BloodhoundBlog

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Category: Marketing (page 67 of 191)

June 30, 2008

Project Bloodhound speaking in tongues: To whom am I speaking?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a lady phone me the other day who would rather have emailed. She was on our Phoenix real estate web site and she couldn’t figure out how to email me. In fact, my email address is associated with every post, just like here, but that wasn’t obvious to her. I revisited the sidebar, which is a topic to which we will return. But for most real estate weblogs, there is an ever more exigent problem: Who the hell am I speaking to in the first place?

If you’re the only person writing on the weblog, you might think you can get away without a byline on your posts. I think this is a mistake. Yes, people can go to your About page, but your job is to make connections, not to make people work. I think our way of doing things — an avatar plus every which way of grasping onto more content — is a better way of going at things.

We do our avatars with custom PHP, but I know they can also be done with the Gravatar software — I just don’t know how. I’m going to show you everything we’re doing at BloodhoundBlog — not because you should do all this, but just to show you how to do it.

The theme files you will want to edit will be named index.php, search.php, archive.php and possibly some others. You are looking for files that contain “the loop,” the means by which WordPress extracts posts from its MySQL database and displays them. The code for “the loop” looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : 
while (have_posts()) : 
the_post(); ?>

Any files that contain that code will need to be edited.

Edited where? Look for the div that already contains posting information — usually the date. You’ll be editing within that div. You can start with index.php, working iteratively until you get to something you like, then copy that code over to the other files you need to edit.

Important: Work on copies of your theme files! If you screw something up, you can always go back and start over.

This is what BHB is Read more

June 29, 2008

BloodhoundBlog at two: The scene of the real estate scenius

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog came into this world two years ago today. I had tried twice before to craft a workable real estate weblog. The second attempt donated its 60-odd posts to BloodhoundBlog on the way in. But BloodhoundBlog was different from our prior attempts right from the start. We were focused on the national real estate industry from the beginning, mixing good writing, deep philosophy and radical new ideas into what has seemed to be a consistently heady brew.

In our first two years, we’ve served over 1.4 million pages to over 750,000 unique souls. We’ve written more than 2,800 posts and hosted more than 25,000 comments. As I write this, we have 600 Technorati links and 67,000 Yahoo backlinks. Those are interesting numbers, but these are more interesting to me: In the past two years (less than that, really, since we didn’t start tracking for about two months), 37,347 people have visited here here 200 or more times. Just short of 151,000 people have visited us nine or more times. And keep in mind that we live by RSS and email subscription. The flip side of this is that just short of half-a-million souls have come to the site only once, which I think is a nice illustration of the relative value of search-engine borne as against more-organic sources of traffic.

And, in reality, none of that matters. BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very loud voice in the RE.net, but BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very serious about big ideas. From the earliest days of the blog, we staked out a ground — the philosophy by which the most serious, most dedicated real estate professionals would thrive in the Web 2.0 world — and defended it with the ferocity of real Bloodhounds. We are always about the grunts on the ground, never about the bosses and vendors who seek to bilk them of their hard-fought earnings. We’ve built an audience not by dumb SEO stunts, not by kissing up to the NAR or the Inmanosphere, not by fawning or flattery or appeals to pity, but simply by delivering the goods day after Read more

June 28, 2008

Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Okay, BloodhoundBlog will be two years old in less than an hour. Here’s one more little bit of our past in celebration. This is from May 31st, 2007. –GSS]

Question #1: Why did Microsoft call its new table-top touch-screen interface “Surface”?

Answer: “It” and “Thing” are trademarks of The Addams Family.

Question #2: What makes a great real estate weblog?

Answer: Whatever you do, don’t ask Inman Blog.

