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Category: Marketing (page 47 of 191)

May 13, 2009

Prospecting Numbers, Real And Acutal (In Case You Wanna Skin Some Cats).

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Skinning cats requires that I’m on the phone.  A lot.  I’m all 2.0, that works, but it’s a tool.

Anyway, the numbers from a week of prospecting where I actually hit the phones each day.

I’m targeted here, calling folks from twitter and linkedin and others.  (People always ask how I get the numbers.  Even when the number is prominent on the website).  I’m pulling folks into a spreadsheet, and sorting it by called/uncalled.  I’m using Google Docs for much of this.  I do it at a stand-up-desk on my old PC.  Anyway, if I could bring myself to do it more–and I think I will–then its scalable.

What I’m doing is feeding people into a database and then I’ll work them from there.  My goals are to:  1.) Make Direct Sales, 2.) Get people in my database.

Total Time Calling: 7 hours, 30 minutes.  (50 minute hour–25 minutes with 5 minute break, 25 minutes with 5 minute break).

Total dials:  641.  (I use Skype to measure this, and I simple went in my call history and sorted by times).

Total Contacts (where I get a live person and not a voice mail):  168

Leads Generated (people that want an email that’s not just a blowoff):  51

Blogs Sold:  9  (12 total sold).

Sales on First Pitch:  1 (was a linkedin Acquaintance that had intended to do a blog for a long time).

Sales off of email/video:  5

Sales on 2nd-3rd pitch: 2

Per sale, my revenue is $750ish.  My take after fees and stuff is $500ish.  This is one of my sources of income, and it’s the most significant one at the moment.

So…I attempted to call and sell 641 times.  That’s a dial every minute and change.  I failed all but nine times.   .014 batting average.    There is always a serious suck factor when I’m making calls.  I don’t always enjoy it.  I do procrastinate and try to find something more interesting to do.  It is tedious at times.  It is hard to stay up and active for an hour and 20 minutes a day.  Not impossible.

I’m telling you all this because it works.  Don’t let anyone tell you anything different.  Failure Read more

May 13, 2009

Need Maps? BatchGeocode.com is the easiest way to create them

by

Realtor, Tech Connoisseur

Author website

I used Batch Geocode yesterday to make a wonderful “quick and dirty” map of homes for a relo buyer

All it needs is Address, City & State.

Grab the info in Excel Format from your MLS Search, paste into the Batch Geocode Window, and it creates a great, scalable map with labelled balloons. The legend even includes the rest of the information from the spreadsheet data. WAY COOL.

May 11, 2009

Making a virtue of necessity is usually an error…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:

Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage?  BAHAHAHHAAHA!

Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.

The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:

My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.

Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in Read more

May 10, 2009

Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but the BattleBack book…

I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.

(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)

But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.

Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.

I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.

It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process Read more

May 9, 2009

The goal of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained training conference is to push the bums out of the real estate business

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

We publish a national real estate industry weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 42 contributors from all over the country, each one an expert in his or her own right. Together we talk about real estate marketing and technology, lending and investment. If you want to know what Realtors and lenders really think, BloodhoundBlog is your keyhole into the industry.

The blog is all about the wired world of real estate, how the participatory internet is changing age-old paradigms of real property and mortgage marketing. When we started three years ago, the Web 2.0 idea of online interaction was still very new. By now, it’s hard to remember a time when these technologies were not ubiquitous.

BloodhoundBlog’s mission is to help Realtors and lenders keep pace with internet tools. In service of that objective, we produce an annual conference called BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Real estate professionals come from all over the country to learn how to market their services in what amounts to a post-marketing marketplace.

This year’s conference ran last week from Tuesday to Friday. We encamped in a hotel near Skyharbor Airport and worked all but continuously for 72 hours. Our world is changing so fast that we felt we had to work that hard, just to learn everything we need to know.

What’s all this to you? BloodhoundBlog is all about promoting excellence in every conceivable way. We do everything we can think of to train Realtors and lenders to provide a better-quality experience by every means attainable.

My objective, expressed baldly, is to chase the bums out of our business. Licensing purports to do this, but it has not. Trade organizations like the National Association of Realtors should do this, but they don’t. But if we can educate consumers to demand better service, better information, better representation, then the bums and the crooks will go get jobs. That’s the way free markets work, when they’re working properly.

Meanwhile, real estate professionals are just catching on to the idea that consumers can see everything we do. Drop in on BloodhoundBlog and keep an eye on us.

