BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 69 of 191)

June 14, 2008

Price matters — but so does everything else: When buyers come to see your home, they’re looking for reasons to reject it, not to buy it

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Incidentally, as tough as it might be to take, this same principle applies to consumers shopping for Realtors or lenders: They’re not looking for reasons to accept and embrace you, they’re looking for reasons to reject you and move on to the next candidate. If you want the business, you have to take away their objections before they think to raise them.

 
Price matters — but so does everything else: When buyers come to see your home, they’re looking for reasons to reject it, not to buy it

If price matters more than anything else in the sale of a home, why bother to clean, repair, stage and market the property for sale?

In a buyer’s market, if a home is priced above its market value, it probably will not show. If it doesn’t show, it can’t sell, and this by itself is all the argument anyone should need to price a home to the current market.

The corollary proposition is that, if your home is properly priced, it should get frequent showings.

So the battle is won, right? All you had to do was price your home to the current market, and you attracted the attention of buyers. Victory is at hand.

Not quite.

Your home is showing, and that’s good. But if it is dirty, if there are obvious repair issues, if the space is cluttered and confusing, if no one has worked to point out why it’s such a good buy — other houses will sell and yours will languish on the market.

As long as you’re priced right — and price can be a moving target in this market — you’ll get showings. But if your home is not a better value than the other houses your buyers are seeing, they’ll buy those homes instead.

That’s exactly what you would do in their place, isn’t it? When you’re picking through the melons at the grocery, you aren’t looking for the ones that are bruised and shopped over, unsightly and unappetizing. Why would you expect buyers to buy a property that you would pass Read more

June 10, 2008

How are you gonna keep ’em up in your vertical real estate search portal when the future of home search is horizontal — and Google’s?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do this: Go to Google and search for Phoenix, AZ real estate. We don’t compete for that term — we’re coming in like 34th place — but a lot of people do — like 3.5 million hits for the keyword without quotes.

Here’s what’s interesting:

Out of those 3.5 million search results, Google Base’s Housing Search comes first. That would be true for any other City, ST real estate search you might want to run. You don’t need the state if the search is unambiguous.

Yes, Google Base doesn’t have a lot of listings so far — only about 4.7 million. That’s twice as many as Zillow.com has right now, but it’s still not very many. The data sources are many and disparate, so it’s plausible that there are some duplicates in there, too.

And, yes, the search interface is horrible. It hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past year. But who is willing to bet it won’t change in the next year?

For plain vanilla horizontal search — of practically anything — Google is god — omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent. If you need more than plain vanilla horizontal search, you have to go vertical — but google wants your vertical real estate search to go vertical with them, too.

There’s more. The upshot of the DOJ/NAR settlement is that the IDX level of real estate search is likely to become ubiquitous. Right now, Google Base is limping along like Trulia.com and Zillow.com — partnering relationships with a few MLS systems, a few big brokerage chains, a few listings remarkers like flyer and virtual tour vendors, and direct entry by home-sellers and their real estate agents. That’s about to change as MLS systems, either directly or through IDX vendors or VOWs, make every MLS listing available to all takers.

If you’re Realtor.com, how are you going to hang onto an audience that can get essentially the same results from the same place they get all their other results — from Google.com?

If you’re Trulia.com — Realtor.com in pastels — what do you have to offer end-users that will be so much more valuable — a year from now Read more

June 10, 2008

The fall and rise of a real estate titan: “Tony has the most valuable asset known to man: unwavering spirit and confidence in himself”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In line with Chris Johnson’s post this morning, a charming real estate story from The American Spectator:

Recently, I was contacted about a hot deal in Buckeye (the fast-growth, west side of Phoenix) by a very bright, young Phoenix wheeler-dealer.

We’ll call him Tony (not his real name). Tony was, and still is, one of the smartest guys I have ever met. I first met him as super-charged go-getter sitting in one of the thousands of real estate cubicles on Camelback Road. At that time, he brought me a deal that turned out very well, and he was pleasant and honest throughout the whole process. Over the years, as I predicted at the time, Tony would quickly move out of the cubicle and into something bigger and better. History proved me correct and by 2004, Tony had a fancy office on the Camelback Miracle Mile with a secretary that looked like she just stepped out of Vogue.

