Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Marketing (page 65 of 191)
Dan Green is a great believer in the power of the media to promote a business, where I am quite a bit more skeptical. He asked me once about the commercial value of my column in the Arizona Republic. Quoting former Vice President John Nance Garner on the value of that elective office, I said, “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Dan loves the mot juste — and I will promise you that, in reality, Garner was more redolent in his retort. But: We just did the math lately and it turns out I’m wrong. The Republic column is worth $1,800 an hour — while I’m writing it.
The essence of good writing — the gist of the mot juste — is to sweep the reader along with you as you go. The corpus of writing is enshrouded in rules, but the rules don’t mean anything if the reader doesn’t care enough to participate. It’s a tragedy to be ignored entirely, but it seems to me still worse to be missed — to be skimmed and scanned and dismissed without ever having been read. I play the way I do, when I write — not as prose, not even as poetry, but as a kind of scat music where the sounds and the meanings of the words play off of each other like kittens and a butterfly on opposite sides of a window — I play this way both to reward attention and to penalize inattention. If you don’t read me with your whole mind, you won’t get it — and that’s the idea.
This is writing about writing, the most perfectly human action there is, and this is the one place you can turn to in the RE.net where the minds are serious enough to write about writing. Teri Lussier was talking about our archives, and I wish we had some organization to them. I wish I could send you off just to all of the many posts we have written about writing — some our own work, some extended quotations from giants of English literature.
There’s this, at least, Read more
These signs don’t exist yet; they won’t be finished until Friday at the earliest.
This is the first time we’ve done this, custom signs with one side in English, one side in Spanish. The flyer is done in both languages, also, one on each side of the sheet. I may echo some of the copy on the web site in Spanish, also.
Just because we can, we’re using four unique photos on each side of the sign. The sign printer is digging this stuff beyond all measure. We came to them two years ago with these ideas, and, so far, no one else has even bothered to ask them what we’re doing. Meanwhile, we keep coming up with new things to try. I want for them to enter our work in sign-makers’ competitions.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography
This started out at a response to Jeff Brown in John Rowles’ “dinosaur” post, but it grew to take on a life of its own.
Jeff Brown:
Sellers, at least in my experience, have been excellent at discerning one thing — who produces results.
Oh, would this were so! I can take you through Phoenix, neighborhood by neighborhood, and show you in which neighborhoods the sellers are paying attention and in which they aren’t. We compete very aggressively in the neighborhoods where sellers are wide awake, but there are places we are called upon to go where the neighbors could not care less who sells what for how much in how long a time. It’s just not on their radar — nor is any tactic or technique for optimizing results. We only work with sellers who care, so it makes a huge difference to us.
The brokerage — not agent — we are most likely to lose business to has done an excellent job of promoting its long-standing reputation. For the most part the agents do nothing that we would consider exceptional, and their time on market and LP/SP ratios are horrible right now, but we can only penetrate that marketing veil if the seller is paying first-hand attention.
I had a surprise yesterday. The Arizona Republic column brings me a small number of deals, but they tend to be very interesting. We’re working one now, two listings and a purchase. One of the listings is in Sun City, a Del Webb original, unmolested, on the golf course. We listed it our way last Friday, because that’s what we do. Yesterday I was out there to deal with the sign and almost all of the flyers were gone. When our flyers seem to evaporate, it almost always means that the neighbors are interested — not in the house, but in us as listers. I’ll be interested to see if the sellers out there really are paying attention. The houses don’t sell for huge amounts, but if the sellers are willing to work our way, it might be worthwhile to pioneer a second niche out there.
Our timing Read more
This is my column for last week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
Don’t learn all the wrong lessons about creative mortgages
Arguably, the Phoenix real estate market is in a state of incipient recovery. Will there be more bad news? Certainly. There are still thousands of homes stuck in the foreclosure process. But prices are low enough, by now, that our surplus inventory will be absorbed — by investors, new-comers and second-home bargain-hunters.
The bad news is that, at the end of all this, we will have learned all the wrong lessons from the real estate market downturn.
Are Adjustable Rate Mortgages a bad thing? People learned to hate the first generation of ARMs, so lenders built in guaranteed flat starter rates, fixed adjustment periods, maximum adjustment caps. But even with all that, ARMs came through the down market with a sullied reputation. With fixed rates still riding so low, ARMs don’t make a lot of sense right now, but that doesn’t mean they never make sense.
