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Category: Marketing (page 56 of 191)

December 3, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing – enroll now to be sure you get a seat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve got the dates for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix: April 28th to May 1st, 2009.

We’ve got the location: The Radisson Phoenix Airport Hotel North, 427 North 44th St, Phoenix, AZ 85008.

And we’ve got the game plan: A three-day Guerilla Marketing Boot Camp during which you’re going to completely revise your marketing profile — in class. We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

What are we missing? You. Skip ahead if you’re ready to register for the most intense real estate marketing conference you will ever attend.

Got questions? Here are some BloodhoundBlog posts discussing Unchained in Orlando and anticipating the scenius to come in Phoenix:

Want to know even more? Why not. We’re in the marketing business, after all.

Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job to attract and convert new business, we have what you need. On BloodhoundBlog, we talk a lot about Social Media Marketing, but in our own businesses, we work with Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Direct Marketing and good old-fashioned belly-to-belly sales. We also work directly with internet-based tools from PHP to RSS to CSS — acronym soup.

Why should you come? We’ll be going through every bit of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. Not lecturing as you race to keep up in your notes, but actually doing the work, hands-on, on your own marketing materials.

How will you benefit? Not only will you completely overhaul your existing marketing profile, you’ll learn how Read more

November 29, 2008

Who wants to play the Scenius game? Rebuilding The Long List as a micro-blog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All right, let’s play a little, shall we?

One of the things that came out of our little scenius on Thanksgiving (which continues through today) was a better way of handling the job I used to do with The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. I’ve been ignoring that chore since last Spring, a plausible clue that I just might end up ignoring it forevermore. Even so, it was a good idea, and I learned a lot of cool stuff from the code I wrote to manage The Long List scroller that used to live in our sidebar.

What I want to do for now is to implement another kind of sidebar scroller, this one more like a micro-blog of useful and informative posts — mostly marketing, but other matters of importance as well. There were people who used The Long List as their feed reader, and this should work even better in that regard.

You can see it in our sidebar right now. It’s the scroller box headed “SCENIUS: SWITCHED-ON MARKETING” — with links to 50 highly-relevant weblog posts.

If you want to play along with the development process, you can be a big help.

How?

Break this software:

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

I’m serious. I want you to install that code in your sidebar and see if you can break it.

There are two ways we know of that you might be able to break it.

First, the PHP may not want to work for you. If that happens, I would love to see a screen shot in your email to me about what happened. So you know: I do not believe this will happen. We broke it every which way yesterday, and I think I have code that should work on any true Apache web server.

The second way that this code could fail is that it might not look right. It should come into your sidebar as a well-behaved citizen. It should inherit your sidebar’s style sheets, and it should scroll top to bottom but not left to Read more

November 29, 2008

Someday soon we may have to turn back the clock on home lending

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Someday soon we may have to turn back the clock on home lending

Furniture stores are offering weekly payments. Department stores and jewelry stores are making Christmas easier with layaway plans.

Check the calendar. Did someone dial the clock back to 1968?

Not quite, but the credit crunch has got us looking backwards in time to try to remember how we used to do business, back before easy credit made things so easy.

Here’s the dirty little secret no one shared with you: For many, many years, the business of America has been credit.

Car dealerships don’t sell cars, they sell financing, selling your loan at a discount as soon as your tires hit the pavement.

Furniture stores don’t sell furniture, they use your desire for new furniture to get you to sign a promissory note.

One of the best protections of your financial interests is called Regulation Z. The Z reportedly stands for Zales, the easy credit jewelry store.

New home builders are in the same game. That’s why the incentives are so much better if you use the builders’ lender.

And that’s why there’s no interest for the first six months. Or no payments at all for the first two years. And all it takes is one quick signature…

But those days are done. Consumers — and corporations — are defaulting on debt like never before in history. The buyers of promissory notes aren’t buying any longer. Instead, they’re in Washington begging for bailouts.

And that leaves the furniture stores and the jewelry stores back in the merchandise business. They need to come up with ways to get people with no money to part with what little they have — a little at a time — in order to have any sort of cash flow at all.

