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Category: Marketing (page 161 of 191)

November 13, 2006

Avid AVM aversion extends only to Zillow.com: NCRC off-shoot starts competing on-line valuation service . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Curiouser and curiouser. Could it be that NCRC’s motive is not to shake-down Zillow.com but to sully its reputation, in advance of going into competition against it? From InmanNews (fingered by Jim Duncan of Real Central VA):

Zillow officials say their valuations should also be seen as a starting point for consumers who want to learn more about the value of their homes.

But the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Zillow does not adequately disclose the degree to which its free automated home valuations can over- or underestimate a property’s value. The site is “likely to cause substantial injury to consumers who rely on the inaccurate representations made by the company,” the complaint alleged.

Zillow officials called the allegations groundless, saying they make every effort to explain the site’s role as a starting point for research, and display accuracy rates for every area covered by the site.

In a confusing twist, a nonprofit group formed by NCRC to promote best practices in the appraisal industry has hired another company, Eppraisal LLC, to provide a service similar to Saris Technologies’ eppraisal.com.

The NCRC offshoot, the Center for Responsible Appraisals and Valuations, is contracting with Eppraisal LLC to operate its www.BuySmartProgram.com Web site, which offers consumers appraisals using an automated valuation model in conjunction with the services of an appraiser.

NCRC vice president David Berenbaum said there is no contradiction in NCRC’s complaint against Zillow and CRAV’s use of an AVM on the www.BuySmartProgram.com Web site.

“The product being offered is an appraisal involving a site visit. It is not limited to an AVM,” Berenbaum said. “We do not have a problem with accurate AVMs, especially if they are combined with (the services of) an appraiser.”

Berenbaum said Eppraisal LLC is a subcontractor with no influence over policy decisions at NCRC or CRAV.

Based in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, Eppraisal LLC offers access to a network of 10,000 appraisers through its Web site, www.uappraiseit.com.

Scott said the term eppraisal has not been trademarked, and that Saris and its www.eppraisal.com service have no ties to Eppraisal LLC.

Another unrelated company with a Read more

November 13, 2006

This is not to suggest that all Realtors are “professionals”

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Electronic Mind ControlThe well informed and logical Kaye Thomas wrote:

It never ceases to amaze me that REALTORS are blamed for prices going up and down in the real estate market. Really, do you think if we had that type of power the market would be where it is now?

Here’s a secret known only to greedy, unscrupulous REALTORS we have nothing to do with the ups and downs in the real estate market. Buyers and Sellers are responsible. Buyers actually have more power then sellers. Basic market principles of supply and demand determine the market not agents. In the current market Buyers stopped buying when they determined that prices had gone too high. You can’t sell something if no one is buying. Sellers have two choices. Take their property off the market or reduce the price to a point that a Buyer finds value.

Believe me if I could “make” someone buy or sell real estate whenever I wanted I would make Bill Gates look like a pauper. I would be in my private jet somewhere between Maui and Hilton Head and would always be playing golf on the best courses in the world.

Then “Pop” rudely responded with the following:

Your statements are lies. Clients generally have day jobs, and rely on professionals for good advice when making a purchase. Realtors don’t disclose, and most clients don’t realize, that increases in transaction volume and transaction price are the realtors lifeblood.

Realtors generally are more than willing to recommend financing sources, especially for that sub-prime buyer.

Realtors also advised their clients during the multiple contracts spending spree of the past several years. Statements like, “Real estate never goes down.” or “You’d better get in before you get priced out” have strongly contributed to buyers decisions to over-extend themselves. After all, to the average schmuck, Realtors are the experts.

Realtors certainly know appraisers that will make sure the property meets or exceeds it’s finance target.

And, most importantly, Realtors (being in sales) certainly have a ripe understanding of the role that emotion and buyer psychology have in setting a price point. Appealing to greed and fear at the margins of the Read more

November 12, 2006

Dustin says, “It’s time for a New Name for ‘Blog'”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Indeed! Blog is an ugly word. Weblog is an ugly word.

The relationship I will have with Russell Shaw — blogfather and blogson or blogchild — is delimited by ugly words.

The ultimate ugly word associated with wegblogging, itself an ugly word:

Blogosphere.

It sounds like something Uncle Chester had to hack up every morning before his day could get started.

How soon will these words change?

Right after they fix the HVAC system in Persephone’s winter home…

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November 12, 2006

Beat the Devil Sunday: What’s the highest buyer’s agent’s commission you can find in your market . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s print up a junk mail envelope: Doug Quance may already have won!

Witness:

I think I might have found a winner…

I searched our MLS yesterday, and found a co-broke of 20%! New construction 4 bed 2.5 bath listed at $270K.

http://brokersfirstrealty.com/2006/11/12/commissions-incentives-and-ethics/

It’s no typo… the listing agent spelled it out in the public remarks…

Dave Barnes dropped a dime on this one, not as high in percentage terms but a huge amount of money.

Can you beat these? I know of a bunch of 10% deals, but nothing this extreme. How about you?

(Inlookers take note: We come not to praise excessive commissions but to damn them.)

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November 11, 2006

Links for a very busy Saturday . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m selling at least two houses this weekend, so I’m catch as catch can. I want to write a very involved Realty Reality story, too, so my Saturday is much enriched. Here are some other riches:

Realty Thoughts ponders the differences between the Inman shows and NARdiGRAS. Here’s one that pops out at me: So far, almost no news has broken at NARdiGRAS.

Both The Real Estate Bloggers and Real Central VA draw attention to The Real Estate Journal’s expose on agent bonuses:

The best defense for buyers may be to insist that agents disclose the compensation being offered on any property under serious consideration. That way, consumers could negotiate ways to share anything that goes beyond a normal pay day for the agent — or at least take the incentives into account in assessing the agent’s advice. But few consumers raise such questions. Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, a broker in the Washington, D.C., area who operates a real-estate search site, www.tbhse.com, says he believes “most buyers have no clue how their agent is being compensated.”

“‘Ethically, if you are representing the buyer and taking the buyer to a place where you are getting an increased commission, the right thing to do is tell them,’ says Danny O’Sullivan, a senior vice president with Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. in Fairfax, Va.” Ya think? In September, I wrote on Arizona’s laws regarding agent bonuses.

Jim Duncan at Real Central VA is in love with the improvements to GoogleBase announced at NARdiGRAS. I’ll withhold judgement. Even so, its seems inevitable that we are to be XMLated by The Borg. This bodes ill for smaller players, I should think.

Marlow Harris at 360Digest is trading maps for money in a very astute analysis. How hi is Seattle’s tech?: I don’t know of a single map interface at a Phoenix brokerage.

Joel Burslem at The Future of Real Estate Marketing doesn’t like Cyberhomes. Who can blame him?

Finally, The Real Estate Tomato is spreading the spaghetti sauce: Jim Cronin has started TomatoBlogs.com, a turn-key real estate weblog vendor. Pre-launch blogs: The Realty Doctor, The Silver Bee and Sacramento Real Estate Voice. All WordPress, Read more

November 10, 2006

Writing better descriptive real estate copy as a path to building character . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read some copy for a real estate listing, and I thought, “Wow, this is game and lame at the same time.” Game because the Realtor was really trying to stretch beyond typically insipid real estate copy. Lame because, well, even so — the copy was lame. It led with a cliche, then jumped immediately into EduSpeak, the unreadable argot of academia. Within a scant few seconds, we were right back in Realtorville, an unending list of features without a benefit — nor a beneficiary — in sight. In the end, it was game-by-intent, an attempt to attempt to do something different — without actually doing anything differently.

Here’s my take on the same theme:

What you notice first is the quiet — but you don’t even actually notice it. The air is so still and the silence so complete that you don’t truly hear the quiet until it is interrupted.

