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Category: Marketing (page 178 of 191)

September 22, 2006

Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce: Residential real estate rebounding, commercial real estate strong, population growth unabated

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Two articles in today’s Arizona Republic on the state of the local economy as detailed by the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, both largely good news. Catherine Reagor continues her slow apprehension of the idea that this year is not last year. And R.L. Brown advises us all to adapt to the housing slowdown — even though it might be ending.

For Market Basket resale homes so far this month, prices are up over August. Prices are up for the first 21 days of September, as compared with the first 21 days of August — a better comparison, since most home sales close near the end of the month. Sales volume for those 21 days is up significantly, but so is the average Days on Market. Builder’s spec-home inventory will be substantially reduced by the end of the month, so it is conceivable that we could be six months away from something like a normal market.

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September 22, 2006

Buying a new-built home? How much is your agent getting paid?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Protect yourself from agent bonus fees by builders

Are you buying a home? How much is your agent getting paid?

If you’re buying resale, the answer is probably 3 percent, and possibly even less, although there may be buyer’s agent bonuses that your agent should have disclosed to you.

But what if you’re buying a new home? Right now, builders are paying agents 5 percent, 6 percent, 8 percent — even 10 percent of the base price of your home.

The builders are paying for the introduction. They don’t expect — or even want — your agent to represent your interests.

They’re paying so much right now for two reasons: They want to sell as much inventory as possible between now and the end of the fiscal quarter on September 30th. And they hope that by offering very high commissions, they can induce your agent to persuade you to buy at one subdivision over another.

Your agent may be faithfully representing your interests, but the objective of an exorbitant commission is to induce the agent to betray your interests in the builder’s behalf.

Here’s the kicker: Every cent of that commission will be paid by you. The buyer pays for everything in the sale of the home. If the builders were offering a 2 percent buyer’s agent’s commission instead of 10 percent they could charge you 8 percentage points less for the home, or give you 8 percentage points more in upgrades, or pay your down payment or closing costs, or buy down your interest rate.

How can you protect yourself?

First, stipulate in your employment agreement with your agent that all commissions and bonuses will be disclosed to you.

Secondly, agree in advance on the maximum compensation to be paid to your agent, with all the rest of any sales commission or bonuses going toward your down payment or other costs.

How much is enough?

New home builders make all the rules. No matter how much your agent might want to work on your behalf, there is a hard limit to how much the builder will permit.

Except in extraordinary circumstances, I think 2 Read more

September 21, 2006

ZillowNews round-up . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Under the Zillow: The Tax-man cometh…

My two favorite bits, in two days of coverage:

Lenderama doesn’t need accuracy, he needs a Zillow-based tickler to stay in front of his clients.

MyZillow allows you to make “estimates” of what a property is worth. The estimate takes Zillow’s data and adjusts for specific information you know about the home. Then they generate a monthly email letting you know what those values are doing, while adjusting for your estimate.

Mortgage Brokers are in a unique position to make these estimates in a way that real estate agents cannot. Every time a broker does a refi, they can use the appraisal to work up the estimate to match the real value. Then you can save that estimate in MyZillow. You get a monthly report on that homes value. Now you know about how much the home has appreciated, and how much of the mortgage is likely paid off. With this data, you have a pretty good idea of your existing client base’s equity, and can market to them accordingly.

Based on this information, you could send out reminders that they may have reached 80% LTV, and should look into getting their MI dropped. Or, you could send out offers on HELOC’s, or Cash Outs. You could give them a heads up that properties are dropping in their neighborhood. Whatever you do, it’s just another way to help keep in touch with past (and hopefully future) clients.

Sheer brilliance.

And Sellsius&176; points out that Zillow.com has drawn a bright red circle around its own Achilles’ Heel:

If an owner gets to change the zestimate, guess what? It sits there right next to Zillow’s. Now what? Now we really need a professional more than ever to untangle these worms.

Overnight Zillow has gone from a veil of pseudo-scientific infallibility to a side-by-side pissing contest that can only be settled by a professional referee.

Nice going…

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September 21, 2006

Ask the Broker: Why should I take a buyer’s agent along to buy a new home . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This question came at an appropriate time. My column in tomorrow’s Arizona Republic deals with this topic:

Last year it was so hard to buy a new home. We would have had to camp out in some builders’ parking lots just to have a chance to be in a lottery to see if we could qualify to buy their house! But now it seems the builders are are giving really good deals. And I don’t need a realtor to find new houses that the builders are selling. So, is there any reason why I should use a realtor when I find a house that I think I want to buy?