And all this will come to real estate, too. We still have easy credit, but when interest rates start to climb, we’ll see our own kinds of “old fashioned” financing arrangements: Seller carrybacks, land contracts, wraps, lease purchases, etc.

We may be headed into tough times, but we still have a roadmap from Read more

November 27, 2008

The Thanksgiving Day scenius at BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier and Eric Blackwell get up early in a time zone two hours earlier than mine. Cheryl Johnson lives an hour later than me, but I don’t think she ever sleeps. Anyway, this morning I woke up to Teri, Eric and Cheryl gnawing on a bunch of insanely great ideas by email.

That’s a scenius, y’all: Smart, focused people concentrating on well-understood problems, looking for innovative solutions.

I chipped in a little here and a little there, and then, just like that, we landed on a brand new way of thinking about community building with hyper-local weblogs.

My piece of the puzzle was new software, but what we’re doing is not a tool but a praxis, a working procedure. As a consequence, I’m not going to teach this until BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ll show you how to use your weblog to make better connections with other local — non-real estate — blogs, even as you both improve your SEO and maximize the SEO benefits of weblogging. This is killer stuff, literally the hammer-tap in just the right spot, a cornucopia of benefits for a minimal effort.

But: It involves theory, preparation and a certain amount of software hacking, so we’re going to do it when we can do it all together, side-by-side and step-by-step in Phoenix.

I know money is tight. Pinch your pennies and bring them to Phoenix. We’re going to make it worth your while…

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November 26, 2008

As an expression of gratitude to the Bloodhounds, here’s an Unchained Melody for Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work. –Ayn Rand

I love this place — this life, this earth and this tiny little corner of the net. The accretion of evidence leads me to believe that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have designed for myself. Yes, we’re headed into serious economic trouble, and, yes, we’re headed that way under the leadership of a man who has never held a job in his life and who makes no secret that he knows nothing about the causes of wealth and poverty.

But: Even so: So what?

We are on the cusp of riches without limits. We are literally standing around getting soaked to the skin as soup rains down from the skies, and yet we are so much in the thrall of our treasured wounds that we can’t even see it. That much, at least, is a correctable nuisance.

The curtain goes up at eleven tonight on Act Three of my life, and I know better than anyone that I am the best beneficiary of the riches I talk about. All my life people have asked me for writing advice, and, without intending to be glib, I told them simply this: Have something to say, and have a way of saying it. I am befriended by the times, and — amazingly to me — I am by now able to ship these piles of ore I have quarried from my mind. Do you want to know how to change the world forever, for the good? You do it one mind at a time — starting with your own.

I’m grateful to the Bloodhounds — to the people who read, comment and write here — both for BloodhoundBlog and for Unchained. I’m thankful for our clients, who have been prosperous enough to keep us in business. I don’t think I ever adequately express my gratitude to Cathleen, who gives me everything that can be had from another person. There are so many others — Richard Riccelli and Brian Brady and Teri Lussier — so I hope Read more

November 23, 2008

Speaking in tongues: Using the power of a robust text editor to code HTML pages with dispatch

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is a short screencast on how I use the text editor known as TextWrangler to wrangle text into usable formats. This particular episode illustrates how I create coded HTML from my weekly Arizona Republic column. In future screencasts, I’ll want to illustrate more arcane ideas about deploying robust software toward highly productive objectives.

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November 23, 2008

The bottom of the Phoenix real estate market may be in sight — but, alas, the end is not near

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
The bottom of the Phoenix real estate market may be in sight — but, alas, the end is not near

When will the Phoenix real estate market finally hit bottom?

Believe it or not, I can answer that question with a high degree of precision: When the number of homes being added to the available inventory each month is generally lower than the number of homes sold each month.

But that’s a sleight of hand, isn’t it? I can’t say which month on the calendar will be the market’s nadir, I can only tell you what kind of market activity to watch for.

So here’s one way of looking at things. A newer suburban tract home in the West Valley is selling for $100 a square foot, on average. Practically speaking, this makes new home building unprofitable. Very few new homes will be built, so that source of new inventory is cut off for now.

Meanwhile, various loan workout programs are depleting the foreclosure pipeline. Where before a house might be offered as a short sale and then as a lender-owned home, now there will be an interregnum for the workout. What had been a gusher of lender-owed homes may slow down to a trickle, at least for the next few years.

Meanwhile, the low prices of currently available lender-owned homes are providing incentives for monied investors to come to Phoenix to snap up bargains. The nationwide economic slowdown might put the brakes on our normal in-migration patterns, but if people do move here, they’re going to be soaking up inventory as well.

So we should see some slowing in newly-listed homes, and we have upticks in demand. Are these enough to stop the general decline in home values in the Phoenix market? Ask me in three months.

But even if they are, we’re very far from being out of trouble. The loan workouts, particularly, may well keep home prices from plummeting. But because they will stretch out what in most cases will be an unavoidable foreclosure process, they will probably keep home prices low for years Read more

November 20, 2008

Rethinking Real Estate Web 2.0

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

What do consumers want? I believe this question has been asked ten times to Sunday as it relates to real estate.

I recently read Marc Davison’s recent blog post at 1000Watt Blog summarizing the results of that exact question, What do Consumers Want?.  The report, commissioned by Keller Williams, was developed and written by an impressive list of MBAs and PhDs.  With that amount of intellectual firepower, it is often difficult to question its credibility.

In addition to the report commissioned by Keller Williams, MBA and PhD’s et al, I read a synopsis of NAR’s buyer and seller’s survey, essentially providing the statistics behind today’s buyers and sellers as well as their needs.   I honed in a three key points in NAR’s report:

1.  “Home buyers are consistent in their expectations of real estate agents. Buyers thought the most important agent services are helping find the right house, and negotiating sales terms and price. Because agents often are chosen based on a referral, or were used in a previous transaction, two-thirds of buyers contacted only one real estate agent in the search process.”

2.  “Primarily, sellers want agents to price their home competitively, market the property, find a buyer and sell within a specific timeframe.”

3.  “The most difficult tasks reported by unrepresented sellers are selling within the planned length of time, getting the right price, preparing the home for sale, and understanding and performing paperwork.”

What I found interesting about the Keller William’s report was its premise –  How do you go about the process of selecting an agent?  What I found interesting about the NAR report was that the premise was more consumer centric, not agent centric.

The question I pose is how many of the current RE Web 2.0 solutions have truly “blue sky” functionality?  What if the premise assumed that there was no real estate agent?   What if a solution existed that allowed the consumer to buy and sell real estate at will without the use of a professional?

Ok – now don’t excommunicate me.  I think from a technology perspective, I believe it is a very valid question.  All too often, solutions are Read more

November 20, 2008

Estately.com grows by more than 50%, adding Chicagoland and Long Island, NY, to it on-line inventory of homes for sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seattle-based web search start-up Estately.com adds 120,000 new listings to it inventory today, expanding from the west coast to Chicago and Long Island. The upgrade brings Estately’s inventory to over 300,000 MLS-listed homes. Also a part of today’s announcement, the search-bot will show extended listing histories on homes, a move also recently taken by Redfn.com.

You can play with the Chicago listings by clicking this link. I have a link for the Long Island listings, but I’m not sure it’s working right.

As a matter of disclosure: Estately.com founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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November 19, 2008

Unchained Notes: SMM is a Process, Not a Fetish

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts sharing some of the gold I found at the Unchained Orlando Conference on Social Media Marketing for Real Estate.  The first post was on theme, the second was philosophy and now it’s time to talk nuts and bolts.

You hear a lot about Social Media Marketing. It is variously described as the future of prospecting, a revolutionary version of networking for a 2.0 world, the miracle of permission based marketing and – if I remember correctly – a cure for the common cold.  But more often than not you’re hearing from someone who talks about it as opposed to someone out here in the trenches doing it.  You can always tell because the person just talking about it doesn’t give a whole lot of information on how it works. You hear all the sizzle but what’s needed is for someone to actually throw a big, juicy steak on your plate.  Well, I hope you’re hungry because Brian Brady worked the grill for hours at the Unchained Conference in Orlando and he did not disappoint.  Not only did he serve up the meat of the matter, he cut it into bite size pieces and made it easy to digest.

Why
As with all teaching opportunities, Brian started with the “Why.”  Why do we market and why, specifically, is Social Media Marketing important.  The answer to the first question was easy.  Farming for new customers creates new customers and they are the life-blood of our practice.  It was the answer to the latter question that hit me right between the eyes.  The Internet allows us to automate our Unique Selling Proposition.  Think about the power in that last statement.  Automating your USP and reaching an exponentially larger audience with no extra effort or cost is a magical formula.

Brian identified the five pillars of Social Media Marketing:

  1. Declaration of Identity
  2. Identity by Association
  3. Consumer Generated Conversation
  4. Provider Generated Conversation
  5. Off-Line Conversation

He went on to show us how to “set traps” using these five pillars.  What did he mean by “setting traps?”  Being in the right place at the right time by design Read more

November 17, 2008

Introducing BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress weblogs for real estate professionals

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Say hello to BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress Multi-user weblogs for real estate professionals.

We talked about doing this in Orlando, at the scenius on Swallow Hill Road. Where we started was with the idea of WordPress blogs for the CyberProfessionals to practice on.

We saw that the right system could serve the same function for any novice bloggers — including all of the folks on Active Rain looking to make the leap to WordPress weblogging.

And BloodhoundBlog.net can also be a space for BloodhoundBlog Unchained instructors to help their students get their homework together before coming to Phoenix.

Will this be your last word in real estate weblogging? It can be, but that strikes me as a poor idea. What we’re offering is a free weblogging platform where real estate professionals can learn and grow, ultimately to go off and set up their own WordPress.org weblogs.

And you had better know this is an Unchained weblogging world: You can import content from a host of blogging platforms, and everything you do on BloodhoundBlog.net is easily exported when you’re ready to move on.

If you want to go ahead and get started, just go to BloodhoundBlog.net and set up a new blog. It’s fast, easy and fun.

Still here? Who should set up a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog?

  • Stone newbies. If you want to learn to weblog, you might as well start with the best software, among people who can help you develop the best possible practices.
  • Intermediate bloggers. If you’ve been toying with Active Rain or with real estate forums, it might be time to put away childish things. The work you do with us will transfer easily to a full-blown WordPress.org weblog.
  • Kindred spirits. If you want to build a community of like minds, the price of doing so here can’t be beat.
  • Adhocracy activists. A weblog is the perfect means of coordinating, for example, the Wine-Tasting Realtors of Biloxi.
  • Teachers of lessons profound and arcane — starting with the slave-drivers of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

How can we do this? We have the horsepower — dawgpower — that’s how. Even so, we’re not letting you all the way off the leash. There are plug-ins, but Read more

November 17, 2008

The just-exactly-how-clever-are-you marketing-spam of the morning: SuperCuts shows you how to cut your database marketing costs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is pure spam, as far as I know, completely unsolicited. I read it and loved and now I’m sharing it with you:

Here’s a web-based version, if you’re having trouble reading it.

I read this as Harrah’s-style database marketing at its best: I’m offering you an incentive to sign up to be touched at your natural buying points. That’s a mutually-reinforcing loyalty, with the merchant, of course, taking care of the up-keep for the relationship.

The issue: How to translate it to real estate. It’s not enough to have an offer. Free moving boxes are a one-off freemium, and what you want are regular reasons to touch your people.

Richard Riccelli has a great idea for synergistic offers, but you’ll have to use your imagination to retool it for real estate. He suggests giving a free magazine subscription as a freemium. For us, it might be Dwell or Cottages. In your market, it might be your local city mag. The challenge is turning the offer into natural, organic touch points. One solution might be to feature something from the magazine in your monthly newsletter. Another might be simply to call your subscriber clients to talk about issues raised in the latest issue.

A comps search is a way to stay in touch with past buyers. These were a lot more fun when prices were going up, but it’s still a nice way to stay in contact. I’m assuming everyone knows what this is: An MLS-based search of stone comps to the buyer’s home, with email alerts going to them and to you every time something changes. They get to see what’s going on in their hyper-hyper-hyper-local market, and you get a golden opportunity to talk them every time a comp is listed or sold.

What else? I wish we could have a couponable event every four to six weeks, like SuperCuts, but what other things can we do to create pull-based relationships that give us natural, organic opportunities to stay in front of our clients?

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November 17, 2008

Unchained Notes: It’s a Greek Thing

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts sharing some of the gold I found at the Unchained Orlando Conference on Social Media Marketing for Real Estate.  In the first post: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Hound Pound,  I talked a little about the theme that emerged through all the speakers.  In this, the second post, the theme reveals its philosophy.

Imagine someone handing you a list with ten actions you could use right now to improve your marketing.  Now imagine not only being given the list, but an understanding of the “why” behind the actions on the list.  You would go from an agent that is hungry, to an agent eating a fish, to an agent who knows how to fish in rapid order.  That is what Greg Swann, our first speaker, accomplished when he shared his Unchained Epiphany.

Greg pointed out that most civilizations will do just what is needed to survive and no more.  When faced with a new problem they will do just enough to overcome it but again, no more.  He did not come right out and say it, but I couldn’t help myself thinking of us as a civilization.  All of us involved in the real estate business.  We have our own language, our own goals, our own methods for determining hierarchy and possibly most important, we have our own culture.  We also suffer from the same problems Greg was describing: often doing just what is needed to get by; just enough to solve a problem, pay the bills and move on to the next thing.  Not all cultures operate this way.

The Greeks, as Mr. Swann pointed out, were the first culture to come along and reach for more than just surviving; to become, as Greg said: “a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake.”  We, each and every one of us, has that opportunity.  We are free to succeed and we are free to fail.  We are free to control our business and we are free to believe others Read more

November 16, 2008

Thus does Big Mother make gonophs of us all: How to keep your house by taking taxpayers for a ride

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is choice, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

To qualify, you must be at least 90 days delinquent and live in the home as your primary residence. You must owe at least 90 percent of the home’s value. It’s fine if you owe more than it’s worth.

Your mortgage must be owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or held by one of the participating loan companies.

If you meet these requirements and can document your income, your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment – including property taxes, insurance and association dues – to 38 percent of your gross income.

The reduction can be accomplished in one or more ways:

— Reducing the interest rate, but not below 3 percent. (The new rate, if below market, goes back to a market rate after five years.)

— Extending the term of the loan up to 40 years.

— Reducing the principal on which monthly payments are calculated. Unpaid principal is added to the loan balance and due when the homeowner sells or refinances. The reduced interest payments never have to be repaid.

If you owe more than the home is worth, the plan will only reduce principal down to 100 percent of market value, according to an official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If all three of these maneuvers can’t reduce your payments to 38 percent of income, you won’t get a fast-track modification but could still request a customized deal, says the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The streamlined process looks only at income, not assets. If you refinanced your home to buy a Mercedes or own another home, you won’t be expected to sell them to pay your mortgage.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to Read more

November 16, 2008

Can California cultivate anything better than the seeds of its own destruction? Urbanologist Joel Kotkin tallies the state’s ills

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin on the rise and fall of the Golden State:

Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I coauthored a book called California, Inc. about our adopted home state. The book described “California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.”

As relative newcomers at the time, we saw California as a place of limitless possibility. And over most of the next two decades, my coauthor, Paul Grabowicz, and I could feel comfortable that we were indeed predicting the future.

But much has changed in recent years. And today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.

Since 2000, California’s job growth rate— which in the late 1970s surged at many times the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration. Texas has replaced California as the leading growth center for Hispanics.

Out-migration is a key factor, along with a weak economy, for the collapse of the housing market. Simply put, the population growth expected for many areas has not materialized, nor the new jobs that might attract newcomers. In the past year, four of the top six housing markets in terms of price decline have been in California, including Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles. The Central Valley towns of Stockton, Merced, and Modesto have all been awarded the dubious honors of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation during the past year.

Even with prices down, many of the most desirable places in California are also among the most unaffordable in the nation. Less than 15 percent of households earning the local median income can afford a home in L.A. or San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, or San Jose, it’s less than a third. That’s about half the number who can buy in the big Texas or North Carolina markets. Moreover, state officials warned in October that they might have to seek 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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