What was that?! That scampering sound. You peer into the underbrush and there it is — a Whiptail lizard twenty yards away — and you were actually able to hear its tiny footfalls.

You don’t feel the breeze as much as you see it in the lazy skirling of the Redtail hawks overhead. The sun is omnipresent, but you feel it best in the tingling on your skin. You breathe deep, relishing the crisp, clean scent of creosote slowly baking in the heat of the afternoon…

This is the desert — the desert you came here to find but lost somewhere in a vast, overpacked parking lot.

This is the desert — untamed and illimitable, alive and thriving against all odds.

This is the desert — not a day trip, not a camping trip, not a now-and-then excursion.

This is home. Your home, from now on…

That’s an introduction. I’m not selling a house. I’m selling a life. In this case, a life with some negatives — the commute to Phoenix is at least 45 minutes, and the buyer is going to find snakes and scorpions in the home several times a year. But what I want to sell about this property is the unique life that this home Read more

November 10, 2006

Excessive buyer’s agent’s commissions at new builds: “Killer deals often come with payoff . . . “

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). I don’t write the headlines, and I don’t think this one is terribly representative of the article, but it is what it is. I asked the paper to change the attribution to use BloodhoundBlog’s web address rather than my phone number, so maybe the poisonous phone calls will turn into poison-pen letters instead.

 
Killer deals often come with payoff

I have clients who are closing escrow on a new-built home soon. They’re moving from a house of about 1,725 square feet to a home of about 2,100 square feet.

Because it’s a new build and because of when they’re buying it and, most especially, because it’s a spec home — a home specified by and started for another buyer who has since canceled the purchase — they’re getting a smoking deal.

The builder is trying to close on absolutely every spec home, so it’s making great deals. It’s giving my buyers a $75,000 upgrade package, plus throwing 6 percent of the purchase price toward their down payment.

If the Valley’s real estate market gets back to normal soon, they’ll have a ton of equity fairly quickly. And even if not, this home is an incredible bargain — an unrepeatable opportunity.

Here’s the kicker: The builder’s sales rep told me in private that the buyer’s agent’s commission is 8 percent. Unbelievable!

I strive to be a vigorous champion for my buyers, but builders leave precious little room for a Realtor to effect any meaningful buyer’s representation.

In effect, taking a party to a new-home subdivision is a referral. That could explain why so many builders and Realtors treat it that way.

For my part, I’m doing everything I can to defend and protect my clients’ interests, and that still won’t be very much.

So how much should I get paid for doing not very much work as capably and professionally as I can?

Surely not 8 percent. I won’t even take 3 percent on new construction.

Here’s what I did for this home: I conceded 6 percent to my clients, keeping 2 percent for the brokerage.

They didn’t have to ask for this, nor should Read more

November 9, 2006

Zip Realty and a Press Release

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

It never ceases to amuse me (amaze me?) what the press finds “interesting” for a real estate “news story”. Of course it is totally predictable what Inman News finds newsworthy – hacking away at Realtor commissions. Brad Inman has been on a mission from God on this issue for some years. So please don’t get the idea that only obviously crazy people are the only ones working on this vital issue. Here is a link to post I made on Inman’s blog last week. If you are interested, here is the link to the video on CAR’s website. Allan Dalton’s comments, especially the stuff in the last twenty minutes, are well worth any Realtor’s time. I especially liked his idea that yammering on about “we give great service” is NOT productive – and that no one really gives a crap. You will see what I liked so much if you watch it. The first part is quite boring but once Allan starts to talk – turn the volume up and listen.

Zip Realty Logo

Zip. A stupid name? I think so. But damn are they good at using the press! Here are some numbers they just released:

ZipRealty Inc. (Nasdaq: ZIPR) today announced third-quarter net income of $600,000, down from net income of $2.9 million in third-quarter 2005. For the first nine months of the year, ZipRealty reported a net loss of $386,000 compared with net income of $2.57 million for the first nine months of 2005.

The company employed 1,747 ZipAgents as of Sept. 30, compared with 1,383 at the end of third-quarter 2005 and 1,669 at the close of second-quarter 2006.

ZipRealty also announced that the total value of real estate transactions closed decreased about 11.8 percent in the third quarter to $1.2 billion, compared with $1.36 billion in third-quarter 2005, while the number of transactions closed fell 6 percent to 3,467 compared to the same period last year.

Please keep in mind this is a NATIONAL company. In my area (greater Phoenix area) there are privately owned real estate companies that have better numbers than Zip.

Local companies here that have about that many agents (just here Read more

November 9, 2006

I’m really not hungry, so can I get a rebate on that order of crow . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have another column in the newspaper tomorrow beating up on buyer’s agent’s commissions, so this seems an appropriate moment to make a confession:

I don’t think it makes a damn bit of difference.

This is the fifth column in this series, running every other week because the editor hated all the complaint calls from Realtors and brokers. I get quite a few calls, too, almost always line-blocked and anonymous. What’s interesting is that I have never had a call from an ordinary reader on this topic — not even when I’ve talked about huge commissions at new home subdivisions.

We’ve been advertising the idea of rebates on buyer’s agent’s commissions in various ways for weeks now. I can measure every inbound click generated by these ads. Net consequence: Crickets chirping. Realtor.com hasn’t been totally underwhelming, but one of the two magazine ads has drawn not one single click-through. The second best performer is the button on our web site. The uncontested champion: The button on BloodhoundBlog. Even so, total interest, scattered and mild, has not resulted in one closed client. We’ve closed on buyers, but not on anyone who showed up to find out more about rebated commissions.

People can be excited by the idea once it is explained to them, but it has to be explained in detail, and even then some don’t get it. Either the idea that buyer representation is “free” is nearly ineradicable or people really don’t mind financing all those extra thousands of dollars.

Jeff Brown foresaw all of this, but I’m from Missouri. Even now it is astounding to me that people would not be more rational about huge sums of money.

Sellers pay attention, and the promotion we do to sellers makes tracks. Talking to buyers in a way that would make sense to a seller has done nothing for us. I don’t claim that this idea cannot work, nor that the way we implemented it was without fault. I’d be interested to hear from anyone playing with similar ideas. My take, for now, is that offering a hard-headed — as against soft-hearted — benefit to buyers is a Read more

November 9, 2006

Phoenix-area single-family homes down one percent from October 2005?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

ASU’s Dr. Jay Butler’s housing numbers for October 2006 have been released:

The Valley’s single-family home-resale market clicked higher in October though sales are well off from last year’s frenzy.

There were 4,985 sales in October, up slightly from 4,875 the previous month but down nearly 41 percent from October of last year, according to the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic.

The median price stayed essentially flat. The new median of $257,000 is marginally higher than $256,900 in September.

Here’s the juicy news, though:

The new median is a little more than 1 percent lower than in October of last year.

Butler has median values down 3.78% from the peak in Jun 2006.

Almost this sounds like a houseful of bad new stuffed into a baby bootie, but it is actually a nice illustration of the uselessness of Butler’s methods. He strikes a median among all sales, Valleywide. If houses are selling well at the high end of the price spectrum and poorly at the low end, this will tend to make the market as a whole look healthier than it is.

John L. Wake at Arizona Real Estate Notebook has a better set of median values, charting October’s numbers city-by-city.

We work from a completely different set of numbers in our Market Basket of Homes, and I realize the curse of these analyses is that they’re all based on different assumptions. But we’re interested in the houses we actually sell and that the people in the middle of the Bell Curve actually buy. Moreover, by working with a representative subset of that market, we can read every listing, one-by-one, to try to determine what really happened.

