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Category: Marketing (page 190 of 191)

July 29, 2006

Catching up — for now . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I live in Safari, an exceptionally adept tabbed web browser. In consequence, I can pile up page after page of stuff, each crammed with semi-organized tabs, that I intend to deal with later. Well, fast is the new slow and later is now — at least for the moment.

How will the TruZillia APIs make money? Volume! Baron Briefs has a richer answer:

My initial thought on why each would do this: By opening up Zestimates and Zindices to the masses, Zillow is following in the foot steps of major players like Amazon and Google…build an API, let others innovate off the technology, and then acquire the best of breed. Remember, they recently picked up an extra $25 million to “broaden their product offering”. As far as TruliaMap, it’s likely an attempt to win over agents and brokers who haven’t warmed up to the idea of their website being crawled and scraped. Now, they get a cool widget for their website and Trulia gets access to more listings.

Galen Ward at Rain City Guide has more, including sightings of the Great Kong, the 900 pound gorilla that is Google. And: Will brokers embrace Trulia’s maps?:

In other news, Trulia is now letting you post their listings on your site. They say it’s for agents and brokers, but do agents and brokers really want to steer people away from their web sites? If a visitor clicks on More details… they are whisked to the listing agent’s website. I predict that it will mostly be used by bloggers and non-real estate people.

The Real Estate Newsblog takes exception, sotto voce, to to my criticisms of Zillow.com’s epistemology:

I guess a significant problem for Zillow at the moment is credibility. Some suggest that Zillow’s “Zestimates” are way off base, but since they’re still in beta, it’s probably slightly premature to be overly critical at this point, notwithstanding the near $60 million they’ve got in seed money.

In fact, for the reason I named, Zillow.com cannot ever produce a reliable evaluation of a house. This is not a matter of refinement, it’s a fundamental defect in the epistemological model they’re working from. Read more

July 29, 2006

The M-m-m-mole . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Catherine Reagor of the Arizona Republic actually acknowledges that comparing this year to last year may not be an ideally-informative strategy:

Although the Valley’s housing market is definitely slowing, comparisons to last year’s frenzied sales pace and appreciation gains aren’t a perfect indicator. During 2005, metro Phoenix home prices soared 50 percent and houses were selling within days.

We call this tactic The Mole, in honor of Dr. Evil (who now runs a BubbleBlog from which he hopes to extract milllllllions of dollars). The alleged news is that new-build permits are down from last year. Big surprise. The actual news is that 29,943 have been pulled in the Valley through the end of June, which would have been a record-setting pace were it not for last year. Irresponsible reporting? You bet. Alas, we have no other kind in Phoenix.

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July 28, 2006

We got on-line real estate document management for free . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As with realPING, we’re pinching the best ninety percent of SureClose, too:

SureClose delivers every listing, sale, closing and/or loan file — and every document — online and on CD-ROM at closing. Your staff simply faxes or scans your files & documents to your secure, branded SureClose? web site. Files are then available 24/7 for review and management enterprise-wide.

Not faxing, scanning and uploading with a form, but the rest of it: Every doc on-line in a secure web site available to principals, their vendors and the brokerage, all ready to be dumped to a CD-ROM at the end of the transaction. Bullet-proof access to all documents for our clients and bullet-proof uploading and maintenance for the Realtor, all through the power of PHP.

Can’t beat the price — and the funny part is that our really good programmer is off having a teenager’s summer…

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July 28, 2006

Who should be shuddering . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…about Trulia.com casting their net of free map-mash-ups all over the place? How about Redfin.com? Unless they have another fish in their pocket, they are now head-to-head competitors with ZipRealty.com, HelpUSell.com, Assist2Sell.com, etc.

Bottom-feeders of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your investment capital!

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July 28, 2006

TruZillow and the dis-form-ation of real estate web sites . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Color me grateful, but one benefit of the Trulia/Zillow free APIs for Realtor web sites is that we should see the end of the sleazy practice of making dewy-eyed anonymous-by-preference Google-borne immigrants fill out a form to search the MLS listings.

This crap is straight out of Dan Gooder, but, just as less is more, Gooder is worse. Acolytes of The Church of Seth know better. Interruption marketing (what Trulia and Zillow plan to do) is bad, but hostage-taking is insufferable.

It’s strictly a matter of serendipity that Seth Godin has the same first name as Cain and Abel’s other brother, but here is a Golden Rule more precious than gold itself: If the tables were turned, how would you want to be treated? If you — out of curiosity or because you want to invest in another town or because you want to move your widowed mother into a better neighborhood — visit another Realtor’s web site, do you want to surrender your personal details just to surf the local MLS? If not, then why would you do this to your own potential clients?

Luckily for the rest of us, we probably won’t have to wait for the Gooderites to discover a better morality. The TruZillow sites will be free — as Stewart Brand always wanted them to be — and the sites that continue to cower behind Berlin Wall-like contact-info forms will be neglected.

And — it just occurs to me — the Truliactive and Zillowized sites will probably be linked from Trulia.com and Zillow.com, which has SEO implications. And now I’m interested…

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July 28, 2006

“There’s a reason they call it a ‘buyers’ market”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Catherine Reagor in the Arizona Republic runs down all the bad news, but there is a better lens for interpreting this information. Take note of M. Anthony Carr in Realty Times:

Buyers scurry, afraid of buying at the height of the market.

So why aren’t builders running scared? Because the underlying principles of a good market remain sound in the midst of the market fears. While nationally, the industry has cooled to “more sustainable levels,” according to the National Association of Home Builders, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports strong job gains in many of the fastest-growing states, with 37 states exceeding their pre-recession peak levels of employment in 2005.”

The group recently released a mid-year housing report on its real estate trends website, HousingEconomics.com. A cooling of the market this year will still result in the third highest level of housing starts in the last few years.

That’s why you keep seeing building projects going up. Definitely, not as many houses are being constructed in 2006 as last year, but the NAHB report points to several positive market growth indicators in various regions across the country.

Job growth is continuing upward. Unemployment is dropping. Businesses continue to expand and economists across the country continue to estimate that the need for more housing will stretch beyond the current inventory surplus.

The National Association of Realtors still is holding to 2006 being another very strong year — the third highest on record. NAHB members are still bull on the housing market. What we’re seeing in ’06, it seems, is a transition year. For buyers who have no choice but to buy because of social or lifestyle reasons (birth of new baby, marriage, retirement, in-laws moving in, new job, relocation, etc.) they will buy now and unwittingly pick up a great deal.

For buyers who are too skittish about the market, they will miss a financial boosting opportunity. In markets where it has normalized (D.C., Miami, Chicago, Phoenix) buyers who buy based on rock-hard solid economic evidence, will be excited in a few years that they bought a house low and now stand to earn a handsome profit a few Read more

July 28, 2006

The buyer can — and should — negotiate the buyer’s agent’s compensation . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My phone hasn’t rung yet, but my ears are already burning. My column in today’s Arizona Republic: Buyer should negotiate compensation for agent. (A more-permanent link.) This is Ardell’s turf, of course, although my take on The Big Picture is somewhat different. In any case, I expect to have my ears — and, heaven help me, not my hide — well warmed today.

Buyer should negotiate compensation for agent

Last week we established that the buyer pays for everything in the purchase of a home. Why, then, does the seller negotiate the sales commissions?

The short answer is, because that’s the way it’s always been done. The longer answer is not as pretty: Historically, only sellers were represented in a real estate transaction, and, despite efforts at reform, the buyer is still often treated as a second-class citizen.

Consider the buyer’s agent’s bonus, for example. It will be there as plain as day in the listing: “Seller to pay buyer’s agent a bonus of $5,000 for successful close of escrow by Aug. 31.”

What does that say? It says in the plainest possible language that both the seller and the listing agent believe that the buyer’s agent really works for the seller, not for the buyer. The objective of the bonus is to induce the buyer’s agent to push the buyer into buying the home that is offering the bonus, rather than another.

The goal, motive and purpose of a buyer’s agent’s bonus are to give the buyer’s agent an incentive to betray his agency. His fiduciary duty is to the buyer. The seller and the listing agent are using the bonus to “buy” his fidelity.

