carnivals:

Kris Berg‘s post Kibble and Bits can be found at the Carnival of Real Estate at @ House Values.

Jeff Brown‘s entry The S & P Is Up Over 16% In 2006! is among the winners at the Carnival of Real Estate Investing at Cash Flow Treasures.

Sadly, Dan Green‘s excellent article detailing What Isaac Newton Knew About Mortgage Lending did not make the list of finalists at the Carnival of Business at My Money Forest.

But: We thought Dan’s post simply killed, so it is this week’s Carnival of BloodhoundBlog Winner…

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January 8, 2007

Was BusinessWeek bamboozled? “Twist” doesn’t know what she doesn’t know . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a copy of email I just sent to Peter Coy of BusinessWeek with respect to false claims made last week about deception in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. Cliff’s Notes: False alarm resulting from “crackpot claims, the end product of a fervid imagination and a Rube Goldberg spreadsheet.”

From: GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com
Subject: Problem solved — “Twist” doesn’t know what she doesn’t know
Date: January 8, 2007 2:13:57 AM MST
To: Peter_Coy, Twist
Cc: Jay, Jonathan, John

The mystery unraveled.

1. Ms. Averett does not have access to the ARMLS system.

2. Her analysis is based on summary reports issued by the ARMLS staff, presumably for PR purposes.

3. Those reports omit many categories of residential listings, presumably to make the summary fit on a single page.

4. The three columns of Ms Averett’s analysis that buttress her claim — New Listings, Delisted, and Ratio Sales/Delisted are not obtained from these summary reports. There may be some other source, but they’re not in the ARMLS reports — at least not in those I looked at.

5. As has been demonstrated by four Phoenix-area Realtors working independently but directly in the ARMLS system, Ms. Averett’s contentions about the months of November and December of 2005 and January of 2006 are not only false, they bear no resemblance to reality at all. I have also demonstrated that her contentions with respect to the same months one year earlier are also false.

6. Given that the methodology she deploys is dubious at best, and probably completely devoid of meaning, it seems reasonable to surmise that all of the rest of her claims with respect to ARMLS are also false. This is not to imply that the ARMLS system is fault-free, but simply that the fault Ms. Averett claims to have identified does not exist. She does not understand the ARMLS system well enough to make any sort of informed statement about it.

7. The other weblogging Phoenix-area Realtors copied above may have more to add as they peruse Ms. Averett’s work product. John L. Wake surmised from the beginning that Ms. Averett was working from ARMLS-issued summaries rather than directly from the database.

8. My Read more

January 7, 2007

Trade or trade shows? The business of real estate is transacted face-to-face . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The RE.net is abuzz about this week’s Inman’s Real Estate Connect in New York, but the coming week owns an embarrassment of trade show riches.

Also on tap this week: The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And, best of all: The Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

These are all basically vendor shows, despite the hype — or, rather, in support of the hype. The big news will come from Apple, of course, and much of the ‘news’ coming out of the other two shows will be fun to make fun of. I get no end of mileage out of the goofy crap corporate weenies try to foist off on long-suffering Realtors.

We’ll be here, taking it all in, of course. But mainly we’ll be here working. This is the first selling weekend in the New Year. We’re showing. We’re listing. And we’re not wasting the precious time of a finite life. Fun is fun, and, of the three trade shows, I’d probably pick CES — just to be in Vegas. But I don’t go even a little bit North in the Winter, and, in any case, the business of real estate brokerage is not transacted at trade shows…

Further notice: A much-expanded version of this is posted at Inman Blog.

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January 6, 2007

Think globally, blog locally: If you want local leads from your real estate weblog, pursue local interests . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog tends very strongly to cover news and views of interest to real estate professionals nationwide. And — guess what? — our audience, by an overwhelming majority, consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Here’s the bad news: If you have a real estate weblog, the chances are excellent that your objective is to attract interest from buyers and sellers in your local market. But — guess what? — your audience, by an overwhelming majority, very probably consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Why should this be so?

There are three reasons:

First, the permanent audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals all over the country — all over the Anglosphere, really, those countries most strongly influenced by the English language, its customs and traditions.

Second, to the extent that consumers are finding your real estate weblog by long tail search terms, they are evanescent — fleeting. For one thing, their interest in buying or selling a home has a limited time window; when they’re done, most of them are done for a long while. And, for another, they’re flitting in and out from Google just as you do, when you’re searching for something on-line.

But third, and most importantly, you don’t have a local audience because you are not cultivating a local audience.

This year portends to be the Year of the Locality in real estate weblogs. Active Rain is starting a new site call Localism.com, which is to be devoted to engendering very high long tail organic search engine rankings for locality and neighborhood-level keywords. MyHouseKey.org, to debut this week, is pursuing the same strategy.

These are not awful ideas, but they’re not great, either. As with your current conundrum, a long tail searcher is apt to be ephemeral, landing on and lasting at your weblog only an instant.

The better plan, I think, is to get local consumers to come and stay, to come and come back, to favorite your weblog, to — O, holy of holies! — blogroll your real estate weblog.

I have two ideas on how to do this, one great and one insanely great. I’ll share the great one, but my Read more

January 6, 2007

Lessons from the Epicenter

by

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

Author website

I am biased towards Phoenix. I should be. I lived in the Valley of the Sun for twelve years. I was married in St. Mary’s Basilica, celebrated that conjugal union at Heritage Square, and watch my daughter come into this world at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I’ve lent money on mansions in Mesa and mobile homes in Marana. I’ve dined at Durant’s and drank beer at the Downside Risk.

I love living and working San Diego but have bias towards Phoenix. Bias nothwithstanding…
Phoenix is the epicenter of Real Estate 2.0. That’s fancy term for interaction between the consumer and real estate professionals. It gives the consumer a chance to get to know you (the principle of transparency) and get valuable information about communites (the principle of local content).

Phoenix is the epicenter of Real Estate 2.0. Bloodhound Blog is here. The Phoenix Real Estate Guy is here. Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog is here. Boatloads of Bubbleheads are here. Today, I was here with 20 other front-line evangelists discussing the Gospel according to Google. Here are the lessons we learned.

January 6, 2007

Avoiding a close shave with Occam’s Razor . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dale Gribble: You see, what they do is, they send everyone from the MLS office home early on Christmas Eve.

Then they go in and edit thousands of records.

That makes things look good when they’re really bad, get it?

Then they call Twist and fool her with the false information.

Then they change all those thousands of records back, before anybody has a chance to notice.

It’s a sinister and diabolical plan, faultlessly executed every year!

It might sound like a lot of trouble, but it’s nothing compared to what they went through to fake the Zapruder film!

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January 5, 2007

BloodhoundBlog’s Brian Brady hosts Phoenix-area webloggers forum

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

About twenty Phoenix-area webloggers, many of them Active Rain participants, attended a real estate weblogging forum hosted today by BloodhoundBlog weblogger Brian Brady at the Phoenix Public Library in Downtown Phoenix.

Today’s event was a sort of get-acquainted meeting, with the attending bloggers introducing themselves and talking about their weblogging experiences and marketing goals. Brady anticipates coordinating events like this on a quarterly basis.

Cathleen Collins and I were there, along with Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy and Jonathan Dalton. In a perfect expression of the weblogging ideal, Jonathan already has an excellent post up on the event.

One of the things I spoke about, and promised to elaborate on in a post, is the push toward local content, local interest, and, especially, local inbound links. I’ll write that up over the weekend.

Afterward, Brian, Cathleen and I spoke at length about Big Picture issues relating to real estate weblogging. 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. No promises — life is short — but a turnout of twenty people today was impressive — in a city that is home to thousands of Realtors…

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January 5, 2007

Uptown hound: BloodhoundBlog to contribute to Inman Blog . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jessica Swesey at Inman Blog has invited webloggers from six real estate weblogs to contribute posts to Inman’s real estate blog. Our initial post is a summary of my thoughts on MGM-Mirage’s Project City center in Las Vegas.

Going forward, I will be highlighting other great posts from BloodhoundBlog’s star-studded roster of contributors. Think of it as a sort of daily Carnival of BloodhoundBlog.

This is a great honor for us, of course, and, in recognition of this, I think I should hustle Odysseus off to the groomer…

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January 5, 2007

Communication a good reason to use Realtor

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Communication a good reason to use Realtor

Why do you need professional representation when you buy or sell a home? It’s not because of the Multiple Listing Service. As we have seen, Realtors can put a transaction together in ways you hadn’t foreseen. More importantly, an experienced Realtor knows how to keep your transaction from falling apart.

My wife had a house close on Dec. 22, just in time for Christmas. She was the listing agent, and the house sold in 21 days. The buyers came in without a contingency on the sale of another home. But they were coming from out of state, and their communication with their lender was beset by delays.

The sellers were buying their next home in Boise, Idaho, and that transaction was contingent on the sale of their home in Arizona.

Without discussing the date with either my wife or with their buyer’s agent in Boise, the sellers scheduled their closing in Boise for the same day as their closing in Arizona, Dec. 15. They scheduled their movers to deliver their furniture on that same day. And they invited their whole extended family to spend the holidays with them in their new home.

Now God loves the uninitiated in real estate transactions, and he graces them with the unshakeable faith that things always work perfectly. Especially with out-of-state buyers. Especially with delayed and incomplete communication with the lender. Especially with contingent sales. Most especially with simultaneous closings — in two states.

Consider the disclosure chain: The buyer’s lender to the buyer’s agent to my wife to the Boise buyer’s agent to the Boise seller’s agent, with my wife also keeping the lender on the Boise property in the loop, and with each Realtor and lender keeping their clients and the title companies up to date.

The buyer’s lender was late, making everything else late, with dozens of phone calls among the parties to keep everything together. Everything closed a week late, barely averting the disaster of a huge extended family spending Christmas in a motel.

Who needs Realtors? That’s easy.

Anyone who doesn’t do this Read more

January 4, 2007

Tomato soup in the rain: The Real Estate Tomato at Rain City Guide . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide interviews Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato:

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

The unfathomable amount of content that is generated because of this (gold)rush to blog will persist longer than you and I, no doubt… but in 3 years the blog will no longer be the tool that “gets it done”. TheVlog (video blog) will be the most effective marketing platform for real estate. As the internet, television, Xbox, music, etc. merge into one console, and we sit 15 feet from the flat screen with remote in hand, browsing through channels/websites/whatever do you really see us reading? Video will be the most effective form of marketing (it already is, duh), and learning how to embrace it on an independent basis (like the blog) will be crucial to real estate agents in 2010.

I knew we should have bought that sixty-inch plasma for Christmas. Read the whole thing. Tomatoes are too damn pungent, but Jim’s vision is to be savored anyway…

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January 4, 2007

Twisted minds: Was BusinessWeek bamboozled by bubble-blogstress?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Was a big-time Sixth Avenue media giant flim-flammed by a Gilbert, AZ, housewife, nom de guerre “Twist,” who has set herself up as an authority on the residential real estate market and its feverishly-sought collapse? From BusinessWeek Online’s Hot Property:

In Phoenix, the numbers seem to go kerflooey every December. In December 2005, the number of houses that were withdrawn from the market plummeted to just 87, from 3,673 the previous month and 5,882 the month after. (Twist defines withdrawals to include listings that are expired, withdrawn, pending, or temporarily off the market.) In December of ’04 in Phoenix, withdrawals declined so much that they supposedly went negative–specifically, a negative 1,234. Of course, there is no such thing as a “negative withdrawal,” so this has to be some kind of bookkeeping fudge.

As it turns out, the only thing wrong with this is everything.

I have no idea why we’re talking about November and December of 2005 and January of 2006, but these are the actual numbers for Expired, Cancelled, Sale Pending and Temporarily Off Market listings from those months, as taken this afternoon from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service, the MLS system for the Phoenix area:

November 2005
Expired: 1021
Cancelled: 2444
Pending: 1
Temporarily Off Market: 1
Total 3467

December 2005
Expired: 2134
Cancelled: 2218
Pending: 2
Temporarily Off Market: 1
Total 4355

January 2006
Expired: 1568
Cancelled: 2582
Pending: 3
Temporarily Off Market: 6
Total 4159

November 2004 (amended to orignal post for completeness)
Expired: 640
Cancelled: 1200
Pending: 0
Temporarily Off Market: 0
Total 1840

December 2004
Expired: 1062
Cancelled: 1001
Pending: 0
Temporarily Off Market: 2
Total 2065

January 2005
Expired: 605
Cancelled: 1363
Pending: 1
Temporarily Off Market: 3
Total 1972

Why are so few homes listed as Sale Pending or Temporarily Off Market? Because the status of those listings has changed in the intervening months, most of them to Sold.

I have no idea what “Twist” was failing to measure, but a Realtor would only be concerned with Expired and Cancelled listings, recognizing that the other two categories are nebulous and subject to change.

And, obviously: Bubble bloggers are notoriously reckless with numbers. They have an agenda, so they tend to throw out any data that do not fit their preconceptions. I have no idea if that’s what has happened here, but I can’t see Read more

January 4, 2007

Our Operators Are Standing By

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

In Dustin’s recent interview at RCG with the Bloodhound contributors, Brian Brady suggested that he might like to try Live Chat on his site to encourage participation from the fear-of-commitment contingent of his readership, those who are reluctant to post comments but might actually have something to ask or say.

I thought Brian might benefit from my own, personal foray into the world of Live Chat. Like many of you, I had been exposed to the concept many times, usually involving computer-blowing-up or other unfortunate technology-related mishaps. Frantically in search of a tech support phone number, I would happen upon (as in, after spending 4 1/2 hours in FAQ hell) a Live Chat option, wherein I am assured that operators are standing by. At this point in my Live Chat experience, I just saw the little button, which would ultimately lead me to a painfully long typing exchange with someone on the other side of the International Date Line who possessed no grasp of sarcasm or American Idioms, as just an evil corporate plot to assure that my computer remain in “blow up” state.

A little later, I read an article somewhere where an agent attributed a huge increase in business due to the Live Chat feature on her website. Interesting… I hadn’t really thought about the application as a business generator for real estate agents. Not to be left behind, I went directly to the Live Person website to get me one of those guys. Naturally, all questions and orders are handled there through Live Chat, and this should have been my first hint at trouble. A nice man named Ian (I don’t remember, I made that up) from Tel Aviv (that much I remember because it struck me as odd that he should open with Shabat Shalom) proceeded to set me up. In less than the time it would have taken me to run over to Alberta for a gallon of milk (I live in San Diego, so that is the joke), I had the feature installed on my website. You see, the beauty of Live Chat (for the busy operator) Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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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