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Category: Marketing (page 89 of 191)

February 1, 2008

Up Your Marketing Game

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

What tips do you have to share with us to help everyone brush up on their marketing game?

February 1, 2008

If you’ve finally found your dream home — don’t dawdle

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
If you’ve finally found your dream home — don’t dawdle

Here’s a paradox for the ages: It’s been a strong buyers market for more than two years — and yet buyers still can’t afford to be lax about the houses they love.

How’s that? In our recent seller’s market, sellers were completely indifferent to home-buyers — as a matter of studied strategy. “We might consider your offer,” they seemed to say, “but not today. We’re letting the offers pile up until Monday or Tuesday, then we’ll take a look at them all at the same time.”

Why can’t buyers in this market approach sellers with the same bland indifference?

They can — provided they’re willing to buy just any home.

In a seller’s market, qualified buyers are essentially a fungible quantity. Each one is simply a pile of money in the seller’s eyes — some larger, some smaller, some sooner, some later. Allowing for risks and opportunities, one is as good as another.

Not so for buyers. Houses are inherently non-fungible — each one is unique in location, appearance, construction, condition, amenities and lifestyle factors. Even with so many homes for sale right now, it can be a challenge for buyers to find even one house they are completely committed to buying.

My take: If you want to get the best possible deal, pick three homes, not one, and pit the sellers against each other.

But buyers don’t do this. Instead, they look at dozens of sub-standard offerings, and then focus all of their attention on the one house they can find that is priced right, repaired and staged right, marketed right.

And guess what? Of all the houses these buyers will have seen, this is the one for which there is competition. The factors that appeal to them also appeal to the other folks out there looking for homes right now. The dirty or neglected or over-priced houses attract no offers, where the few that are truly market-ready can draw multiple contracts within a few days of being listed.

The lesson to take away: If you really love Read more

January 31, 2008

Who benefits from occupational licensing laws? The licensees, to be sure — to the detriment of the consumer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Coyote Blog and Radley Balko, the Philadelphia Inquirer brings us a nice illustration of why occupational licensing laws really exist: Not to protect the consumer, but to protect the licensees from free-market competition:

Mary Jo Pletz was really, really good at eBay. But now the former stay-at-home mother and gonzo Internet retailer fears a maximum $10 million fine for selling 10,000 toys, antiques, videos, sports memorabilia, books, tools and infant clothes on eBay without an auctioneer’s license.

An official from the Department of State knocked on Pletz’s white-brick ranch here north of Allentown in late December 2006 and said her Internet business, D&J Virtual Consignment, was being investigated for violating state laws.

“I was dumbfounded,” said Pletz, who led the dark-suited investigator to a side patio area, where he grilled her. “I told him I would just shut down,” she said.

Mary Jo’s violation? Auctioneering without a license. Sound familiar? It should. It parallels the dumb stunt the Sate of Arizona tried to pull on Zillow.com, which was accused of doing real estate appraisals without a license.

But there are consumers who need protecting, right? Oh, you bet:

D&J Virtual Consignment had 11,000 feedback comments on eBay and 14 were negative, Pletz said, giving her a 99.9 percent satisfaction rating.

Ebay is not just perfect Capitalism, it is Capitalism Perfected — everything that has always been implicit in free-market commercial transactions made utterly transparent by means of database management. If you are looking for the complete and irrefutable refutation of Das Kapital, you’ll find it not on but in the form of Ebay.com.

So where’s the beef?

Amoros, the state spokeswoman, said investigations were a “complaint-driven” process but those complaints are confidential.

Uh huh.

It is only possible to for you to defend occupational licensing laws by ignoring the palpable harm they do to actual consumers — higher prices for lower quality goods and services. But even then, don’t get downwind of yourself. This stuff stinks.

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January 30, 2008

Big News: Ignore all that fine print, tear through all that red tape — Redfin.com supports Safari at last!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, wait, that’s not the big news from Redfin.com. In fact, I reported the really big news last night:

Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

So here’s what’s changed, as of 12:01 am EST: Redfin agents are going to squire buyers around for free four times as much as they have in the past. No news on who’s buying lunch.

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today rolled out a 75-day trial of a new home-tours policy that allows visitors to its site to arrange four Redfin-hosted home tours without paying any money up-front or making any commitment to Redfin. The first two tours would be free, and the third and fourth tours would cost $250 at closing, with any subsequent tours costing $250 in advance.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? My experience is that home-buyers are not the most assiduous readers of fine print.

There’s more:

The new tours last two hours, and require the buyer to provide a mortgage pre-approval letter documenting her ability to buy the homes she is scheduled to visit. Redfin deducts the $250 charges for the third and fourth tours from the commission refund, which has averaged roughly $10,000 at closing. Customers who do not complete a purchase with Redfin do not pay for their third and fourth tours. Previously, Redfin only provided one free three-hour home tour, charging $250 in advance for each additional tour.

I’m thinking there can be too much red tape even for the INTx gnomes who find Redfin appealing. What is clear is that pay-as-you-go has a less-than-ideal gnome appeal.

I can do four houses an hour with normal buyers. I normally do 12 houses in three hours, then make the buyers stop. After 12 houses, their eyes glaze over. If we limited ourselves to two hours, that would be eight houses. Four two-hour tours would be 32 houses. This is nothing at all like the original Redfin game plan — shoving the expense of showing homes onto Read more

January 30, 2008

Obeo, Baby, where have you been all my life? Why should buyers stop at virtually moving in their furniture when they can virtually redecorate — inside and outside — as well?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We are too much misled, surely. Too much miscounseled, misdirected, misinformed. Too many of the people we turn to for advice on selling homes don’t actually sell homes themselves — never have — and, in consequence, too often, they are too much mistaken.

Consider that 2006 was to have been the Year of the Real Estate Video — except it wasn’t. Nor was 2007. And nor, neither, will be 2008. Video is useful for telling stories and for communicating personality. In expert hands it can be an incomparable tool for conveying arcane or abstract ideas. As a real estate marketing tool, it is at best a role-player — and most often — owing to crappy production values and even crappier pre-planning — it serves more as a detriment than a benefit to the marketing of a home.

Good photography, by contrast, is the real estate marketing tool of the millennium. Houses sit still, and what buyers want, more than anything, are scads of detail-rich images that also sit still — so they can examine, repeatedly, every last one of those details.

We will sometimes do video in a role-playing way for our listings, but the second most popular feature on our web sites, after the photographs, is the interactive floorplan. Buyers love to see exactly how their furniture is going to fit into the home — and the more they commit their minds to the home, the more committed they are to buying it. The scientific name for this intricate process is: Salesmanship.

For years now, we have dreamed of an even more fun, more engaging, more interactive tool to put on our sites: Virtual redecorating. Change the paint. Change the flooring. Change the cabinets and countertops. “You almost love this home, folks, and you haven’t even liked anything else. What can you do to make this place your own?” The name for this again? Oh, yes. Salesmanship.

And guess what? It’s here. Obeo, about whom I knew nothing until this morning, has solved the virtual tour problem in a way I not only don’t hate, but actually like. And they have given me virtual redecorating, Read more

January 30, 2008

In The Business Of Personal Relationships, Database Marketing Is More Effective Than SEO Marketing

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

Two years ago, NAR told us that 74% of people begin their home search online.  What they didn’t tell us, however, what percentage of those people write paper with the agent on whose site they began said search.

This omission is an important one.  Just because a person starts online doesn’t mean he finishes there.  If you’ve researched a product at multiple Web sites before making the actual purchase, you understand what I mean.

Every store except the last one was just a borrowed encyclopedia.

Click-throughs from a search engines are not “leads” and that’s why the NAR statistic is misleading.  Until a reader engages the author personally, the click-through is only that.

A Web site visitor that registers for free search, free reports, or free seminars is not your client.  He is a window-shopper taking home free samples.  He’s a client when he signs, and never before.

Today, the Federal Reserve will do something to the Fed Funds Rate and if history is an indicator, my Web site traffic will quadruple.  It happens every time.  It’s because I’m so high on Google for the term “fed funds rate mortgage“. 

Of the traffic from Google, not a single person will reach out to me for a “personal question” about their mortgage.  Again, history is my indicator.  I am the source of information of for a lot of people and that suits me fine.

Knowing that my clients would care about the same information, I have a planned email to my database that will do three things:

  1. Explain that the cut in Fed Funds Rate will likely cause mortgage rates to rise
  2. Introduce them to the concept of “why the Fed is taking a shower”
  3. Point them back to my Web site for a full explanation of the “shower” analogy

This email to my database will generate new business.  Once more, history is my indicator. 

The last time I saw this was when I sent my “stick people in houses” video on the same day the Fed dropped rates 0.750% out of nowhere.  The email generated much more business for my team than did placing high on Google’s page rank.

When you’re in the business of personal relationships, effective database Read more

January 29, 2008

Want to learn how to sniff out bias in the mainstream media? Follow your nose — all the way to Yosemite

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

John Cook fingered this mash note to Redfin.com in Forbes Magazine. More of the same four-legs-good, two-legs-bad crap we expect from the mainstream media, but it’s short enough that the bias is almost too obvious.

Consider the attributions for quotes:

  • “says Kelman, 37”
  • “Kelman says.”
  • “one Redfin representative wrote recently”
  • “read another posting”
  • “says Steven Del Bianco”

These are all people of whom the writer approves.

But you can’t write a morality play without a villain, so take note of this item, quoted in full:

“In our area the consumer is savvy enough to know that they want value and a high-quality agent,” sniffs Gary Bulanti, a Realtor with Alain Pinel Realtors in Menlo Park, Calif.

Did you sniff out that “sniffs”? Kelman says, then says again. Redfin’s minions write and post. Even investors in past failed discount brokerages get to have their “say,” as it were. But if you are anti-Redfin in even the smallest way, you sniff — you bloated, soul-sucking, counter-revolutionary pig!

It’s all one, really. Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

But just stop for a moment to take account of this:

In a national forest near Yosemite National Park someone affixed fake Redfin bumper stickers to signs, trees and rocks to make the company look like a shameless promoter and defiler of the environment. After Redfin staffers removed the stickers, which they have never used to pitch the Seattle company, the trickster started tossing the signs, attached to weights, into branches of sequoias.

First we have some some kind of demented, Edward Abbee-like monkey-wrenching counter-revolutionary pig of a Realtor, who traipses off from densely-populated Seattle to a national frolicking forest to smear Redfin. And then we have a yellow school-bus full of happy, happy Redfinions — red caps, blue kerchiefs, khaki tunics and cargo shorts — racing off to that same forest to repair this horrendous damage to the natural world, praying all the while to Gaia to heal the deeper wound. On the way home they sing Read more

January 28, 2008

Principles of Flight and Real Estate — Getting Off the Ground

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I’ve seen in the real estate business the rough equivalent of what my grandma saw in her lifetime with flight. Born in 1909 she saw in real time the embryonic stage of flight. The first successful flight was only six years before her birth. 60 short years later she watched, on a ‘machine’ not in existence until she’d been married and had four children (three on her front porch), American men land on the moon and come back safely.

Think of where real estate brokerage was 40 years ago. I’d compare it to the planes used in World War I. The MLS existed, but was in book/magazine form delivered by truck, supplemented thrice weekly on paper held together by staples. The establishment of farms for Heaven’s sake, was a huge break through! Knock on the same doors every month? Why would anyone do that on purpose?

There were no teams, not even the biggest thinkers created teams, even in the ’70’s. (at least that I can recall) The team itself was another development thought by most as staggeringly forward thinking. My father didn’t use for sale signs and he was thought of as a maverick. 🙂 We’ve seen the rise of franchises which came like a herd of buffaloes in the ’70’s. Some still exist, most don’t, but the franchise has remained as a significant player.

The first time i heard of an agent being paid a 70% commission split by their broker I thought it was a joke. It was real. It was the beginning of what we see today. 100% commission offices with ‘desk’ fees. In-house service companies — title, lenders, escrow, etc. The shift from the broker/owner being the god of all things to the producing agent should have been predictable. The tail wagging the dog is at least in part why we’re here today. Most high producing agents would fall flat on their faces if they’d been forced to open their own companies. But that’s another post altogether.

Where exactly is here?

It’s business models we’d of laughed at 40 years ago. Marketing not hinted at on TV shows Read more

January 28, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “A hopeless attempt to regain what she lost: her sense of trust and self-reliance”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the benefits of The Odysseus Medal competition, for me, personally — especially since we started echoing the Long List of nominees — is that I don’t feel as much pressure to weigh in on every last thing. I’ve been writing software in my spare moments for the last two weeks, and, amazingly enough, the world spins on without me. Last week we had Roost.com launch, which I wrote about, but we also had a huge Fed rate cut and the extended coverage of the Ummel lawsuit, and I got to coast on both stories, on the strength of the great work done by other voices in the RE.net.

And, as it works out, this week is an all-Ummel Odysseus Medal Awards post.

We start with Glenn Kelmann, who wins The Odysseus Medal this week for “114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance”:

Once a buyer’s agent begins making representations about price, it seems possible for him to make negligent representations about price. This doesn’t mean an agent can’t make representations about price, and can’t be wrong when he does. He just can’t be negligently wrong, by withholding material information that a reasonable person would want to see. If the Ummels’ agent did that, he should pay for it.

Of course, since we have no idea from our seat in the peanut gallery what really happened between Ms. Ummel and her agent, the whole debate is academic. The only undeniable fact is that the lawsuit that Ms. Ummel is pursuing, at greater cost than she is likely to recoup, must be like all other forms of revenge, a hopeless attempt to regain what she lost: her sense of trust and self-reliance.