I love this picture:

Those people are waiting on a line to take a raffle ticket that will afford one or two lucky winners the opportunity to put a deposit down on a house that will not have been built for ten months or so. The photo was taken last June, in the midst of the buying frenzy that was going on in the Phoenix area at that time.

I was at another subdivision at about the same time where a couple was living outside the sales office in their mobile home. One or the other was continuously waiting on line on the off chance that the builder might release a lot for sale.

All of these folks were owner-occupants. Investors were banned from new home subdivisions at that time, and no investor would wait day-upon-day for a chance at a lot, anyway. The investors were buying resale homes, where all you needed was cash and fast information.

Those days are done. Resale inventory hovers at around 47,000 homes right now, where normal is somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000, and new-home builders have their own excess inventory to work through. For one thing, their demand projections were wrong, so they planned more lot releases than they had buyers for. Add to this the slow sales in resale — which means that many would-be move-up buyers have had to cancel their contracts.

For now, builders have a surplus of ‘spec’ homes — houses that have been specified, planned, permitted Read more

September 20, 2006

Radio daze: Phoenix-area real estate webloggers make a five theater assault on the market . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Three Phoenix-area webloggers, Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, John Wake of Arizona Real Estate Notebook, and Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog, helped turn a radio show into a five-media event: The radio broadcast itself, listener call-in questions, live weblogging with listener call-in and write-in questions, an on-line podcast and static weblogging after-the-fact. KJZZ-FM radio host Steve Goldstein and producer Paul Atkinson pulled the whole event together. Economist Alan McGuire participated as well, along with call-in guests and pre-taped segments.

The topic was the Phoenix real estate market: Is it a bubble or simply a market correction? For the most part, the bubble contingency wasn’t represented, but there was a great deal of very detailed economic information coming in from all sources.

KJZZ has made its own web page available, along with a podcast of the radio broadcast. Paul Atkinson told me that the live weblogging was very active. The folks at the radio station were very excited about the vibrancy of the multi-media experience. I can’t speak for the other webloggers — I know they’ll speak for themselves — but I had a blast.

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September 20, 2006

Kitchen remodel: $10,000. Bathroom addition: $7,500. Ocean view: Priceless . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kris Berg at The San Diego Home Blog:

I have met with sellers who were quick to point out that they have an ocean view. From the guest bath. While balancing precariously on a stack of books. In high heels. With a telescope. Do you think they just might add the “water view” description to their property?

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September 20, 2006

Zillow.com bites the wrong bullet: In preference to telling one simple truth, it will propagate thousands of tiny lies . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a simple fact, one of the most important reasons why homeowners need professional representation to market their houses: Diogenes himself could not find an objective seller. It’s not enough to detail everything that’s wrong with the neighbor’s homes, the more important job, in a listing appointment, is to tell the Realtor why this home is worth much more than mere facts would indicate. The average American is slightly above average, and the average American bathroom remodel is worth tens of thousands of dollars more than you ever might have guessed.

This is to be expected. It’s simply not in our nature to discount for subjectivity where we are most in need of such a discounting. My kid’s smarter than your kid, and Helen herself is but a shadow to my best-beloved. This is only too human.

So: Zillow.com has a problem. People treat its silly Zestimates as though they were appraisals, even though anyone should know they can’t be appraisals. You could say caveat lector, but readers of Zillow.com’s web site have to dig pretty deep to find any caveats. What they find instead are big type and goofy pictures entreating you to… treat its silly Zestimates as though they were appraisals…

There is an obvious solution to this problem: Put up a disclaimer in even bigger type that says: “Ahem! A silly Zestimate is not an appraisal, which cannot be done without an objective, on-site inspection of a property.” That would be honest, and it would be sufficient to advise Zillow.com users that an Automated Valuation Method cannot reliably establish the value of real property.

This they will not do, possibly because it would cause those users to wonder why the hell they’re bothering with a tool that is admittedly useless. So rather than admit the nakedly obvious truth, Zillow.com has elected instead to propagate thousands of tiny lies.

In a comment posted here on September 1, David G. from Zillow.com broke this news:

Lastly, just a heads-up that we’ve decided to let homeowners edit and publish corrected home facts on Zillow.

That shoe finally dropped last night. Rich Barton, Zillow.com’s chairman and CEO, made the Read more

September 19, 2006

Here’s a little slide show to play with . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Start from this page. What you should see is a self-running slide show of seven photos and their captions with manual controls. Now go to your browser’s preferences and turn off Javascript. Refresh the page. Now you should get the same seven photos and captions stacked up vertically. More than 98% of all web browsers have Javascript by now, but the super-lo-tech version also serves as the search-engine-spider-readable version of the text.

(If either of these things don’t happen, let me know. Also, don’t forget to turn Javascript back on.)

I didn’t build the slide show. I have one that I built years ago, but this is a lot richer. We’re integrating this with our content management tools so that every new page we build for a listing from now on will be built as this kind of either/or slide show. All of the pages will be site/appearance-independent, also, because I want to build all of my new sites as WordPress weblogs. The look and feel of these slide-show pages will come with the weblog template.

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September 19, 2006

Howling about real estate on the radio . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I will be one of the guests on tomorrow’s broadcast of KJZZ’s Here and Now radio program. One of the big names of Phoenix real estate analysis will be there, as well, either R.L. Brown or Elliott Pollack. ASU’s Dr. Jay Butler cannot be there, more’s the pity. Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, will be a guest blogger, stirring the pot by keyboard.

The topic: The Phoenix-area real estate market.

The show will be broadcast on Wednesday from 11 am to 12 Noon on KJZZ 91.5 FM. A podcast will be available on Here and Now’s web page soon afterward.

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September 19, 2006

How many battalions does Google have . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Google Blogoscoped, Google has pulled the plug entirely on the Belgian newspaper that is suing it for theft of content. Whatever the merits of the case, acting out of caprice or spite while a judge’s gavel is poised over your head is dumb. This could be the tech’s Maginot Line, where Web 2.0 meets Government 0.99…

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September 19, 2006

For real estate promotion, the business card form factor is a tiny little workhorse . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Rory Siems at Laguna Niguel Real Estate Blog has a post on using business cards for collateral promotion. I think this is a fantastic idea. In cost-benefit terms, the business card form factor may be the perfect print ad medium. It’s pretty lousy for conveying a lot of information, but it is an extremely portable, pocketable format for inciting interest and directing that interest to where the details can be delivered in detail.

We use business cards whenever we want to target-market homes or individuals. I can hold my own hand for the design — kludgey but proficient — so we can turn a new set of cards around in 48 hours or less. They’re inexpensive to buy, to ship and to distribute, so we can put 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 cards on the street in no time at all.

A primary application is ‘Open House’ announcements. We don’t do ‘Just Listed’ cards. We’d rather have potential buyers come and see the house for themselves. If we can clearly identify the neighborhoods where our buyer should be living, we’ll broadcast ‘Open House’ cards house-by-house. The cards above are typical ‘Open House’ cards. We always use the back of the card. The back copy you’re seeing here is very similar to the back copy we use on our personal business cards.

We do do ‘Just Sold’ cards, because we want for the nearby neighbors to apprehend the quality of effort we bring to our listings. Every card we do for a listing will promote that home’s custom web site, of course. The flyer boxes we use have a special pocket for business cards near the top. That way, if someone doesn’t want to take a flyer, they can take a card instead. Often, we will use the home’s card in the ‘Take One’ flyer stand inside the house, as well.

The image above to the right is the back of a ‘Just Sold’ card. I believe in the power of the written word. Almost always with a card like this, I’m going to use the front face to sell the specific idea and the back Read more

September 18, 2006

Is Real Estate 2.0 nothing more than a cabal of cheaper and more-efficient moral midgets . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m up to my elbows in Ajax (“You’re soaking in it!”), but I don’t want this to get washed away in the suds: With respect to Redfin’s assertion of propriety, Kevin Boer at In The Trenches (blogrolled) provides a plausible explanation for how Redfin might be so adept at identifying impropriety.

An idea has been bugging me, and I don’t know what to do about it. Realtors are too much identified with The Real Estate King, the cheesy, sleazy used car salesmen. But there is another image of the Realtor, one among those we used to call The Better Men — maybe stodgy, maybe stuffy, but a man of firm and fixed principles. Real estate 2.0 (come and get me!) might bring us greater efficiencies, but if it brings us even worse behavior — how is that a benefit? Zillow.com whispers the truth and shouts the lie. The listings aggregators steal content like bums in Grand Central Station mining the coin returns on pay-phones. And Redfin.com seemingly devotes its every living moment to making street criminals look like men of character. This is not an improvement.

If you think about this at all, please think carefully. I am up to my elbows in Ajax — with which I intend to cleanse Phoenix of every last greasy remnant of The Real Estate King. But we gain absolutely nothing if we remake our industry as a cabal of cheaper and more-efficient moral midgets. The realty.bots might be famous and they might have a lot of money behind them. But if they are our future, we might as well have changed nothing…

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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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