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Category: Marketing (page 66 of 191)

July 9, 2008

Localism.com: It’s Not Just For Surfers

by

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

Author website

I remember when ActiveRain.com released its Localism.com portal.  SoCal surfin’ REALTOR dude, Rory Siems commented that he thought “Localism” was a term surfers used for defending their beach from “kooks“.  While Localism is not a surfing site, the principle of “protecting your turf” is alive and well for local real estate professionals.

Bloodhound colleague Michele DeRepegny vented her frustrations with the new site:

But this morning I’m feeling a little nauseous after the much anticipated revamp of Localism, The redesign is neutral and simple, with a few twists in navigation still needed.   I would have rather paid for an “outside blog” than purchased “communities“.  Maybe buying the way to the top as a community sponsor will actually reduce some of the crud posting just for points, but right now I’m having very mixed feelings about continuing to drink the Kool Aid.  Maybe I just need sleep.

I was privy to a pre-release tour so I know why they whitewashed the design.  The concept is that Localism isn’t just about real estate anymore.  It’s designed as a national host for thousands of hyper-local communities.  Membership is free and available to anybody in the community, including non-real estate related businesses.  The white washing was done to draw the readers to the user-generated content rather than an appealing design.  Community sponsorship is available to any business and quality content providers are rewarded with featured status on the pages.

Navigation is cumbersome but the site is in its infancy.  The designers are trying to create a sense of “stickiness” where the users are drawn to deep local content, be it pictures, video, or text.  They have some glitches but they should work it out.

The main feature of the site is that content will be edited for quality.  Active Rain hired editors to determine what user-generated content will be quality and what should be buried in the bowels of the server.  The intended result?  A sticky site about “your town”, for “your neighbors”, sponsored by “your Rotarians (local businesses).

Greg Swann feels it might be a SEO play:

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. Read more

July 9, 2008

As good as a link: How would you like to “co-brand” with Zillow?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to see something huge in the guise of something that might seem quite small at first?

Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. It’s supposed to go live at 9 pm PST, but it’s already working for me.

What’s different?

Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog.

Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com.

So what’s going on here?

As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches.

(We can take a moment to snicker behind our hands. Trulia.com is building its reputation on being niggardly and hostile toward ordinary working real estate agents, so what better way to throw the whole issue into the starkest possible contrast? I don’t think Zillow approaches things this way, but the irony can’t be lost on them.)

Why does this matter? Because it’s a very reasonable response to an objection. If someone says, “Providing or promoting content on Zillow.com improves their garden but not your own,” Zillow can offer up the perfect counter: If you shed attention to us, we will make you our partner for that entire visit, and we will entreat your guest to return to you with every page that person views.

This is brilliant every way you think about it, and, of the wannabe Web 2.0 players in the real estate industry, Zillow seems to me to be the only one who really gets the whole bundle of Web 2.0 concepts: You give to get, wealth is abundant, the expectation of good behavior yields good behavior, etc.

There’s more. Zillow.com is about to introduce a ton of new widgets and gadgets, each one of which will be co-branded to the end-user. You’ll be able to post real-time mortgage quotes, for instance, and anything built with the Zillow API will Read more

July 9, 2008

Content is king: The future of internet search is heuristic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I worked this out in email this afternoon. It’s stone obvious, once you think about it, so I think it might be on the horizon now — if it’s not already happening.

What the hell are you talking about, Greg?

I think the next level of search engine algorithms is going to be based in an heuristic observation of end-user behavior to correlate keyword relevance to actual relevance.

Do you see? Google and other search engines identify patterns of keywords in static HTML documents to try to identify keyword-relevant content. They do this because it’s cheap. Before that, they used gunk like meta tags because that was even cheaper — because that had too little hardware and software and too many documents to index.

The hardware and software problems are gone, plus Google has a huge and growing database of user behavior that is has harvested from the many bits of Google software people load on their systems. Moreover, Google has learned to draw sophisticated inferences from user behavior.

So consider two web pages. One is very strong on relevant keywords, but weak on useful content. The other is not as strong on keywords, but it delivers an ocean of very useful data. When users click into the first page, they tend to click out right away — high bounce rate, short time on site, few pageviews per visit. Users of the other site stay for hours and read everything twice — low bounce rate, long time on site, many pageviews per visit.

Assuming Google or another search engine can measure all of this end-user behavior, which site is actually more relevant to real people?

This is so obvious that it has to happen. If Google doesn’t do it, its successor as the number one search engine will.

