There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 153 of 191)

Fred Flintstone speaks: Sniffing around video podcasting . . .

The link below will bring up a video we made in September of 2005. There’s much to apologize for: I do, beyond doubt, look like Fred Flintstone, no one went to the MTV school of interesting videography and my presentation is punctuated by too many um’s and random interrogatories (“right?”). Worst of all, this was near the apogee of the real estate boom in Phoenix, and my near-term and mid-term predictions have proved to be way off.

This was delivered to a college-level class of real estate pre-licensing students, so there is quite a bit of inside baseball. The file is huge, too, around 150MB, so you might want to give it a miss on that basis alone.

This video is called Real Estate in Real Life, Part I. Part II dealt with a four-sided, entirely-brokered transactions (that is, I introduced and represented all four sides). This was very intricate, and it’s a nice illustration of the Realtor’s art. I thought about posting that, instead, but good Realtors already know how to put complicated transactions together, and, of course, our BubbleHeaded friends have nothing to learn from anyone.

But: What I’m really doing is installing and testing the technology necessary for us to deliver audio and video podcasting content in the coming year. In the short run, I want to archive interviews with some of the amazing people we get to talk to. In the longer run, we may put together something more formal, like a podcasted real estate radio or television show.

For now: Watch it if you like. It’s informative and at least mildly inspiring. There will be more audio and video content to come in 2007.

BloodhoundBlog at six months: Getting our legs under us . . .

BloodhoundBlog is six month’s old today. The first post, an accidental prophesy, was about the incipient disintermediation of for-pay content providers in the age of the internet:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I documented the birth of the blog soon thereafter, but it’s reasonable to argue that BloodhoundBlog is a natural progression in the erosion of the castle walls surrounding for-pay intellectual property. When Joseph Rago rails that weblogs are “written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” by what sum, precisely, is the Wall Street Journal enriched? Is it plausible that more wealth was “monetized” in the Rago-reaction than ever was realized by the original rant? If “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” who made more — Rago or the anti-Ragoons? And what persists, in the end, but another “free” opinion in an unmetered atmosphere of “free” opinions?

Their world is done. Ours is but begun. There may be a way to build a wall around original reporting, particularly where the information is time-sensitive, is difficult to obtain or is available only from an easily-restricted source. The obvious example is a real-time — as against time-delayed — stock ticker. What’s left after that? Habit? Status? Higher production quality — which may be a further expression of status? What argument can the vestigial Joseph Ragos make for the added value of “metered” air? It’s time for a deep breath, isn’t it? Why not? The air is “free.”

Do you want to argue for the superiority of your content? Good on ya! Produce superior content. Is it your goal to argue that your content is so much better that you deserve to be paid for it? Good luck with that plan. You may be able to draw enough eyes that you can dupe some advertisers into paying for the chance to try to hook a few — just like the endlessly preening broadcast news. If you see your future in a box office — a toll booth on the information superhighway — then do, please, take that deep breath. There’s a clue Read more

Information comes with experience

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

Information comes with experience

Continuing from last week, let’s work together as Realtors and round out the purchase offer for our buyers.

What’s the best closing date? The buyers have never thought about it, but it’s our job to know. They’re in a lease until the end of January, and obviously they would want to limit the number of days they pay for two homes.

But mortgage interest is paid in arrears. If the buyers close very late in the month, they will pay a small amount for those few days of interest, and then their next payment will not come until March 1 — a nice breather.

Closing too late in the month is bad because things can spill over to the start of the month — which means almost a full month of interest payments in advance. Ideally, we want a Tuesday, seven to 10 days from the end of the month.

But wait: The buyers are taking 3 percent in closing costs. Who cares about pre-paid interest? The buyers might not know to care, but we get paid to care. Our costs are so low that we might be able to apply a big chunk of that 3 percent to buying down the interest rates, leaving the buyers with extra money in their pockets with every monthly payment.

How much in earnest? A thousand dollars, right now. It’s a buyer’s market.

Now this is not a hugely aggressive offer. Buyers are rarely willing to push things as hard as they might. But, the aggression in this offer was put there by us, not by the buyers. Most of the very subtle ideas the buyers will have known nothing about until we explained them.

That’s representation — real, not perceived. Truly, the buyers had no idea how to construct an offer for their home.

Every home is unique, and every real estate transaction is unique. There is no way that unrepresented buyers and sellers can do as well for themselves as they could with professional representation. The information that matters doesn’t come from the MLS, it comes from the Read more

Consumer Federation of America – Controlled by Big Banks?

A somewhat remarkable report has been released by the Consumer Federation of America. I first read about it on Inman News and wondered who they were. Was this just another front group (obviously bought and paid for by big banking) like the American Homeowners Grass Roots Alliance? I also first ran across that group on Inman – Inman will almost always find any letter written by Bruce Hahn, the President of the American Homeowners Grass Roots Alliance, worth publishing. As Hahn is so obviously getting funding from some organization with pretty deep pockets, it was easy to spot him and his organization as a front for someone with an agenda they would prefer be kept hidden. I don’t actually know it is Bank of America but, for sure, it is big banking that keeps Mr. Hahn’s “alliance” afloat.

So I am expecting to find something similar when I read about the report issued a couple of weeks ago by the Consumer Federation of America. Surprise, surprise – they really are a “federation” and they really do have lots of links that have nothing to do with real estate sales being regulated by the federal government. For anyone who would like to wade through the entire report from the CFA here is a PDF of it.

For anyone who would care to read excellent expert analysis of the report and the overall “flow” that is coming from the CFA – there are two articles by Blanche Evans that I think are well worth spending the time they will take to read. I read her most recent one first, it was first published December 12. Then the one she wrote on July 25 of this year.

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I would also like to extend a warm welcome to our newest member, Brian Brady. I was surprised (and pleased) to see you on BloodhoundBlog, as I had just found you (on your blog) a couple of weeks ago and really liked what I saw. Also, I just have to commend our “Top Blogger” on BloodhoundBlog (she is the first one on the list). I vote that if any new Read more

Santa brought us a new contributor: Introducing Brian Brady . . .

We’re adding a tenth contributor today, Mortgage Broker Brian Brady:

Brian Brady is a San Diego-based mortgage broker. Working with his wife, Debra, Brian deploys six years of experience on Wall Street to make sure the loans he underwrites fit his clients’ overall financial plans.

You may know Brian’s work from his own weblog or from his participation on ActiveRain. Brian promises that he is “America’s most opinionated mortgage broker,” so we should be disabused of even vestigial errors in short order.

Take note that we are always on the lookout for talented writers. If you think your work belongs here, say so.

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Not just any fools: Heavy on the light rail propaganda, please . . .

Almost three years ago, The Goldwater Institute, a free-market think tank in Phoenix, published a devastating accounting of the light rail system now being built in Metropolitan Phoenix:

[The Maricopa Association of Governments]’s public transit plans deserve close scrutiny. Use of urban public transportation systems has been in decline since the end of World War II, when public transit provided 50 percent of urban travel. Last year, only three percent of urban travel in America was provided by public transit. This decline has occurred despite prodigious government efforts to prevent it. Governments now spend 30 to 40 times as much on public transit as for roadways. But evidence suggests that transit is not the most effective use of public transportation dollars.

Of all the options in the public transit mix, light rail deserves the most scrutiny. Because it requires its own special track, it lacks the flexibility of buses, which use existing city streets. And because tracks would be constructed on existing city streets, light rail in the Phoenix region is actually projected to increase traffic congestion. Furthermore, in no city in America does light rail transit account for much more than one percent of urban person-miles of travel. The Phoenix light rail system is projected to account for only two-tenths of one percent of travel in the region.

The average cost of light rail per passenger-mile is around $1.50, almost double the cost of bus transit, and five times the cost of automobile transportation per vehicle-mile. On average, taxpayers pay nearly 90 percent of the cost of light rail passenger travel, considerably more than for all other transit modes. Worst of all, light rail would do almost nothing to relieve traffic congestion. Because 80 percent of new light rail passengers in Maricopa County would be former bus passengers, light rail would remove less than one car in 1,000 from traffic.

To my knowledge, no one has ever challenged the numbers in this report — perhaps because it is based entirely on Valley Metro’s own projections. The Arizona Republic dismissed it with high-handed hand-waving, insisting — I kid you not — that people say that Read more

The Harm That David Lereah Does

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.Albert Einstein

Mike wrote:

If you don’t have a sense of humor, you probably don’t have any sense at all.dog pissing on snowman

Merry Christmas to you and your family, Mr. Shaw.

And to everyone else here.

You see, salutations can be expressed without including a condescending, gratuitous insult; try it sometime.

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Fair enough. As you were obviously smart enough to see that the humor line was intended for you (without me saying so) I’m going to attempt to respond to the whole “David Lereah Issue” without (after all, it IS Christmas) making any snide comments towards you (or any of the other people who may share your views). First, I am not “defending” David Lereah. I don’t know him and I have never paid any attention to any specific statement or prediction he has made. I don’t even know how long he has been the chief economist for the NAR. I have no data to suggest that any of his predictions or forecasts are ever accurate and I am not claiming that they are. I will also state that I have read comments from people who have meet him and / or have listened to him speak and from all accounts the reports would indicate that he is a likable person and comes off as well informed and intelligent.

For the purposes of what I want us to look at here, we can think of David Lereah as the equivalent of a stopped clock – at a minimum, he is going to be right twice a day with the correct time. So, if the point is that he is usually wrong – lets just agree, he is almost always wrong. For me, he does not cast a “long shadow”. I don’t think most REALTORS even know who he is, or what he has to say – let alone the general public. I don’t believe that most people who live in the United States give a crap what he or anyone Read more

Wikipedia founder proposes Google alternative . . .

From The Times of London (via TechMeme):

[Wikipedia founder Jimbo] Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, known as “Wikipedians”, using free open-source software.

Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software to create his search engine.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.

I like the idea in principle, but I can see two gaping holes: One is simply that pages that are highly worthy but hugely unknown will not be ranked. And, more obviously, the kind of bogus rank-spamming evident at sites like Digg is a real risk.

A mash-up using Google for raw results filtered through Wikiasari’s vetting might be a great short-answer search engine, though…

A further thought: Jimmy Wales already has access to a fine database of social site rankings: Wikipedia itself. Starting there and making ranking easy through the search-engine UI, he might have a product…

Pat Kitano has more.

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Cutting out middle man in a sale might cost you

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

 
Cutting out middle man in a sale might cost you

I’ve talked about disintermediation before, and surely it will come up again. Disintermediation in real estate is the idea that buyers and sellers can eliminate the middle man — in this case the Realtors — and deal with each other directly.

The belief is that the Internet will provide information formerly “hoarded” by Realtors so that real estate transactions will become as simple as buying stocks or airline tickets online.

The information that is supposed to make this happen is the Multiple Listing Service, and that’s something we can talk about another day. For now it is sufficient to make plain that MLS listings are very far from being the most important information in the sale of a home. The simple fact is that, because I do this job every day, I can do a much better job than an unrepresented buyer or seller, much as you can do your job better than I could.

Want proof? Let’s go buy a house.

We’re out showing homes with our party and they settle on one they like. Because it’s a buyer’s market, and because the buyers aren’t very well prepared, we don’t write a contract right away.

What’s the best day to write an offer? Tuesday, in principle, but the absolute best day is the first Tuesday after the first of the month. The buyers have never given this a second thought, but it’s our job to know.

We’ll send the buyers to a lender we know and trust. Why? Because, although they have good credit and good incomes, they have no cash. Our lender can write a fast 80/20 loan with very low closing costs. Say what? That’s an 80 percent first mortgage, a 20 percent second mortgage with no private mortgage insurance — all without costly junk fees.

When we finally write the offer, we’ll recommend a structure like this: List price, less 5 percent, with an additional 3 percent coming back to the buyers as closing costs.

Are we done yet? Not even close, but we’re done for now. Come Read more

Ooh, baby, baby it’s a wired world — but what is going to change in residential real estate in the next 12 months? Almost nothing . . .

One of my clients gave me a wake-up call late this year. She has a computer, but she’s never unpacked it in her current home. I don’t know if the computer is robust enough for broadband, but it really doesn’t matter, does it? I’ve been ferrying listings to her by car — printed on paper, stuffed in envelopes and parked under her doormat. Just lately she acquired a fax machine, which is convenient. We have a house under contract and there is a lot of paper flowing back and forth. Certain oil-rich sheikdoms might weep, but everyone else can breathe freely — and from a cleaner air supply.

This is a weird world for a wired Realtor, but guess what? It’s the real world. My own sweet mother is such a Luddite that we’re buying her the dumbest dumb terminal I have ever seen for Christmas. We started out saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” By this point, we act as though we believe that everything is a nail.

This is incorrect.

For one thing, buyers and sellers of residential real estate are not on-line in concentrations greater than other demographics. How could they be? Young people, yes. Technophiles, yes. Everyone else…? Not so much.

Moreover, whether or not buyers and sellers are poking around on-line, for the most part they are not making life-altering financial decisions in untouched-by-human-hands on-line real estate transactions. There might be a news story about a crazy young couple taking the plunge, but you need to stop for a moment to recall that that exact page of the newspaper only just last week was devoted to a young man who has never cut his toenails. What makes news? The exception, not the rule.

We are too much misled. The exception is interesting, but it’s interesting because it’s rare. We ignore the commonplace because… well, it’s commonplace. In the last year, we saw the launches of dozens of new Realty.bots, each one devised to provide easier access to information that was, for the most part, already available. What changed in actual, on-the-ground residential real estate Read more

Inside The Box – YES, NO and MAYBE

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. – Henry Ford

In an email, Adam wrote:

Russell-

I never got a chance to thank you for the Star Wars “Duel in the Desert.” I attended the event and very much appreciated your insight and humor. I have been doing Real Estate for over 6 years in CA and AZ. Although I have made over 100k one year, I have struggled through many others. I found this interesting in the sense that you mentioned doing this through the first part of your career (the ups and downs).