Sitting in his plush office, Tony was still Tony, going 1,000 miles per hour and talking up deals, but in a nice and pleasant way. He had picked up a few nice souvenirs of the ongoing boom, including a fancy spread in the 85253 zip code where he entertained lavishly, a sleek new private jet, and a very cool yacht in Marina Del Rey. At Tony’s 2005 Christmas Party, I could have sworn that half the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders were there at Tony’s Paradise Valley house.

Anyway, Tony was calling me after a long absence. I had missed the ’06 and ’07 Christmas parties, but I can only imagine their lavish scale. Tony was now on the phone saying he had a great deal that I should look at “right away…this one you’re gonna love.” I have heard that line a million times, but in Tony’s case, I trusted his judgment and agreed to meet that day at my office. Tony arrived, pitched the deal (I was already fairly familiar with the location and the dynamics of the site), and indeed, it was a deal. It was exactly right for one of my clients in Read more

June 10, 2008

You Control Way More Than You Think

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

If you are an enemy of agents working hard, you are an enemy of mine.  If you make it socially acceptable to fail in this market, you–personally–are as bad as the media that has made it socially acceptable to walk away from your house.  I have said to just walk away from failure enablers, but I have to fight back. 

I read a post yesterday that made me again question WHY I read RE blogs.  The poster had some closings that were going sideways It occurred to me that this mighta been their fault.  I mentioned this.   This agent was using the ‘best lender, best systems and best procedures,’ to  watch their deals go sideways, and then use the best blog to yell at the echo chamber…I was quickly shouted down by the chorus of failure fanatics. 

If Your Systems Are Failing, By Definition, They Ain’t The Best!

Lemme tell ya something.  There are people doing great (and easy) business in this market.  I know a buyer’s agent here Columbus that has 7 houses under contract every month like a machine.  That’s because the month before he sends 15 people up for loan approval, and won’t be satisfied with a non approved loan, and asks me brutal questions.  Generates his own leads, doesn’t take listings, and is in 100% control.  Stuff happens, but it’s never on more than 1/10th of his business.  OH, this agent sells everyone two houses.  His buyers write an ethical and fully disclosed second house offer in case the first house fails to get the short sale processes moving at two places so he’s guaranteed a check.  And with his deals, he runs the short sale unless it’s a listing agent he knows.  He’s taken responsibility for way more work.  

It’s More Comfortable to Be and to Manufacture Victims

It’s infinitely more comfortable to think that something else was the author of our failure, isn’t it?  It makes us all feel better when we don’t have to realize that we effed it up, because the (choose one) [Buyer/broker/builder/lender/other agent/title Read more

June 9, 2008

iPhone 2.0 debuts with faster 3G wireless and a built-in GPS system — and a $199 price tag for the 8GB model. Video? Flash? Javascript? Ask later, but third-party apps also debut on July 11. [Updated]

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

TechCrunch, but this news will be everywhere:

Apple announced its new 3G iPhone today. It is much thinner, much faster, and much cheaper than its predecessor. Starting at $199, you get an 8 gigabyte device with GPS that works on AT&T’s high-speed 3G network (as opposed to the slower EDGE network all previous iPhones are bound to). A 16 gigabyte version will go for $299. Considering that the current 8 GB iPhones cost $399, that is quite a steal. The battery is supposed to support 300 hours of standby time, 5 to 6 hours of Web browsing, 7 hours of video, and 24 hours of audio. But talk time is cut in half from 10 hours to 5 hours, when using the 3G network. The launch date is July 11.

The New York Times:

The biggest news from Apple is what Steve Jobs didn’t say: It has completely changed the basis of its deals with AT&T and other wireless carriers.

According to a press release from AT&T, the carrier will no longer give a portion of monthly usage fees to Apple. Instead carriers will pay Apple a subsidy for each phone sold, in order to bring the price from $399 down to $199 for the 8 Gigabyte model. The company did not specify the amount of the subsidy. Subsidies of $200 to $300 are common in the industry.