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. But more importantly: Now and forever, content is king. A highly-passionate, well-written, deeply-informative weblog is going to kick the ass of any site trying to get by on money and high-gloss lipstick.

If you deliver the goods, the search engines are going to find a way Read more

July 8, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs shipping; watch your mailbox

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The DVDs for BloodhoundBlog Unchained will ship tomorrow, at long last. I guess that’s only six weeks, but it seems much longer. If you live in Phoenix, you should have a package by Friday. Further out, you could be looking at next Monday or Tuesday. If you haven’t received yours by then, let me know.

As it happens, I have a few spare packages made up. Brian Brady has plans to take care of real estate webloggers shortly, but, if you don’t have a real estate weblog, you might slip over to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com and snag a set for yourself. You’ll get more than ten hours of hard-headed, practical real estate content, much of it unavailable anywhere else at any price.

The more I think about this, the more stark the contrast becomes. Monday May 19th at Unchained, in particular, is like nothing you have ever seen at any real estate event. Monday is represented on Discs One and Two, and, while I don’t want to take anything away from Tuesday’s presentations, the work Brian and I did on Monday is a year’s worth of homework by itself.

We want a lot more than that in Orlando — and Brian hasn’t cut off the early-bird price so it’s still available as I write this — and last night we started trading emails to talk about how to offer an exponentially greater product next May in Phoenix. I don’t know if we can afford it, and I don’t know if we can pull it off, but we’d like to put together a fully-realized scenius scene next year, a concentrated boot camp for the first generation of fully-wired real estate professionals.

My ambitions are unchained, unbounded. I want for the people working with us to become so much better than their competition — so much more in demand — that they put themselves beyond competition. As a secondary consequence, I want for that level of excellent performance to supplant everything else in the marketplace. I want for all of us working together to be the catalyst that makes real estate a profession at last.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix was Read more

July 7, 2008

Attention Realtor association wannabe geeks: All monopolies suck by definition, so you must open up our forms to multiple vendors

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote a couple of times yesterday about using the iPhone as the laptop killer for real estate transactions. If my guesses about cloud computing play out, the iPhone and subsequent hand-held computers have the potential to replace our desktop machines as well — or at least give us every bit of the power we expect from a desktop machine no matter where we happen to be. This is all for real, a brand new world unfolding before our eyes.

What is not new, alas, are the monopolies of morons imposed upon us by the National Association of Realtors and all of its many tentacular sub-cartels. Where everything in business is about to change radically — in response to the iPhone, to Web 3.0, to the unforeseeable efficiencies of the cloud — everything in our business will change at its usual glacial pace — driven not by the pursuit of profit, not by the thrill of innovation, not by the ever-more-vast oceans of information available to us — driven only by the need of the NAR and its cabal of sleazy vendors to hold Realtors hostage.

In late May I bitched about the vast hordes of bugs that infest Zipforms, but I knew going in that this was a Sysiphean effort. The people who impose these awful products on us are not the ones stuck using them. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are off-budget contributions — subsidies for Realtor association parties, for example — written into the contracts, which simply introduces bribery into what is already a capricious decision-making process. Caprice, it is worthwhile to stress, is the opposite of reason.

Tom Farley, the new CEO of the Arizona Association of Realtors actually called me in response to that post, but I could not manage to convey to him the importance of multiple, competing vendors to a free — or even quasi-free — market. What he told me is that, instead of Zipforms, in the future we will be inflicted with a different hopelessly buggy Windows-only piece of crap software. I know the man was in deep earnest, and I know Read more

July 7, 2008

Being a part of Social Media does not mean contributing to the 3,000 advertising messages the average person recieves everyday.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

Sure, the below slideshare will come across a bit heavy handed, but the facts are real.  Exercise choice by filling in the asterisks with either one of my favorites.  One (for the sci-fi fans out there) the over used intensifier from Battlestar Galactica.  Or two, remember that you are reading this on a blog and choose one of the late George Carlin’s 7 dirty words (NSFW version).  Our freedoms are precious and not shared world wide by any means.

Now, if you heard what was spoken at the Heard then it’s how passionately the message was delivered.  Ever since your chosen dalliance after logging on became more than checking email and playing mine-sweeper, everyone has been asking a lot of the same questions.  Only now instead of dropping some type and waiting … waiting … waiting  for a response, we have a variety of platforms to communicate on by chat, video, and even fantasy character.  But who’s listening in Real Estate?