How about stated-income loans? Many of the foreclosed homes in the Valley were bought on stated income. But the problem wasn’t the loans, it was the buyers — who lied about their income — and the lenders — who let them get away with it.
Negative-amortization loans were another source of foreclosures, even though the idea behind the loan product itself is perfectly sound — in an appreciating real estate market.
The problem with all these loan products — and other “exotics” — was not the particular loan program. The problem was the profligacy of a surging real estate market — coupled with the securitization of mortgages.
Everyone acted as if the party would never end, that home prices would continue to rise indefinitely. Still worse, lenders had socialized the risk of their poorly-vetted loans to securities investors. Ultimately, lenders didn’t have to care if their loans were properly secured by good credit, steady income and valuable assets.
You can blame the people involved if you want, but don’t blame creative mortgage programs. Everything’s a trade-off, and it could make sense for you to get a stated neg-am ARM for your next Read more
As far as I can tell, the RE.net has been advocating for better broker Web sites for as long as there has been an RE.net. Many articles and posts focus on the twin pillars of eCommerce — Search + Content — but many brokers still have Web 1.0 sites or, worse, Web 1.0 sites tarted up with gimmicks to look like Web 2.0 sites while offering the same old stove-piped database search of the same old IDX content.
I started my company to bring common sense eCommerce strategy and Best Practices to Real Estate. To be honest, it has been harder than I thought it would be to get brokers to play ball and, lately, I have been thinking about why that is.
I’ve found that brokers are unique creatures in many different ways, but the most frustrating thing for me when it comes to improving Web marketing programs is that many of them seem to operate on the principle that ignorance is bliss because its cheap. Our clients are the exceptions that prove the rule, but even among them the pace of acceptance and progress varies widely.
Let me put a finer point on that by comparing a project in the real world with what often happens in the Oz of Real Estate:
I just started a new integration project for UVEX Sports. This project will replace the Web-based Business to Business (B2B) platform they are currently using with one that is hosted in-house and tied directly to their enterprise management software. UVEX sees a huge benefit in making the information and functionality that their software holds completely accessible to sales reps and customers via the Web. This is a significant upgrade over the current platform and a really, really good idea.
This exercise is understood by UVEX’s management, consultants and vendors as an integration project. Integration projects have two basic components:
- Technology Integration: Integrating existing systems with new software and hardware.
- Business Integration: Teaching management, customer service people, sales reps, and retail buyers to use the new system and make room for it in their day to day running of the business.
Once the project is complete, Read more
In this market the answer to that ponderous question would seem to be, “Are you out of your frolicking mind?!” But intrepid real estate weblogger Jay Thompson takes on the question in U.S. News & World Report in an iterative debate starting today.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Attend, if you please: OmniFocus for the iPhone. It will not only help you Get Things Done, it will tell you when to do them. No kidding. If one of your tasks is to ship a parcel at the post office, OmniFocus will sound an alarm when you are near one. Approaching the supermarket? Here’s your shopping list.
That much is just the idea of a PDA coupled with a GPS system. Still, it’s cool. But my dream for a hand-held computer is much larger than that.
Consider: I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have LowePro 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 car 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, so I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a freakin’ cop — which is 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 — and for later iterations of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even the Canon and HP rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. You might have a laptop and printer in your trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but you don’t have that computing power on your 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 want to be able to carry my entire real estate business with me, every time I leave the house. This implies cloud computing, of course, since I will Read more
OKAYfine. H2s aren’t so practical, are they? And it’s maybe vanity to have an assistant at this point, when you’re down to 20 deals a year. Maybe it’s stupid to run that display ad in the paper, sharing space with a Realtor or Loan Officer. But you’re committed, right? The give and take of this grind is in your blood, and you’re gonna survive this..resurgence of the 1970’s.
So let’s figure out how:
- Ruthlessly Control Your Personal Spending. Thanks to the IRS, I’ve been a low-spending guy anyway. But there was still fat in my budget. Mint.Com quickly pointed out what I actually spent money on. And there was tons of room to save. About $700 bucks a month without much lifestyle change. Each $100 you can save a month is $150 you don’t have to earn. The lower your nut is, the better equipped you’re gonna be. Having a low cash need = low stress.
