BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 78 of 191)

April 6, 2008

What Do I Do Now?

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Below are two emails I’ve received in the past week. One is from a successful veteran agent in Texas and the other is from a young man from Canada in the business just over a year. Their stories are a bit different but my response is going to be the same to both.

__

From the veteran agent:

I just wanted to say Hi and wondered how things are going in your market?

Our market has seemed to turn into a foreclosure market and a significant chunk has come from that direction! 90% of listings are over-priced…but one story homes and REALLY nice homes are selling.

Interest rates are causing the market to fluctuate…and the stock market seems to be doing the same thing.

At best my business is breaking even after paying me and my wife’s salary of $200k a year….which I guess is good. If things continue then my profitability will have dropped over 50% this year. We generally NET $420,000 -$470,000 per year on sales of 1 Million.

__

Much longer when from the new agent:

Hi Russell,

Thank you for returning my call and giving me the correct email address. I have a lot on my mind with this career called real estate and I need a real person who understands the psychology of the business and who can point me in the right direction. With your proven track record I know I can use what you have already applied and take it to the next level, because the company I work and the broker’s are not seeing the big picture that I am seeing and it is a little frustrating. There are great trainers say that “if you want something go out and find people that is doing what you want to be doing, and start to do what they do on a regular basis”.

Just to give you a little bit about me and to get you up to speed on where I am at in my career, and what I am looking to accomplish. I have been in Real estate for a little over a year and my first year Gross sales were $75,000. My Read more

April 5, 2008

Ask the Broker: What relationships must be disclosed in a real estate transaction, and what are the consequences if they aren’t?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We haven’t done one of these in a while. We get a lot of really good questions, but, for most of them, the answer is the same: “You need to talk to a really good real estate attorney in your jurisdiction.”

This one is different, with a couple of interesting problems:

I signed a contract on a home in Virginia. We just found out 3 weeks later after the home inspection the sellers agent is the brother in law to the seller. He never told us. My agent took a cut in his commission to make the sale go though and he was not told. Can this break a contract?

These are the two issues I’m seeing — your mileage may vary:

  • “the sellers agent is the brother in law to the seller” — and this was not disclosed
  • “Can this break a contract?”

There may be a specific answer to the first issue in Virginia statute law. In Arizona, my advice to agents would be to disclose only first degree relationships — blood, adoptive or legal: Mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, son or daughter.

Arguably, an agent could disclose any prior knowledge of the principal, guarding that person’s confidentiality, but I don’t see failing to disclose a brother-in-law as being a grievous injury. Am I wrong?

I’m thinking maybe the second issue — “Can this break a contract?” — is the real objection.

My answer: Almost certainly not. I can’t say for sure without reading the contract language, but I would be amazed if it included a contingency for undisclosed second-degree relationships.

In other words, if the failure to disclose the brother-in-law really is an actionable issue in Virginia, the action would be taken against the agent at the state licensing authority or the local board of Realtors.

Unless the agent is a party to the purchase contract, I can’t see how any misfeasance on his part could be considered a breach of that contract — which governs the performance of only the principal parties.

Others reading here may differ, which disagreement is invited.

And if you want to explore your full recourse under the law: “You need to talk to a really Read more

April 5, 2008

Looking for a bargain in Phoenix real estate? Add some elbow grease to your money and go for a bank-owned home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Looking for a bargain in Phoenix real estate? Add some elbow grease to your money and go for a bank-owned home

Last week we talked about how home sellers can command a premium price in the current Phoenix real estate market, even if they are competing with nearby foreclosure properties, by putting the home into turn-key condition.

So what’s the counter-strategy? If you’re a buyer looking for the best possible price, what should you do?

Go for the bank-owned homes, of course. Trying to buy a short sale can be heart-rending. The price listed in the MLS will be meaningless. The lender will decide what price to allow. Still worse, lenders drag their feet on short sales. If they have any hope of keeping the loan alive, they won’t let the house go. Meanwhile, your own interest rate could be spiking, rendering you unqualified for the deal if and when it finally comes through.

By contrast, bank-owned homes (you might hear them called REOs, for “real estate owned”) can race through the escrow process. Once a bank has foreclosed on a home, all it wants is to get it off its books and recover whatever cash it can, as quickly as it can. In consequence, your offer might be approved in just a couple of days, with the bank rushing the closing date any way it can.

Because of that, your loan qualification matters a lot. If you look shaky to the bank, it might pick a lower offer from a stronger borrower just to be assured of getting whatever money it can out of the deal.

And then there is the condition of the home. People  losing their homes sometimes let the daily maintenance slide. Expect to see filthy carpets, scuffed-up paint, damaged doors. The air conditioner might have been removed and sold, or the water heater — or even the kitchen sink.

In most cases, the bargain price you get for the home is going to be offset somewhat by the money you will have to put into it. But if you are handy Read more

April 4, 2008

Can you top this? From listed to closed in 184 hours

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy’s $60,000 brother-in-law listing has closed in scratch time. All cash, opened escrow Monday morning, recorded this afternoon.

In theory, you can transfer title on a house in Arizona same day, but I’ll bet it’s been a few decades since anyone got the job done that fast.

How about you? What’s the fastest you’ve ever closed on an MLS-listed home?

Technorati Tags: ,

April 3, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Want to learn how Zillow.com bakes a sweeter, tastier browser cookie? Scratch the FUD from your recipe

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wanted to expand on my post from last night on Zillow.com’s use of web browser cookies with its new Mortgage Marketplace free loan quotes software.

So you know going in, I have a huge contempt for people who try to sow FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt — about new technology. In the podcast linked below, I’ll give you the grand tour of the browser cookie bakery:

  • What cookies really are
  • Their implications for privacy and secrecy
  • How Zillow is implementing browser cookies
  • And, most importantly, how you can deploy browser cookies in your own marketing

If you insist upon living in a demon-haunted world, you’re probably not going to get much out of this. But if you understand that, as a side-effect, Zillow is teaching you a great deal about hi-tech marketing, then put on your thinking cap and think.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

April 3, 2008

Heard on Broad Street: “Zillow.com may in fact be reinventing — and perfecting — Capitalism”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Back in the 19th century, when the stodgy New York Stock Exchange was already ensconced in the lap of luxury, the traders who would one day form the American Stock Exchange were stuck out in the rain.

Literally. Stock brokerages that couldn’t afford a seat on the NYSE instead rented offices on either side of Broad Street near Exchange Place. Clerks hanging out of windows would communicate bid and ask prices by hand signals to the traders working outside on Broad Street. Rain, sleet or snow, the traders effected their exchanges.

Last Summer I poked fun at Zillow.com’s CEO Rich Barton for a vision he had of a 19th century marketplace. This is Barton’s quote:

“I see an old-style marketplace formed, a city market like Pike Place Market. I actually dug up an old photo — Pike Place Market at the turn of the last century. People were gesticulating. People were buying things. People were gossiping. Negotiations were happening. Big billboards were advertising things above the marketplace. That’s the picture I have in my head.”

Give the man his due. I’m thinking Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace is more like Broad Street than the Pike Place Market, but it definitely is a true bourse — the maximum flow of information between buyers and sellers with the minimum of friction — or even overhead!

I wrote last month that Zillow.com is leading us toward the realization of Capitalism’s promise. Everything we claim as a defect of Capitalism is in fact the confluence of two other systemic defects:

First, a small few people want to behave badly, which fact permits other sleazy people to malign honest traders who are themselves innocent of all wrong-doing.

And second, physical impediments to the flow of information prevent the overwhelming majority of overwhelmingly honest people from distinguishing the innocents from the crooks.

Software systems like Ebay and Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace mitigate the second defect, leaving the bad actors fewer and fewer places to hide.

The Mortgage Marketplace is a small thing, so far, and, as with everything in the RE.net world, it looks much larger to us than it really is. But consumers — and lenders! — have Read more

April 2, 2008

Zillow.com takes advertising demographics to never-before-seen places

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other bit of news to come out of Zillow.com is this: The real estate start-up is collecting, deploying and reselling advertising demographics in unique and interesting ways.

The vast quantities of demographic information — income, property values, credit scores — that will be collected in the new Mortgage Marketplace software will be stored in browser “cookies” on the user’s own computer. In other words, Zillow will not be storing this information in its own databases, but will retain control over it by means of software that will be able to access the cookies in future sessions on Zillow.com.

What this means is that Zillow will be able to deliver highly-targeted advertising to its users, zeroing in on products and services that would be most appealing to that user’s sex, age, income and other demographic characteristics.

This by itself will make Zillow extremely profitable to advertisers, who seek assurance that their promotional efforts are aimed at the right prospects.

But Zillow is also making these cookies available to other advertising vendors, such as Google’s Adwords system. By this means, other advertisers will be able to deploy the demographic information Zillow is collecting to target their own ads.

Obviously, the reselling of this demographic information is also a profit-center for Zillow.com — reports of whose financial demise may turn out to have been premature.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

April 2, 2008

Zillow.com’s long-awaited mortgage lending service offers anonymous customized loan quotes to consumers, affording loan originators the opportunity to compete transparently for free mortgage leads

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seattle-based real estate start-up Zillow.com tonight releases its long-anticipated mortgage lending product. We’ve known for nearly a month that Zillow’s offering would include working loan originators in some fashion. What becomes clear tonight is that Zillow will basically be acting as a hands-off intermediary between mortgage-seeking clients and loan originators.

