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Category: Marketing (page 37 of 191)

August 17, 2010

Master Seller-Financing To Beat The Mortgage Market Freeze of 2011

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

I’m not so sure I want to play hockey against Bryant Tutas.  He thinks like Wayne Gretsky.

I cautioned about the coming mortgage freeze and asked what agents might do to prepare for it.  I’m a mortgage guy so I think in terms of institutional financing.  I completely forgot about seller-financing.  Bryant Tutas answered:

I’m ready for it. I just listed my 3rd property this month where the seller is offering financing. Seller financing is going to be very popular over the next few years. I’ve also been marketing to foreign investors with cash to spend. Once they purchase a home we turn right around and offer it for sale with financing. It’s a win all the way around.

Are you kidding me?  It’s so time-tested but underutilized it’s brilliant.  I forgot all about it!

What do you know about seller-financing?

First, you have to have a seller with some equity but…. ain’t nobody got no equity no mo’.  What’s a hustler to do?

Foreigners are looking to pay cash for U.S. homes and are finding great bargains at auction.  In San Diego, we see investors buy properties at auction and sell them for 20-35% higher, 60-90 days later.  The problem with some of those properties is that they aren’t appraising.  Seller financing doesn’t require an appraisal nor does it have  those pesky underwriting guidelines.  Bryant Tutas mentioned that he is prospecting foreign investors, to buy properties and sell them with financing terms.

This is the ultimate form of private financing.  Before you embark on this strategy, you might advise your sellers to require the following when considering offers:

  • a tri-merged credit report– you definitely want to check for tax liens, judgments, and large charge-offs.  All of those can become liens on title
  • It’s a good idea to require some income documentation– if your buyer’s housing expense doesn’t exceed 50%, you’re kosher in California but it’s probably a good idea to make sure that all of his/her debts don’t exceed 50% of gross monthly income
  • A down payment is going to assure your buyer has something to lose if the deal goes sour.  I might suggest Read more
August 17, 2010

Nobody Cares About Your M.O. ‘Till They See It’s Skinnin’ Cats Big Time

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

In almost every baseball game you’ll ever see, there comes a point when the starting pitchers run into a situation on which the game’s outcome will likely pivot. Take last night for instance — the Padres/Cubs game in Chicago. Padre’s starting pitcher Keven Correia had a rocky first inning. The first two batters hit safely, resulting in men on 2nd and 3rd with nobody out, and the heart of the order now due up.

Nobody scored.

Kevin went on to pitch shutout ball ’till lifted for a pinch hitter in the seventh inning. That first inning could’ve gone either way. But he skinned that cat in short order. He’s not Bob Gibson, in that he can’t overpower hitters. He gets batters out the old fashioned way — by pitching, not throwing. When the season’s over, Kevin will have won 13-15 games, a total which is distinctly in the upper echelon of major league results.

HIs fastball can be hit by high school players if not located well. His curveball reminds nobody of Sandy Koufax. Yet he keeps skinnin’ more of his share of cats. Why? Cuz even though his ‘stuff’ ain’t hall of fame caliber, he knows how to make the best of what he has, and consistently does what all winning pitchers do, regardless of what they’re throwing. He disrupts batters’ timing. I know this first hand, as I had the pleasure of havin’ the dish once when he was a junior college pitcher in San Diego.

It ain’t rocket science– but a helluva lot easier said than done. It’s analogous to success in real estate brokerage. Those who do what produces consistent results — skin the most cats — win. And to quote all of our grandpas, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Last Thursday I wrote a post about a guy on the east coast who’s been skinnin’ cats at a pretty impressive clip, almost all on the buyer side. (He’ll close 70 sides this year.) Exclusive of any referrals, 100% of his business comes directly from his online efforts, which generate about 7-8,000 leads Read more

August 15, 2010

Me and Claudia and PHP: Using internet real estate marketing to — you know — sell real estate…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So, the Arizona Republic ran an article yesterday on on-line real estate marketing and you will never in a million years guess who they did not call. I never get called for any of those kinds of things — the RaiseTheBarTab kinds of events — even though we’re doing cooler stuff than anyone I know of. I’m not weeping. I’m always very forthcoming with everything I know, but if there is going to be a cadre of Realtors dead set against learning how to do the work I do, I’m more than happy to have them working in my own market.

And I’m not bragging, either. We’re going to have a banner year, for us, in terms of volume of transactions, and we’re kicking the asses of all the canned-software Twitter-fidgets named in the article. But we are digging our way out of a deep hole, and we’re a long way from where I want us to be. I like to brag that we spend almost nothing on marketing, but the fact is that we almost never have any money to spend on marketing. I will put every Realtor in Phoenix on notice: When we have money and staff, we are going to be a force to contend with.

