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Category: Marketing (page 165 of 191)

October 23, 2006

Identifying mavericks: Socrates, Jesus, Cyrano and — Glenn Kelman?!? We don’t have to love the truth, we just have to live with it . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in a comment at Mike’s Corner. Mike Price is looking for nominations for the most influential mavericks in the real estate industry, individuals and companies. Share your thoughts with him.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, although the words I use in my own mind are closer to “renegade” or “heretic.” And the context is immense, at least to my way of thinking: The story of The West, in capitals, as against The East, is the story of Socrates, the man who chose to die rather than bend to the will of the mob. The Nazarene was the key popularizer of the tale, but if you look for it, you will find it reflected in every enduring story of The West.

Most fundamentally, The West is the heretic, the renegade, the maverick, the man or woman who stands — “not high it may be but alone” — for new truth, standing down all of received wisdom. This is why The West is so outrageously dynamic, where The East, broadly defined, celebrates and venerates that which is traditional and unchanging.

So who would I pick as the maverick individual and company bringing the most change to the real estate industry right now?

Glenn Kelman and Redfin.com.

My experience of the man has been overwhelmingly negative, and I don’t care for the way the company operates: It foists its agency responsibilities onto listing agents, then publicly vilifies them if they object to this cowbird-like behavior.

But someone at Redfin.com — or possibly some unknown maverick — figured out that the contradiction of the listing agent compensating the buyer’s agent could be exploited to market advantage, and this one innovation, in due course, will — at a minimum — divorce the two commissions from one another, resulting in a true buyer’s agency at last. It may also serve to eliminate the proprietarian idea of the MLS, a serendipitous side-effect.

I don’t think Redfin.com can survive as a business, at least not in its present form. Its head-count is huge for the volume it is doing. The proportional rebate system makes it impossible for the company Read more

October 23, 2006

Google Mobile Maps supports Treo . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I never get lost, which sometimes annoys and sometimes enthralls my best-beloved. The Swann Boys as a bloodline are endowed with an extra-large kinesthesia gene. I can find my way around in cities I have been to only once, decades ago. Whenever we travel, I do all the driving, because even when I don’t know where I am, I am in the process of mapping the whole place in my mind.

This turns out to be a real advantage in the real estate business. I never forget how to get to a house I’ve been to before. I know at once when the listing agent’s driving directions are wrong — as they are at least 20% of the time. I know every back-way sneak-around in Greater Phoenix.

Cathy is a great driver, and she is not directionally-challenged. But in strange neighborhoods, she doesn’t know by the magic of kinesthesia where she is. She maps her showings, which I never do, and then works those maps carefully as she drives.

So here is great news, which Cathy discovered yesterday: Google Mobile Maps is supporting the Treo line of cell phones. This might be old news. I had looked at GMM when it was new, but it was useless to us without Treo support.

This is not the ultimate perfect mapping solution. We grow so fast that no mapping software can keep up. But it’s a big improvement over schlepping a 100+ page map book.

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October 23, 2006

Want to stop sprawl? Stop subsidizing it . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s an article in today’s Arizona Republic documenting, at least subject to inference, how the sprawl machine works.

First, developers put up houses on remote farmland, because the land is cheap. There are no roads, schools, libraries, fire stations, etc., but the developers know that the new residents will clamor for those things as soon as they move in. Politicians, scared to death of negative opinion, build all these missing amenities, adding value to all the remaining unbuilt homes and undeveloped land.

The politicians finally get about half wise and impose “impact fees” — taxes assessed in advance, per new rooftop, to pay for the amenities that will be built as the new homes are built. The developers argue that this makes the homes less affordable, which is true. The politicians argue that the new residents are bearing the costs of the new burdens they occasion, which is also at least somewhat true.

But here are two more true statements which you will never hear uttered aloud:

1. In our current mixed-economy, if the politicians said, “Sorry, folks, you moved where you shouldn’t have,” eventually developers would stop trying to build in places where municipalities don’t provide services. Those who didn’t learn better — developers and their customers — could stew in their own juice.