So what should a buyer’s agent do, when showing a home for which a bonus is offered? Disclose the bonus to the buyer and commit to either waiving the bonus or passing it through to the buyer. There should be no doubts in the buyer’s mind about the agent’s loyalties.

But there’s more to this issue: If the seller can negotiate compensation with the listing agent, why can’t the buyer negotiate compensation with the buyer’s agent?

The short answer is, because it’s never been Read more

July 27, 2006

A map mash-up on steroids: Building the perfect beast . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The software specification shown hear harkens back to this weblog post in reaction to The Future of Real Estate Marketing‘s remarks on ShackYack.com, a particulary robust real estate seach tool using a Google Maps mash-up for its interface. Cathy and I designed this as a futher elaboration on the ShackYack.com model. Given that maps are now free (shudder!), there’s is no reason to hoard this design, and every good reason to throw it out to the world in the hopes that someone will implement these ideas.

PROBLEM: MLS search systems (at least ours) are inadequate. The programmers aim for easy-to-use interfaces with no SQL-like access to the data.

PROBLEM: End-user search systems (like IDX) are inadequate, too dumbed down and unsatisfying.

PROBLEM: Neither sort of search is comprehensive; only MLS listings are shown.

PROBLEM: Either sort of search leaves too many unanswered questions.

OPPORTUNITY: A search system like ShackYack.com is very satisfying, even if it is still inadequate and limited.

SOLUTION: Mash it all even more: A ShackYack-like interface to a high-octane search engine (extensible on the fly so as not to be too daunting) of both MLS and XML-fed or user-entered FSBO listings, with on-line shopping-like features, side-by-side comparison features, user selection and exclusion, and, finally Zillowish comping of the short list against active and sold listings — all of this still and always reflected on the ShackYack-like interface.

I. Search. Full SQL/RDBMS, reflected in the user-interface.

II. Database. Full local MLS plus any acquirable XML feeds of FSBOs, with a form for do-it-yourself one-off FSBOs. ShackYack is using shades of gray to reflect relative price, but it would make more sense to me to use separate colors and shades of those colors to reflect types and relationships of listings.

III. Search interface. Basic search always visible, with pop-outs to add or remove more robust types of search categories. If some MLS data is limited to members, as it is now, certain search categories would be available only to logged-in MLS members. The trouble with a ShackYack-like search is that too many pertinent criteria are missing. It’s fun to play with, but for a true home search, you’d be Read more

July 27, 2006

Color me stupid, but . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…I don’t get it.

The Future of Real Estate Marketing avers that Trulia.com’s release of its map interface is a shudder-inducing disaster for other developers. This on the heels of yesterday’s reporting on Zillow.com’s release of its API to individual brokerages. There’s more news on both announcements at RealtyThoughts.

Is this exciting news for Realtors? Possibly. Gee whiz technology is like CheezWhiz — a little goes a long way. There may actually be a qualified, motivated real estate buyer who says, “If only I could see all the properties on an interactive map.” If so, that person is only surrounded by eleven other qualified, motivated buyers saying, “If only there were more photos…”

That’s as may be, and this stuff will surely be deployed. If I were Trulia.com, I would hook into that Zillow.com back-end and disintermediate the behotches: All the usual Truila details-in-a-box plus the completely unreliable Zestimate. If Zillow won’t roll over, someone else will.

But this is my question: How the hell are either of these two quivering little firms going to make money on this? “Advertising!” they shout in unison, but the advertising is on their home pages, where these APIs aren’t. Each one has a little click-back button to take self-selected volunteers back to the home planet. But if I’m getting the milk for free at LargelyUnobjectionableAtlantaHomes.com, why the heck would I go to the dairy?

If anybody’s shuddering it could be because they’re getting the not-too-subtle idea that what the “2.0” in Web 2.0 means is that investors will be shooting themselves in both feet this time…

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July 27, 2006

“You’ve got mail — and egg on your face”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Yet another dumb tool, LeadAlarm, this one cited by the Inman blog.