Somebody asked you a question and you mentioned to them about not being “all the way in the box.” You then mentioned something along the line of You finally getting this perspective yourself in your career and getting “all the way in the box.”

I want to get all the way in. How is this change made? How do/did you flip that switch? I’ve been waiting for years yet it hasn’t happened.

If this seems like a strange email, it’s because it is! I just valued your advice so much that you gave a couple of months back and thought you might be able to give me more insight.

Thanks,

Adam

The question I was responding to was from a lady asking about sending out postcards but she didn’t want to mail “ordinary” postcards to a farm area or a personal mailing list. She wanted something really unique – something outside the box. As I hear this sort of thing all the time (and recognize it as a destructive idea) I told her that her problem was not that she wasn’t outside the box with her thinking and her postcard program but that she wasn’t IN the box yet. Few agents are suffering from not being “outside the box”. They think they are but their real problem is they haven’t gotten “inside the box” yet.

There are certain fundamentals in any industry, profession or activity. There are correct ways of doing almost anything. The people at the top (of almost any activity) have Read more

A richness of embarrassments: My soup-bowl runneth over with Top Ramen . . .

I keep thinking that I’m going to have free time for blue sky projects at Christmas, and I just keep getting busier. I accidentally sold another house today — 166,800 packages of Top Ramen to me, but it’s a new build that won’t close until around July of 2008. As the Phoenix market recovers, we could end up with a lot of Top Ramen in the pipeline.

I should be linking more, but I think Christmas has got everyone, one way or another. The much-promoted Yankee Blog Swap was today. I credit Mary McKnight with an impressive amount of preparation, but only three bits of news jumped out at me:

First, Kris Berg is a rare wit wherever she goes.

Second, Dan Green thinks mortgage weblogs are boring. So much he knows.

And third, Glenn Kelman is much more tolerable at his increased dosage.

I have houses closing all week, along with our own refi. It’s cold here, something I almost never get to say. But I caught the wind in a sinus, and I have that half-stupid feeling that precedes a cold. Wonderful. I should probably have some chicken soup, but we have all this damnable Top Ramen to dispose of…

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Five by four: Twenty things you didn’t know, with five more to come . . .

The four victims I tagged for the “Five things you didn’t know about me” have come forward with their deepest darkest secrets:

Kris Berg is a very smart person with a quick wit (who didn’t know this?) and a perilous driver.

Doug Quance has led a life of Steinbeck-like diversity in a vast host of locations.

Jeff Brown takes you on a grand tour of his life, from his grandfather to his wife. Along the way he explains the origins of the appellation “Bawldguy.”

And Dan Green is gracious enough to show us the everyday life of the hard-charging over-achiever. I say we enter the man in a pie-eating marathon!

My duty is discharged, and I am deeply honored to be working with such amazing people.

But there is a lingering detail…

Russell: Did you notice that Jeff called you out…?

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The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

…is up at Seattle Real Estate Professionals. Moderator Marlow Harris presents awards in three categories.

BloodhoundBlog is a Carnival unto its own. Here are eleven entries from the last week that I thought were exemplary:

Russell Shaw: Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?
Kris Berg: When It Clicks
Cathleen Collins: Punch and Pie At This Week’s Carnival of Real Estate
Dan Green: Why The Fed Matters to Real Estate
Greg Swann: Who needs Realtors . . . ?
Russell Shaw: Making Predictions, Cowards & Lies
Kris Berg: Between Rock and a Hard Place
Greg Swann: Everybody loves Ramen . . .
Russell Shaw: Anonymous Posters Who Hate Lereah
Jeff Brown: How Much Is An Excellent Assistant Worth? Are You Kidding?
Richard Riccelli: There’s no business like show business, like no business I know

Dan Green’s Why The Fed Matters to Real Estate was our entry in the Carnival of Real Estate, the Carnival of Real Estate Investing, the Carnival of Business and the Carnival of Marketing.

Cathleen Collins is the judge of our Carnival entries, but her Punch and Pie At This Week’s Carnival of Real Estate got the most votes from our contributors, so it is my honor to declare her the winner of the Bloodhound Carnival.

Marlow Harris hosts the Carnival of Real Estate at her own 360 Digest on January 15, 2007 — a week after Elvis Presley’s birthday. She threatens to have a category devoted to Elvis posts, which should be fun…

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