What is more, consumers will now pay $30 a month for unlimited data service from AT&T, compared to $20 under the plan introduced last year. So even though the phone will now cost $200, consumers will be out more cash at the end of a two-year contract compared to the previous deal.

Of course, that includes faster 3G data service, so the price increase may be worth it. But we should call it an iPhone price increase, not a cut.

Unlimited data service for business users will cost $45 a month.

[….]

AT&T also said in its release that it now has 3G data service in 280 metropolitan areas, and that will increase to 350 areas by the end of the year.

For Apple, this move to getting all its money up front Read more

June 7, 2008

Has the Phoenix real estate market turned the corner? It’s too early to tell, but May’s results suggest we may be nearing the bottom

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Has the Phoenix real estate market turned the corner? It’s too early to tell, but May’s results suggest we may be nearing the bottom

Are you in the mood for some good real estate news for a change? How about some news that’s not all bad? Here’s what news there is, in any case:

May was a very strong month for clearing bread-and-butter inventory in the Phoenix real estate market. BloodhoundRealty.com tracks sales of newer suburban tract homes — three bedroom, two bath, single-story homes with tile roofs and two-car garages — the middle of the housing-supply bell curve.

We have records going back to January of 2004, so we have tracked both the boom and the bust in our recent real estate history. May 2008 was the strongest month for the homes we track since May of 2007, with the best month before then being November of 2006. A total of 170 of these homes sold in May, up from 114 in April.

Prices were down, month over month, and not by just a little bit, so May’s results no doubt reflect the sale of a lot of lender-owned properties. But inventories of the homes we track are down by 7% from April and by over 14% from March.

The implied absorption rate from May’s results is 5.2 months, down from 8.4 months for April. Absorption rate is the amount of time it would take to absorb all currently-available inventory at the current rate of sales.

The absorption rate calculation is less than reliable, since it uses backward-looking numbers to make a forward-looking projection. But substantially greater sales taken together with substantially lower inventories is a very good sign.

As a matter of anecdotal evidence, earlier this week I phoned the listing agent of a very market-weary short sale. After months of no activity, three offers came in over the weekend. The seller issued multiple counter-offers, with the high-bid being $17,000 over the list price.

So has the Phoenix real estate market finally turned the corner? We won’t know for sure for two or three months Read more

June 7, 2008

Is ePerks.com’s Ben Behrouzi, infamous for trying to censor a real estate weblogger, stealing content from Mervyns and Chevron?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

At his new web site, BrokerScience.com, Trace Richardson is on a tear. Trace got his teeth into the story of ePerks.com’s attempts to silence real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy with a cease and desist letter. Starting with an analysis of how ePerks has managed to achieve an orderly self-destruction, Trace has uncovered one irregularity after another in Ben Behrouzi’s internet businesses.

The latest snafu? Behrouzi added “Values” and “Culture” pages to the ePerks.com web site. The only problem is: The content seems to have been taken, in large measure, from Mervyns.com and Chevron.com.

Here’s the full run-down on Trace’s stories on Behrouzi’s start-ups:

At this point, I’m thinking Ben Behrouzi is beyond redemption. From the evidence, he seems to be much more interested in pushing people around than in making money on the internet. My hope is that other internet entrepreneurs following this train wreck can manage to catch a clue: For the first time since Athens — for the first time in history, really — ordinary people have equal access to the Agora. You cannot shout Vlad Zablotskyy or Russell Shaw or Trace Richardson or me down. Our voices are at least as loud as yours, and we will not be silenced by threats, intimidation or dirty tricks. You can learn to live by cooperation and conciliation, or you can master the art of starving alone.

Technorati Tags: , ,

June 4, 2008

An Unchained expostulation: Guess who is not coming to Inman?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We made a ton of video clips at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. BrokerIPTV.com made a bunch more, and theirs feature strange and esoteric production elements like good lighting and audible sound. The difference is, ours were on YouTube right away, and theirs took a while to gestate. One that I’ve been waiting for finally hatched today, yours truly on the subject of being Unchained:

If you watch that clip, this should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: I don’t tell people what to do. There are no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors. I don’t like rules, but I also don’t like working with people who need to be told what to do — and I really don’t like working with people who try to tell other people what to do.

That paragraph is predicate to this one: Since there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on anything, it should be obvious that there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect. Bloodhounds have been invited to speak at the last couple of events, and I, personally, have no feelings about this one way or another.

But, oddly enough, for this summer’s event, only one Bloodhound has been invited to speak, Estately.com’s Galen Ward. That’s not completely true. Just after Unchained, Brian Brady was approached, perhaps as a ham-handed divide-and-conquer strategy. But Cheryl Johnson was not invited to teach PhotoShop, Eric Blackwell and Eric Bramlett weren’t invited to teach SEO, Geno Petro wasn’t invited to teach the art of mesmerizing an audience. Mike Farmer, Sean Purcell and Jeff Brown are, each in his own way, reinventing the real estate brokerage, but this is not a topic of interest at Inman Connect.

In other words, there does seem to be an Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect, but it doesn’t originate here.

So be it. We care a lot. As is discussed in the clip, BloodhoundBlog Unchained set a new standard for training events in the wired world of real estate in our first swing at the ball. We dropped the ball completely on the drinking and partying and killing time in the hallways categories, but I know we traded a Read more

June 3, 2008

Mitch Ribak: It’s The Contact, Not The Content

by

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

Author website

As Jeff Brown would say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”.

Mitch Ribak is a Florida real estate broker who purposefully avoids the Web 2.0 world. Well, that’s not really true. Mitch Ribak is a blogger. I met him on Home Gain Blog and I read everything he writes. Why? Because he’s VERY effective at marketing.

Mitch is extremely helpful. In the 3-4 months I’ve known him, he’s answered every single question I’ve asked and gone out of his way to explain the efficacy of his pay per click marketing success. He is extremely open with advice, sharing with whomever asks for it. Mitch designed a CRM called 100mphmarketing.com which he’ll release next month. I respect this guy a lot.

Here’s the short version of this 15 minute interview:

1- If a REALTOR is not online, he’s going to lose out.

2- Buyers control this market, not sellers. Ergo, attract buyers with your marketing.

3- Websites should offer less content, not more. The most important tool is a lead capture tool.

4- Give enough content to entice the buyer to call you.

5- The lead capture form should be prominent on every page.

6- Quality lead generation comes from attracting serious buyers; the lead capture form distinguishes their intent.

7- Traffic should be high quality. Mitch uses PPC and affiliate marketing programs.

8- No email= no access to listings. Real estate brokerage is a business and businesses must deal with serious buyers.

9- Conversion is key. It is the contact with not the content provided for the customer that is of paramount importance. Autoresponders work because they automate the marketing process. “Dripped” MLS listings buys customers’ brain cells.

Mitch has “street cred”. His team of 14 agents closed 193 transactions, last year. Last month, they closed 38 transactions. Not a big deal? He sells real estate in Brevard County, Florida; the eye of the hurricane.

I’ll ask you to listen to the interview with Mitch before you comment.

June 3, 2008

What does Zillow.com understand that Trulia.com is missing? “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think that there may have been a time, in the blue-sky days of gray-skyed Seattle, when people with two-digit badge numbers at Zillow.com actually thought they might be able to disintermediate Realtors — much as Expedia.com had disintermediated travel agents. No one at Zillow will admit to this, but I suspect that a notion like this could have been in the original design parameters for the hypothetical software they were brainstorming in those days.

If this is true, then, to their credit, they came to their senses. Presumably, they realized, first, that the National Association of Realtors is a ferocious criminal mob that will do anything to destroy perceived competition, and, second, that, as simple as it might seem from the outside, real estate representation is too complicated to be automated cost-effectively, at least for now. Instead, Zillow.com made a conscious and thorough-going decision to partner with real estate agents and lenders, offering them exposure on its platform in exchange for building out its content.

You could argue that Trulia.com made a similar resolution, but it seems more likely to me that the San Francisco start-up is simply aping Zillow’s partnership with individual practitioners without really understanding it.

From a distance, the differences in the partnering relationships of the two companies could not be more stark. At Trulia, the most important kind of partner is the one who can deliver the most listings. The hierarchy runs from brokerage chain to brokerage to broker to agent to seller.

Zillow’s hierarchy is the other way around: The most important source of information about a home is that home’s owner. Next comes the agent, followed by the broker, the brokerage and the brokerage chain.

In both cases, higher parties on the hierarchy have the power to override — and thus usurp — the contributions of lower parties. What this means in practice is that sellers and their listing agents are regarded as being the least authoritative sources of information at Trulia — and therefore the last in line to receive practical benefits from the leads that might be generated by the on-line reiteration of the agent’s listing of Read more

June 2, 2008

Phoenix real estate market news: May rocked

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I tend not to cover local market news at BloodhoundBlog, but this is big, and I expect it might be replicated across the country. I’ll be writing about it tomorrow for Saturday’s Republic, but it won’t be news-pages news for another ten days or so.

Here’s the news, in any case:

May was a very strong month for clearing bread-and-butter inventory in the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market. We track sales of newer suburban tract homes, with records going back to January of 2004. May was the strongest month for those homes since May of 2007, with the best month before then being November of 2006.

Price are down, month over month, and not just a little, so May’s results no doubt reflect the sale of a lot of lender-owned properties. But inventories of these same homes are down 7% from April and over 14% from March. The implied absorption rate from May’s results is 5.2 months, down from 8.4 months for April.

The lender/title month ended on a Friday, so it will be Wednesday or Thursday before I’ll be willing to commit to solid numbers. As a matter of anecdotal evidence, I called yesterday about a very market-weary short sale. After months of no activity, three offers came in over the weekend. The seller multiple countered, with the current high-bid being $17,000 over list. We won’t know for sure for two or three months after the fact, but May or June could be the bottom of the market in Phoenix.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

June 2, 2008

BloodhoundBlog in the terrible two’s and the me-me-me meme

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had mail last night from a sweet kid who wanted to tag me in what she called a MeMe game. I thought that by itself was nice take on the idea of memes as represented in the wired world of real estate, but it also put me in mind of a promise I made a while back:

Inlookers: I will be happy to entertain any other What would David Gibbons do?-type questions. You can email me; I’ll shield your identity. Or you can use the “Ask the Broker” button — if you fudge the email address field, it’s completely confidential. If your question is obnoxious, don’t waste your time — because I don’t waste mine. But if you have a sincere question about BloodhoundBlog or me or whatever […] fire away. I am surely also the most forthcoming — and loquacious! — person any of you are ever likely to meet. If you want to know something, just ask.

This is not a vanity on my part. People who have met me in person will tell you that I don’t ask many personal questions. I see them as bring not so much impertinent as irrelevant. All I care about is work — mine, yours, ours. But if there’s something you’re just dying to know, don’t suffer in ignorance, and, for goodness’ sakes, don’t gossip. Ask away. I will conceal nothing.

BloodhoundBlog will be two years old on June 29th. The world of real estate weblogging has exploded since we got started — but my argument is that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re doing everything we can do expand this world we live in, to help more and more real estate professionals understand the implications of Web 2.0 marketing. In the coming weeks, I plan to revisit some of the underlying philosophical issues that drive BloodhoundBlog — to illustrate where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.

Louis Cammarosano sent this along yesterday:

Was going over our google analytics re the HomeGain blog and was checking sources of traffic. Someone came to our site from a Google search excellent real estate marketing. Click on the Read more

May 31, 2008

Imagineering Unchained Orlando: The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything about taking BloodhoundBlog Unchained to Orlando is in flux until we find out what we can do about meeting rooms. Even so, I’m swimming in ideas for how I want it to work.

As before, as always, I want for there to be a ton of hard-headed content. We set a new high-water mark for real estate conferences in Phoenix, and I want to bump that mark quite a bit higher.

Here’s how my thoughts run right now, all subject to amendment by cruel reality and subsequent brainstorms:

This is a one-day affair, and so it has to be a concentrated dose of that Unchained attitude. We also have to accommodate the comings and goings of the conventioneers, since it seems less than likely that they will all be available for the same one huge block of time.