May 9, 2009

My own first-hand foreclosure story

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On April 27th, ironically the day before BloodhoundBlog Unchained commenced, IndyMac Bank posted a Notice of Trustee’s Sale against our home. I didn’t know about this until this week, although I had known it was a possibility.

This is really nobody’s business. But as a matter of steadfast policy, I have never let anyone make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself. I know I tend to excite the most evil sentiments in people with evil minds, so they may want to take this opportunity to further their self-destruction. This matters to me not at all. I live my life well to the right of the zero on the number line, and the only people I deal with or care about do the same. People who pursue disvalues are of no value to themselves, nor to anyone.

But so as not to introduce this topic and then leave it unexplained, here’s what happened: For the past three years, our outflow has exceeded our inflow. This is not an unusual story in the real estate business, and we have been lucky to have enough high-paying work to at least keep us within reach of profitability. During this same time, as you have seen here, we have completely reengineered everything we think about marketing, with the ultimate test of those ideas beginning only now.

But our debt load became severe enough last year that we had to make some hard choices. I elected to take a chance on our mortgage payments, since there was a plausible threat that we might lose the house anyway. Our choice was to keep the doors open at the risk of those doors themselves. I could see an upswing in our business activity, to the extent that I expected to catch up on the mortgage by the second quarter of 2009, and to catch up on everything by the fourth quarter.

I still expect this to be the case. My one mistake was that I didn’t think IndyMac would pull the trigger this soon. I played chicken and I lost, so now, in addition to buying back Read more

May 8, 2009

Query: Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I can’t believe I’m writing this, at this hour. My weariness from this week hasn’t had a chance to overcome my leftover weariness from last week. Sooner or later I’ll make enough money to check into a rest home!

But: Brian Brady, Richard Riccelli and I have been talking about this all week, and I thought I’d run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

So:

Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

If so, what book should it be?

I’m the worst anti-dead-tree snob there is, but the Gary Keller books have proved that print still has legs. We want a way to get through to the 99% of agents and Realtors who have but barely dipped a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. It seems clear that we have to carry the word to them in a format they can (literally) grasp.

So how would you advise us? I know what I want, and I know what Brian wants and what Richard wants. What do you want? What would you want if you were a punter on the sidelines wondering if the topics we take up here are worth worrying about? What might you want if you were a consumer, not someone in the real estate business?

I’m interested to hear where your thoughts run.

May 7, 2009

The Funnel: the Leak in my Marketing Efforts!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Leaks and Managing the Marketing FunnelI’m not cursed with having to get things perfect.  I don’t know if the 70% solution describes me either.  My goal is the 90% or better solution with 20% or less of the effort it may take others to get there.  Tools like engenu warm me to the core!

The Unchained crowd sets a complete new standard for real estate folks I’ve been around.  I have work to do on everything after Unchained.  But, at least I know a bunch of things to do, and who to talk with if I get stuck.  I can’t think of anything more powerful than that.

So, my list includes most everything.  In no particular order, webinars, SEO, engenu sites, focused CPC advertising, social media and what is for me the most fun, the Gonzo, unforgettable marketing.

But that sales funnel management still has me flummoxed.  I don’t give much due to the “automated” touch from a system.  I’m so good at filtering that type of thing, and give it so little credit, that I know that my incredibly smart friends and clients won’t like it either.  The experience from these systems just seems so lacking.  But I won’t argue that they can work successfully for a business.  Maybe I just don’t have the discipline to sustain them properly.

For me, a funnel that integrated with something like facebook might be better.  All I might really need is a periodic reminder to say something to those I’ve forgotten to contact in awhile.  If it automatically tracked who I had been in touch with, it becomes easy to use.  Frankly, that would be a great way to make sure I’m keeping in touch with my friends as well.  Which brings me to the crux of the issue; my clients and associates are a great many of my friends.  I need a reliable approach that treats them that way.

Do I feel like I need to “touch” my clients a dozen times a year?  Maybe not if the times I do engage with them are actually meaningful, memorable or gonzo enough.

Once I get some of the other things done, I won’t be Read more

May 6, 2009

Why Don’t REALTORS Solicit Lenders For Buyers?

by

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

Author website

REALTORS constantly solicit banks and mortgage lenders for REO business.  Why isn’t the producing REALTOR, as a matter of course, soliciting business from loan originators?

I posed this question at Unchained Phoenix ’09 and you would have thought I asked the REALTORs to walk on coals…at first.  A few bright agents listened to my reasoning:

  • I talk to lots of people and do a FAIR job at managing my database.
  • I subscribe to a service that notifies me when a past client’s home is listed (so I can jump on the new loan).
  • I lend nationally although that doesn’t matter.
  • I don’t charge a referral fee for relocating buyers; I just want their new loan.

Agents often consider themselves to be the center of the relationship but most don’t manage that relationship, post-closing, very well:

In finding a real estate professional, 44 percent of buyers were referred by a friend, neighbor or relative, 11 percent used an agent from a previous transaction, 7 percent found an agent on the Internet, 7 percent met at an open house and 6 percent saw contact information on a “for sale” sign. Six other categories accounted for smaller shares each.

The light bulb went off for Cindy DiCianni when I suggested that she look at last year’s business to discover the source city; she helped nine San Diegans settle in Kansas City in 2008.  She promptly added me as a “referral contact” to her database.  Alice Held did the same, promising me an invitation to her Holiday Party.

Teri Lussier asked me about this in an e-mail today:

Lenders court Realtors. Do Realtors court lenders? Often?

Of course we court REALTORs and REALTORs never court us…NEVER.  I think that’s really dumb.  Forget that I’m “just the lender”.  I’m a “person” who has influence.  I’ll most likely encounter a relocation to Dayton (or Kansas City) once every three years.  if you’re tryng to close 24 transactions a year, that means you should market to 75-100 loan originators, around the country.

What would a lender like/need/want in order for me to be their go-to Realtor of choice?

If you’re in San Diego, a monthly phone call wouldn’t hurt.  Read more

May 6, 2009

Meet the new dogs: Six new Bloodhounds to fill out the pack

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We added six new BloodhoundBlog contributors last Friday at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Actually, we added seven, but Dave Smith of the Real Estate Blog Lab has elected to take a pass for now to free up time for other projects.

It’s no accident that all of these folks are coming out of Unchained. A year ago, BloodhoundBlog Unchained was something that we did. By now, it’s something that we are. The blog and the events are conjoined, like a two-headed Cerberus, and each generates content and cultivates talent for the other.

One of the things we do here, one of the things we’ve always tried to do, is to make stars of our contributors. In a world without middle-men, the engaging expression of expertise should earn a writer a cachet of authority, and that authority should influence larger and larger audiences. We have built a big megaphone for talking to real estate professionals, and we want to make that megaphone available to the most creative and talented people we can find.

So: Here are the new dogs. I hope you’ll make them feel welcome.

It would be an understatement to say that Ira Serkes was the stand-out student at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. The man is a geyser of fascinating real estate marketing ideas, which he shares with an unrestrained delight. Ira and his wife Carol are Realtors in Berkeley, California. Ira co-authored “Get the Best Deal When Selling Your Home — SF Bay Area Edition” and Nolo Press’s best-selling book “How to Buy a House in California.”

Scott Cowan is a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog. He organized our invasion of Seattle in February, and, while we were there, he signed on to work as a staffer for BloodhoundBlog in Phoenix. That is, he and Brad Coy served admirably as the Vice Presidents in Charge of Everything Else. Scott sells classic homes in the Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and the Puyallup areas of Washington State. If you want to make his day, ask him about the $8,000 home-buyer credit.

Kerry Melcher may be the most unlikeliest contributor to a weblog that has always endeavored to bring you unlikely contributors. Kerry is Read more

May 5, 2009

Reflecting (very) briefly on the Phoenix real estate market: “I got my job through the New York Times”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last Tuesday, while racing around doing real estate work and preparing for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, I was interviewed by the New York Times about the Phoenix real estate market.

I’ve been interviewed a zillion times before, and it’s cool and fun and it means absolutely nothing. I got picked because of this article, from my column in the Arizona Republic. I spoke to the reporter for 45 minutes on the phone, and about twelve of my words made it into the newspaper.

Okayfine. That’s the way it works. I’m just waxed fruit in these tableaux and I know it.

But here’s the cool part: Yesterday I got a call from a potential client about the article. Never happened before. Real estate investor from Canada looking to balance his risk by picking up some lender-owned homes in Phoenix.

As a marketing strategy, talking to reporters is probably less productive than handing out business cards in the supermarket parking lot, but serendipity is where you find it.

 
Further notice: Today I was interviewed by MacLean’s magazine about Canadians buying real estate in Phoenix. The reporter found me where? In the New York Times. Clearly there is a difference…

May 4, 2009

A video postcard from Unchained in Phoenix

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

Paybacks a mutha, so be careful what you ask for.  I opened up the MacBook and asked the gang to do a video postcard for Teri Lussier because she could not make it.  Much to my surprise, some bloodhounds don’t forget.   Beyond that we get a look at the scenius in action and another sneak peak at some more video footage to come from Unchained in Phoenix. Enjoy, and don’t get too many ideas. I made a promise that this factotum/guest speaker/Omega will be performing Blake from Glenngary Glenn Ross next time we meet up.

Featuring Eric Blackwell with the Omegas working on SEO and Ryan Hartman exploring Gonzo Marketing with the Alphas.

May 4, 2009

The Heart of Unchained

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Three days later and my head’s still not right.  Have you ever returned home from a few days away and felt like you needed another vacation in order to recover from your vacation?  You might say the Unchained Conference was like that… but you’d be off by a factor of 10.  Unchained was roughly 32 hours of fast-paced information downloaded without filter or pause in a two and a half day schedule.  Vacation?  I need an I.V. drip.

You might also think, based on what I just wrote, it would be difficult to name the #1 highlight of the entire three days.  But you’d be wrong again. (You’re really not very good at this game. 🙂 )  There were hundreds of moments to choose from and I’m gonna list a few, but there was a definite highlight – an apogee if you will.  It was during that moment I realized I was experiencing everything it means when we say the bloodhound way.

In the kick-off class of the conference, yours truly was the instructor and I didn’t know what to expect.  The feel of this conference – the expectation – was very high-tech.  Yet I’m using terms like “old school” marketing and making a point of saying that all the shiny gizmos and gadgets handed out over the next three days  were just so much dust gatherers without a framework rooted in old fashioned sales and marketing.  To say I was a little anxious about kicking off an online conference with my offline message is like saying the Christians felt a little concerned about entering the lion’s den wearing nothing but butter-flavored bikinis.  I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.  Highlight of the class: we had two attendees benefit from the scenius of the group and nail down their niche, then go online to PURCHASE THEIR DOMAIN NAME AND LAUNCH THEMSELVES right there in class.  God bless people of action.

Once the moments began to roll, they just never let up for three days:

May 3, 2009

Facebook Quizzes For Real Estate Marketers

by

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

Author website

Facebook quizzes might be a darned good tool for real estate agents.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  Facebook quizzes are those independent applications that ask you 5-10 questions and tell you who you were in a past life, what your inner animal is, and what sort of American accent you might have.  I take them when I’m surfing Facebook in the middle of the night.

I got hit with a black pearl when demonstrating Facebook, at BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and I saw Brad Coy’s profile.  Brad took the quiz “Which San Francisco Neighborhood Are You?” and it posted to his Facebook Wall.  His result inspired a conversation from me.

ME: “Brad, What’s up with The Mission District? ”

BRAD: “Oh, I don’t know, Brian.  I was goofing around and that’s the neighborhood the quiz results picked for me”

ME: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I get it Brad but what’s up with The Mission District?

BRAD: I’m not following you.

ME:   I don’t know much about San Francisco and I haven’t heard a lot about The Mission District.  Is this a potential gentrification neighborhood?

It didn’t hit me until my Unchained Omega Session; Facebook quizzes, long held to be a novelty, could start the right kind of conversations for real estate agents.  I played around with one a few months ago and over 100 people took my quiz.  The lightbulb went off for RuthAnn Macklin, a Virtual Real Estate Assistant and member of CyberProfessionals.  RuthAnn figures that she can demonstrate the need for her services by pointing out how difficult it is to “go it alone” as a REALTOR, through a Facebook quiz.

“Which San Francisco Neighborhood Are You?” is a cute quiz BUT…it can start the right kind of conversations for Brad Coy.

  • Which North County Town Are You?” might be perfect for Don Reedy.
  • “Are You Really A  Moonie?” might distinguish potential Moon Valley home buyers for Center City Phoenix agent Keri Melcher.
  • “Mo or Kan?” could help Cindy DiCianni, Kansas City Agent, determine which Kansas City suburb her clients might enjoy.
  • “Are you Chill Enough For Island Life?” could help Amelia Island Real Estate Agents, the Werlings.
  • Finally, imagine what newly-discovered 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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