Consumers using Zillow’s new Mortgage Marketplace will be able to anonymously solicit bids for loans from participating lenders. The consumer will fill out a detailed form disclosing all pertinent financial details.

The form will be submitted anonymously to participating lenders, who will, in their turn, produce quasi-pro-forma loan quotes, submitting them, through Zillow, to the consumer. The consumer will then have the choice to make direct contact with particular lenders to decide whom to do business with.

To a very large degree, the information asymmetry between lender and borrower is done away with, since the loan quote will detail every fee associated with the loan. Moreover, Zillow will be implementing a reputation-management system whereby borrowers will be able to rate their lenders on their performance.

In return, the lenders will receive Zillow’s mortgage leads at no cost.

The new service is expected to come on-line at 9 pm PST tonight. I made screenshots in the product demo teleconference I attended today, but my expectation is that these will be obviated very shortly.

 
Elsewhere: Todd Carpenter, Rich Barton, John Cook, Drew Meyers, TechCrunch, Rhonda Porter, Spencer Rascoff, Joel Burslem, Kevin Boer, Jay Thompson, Rhonda Porter (again), Pat Kitano, Morgan Brown, Trace Richardson.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

April 2, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: How did Brian Brady get to be Canada’s Favorite American Mortgage Broker?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you search on Google.com for canadian real estate american mortgage what do you find?

Brian Brady, of course, Canada’s Favorite American Mortgage Broker.

In the podcast liked below, Brian discusses the strategy he deployed to dominate many Search Engine Results Pages for Canadian investors looking to pick up American bargains while the loonie is near parity with the U.S. dollar.

Here’s the battle plan in miniature: Be found, be food, be funded. You have to write content that will score well on search pages or over-the-transom clients will never find you. Once they’ve landed on your site, you have to feed them the information they’re hungry for — all they can eat. And once they’ve decided to do business with you, you have to be able to deliver your product when and as promised.

Are we talking about underwriting rental property loans for prosperous Canadian investors? Or are we talking about your business? Listen to the podcast to find out.

BlackPearlMarketingMinute040208.mp3

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

April 2, 2008

Blogging other Realtor’s listings: Selling houses by selling history, details, ideas, lifestyle — selling the story of the home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was in an historic home on Monday that made me think it had been built by an important home-builder in the very early days of the suburbanization of Phoenix. With the permission of the lister, I went back yesterday and took dozens of photos of the property.

I built an engenu web site for 718 West Moreland Street, then I wrote a weblog post summarizing the web site.

My primary interest, to be honest, was simply to document the home in its current pre-furbed condition. But, if by telling a plausible back-story about the home I can bring it a buyer who will give it the love it needs and deserves, either through me or directly through the listing agent, so much the better.

We’re interested in real estate. We’re interested in engaging people who are interested in real estate. Not to beat a dead horse to a bloody pulp, but it seems reasonable to me that blogging about real estate is a laudable way to achieve our weblogging objectives.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

April 2, 2008

I am not a blogger

by

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

Author website

This is an article I wrote on Active Rain, about a month ago.  I’ve since deleted it because it was behind the “Members’ Only” wall and the rules there state you can’t “out” a private post because of the comments:

I am not a blogger.

I’m a marketer, a social media marketer. There’s a difference between the two. Blogging is often portrayed as an “art form”. I am no artist. If you’ve ever seen my drawings, or heard my singing, you’ll quickly verify that.

Why do I blog? It’s part of my overall branding strategy within my social media marketing plan. I want to be a ubiquitous presence, in plain sight of consumers, giving them what they want. If I give consumers what they want, they’ll give me what I want; a chance to fund their mortgage loan. It’s simple economics if you think about it. Consumers demand; we supply that demand.

Consumers want to see houses and mortgage rates. How do I know this? I write on Long Beach Real Estate Home, Laurie Manny’s blog. Laurie has had tremendous success with blogged listings. Her readers (and subsequent buyers) want to see homes for sale. Her readers started calling me when I wrote the Long Beach Mortgage Rates report…AND put my contact information on the post! Readers want to see homes for sale and mortgage rates available.

Todd Carpenter takes it one step further:

I bet most of you didn’t realize that I had a second mortgage blog. That’s okay because it flies under the radar. When I talked to Brian Brady about it a couple weeks ago, he called it a Trojan Horse. I like that definition. The secret is, my other mortgage blog is cleverly disguised as a blog about Modern Homes in Denver. Yep, it’s a mortgage blog that never bothers to mention mortgages

Todd jokingly recalls the expression “Real Estate Porn”. The most successful real estate blog, Curbed.com, is laden with real estate porn. Consumers LOVE it. Alas, Todd reports that blogging theoreticians don’t:

Blog experts like Dustin Read more

April 1, 2008

State-mandated licensing of interior designers is our only possible protection from life-threatening color clashes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Coyote Blog, Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice argues against occupational licensing for interior designers in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design, completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who practice interior design to use that term without government permission.