I don’t write about everything that tickles or rankles me. I couldn’t, even if I didn’t have other things to do. But I thought it was particularly ironical for Joel Burslem and Jessica Swesey to talk about weblogging in a video. Joel has proven blogger credibility. Jessica is a good reporter who has never impressed me as actually understanding weblogging as a distinct medium. I have told Brad Inman in private that he doesn’t “get” weblogging, to which criticism he issued testy but irrelevant rejoinders. If putting marks on phosphors in reverse-chronological order is weblogging, then there really are 70 million webloggers.

But take a look at this, as an example (and I’m picking on Inman because they’re professionals and, I hope, thick-skinned enough to bear up to the scrutiny):

In the middle of the 16th Century, the Great Chinese Wall was built to keep enemy armies out and to create a perception of invincibility. Gated communities were built in the US suburbs in the 1980s to keep urban criminals out and to create prestigious residential compounds. The building of walls and fences along the Mexican border are being built to keep workers and terrorists out and to appease a multitude of American nationalistic fears. The Great Chinese Wall did not work; gates in the burbs were irrelevant to safety and fences on the Mexican border will not stop people from risking their lives to find work. One of the ugliest walls in history was the Berlin Wall, which came down when freedom persevered over human repression.
Walls and fences are an admission of our failure to solve problems in a civil way. They divide people; they exclude; they fracture societies and communities.
In the 1950s in my small hometown of Carlinville, Read more

June 28, 2008

No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is a multi-stop time-travel journey. I’m writing this text, here within these brackets, on June 28th, 2008. I’m reprising a BloodhoundBlog post from September 15th, 2006, that in its turn reprises a PresenceOfMind.net post from September 14th, 2004, which in its turn is unearthing a rant I wrote in 1996. It will all make sense if you let it. This is more birthday celebration — the subject is disintermediation — but I happened to think of this because we latched onto Radio Paradise, today, an amazingly excellent Triple-A internet radio station in Paradise, CA. All of this fits together, I promise, and the argument about media from 1996 is still right on point. One of the things that I, personally, love about BloodhoundBlog, is that our audience has always been so outrageously bright. It’s very liberating for me to be able to be my whole self at work. Never doubt my gratitude. –GSS]

 
No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

I got XM Radio two years ago to the day, yesterday. Two years from now, the whole deal may be done: Between the iPod, streaming internet radio and Wi-Max, the eternal footman may already be snickering for satellite radio. Sic transit gloria mundi — and orbits nearby.

That’s a disintermediation story by itself, and we’re about to nest ourselves two layers deeper in order to talk about massive, earth-shaking cases of media disintermediation. The argument made here parallels the one made earlier this week by Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato: The exponential growth of bandwidth increases the power of individuals at the expense of elites.

But: I could just as easily argue the contrary: Feeding Dan Rather to the lions is exactly what a Roman Emperor would do to sustain his power while seeming to placate the mob.

That’s a larger question than I’m prepared to settle on a Friday night. Instead, we can think about the future of real estate while we revisit the history of radio. There’s quite a lot here that relates to weblogging, as well — which Read more

June 28, 2008

You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

So your house is finally under contract. Congratulations. It took longer than you thought it would to sell, and you had to go through three price reductions before you got regular showings. But now you’re under contract and in escrow. You’ve made it through the inspections and you’ve taken care of all of the repairs. Nothing but smooth sailing from here, right?

Not quite.

Here comes some bad news you hadn’t anticipated: Your house didn’t appraise.

A lender will only lend on the appraised value or the purchase price — whichever is lower. If the appraisal comes in lower than the purchase price, something has to give.

If there’s an appraisal contingency in the contract — and there almost always is — the buyers can cancel the contract unilaterally.

More likely, they’re going to want you to lower your price instead.

If you don’t, you’re almost certainly killing that contract. The lender will not underwrite the loan, so the buyers will be forced to cancel using the financing contingency.

You could end up waiting quite a while longer for another buyer. And that buyer could offer you quite a bit less for your home. And even then, your house will still have to appraise for the purchase price. If home values continue to decline, you could live through this same nightmare a second time.

So does that mean you should cave on the appraisal no matter what? Not necessarily — depending on your objectives. If you need to move now, take your punishment and move on. But if you can afford to wait long enough for the market to recover, that might be the better option.

Appraisers and loan underwriters are skittish right now. Lenders are taking back homes and selling them for fifty cents on the dollar. Appraisers are being fastidious to make sure they are not overestimating values.

And all of this is just another reason to price your home to the market. You Read more

June 27, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Inman’s non-ad ad might be extortion, but at least you’re invited to help them betray their own advertisers — for a fee, of course

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is what you will see if you click on a link to an Inman News article:

First: What ad? There isn’t any ad there, just a ransom note.

Who’s the hostage? That would be you. Inman is deliberately interposing itself between you and what you want, demanding payment to get out of your way. That much is extortion, and it’s extortion of the Chokepoint Charlie variety, since the chokepoint is entirely an artifice manufactured by Inman in order either to extort your funds or to punish you by delay for refusing to be extorted.

Nice behavior, huh?

There’s more. The non-ad ad actually attempts to insinuate that it is a matter of prestige to have been extorted in this fashion. “Club members,” the concierge in the pro shop will inform you, “have first claim on available tee times.” If you cough up the dough demanded by this chokepoint, you’re not a schmoo who got rolled in exchange for faster access to regurgitated press releases. To the contrary. You’re a member, one of the privileged elite. In essence, it’s like a line pass in Las Vegas: You’re not some ordinary sucker. No, sir! You’re a very special sucker!

We’re not done. Consider the advertisers, even though I can’t ever remember seeing an ad in this non-ad ad’s place. The “social contract” between Inman and the advertiser runs like this: “We know that our readers don’t want to be delayed. We know they just want access to whatever it is they clicked through to find. So, in exchange for your money, were going to frustrate and betray them — with your ad being the instrument of that betrayal.”

I cannot imagine an advertiser stupid enough to want to try to engage the people it just pissed off, but this is literally the expectation governing that particular advertising space.

But now we’re back to the non-ad ad. What does it really say? It says that Inman will take money from advertisers to frustrate and betray its own readers. Unless those readers are willing to pay the extortion money, in which case Inman will frustrate and betray its own advertisers, from Read more

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to make Google your weblog’s best friend

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is one of the all-time most popular posts on BloodhoundBlog. I’m reprising it for Project Bloodhound, first because it’s a nice leveraged SEO solution, and second because it’s a painless introduction to customizing the PHP in WordPress. –GSS]

 
Who can probe all the mysteries of Google? Not me, and I don’t even do referrals on the subject. But I can give you a 93% solution to the problem, and you can worry about the other 7% when you’re not too busy handling incoming traffic.

What’s the secret? Like this: Relevance equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. If those three elements are in close correspondence, to Google the article is what it says it is. If that sounds like a Zestimate of a burned down house, it’s because it is. Software cannot evaluate objectively, it can only draw inferences from trusted indicators. If you leave a trail of indicators that Google associates with highly-relevant content, then it is highly-relevant content.

I’ve talked about writing headlines and body copy that are long-tail keyword rich. If you have a WordPress weblog, here’s a way to get your post’s title to correspond to its headline:

<title>
<?php wp_title(" "); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(" ", false)) { echo " | "; } ?>
YourBlogName | 
Your blog's tagline...
</title>

Here is what that code says:

If there is a headline, show it as the title of the page. On your main page, there is no title. On archive or category pages, the archive or the category will be the title.

If we did show a title, lay down a vertical bar as punctuation.

Then show the weblog’s name and tag line, separated by a vertical bar.

Altogether, the code means that when your post is shown as a standalone weblog entry, the title of that page will be the headline of the post. This is the way Google will see it for indexing purposes. And what that means is that Google will regard your post as being highly relevant.

You can snag a copy of the code you see above by clicking here. The file you need to edit is named “header.php”. You’ll find it in the folder for Read more

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to write headlines for your real estate weblog posts that deliver the goods — and deliver Google results

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A headline on a weblog post is a differentiator — this entry is different from all the others — but that’s not a very useful lens for understanding headlines. A serial number — A37592x — is a differentiator, too.

A headline can serve the same purpose as a headline in the newspaper, as a brief summary of the succeeding content — “Man kills wife, kids, self.”

That’s a useful function, but it’s not really doing the job we want a headline on a blog post to do.

Here’s a better way of understanding the communicative purpose of a weblog entry’s headline:

A headline is a testament from the writer to the reader than the content described in the headline is accurately reflected by that headline and that reading that content will repay the effort it entails.

But that’s still not enough. A headline on a weblog post, and on any persuasive copy, has to ensnare and entice the reader. The headline has to promise a substantive benefit that the reader will realize by pursuing the copy. Writing an effective headline is very much a Direct Marketing problem.

And we’re not done even yet. In addition to all the jobs it must undertake in the reader’s behalf, a well-written weblog headline should also engage horizontal search engines in meaningful ways.

So a properly-crafted weblog headline will:

  • Summarize the content in an interesting way
  • Promise the reader a practical benefit for reading that content
  • Search well on the most-significant keywords in that content

That’s a big load to carry, but a good headline can make a post, where a bad one can break it.

I don’t want to represent myself as a good example, because I will frequently opt for clever rather than good, but the headline of this post is a nice example of a good headline: It tells you what I’m going to talk about, it tells you how you will gain by reading this post, and it is strong on keywords that are likely to be searched by people who may have an interest in BloodhoundBlog’s ongoing content.

The latter point is important. It’s easy to score well on long-tail search terms, but Read more

June 26, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: The marketing power of a custom yard sign is not the color, not the photography, not even that it is custom-made — it’s the text on the sign that stops traffic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve been making custom yard signs for two years now, but that represents the third generation of our sign philosophy. The second generation featured a huge picture of Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound, and that was a real traffic stopper when it was new. The first generation sported a huge rendition of our corporate logo, which we moved, in smaller form, to the riser on top of the post for the second and third generation signs.

What BloodhoundRealty.com signs have always had in common, going back to 2003, is that paragraph of small text in the middle of the sign. With our custom signs, we can rhapsodize each house, but we knew from the very beginning that that paragraph of text would stop traffic, and that this would win attention for our homes that we could not achieve with an ordinary real estate sign.

We knew back then that we wanted custom signs, we just couldn’t do it then. (Richard Riccelli suggested that we mount a metal frame on our signs so that we could swap in other text.) We knew then, as we we know now, that good marketing sells houses — but that exceptional marketing would set us apart from the Realtors we compete against with our sellers and with their neighbors.

Here’s how to understand the Bloodhound marketing strategy: Everything we do goes into selling the house — into inducing the behaviors necessary for the home to be sold. And selling houses the way we do accomplishes the objective of selling everything we do to those homeowners who are paying attention. In that respect, all of our marketing is integrated — all one thing.

This is adapted from a comment I posted earlier today.

What matters most about custom yard signs is not the color, not the photography, not even that they are custom-made for the house. What makes them sell is that paragraph of text in the middle of the sign. As you could easily predict, there is a philosophy behind everything we do, including our custom signs:

Forever and always, Realtors have treated their yard signs like billboards. After all, the traffic Read more

June 26, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to write a question post that gets answers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Our new contributors are true Bloodhounds, equal to all the others. We don’t have rules, we don’t play status games and we don’t want for anyone to feel less than perfectly welcome here.

But: We do recognize that the new Bloodhounds are going to have questions. We want for them to have questions, since their questions will kick off great discussions of how to manage the world of Social Media Marketing.

However: The question post can be the death of weblogging. You set something up and then you say, “Does that makes sense?” or “What say you?” or “Am I wrong?” Sounds harmless enough, but, for some reason, posts like that tend to die a commentless death. It’s plausible to me that you see them so often on weblogs where the host is desperate for comments that that trailing question comes to seem like desperation in the flesh — like a blind date who turns out to be a sweaty Trekkie with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Here’s a way to put together a question post that will spark a conversation rather than languish in perpetuity, unremarked on and unloved.

First, instead of ending with the question, start with it: Just exactly how do you establish a following on Twitter without looking like another pushy Realtor?

Second, take some responsibility for yourself: Here’s what I was thinking. I thought I might just go in and start talking about the things that fascinate me in the neighborhoods I work in.

Third, give your readers the respect they deserve: I know there are a lot of people out there who have been successfully tweeting real estate for quite a while, so I was hoping someone could give me some direction.

Fourth, get right back to the questions: Am I all messed up in my thinking? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a better way of going at things?

Fifth, go one down, graciously: I know you guys know so much more about this than I do. Thanks for taking the time to hold my hand.

Like this:

Just exactly how do you establish a following on Twitter without looking like another pushy Realtor?

Here’s what I Read more

June 26, 2008

Estately.com in San Diego: Map-based search in a land without rain

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Estately.com starts operations in San Diego today, the third city to be served by the Seattle-based map-based real estate search start-up. Considering that the company has so-far only raked in a modest six-figures in venture capital, this would seem to argue that Estately’s software scales easily. No news on finances, but, seriously, there must be some boot-strapping money to permit this rapid growth.

This is from an email from Estately.com co-founder and BloodhoundBlog contributor Galen Ward:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, June 26th, over 19,000 San Diego homes and condos will be added to Estately.com’s 105,000+ properties for sale. Given the rapid changes in San Diego’s market, we are especially excited to give consumers the ability to track price changes on individual homes and across searches and areas.
Here are some example searches Estately makes into a snap:

  • Homes in La Jolla priced between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and sorted from cheapest to most expensive
  • Homes between $350,000 and $450,000 in Chula Vista
  • Homes including the words “motivated” (as in “motivated seller”) in the San Diego area

Additionally, we have revamped our “nearby information” information, plotted local schools and school scores, parks and transit stops on a map, and integrated it into the listing page.

I tried to run a search on “smug, slow-talking beachbums bragging about all the money they scam off of Arizona tourists with trained fish acts” — but that turns out to be everybody in San Diego.

Next stop: I’m betting on Oakland, but that’s only because I peeked. What’s not next: Phoenix — more’s the pity.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

June 25, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Apprehending all of the marketing objectives of single-property web sites

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.

That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.

Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.

There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.

And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.

This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.

Start here: Read more

June 24, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: A marketing quiz to shed light on the full value of the Coffee Table Books we make for our listings

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about the Coffee Table Books we make for some of our listings, and I talked about them briefly at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I wanted to go into the idea in greater detail, because I think this is a case where, if you don’t understand all of our thinking, you could easily miss the big picture by focusing on the pixels.

Cathleen Collins invented the idea of doing Coffee Table Books for listings. She knew what we wanted, and then she searched the internet to find a way to do it. (We use Apple’s iPhoto, but you get get similar products from Shutterfly. H/T Cheryl Johnson.) We’re not always this lucky. We knew what we wanted in custom yard signs years before we were able to find a vendor who could do it.

To understand our marketing objectives, we need to start at the top. A Coffee Table Book is an objet d’art. It is only secondarily a book. It is primarily a statement about the subject of that book. By its nature, a Coffee Table Book says, “This is important. This is no mere casual, ordinary thing. This is an object or event that deserves to be heralded, celebrated, honored.” That’s why these books can only work for certain homes, and, why, incidentally, I think it’s a mistake to violate the format. If you turn your Coffee Table Book into a hard-cover version of the kind of comb-bound listing books produced by title companies, you cheapen your impact — possibly to the point of anti-marketing — and frustrate your objectives.

So the sine qua non of a BloodhoundRealty.com Coffee Table Book is an exceptional home. The book says, “This home is extraordinary,” so the home has to be extraordinary enough to justify the existence of the book.

And this comes back to the knock-their-socks-off idea of marketing a listing. The Coffee Table Book expresses your total commitment to your sellers, and it makes the same kind of impression on potential buyers. A Coffee Table Book will not paper over the defects in an ugly, dirty, decrepit home, but it will make your listing stand Read more

June 23, 2008

If you commit yourself to delivering a premium listing, trying to cheap it out will instruct you in the previously-unknown 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Idea-by-idea, house-by-house, we are writing the book on the art of listing premium-priced homes for sale. The things we do are often beyond useless at lower price points, and we’re not a part of the canapes and cocktails circuit where high-end homes are sold. But for executive homes, luxury homes, historic and architecturally-distinctive homes, the kinds of marketing tools we are perfecting are very effective.

Effective at what? At selling the house, of course. Everything we do is about selling the house. If we happen to make a strong impression on the neighbors or on other people who see the work we are doing, so much the better. Even so, that’s not the point. People should be impressed by the commitment we make to selling our listings, but our purpose in making that commitment is to get the house sold.

Here’s a true fact, apparently known to everyone except real estate agents: Consumers — the people we hope to make our clients — see us as being lazy and cheap. They think we’re overpaid, but it’s probably less that they think our paychecks are too big and more that they don’t see any effort on our part to justify those paychecks.

A typical listing is a lockbox and a sign. Is there a flyer? Or is there just an empty flyer box? Has the flyer been edited with a ballpoint pen to reflect price reductions? How many photos are there in the MLS listing — and are they any damned good?

The marginal cost of everything I’ve talked about so far is essentially nothing, amortized over a few dozen listings. The one exigent out-of-pocket cost might be the post for the sign, and I have seen real estate signs nailed to trees. I wish I were joking.

If consumers see us as being lazy and cheap, it’s only because far too many of us are lazy and cheap when it comes to servicing our clients. It’s comical, actually. The Realtor who pisses away $5,000 acquiring a client worth $10,000 in gross commission income can’t bring himself to spend fifty bucks out-of-pocket on that client.

There’s a Read more

June 23, 2008

Inmanically Incorrect: Vendors Are Tools

by

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

Author website

I think a little bit differently about marketing than Greg Swann does.  Not much, but we’re of slightly different mindsets.  I’m not scared to call a name a lead, a voice on the phone a prospect, a loan applicant a borrower, and a funded loan recipient a client.  I KNOW they’re people because I’ve always treated them as people. I don’t need a rip off of a Nike ad to tell me that.   Ain’t nuttin’ original about treating people who inquire about your services with respect;  Sister Brigid taught me that back in 1972.

Greg and I think a bit differently about vendors, also. While Greg envisions a world without vendors, I see them as a necessary evil.  My goal is to maximize the necessary (efficacy) while reducing the evil (money paid).  The problem with the whole vendor/practitioner relationship is that practitioners are looking for the little purple pill; the shortcut.  That’s what the charlatans prey upon.

We talked about this at Unchained. Mary McKnight taught us how the fish can find your bait,  Louis Cammarosano gave us a demonstration about how to cast our nets,  Steve Hundley taught us how to hook them, and Ron Cates taught us how to prepare them so that they’re edible. Moreover, David Gibbons taught us where the schools of fish are swimming so that you’re better prepared for the next big expedition.

All of them…”vendors”. Vendors inasmuch as they insert themselves in between the practitioner and the customer and get paid for it. They get paid for it because they deliver hungry people to your restaurant for less money than it would cost to do yourself.

Should Greg’s utopian prayer of zero acquisition cost be a virtue? Of course.  We should all strive for utopia.  His message, if I’m not mistaken, is that the brave new world is building pressure behind the dammed chokepoints so that the chokepoints have to evaluate their efficacy.  The smart ones are evolving their models to increase their efficacy while the irrelevant proclaim that we practitioners are all idiots.

Wanna know how I know this? I watched them call you “glorified delivery people, gatherers 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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