The basic functionality Realtors should already be doing with server-side programming or just with rules from an email client. The “gee whiz” voice technology is a bug, not a feature: Voice is a lousy way to deliver data originating in a form. Another three dollar egg for desperate, gullible Realtors…

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July 27, 2006

Get potent ping power for the price of a promo . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read about realPING on the Zillow.com weblog’s coverage of Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. I never think about something until I do. This morning Cathy mentioned the idea of having something on our web pages that would induce prospects to contact us. We have a big phone number on the BloodhoundRealty.com website, but she was looking for something at once sexier and more hi-tech. I did my best not to think about this all day, and then, when my thoughts should have lightly turned to thoughts of slumber, I saw the realPING page.

This is really dumb technology. I never know for sure how much other people understand of software, but I can reverse engineer just about anything I see running — in the abstract, anyway. Understanding an algorithm is a lot easier than replicating it — unless it’s something really dumb like realPING.

I just wrote the basic functionality. The “Get Tracking!” button in the sidebar took longer to make than did GetTracking.php. All I have right now is the basic paging function, not the on-and-off for business hours business, but that’s simple to mimic, also. What I have is a clean-room perfect clone, reverse engineered solely from the descriptive promotional material made available on realPING’s home page. (I didn’t even drill down to sub-pages.)

Here’s my offer:

I will make my PHP files for this function available to you as PromoWare: You put me in your blogroll and the software is yours. No cost, no further obligation, no contracts, no monthly fees, no salesman will call. However: You hold your own hand for installation and support.

To take advantage of this offer, you need two things:

  1. The site this runs from must have PHP installed on it with the mail functions turned on
  2. You need a mobile phone or other device that can receive email or epages sent as email from PHP

Ninety percent of everybody reading this will have both of these things, but if you don’t know, the person you check with is the one who should do the installation and support hand-holding.

I wish I had more time to write software. The other Read more

July 26, 2006

The elemental aimlessness of MLS-lessness . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Citing an article from the Boston Globe, the Real Estate Investing For Real bog insists that:

There should be a system where anyone, real estate agents, FSBOs, etc., can list or search for properties.

Great news! Such a tool exists. It’s called the classified section of the newspaper. Not so cheap to list, but searching costs around half-a-buck. Even better, CraigsList.com is free in most markets.

The good news is, the writer already has what he wants — in vast abundance: CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera. The bad news is, the writer already has what he wants — vastly abundant free or nearly-free listing portals, each of which has its own data structure and feed format. The geniuses who are bringing us all this cleverly-designed white noise don’t actually understand the problems the MLS was created to solve: open listings and the difficulty of coordinating cooperation among agents from different brokerages. So what do we find on CraigsList.com, Trulia.com, PropSmart.com, et infinitely cetera? Open listings and no provision for coordinating cooperation among agents. O!, Brave New World, simultaneously disintermediated and reambiguated. It’s hard to regard this as an improvement.

What the writer really wants is something very much like the MLS, but without exclusive membership, without the mandatory unilateral offer of compensation and without the intellectual property rights of listing brokers. You could say he wants to eat his cake and still have it, but the sad part is, he just might get his wish. Even as loose as we are about internet businesses, I’m pretty sure the Feds would regard such a thing arising privately as collusion. But if the Feds ram it down our throats instead…

The cure for what the writer thinks ails us might be a lot worse than the disease.

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July 26, 2006

If you can’t tell the truth, tell a Big Lie . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com cannot tell the truth about home values, so it is releasing an Application Programmer Interface to spread its misinformation far and wide.

Who do they hope to enlist with their API? Working Realtors, the people who know best that Zillow.com’s property evaluations are necessarily and unavoidably false.

Could the strategy work? Hide and watch.

Here’s a better question: Could this be the fifth column of a triumphalist Web 2.0, where obvious falsehoods are so widely propagated as to be accepted as truth?

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July 26, 2006

How dare you object that the Little Red Fin wants to eat the bread it didn’t bother to bake?!?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Snipped from the speech Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman made yesterday to a Congressional subcommittee:

that we must register our users

He said a lot more than this, of course, and you might go read it all. But much of what he said sounded to me like complaints that Redfin has been expected to hew to the same real estate laws as every other brokerage in Washington or California. The quoted matter in particular, “that we must register our users”, sounds as if Kelman is objecting to even the most minimal interpretation of procuring cause. Too late, we learn the unhappy consequences of not teaching The Little Red Hen in the schools…

Marlow Harris at 360Digest.com has much, much more.

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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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