What I thought we might do is run the circus from 8 am to 8 pm, with Brian and I doing a four-hour show three times or a three-hour show four times — thus to deliver the most that we can to the greatest number of people. An even better idea: Two different three-hour shows, each delivered twice. Unchained in Phoenix was eleven-plus hours of content, but we could condense that down to a very highly-concentrated six hours of material.

Then, in the next room over we could have a trade show floor with vendors we trust having an opportunity to present their value propositions and give away tee shirts and frisbees.

And then in a third room, this one cut into three or four breakout rooms, we could offer hour-long breakout sessions aimed at every level of geek, from infra to ultra. We need beginner sessions. We need expert sessions. This is a way we can meet a multitude of needs. Twelve hours times three rooms could accommodate up to 36 unique class sessions. I would expect many sessions to be repeated through the day, but 36 class slots presents a lot of teaching opportunities.

In the end, we end up with a sort of All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Show up when you can, stay for as long as you Read more

May 31, 2008

Looking for the bottom? Real estate speculators are establishing the bottom-dollar price for lender-owned homes in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Looking for the bottom? Real estate speculators are establishing the bottom-dollar price for lender-owned homes in Phoenix

If you’re looking for the bottom of the real estate market in Phoenix, chances are it’s right up the block. It’s that house with the jungle of overgrown weeds in front.

It used to be for sale. Then it was a short sale. By now it’s lender-owned. A year ago it might have been listed for $250,000. Now the price has been slashed to $120,000 — maybe less.

That’s a sad story, particularly if you knew the owners. And now, as you watch the parade of investors checking it out, you might feel a certain anger toward them.

If so, your anger is misdirected. Between syrupy books and movies and high-strung high-school-teachers, we have been indoctrinated to despise speculators. But the truth is, speculators are the garbage collectors of capitalism. They come in and clean up messes they did not create, returning productive value to underperforming assets.

It you’re looking for a villain in these stories, look to the borrower, to the lender or just to the vicissitudes of life. But it is the speculators who are going to bring the real estate market back to a viable state.

How? By establishing the bottom-dollar price.

What is your home really worth right now? It’s worth as much as the lowest-price lender-owned comparable plus the cost of returning that home to turn-key condition plus a small convenience premium. In other words, if the lender-owned house sells for $120,000, and if it will take $10,000 to make it as nice as your home, then your home is worth $135,000 — $140,000 at most.

And if you’re not willing to sell you home for that price? Get it off the market right now. It will not sell for more, but the surplus of over-priced inventory is a false signal to buyers that the market has not found its bottom.

If you must sell into this market, you’ll sell at the market price. If you can afford to wait, you will almost certainly do better Read more

May 30, 2008

Are you a professional practitioner or just an order-taking lackey? How to list a home for sale like you own the damn place

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about how we list homes for sale (and not just in that post; surfing the archives repays effort). At Unchained I illustrated some of our ideas, and you can catch this show on the DVDs if you missed it live. Everything we do is about selling the house — not selling us as a brokerage or as agents and not attracting buyers for other listings. We reap a substantial secondary marketing benefit from listing as hard as we do — both the efforts we undertake and our victory dance when we succeed — but our entire focus is on selling the house.

There is more stuff I could talk about, and we are always playing with new ideas. It’s fun — for me at least — to work with buyers, but listing is a perfectible praxis: By the assiduous application of thought and effort, we can get better and better at it the more we do it. But there is a limit to that proposition: You cannot sell a house that won’t sell, and that’s what I want to talk about.

But first: Listing in Phoenix right now, and in many other markets, can be a heart-breaking endeavor. There is too much inventory and there are too few buyers, and even the most perfect home can come up second-best again and again. “If you list, you’ll last,” but it could be that you’ll last a little better right now if you focus your attentions on motivated, qualified buyers, rather than speculating on sellers. You don’t have to blow off sellers, but I think you might be wise to reschedule listing appointments in favor of showing appointments, if one has to give way for the other.

Here’s the real meat of the matter, though: How much will you get paid for a listing that does not sell?

We charge a $1,500 non-refundable retainer when we list, but that doesn’t begin to cover our costs before we even hit the MLS. I’ll come back to this idea, but the point for now is that we actually lose money if our listings don’t sell. Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts