There’s always something to howl about.
Inman News is reporting today on a possible reprieve for seller-paid down-payment assistance programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah. As you will recall, Brian Brady gave you the heads-up on this initiative on August 27th. Brian will be checking in shortly with details of his schmoozing adventures with Barney Frank’s kitchen cabinet. Cliff’s Notes: Don’t tear up those purchase contracts just yet.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Real Estate Success Tracker is a Customer Relations Manager/Transaction Manager for Realtors. It comes in Windows and Macintosh versions, plus a networked version that will work with clients on either platform.
REST CEO Matthew Hardy — a BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix matriculant — has been paying attention to the marketplace — unheard of among real estate product vendors — so REST has been quietly moving into the cloud. But Hardy has always been committed to both data security and to your ownership of your data, so REST in the cloud will be available only from your own REST client software — with the database running on your REST network server in your office.
And so the next logical step in this cloudwise progression is an iPhone client, and that is nearing completion. Shown below are three reduced screens from REST for the iPhone, which could be released in beta form as early as this afternoon:
REST is free to try. As a CRM it rocks, but it’s designed to bring systemization and automation to every aspect of a Realtor’s practice. As an example, it’s very easy to build Gary-Keller-style drip/touch campaigns for your clients, customers and prospects. Also very easy to build task scripts for assistants, which can then be assigned to clients or transactions.
Matthew and his team are working hard to integrate REST with the iPhone, bringing us one step closer to one of my long-held dreams: A unified contact database that is synced to every computer and mobile phone in our business. REST is one of the key components we are counting on to take our business into the cloud, and the iPhone app will be a big step in that direction.
BloodhoundRealty.com is a REST installation, but I confess we haven’t made the best use of it, so far. The software has been there for us, but we haven’t been there for it. We have an intern working now to correct our RESTlessness. But: Cathleen and I will both be running the beta iPhone app, so I’ll let you know how it’s working for us.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
That image looks nice, but I’m pretty sure it’s a mistake. We’re growing, always, but I don’t think we’re growing quite this fast.
I know that Technorati has been cleaning out its sock drawer, so, for all I know, that could be a true reflection of our Technorati reach. But I think I’ll wait a few days before borrowing against that number…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
[This is the introductory text to an eBook I have prepared discussing the idea of divorcing the real estate commissions, a topic I have discussed here at some length. You can find the eBook by clicking here. If you like, you can post a button linking to this book — there is code at the end of this post. But my primary motive for putting this together is to appeal to the various consumer-facing personal finance weblogs. I don’t foresee any meaningful reform in the real estate industry originating from the inside, so I am doing what I can to arm consumers against the pernicious evil that is the National Association of Realtors. –GSS]
Introduction
Here are three interesting real estate questions, two that came to me directly and one that was commended to me by Rudy Bachraty of Trulia.com.
Question #1: “Potential buyers for our home ($800K – California) have a realtor but he did not find our home for them. The buyers did and have visited both times without him. He has played no role whatever in bringing us these buyers. If we accept their offer why on earth should we give him 3% ($24K) of our home’s equity for contributing nothing whatsoever?”
Question #2: “When looking at homes on our own and calling the listing agents ourselves to set up appointments, does that obligate us to go with the listing agent if we decide to place an offer on the property?”
Question #3: “Since the amount of work involved doesn’t really differ according to the value of the house, financially, it seems like the percentage commission would make higher prices more favorable from a buyer’s agent’s perspective. If this is the case, why would the buyer’s agent be motivated to help negotiate the price down?”
Now, there are nice, long, complicated answers for each of those questions, and nice, long, complicated answers are the very essence of a certain type of salesmanship. It’s called Tap-Dancing, and it works — at least if you’re easily confused. But here are much shorter, much more truthful answers to those three questions:
Answer #1: If you want to hang Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
August was a great month for real estate sales, but when 40% of buyers are pushed off the playing field, home prices could plummet
We won’t have reliable numbers for a few days,* but preliminary results leave no doubt that August was a huge month for real estate sales in the Valley of the Sun. Not for prices, alas, which continued to slide by around 1.5% last month. But, of the bread-and-butter suburban tract homes we track, around 200 will have sold, a two-year high.
September promises to be a banner month also, with nearly 280 homes currently under contract. Not all of those homes will make it through the escrow process, but most of them will.
What accounts for all this activity? The single greatest factor is seller-paid down-payment assistance programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah. An FHA loan requires a 3% down-payment, and these grant programs permit the seller to fund the grant, along with up to 3% more for closing costs. The upshot is that buyers can take possession of the home for “nothing down.”
In recent months, down-payment assistance programs have accounted for as much as 40% of sales of resale homes, and as much as 90% of new-build sales.
Here’s the catch: Under the mortgage relief act recently signed into law, seller-paid down-payment assistance will be forbidden. The restriction takes effect on October 1st, but most lenders have already closed the window on new AmeriDream and Nehemiah loans.
It’s possible these programs will be reinstated by future legislation, but, even if they are not, it’s not the end of the world. It’s no great challenge to find a decent starter home for $100,000. And if buyers cannot manage to save up $3,000 for a down-payment ($3,500 after October 1st), acquiring a huge new debt may not be the best solution to their financial problems.
But the short-run prognosis seems pretty obvious: When 40% of resale buyers are forced onto the sidelines, the downward pressure on prices should accelerate.
The bottom line: If you’re prepared to buy a house in the Phoenix area, either Read more
Has SellsiusRealEstate.com (“Just like Craigslist, only not free!”) hit the Dead Pool? The weblog rages on, but the main site doesn’t even 404. The “About” page for the weblog has been re-rendered as yet another those-who-can’t-teach pitch, and, of course, Sellsius was a pioneer in the suddenly-popular practice of making net.friends in order to sell them out to advertisers. Perhaps these business models are enough to keep the wolves at bay. Sic transit gloria mundi.
But despair not. Even today, there is something new under the sun. RealtyBaron.com is introducing an idea it calls “risk management for Realtors.” What it is is a hedging strategy — akin to an insurance bet in Blackjack — whereby listing agents pay a premium to insure that listings are profitable whether or not they sell.
Worth a thousand words:
Oh, wait. That is a thousand words. 😉
This is not quite stoopid, although it shares some genes with stoopid. It’s a Realtor-milking scheme, beyond all doubt. It’s not quite as scurvy as some scams, but it does amount to you betting on your own failure, hardly the food of a good attitude.
I don’t completely hate the idea. But, assuming it takes off in sufficient numbers to matter, it seems to be misaligned to rational market incentives.
As I’ve discussed in the past, we charge a non-refundable retainer to sellers for similar reasons, to cover our front-loaded costs if the rug is pulled out from under us. But the primary reason for the retainer is to impose a meaningful cost on the seller for pulling the rug out from under us. We want for our sellers to have some skin in the game, to make cancellation an unattractive prospect — and to make sure they’re completely committed before we start working. The hedge bet does nothing to assure the commitment of the seller.
Moreover, as above, the entire plan is built around a bet on failure. If you as the lister know your ass is covered both ways, are you as likely to do the whatever-it-takes to get your listing sold? And if you are not, what direction should you expect the Read more
Chrome: Yawn. Firefox, OTOH, is coming along nicely. I now run it side-by-side with Safari on my Mac. Safari is still my fave, but I don’t rail at Firefox like I used to.
The user interface of the iPhone is actually a hugely subversive paradigm shift in computer design: Tapping, multi-touch, micro- and macro-spatial awareness — these are all new things under the sun. Cathleen has been hearing interesting rumors about this UI being the basis for a MacTablet computer. And Apple has an event scheduled for next week…
I mentioned a week or two ago that I’m having Cameron build a session-tracker for our web sites. What he’s working on will live at the top HTML level of our server, so that, if necessary, he can track activity from the same one IP address across multiple domains. In other words, if someone follows a link from here to BloodhoundRealty.com, then from there to one of our single-property web sites, we should be able to see every movement.
I find myself wanting something like Jott without the limitations. When I’m previewing a house, I’d like to be able to dictate my impressions on the spot. I’d also like to be able to dictate emails, weblog posts and miscellaneous memoranda. Is there anything out there like that, ideally phone-based like Jott?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Time is physics, the stately transit of the stars and planets. Time is space is mass is energy, four faces of the same one thing, elegant in its simplicity.
The passage of time — or, rather, the awareness of the passage of time — is a human artifact, a man-made thing. The Greeks or their forebears gave us seconds and minutes and hours — elegantly composed of factorials. Days, weeks, months, decades, centuries, millennia — time marches on, don’t it?
Here’s my thing, and it’s something I don’t think I’ve ever talked about with other people: I am constantly aware of the passage of time. It matters to me that I get things done, so I am always measuring my performance against the clock.
Even moreso if I have set aside time to complete a task.
Even moreso at the end of the workday.
Even moreso on Friday afternoons, when I look back to see what I accomplished for the week.
And much, much moreso at the start of a new month, when I not only look back at what got done in the month just past, but also look ahead to what the coming month promises.
If you’re in straight commission sales, you live out of a pipeline, that’s understood. It’s nice to watch those paychecks coming out of the pipeline, but the haunting question — always — is what am I doing right now to put future paychecks into the pipeline?
Like many people reading here, August was a great month for us. I won’t know until I see the final numbers, but it may have been our best month ever. Certainly it’s in the top five.
September shows real promise, both because lenders are getting back on their bicycles and because Phoenix is suddenly very appealing to all-cash buyers.
But still… I look at the calendar and I think about that pipeline…
I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got to go to work.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). There is a fuller review of this new technology here.
With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets
So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia.com or Zillow.com? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but this week marks a decisive change in the game: Trulia just released an iPhone application.
Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of other smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.
It’s hard to argue with the design premise: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database?
The ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency transactions, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.
But here’s the bonus that popped out at me when I heard about Trulia’s iPhone application: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. I like anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients.
The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus Read more
The other day I went through our cloud-centered email strategy:
I have my mail set up like this: From my iMac in the office, certain categories of email — initial client contacts plus mail from anyone in my Address Book — are redirected to a unique iPhone-only gmail account. That way, I get echoes of the mail that matters to me, with zero spam. The iPhone’s mail account won’t honor my gmail Reply To setting, which sucks, but, as above, the advantage is that I have my important email wherever I happen to be working.
I thought it was adequate at the time. But then the power failed…
In circumstances like these, I have fallen back to SquirrelMail, a Unix-based server-side mail client. That turns out to be less than ideal.
We got the power back today, and I was ready at once to implement our new email strategy.
Note that this little episode illustrates why it is so useful to control your own web hosting, at least at the mail-server level.
Here’s what we’re doing, as of this afternoon:
At the file server, my main email account (GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com) is being echoed to a new gmail account I created today. That account is simply intended to be a duplicate catch-all for all my inbound mail.
My iMac continues to receive my mail and to process it according to the rules discussed above — provided my iMac is working.
Under normal conditions, my email will be handled just as described above. But in the event of a power failure or serious crash, I will still have access to all of my mail from any computer anywhere, including my iPhone, without having to screw around with SquirrelMail.
Our cloud strategies are all about redundancy. I don’t care that I might have to react to up to three copies of any piece of email. My fear is that instead of three copies I will have zero copies to work with.
I worked out a redundant cloud-based fax strategy, too, that I’ll be talking about later.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
I see this all the time lately. The blue lockboxes are Supra boxes. They cost about $75 each.
The vendor box and the front blue box belong to the current lister of the home.
We do our homes this way, too, with a Supra box for Realtors, appraisers and inspectors and a vendor box for any tradesmen we send into the house — and also to have a spare key on the property. For reasons that seem obvious to us, we don’t put the two lockboxes in the same place.
The blue box in back belongs to the last listing agent, for whom the home didn’t sell.
I’d have to run the lockbox to know for sure, but when I see more than one blue box on a property, my assumption is that the previous agent has left the business. Otherwise, why leave a $75 asset hanging on the hose bib?
We’ve thought about offering $20 for the release codes for these orphaned lockboxes: A little dough for you, and we’ll pick up the lockbox.
A sad story, but it’s not the liquidator’s job to weep over the mess, but simply to clean it up.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Jott. Jott is preternaturally useful, since you can just phone yourself notes from the road and have them waiting for you when you get back to the office. Here’s an iPhone strategy: Install the iPhone app, but continue to use Jott by phone. That way, your Jotts will show up on your home email account, but they will also sync wirelessly with the iPhone client. You’ll have your notes with you wherever you happen to be working.
NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is by now the de facto category-killer feed reader. The desktop version syncs wirelessly with the iPhone client, so you never see the same news twice: If you read it on your iPhone, it won’t show up on your home client and vice versa.
Mail. A built-in app? You bet. I have my mail set up like this: From my iMac in the office, certain categories of email — initial client contacts plus mail from anyone in my Address Book — are redirected to a unique iPhone-only gmail account. That way, I get echoes of the mail that matters to me, with zero spam. The iPhone’s mail account won’t honor my gmail Reply To setting, which sucks, but, as above, the advantage is that I have my important email wherever I happen to be working.
Maps. Another built-in app — and it made me look look smart twice yesterday. I’m very kinesthetic. I rarely get lost, and I can remember any route I have ever traveled. Even so, directions in real estate listings can suck. Having on-demand GPS mapping is a life-saver for a working Realtor.
Where. If Where did nothing but find the nearest Starbucks, I would still love it to death. But Where finds and maps anything that can be found — with a fast, clean interface.
Cathy has four pages of iPhone apps so far. I am very conservative by contrast. But I have two voice dialers that I’m trying to find time to train. If one or the other does the job, I’ll be sure to talk about it, because hands-free dialing would make the iPhone that much more valuable — to a Read more
As I’ve mentioned, I’m building a dedicated direct-response web site devoted to pre-selling listing clients. Our main Phoenix real estate weblog does a good job selling to buyers, sellers, investors and relocators, the four markets we target there, but it is my belief that I can build a sales engine that can pre-sell and pre-condition homeowners in such a way that, by the time they contact us, we will be completely Beyond Competition.
I talked about a number of these ideas at Unchained in Phoenix, and we’ll be doing quite a bit more on this topic in Orlando.
Consider this:
21:28:40 http://distinctivephoenix.com/ 21:29:43 http://abetterlisting.com/ 21:32:18 http://abetterlisting.com/Presentation/ 21:46:29 http://distinctivephoenix.com/ 21:50:33 http://abetterlisting.com/
That’s a set of visits from one unique IP address. I built minimal session tracking into the site, but I have Cameron working on a much more robust solution. But what you’re seeing is at least 22 minutes of someone’s life. Not counting search engine spiders, this site draws fewer than six unique visitors a day — but they’re all like this. Twenty-two minutes is a short visit. People have stayed for over an hour. Others have come back for three or four days in succession. The site is not converting as well as I want it to — yet — but I’m seeing exactly the kind of user behavior I want.
There are points I want to make, but I’ll have to be brief. This site and our others are converting well enough that I’m short on time all the time.
But let’s hit this much, at least:
Over the past few days, Redfin got into it with a bunch of other real estate websites. What else is new?
In an argument about who has the most homes for sale, which began on TechCrunch and continued on Redfin’s blog, one participant argued that what consumers really care about is advanced filtering options, not inventory.
Which got us thinking. We spend a fair bit of time on advanced filtering options. And we’ve always thought we need to spend more: every week, we get requests for filters on parking, townhouses, waterfront location (Seattle), historic designation (DC), pool (LA).
So Redfin’s Jim Lamb just analyzed 70,000 Redfin searches from Thursday, August 21 to find out which of Redfin.com’s search filters people really use. It’s an analysis we’ve done before, to figure out whether a listing gets seen more if it’s priced to be included in web searches, like at $449,500 rather than $450,100.
What we learned last night was a little demoralizing. People filter on price, beds, baths, sometimes square feet, and new (or very old) listings, but not much else:
On looking at this, Matt Goyer said, “Who doesn’t filter on square footage?” I could only sadly shake my head. Consumers completely skip the fancy stuff:
So even as we argued that filtering options aren’t as important as inventory, we didn’t really believe it: our engineers have been hard at work on… you guessed it, more filtering options. Just now, it’s parking & townhouse filters. (Every week, I get a crazy screed from a consumer about how much people hate townhouses… which I read… from my townhouse.)
What do you think? Are we wasting our time? Confusing our consumers? As it is, we Read more
There’s news and then there’s news. Consider:
A real estate industry study released today shows that most popular consumer real estate search engines, including Trulia, Zillow, Google and Yahoo!, offer home seekers only a small fraction of the homes actually available on the market — and that many of the listings are inaccurate or out of date. Real estate searches on these popular sites in three sample markets — Miami, Dallas and San Diego — failed to provide users with as much as 92 percent of available listings in their home searches.
“Holy cow!” you might think. “The mainstream media is writing something actually factual about the defects of venture-capital-funded Realty.bots! No puff, no fluff, just the straight dope!”
Contain yourself. This is not news. Like most “news,” it’s a regurgitated press release. “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?”
The study, commissioned by Roost.com and conducted by the WAV Group, points out the stark contrasts between different online property search methods available today and concluded that the most accurate source of listing information is the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The WAV Group specifically researched how popular consumer real estate search sites including Trulia, Google and Yahoo!, among others — which aggregate listings from a variety of third-party sources — stack up to sites like Roost.com, which are enabled by the MLS. The MLS is the real estate industry standard database for sharing information on local homes for sale and is available only to licensed real estate agents and brokers; all the listings on the MLS are derived from local agents and brokers. To serve the needs of agents wishing to make MLS property search available to consumers, MLS boards nationwide have deployed a standard called Internet Data Exchange, or IDX.
This again is obvious, of course, so it’s perfectly understandable that mainstream media mavens seem not to know it. But it’s completely self-serving on Roost’s part. The actual news in this “news” would be:
Trulia/Zillow available everywhere (even on your phone), Roost unknown to founders’ mothers
But when would you ever expect to find news in the newspapers?
In fact, in the cities where it operates, Redfin.com has the most Read more