So, even though I don’t issue any Twitter spasms, at least not non-robotically, of late I am putting paid to a lot of new and interesting real estate marketing ideas.

What’s changed? Cathleen is giving me some Claudia time. Claudia Couts is the housekeeper I made Cathleen hire last year. She’s with us for two hours a day, six days a week. She keeps the house down to a manageable level of chaos and takes care of all the pet-maintenance duties. The idea was to open up the time that Cathleen was spending on those chores, and this has been a win-win all around.

Lately I’ve been buried in paperwork, at which I’m horrible, and I had marketing ideas that required small amounts of rote labor — at which I’m also horrible. I thought we might hire a virtual assistant, but Cathleen suggested giving Claudia a Read more

August 14, 2010

Innovation now: I’ve stopped taking buyer’s checks for earnest money, but now I want to stop worrying about wire transfers, too.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m living much of my time right now with my nose pressed right up against one tool or another — listings, DocuSign, the steering wheel, et endlessly cetera. That’s cool, we need the dough, and we can’t make it rain hard enough, fast enough. But by this point I have no idea if something I’m doing is an innovation or not. I’m just dancing as fast as I can.

This topic just came up, and I’m passing it along because I haven’t done that here yet. I know this because I hadn’t done it with my wife and business partner until just now.

Here’s the scoop: I’ve all but stopped taking earnest checks. I’m having almost all of my buyers wire their earnest money deposits directly into title. I never touch anyone’s else’s money — the only known way a real estate broker can be assured of escaping imprisonment.

But that’s not my reason for coming to do things this way. I used to take the check, made out to Chicago or Fidelity or whatever, then schlep it around while I waited for the contract to be executed. Not fun but not onerous — just inefficient.

By now, I do a lot of REOs as rental home investments for out-of-state buyers. I don’t know the name of the title company when we write the contract, and the buyer is back home by the time we need to deposit the funds.

I don’t even talk about checks any longer. I tell the buyer how things work and that I will have title email wiring instructions when we’re ready to rock. Totally transparent, totally arm’s-length, and no one involved in the process says boo.

If the lister is a little too adamant about receiving a PDF of a fax of a scan of a photocopy of a useless check, I will add language like this: “Seller is aware that Buyer will deposit Earnest Money by wire transfer into Title Company, to be determined by Seller, within one business day after Seller’s final acceptance of this Purchase Contract and any incorporated addenda.” (Reminder: I am not your broker.)

It’s the perfect Read more

August 2, 2010

Are you using QR codes on your flyers or signs?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vide:

That says: “Text HOUND9 to 88000.” If you snap a picture of it with a QR-code-reading client on your smart-phone, it should, in three steps or fewer, take you to a DriveBuy Technologies page for one of Cathleen’s short sale listings.

If you like good design, QR codes are plug ugly. But we’re going to start using them on our signs, commencing with the next listing. We often put the DriveBuy copy on a rider, so we’ll add the QR code there — on the order fo five inches square to make for an easy target.

Is anyone else playing with this technology?

August 1, 2010

The Holy Grail of Real Estate Marketing: What Actually Works?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

The only thing this marketing ignoramus can say with unshakeable confidence, is that marketing ain’t sales. The rest I’m not all that sure about. Though to be fair, the more I read, the more I’m confused. So many of those who put bread on the table giving marketing advice, disagree vehemently with each other on so many aspects of their trade. But that’s true in most disciplines, right?

Anywho, the more I read, observe, and try to understand about real estate marketing, the more I wanna ask the one question I think is almost never asked.

Is your marketing, whether in-house or from outside, producing bottom line, as in ‘your banker is happy to see you’ kinda results?

Since I generally couldn’t market my way out of a wet paper bag, I tend to use what works, discarding the rest. I suspect some of what I have discarded, failed due to my poor execution rather than bad marketing advice. Though Lord knows, I’ve paid for some pretty worthless counsel. Here’s what’s on my new menu.

  • Direct mail
  • Warm calls following direct mail
  • Blogging
  • IDX on company website
  • Seminars directed at ‘house’ agents — i.e. Rainmaker concept

    • What’s the Holy Grail of real estate marketing?

    For my sake, let’s not make it too complicated. It’s marketing that predictably delivers wicked good bottom line results.

    Did I say results? I meant results measurable in terms of increased bank deposits, not mountains of ‘leads’. Man, if there’s a marketing term that’s pretty much lost any real meaning these days, it’s ‘lead’. I’m surprised there isn’t a statue somewhere in homage to the lead. If there was any justice, it’d be the statue sportin’ the most pigeons.

    Let’s really trash what seems to be the prevailing concept of leads while we’re at it.

    Have you noticed how most marketing people want you to base the success of any real estate marketing system they tout, upon the quantity of leads, instead of increasing sales? Don’t get me wrong, they tell us sales will go up, but for the most part they’re sellin’ ways to generate leads. To be fair, their logical retort is that Read more

    July 26, 2010

    An apology to Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman: “I bought my house on FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com!”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I owe Glenn Kelman an apology. When Redfin.com was young — which is to say four long years ago — I swore that Glenn’s assertion that people would buy homes like books on Amazon.com was simply absurd. I have moved people into rental properties sight unseen, and quite a few of my investors let me pick out rental home investments for them. But I could not foresee a day when people would commit huge sums of money to purchase a residence they had seen only on the internet.

    Today I am obliged to eat my words — and I’m damn glad I don’t wear a hat!

    I had email this afternoon from a vistor to our Phoenix MLS search site, FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com. Writing to me from Florida, he had found a property on our site that he wanted to purchase. To his credit, the home is very aggressively priced to its competition, as well as being listed for several thousand dollars less than the lowest recent comparable sale. In other words, very far from being wrong about this offer, he is right on the money. Plus which, he’s an investor, so he’s not going to have to explain to his spouse that he bought her a mail-order homestead.

    But still…

    But: Still: Thanks to DocuSign, we had everything done 53 minutes later. I had Phoenix handyman Mark Deermer meet me at the property so we could take a look at it — this after the contracts were already executed — but there was no key in the lockbox so we weren’t able to go inside. But we have ten days from acceptance to look for red flags, so there’s no risk in the work we’ve done so far.

    But still…

    Took me by surprise, but it’s been utterly painless till now. We may end up killing the deal yet, but, if not, we’ll close in 30 days or fewer.

    So: Glenn Kelman: My hat — the one I don’t wear and won’t have to eat — is off to you. It’s a whole new world of real estate.

    July 14, 2010

    Ashley Dupre, Manhattan Real Estate Broker ?

    by

    Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
    Structured Debt and Equity
    Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

    Author website

    Remember Ashley Dupre?  We visited her two years ago, when her tryst with New York’s #1 John hit the front page:

    Who is Ashley Dupree and why do we care about her? Ashley is a budding songwriter and singer with a compelling story. She was cast into the limelight as Eliot Spitzer’s paramour; taking a few large a month for companionship. Now I don’t want to comment on the morality of prostitution; in 49 states, it’s illegal. Whether you’re an Emporer’s Club “provider” or a sex worker trolling Grand Central, the State of New York considers prostitution a crime. The allegations against Ashley have not been proven in a court of law and frankly, I don’t care if she did it or not. Why?

    I said then that she could reinvent herself:

    Memo to Ashley Alexandra Dupree: America is the land of “reinventing yourself”. Ask Sidney Biddle Barrows, Vanessa Williams, Donald Trump, or even Daryl Strawberry how forgiving the American public is. Americans crave drama, revere celebrity, and have a sense of justice about them.

    Ashley followed the”fifteen minutes of fame” plan.  She moved to LA, posed for a centerfold, and stayed away from jail.  She moved back to Manhattan and is pondering a career in…real estate brokerage!

    The Post’s sultry sex columnist has moved back to town from the West Coast and immediately decided to enroll in a real estate course at NYU. The course is required to apply for a New York broker’s license — but Dupre said she isn’t quite ready to become a full-time real estate dealmaker yet.

    She told us, “I recently moved back to New York from Los Angeles. Since being home, I took and passed the accelerated Real Estate Salesperson Course at NYU.

    Only in New York.   Her future colleagues seem to think she fits in quite well:

    Sources told us Dupre fit in well at NYU and “made a ton of friends. She dressed very cute to class, hung out with Read more

    July 10, 2010

    Are Old Blog Posts Useless?

    by

    Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
    Structured Debt and Equity
    Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

    Author website

    “How much traffic could you reasonably expect from blog posts that are a couple of years old?” asked Kaiholo Hale, a Maui vacation rental expert.

    My answer?  A bunch of good traffic if the blog post is relevant.  I’ll show you two of my little workhorses:

    • Google “Apartment Loans San Diego” and you’ll see that my post from December, 2006 is ranking second or third.  I’ve funded about ten loans, most of them second mortgages, in the past 3 years from that blog post.  I only make about $1,000 from each loan but they’re really easy to do.  Few mortgage brokers have access to the capital I have to make these loans.
    • Google “Short Sales and PMI” to find that I rank first for that term.  The information on that post is some 10-12 years old so I need to update it.  Still, this post generates about a dozen inquiries every month.  I had to figure out how to make this post pay me so I built an opt-in email list for people who sold their homes via short sale.  That led to another list for people who lost the home through foreclosure.  Last fall, I stratified the lists by sale date so that I can “tickle” them as we approach their qualification date.  Over 200 people have signed up for these newsletters but only s few dozen are still reading them.  I add about five each month and expect that only one of those five will be “with me” in 2-3 years.

    Two little work horses should produce $50,000 annual GCI for me in 2011. I can do much better than that. Greg Swann once remarked that you can return to old blog posts and “polish them up”.  You can update them, double check your grammar and spelling, and try to add some conversion tools or calls to action so that they can turn into GCI for you.  Let’s see what I might do with my two:

    The apartment loans post is a quick conversion.  People landing on that page want a loan and they want it quickly.  I think I can add some Read more

    July 9, 2010

    Active Rain Says TANSTAAFL To Founding Members’ Uproar

    by

    Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
    Structured Debt and Equity
    Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

    Author website

    The Active Rain Real Estate Network is charging a fee.  I’m not surprised.  The network has been trying to find ways to monetize its business since inception.  It tried a referral network and advertising and now it’s faced with the hard decision of pay-for-play.

    Lani, at Agent Genius reported that one founding member deleted all of his content in protest:

    This week, Active Rain inadvertently makes for heated conversation again by going back on their promise to founding members (the first users of the service) that they would never have to pay to participate because they evangelized for free and promoted the service making it what it is today.

    Real estate blogger Jay Thompson, one of Active Rain’s original users and long time advocate of the brand noticed along with many other bloggers today that despite ActiveRain’s promise to grandfather in “founding members,” he was asked to pay an annual fee before he would be allowed to continue participating.

    ActiveRain allegedly fudged notifying founding members and moved forward by only allowing active members to be grandfathered in. Thompson’s argument is not only one that he and others did not receive proper notification, but he and others comment frequently and despite being on a points based system tied to each user’s account, it is not considered to be “participation.”

    Thompson’s response? He deleted all of the content he had ever written and I suspect he and others will no longer refer to ActiveRain in their frequent seminars, courses and speaking engagements.

    I don’t know if I would have chosen to delete my content there.  Like any advertising model, it might have been useful to really analyze the costs and benefits.  I can think of three benefits to paying for membership in the network:

    • Back links to my home site– I can’t quantify what that benefit is but I know it helps my SEO
    • Traffic- I get some 200 visitors monthly from Active Rain URLs
    • Conversion- I receive 1-2 GOOD inquiries monthly, directly from the Active Rain contact forms.

    This isn’t too hard to quantify.  The Read more

    June 18, 2010

    Harvesting the Redfin green: Learning how to work with web-based prospects who may not have known they were contacting a Realtor.

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I built our first real estate web site in June of 2001. I had just gotten my license that May, parking it with an apartment locating service called The Apartment Store. The folks Jeff Brown calls “house agents” like to laugh at niche players in the real estate world, but I passed on three residential brokerages to do rentals. Why? Because I knew I would starve to death — as 85+% of all new licensees do — waiting for my first home buyer or seller. Instead, I took a job where I stood a chance of getting belly-to-belly with five or six motivated people a day.

    But: I built the web site because I wasn’t in love with the people I was meeting. Jack English, the broker, had built his business around serving extremely marginal clients — apartment seekers with bad credit, past judgements, felony convictions, etc. Everyone deserves a second chance in life, but, for the most part, I turned out to be a poor fit for the targeted clientele. I moved some interesting people I was delighted to help — for example, two recovered heroin addicts and the sweetest paroled murderer one could ever hope to meet — but I also met a lot of people to whom no one should ever have extended credit.

    Even so, the experience was great. I got to talk to a lot of people, showing a lot of apartments and rental homes, and I got to learn, very quickly, what makes the frog jump. That’s why I built the web site: I realized that Jack’s business model was missing a better segment of the rental market. Less-than-ideally-qualified tenants needed help because they didn’t know who would take them and who would turn them down. But there was a much larger, much juicier, much better-qualified pool of prospects out there: People with plenty of money but no time.