If your clients are not asking to connect with you via a variety of social media, the day will come soon enough.  If you are interested with dealing with what we are calling the Millennials or Gen-Y at all then pay real close attention to slides 38 – 44.  “Tomorrows consumers are today’s digital natives”.  “96% of them have joined a social networks and they don’t care about your ad.  They care about what their friends think”.

So what are you doing to get on board?   For me it’s testing and exploring different platforms.  It’s asking those I meet what they are using to communicate.   Your mileage will vary given your market and demographics, but there is a certainty in that your presence, your reputation, and your voice could be working for you 24 hrs. a day.

“Content is the new democracy, and we the people are ensuring that our voices are heard”

July 6, 2008

Head in the cloud: This week’s new iPhone is the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As part of our breathtakingly romantic anniversary weekend, Cathy and I were talking today about all of the various types of digital storage devices we have actually used in our lives. I thought it would be a fun exercise at a conference, simply as a way of illustrating how rapidly technology changes while we’re not paying attention.

But stop for a moment and think: Right now, you’re probably using hard disks, CD- or DVR-ROMs and thumb drives for storage. You used to have Zip drives and streaming tape drives and flexi- and floppy-disks, but we are within a year or two of being rid of magnetic media altogether. Solid state hard disks will be hugely capacious, hugely fast, very secure and wicked cheap.

And then: What next?

It’s plausible to me that the next level of off-line digital storage will be the cloud itself — multiple, multiply-redundant, self-replicating, self-maintaining copies of your data, instantly accessible and virtually indestructible. I’m presuming the advent of Web 3.0, as well, but we are there already anyway.

I rank on Windows because it’s funny, but it doesn’t mean anything. In the cloud, Windows is a dead letter, and Apple only matters as a model of how to build elegant, functional software. The cloud is beyond operating systems, because, just as Web 2.0 is ideally browser-independent, Web 3.0 is operating system-independent. It will not matter how you address the cloud, since every way you have of doing that is simply a user interface — browser-, operating system- and device-independent.

This is why it is worthwhile for everyone — not just people in the real estate business — to think about the iPhone. It’s not a Mac OS computer, it’s the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing.

The ideal way to do forms on an iPhone (or any mobile device) is not by filling in the blanks on a PDF file, but, rather, filling in the blanks on a multi-page HTML form. The complete contract language could be there, in readable HTML, and the Realtor or lender could let the client type their own text fields and click their Read more

July 6, 2008

Friday is iPhone day: Do you know of anyone who is building a paperless real estate contracts-processing application for the iPhone?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The headline asks the question. In Arizona, forms software is a monopoly controlled by the Arizona Association of Realtors, which simply means that the solution available to us is satisfactory to no one.

That much is very sad, since filling in the blanks on PDF files is about as easy as you can get in the world of dedicated applications. It’s built into the Acrobat API. Even so, ZipForms is an amazingly buggy, amazingly Window-centric piece of crap.

Do you know of anyone out there who is pushing the envelope? I suspect the AAR is planning to make a change, but I know it will just be another half-assed Windows kludge. Is there anyone, anywhere doing better work?

The iPhone is the perfect platform for writing contracts, since, with electronic signing, you could transmit an executed copy to your client, to the other agent, to title, to the lender, to the inspectors — to anyone, just like that. If paperless doesn’t also mean deskless, it doesn’t mean enough to suit me.

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July 5, 2008

Musical chairs: You can buy a home on leased land for a bargain price, but you must be prepared to sell before the music stops

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Musical chairs: You can buy a home on leased land for a bargain price, but you must be prepared to sell before the music stops

We’re preparing to list a condominium that sits on leased land. Land leases aren’t common in the Phoenix area, but they do exist.

The most common way to own real property in the Valley is in fee simple: You own the land and all the structures on it, plus any mineral, water and air rights that haven’t been alienated by legislation or previous sale.

A very distant second way of owning property is the condominium plat: You own the airspace described by your interior walls, and you and all of your neighbors own the land and structures in common. Most often you will also own the air conditioner, and possibly also the roof. These are expensive to replace, so crafty developers and their HOAs socialize the risk to you.

We have a few co-ops in the Phoenix area, but very few. In a cooperative, you and all of your neighbors own the land and the structures in common, and you have a right to occupy your living space.

In a land lease, the structures can be owned in any one of these three ways — by individuals, by a condominium HOA or by a cooperative corporation. The important difference is that the land is owned by a landlord, and the landlord will be taking that land back someday.

What happens to the structures? They revert to the landlord’s ownership, and the former owners of those structures are left owning nothing.

In essence, it’s a game of musical chairs. The structures on the leasehold pass from owner to owner, but, when the music stops, no one then on that land has a place to sit. This tends to depress property values on leased land.

But land leases are written for very long terms, and a lot can happen in that time. If the landlord gets a huge offer for the land, the people who own the structures could get bought out early at Read more

July 3, 2008

Yankee Doodle Dog: This weekend only, tickets for the BloodhoundBlog Orlando Unchained Social Media Marketing event are only $99

by

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

Author website

“It’s deja-vu all over again,” said Yogi Berra.

Yogi was referring to the multiple World Series rings he collected as a Yankee. For me, deja-vu is the grassroots campaign to kick-off the next BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference, on November 7, 2008, in Orlando, FL.

Like Yogi, I take particular delight in this challenge. Unchained Phoenix was our first World Series victory. Many Unchained graduates tell us it was a four-game sweep.   Our challenge now is to RETAIN the championship.   The road to victory starts tonight.

What might you expect from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference in Orlando?   Ask our newly commissioned guerrillas, on the front lines, if  what they learned in Phoenix is working.

Here’s Christine Beaur-Mortezaie’s take:

For the last couple of months I’ve enjoyed being a BloodHoundBlog spectator. Just keeping up with these prolific and interesting writers is a job, rewarding, but quite a job. I still can’t figure out how to carve out time for web 2.o.   I have been way too busy harnessing time for deals  that are generating income now but BHB and all its talented contributors have brought a breath of fresh air to my stale world.

I’ve been in real estate for 5 years and no one, except for Laurie Manny, whom I had the good fortune to meet recently in the Long Beach office, has ever challenged me to think beyond the tip of my nose. So break the mold! What a far-fetched idea! The modus operandi had been “Do as I have ALWAYS done and YOU TOO will be successful” and YOU TOO will be at the same place… chained in 20 years…

I had to attend BHB Unchained in Phoenix. Lucky me! At Unchained was the most phenomenal group of people, with such diverse personalities, talents and experiences. What made the conference so fabulous, beyond the presentations, was the continual sharing and exchange between presenters and attendees, table partners and neighbors, lunch companions and the water cooler cohorts. There was no right or wrong, just opinions – sometimes strong, and opportunities to share and learn. Quite different from what I had Read more

July 2, 2008

Do you work like a Bloodhound? I have a no-fee referral in Cary, NC

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of our past clients is looking for aggressive representation in Cary, NC. He worked with us on the buying side and later as a seller, so he knows all about how we work. That’s what he wants in his new locale. He’s smart, he blogs and he could end up being a very good source of referrals for you in the Research Triangle area. If you over-deliver in everything you do, the referral from me is free. I want to help him, but I want to help hard-working dogs wherever and whenever I can.

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July 2, 2008

Video from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs: Introduction to The Way of the Farmer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We got the manufactured BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs on Monday. I’ve been watching them as I work at my desk in order to approve the manufacturing job. Believe it or not, this is first I have seen of this video. It was shot to tape at the event, we had it mastered into DVDs in Scottsdale, then I immediately shipped it off to Texas for manufacturing. All along, I was expecting it to be kindasorta disappointing, and, so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. For a one-camera video shoot, it’s coming off okay.

There are tragedies, alas. In my convocation, I introduced all of the Bloodhounds who had come to Phoenix. For some reason, the videographer cut this off, so only Teri gets introduced. I’m sorry for everyone, but especially for Geno Petro, because I had pointed out for all posterity what an exceptionally fine writer the man is.

Appended below is about thirteen minutes from The Way of the Farmer, a presentation on hi-tech geographic farming.

If you’ve paid for DVDs, they’ll be shipping this week. If you have a real estate weblog, Brian Brady has a special offer coming up for you, but, if you don’t, you might want to click the button in the sidebar to get your own set of Unchained DVDs.

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July 1, 2008

Not to beat a dead horse…

by

Real Estate Agent

Author website

I began reading this blog last year right after I first received my license.  I took the class, the follow up class, graduated, found a brokerage, got the signature, then got my license.  After all this I realized I knew nothing about Real Estate.  I knew nothing at all.  Where do I start?  Google of course.

I found BHB.  I began reading, reading, reading, and reading some more.  I read Greg and what he does after he lists a property in Phoenix.  I asked myself, “Would this work in Columbia SC?”  I took it to heart and pondered it for several days.  I finally came up with the answer.  Some will, some will not.  Thus is life.  At this point, I began to slowly implement these ideas (though I didn’t grasp the ideas and honestly still don’t).

Tonight, I was writing a blog post on my personal blog about the most expensive houses in my market.  Naturally, they do not resemble the prices that several of the Bloodhounds are used to.  The average price in Columbia, SC is $145,000.  I’ll take them all day long and sell every one I can.  I like that price range personally.

I felt a little gluttonous this evening and decided to write the post.  Of course, I pull up the MLS, do a basic all areas search for houses above $1 million in my markets.  I was surprised to see a $5.75 million dollar property.  I was more surprised to see the pictures.  This is the headline image for the house (remember, this is the most expensive house on the market in Columbia, SC)

columbia sc real estate

Lovely house I am sure.  However, with this picture, I am going no where near it.

Now, ok, it’s not horrible…however, this is the 3rd most expensive house’s picture coming in at $3 million even.

columbia sc real estate

Remember, the title of this post is ‘Not to beat a dead horse…’.  I know this goes on all the time.  Horrible pictures don’t sell houses, IDIOTS sell houses…apparently.

I do not claim to be a photographer by any means.  I continuously cut my little sister out of photographs.  If I stood to Read more

July 1, 2008

Making the pack: How to break your way into BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lately, I’m getting two or three requests a day to write with us. They come from sweet, smart, earnest people, and, while I look at everything they send to me, I usually don’t have time to write back and decline their requests. That’s the one part of this job I really hate, because I’ve always hated being on the receiving end of that kind of transaction. On the other hand, I know from experience that the attention of readers is not something I give, nor something you get, but, rather, something that the writer seizes, takes by the irrepressible force of sheer talent. I’m in the unique position of being able to share this rostrum we have built with other people. But I can’t make anyone listen — not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

I had email yesterday from John Rowles, and, on the strength of that one email, without looking at anything else he had written, I invited him to join us. John’s letter was simply riveting. I read every work, all the way to the end, but I knew by the fifth paragraph that he would be writing with us. I can think of a dozen things I might think about, if I am deliberating about a potential contributor, and I will sometimes appeal to Brian or Teri or Cathleen for advice. But when a writer knocks my socks off — knocks them all the way across the room — there is nothing to think about.

I owe formal introductions for John, and for all the wonderful writers we added last week. For now, here is John’s email in its entirety:

Hi Greg:

1995-6: I was 26 and four years out from earning my BA in journalism when Web 1.0 happened. I spent those four years tending bar and working in ski shops while I started to build a portfolio of feature-length articles. My girlfriend  managed an apartment complex, and I met Bill while hanging out in her office. Bill had a computer setup straight out of the movie War Games, complete with a voice modulator (“Hello, Bill. Would you Read more

July 1, 2008

Project Bloodhound: Picture this: A big wall of text.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Yes folks, it’s the question that never goes away: Why don’t you post more images? Short answer: I don’t like to read posts with images. Unless we are talking about specific property, images rarely add to the writing, and to me, they almost always take away from the writing.

When discussing property, you do need photos, and I do post images- now I post them in engenu. I take a lot of photos, I post a lot of photos of real estate, however, since they are used for buyers and I’m not the listing agent, they don’t always get posted on my blog. But this email wasn’t refering to real estate photos, the writer was lamenting my lack of just, ya know, images in general.

Here’s the thing: Real estate bloggers ask me about my lack of photos, but other bloggers never ask me this question, and I don’t see a lot of images in the blogs I read. So the way I see it is that since I’m not writing to other real estate bloggers, I’m writing to consumers, some of whom are in fact, non real estate bloggers, and they aren’t bothered by my Walls of Text, why do something that doesn’t make any sense to me?

I’ve been accused, and am occasionally guilty, of being stubborn, I suppose there is the tiniest, itty bitty chance that I’m wrong so I’m willing to listen to reason. I’ve heard and heard and heard some more from the RE.net about this, but I’d love to hear from the anyone outside the industry- are images a help or a hindrance to reading a blog?

And, because I love a good compromise and I love multi-tasking, I’m sharing a video- an image! The sentiment of this song is for Vance Shutes and Tom Vanderwell. We have begun sharing ideas about living a full life in the Rust Belt. And I suppose this song could be considered another Unchained Melody. But mostly, it’s here because it’s a very clever compromise between text and image. I’ve been told that a picture is worth a thousand words. 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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