2. In a truly free market, developers would build all the amenities we’re talking about (and then some) at a particular project — or they wouldn’t build the project at all. The current mess is occasioned by government intrusion into real estate, On the one hand, developers can build where they shouldn’t. On the other, they can sucker the taxpayers — again and again — into adding immense value to what was once essentially worthless land.

Want to stop sprawl in its tracks? Get governments out of the real estate business…

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October 22, 2006

Valley home values: The sun will come up tomorrow . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Today marks the release of The Arizona Republic‘s semi-annual run-down of home prices. I’ve never liked this treatment because it is based on median prices — which tells you nothing about particular homes — and is sorted by zip code — arbitrary and enormous spaces. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes. You can pursue the links from the page linked above for details. 1. Not as good as last year. 2. Prices down somewhat or barely up, year over year. 3. Lots of inventory. 4. The sun will come up tomorrow.

The biggest news might be that Catherine Reagor has discovered new reasons for hope. In a goofy home movie made for Channel 12, she actually rhapsodizes about appreciation potential. She predicts a Valley population of 20 million (our carrying capacity is 8 million), so she’s not down to Earth on all ten toes, but her progress is laudable.

I was interviewed for this year’s rundown. I spent about an hour on the phone from my patio one afternoon, maybe twenty minutes from the car the next afternoon. I also referred two of my favorite investor clients, one of whom was interviewed for about twenty minutes as he was standing in a store. All of that turned into one mangled sentence in three sections of the paper.

The actual news is this: Our fundamentals are sound. In-migration continues apace. There is a lot of inventory on the market right now, but many sellers are not actually motivated to sell at current market prices. Those homes can be thought of as ghost inventory. A perfectly normal number of buyers are buying homes at or above list prices, with deep discounting being rare. The surfeit of inventory will take some time to work out, but I see no indications of looming catastrophe. The news isn’t great, but it certainly isn’t awful…

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October 21, 2006

The “Win a BloodhoundRealty.com Tee-Shirt Contest” contest . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy is out with a crew today, canvassing a neighborhood with invitations to an Open House she is holding tomorrow. They are wearing our new Tee-Shirts:

We had these made because we are sponsoring contestants in a walk-a-thon, but we made a bunch, so they could be used for things like this, as well.

It occurred to me that we should give away a Tee-Shirt in a contest, but I really don’t have the gift for contests. The one weblog contest idea I’ve had so far is the CheezWhiz Olympics, an award for the new real estate technology that is simultaneously the coolest-sounding and stoopidest idea of the week. Unfortunately, that could easily lead to the entire globe being coated with a thin layer of CheezWhiz.

Anyway, the idea I had was to sponsor a contest to decide what contest to sponsor. In other words, you come up with the contest idea. If we pick your idea, the winner of the contest you suggest will win a BloodhoundRealty.com Tee-Shirt — and so will you.

Hanes Beefy-Tee, top-quality silk screening — a lasting trophy of your peculiar genius…

So what do you have to lose — except for your time, dignity and good name? After all, we’ll pay the postage! Tell us what contest to sponsor and WIN!

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October 21, 2006

The Irresistible Bastard: Building the perfect marketer for the Twenty-First Century real estate industry . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

UrbanDigs.com offers some great practical advice on timing low-ball offers. TrueGotham offers further thoughts. Both of these posts are Manhattansized, so you’ll need to scale accordingly for your local market.

Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets has excellent advice on the subject of your Realtor’s excellent advice. We’re not being pushy, honest! We’re helping you quarry your home’s inner greatness.

From Jeff Brown at Behind the Curtain: What do you want from the news, truth or accuracy?

PressReal.com (blogrolled — sorry, should have done this a while ago) asks Who pays the commission?, a question near and dear to Bloodhound hearts.

On the subject of “discounting” generally, Greg Tracy at BlueRoof.com composes a symphony:

But the best part about our new company is all the support we get from our clients. The consumers like what we’re doing because we are a new business model and most consumers really don’t like the traditional real estate models.

It’s funny if you think about the whole criticism of “discount broker”. Some people from my previous brokerage say that I’m selling out because now I’m a “Discount Broker”. Well, what does that mean?

That means that I’m doing the same thing for less…

And that’s the criticism? Even funnier is when the large companies take out ads that put down “discount brokers”. It’s like Albertson’s taking out an ad that says don’t buy from Safeway because they sell things for less. That’s what these agents are saying. And it’s really funny because most of them discount their commissions too, they just don’t admit it. We don’t discount our service or cut corners, in fact we have higher minimum standards for marketing our listings than most of the industry.

When I meet with people and show them our model and how we can help them they get excited about our model. We’ve had people tell us they were going to name rooms in the home after us and they send us incredible testimonials and they refer all their friends to us, which is the greatest endorsement they can give.

(Gentlemen: If you have a lingering problem from the photo in Greg Tracy’s post, The Phoenix Real Read more

October 20, 2006

Realty Reality: Service above and beyond mere real estate with Katie and Bob . . .

by

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

I’ve been trading email this week with a client whose house I listed and sold last week. She’s been under the weather, and I’ve been checking up on her via email and text messaging.

Katie was 19 years old, just barely old enough to sign a contract when she asked Greg to help her find a home two summers ago. I wasn’t a Realtor yet, but remembered her from the stories Greg would tell about how impressed he was with the financial finesse for one so young. He helped her find her house, a charming condo in Scottsdale. He helped her write the offer, so that she was able to buy that house with nothing down and even walk away from the closing with a few hundred dollars left over from her earnest deposit. And after she owned her new home, he accompanied her to meet the head of the self-governed HOA at a meeting they called to greet their newest member and to make sure she understood the “rules.” One of those rules, believe it or not, was that she not get pregnant! Greg introduced the HOA to the Fair Housing Act, so they backed off, but I think the whole experience tarnished Katie’s first home ownership experience.

She never came to feel a part of her community. But inside her own horizontal airspace, Katie made a lovely home for herself and her beautiful new kitten, Bob.

Bob was just about two years old this past summer, when Greg heard from Katie, asking for help selling her house. She had waited patiently as she saw the amazing housing market of last summer, then watched the prices flatten out and even go down a little from what houses were getting last summer, before she was able to sell her house without paying taxes on the capital gain. She had one figure in mind that she thought she could sell her house for and be happy with the profit. But Greg and I encouraged her to ask for more, and about a month later she accepted an offer for that higher amount plus $100 :).

Katie Read more

October 20, 2006

Arizona ranks fourth for new jobs totals . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The Business Journal of Phoenix:

Arizona added 119,200 jobs between over the last 12 months and 5,500 new jobs between August and September of this year, according to new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Those year-over-year jobs numbers rank fourth in the U.S. behind only Florida, Texas and California. Those states have far larger populations than Arizona.

Arizona posted larger September 2005 to September 2006 job gains than more populous states such as New York and Massachusetts.

Arizona also had the third-highest percentage job growth over the last two years, behind only Nevada and Utah. Arizona had held one of the top two spots for some time.

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October 20, 2006

The Divorced Commission and the MLS: Building a much better home search tool . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, carrying on from the idea of the Divorced Commission — a condition whereby, by some means, the buyer’s broker’s compensation has been divorced from the listing agreement — what are the implications for the Multiple Listings Service model of propagating real estate listings?

As we are seeing, divorcing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listings agent’s compensation has salutary consequences with respect to the agency relationships of both sellers and buyers and with the cooperation of agents. By getting rid of the doctrine of procuring cause, we eliminate the need for high secrecy among agents.

