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Category: Marketing (page 75 of 191)

April 28, 2008

The Real Definition of Insanity In This Market

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Remember when Enron was still everyone’s darling?  Remember when they were a high flying company that could do no wrong?

Remember when AOL was high flying and had the audacity to buy Time Warner?

Or even Bear Stearns?  Kmart, Qwest, MCI/Worldcom,  Lucent Technology, Arthur Andersen, all were at one time ‘highly regarded’ companies that lost a huge percent of their value.   That’s a ‘top of head,’ list without considering the Airlines.

There are countless more examples of big companies getting wiped out in a day.  People’s pensions are inevitably the big story.  Middle class families get wiped out because they had all of their ducks in one basket.   Employees sue the company because senior executives didn’t tell them that there were risks inherent in the stock.   The media has their normal pity party.  But the real shame?  Nobody stops to think for a second: no matter how good the company, is it sane to put all of your money in one place?

When I get on someone about blogging (un artfully), the real message was meant to be this: if you only have one widget for getting money, you’re nuts, and you’ll be destroyed someday.   Maybe not soon, but someday.  It might, temporarily, be a most efficient to do what works, and chase a single source of leads.  How was business done 15 years ago?   We didn’t predict the nature of today’s changes.  Blogging is great, and it might last a long time.  But you cant operate with the assumption that it’s going to be here.  That leads to complacency and obsolescence.

To have a healthy business, you have to have many sources of income and leads, so if one of ’em dries up, you’re not on the streets.  Because…no matter how good the widget, no matter how efficient the model, you MUST have several great sources for your business.  It’s a baseline survival requirement for this new market. 

What would happen to you if the top 2 sources of leads dried up in a short time.  Even if ROI Read more

April 27, 2008

The challenge for Realtors and lenders in the future: How do you sell to consumers who don’t want to be sold?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). The lender in the story? Brian Brady, America’s #1 Mortgage Broker.

 
The challenge for Realtors and lenders in the future: How do you sell to consumers who don’t want to be sold?

We represented a cute couple in the purchase of their first home late last year. That much is not news: First time home-buyers are the bread and butter of the real estate business. What was interesting to me was how internet-focused they were.

The husband, Michael, is an internet adept, but his wife, Danielle, is a true wizard. Her primary interface to the commercial world is the world wide web.

They found me on the internet, of course, and I referred them to a lender that I know through the nets.

Consider this: There are 30,000 Realtors in Phoenix, and at least that many lenders. All of them are advertising at a furious pace — newspapers, real estate magazines, supermarket shopping carts, bus benches, billboards, radio, TV — plus balloons, free pens and scratch pads and coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, flower seeds, recipe cards and Halloween pumpkins.

Real estate professionals spent millions of dollars trying to get Michael and Danielle’s attention, and all of that money was wasted. They are not paying attention to advertising.

To the contrary, if Danielle cannot completely research a product or service on-line, she won’t have anything to do with it. They never once went into the home they were buying without a digital camera. I watched Danielle crane around in impossible contortions so she could read and write down the model and serial numbers from the washer and dryer so she could research them on-line.

Looking forward, nothing changes as fast as we expect it to. But looking backward, the world seems always to be changing like dreams. Danielle is immune to advertising. She recycles her junk mail unread. She doesn’t want to be pitched, she doesn’t want to be sold, she doesn’t want to be wheedled or needled or cajoled. She doesn’t want to be closed on.

All those old school gimmicks still work — on some Read more

April 27, 2008

Update On New Data Standards for Listing Displays

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

On April 12th, I posted some “news” from NAR regarding the unanimous approval by RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization) of the draft data standards for listing display.

On Friday, April 11th, NAR announced that the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) had unanimously approved a “draft standardized data format for distributing real estate listing information.”  

A few of you wanted more information, so I contacted NAR’s Technology Center and got the full scoop.

First, the draft is NOT available on-line, at least in a format that non-techies can read.  Here is a link to some really technical stuff for those of you who know what an “enum” is all about (I do not have a clue).

Second, I found out that these standards are a subset of the RETS data.  The RETS Syndication Standards (the official name) includes less than 2 dozen fields (I’ve heard 14) from RETS.  That sounds like a lot of field at first, but once you count up the obvious ones (e.g., agent name, contact, beds, baths, etc.) that is not very many.  Not that I’m second guessing the wizards who came up with this stuff.

Finally, the near riff I reported in the original post was reasonably accurate.  The big aggregators were tired of the slowness and bureaucracy of the process, but after they threatened to create their own standards, the process moved very quickly.  Essentially, they are beta testing now and will make the final decision in August.

So, what does this mean to REALTORS®?  Here’s what Chris McKeever from NAR said in an e-mail:

With the RESO and NAR backing of this Syndication Specification, this could very easily be adopted into MLS systems to allow them to be the clearinghouse for data transfer between all points.  In other words, your single point of listing data entry into the MLS could then also dynamically be sent to every site that you choose, very similiar to how REALTOR.com is fed now.  This, coupled with the growing number of consumer facing MLS search portals(link) could throw a complete paradigm shift into how listings are marketed on the web.

April 27, 2008

The smarter agent emerging: standards out of experimentation

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

Choice is becoming more critical as options increasingly expand. I have read about this potential problem for years and now we seem to be well along the road to increasing abundance of options. As real esate agents, we’re inundated with options regarding web sites, social networking avenues, blogs to read, models to consider, marketing techniques to employ and advertising venues to use. It’s the flip side of the blessing, the curse of too many options and the problem of choice.

One of the benefits of sites like Bloodhound is that people are giving consideration to these problems and openly writing about what has been found to be the best practices. Awhile back I talked about an article written years ago predicting how the internet would intially be chaos, then experimentation and selection and winnowing, then a standardization period. I want to give credit to the writer, but I can’t find the source. Perhaps someone will remember.

It seems we are still in the experimentation stage, but as we quickly change and learn, choices will hopefully become easier. There is still a dearth of statistics showing the effectiveness of blogging, social networking and online marketing through website providers, RE sites and social sites but anectdotal evidence and personal experience based on analysis are beginning to give us an indication that these new forms of doing business have much potential for those who are adopting the right methods and utilizing them in a committed way.

I do have evidence in my own company that online business has increased by at least 20-30% each year for the last three years, I just haven’t pinpointed which methods produce what part of that business — perhaps it’s a holistic effect of it all.

Making choices is based on knowledge gained through experimentation, our results and the results of others, developing certain guidelines I can use to measure new offerings. In other words, I’m getting to a point where I don’t have to experiment with every new online offering, wasting money on useless gimmicks — it’s easier to tell now which ones have merit and which ones are just a snazzy remake of something I’ve tried that didn’t work.

I suspect many real Read more

April 27, 2008

Gen X, Gen Y, And the End Of The Traditional Real Estate Business Model

by

Real Estate Broadcaster and Investor

Author website

 Real Estate Radio USA | Gen Y Homebuyers

With the median age of real estate agents being 52 years of age (source NAR), new Realtors hoping to make their mark in the real estate business are casting aside conventional wisdom.

New Real Estate Agents Seeking Gen X And Gen Y Buyers Break From The Mold

New real estate agents, cognizant of the fact that 84% of homebuyers start their home buying journey on the Internet and that the median age of first time home buyers is 32, now realize that what may have worked for the elder-statesmen of the industry is not what their clientele are looking for.

In a demographic wherein 50% of which use social networking websites,the axioms of traditional real estate sales is not viewed as being prudent.

Young agents are now finding that chaperoning prospective buyers from house to house and acting as the veritable liaison between the Buyer and Seller is not generating sales among the Gen X and Gen Y hip and technologically advanced home buyer.

“People, especially my peers, aren’t looking for a ride to the property or a go-between; they want to IM me to find out how big the basement is,” said Lisa Johnson, 33, who works for Coldwell Banker in Haverhill. “They often have more information on the properties than most realtors. They don’t want a new friend; they want answers fast and will make decisions quickly when you provide them. I know this because I’m the same way.” (As reported recently in the Boston Globe.)

It is becoming more and more apparent that a fresh, younger, breed of real estate agent is in great demand in an aging industry struggling to keep pace with a market populated with an emerging younger homebuyer. The dilemma? The real estate industry continues to get older while the industry’s consumer base begins to skew younger.

This widening gap poses a great conundrum for traditional real estate agents.Younger prospective home buyers seek to do their own research, on their own time, and in their own manner. They expect a real estate agent to “chill-out” and just be there when they are ready. They definitely do not want to be involved Read more

April 26, 2008

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer at FBS Blog fingered an astounding exposition by Clay Shirky on the impact participatory media will have on us all:

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the Read more

April 25, 2008

REALTORS are Important To An Originator’s Success…Sort Of.

by

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

Author website

Loan originators are taught to develop REALTOR relationships. While development of those referral relationships is important, I’ve seen originators waste time and money on unprofitable “partnerships”. This initial article, in my new series about REALTOR marketing, will explore how to quantify the referral relationship to more efficiently understand how to focus your efforts.

Why prospect REALTORS?

Well, that’s where the money is, right? REALTORs deal with buyers who need financing for homes. Their clients have means, motive and opportunity to generate fee income within 60 days. What can be expected of such a relationship? If it’s a good relationship, the originator can expect three loans annually, from the average, full-time REALTOR.

Three loans each year. Did you hear that?

Move up REALTORS are perhaps the least productive for an originator to target. Most of their clients show up with a pre-approval letter (or lending relationship) in hand. The REALTOR who overzealously recommends you runs the risk of “steering” accusations. A successful real estate agent, who works this market, is probably closing 15-20 sides annually. Half of them will be listings so there are only 10 loans available to you. Half will have their own financing so you’ve got a shot at five. Throw in a couple of new home purchases and your number drops to three…IF…everything goes well. The expected value of the move-up REALTOR relationship is about $9,000 GCI annually. Assuming a 70% commission split, that number drops to $6,000. Remember that number when asked about “co-op advertising”, Padres tickets, or joint seminars.

Mega-agent teams can be a great source of loans for you until they get into the mortgage business. The deteriorating profitability, of a full-service brokerage, forces broker-owners and team leaders to explore ancillary services as an alternative income stream. I can’t say that I blame them, either. Control of the customer experience combined with the added revenue make affiliated business agreements attractive to REALTORS who consistently produce. While you may feel that you “hit the motherlode” when you connect with the mega-agent, keep in mind that you’re “security” can be short-lived.

Where then, can an originator target her referral marketing efforts?

1- Read more

April 24, 2008

Actions speak louder than words, so let your actions say this: “I intend to do more to earn your business.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Rohrig got to hang a sold sign on the first custom yard sign he built for a listing. The sign probably didn’t sell the house, but it did sell another homeowner on listing with Mike.

He relates this in email:

I had reports from my seller of at least one person just short of slamming on their brakes to look at the sign. How do you think the sellers felt when they saw that?

From Tallahassee, Barry Bevis offers this:

Here are my first two custom yard signs.

Learned a little — as you always go the first time out. Next time they will be larger, I’ll balance the fonts out, No rivet through my logo and maybe shorten the text — but the paragraph is stopping walkers.

As I posted on your blog, the web address just sends you to the listing page on my website.

Here are Barry’s signs:

I think this rocks. From our point of view, a listing sells to three parties: The seller, the buyer and the neighbors. The idea of using yard signs to snare random buyers — in the hope of selling them something — anything! — seems sub-optimal to me. We would rather knock the socks off the neighbors, thus to cultivate a steady stream of listings.

As both Mike and Barry note, a custom yard sign is excellent for drawing buyer attention. And your actions will speak to your sellers much louder than any words could that you want to earn their business. And that yard sign will communicate silently to neighbors who are thinking of selling that they need to give you a call. I rate that a win all around.

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April 24, 2008

Another Happy Customer

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Below is an email I just received that I thought I would pass along.

Prey - listings

After talking with your agent this afternoon, I NOW UNDERSTAND how you can advertise that most of your propertys sell in 30 days !!!!!!

YOU PREY on the unfortunate home owners who’s property and there situation are in distress !!!!!! YOUR agent had the GALL to tell me Id have to list my home for under $ 150,000 !!! You know SHE DID NOT EVEN SEE MY PROPERTY !!!!! All her talk about bad times etc, and wanting to know why I wanted to sell was her attempt to , I GUESS , scare me into listing a property worth alot more than that BUT you people DONT want to work for your money as a true real estate person does by seeking buyers for homes priced properly. YOU JUST WANT the distressed propertys so as you can scare the home owner with your talk , get him to list with you at a drastically reduced price so as it will sell in your advertised 30 days with you people doing little to NO work and making your money !!!

Answer this IF YOU CAN !!!! How can your agent MAGICALLY put a value on my property WITHOUT even seeing it, re, condition etc BUT she can magically compare it to another property priced lower WHICH she hasnt even seen neither. How do you people MAGICALLY be able to EVEN compare the two without even seeing EITHER ONE !!! The comparison one could be a piece of #%^# !!!! Mine is not !!!!!!

How do you people even call your self realtors in what you are doing !!!!

April 23, 2008

Estately.com gets $450K angel round funding, and it is barreling right down California’s throat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Looking for the ultimate status symbol in Scottsdale? Drive a Porsche. In Manhattan? Maybe a co-op on Central Park West — and a Porsche. But in Seattle, if you want to make heads turn, get yourself some venture capital funding.

Estately.com co-founders Galen Ward and Douglas Cole join that rarefied company today, snagging $450,000 in angel round funding. What that means is that “a small group of online entrepreneurs” believes the company is worth at least $4 million on resale. The funding — to be used to expand into other states — is no doubt welcome, but it comes with an added pressure to work miracles.

From the company’s press release:

Estately.com is the leader in location and lifestyle real estate search, allowing users to search from over 45,000 Western Washington homes and condos using unique search features; users can search for properties a quarter mile from specific Metro bus and Sound Transit light rail lines, users can search inside or nearby neighborhoods, zip codes or cities, and users can use text search to narrow their MLS-based home search down to “Tudors,” “fixers,” “short sales,” or “pre foreclosures” without registering on the site. Estately.com also brings searchers information on the closest local schools (including school scores), parks, transit stops, and restaurants for every property in its database. Anyone interested in real estate can track property price changes on individual properties or on area-wide searches and can store (and search for) private notes on any property.

When a real estate seller or shopper is ready to work with a professional, they can anonymously get competing offers from pre-screened and hand selected professionals in their area – no name or phone number required. Estately rigorously screens the agents allowed to participate in the program – Estately combines a powerful in house Realtor ranking system, using the same MLS data displayed on the site, with interviews and reference checks on every agent in the program. All participating Realtors have over 5 years experience unless they come highly recommended by a verified client, have considerable experience in the locale, and have received positive reviews from previous clients. In the Read more

April 22, 2008

engenu public beta test goes live: If you want to explore the software BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build our web pages and web sites, this is your opportunity to deploy engenu on your own web server

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been talking about engenu for a couple of months now. This is the software that BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build single property web sites for our listings and other web pages and web sites that we use to communicate with clients and vendors. Our belief is that the language of real estate is photography, and that, in many cases, the most effective way of communicating real estate concepts is by means of web pages and web sites.

I have been building pages and sites like this for as long as I have been in real estate, first manually, then with a steadily improving series of software programs. engenu is a further development on those ideas, designed and written from scratch this year. We have been using it for our own jobs for the past two months — to make sure that we had what we wanted, and to makes sure everything was working properly.

Here are some engenu sites we have built, both as live work and as examples of what the software can do:

What is it, exactly? engenu is slide-show-oriented software for the semi-automated creation of web pages and web sites. It is communications software, not a presentation package. As an expression of this, even though we make very elaborate single-property web sites for our listings, we continue to use a third-party vendor for our virtual tours.

Who should use engenu? Realtors — and I mean all of them — but also handymen, roofers, landscapers, inspectors — anyone who needs to communicate frequently with digital photographs.

What will you need to run engenu? Root level access to an Apache web server, a robust FTP client that you know how to use, and a strong need to create a lot of professional-looking web pages quickly and cheaply. engenu is multi-user software, so, as soon as you have it installed, you can split the workload for large Read more

April 22, 2008

Cleaned by Capitalism: Our professed love of nature is an artifact of our enormous prosperity

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other week Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek posted a wonderful article discussing the advent of the rule of law as a precursor to poetic rhapsodizing about the love of the natural world. The post featured a quote from Macaulay’s History of England:

Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develop in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. . . .

It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of robbers . . . that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain tops.

Today is Earth Day, and Boudreaux is back with another trenchant post, this one discussing the revolting squalor that typifies pre-capitalist communities.

Don Boudreaux is the Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University — a hot zone of free-market economic research. In today’s post, he cites an article he had originally written for The Freeman, the magazine of The Foundation for Economic Education.

Boudreaux has given BloodhoundBlog permission to print his article in its entirely. The Greek root of the word economics literally means household management, and it’s not a coincidence that Read more

April 21, 2008

Eye On The Ball, Folks…Hug Your CPA Today…

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

We’ll keep this first post short, sweet, and incredibly practical.  We all want that magic bullet.  That thing that gets us four more work free "deals" this quarter, right?  Well, it doesn’t exist.  So instead of whining about marketing, let’s look to the calendar for a drop dead simple, 1.0 way to get a little bit of scratch this month.

We all know what happened last Tuesday, right?  It was tax day. 

Lots of people thought about their finances, lots of people talked to their local CPAs.  Loads of CPAs saw lots of financial statements, heard why people were freeing up cash, maybe a few even heard the sugar-sweet phrase ‘1031,’ just days ago. 

And you know what?  Betcha a Starbucks they don’t all have trustworthy referral partners to work with. 

Betcha that if you grabbed a list of CPAs–now that the CPAs aren’t in tax season–and reached out via ANY authentic method (post cards, friendly calls, offering lunch, whatever you’re comfortable with that gets measurable results), and authentically offered yourself as a trustworthy person to help navigate these turbulent waters…

You’d get solid referrals in days and weeks-not months.

There are dozens of "scripts" you can use, but why not do it in a sentence:

The more direct and more honest, the better.  I’ve called CPAs (and financial planners) and uttered a run on sentence: "Hi, I’m Chris Johnson, with ____________.  I wanted to reach out and let you know that if you had clients buying a property, I would be honored to help them, and help you make sure it was congruent with their long term goals. Do you have anyone in that category?"  

Now, I’ve never once had someone jump through the phone to send me a client.  But, I’ve made (too) few of these calls to CPAs.  And every time I do, within a couple of hours, I meet someone I connect with, I want to help, and that sends people to me because I reached out.  I’m still closing loans from CPAs I Read more

April 20, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition will be postponed this week

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re busy with real estate stuff, and I’m grinding on all gears to push engenu out the door. Plus which, there were only 65 nominations, suggesting, perhaps, that the rest of the world has Teri’s Spring fever.

In the mean time, here’s a blog post from Mark Steyn illustrating why a reactive, me-too, catch-up strategy is likely to fail in the net.world:

Old media dinosaurs looking to the Internet to make up for declining print sales will find this analysis disquieting:

In the first three months of this year, the average amount of time visitors spent on newspaper sites fell by 2.9% to 44 minutes and 18 seconds per month, or less than 1½ minutes per day. In the same period, the average number of pages viewed per unique site visitor dropped by 6.6% to 47.2 per month…

The decline in the average duration of sessions at newspaper web pages suggests that visitors are not utilizing the industry’s sites as primary destinations, but, rather, as places to episodically view individual articles highlighted by Google News, Drudge, Digg, blogs or any of the thousands of other places they might be.

So, if you happen to see a link at, say, NRO to something in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, you’ll click and read it, and then go away and not return to the paper until you click another link that tickles your fancy. That’s a hard model to sell to advertisers.

American newspapers have only themselves to blame. Instead of recognizing the necessity to reinvent their approach online, for the most part they simply transferred their old dullness to the new technology. Their print drabness derived mostly from the complacency of their local monopoly, and that’s the one thing you can’t transfer to the Internet. It will take more than the web to save these sclerotic franchises.

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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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