- Control Your Environment. De clutter the hell out of everything. That stack of “broker/agent” magazines? Pitch. Everything in your workspace is something that you have to think about and something that siphons mental energy. Spend 40 minutes pitching damn near everything till you’re down to your computer, family pictures, a pen and paper, and maybe a cup for coffee or water. Make your workspace look like an Apple commercial, and see what the you get done.
- Lead Generation = 35% of your time, minimum. Yeah, deals take longer and are more fragile then ever. I get it. But would you sleep better at night with six more fragile deals? Surely SOME of your deals would close if you had more going. And, when you learn how to ensure fragile deals are gonna close, well, when the market hits the other end of the cycle, you will be crushing your new competition. C’mon. Instead of calling your lender and asking for a status update every three minutes (even though they should be calling you), Read more
The Erics and I have been trying to figure out why Google has been holding out on us for coming on two months now. We tripped some trigger, obviously, but we can’t figure out which. The upshot is that we’re losing between 500 and 1,000 hard clicks we would have gotten every day — most all of them with a uselessly-high bounce rate. The other end of the stick is that, because we’re seeing nothing but serious visitors, our pageviews and time on site are way up.
And at the other other end of the stick, there is Technorati, the gift that keeps on giving. Our rank is 615 as I write this, as high as it has ever been. I don’t know how many more links we will need to make it into the Top 5,000 weblogs — but I would love to find out.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
About a month ago, Zillow started showing the number of contributions you have made to their data base in your profile. Up at the top you see the total number of contributions, and down below you get a running total of recent contributions.
It was obvious where they were headed, a de facto ranking system based on user contributions. In the co-branding information released earlier this week, Zillow made mention of “badges,” and one of the pix they released showed a badge in the co-branding area.
But… I didn’t actually dare to think that I would qualify as a Zillow All Star…
There’s a point at which it’s kind of funny — does it come with a secret decoder ring? But even so, I don’t hate the idea. Active Rain built something that might someday be a business on a completely brain-dead points system. There is no way to make a brain-dead contribution to Zillow. Everything matters.
And thrusting everything associated with the sale of real estate to the side, I love the idea of Zillow becoming fully-populated with data. There may come a day when the Zillow data base is the de facto museum of residential real estate. Hundreds of biz school PhD theses could emerge from that vast store of information.
In the mean time, your Zillow All Star badge is another co-branding trinket you can put on your weblog.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology, Zillow.com
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Jonathan Washburn and Bob Stewart were my guests on a 45 minute interview about the new Localism.com:
1- Bob Stewart gave us an overview of the new Localism site and described its stated purpose.
2- Jon Washburn explained the history of the Localism portal and how polling the Active Rain community led to the decision to repurpose the portal as a hyper-local community interest site.
3- Opportunities for community evangelism were discussed along with practical ideas about how existing Active Rain members might benefit.
4- The sponsored community issue as well as “Top Neighbors” placement were explained.
5- Jon Washburn explained basic SEO strategy.
6- Bob Stewart discussed how the SEO strategy will be coupled with search engine marketing to draw consumers to the site.
7- Jon Washburn answered the BIG question; “Will he sell Localism or Active Rain ?”
The interview is about 45 minutes long and is perfect to download to your iPod, for your evening workout.
Apple. John Cook with a nice Jott for the iPhone video. Most popular apps so far. TechCrunch’s picks. LifeHacker’s picks. Continuous fanboy fanaticism at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Here is a sweet built-for-the-iPhone iPhone User’s Guide.
I know Cathy wants to buy tomorrow — the 16GB white monsters with Jawbones. We’re listing tonight, so who knows when we’ll get any sleep.
Addendum: Not so fast…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Map-based web search start-up Estately.com has uncanny timing for launching new cities and services. No matter what dates they pick, it seems that either Zillow or Redfin will have news on those days.
Here’s the news, which I sat on to get Estately out of Zillow’s glare:
Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, July 10th, over 40,000 San Francisco homes and condos from four Bay Area MLSes will be added to Estately.com’s 115,000+ properties for sale. The Bay Area marks our fourth major market – Seattle, Portland, and San Diego are all live on Estately right now – and the third major market we have entered this summer.
As always, Estately will provide the richest kind of map-based search experience: All MLS listings plus neighborhood-based searches, local schools mapped with the homes, search by transit availability, etc.
Disclosure: Estately.com co-founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology