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Category: Marketing (page 64 of 191)

July 28, 2008

Unchained in Orlando: Scouting Disneyville for the perfect location

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We got to go to StarPower this year as guests of Russell and Wendy Shaw, which was very gracious on their part and positively dispositive on ours: We could not have made the trip without them. I’ll write more on our StarPower experience, because we came away with some very interesting ideas to play with.

For now, I want to talk a bit about Orlando. It was my first time there, and I might have passed on StarPower if I hadn’t had the secondary objective of getting the lay of the land in the Magic Kingdom. In fact, we didn’t even see anything of Disney — other than Disney-dazed kids, that is — but we got a very good feel for the area around the Orange County Convention Center where BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando will be held.

Here are some photos, just for fun:

This is the North/South building of the Convention Center. It’s immense, but, even so, it’s much smaller than the West building.

This is just the main entrance to the West building. This is where you will find the trade show floor of the NAR Convention. The NAR has also reserved all of the available meeting space in the nearby hotels, to what end I do not know.

Everything you’re seeing here is along International Drive, a fun, walkable commercial district lined with hotels, restaurants, shops and other attractions.

Here’s a little bit of International Drive’s whimsy. StarPower was held at a huge Ritz Carlton/JW Mariott golf resort, but we stayed in a hotel off of International Drive. We had a rented car, and I can navigate with some confidence in this Southwest quadrant of greater Orlando.

We’re Realtors, and we never go anywhere without looking at the real estate. Friday night while I was negotiating the sale of one of our listings, Cathy was in a state of complete rapture as we drove very slowly along South Bay Drive. If you’re looking for a place to play Google StreetView games, this is it.

Orlando in July was surprisingly pleasant. In November, it should be simply heavenly.

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July 27, 2008

Do You “Knol”? Utilizing a new Google Offering

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Real Estate Broker

Author website

It looks like Problogger has mixed opinions on the launch of Google’s Knol. Meanwhile, Seer Interactive shows Knol already ranking for some keywords.

Search Engine Land compares Knol to Wikipedia and gives you step by step instruction on setting up your own Knols. I love the ability to have a collaboration but be able to moderate and control content edits. I have an ongoing feud on Wikipedia with someone who does not feel that a link to a hyper local blog full of community information belongs on Wikipedia – I put it on – he takes it off – one year later – 15 edits and I get incredible traffic to my local blog from Wikipedia. I just have to check it every few weeks!

For me it Knol is another tool in my arsenal of online marketing. I’ve got my start and am committing to adding fresh information at least weekly. Currently I’m ranked number 3 for the search “Real Estate” and the only one for “Athens, Georgia” who wants to join me? What content do you think will be most applicable and how do you plan to leverage this new tool?

July 27, 2008

A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish

We do things that other brokers in the Phoenix area don’t do. We’re not the busiest listing brokerage — not by miles — but we’re among the most aggressively innovative in our marketing practices.

Our yard signs have always been very big, to try to grab as much attention as we can get for our listed homes, but for the past two years we have been building custom signs for our listings.

Working with Signs By Tomorrow in Peoria, we have been able to build huge, custom, four-color signs for our listed homes — featuring giant photographs of the interior and exterior of the house and custom descriptive copy about the property.

Our signs stop traffic. I know because I will often sit in my car a block or two away and watch passing cars as they slow down and stop to take in the sign, look over the house and grab a flyer.

We have a home listed in Peoria right now, and we took things one step further for this property. We know that a significant number of people in the surrounding area speak Spanish as their first language, so both the flyer and the custom sign are printed with one side in English and one side in Spanish.

Working from the English version of the Flyer, Enrique Lopez of YourPrintSource.com prepared the Spanish translation. This copy was typeset for both the flyer and the sign. If you approach the home — 7813 West Beryl Avenue — from the East, you’ll see the sign and flyer in English. From the West, you’ll see the sign and flyer in Spanish.

Just because there’s no reason not to, the photos on each side of the sign are unique. Instead of four pictures, we were able to use eight.

We also added a Spanish version of the flyer to the MLS listing so that Spanish-speaking buyers can read about the features of the home.

Regardless of our endlessly-debated border policies, as Read more

July 27, 2008

What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key.

All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, but I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a cop — not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone or for some later iteration of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. I might have a laptop and printer in my trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but I don’t have that computing power on my person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I’m perfectly happy to give up printed documents if I can shoot PDFs in all directions at will. This sounds almost implausible, but I think we might be down to the sclerotic real estate industry itself as the obstacle: Realtor associations, lenders, title companies, and all of the many branches of government.

It’s common, when discussing ideas like this, to throw up technical issues. The technical problems are truly trivial. The problem we face in real estate is the dinosaur mentality of our leadership. Properazzi.com has an iPhone interface, as do Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The National Association of Realtors Read more

July 24, 2008

The Epic Battle Ensues: Realtor vs. Realtwhore

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Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

Not sure if you’ve visited TruliaVoices lately – there is an active thread currently running, at last count, 1,599 responses. I believe that is the longest running thread in Trulia’s fledgling history. The poster has since updated the question with more information qualifying the question due to the overwhelming number of responses, however, the basic question is, “Why should someone buy in this market?”

When initially posted, the question was a legitimate query into an expert’s view as to why someone in the poster’s circumstances should buy in Chicago. Personally, I had a problem with the question – should the response be a multiple choice response?

a. buy low, sell high
b. interest rates are at historically low levels
c. Jill is half as tall as Bill and 3/4 tall as Sally
d. Vicodine
e. There is insufficent data to answer to this question

I like “e” – and for the first time in almost 30 years, I can now fully appreciate the significance of that answer on the SATs. For those of you who found Vicodine to be the logical choice, may I suggest an intervention?

Ok – so I’ve been following the thread from time to time, watching it morph from being a useful discussion to – lately – a discussion regarding the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel. Almost like a game of telephone gone bad. More disturbing to me however is how the question has evolved into a rhetorical question “WHY THE HELL would someone buy in this market? What are you, an idiot?”

If you’re familiar with the TruliaVoices rating scheme, you understand that comments are rated by either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Honestly, I think there’s a conspiracy brewing. As you read the responses of the many realtors who answered the question, “There is no better time to buy!”, many of those responses were met with a burrage of thrumbs down. You can almost hear the resounding “BOO!”, “LOSER!” – you know, while you’re at, why don’t you just poke me and call me fat.

On the Read more

July 24, 2008

Open sourcing and spiking the punchbowl with anarchism. REBarCamp is birthed as a user generated unconference and it absolutely rocks!

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

There’s no question that I felt a lot of anxiety in having possibly two hundred people show up for a BarCamp event without a “well structured agenda”. Nearly the entire event was created by using a variety of social media tools, our fearless unorganizer, Andy Kaufman led the charge into creating an unprecedented event for Real Estate professionals.   The black pearl from REBarCamp is letting go of control and operating without hierarchy can work to generate progressive brainstorming.   The many volunteers and attendees should be real proud of themselves for putting on what was probably the most unique event Real Estate Technology has ever seen.  I wished I had more time to parse some of the data I know that’s being posted to the web right now, but I’m working on transacting 3 of the most challenging deals I’ve had in two years.

The videos below give a post wrap up perspective by a few of the Campers.

Mike price of ML Broadcast chimes in for substance and structure.

Mike Price video

Daniel Rothamel who’s “not big on circles” say’s we hit a home run.

Daniel Rothamel video

Todd Carpenter and BarCamp mastermind Andy Kaufman managed to even get some value despite all the cat herding.

Todd and Andy video

David Gibbons of Zillow, which sponsored Beer for Bloggers downstairs after the event, shares what a vet of social media learned and I think my “Greg Swann” sneaks out as I give the Cafe Du Nord a mention. This of course, was recorded after my first celebratory pint of Racer Ale.

David Gibbons video

Many thanks to all of the amazing sponsors, volunteers, and participants for making this happen. I’m looking forward to gathering some more feedback as it comes in.

July 23, 2008

What’s better than a hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour? How about a FREE hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the factors that unites the vendors who annoy me is that they tend to do things that are fast, cheap and obvious, then market them like manna from the heavens. Still worse is doing something fast, cheap and obvious as a hosted solution, charging start-up fees, per use fees and monthly hosting fees — which can turn into a boatload of money real fast.

The back side of doing things that are fast, cheap and obvious is that the product category quickly becomes a commodity, with the corresponding free fall in prices. The dipshit thing may not be worth having, but at least it doesn’t cost much.

Today the economy of abundance comes to Ken-Burns-style virtual tours. Documentarian Ken Burns and others perfected a style of cinematography that lends motion to still photos by panning across and zooming in on the images. This turns out to be a fast, cheap and obvious way to build cheesy little faux-video virtual tours.

The good news: These kinds of tours have always been pretty cheap.

The bad news: They’re video, even if there is no actual live motion, so they occupy huge amounts of disk space and consume big bunches of bandwidth.

The worse news: They suck. As with true video, they only work as virtual tours as the secondary tour, the back-up or the teaser. All virtual tour solutions suck, but the faux-video photo-based virtual tour sucks big time.

The purpose of a virtual tour is to get the viewer to commit to the home, and the only way to do that is by way of the commitment of time. Any real estate promotion that excuses the buyer after a minute or two — as all video solutions do — is sub-optimal. The ideal virtual tour will offer the buyer more and more tools to play with, more and more ways to “try on” the home.

All virtual tours suck to one degree or another, but the best of the breed right now is Obeo.com. You get the panoramas and the pro-photographer photos, the neighborhood information, all that stuff. But what you get with Obeo and no one Read more

July 23, 2008

There aren’t enough advertising dollars for Zillow.com to go IPO, but adding Google Street View makes the site a little more useful

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So far, in 30 months since Zillow.com launched, precisely one client has shown me a Zestimate. I mention the site all the time, just as a matter of casual conversation, but only the INTx types know what the hell I’m talking about. Last night on the the phone with Brian Brady, I equated the Realty.bots with model trains: We fool around with these model train layouts because they’re interesting and fun — and then we get up and go back to our real jobs on the railroad.

That’s not completely fair. I’ve been using Zillow more and more in my own real estate practice, as one of my pre-listing tools. Because our current MLS system sucks so bad — it’s gone on July 28th — often I will go to Zillow first.

One thing I’ve wanted and missed at the site is Google’s Street View.

Guess what we’re getting today? That link is dead for now, but I’m not under any embargo, so here’s the news:

Even though it uses Microsoft’s satellite imagery, Zillow will also be adding Google’s Street View technology for exterior elevations of homes and views of the streets and surrounding areas.

The other bit of Zillow news this week was the announcement by Zillow.com CFO Spencer Rascoff that the start-up will not be going IPO in 2008.

The problem? All of Zillow’s services are built on an advertising-based revenue model, and it is struggling to sell enough ads.
 
“There’s an online advertising recession right now, and we are not immune,” said Rascoff. He did not show any signs of departing from the company’s advertising-based business model, or its eventual plans for an IPO.

Street View doesn’t seem to be turned on yet, as I write this. The IPO spigot may be turned off for quite a while.

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July 22, 2008

What’s the difference between BloodhoundBlog Unchained and a trade show like Inman Connect? Nothing but the chains…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In a comment to my Parliament of Whores post, Erion Shehaj asks:

I’m having a hard time differentiating between an event such as Connect and BHB Unchained[….] Is there any real difference between them charging for a conference and you doing the same?

Now that’s an excellent question.

Have you been to events like Inman Connect, StarPower or the NAR Convention? Are they charging you for a conference? You bet.

Is that their sole or even their primary objective? To the contrary.

A trade show exists to deliver you to its sponsors. The conference curriculum will consist of sponsored presentations, with the sponsors attempting to sell you their products. Are these the best tools for your business? No. The sponsors you hear from will be the highest bidders, and the hosting organization — Inman or StarPower or the NAR — will actively prevent anyone from pointing out that the sponsor’s products are inferior to others available. In other words, a trade show like Inman Connect, StarPower or the NAR Convention is nothing but a shillfest, a carnival for bilking dupes, who come there to be bilked on their own nickel.

I know you haven’t been to the one Unchained event we have had so far, but what we do is nothing like that. We had one sponsor, Zillow.com, which bought nothing but naming rights — practically speaking as a much-needed subsidy. No other sponsors, no sponsored presentations at all, no trade-show booths. The bulk of the program was Brian Brady and I teaching the theory and practice of Social Media Marketing. We interviewed a few vendors as a means of pinning them down and putting the screws to them. Everything about Unchained is contained in that one word: Achieving the greatest possible independence for the grunts on the ground.

You highlighted this text:

rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income

Everything that Brian and I do is aimed at helping working Realtors and lenders hang on to every cent they earn. If you come to see us live, you’re going to pay. Electrons are almost free but atoms cost money to move Read more

July 22, 2008

Do you work like a Georgia Bloodhound? I have a no-fee referral in Columbia County, Georgia

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I heard from a young military couple in Augusta, GA, looking to buy their first home. They have very good, very detailed questions, and they’re looking for straight answers. Obviously, a familiarity with the GI way of owning real estate is going to help. No fee on my end. Let me know by email if you can run down the game.

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July 22, 2008

WordPress for iPhone application released overnight

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Unofficial Apple Weblog. It’s for posting only, but you should be able to handle most admin tasks from Safari. There are alt.themes out there that will reformat your weblog for the iPhone/iTouch screen. I’ll have more to say about these if we ever actually lay hands on a 3G iPhone. More at WordPress.org.

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July 21, 2008

Introducing Thomas Hall: “It ain’t all Big Hair and Cadillacs”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m way behind on introductions, but time marches on. Today we’re adding Thomas Hall to the roster. He is the creator of a weblog called It ain’t all Big Hair and Cadillacs, and that little bit of insolence by itself is more than enough to qualify him for membership in the pack.

Here’s Thomas speaking in his own behalf:

I am truly a frustrated management consultant who sells real estate. I am at a certain point in my “career” in that I want to be more involved in the mindshare of real estate technology while continuing to be a practitioner. I have clear ideas about the role of technology in real estate — I believe the basic model needs a rework, but I am firmly entrenched in finding better ways for realtors to work with consumers. I don’t think technology replaces the role of an agent — it should enhance it.

Smart guy. Good writer. A Bloodhound kind of attitude. Let’s see how he howls.

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July 21, 2008

Bearing the sacred mantle of insolence in the Parliament of Whores: Win one of two free sets of BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs in “The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-scam of the week” contest!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: What’s the difference between cows and Realtors?

A: When they get the urge to be milked, cows don’t fly to trade shows at their own expense, wandering from booth to booth with their udders out.

Well. I certainly feel vindicated. The RSSPieces clusterfrolic is further proof of the advice I gave about dealing with vendors a year ago:

1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices

BloodhoundBlog has been vindicated much more than I expected this year. On issue after issue, we’re the only national real estate voice to be heard on the topic:

In March, I noted that much of the RE.net had gotten in bed with Brad Inman. Minions of the NAR — I called them the “nice niche” and Teri Lussier is turning it into a meme — have made their incursions as well. The result is that, at the national level, we are the only consistent voice left for consumers and for the grunts on the ground, the people who actually do real estate — rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income.

We are what we are, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I just didn’t expect to have the entire battlefield abandoned to us. Obviously we can more than bear the load. I worried for a while about Vlad’s Legal Defense fund, but we’ve more than covered what we’ve needed so far. For a time I was mildly dismayed that too much of the wired world of real estate seems, per Emerson, “to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression” — but that certainly doesn’t describe anything that happens here.

Real estate is a vendorslut industry, Read more

July 20, 2008

Project Bloodhound: Marketing into open hostility, blank indifference or firmly-entrenched error: How do you get people who already don’t intend to listen to you to listen anyway?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I mentioned the Saturday Afternoon Marketing Circle yesterday. Richard Riccelli, Jeff Brown, Teri Lussier and I have been talking about an ugly marketing problem and how to get around it. I left off last night with this:

You can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error. You can only persuade people who are listening to you.

I could go further than that to say that people only change their behavior in significant ways when the pain of their errors exceeds their inertia in emending them. In that respect, this real estate market is a good friend to Realtors like us, who intend to do a whole lot more to earn the business. In a normal market, no one is listening. Right now, a lot of people are tuned into the idea of better and worse results.

That notwithstanding, Teri offers up this observation to the idea that “you can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error”:

Why not? I’m not being a snot, I really don’t understand why you’d say this. Can’t great (legendary) marketing overcome a wide variety of objections?

We want to teach salesmanship at Unchained in Orlando, and this question illustrates why we want to cover this stuff. To wit:

An objection is a buying sign.

If someone raises an objection to something you’ve said, they’re not only already listening to you, they’re listening hard. If you can pull out every objection and address them satisfactorily, you’ll make a sale. In many ways objections are better than placid acceptance, since the placidity may be masking unstated objections.

But that’s not what Teri and I are talking about. The issue is this: How do you get the attention of people who are already consciously or subconsciously convinced that they don’t want to hear what you have to say?

Teri put it this way in our discussion:

So your weakness is not marketing listed homes, but marketing to convince the seller to do things your way from the beginning.

But exactly. Our efforts are remarkable. Our results, even in this market, have been very strong compared to the agents we compete against. But as I discussed with Jeff the other day, 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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