BloodhoundBlog

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Category: Marketing (page 46 of 191)

June 29, 2009

Building the perfect Bloodhound, three years into the job

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen took most of my client contact off my hands Sunday so that I could have time free to play with a new API the FlexMLS folks are getting ready to release to their client MLS systems. I love FlexMLS, and I haven’t said nearly enough good things about it here, but let this stand as endorsement enough: If your MLS is on the cusp of its vendor contract, get FlexMLS. It’s plausible to me that other companies might have cool stuff, but other companies don’t listen to geeks like me. FBS is wicked smart to begin with, but they’re smart enough to know that nobody knows everything. By listening to the user base, they’re able to grow their product in ways that will matter a great deal to all of us going forward.

So for Act one, I worked out how to build radius searches from any valid street address. By software, I mean. I want to be able to work from street addresses to build searches on the fly.

Act two was just brute force API programming, building semi-custom searches into 11,000 or so unique pages. (I’ve mentioned that Realtors have a publishing problem, but I’ll bet you weren’t thinking in the thousands of pages.)

Act three was a quick-search form. A lot of folks already have stuff like this from their IDX vendors. The difference is that I can build as many as I want, as elaborately as I want, using the most common or the most arcane fields in the MLS system. As an example, imagine a weblog post about central vacuum systems coupled with a quick search form featuring homes with central vac. Can your IDX system do that?

That’s innovation, y’all, and there is a point at which it is nothing more for me than ars gratia artis — art for art’s sake. I play with new ideas not to make money or to skin elephants, but because I love new things, and I love to wring every last drop of implication out of anything I lay my hands on. I can find the marketing — and, one hopes, Read more

June 26, 2009

How Do You Measure The True Success Of Innovation?

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

Greg’s recent post about Bloodhoundblog’s innovation contribution to the real estate industry created the typical debate over dinosaurs vs. Web 2.0.

However, there were several good points about the difference between innovation and success.

I’d like to argue that innovation is a component of success, as is failure.

Whether you’re skinning cats the 1.0 way, exploring the potential of a complete virtual realty solution, mixing a creative listing landing page with a direct mail campaign, or putting your referral relationships to full use, the simple fact that most of us are still left in the game to have these discussions is a small sign that we’re all successful in one manner or another.

It is hard to deny that the industry is rapidly changing, especially with regards to the way we leverage the web to communicate to our clients and colleagues.

By the time something has been proven, its already old news and can’t really be considered innovative.

What does innovation mean to me?

In order to have a productive conversation about the actual value of an innovative idea, I think it is important that we first agree on a common definition of innovation.

I hear words tossed around like Top Producer, high conversions, leads to loans….  which don’t mean much to me unless those are the results I’m expecting when I buy a product.

But to me, innovation is more of a way of life vs a business decision.  I’m always looking for ways to make something or someone better, without living in fear of failure.

I don’t need social proof from the masses to build my confidence.  Matter of fact, if everyone is already doing something well, then I’m even more motivated to find a different, more efficient way of accomplishing the same goal.

My loving and patient wife has to deal with these character traits every day.  And to make things worse on her, my 2 year old daughter is showing signs of following in her father’s patterns.  I couldn’t be more proud.

Either way, I just wasn’t designed to wait around on other people to prove that an innovative idea can be successful.  Maybe its because I focus Read more

June 22, 2009

Just because the real estate market is being trumpeted by bull horns, that doesn’t mean it’s time to retract your bear claws

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m the leading bear in an article in Saturday’s Toronto Globe and Mail. I wasn’t as dour as the overall slant of the article, but it remains that the Phoenix real estate market is overbuilt. We have more kitchens than cooks, and, as long as that is so, a robust and enduring recovery is not possible.

One thing I didn’t say, but I wish were true: “Mr. Swann said he has clients from Canada, California, Oregon and elsewhere snapping up dozens of houses at a time.” I have dozens of investor clients, most of whom are buying nothing right now, since it’s stupid to compete for the privilege of over-paying for a rental home. I have one client who plans to buy dozens of homes, but who has not started yet.

The interesting thing is, it really is a great time to buy a house in Phoenix — except at the very low end. Sellers with equity are finally waking up and smelling the coffee, so the move-up market — at least below $500,000 or so, jumboland — is really starting to move. First-time home-buyers, enriched by the $8,000 tax credit, are butting heads with out-of-state investors for all the homes priced $100,000 and under. But for people with buying power, things are looking very rosy right now.

Even so, the Globe and Mail article is good reading. The authors explore a lot of systemic factors that could make our current mini-boom a fondly-remembered oasis in a desert of on-going bad news.