How did those houses do in October? Down 4.07% from September, down 7.97% year-over-year, and down 9.88% from the December 2005 high. This is not the disaster it might be portrayed in the newspaper. After all, two-year appreciation on an average Market Basket home is 38.21%. Three-year appreciation is 63.15%. But this news is in stark contrast to the news reported by Dr. Butler.

MLS inventories are down, and some people want to argue that this means the market has turned. Read more

November 8, 2006

What’s the big idea? The good, the true and the beautiful in real estate weblogging . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I really, really like ideas, and I sometimes feel like I should talk about them in a larger, more comprehensive way. Events intrude, always. Plus which, I think extended rumination is what god made retirement for. For now, we gallop on horseback through the museum of my mind, since this is what I have time for.

I love having Russell Shaw with us, because he is serious, rigorous and thorough-going. But he sees the world from where he stands, and very few of us command similar heights. Russell says, in essence, “I charge more because I’m worth more.” This argument has unassailable particular merit, as do the similar arguments made by Our Lady Ardell and the avuncular Jeff Brown.

But the argument does not invert, as many wish it could: “I’m worth more because I charge more” is the fallacy non sequitur. How much commission should a Realtor charge? In fact — in actual, demonstrable, undeniable fact — some large fraction of the NAR membership is earning nothing.

Surplus capacity argues either for lower prices, for liquidation of some of that capacity, or both. Ardell argues with some cogency that nothing will be done from the inside about prices — although she might be surprised at what can be done from the outside. Even so, the quantity of real estate transactions will not go up with a marginal reduction in transaction costs. We still sleep one pillow per capita. In any case, the problem of excess capacity can easily be solved by eliminating the real estate broker’s safe harbor from tax withholding laws.

Brokers really don’t even have much reason to oppose this, if we presume that the quantity of real estate transactions is inelastic. In other words, if a broker can anticipate 1,000 transactions a year whether he has 1,000 agents or 100 agents, then the only real difference to his business is the marginal cost of tax-withholding itself — which that broker will surely find a way to socialize to the agents anyway.

Privately, our own billionaire brain trust — god help us if they ever dun us! — has been reflecting on the Read more

November 8, 2006

Run faster: There’s a new minimum wage in Arizona . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The voters of Arizona passed a number of those pernicious ballot initiatives Cameron argued against Monday night.

Probably the most consequential is a coercive increase in the minimum wage. Warm-hearted people like to think of poor people making more money, but the net consequence of minimum wage laws is to get marginal employees — such as teenagers, the handicapped and people recovering from really bad decisions — fired, while lowering the marginal costs of alternatives to local human labor.

In other words, when you raise the marginal cost of employing goofy neighborhood kids, you essentially lower the marginal cost of adding labor-saving equipment or sending that labor off-shore. This is pure Bastiat, the seen and the unseen. What is seen are the shiny, happy people working at Taco Bell — already a capital-intensive response to high labor costs — for much more money. What is not seen are the many more people who had been working there, but who were fired because they were unprofitable at the coerced higher wage.

The good news is, if you own, say, a real estate brokerage, the cost of independent-contractor labor just went down, and the quality of the labor pool soared.

Remember, avoiding slavery is easy. Just keep running faster and faster…

Here’s are some faster-paced idea to speed the race:

Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch both have news on like.com, a visual search engine. Like images.google.com or whatever, you can do keyword searches for images. But the cooler feature set is to use an image to search for other, similar images. Picture yourself standing outside a house, looking at all the junk mounted around the electrical panel, and the client says, “What’s that?” Wouldn’t it be sweet to whip out your digital camera and reply, “Let’s find out.”

The XBroker nails a manifesto to the door of the Treasury.

Christine Forgione at NY Houses 4 Sale has a stout defense of why you need a Realtor. (Am I the only person who sees this site as one giant link? Real Estate Snippets look like this to me, too, like everything is encapsulated within one giant link.)

Kris Berg from The San Diego Home 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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