You might stare at them incredulously for a moment, then look down at your calendar and say, “Oh, I get it — April Fool!” Right? Wrong.

These folks represent the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that “Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and quality of life.”

Legislative analysis by a half-dozen states that rebuffed ASID’s attempts to cartelize interior design — including Colorado, Washington and South Carolina — has failed to support ASID’s claim that the location of your couch or the color of your bedroom walls is literally a matter of life and death. As the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies put it, there is “no evidence of physical or financial harm being caused to . . . consumers by the unregulated practice of interior designers.”

Lacking any factual support for its sweeping public welfare claims, ASID and its supporters often resort to fear-mongering.[…]

If there were any credible evidence that unregulated interior design presents a genuine risk to consumers, ASID would certainly have found it by now. They have had plenty of time (more than three decades), resources (dues for Read more

April 1, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “I feel like I too, am losing market share quickly in this wildly out of control time warp where one second I’m a kid and the next, I’m in my 50s selling real estate in a down market.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Geno Petro for Geno’s Wrong (bang a gong):

My mother brings in a ham sandwich on a kaiser roll from the kitchen. It has mayo, mustard and a pickle on it. Onion, too. I rarely eat any of those things but I dare not say a word for fear of offending her.  “Diet Coke?” she asks.

“No mom…you know what Paris Hilton says about Diet Coke, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t like her.” declares Mitzi.

“What?” my dad pipes in, apparently with a different opinion of the media icon.

“Only fat people drink Diet Coke,” I say.

“Fat people?”

“Yeah, it’s a joke I think.” I say,  now wondering myself if it’s even funny. They don’t get it and now, I don’t get it either. My wife Mona, is taking a nap upstairs, belly full with as many sandwiches as she’s probably eaten in a month. The volume is turned down on the television and closed captions are streaming across the top third of the screen, covering  the faces of everyone on the Fox News Network. My parents read, watch and comment unfavorably whenever someone bashes Hillary or Obama and hiss in unison when anything positive is said about Bush or the War. I ask them why they even watch Fox at all if they are Democrats but they don’t really get the question. I guess I don’t really get it either in this particular election year. Perhaps they just have trouble working the remote and are afraid to mess with the Dish. There are Post-it notes taped to everything electronic in the house and most things static, as well.

And despite what I have just witnessed, I feel like I too, am losing market share quickly in this wildly out of control time warp where one second I’m a kid and the next, I’m in my 50s selling real estate in a down market.  In 10 minutes, I’ll be my father looking for any small victory I can muster. I sometimes feel as if I’m lagging behind all the youth and technology in my chosen industry of real estate. I have to read something three times before it makes sense, lately. I can only Read more

April 1, 2008

Where Were You When The Real Estate Industry Morphed?

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

Life is good — I’ll be going to the Master’s next week. It’s been a few years since I’ve gone. A friend has some family connection with passes and if one of his business clients back out, he gets me in. Business is picking up also. I just got a contract on one of my “flips” before I even finished and put it on the market, so now I’ll change hats and be a buyer for a while looking for another one.

Leads are coming in on a regular basis, a mixture of strong leads, not so strong and weak. They are all possibilities. I’ve even had time to browse the web and see all the distinctions without much difference being made. As topics run thin we tend to make finer and finer distinctions to prove….what? Superiority? Most likely. Hell, I always think I’m superior. Well, not really, I just like to think I am a lot of the time. In my better moments I realize I’m perpetually on a learning curve. Just as soon as I’m ready to crown myself as “Expert” I hear something from left field that sends me back to the drawing board, to tweak, re-think, adjust.

Perhaps that’s the highest value of this great learning environment called the internet, we’re contantly evolving and becoming better, never crowned for long as “Expert”. However, the more we learn the closer we get to being knowledgable enough to know what we don’t know and how to find the missing pieces.

One thing that fires my imagination and pulls me into the good and the bad of the internet is the growing “conversation”. From Maine to Florida and from Georgia to Oregon, to Canada and overseas, people typing away, posting and responding, creating conversations that for certain specific interests like real estate become Great Conversations with various ideas and concepts being woven throughout. There’s no central authority managing the conversation, there’s no hierarchy of experts, only diverse voices growing, hopefully, not into a Tower of Babel but in different directions of movement and progress until the best ideas and concepts begin forming a great change for the better.

It’s a such a 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