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Category: Marketing (page 42 of 191)

December 4, 2009

Embarrassing Confessions & Marketing Memory

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Two quick confessions:

I can’t throw a baseball.
I’m pretty sure I just scared a potential client away.

I used to be able to throw a baseball.  I played little league and pony league with some success.  There weren’t any pro scouts putting radar guns on me or anything, but I played right up until high school and I was regularly elected to the all-star team.  (Although looking back, it probably helped that I was much bigger than all the other kids and threatened to show them my Bruce-Lee-super-fist-of-temporary-death if they didn’t vote for me…  Nah, I’m sure it was my prowess inside the foul lines.)

Anyway, in high school I discovered my true calling: shot-put.  After that, I didn’t have occasion to pick up another baseball until my boys started playing just a year or two ago.  That’s when I discovered that I now had all the throwing grace and accuracy of a little girl.  You see, by my estimate I probably threw the shot – over the course of my competitive career – 15-20,000 times.  That pretty much wiped out any skill I ever had for throwing a baseball.  On the other hand, it created a near perfect shot-put technique that I can still demonstrate even now… as I enter my peak “mid 40s” athletic years.  (These are a lot like my peak “mid 20s” athletic years, only everything is now done while carrying around the extra weight of a small child.  It’s actually quite impressive if you think about it…)  Think about it or not, I can still summon dynamic and purposeful form because of a powerful adaptation called muscle memory.

Earlier this week, as I was parking my truck,  I noticed a car stopped in the middle of the street.  The driver was craning her neck to jot down information from an agent’s For Sale sign.  She then pulled up two houses and stopped again to take down information from another agent’s For Sale sign.  By this time I was walking down the sidewalk; I veered in toward the middle of the street and approached her on the drivers’ side.  “Hi,” I Read more

November 26, 2009

A look back at the last decade in real estate, what I got right, what I got wrong — and where things go from here

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My friend Andrew Breese asked me to go through my own history, in light of both the real estate boom and the bust, detailing where I was wrong and where I was right.

Very big job, and it would be a long essay to write, so I’ve elected to go through it in video instead.

Click on the graphic below to watch the video.

November 24, 2009

Me and KJZZ: What’s up with the real estate market? Tune in Wednesday to hear my take on the topic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I will be on KJZZ radio (91.5 FM) in Phoenix tomorrow from 11:30 am to Noon. I’ll be talking about the state of the real estate market, the impact of the real estate tax credit and the flow of international buyers into the Phoenix market.

I think there will be an MP3 available, afterward, but you can stream KJZZ by clicking on this link.

 
Further notice: Click here for a link to the broadcast.

November 24, 2009

New cameras for the Bloodhounds: My take is that the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZR1 offers a lot of bang for the buck

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If your car keys are with you, your camera should be with you.” That’s one of the mantras I preach at Realtors when I speak in public. The language of real estate is photography, and you cannot do your job properly if you can’t communicate what you’re seeing to your clients.

Having a camera along solves a multitude of dilemmas. I see a lot of houses for out of state buyers, so the web sites I build for them can provide invaluable details about candidate homes. But there are all kinds of other benefits to always having a camera with you when you’re out of the office: Documenting benefits and drawbacks of specific neighborhoods, capturing on-the-spot images of red flag issues before the inspector transmits his report, etc.

“But,” you may be be straining to expostulate, “my phone has a camera.” Believe me, I know. I see its output in the MLS way too often. Your phone has a bad camera, with a cheesy little lens — its focal length much too long for real estate — and a cheesy little image size. Someday phone cameras may be adequate for day-to-day real estate work, but that day is not today.

We have a Kodak Digital SLR for listings and other high-end work, but, until lately, we have each carried a Fujifilm Finepix E500 for everyday photos. This was a reasonable price/performance compromise when we got them. They’re light in weight and they’re powered by AA batteries, so there was never any threat of running out of juice. The lens is only 28mm at its widest, which is adequate but not ideal. But those cameras were workhorses. Cathleen and I both rolled them over, call it around 15,000 photos each over the past four years.

But all things come to an end. Cathy lost her Finepix recently, and mine is exhibiting the kind of noisome behavior that argues that it’s about to fail permanently.

Time to go shopping. I’ve been following the Panasonic Lumix line of point-and-shoot digital cameras since I first heard about them in a post by Jeff Turner, a long time ago. I got Read more

November 22, 2009

Dominating Websearch with Focus

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

One of the things I picked up from reading Greg’s blog was his desire to dominate the real estate market not in Phoenix, but in particular neighborhoods. Chris Gilgian’s, a 1950s development where I used to live,  the Willo Historic District, and other neighborhoods in downtown Phoenix. 

As a criminal lawyer, it’s a bit different because, at least in North Carolina, the court system is countywide, meaning that anyone arrested for a crime in Wake County will be handled at the same courthouse or go to the same jail, regardless of whether they live in Knightdale or in Apex.  It doesn’t much matter whether they’re a North Raleigh resident or a Cary resident from a lawyer’s perspective.  The case will be handled at the same place.

But for search and ranking purposes, it does matter.  That’s because most people I want as clients have never committed a crime before or have only had traffic or minor misdemeanors.  And because they’re new to the system, they may not realize, when they’re searching for a lawyer, that the system is county wide.  As a consequence they will search for a lawyer in their neighborhood.

That insight – that potential clients will search for an Apex criminal lawyer or a Cary criminal lawyer – has focused my web and marketing approach.  In the first few weeks, I would mention every neighborhood in the community in my posts.  The scattershot approach wasn’t incredibly effective in terms of ranking.

Now I focus my attention on three communities: Cary, Apex, and Raleigh.  Why those communities?  Raleigh is obvious: if I can dominate Raleigh, there’s a lot of business to be had.  But I picked Cary and Apex for four reasons.  These are the wealthiest parts of the county, so people can pay for legal representation.  These are places where a lot of northerners live – the joke about Cary is that it stands for “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.”  The fact that I also am a northerner is certainly not a negative when interacting with them, and may also be a plus.

In addition, it was clear to me from a Read more

November 17, 2009

Further thoughts — mostly non-thoughts — on RPR

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reacting to John Rowles’ post, Jim Duncan has been talking about the RPR idea for years, and I read a little more about it today, having been tipped over the weekend by Tom Johnson. My take: Yawn.

RPR is not the generals fighting the last war, but the war before that. Apparently, the NAR still believes that the added value of real estate representation comes from hoarding data. RPR is their attempt to put a new fence around the data, having let the last set of barriers fall to Realtor.com and to IDX.

It’s twice funny to me, because not only is that war already well won — by the consumer — so is the true last war, the Battle of the Realty.bots. After all of this chatter, none of this shit has turned out to mean anything in real life.

I mean nothing. I’m convinced by now that no one who does not actually represent buyers and sellers has any clue about what is going on in the real estate market. We don’t search for listings — our clients do — and our position is stronger than ever. We post our listings wherever we can — and our position is stronger than ever.

I’m no friend to any restraint or restriction on trade, but buying or selling a home is a lot more complicated than it was four years ago. Our clients don’t need flashy web sites, they need agents who know how to navigate the shoals of the transaction.

RPR, MLS, VOW, IDX — all of this goes away when we do away with the co-broke. In the mean time, it’s deck chairs on the Titanic, at best, one more dipshit time-wasting “tool” to mask sales-call reluctance.

Notes for the grunts on the ground:

1. Motivated buyers and sellers will not go through a middleman in the early phases of their search. This is 1974-style thinking from the NAR.

2. Motivated buyers and sellers don’t care how they found you. They care about what they found: Do you know your shit? Can you deliver the product? Is your word any good?

3. Whether or not the information you Read more

November 12, 2009

The #1 Obstacle in Real Estate

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Would you like to know what the #1 obstacle is to achieving success in the real estate profession?  If you did know, would you create a marketing campaign around it and start knocking the ball out of the park?  I love marketing campaigns.  I love creating them and prodding them into action; I even love writing about successful real estate marketing campaigns.  But the truth is, the biggest obstacle to our success isn’t a lack of good marketing ideas.  It’s not the economy or interest rates or the inventory.  It’s actually nothing “out there.”  That’s because there’s nothing “out there” nearly so scary or powerful or destructive to our success as we are to ourselves.  That’s right: our #1 obstacle in Real Estate… is us.  We all carry around a few self-doubts, maybe even a few “I can’ts.”  If asked, I bet you could list five things you don’t like about yourself without even putting much thought into it.  It’s as if we’ve gone on a date with ourselves and halfway through dinner decided we’re not good enough for the other person at the table… and the other person is us!

Knowledge is power and knowing that we are our own biggest obstacle is very powerful. Yes, you have to have goals.  Yes, you need a marketing plan to achieve them.  But I guarantee you that plan will be much more successful if its very first step, is to fall back in love… with yourself.  Sound a little corny?  Maybe easier said than done?  Fear not: I’m going to leave you with a small, powerful two-word phrase for that all-important first step.  Not long ago I was talking to my 7 year old son and I was congratulating him on figuring something out for himself.  He immediately threw his arms into the air and said “Yeah Me!”  No pretense.  No guilt.  Only genuine admiration.  Imagine that: “Yeah Me!”

Go ahead, try it yourself.  Stop reading for a moment, put your arms in the air and say “Yeah Me!”  Come on… say it with feeling – really mean it.  “Yeah Me!”  Does it feel Read more

November 12, 2009

When the cash-for-clunkers “logic” comes to the real estate market, it’s time for every homeowner with equity to cash in big

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s cash-for-clunkers time in the real estate market.

Last week, in addition to extending the $8,000 first-time home-buyers tax credit for another six months, Congress added a new $6,500 tax-credit for move-up buyers.

The credit can be applied for homes selling for as much as $800,000, and the income limits exclude almost nobody.

You have to have lived in your home for more than five years out of the last eight, but that’s hardly an onerous restriction. And homeowners who have put down roots have equity.

Remember that capital gains on your primary residence are excluded from taxation if you have lived in your home for the past five years. But the way the government is spending money, that exclusion cannot last.

But, but, but… Your home isn’t worth what it was in December of 2005. That’s true, but it doesn’t change anything. The home that you can buy now was also selling for more four years ago.

Here’s the way things really shake out: If you have equity in your home, you can take that equity as a tax-free profit — for now. At the same time, you can snag the $6,500 tax credit. And you can do all of this at historic low interest rates.

If your house is worth $400,000 and you only paid $300,000 for it, you could reap a gain of $100,000 — which would save you thousands of dollars in taxes. If you wait for prices to go higher, you may wait a long time for a much smaller return. And the house you buy then will have appreciated, also.

I think we’re looking at a perfect storm for homeowners with equity: You can move now, take a tax-free gain, get a lot more house than you could have bought a few years ago, all financed with a low-interest mortgage. And then, next April, Uncle Sam will write you a big fat check for your trouble.

On second thought, this is less cash-for-clunkers than the taxpayer’s revenge…

 
Sell this idea! Feel free to share this idea with your clients and prospects — in your blog, by email, on the phone. This is big, and the Read more

November 6, 2009

Homebound hounds: You’re going to have break those chains on your own this year in San Diego

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think it should be obvious by our lack of self-promotion, but we ended up not putting anything together for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in San Diego. I can’t speak for Brian, but I’ve been wall-to-wall with work for months, and I haven’t had time for anything else.

I’ll go through the PayPal records tonight to make sure everyone’s money is refunded.

Meanwhile: If you see any NAR grand poobahs, be sure to kick ’em in the shins for shifting all your November move-ups into December. Christmas may be good, Thanksgiving not so much…

November 5, 2009

Congress extends and expands the home-buyer’s tax credit

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Post:

Under the housing program, people seeking to own a home for the first time in three years would receive an $8,000 tax credit if they sign a contract by April 30 and close on it by June 30. Current homeowners who are buying a new primary residence would be eligible for a $6,500 tax credit starting Dec. 1 if they owned their home for five consecutive years in the previous eight.

The timing is more lenient for military families who have been deployed overseas for 90 days or more in 2008 or 2009. They would have until April 30, 2011 to sign a contract.

But the measure limits the purchase price of the home to $800,000. It also imposes income caps so that people who make more than $125,000 annually and couples who make more than $225,000 would not be eligible for a refund. Anyone who collects the tax credit but sells their home within three years of buying it must return the refund.

The program is estimated to cost $10.8 billion.

The passage of the tax credit provision was a huge win for the real estate industry, which has been lobbying aggressively to extend and expand the program. They say the tax credit has helped boost sales and clear out a glut of lower-priced homes, especially foreclosures, and that ending it would be a blow to the housing market’s recovery.

But critics of the program, including some economists, say the program is far too expensive. They say that most people who used it would have bought homes anyway. They attribute the uptick in home sales in recent months more to low prices and record low interest rates.

Questions for the lenders: The tax credit for move-ups doesn’t commence until 12/01/09. What about first-timers? Can they be under contract now, or do they need to wait until after the end of the month.

More: Do I read this right? Can you “move up” after having rented for the last three years?

I hate this, of course. The real estate market can’t shake out if we won’t let it. But as listers of higher-end homes… Thus does the Read more

November 5, 2009

FannieRents: “Taxpayers are now going to own all these houses Fannie Mae should have unloaded. It’s going to cost a fortune.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Yahoo News:

Can’t pay the mortgage? You still might be able to stay in your home. Government-controlled mortgage company Fannie Mae is going to give borrowers on the verge of foreclosure the option of renting their homes for a year.

The change announced Thursday could give a temporary break to thousands of homeowners, but critics question whether it will only add to the mushrooming losses at the company, which has received billions in taxpayer money.

The new “Deed for Lease” program will allow homeowners to transfer title to Fannie Mae and sign a one-year lease, with potential month-to-month extensions after that. It also helps save money because the lender does not need to complete the often lengthy and time-consuming foreclosure process.

The program helps “eliminate some of the uncertainty of foreclosure, keeps families and tenants in their homes during a transitional period, and helps to stabilize neighborhoods and communities,” Jay Ryan, a Fannie Mae vice president, said in a statement.

It also does less harm to the borrower’s credit record.

“It shows that you put your best effort to work out a solution,” said Gabe Del Rio, director of homeownership at Community HousingWorks of San Diego.

However, Mike Himes, director of homeownership services at NeighborWorks Sacramento, said the industry should push harder to modify loans at lower monthly payments. “The preferred option is allowing people to retain ownership,” he said.

Fannie Mae executives said the rental program is designed to help delinquent homeowners who don’t qualify for a loan modification, but still want to stay in their homes.

To qualify, homeowners have to live in the home as the primary residence and prove that they can afford the market rent, which will be established by the management company running the program. Rents are based on current market rates.

The plan is expected to be particularly attractive in places like Phoenix or Orange County, Calif., where homeowners are stuck paying large mortgage bills on properties that are now worth far less than they originally paid. At the same time, rents have been falling in those areas and homeowners may find they are paying far less to live in their home.

In Orange County, Read more

November 4, 2009

Vook dead yet? Doesn’t matter. If you want to sell blades, first you have to find stubble that people are willing to pay to have shaved.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more

November 1, 2009

“The net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column:

As I write this, the entire real estate industry is on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the $8,000 first-time home-buyers tax credit is going to be extended.

It’s not really a tax credit, it’s a taxpayer-funded subsidy, a “gift” extracted by force from everyone who does not buy a house under the program. The money taken from taxpayers — either now or later by deficit spending — is money that cannot be spent or invested elsewhere.

And it’s not as though this were a zero-sum game. The actual marginal sales — the home sales that would not have happened without the subsidy — may have cost taxpayers from $40,000 to $75,000 each. And as huge as those numbers are, they ignore the interest cost of the borrowed money, the opportunity costs of mal-investment and the compound interest value of those opportunity costs.

Government action cannot create wealth. At best, it moves wealth around. At worst, government destroys wealth by taking it away from the very people who have new ideas and new technologies to invest in.

But as bad as this tax credit is, it’s only temporary. Someday it will end. The mortgage interest tax deduction — which almost no home-owners actually get — is forever. The government dominance of the secondary mortgage market — FannieMae, FreddieMac, GinnieMae, etc. — is forever.

And here’s the real kick in the head, given all we’ve been through in the real estate market over the last eight years: The National Association of Realtors reports that 59% of all new home loans this year were underwritten by the Federal Housing Authority, the Veterans Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

What this means is that a huge number of homes will have been sold this year with down-payments ranging from 3.5% to -5%. Six out of ten new mortgages are essentially nothing-down loans.

The U.S. government wants to buy your vote by making home-ownership easy. But the net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values.

 
Steal this book: I’ve written over 200 Read more

October 28, 2009

Post-Opt Best Practices: Internet Marketing Meets

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Really quickly. A lot of us have various opt in methods. Free books, blog comments, FB adds.

What are we doing with that noise? Hello.  Call them.

Objection #1 “But I Can’t Find A Numba”

OKAY, fine.  You can’t find a number.  Sergey and Eric made this little website, it’s a good starting point.  So is linkedIn.  So is Twitter.  Search your lists.  Search everything you do, and yeah, you can “find a numba.”

It’s not hard.

Some hints:  a lot of people are in the 90 and 9 in your fb list.

A lot of people are in linkedin.

A lot of people are attached to someone else.

Objection 2: But, Daddy, They’ll HAAAAAAAAAATE me.

Twice, maybe.  Twice I’ve called people and gotten some sort of jerk face.  Offense that I’d dare call them.  I call  about 15 people a day.  75 a week.  I have had a bunch of people I got no interest in, that’s for sure.   I have a bunch of people that I can’t stand…another given.   And a bunch of people that want the free stuff.  No sweat.

More often, I call people, decide that they are morons and don’t pursue anything.  With them.  I call, they’re not interesting….to me.  See, calling about 75 people a week gives me options.  I don’t need to chase every imbecile or get anxious about stuff.

…I don’t have any Boiler Room Jedi Mind Tricks.  I don’t even currently have a script.  I’m not that good…I step up to the plate and take my hacks.   And that’s enough to make me a living that has been six figures 9 out of 10 years 2006, friends was the bad, bad year  I know you all were laughing, but I was rocked hard by the IRS, my own ego, and a bunch of rental properties that were imbecilic.

Objection 3:  I shouldn’t have to sell.  I’m such a great blogger that they should come to me.

Okay fine.   Look, they did. They came, saw and commented.  They gave you love, they gave you some confidence.  Now pick up the phone, and close the deal.  They are BEGGING to give you their money.   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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