The practice the NAR calls “cooperation” is actually a metaphor for a graduated hostility. Because there are two “sides” built into the listing commission, the short-term pecuniary self-interest of the listing broker is to keep both “sides” to himself. The idea of procuring cause is a way of inducing “cooperation” by delimiting and circumscribing what we might describe as the leonine avarice of the listing broker.

But in a condition of Divorced Commissions, the listing agent never has access to more than one side of the transaction (except in a disclosed dual agency). The buyer chooses his own representation, and compensates his agent from his own side of the ledger. The issue of procuring cause has become moot.

Moreover, an unrepresented seller has no need to worry about compensating the agent of a represented buyer. In the same way, an unrepresented buyer isn’t compelled to compensate the listing agent for advice and counsel he does not receive.

These benefits carry over to the MLS as well.

Consider this excellent harangue by Jay Thompson:

Pardon my rant…ARMLS (Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service) drives me insane! There are “rules and policies” that every ARMLS member must follow. Failure to do so can (and should) result in a fine for each infraction. Here’s the thing that just drives me batty:

Real estate agent contact info in the public remarks section. It SHOULD be a flagrant violation. Why? Because I share a consumer version of the MLS listing with buyer clients and prospects. So I send a client/prospect an MLS listing, and right there plain as day Read more

October 20, 2006

Online searches fun but offer too few details

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). This is the every-other-week softer-side-of-Greg column. The fireworks will resume next week.

Online searches fun but offer too few details

Have you played with any of the national real estate search engines? You’ve probably been to Realtor.com, but you may not have made time for RealEstate.Yahoo.com.

Two new entrants can be fun to play with: Trulia.com and PropSmart.com. Because these systems don’t have access to MLS systems, they depend on voluntarily submitted listings.

Ultimately, though, national real estate sites throw away too much detail to offer more than an exploratory glimpse into the homes they list.

What do I mean? Is the roof shingle, tile or slate? Is that pool I can see dimly in the gee-whiz satellite photo in-ground or above-ground?

I don’t even like locally available consumer-level MLS access. Some systems provide more detail than others, but there is nothing like the kind of control that comes from having full access to hundreds of unique data fields. If you can’t search to a very short list of high-probability candidates, one of which is the home you will end up buying, what you have is not a home search but a wish book.

If you’re doing a transcontinental relocation, you need more search power than you currently have available. At a minimum, you need a Realtor to feed you more rigorous results than you can get on your own. Moreover, you probably wouldn’t know how to do the search you want done anyway. The idea that Realtors have lost control of the MLS is absurd. If you want to make that data dance the way I do, you have to do it as much as I do.

The other end of this is that for a local search, a buyer doesn’t need much from the MLS to pick out her next house. She might have picked it out years ago and is just waiting for it to come onto the market. This is why an $800,000 house may actually entail less labor for the Realtor than a $200,000 house, because the home search doesn’t have very much to Read more

October 19, 2006

Defining the Divorced Commission: A short-hand term for understanding alternative real estate compensation models . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I just spent a very informative hour on the phone with Jeff Brown, and I want to summarize what I took away from our conversation.

First, Jeff has a very different understanding of the term “co-broke” compared to the way it is used in Arizona. When we went to essentially 100% buyer-brokerage for residential real estate, we kept the term “co-broke” to mean the compensation that would be paid to the buyer’s broker — even though the buyer’s broker is never a sub-agent of the listing broker or the seller and represents only the buyer.

Jeff writes explicit contract language to make pellucid his exclusive buyer’s agency and is also taking his compensation from the buyer. What the listing agent chooses to do about the portion of the sales commission set aside for any cooperating broker is between the listing agent and the seller.

I would describe that as an instance of what I want to call Divorced Commissions. The lingering idea of subordination — seller oversees listing broker who oversees cooperating broker — is completely eliminated, at least from the buyer’s side of the ledger. The buyer contracts for and compensates his own representative.

Similarly, writing the listing agreement to concede any shared sales commission directly to the buyer effects the same sort of divorce. We are doing this with one listing right now, and I gather that Ardell has just done something similar.

This again is a form of Divorced Commissions. Even though in this instance any buyer’s agent’s commission is originating in the listing agreement, neither the lister nor the seller are attempting to use these funds to advance the seller’s interests at the expense of the buyer’s.

Nota bene: The original purpose of encapsulating the cooperating broker’s commission within the listing broker’s commission was to align everyone’s interests with the seller’s interests and against the buyer’s interests. The cooperating broker working with the buyer was compensated for introducing the buyer to the seller and for actively working against the buyer’s interests in the seller’s behalf.

You might argue that, at least in Arizona, where sub-agency is no longer practiced for residential real estate, the Read more

October 19, 2006

Ahem! How disaffected Californians find gold in Arizona . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Retail Traffic Magazine, a reverse goldrush of Californians:

With cheaper housing and job growth to be found through the rest of the Southwest, Californians are conducting a reverse gold rush to Arizona, Nevada and Texas. And California-based retail developers and investors are following suit. That’s part of what’s behind projections that populations in Nevada and Arizona will double in the next 25 years, growing from 2.3 million and 5.7 million to 4.3 million and 10.7 million. In fact, three out of five new residents moving to Las Vegas and Phoenix each year come from California.

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October 19, 2006

Ask the Broker: How do I figure out if this deal makes sense . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a question that encompasses all of my favorite real estate homilies: Every real estate problem is essentially financial. Definitive answers require calculation. Competent adults can agree to anything. And: When buying or selling real estate as a principal, it’s good to have a real estate license.

I am currently selling my house and have been talking to realtors.

We have seen the comps and our house should probably go for about $290,000. We have a friend that we asked if she wanted to buy our house. She looked at it and told her sister (who is a real estate agent) that it was for sale. Her sister called us and wants to buy our house as an investment. So we essentially found the buyer ourselves. She is offering us an immediate buy with a selling price of $280,000. The question is… She wants us to pay a 5% realtor commission and all the closing costs. She said it’s a good deal because we won’t have to worry about open houses and then maybe the house won’t sell for months. We could sell right now and rent back until we are ready to move in Jan. I would think that since we are theoretically selling the house ourselves (we found the buyer) then why should we pay her a fee? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is ultimately a net proceeds problem, but we’ll come back to that.

First, the fact that your buyer is a licensee matters. She can take compensation for the transfer of real property and then apply that to the costs of transferring that property, a very sweet advantage. When I buy an MLS listed property, I go in with a 3% advantage over an unlicensed buyer. Commission income is taxable whether taken in cash or in kind, but my entry (or exit) costs are essentially reduced by the amount of the commission.

Second, whether or not you pay commission in this circumstance is a matter of mutual agreement. Your buyer wants to structure the deal with a commission for her in order to have that money available in the escrow Read more

October 18, 2006

Arizonans too dumb to come in from the rain . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, wait. That can’t be right. There’s no rain. But people in Arizona are much too dumb to appreciate a really good load of slush on a pot-holed freeway — except they don’t call them freeways in the lands where the slush flows. Here’s one thing that’s certain: Those sun-fried Zonies don’t have the sense it takes to live where taxes are high and birth rates are low. What could they be thinking…?

I’m always happy to trumpet the news when Arizona turns up first on lists for in-migration, business formation, job creation, etc., so — fair is fair — today comes news of a study that claims that Arizona is the dumbest state in the Union.

The top five? Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maine.

Are you sensing a trend here? You might think that it’s amazingly bad weather that makes a state smart, but then why New Jersey and not New Hampshire. Could it be that low taxes makes even an otherwise ideal state stupid?

Not to worry. The standard that determines how smart or dumb a state is is how friendly or unfriendly that state is to unionized school-teachers. And by that standard, Arizona is not the “dumbest” state in the Union — more’s the pity . . .

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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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