June 19, 2009

To celebrate BloodhoundBlog’s third birthday, let’s celebrate all of the insanely great ideas we have come up with…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last week I was working, late at night, plugging street addresses into encartus, in preparation for building a bunch of new engenu pages for a new web site we’re building, an exposition of truly-distinguished homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona. While I was working, I got pinged by an incoming email, a moderated comment to Brian Brady’s first post on the idea of disclosing all real estate purchase offers.

While I was reading all the other great comments to that post, I got pinged again, this time a private email asking me what I thought about the nominees for Inman’s most-innovative blog award.

To misquote a line many Bloodhounds love: I don’t think about them. I will stop in at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy once or twice a month, and I know I’ve been to MyTechOpinon and the Clean Slate Blog. But I don’t associate any of those sites with innovation. They’re just weblogs, that’s all.

This is not sour grapes. I don’t give a rat’s ass about beauty contests, and I’ve deliberately painted Inman “News” into a corner: By consistently ignoring what is obviously the most innovative weblog in the RE.net, they come off looking like petulant crybabies even as they despoil their reputation as a “news” source. And does this malign neglect hurt us? Uniquely among RE.net weblogs, we’re a PR6, as is the Inman “News” web site. With no capital investment and nothing but part-time, amateur writers, we’ve pulled even with the life’s work of a big-baby billionaire. One would think the idea of gamesmanship was invented yesterday.

And please don’t post treacly little comments about how you get good ideas everywhere. I have no objection whatever to the Special Olympics, so long as you don’t insist on calling the contestants Olympians. The three innovations cited in the first paragraph of this post, three among hundreds, are more than enough to split BloodhoundBlog away from the herd.

But that’s the point. BloodhoundBlog is ten days away from being three years old. In those three years, we’ve pioneered a vast host of jaw-dropping ideas. If we stopped writing on June 29th, our anniversary, we Read more

June 19, 2009

Freeing The Real Estate Market From The Real Estate Industry

by

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

Author website

AREBOT.com, which stands for the American Real Estate Board of Trade,  is the name of the company that intends to open up the demand-side statistics, by voluntary submission of properties, to an online NASDAQ-like market.

DISCLOSURE:  From this point forward, my opinion may be considered biased.  I have a verbal agreement to receive site advertising in exchange for publicity.

The intention of my post about the “big idea” was to “smoke AREBOT out”.  I knew they were getting ready for a site launch and wanted to have it revealed to the Bloodhound Blog community first.  C. Aaron Bruce, the founder, was happy to explain the site and encouraged me to explain it to you ahead of the official press releases.  This “exclusive”, if you will, is available to all, Wednesday June 24, 2009 at 1PM (PDT), on a conference call.  If you’re interested in the call, raise your hand below and I’ll email you the details.

AREBOT.com is not intended to be an “auction”.  It is an open, transparent, real-time market.  Each zip code will have a live “ticker” moving across the screen, displaying actual offers on homes.  Each listed property will display a time-dated offer history.  Entries are voluntary and cost nothing to the sellers of the home.  The “price”, if you will, is that they offer the property on this  transparent market.

Buyers offer on the properties by entering the terms .  The bid is then considered to be “unverified”, signified by it’s yellow color, until verified and submitted by a licensed real estate agent.  Licensed real estate agents may offer their buyer brokerage services, at no cost, on the site.  Listing agents are protected by their listing agreements and may voluntarily display listings on the site, at no cost to them or the seller.  Verified offers turn green and stay that way for 24 hours (or longer if both agents are negotiating); offers are still accepted until the property is withdrawn from the system.  Rejected offers turn red and are displayed with the property, in perpetuity.  Final terms are not disclosed as most states publicly disclose sales information.  I have no idea Read more

June 14, 2009

Getting a $15,000 tax credit when you purchase your next home could be as easy as stealing candy from a baby…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

So we started with a $7,500 tax deduction for first-time home-buyers.

But that didn’t juice the real estate market enough, so we bumped the number up to $8,000 and made it a full-blown tax credit. If you owe $8,000 in taxes next April, your slate is wiped clean.

But even that didn’t juice the the real estate market enough, so this week Republicans — the alleged party of fiscal responsibility — proposed bumping the tax credit up to $15,000 and making it available to everyone — including billionaires.

How cool is that? You buy a $150,000 house, you get 10% back when you file your taxes. And you can file an early return to get the money now. And you can even finance the tax credit now and pay it back when you file your return.

You can’t — quite — use the tax credit as your down payment, but that “reform” can’t be more than inches and hours away. And a $15,000 down payment on an FHA loan buys you a $428,500 house.

Unfortunately, that’s more than the FHA limit for metropolitan Phoenix, so that limit will need to be “reformed” as well.

Paying people to buy houses would be insane if we actually had the money to back up our promises. But, since we don’t, these “reforms” are the mark of true statesmanship.

I’m helping an ambitious young couple buy their first home right now. We’re late to close, a common enough situation.

They just had their second child, an event mere bureaucracy cannot delay. Their baby boy — his name is James — is sweet and beautiful, healthy and smart, a perfect specimen of incipient humanity.

They’re taking the $8,000 tax credit, of course, as they should. The government doesn’t become less insane if you shoot yourself in the foot.

But it is sweet little Baby James who will pay for that tax credit, and for millions of others, and possibly for millions more at $15,000 a pop. Our economy runs on theft — and we’re running out of people to steal from.

June 10, 2009

If You Will Not Assist Us With the Shrubbery, We Will Be Forced To Say “MORTGAGE!!”

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

Oh, what sad times are these when loan originators can say such words as “Free” and “Mortgage” at will to their contact database?!?!

For if thou doest seek thine Holy Grail, or at least a decent shrubber, ye shalt best consult thy Book of Armaments here before lobbing thine Holy Hand Grenade of Drip Email upon thy database.

In Addition to Nee, Pang and Nuuuwon, Ye Shalt Also Avoid:

Okay, enough of the silly talk.  I’ve got actual work to do.

1)  Free + ________: Permission Marketing proponents love giving free stuff away.  Make it a point to avoid this evil word your email subject lines.

2)  Mortgage: Perhaps the evilest word of them all!  How do you avoid this one if you’re a loan originator?  I guess you could substitute nuuuwon.  Or you can just make it a habit to check your subject lines for keyword spam infractions before sending.  Either will do.

3)  Low Interest Rates: Not that we have a problem with that right now.  So I’m announcing a temporary hunger strike until rates drop back below 5%.  Or at least until dinner.

carrot-top-steroids1Hey, you’ve been a great audience.  Now I’ll turn the stage over to not a good friend of mine who definitely has not been doing any steroids or performance enhancing drugs.  His jokes sucked before he looked like this too.

May 27, 2009

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

May 24, 2009

Show Me “Paint the Fence”

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

I have a confession to make:  CRM isn’t as complicated as people tend to make it.  Take a look at an app like Salesforce and they purposely build the interface to look like you’re piloting a 747 jet when in reality all you’re looking to do is deepen a few hundred relationships and organize your life.  We CRM experts like to try and look a lot smarter than we actually are.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some easy action items that will make managing your database a snap.  WARNING: I’M FLORIDA EDUCATED SO I TEND TO KEEP THINGS AT A 7TH GRADE LEVEL.  GREG SWANN: INITIATE LOBOTOMY NOW.

Lesson #1:  Paint the Fence

Remember when Mr. Miyagi made poor Daniel Son paint the fence?  And wash the car?  And paint the fence again?  If we’re gonna make you a black belt database manager, you’re going to have to suck it up too.  One must not deliver kick to opponent family jewel without proper training.

The most common problem I notice when consulting with mortgage/real estate professionals:  the quality of your data sucks.

  1. Lazy Data Entry:  If you’re populating data from an internet form, expect respondents to take as little time as possible getting to the goodies you’re dangling.  No less than 50% of your data will come in with capitalization, punctuation and other grammatical errors.  There are some automated ways to help clean this data, and I’ll leave that for another day.  But in the meantime, I’m asking you to make a habit of cleaning data as you go.
  2. Incomplete Data:  For the belly-to-belly folks:  I have my salespeople take the extra 120 seconds to visit a new prospect’s website as they enter data into our CRM system.  When I find records with just a name and email address, I get pissed.  When you take the extra time to dig for granular data on a contact, you’re in essence learning more of their story in the process.  Did my prospect give me a fake phone number (easy to learn if the the phone number on their website is different than the one they gave you!)?  How Read more
May 18, 2009

Nothin’ New Under The Sun — Especially If I’m Involved

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I learned early on in my career I had no problem whatsoever taking others’ ideas and running with ’em like a thief out of a 7/11 carrying a paper bag full of ones and fives. I’m BawldJapan — I can take your idea, tweak it for my uses, and most of the time make it work to some degree. Ideas don’t have to be new, or even perceived as cool — they just have to work. What a concept — excuse me a sec while I write that gem down.

For the record, often times epiphanies for me are just empirical evidence I may have arrived at grammar school via the little bus. I’m reminded of my never ending irritation with the various business magazines aimed at entrepreneurs. Two lifelong best friends succeed wildly with a Mexican restaurant in their hometown, and are interviewed by Peter S. Small of Entrepreneurs and Stuff.

“Tell me guys, to what do you attribute your wild success?” “Well Peter, one day we were lamenting the dearth of high quality, affordable Mexican restaurants in Southern California. Then it came to us like a flash! We’ll do our own, and we’ll do it right. The rest is history.” You KNOW you’ve read those interviews too. You can’t swing a dead cat in SoCal without hittin’ an affordable Mexican restaurant with good food.

I’m now about to take what I’ve been saying here for quite awhile to house agents, into what I do. The concept of hyper-local has been cussed and discussed into oblivion. This isn’t about that exactly. This is about taking something that’s traditionally been done on a much larger scale, and narrowing it down to its lowest common denominator. Or something like that. It’s nothing new, and you may have even tried before.

For years I generated impressive business volume using direct (mass) mail — it was always successful, once we figured out the winning formula. From 1987 ’till around 2004 or so, no letter sent out yielded less than five figures worth of closed escrows. A few resulted in six figures. Then it stopped Read more

May 15, 2009

Unchained Freedom “Friends Keep Friends In The Business”

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

As I was driving back to Las Vegas after a full week of hanging out with the Bloodhound crew at Unchained, my mind was racing to get a grasp on all of the new real estate marketing possibilities that I could achieve by the end of the year.

The confidence I gained through the relationships built at Unchained was all I needed to fully execute my online marketing plans.

I believe that everyone is an expert at something, and we all have a ton to learn from each other.

The Scenius sessions at Unchained were a great example of this concept:

  • After a full day of building blogs, Eric Blackwell, Ryan Hartman and I stayed up until 3 am discussing some SEO strategery for Battleback.com.
  • Greg showed me how simple it would be to syndicate my mortgage content on all of my real estate agents’ blogs with just a little bit of technical savvy.
  • Brad Coy and Brian Brady helped me figure out how to easily integrate a Twitter or Facebook presence into my weekly relationship building routines without having to spend too much time being social.
  • Al Lorenz and I talked about the benefits of owning the social media platforms that our clients and referral partners participate on.
  • Sean Purcell’s brainstorming session over a $100 casino chip got me excited about top of mind sales and branding tools.
  • Kerry Melcher’s “Small Town Phoenix Living” reminded me of how important it is to connect with the emotional needs that may impact our clients’ decisions to do business with us.
  • Scott Cowan and I compared our local markets and shared similar opinions about how much online social networking really matters in the long run.
  • Scott Schang and Mark Green opened my eyes to the power of holding online webinars for the purpose of building a loyal database.

I could go on and on about all of the great conversations that I had at Unchained.

My main objective for that week was to fill in a few technical gaps with my blogging skills.  As Greg has mentioned many times, real estate professionals have a publishing problem.

There are so many ideas that I haven’t been able to Read more

May 15, 2009

Skinning elephants: The lifelong salutary benefits of negotiating your compensation with your buyers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s how Mike Elsberry, my home inspector, charges for an inspection for one of my clients:

  • A sliding-scale price based on square footage
  • A sliding scale price based on the age of the home

Bigger homes take somewhat longer and entail somewhat more work to inspect than smaller homes. Older homes may have more wear and tear, also resulting in a longer, more arduous inspection. Mike has a little pricing grid, and taking those two numbers, square footage and age of the home, he can plot the precise price point on his matrix.

You could argue that he could come up with a more predictive pricing scheme, but the genius of his system is obvious: It’s reasonably objective, making it hard to argue with, and Mike can price a job from his cell phone, while driving, with his mouth half full of burrito. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.

Okayfine. Now let’s sell a couple of houses.

I’m about to do a Facebook deal with an old friend from high school. I will be representing her son in the purchase of the condominium he will live in while attending graduate school. Approximate purchase price: $80,000. Gross commission to me: $2,400.

I’m also about to help a very nice couple buy a small hacienda in Paradise Valley, one of the wealthiest towns, per head, in the United States. Approximate purchase price: $800,000. Gross commission to me: $24,000.

Obviously the differences between the two transactions are myriad, but here’s the one that matters most: The $80,000 condo will almost certainly take a lot more of my time than the $800,000 hacienda. I’ll get paid maybe $50 an hour for the condo, and possibly as much as $1,500 an hour for the hacienda.

How does that make sense?

Home inspector Mike Elsberry’s pricing scale makes sense, even if you could argue that something more complicated might make even more sense. The compensation buyer’s agents receive bears no relation to the time and effort expended. As the Freakonomics boys point out, the incentives are misaligned, as well: I get paid more if my buyers pay more, even though their best interest is to pay less. But even 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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