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Category: Marketing (page 45 of 191)

August 15, 2009

Fishing for the details takes all the fun out of real estate fish stories

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“You won’t believe the deal my buddy got on his house. He paid thirty cents on the dollar!”

“You’re right. I don’t believe that.”

“I’m not fooling with you. The house was worth $300,000, and he picked it up for a hundred grand.”

“It was worth $300,000 when?”

“Huh?”

“He got it for $100,000 in what condition?”

“Huh?”

“The house might have been worth $300,000 four years ago. And it might have been in great condition back then, too. What was the list price when your friend put the house under contract?”

“It was listed at $97,500. But the original listing was for $300,000!”

“I don’t doubt it. A lot of homes have been on the market for years. What kind of shape was it in when your friend saw it for the first time?”

“It was great! I mean, there were some holes in the walls, and some of the doors were missing. But it just needed some touch-ups on the paint. And the carpets were hardly stained at all!”

“What was the kitchen like?”

“Cherry! All it needed was a range, an oven, a dishwasher, a microwave and a fridge.”

“In other words everythng but the kitchen sink.”

“No, that was gone, too. But the counters and cabinets were in great shape, just missing a few knobs.”

“So some nice folks bought more home than they could afford during the housing boom. They couldn’t make their payments, so they put the home on the market for more than it was really worth, even back then. It sat on the market for four years, through a normal listing or two, through a short-sale listing, and then it finally sold to your friend as a lender-owned home. Is that about right?”

“You bet! He got a smokin’ deal!”

“Except he didn’t pay thirty cents on the dollar, he paid $2,500 over list.”

“Oh, whatever. Did I tell you about the trout I caught last week at Lake Pleasant? I swear, it was bigger than my arm!”

“Now that I believe.”

 
Steal this book: If you want to use this column on your real estate weblog, feel free. Just give me a link back to http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/

August 13, 2009

Hey Zillow, hey Trulia, hey SmarterAgent: Here’s what I really want in a smart-phone app…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Not for me — for our lenders…

Until lately, lenders and title people never really lived in our world. You could get ’em on the phone all day long — so long as it wasn’t Sunday, so long as it wasn’t 9:30 at night.

That’s changing, thank goodness, especially with lenders.

But: If I need a Loan Status Report (that’s Arizonan for a pre-qual form) at 9:30 on a Sunday night, I need it.

So here’s what I want for one (or more) of y’all to make for lenders:

1. Give them whatever kind of pre-qual calculator they need — with internet access, of course.

2. At the lender’s option, issue the pre-qual information in any extant state association of Realtors form, along with something generic and an auto-generated cover letter.

3. Email as a PDF or send an e-page with a URL to a PDF on your server.

As dumb as these forms are, and as perniciously useless as they sometimes can be, it’s getting to be impossible, in Arizona at least, to submit a contract without one.

So: If you would, please make it easy for lenders to make loan commitments.

Feel free to charge ’em for the app, of course. We all know they’re loaded… 😉

August 12, 2009

Introducing Tony Gallegos: The Mortgage Cicerone as guide dog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today is mortgage expert Tony Gallegos. You’ve known him for years as The Mortgage Cicerone. Tony has just left the cloistered confines of corporate lending and struck out on his own. As a secondary benefit of making this move, he promises to tell BloodhoundBlog readers the unvarnished truth about the world of mortgages.

He’s been a friend of BloodhoundBlog for a long time, and he’s personally acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, so I know y’all will have no trouble making him feel welcome.

August 10, 2009

The National Association of Realtors, in perfecting the idea of Rotarian Socialism, not only sanctified the criminal violation of the property rights of innocent people, it also robbed us of the highest and best uses we might have achieved with our real property…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back up to the top because it fits so well with the recent posts from Al Lorenz and Doug Quance. –GSS

 
I’ve understood since I was 18 or so how real estate develops organically, in a truly free market, so I have known all my adult life how horribly the real estate market has been disrupted by the idiotic intrusions of Rotarian Socialism. It’s all about who can steal a few bucks by strong-arming his neighbors, and no one ever stops to wonder what gets mucked up in the process.

So: I said:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

And Brian Brady said, in a comment to that post:

When it’s a 1-4 unit property, held for investment purposes.

Ten words. What am I missing?

What he’s missing is the definition of commercial real estate. If Brian owned 1-4 rental tuxedoes, should he call that his personal wardrobe? Just because the tax laws engender dumb distinctions, we don’t have to ignore reality, do we? Rental property — including a solitary rental house — is commercial real estate. It is owned in pursuit of profit, not as the residence of the owner.

So again:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

The answer is that it should not. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are going to suffer because — at the bidding of the National Association of Realtors — they took their eye off the ball. There is nothing rare about a tract home. If it gains in value ahead of other consumer goods, there has to be a cause — usually one that originates in the criminal use of force against people innocent of all wrong-doing.

As we have discussed, the precipitating cause of the real estate boom in the southwest was criminal land-use restrictions in the costal metroplex of Southern California. The land there is not inherently scarce, but governments made its development difficult or impossible, driving prices up faster than they would have gone otherwise. Investors falsely believed Read more

August 5, 2009

Prometheus without forethought: Using the Bloodhound meme to bring clients around to a conversation about quality in real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My mind is alive with themes for BloodhoundBlog posts that I’m not writing — the Principle of the Yes Man and the Elephant on the Balcony and Prometheus the Mind-Giver. I’d write more, except my having written so much over the past three years is paying off in spades — in diamonds, as it were.

But in the comments to Chuck Marunde’s marvelous post on the ubiquity of the part-time Realtor, the idea of improving the quality of practitioners came up again.

We’ve been through all of this many times before, and a search of the archives on the terms “licensing” should prove enlightening. But this is the Cliff’s Notes on my own position on the topic: Licensing laws serve only to enshrine mediocrity by implying that minimum standards are adequate and sufficient. To the contrary, a higher standard of care among real estate professionals will be achieved not by stricter licensing laws, and not by the National Association of Realtors, but by the persistent application of market-borne pressure. In other words, a higher quality of service among real estate professionals will come about when superior practitioners raise the bar — and tell the world they have done so.

To which sentiment I will amend this addendum: Ahem!

This is the BloodhoundBlog mission, of course, and, at our third anniversary, I wrote about how proud I am that the word “Bloodhound” has become a de facto meme for quality in the practice of real estate.

And: Nothing exceeds like excess. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. So I’ve made a little button you can put on your web site or weblog, if you like, to spark a Bloodhound-like conversation. That much is the Elephant at the Dining Room Table: Your clients aren’t thinking about quality because the state and the NAR have schooled them to look for meaningless imprimaturs instead. If you want for your clients to be able to identify the better from the worse, you have to initiate the conversation with them. The buttons you see below can help you get that discussion started.

Witness:

160 pixels square:

We're Bloodhounds. We teach our clients to demand better service from real estate professionals.

July 31, 2009

In search of better, faster, linkier Craigslist Ads

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

I still get quite a bit of activity from Craigslist ads. I have been using Postlets, because it puts listings a bunch of different places, and adding a bit of html before and after their code with links to the individual property site, my blogs and my real estate site.

Even though Postlets doesn’t put links in the Craigslist ads, I wanted links! So, since I’m lazy about coding and not very fluent in html, I did a draft post in WordPress with the things I wanted to say and link to and put three lines above the Postlets ad with links to the individual property site, my blog and my real estate home page, clicked to have it shown in html and pasted it in above and below the postlets ad. It looks like this. With 20 or so of these running, I get a noticeable bump in google search results and traffic. No problems with being flagged or having the ads yanked.

But, I’m thinking I can do more.

Craigslist is a more time consuming than I would like because the ads expire every week. I want to automate the process where I can create a template that I can prepare quickly, much like the custom page creation for each property can be automated using Engenu.

So, I took the source code for a property page from Engenu and pasted it into a Craigslist ad to see what would happen. I found out right away that only 30,000 characters were allowed in the post description (the place I can paste in html code). Since the file I tried was 11,000 lines of code, I found that limit pretty quickly. I wanted to see what would come up and I at least found how many characters are allowed. 30,000 characters of code is enough that I should be able to do something better.

Then, I finally searched BHB for Craigslist and found Greg’s post on CL from last year. The comment string is pretty important on that post. After reading those, I was ready to experiment with making a new .html template Read more

July 29, 2009

Want a free GPS-aware smart-phone client to search the complete Phoenix MLS? BloodhoundRealty.com has one, thanks to SmarterAgent

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We signed up for our own version of the SmarterAgent smart-phone MLS client. We’ve been live since Monday, but it proved its value and then some yesterday afternoon.

Cathy was out with buyers, and they asked the most dreaded question of all: “What about that one?” Not every house with a sign is for sale, and, even then, most homes for sale don’t meet your search criteria. That’s why we don’t have that listing with us. But Cathy whipped out her iPhone and did a GPS-based search on her own location. Voile! Three bedrooms. Too small.

That’s not in the SmarterAgent marketing patois, but it doesn’t have to be. The software rocks in anyone’s hands. We had been looking at pure iPhone solutions, but the SmarterAgent tool is simultaneously more robust and more broad-based: It provides a GPS-aware MLS search from virtually any smart-phone. You can also search by map, by address, by MLS number, by neighborhood or subdivision, etc. The user interface is easy to navigate, and the level of detail on the listings exceeds many desktop-based IDX systems.

I wouldn’t want to use this client for showing purposes, but it’s a nice tool for buyers to use as they explore neighborhoods. And, as above, it’s very useful to working Realtors to deal with on-the-fly questions about properties. The best part is, if you follow through and inquire about a property, the phone call — and an email — comes to me. We have the email set up to echo to all of our mail clients, so we don’t miss anything. And the email includes the listing agent’s phone number, so we can track down specific information quickly, no matter where we might happen to be.

If you’re a Realtor working anywhere but Phoenix, I think you should get this thing. It’s a pain in the ass to get in Phoenix, and, besides, my plan is to suck all the oxygen out of the SmarterAgent space in Phoenix.

To that end, here’s how you can help: Write a post on your own weblog about how you intend to look into this cool new tool, and Read more

July 29, 2009

BingHoo

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

It’s official, Yahoo, the original search brand, is outsourcing its search function to Microsoft. I don’t think either Microsoft or Yahoo had a choice. It’s a shotgun marriage.

Those work out all the time, right?

Coming out with something that is noticeably better than Google’s Search experience is the only way anyone will  take significant search audience share from them, because despite all the hype around Tweets and FB, Search is still the fundamental App that makes the Web useful and people need a real reason to switch from what they like and are used to.

Failing that (as Microsoft  has with every incremental redesign of their search offering, including Bing), Redmond probably figured why not buy a solid, if distant, second place?

Yahoo knows how this works: A combination of loyalty and laziness is the only reason they still have enough users that Microsoft is even interested in this deal.

So what does this mean for your SEM efforts?

As Wired points out in a good take on this deal, “…by capturing one opposing army, (Microsoft) dramatically simplifies the battle lines and creates a two-sided conflict.”

Google knows how to hit Microsoft where it hurts, most recently by forcing Microsoft to sacrifice its cash cow, Office, by making it available on line next year to counter Google Docs. So far, Microsoft has not been able to land an equally  solid punch on Google.

That has to make Steve Ballmer’s forehead all purple with the veins popping out, like the evil aliens in the original Star Trek pilot. I don’t think I could work for Ballmer. I first saw those aliens when I was like 6, and I still have nightmares about them.

ballmer-talosian

….but I digress…

One way Steve could finally get some would be to introduce serious competition in contextual text ads, the Web advertising form that Google invented and the only ad model that works on the Web (Exhibit A: They made Google $5.5 Billion last Qtr.).

Real competition from Microsoft in the form of lower costs per click could drive Adword prices down, which all by itself does nothing to take overall search audience share from Google, but Read more

July 25, 2009

Why should you enlist a buyer’s agent to help you buy a home? Because you’ll get a much better deal — even if you pay full price

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Are home-buyers best served by the vigilant efforts of an experienced buyer’s agent? Consider a transaction we have in play right now.

The buyers are a young couple, about to be married. They have about $10,000 in cash.

With a conventional loan, they could put 20% down on a dismal starter home. Or, with Private Mortgage Insurance, they could put 10% down on a nicer home.

But with an FHA loan, $10,000 is 3.5% down on a $285,000 home. We can argue the wisdom of making so small a down payment, but the FHA loan program is the path to homeownership for millions of Americans.

And $285,000 is too much house for our buyers. They found a nice lender-owned two-story home in the suburbs selling for $169,000. The down payment on that home would be $5,915. But the closing costs would probably run to another $5,000 — which comes to more money than they have.

They qualify for the $8,000 first-time home-buyer tax credit, but they won’t get that until they file their tax return. They also qualify for a state-funded grant program that will contribute up to 22% of the purchase price — but which can’t be used for the down payment or the closing costs.

Here’s the deal we put together. We offered $175,000, $6,000 over list price. In exchange, we asked the seller to contribute 4% of the full purchase price to defray the buyer’s closing costs.

The down payment will be $6,125, leaving the buyers $3,875 in cash to pay for the endless expenses of moving into a new home.

And there will be about $2,000 left over after the closing costs are paid. This will be used to buy down the interest rate. The buyers will end up with just over 25% equity in the property for a cash outlay of $6,125 — all at a very low monthly payment. And they’ll still have their $8,000 tax credit to look forward to.

This is the kind of outcome a skilled buyer’s agent can achieve.

 
Steal this book: So far I’ve written two columns on this theme. If Read more

July 18, 2009

With MLS listings available everywhere on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Here’s an intriguing question: Given that it’s so easy to search for homes on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

Face it, if you use the MLS search tool on my web site, you’re seeing exactly the same listings I see. And you know better than I ever could what you like and what you don’t like.

By now, the home search process is at best a partnership between the agent and the buyer. In some cases the buyer and I will work together to perfect our search criteria. But many buyers simply search the available inventory on their own, emailing me the MLS numbers of the homes they want to see.

So why do those buyers need a buyer’s agent?

Realtors hoarded the MLS data for so long that even they came to believe it was the source of their value to buyers. But this is very far from the truth.

You don’t need me to search for listings, although I’m happy to do that. And you don’t need me to open lock-boxes. You need a buyer’s agent to guide you through what is in fact an arcane and perilous process — potentially a financial disaster. You might not need me to find your next home, but you need me to make sure that you get it — or that you pass on it, if that is what is truly in your best interests.

A skilled buyer’s agent will write the kind of purchase contract that will prove surprising to you at every turn, with every term and condition tailored to achieve your best advantage. Your agent will supervise the inspection process and negotiate the optimal solution to the repair issues. Your agent will be prepared for every pitfall in the escrow process.

If you bought and sold houses every day, you could do all these things yourself. It’s because you don’t — and because the seller and the listing agent are looking to take advantage of your naivete at every turn — that you need a skilled buyer’s agent as your steadfast champion in Read more

July 16, 2009

For those of you following the lurid drama of our lives…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We bought our house out of hock today. All it took was a tiny little pawn ticket and a great big check. Our small feat of redemption was actually paid for by June’s receipts, but I got myself into this mess by surfing the payables, and I got myself out the same way. We retired the outstanding debt eleven days early, and it’s been a while since we’ve been that early on anything.

That notwithstanding, we are very far from being out of debt. But June was great, July is good, and August and September promise to be two of our best months ever. If the fourth quarter lives up to its promise, 2009 could end up being our best year so far. By this time next year, we could owe nothing but the mortgage — which is good, because our credit will take a while to recover from these past three years.

There is none of this that is anybody’s business, actually — except that people choose to affect to make my business their own because of who I am and how I behave. That’s fine, even if it sometimes seems to me to be simultaneously voyeuristic and masturbatory. I have a job that pays pretty well when it pays anything at all. When we got slow three years ago, we made a very big bet on internet marketing, which we were already pretty good at back then. By now we kill, and we’re getting better by leaps and bounds every single day. If you think our financial troubles prove our marketing ideas wrong — you just keep thinking that way. By the time you understand what it is we’re doing, we will have leapt into a completely different orbit.

Meanwhile: For all the good-hearted folks who wished us well in all of this: Thank you. I’d rather not have done this in public, but I couldn’t have picked a nicer bunch of people to do it with.

Now switch off this insipid soap opera and go do something productive with your life!

July 12, 2009

Some questions about using DocuSign for electronic signatures

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve avoided DocuSign because ZipForms was so terrible in the Mac world. While the new implementation is not great, it’s better. And as kludgey and expensive as DocuSign seems, I really, really want electronic signatures.

But I have questions:

1. Can I use DocuSign to do my “broker oversight” signatures? That’s not a legal question. I’m just asking, is it possible?

2. If I receive a document — say a counter-offer — from another DocuSign-using Realtor, can I use DocuSign to get my client’s signature on that document?

3. Same question, but just an ordinary PDF? How about an ordinary fax?

4. What about added documents? We do a lot in the way of extended additional clauses, especially on listings, with each version of those clauses being unique. Is it possible to add our own forms in a DocuSign envelope?

5. What do you love about DocuSign?

6. What do you hate about it?

I’m grateful for any insights you can offer.

July 8, 2009

San Diego dogs: When BloodhoundBlog Unchained comes to San Diego during the NAR Convention, will you be ready to stand up and howl?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When we wrapped up BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, Brian Brady and I were already talking about doing an event in San Diego during the National Association of Realtors Convention. Since then, we’ve both gotten really busy, which makes planning for anything difficult.

But: We’re both bursting with lots of new ideas. Brian was regaling me on the phone tonight with some incredible viral conversion ideas. I know that Teri Lussier wants me to talk about persuasive copy, but right now I’m more interested in the persuasive power of the elephant in the room. Plus which, there are a lot of Bloodhounds we can call upon to talk to us about what they’ve been doing.

As with last year’s Unchained in Orlando, the NAR has attempted to lock up every possible meeting space, and, as with last year, they’ve failed to lock us out.

My question is this: When we come to town, who is coming with us? What we’re going to do is a one-day event, an all-day marathon of ideas. I’m inclined to support freedom-loving people everywhere, so we might also stage an adhocratic mastermind session while we’re there — partly a scenius, partly a demonstration of the intellectual mettle of this little apartnership we have going. When the Bloodhounds howl, criminals and cockroaches run for cover.

This is just running a flag up the pole to see who salutes. The price is $100 for the one-day event, and, if you make the commitment, we’ll give you a $100 break on the price of our next full conference in Phoenix. If you want to join us, click the PayPal button below.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $100 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in San Diego on Friday, November 13th, 2009


















Here’s a real kick in the head: I will turn 50 years old that weekend. If you’re in town with us Friday, we’ll cut you a piece of birthday cake.

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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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