    That first site, TheApartmentStore.org, was a killer lead generator. No one was doing anything using forms in those days, and GoTo.com was still selling pay-per-click for as little as a penny a click. I was hauling in four and Read more

    June 16, 2010

    Should Redfin Be Renamed Right-Fin ?

    by

    Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
    Structured Debt and Equity
    Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

    Author website

    A La Jolla real estate broker noticed an article on Gawker.com, about a listing Redfin published, offering a currently occupied home (that isn’t for sale).  From Coastal Real Estate Stars:

    A new listing appeared on Redfin this weekend….1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

    Now, in fairness to the Redfin folks, garbage in= garbage out.  Much of the FSBO data they aggregate comes from Owners.com. Obviously, some prankster listed the White House on Owners.com, which the RE.bots (including Redfin) picked up.  Still, one has to wonder if last night’s speech caused Glenn & Co to take matters into their own hands 🙂

    Clearly, Redfin.com has the best real estate search site on the internet but the glaring marketing lesson here is at the bottom of the post.  JR Sullivan saw this as a great opportunity to showcase his own IDX search engine.

    June 15, 2010

    Killer Real Estate Videos That Won’t Kill Your Budget

    by

    Real Estate Renaissance Man

    Author website

    Yesterday I put up a post on Marketing Videos and Real Estate.  My plea was for more creativity and less facts.  My point? An agent who gets creative and starts using video wisely might just take down the Goliath agent in their neck of the woods.  The very first comment, from Tallahassee Realtor Barry Bevis, got me to thinking.  He said: “Quality at a price is the struggle…  Without going “Hartman” I can’t figure out how to make a good video at a reasonable cost.”  I quickly sat down and jotted out a half dozen video ideas, then put the pad down and walked away.  When working with creative ideas, I usually find it’s a good idea to let them breathe for a while and come back later.  Often times, after rereading them, you discover even fresher and better ideas.  No such luck today though… you get the original ideas and all their rough edges. 🙂

    The goal here is to throw some ideas out and have the genius that is BHB add a lot more.  If we’re lucky, this could turn into a “mini-library” of video marketing ideas for real estate agents temporarily running low in the creativity tank and staring at an empty screen.  For me, it’s all about latching onto an aspect of the house and then running a little wild.  Oh, and I love to steal already well-established ideas from the big boys.

    VISA Take-Off #1 – there are a number of ways to shoot this.  Show aspects of the house that shine and do the voice-over: “View of the mountains, $10,000; Jacuzzi tub in your masterbath, $3000; and so on.  Then come in with the conclusion everyone knows: “Owning your own home, priceless.”  The key is what you show during that line: Young husband carrying beautiful bride across threshold.  Or, husband painting vertical, purple stripes in the living room while the kids nod approvingly. Or, an exterior evening shot of the house with every window warmly lit while we see the sights and sounds of a fantastic party going on inside.  Single site web address appears at the bottom of the screen.

    VISA Take-Off #2 – Same idea, but a child’s perspective (especially Read more

    June 14, 2010

    Video Killed the Real Estate Star…

    by

    Real Estate Renaissance Man

    Author website

    I love marketing.  I love the opportunity presented by a brand new marketing campaign to be creative and stand out from the day-to-day noise of everyone else.  Unfortunately, most agents don’t share my zeal for marketing.  At least, I assume they don’t; how else to explain the mind-numbing dreck I see every day.  Whether by email, on Twitter, over Facebook, online; even on flyers! (When there are flyers.)  Most agents seem to have attended the Detective Joe Friday school of marketing: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

    Video affords us a new form of communication.  It includes multiple modalities that can reach – and interest – many more people than an equivalent, uni-dimensional form of communication.  Some people are predominantly visual, some auditory and some kinesthetic.  An email loses two of those groups, so does a radio spot.  But with video we can reach out to all three groups; we can create terrific visual, we can add sound and we can tell a story that creates emotion.  But even with all that going for it, there is still a limit on effectiveness: us.  In the computer world there is a maxim: garbage in, garbage out.  That can be true of video marketing too, but let’s give it a positive spin.  Here’s the maxim I suggest:

    CREATIVITY IN, CASH OUT

    I expect some might find that a little too crass, but never forget: the ultimate goal is skinnin’ cats.  In any case, my point is creativity.  Believe it or not, a marketing piece for a listing does NOT have to include all the details; that’s what the single site is for, right?  A marketing piece, and especially a video marketing piece, has as its purpose one real objective: TO STAND OUT FROM THE NOISE!  Be memorable, make someone laugh; if you’re really creative: go viral.  This serves the dual purpose of generating interest in what you’re marketing AND generating interest in you – the best damn agent that viewer has ever met.  Now that’s getting bang for your marketing buck.

    Neither of the following two videos is about real estate.  Nor, really, are they much about their product.  But they are creative, they are memorable and they are viral.  Look at what 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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