In this respect, the case just illustrates the perils to both parties when a client outsources her brain to a real estate agent, or a stock-broker, or anyone else trying to sell something. It is why we dislike the paternalistic mindset occasionally used to justify brokerage fees, in which talk of “hand holding” is not seen as condescending, fears about “the single biggest purchase in your life” are stoked, and agent attempts to be persuasive during Read more

January 27, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are 18 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 78 posts. A lot of news, so a longer short-list. Upside: A boatload of fascinating reading.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Ben Martin -- Realtors And Their Associations Realtors And Their Associations Share A Common Problem. What We Have Here Is Failure To Communicate.”,
“Brian Brady — Erin Brockovich Watch Out! Here Comes Erin Brockovich!“,
“Brian Brady — Guerilla Warfare Needed Housevalues.com Invades Activerain.com: Guerilla Warfare Needed“,
“Brian Brady — Ultimate Irony Activerain.com and HouseValues.com- The Ultimate Irony“,
“Brian Brady — Brokers/Lenders The Danger of Real Estate Brokers as Loan Advisors“,
“Charles Feldman — Litigious Clients Real Estate Agents: Are Litigious Clients Out to Get YOU?“,
“Dan Green — Mortgage Rates and the Fed Why Mortgage Rates Didn’t Fall More When The Fed Made A Surprise 0.750% Rate Cut“,
“Doug Quance — Self-Fufilling Prophecy And Now We Shall Witness The Economic Self-Fufilling Prophecy“,
“Dustin Luther — Roost.com Who gave Roost complete MLS listings?“,
“Galen Ward — Benefit versus Features Descriptive text as benefit, not feature“,
“Glenn Kelman — Absolute Perserverance “114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance”“,
“Jay Thompson — Buyer suing realtor On Buyers Suing Agents“,
“Jay Thompson — Roost.com Roost.com: A New Player in Real Estate Search“,
“Jim Cronin — Slow-Loading 3 Reasons Your Real Estate Blog Loads So Darn Slow, and the Solutions“,
“Joel Burslem — Roost.com Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart“,
“Kris Berg — The Fast Lane Real Estate in the Fast Lane“,
“Michael Wurzer — Branded or Unbranded Media Branded or Unbranded Media, A Video Conundrum“,
“Mike Price — Who Rules The Roost? Who Rules The Roost?“,
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    Deadline for next week’s competition Read more

    • January 27, 2008

    Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

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

     
    Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift

    If you’re chasing the market down, chances are you’ll never catch it. The trick to pricing a home for sale is to race the market down.

    How’s that again? We’re in a declining market, that’s understood. It won’t be this way forever, but prices could continue their slow leak for quite a while longer.

    What that means is that, whatever price you might get for your home today, you will probably get still less a month from now or three months from now.

    Hence, you need to make a difficult decision.

    If you don’t actually need to sell right now, you might do better putting your move off for two or three years.

    But suppose instead that you do need to sell your house right now. You have a job offer out of town. You have a big deposit on a new home. You’re expecting triplets. What now?

    Even in the best of markets, sellers can have an inflated idea of the value of their homes. This has certainly been the case in the two years since the market turned. We’ve had a glut of inventory, but much of that has been overpriced inventory.

    Typically, the seller starts out with the price too high, then tries to chase the market down with a series of price reductions — usually too little and too late.

    If your house is not showing, it cannot sell. But if it isn’t showing, this almost always means it is overpriced. The trick to getting it sold now is to price it under the competitive listings.

    The natural impetus, in the face of advice like this, is to say, “I don’t want to give my house away!”

    Who can blame you for feeling that way? But the important question is, “Would you rather hang onto it for a few more months, and then sell it for even less — if you are able to sell it at all?”

    Racing the market down can be a painful decision. But the pain is likely to be Read more

    January 23, 2008

    Speaking in tongues: A universal contact form for real estate weblogs…

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Nota bene: Slightly amended. Reread carefully.

    I landed on Jeff Kempe’s weblog yesterday. In the way of the web, I don’t remember how I got there or why I came. But I spent a little while looking around, without quite realizing what I was looking for.

    And then it hit me: There’s no contact information. No phone number. No “email me!” link. No contact form. You can find Jeff’s phone number on the About page, but that’s about it.

    Maybe he wants it that way. Maybe it’s none of my business. And maybe I’m not so religious about this stuff that I can go out look for motes — or even beams. But Brian Brady is dead-on when he talks about asking for the business, so I decided to do something for Jeff, whether he likes it or not.

    And: You can play, too.

    What I came up with is a sort of universal contact form for real estate webloggers.

    You can see how it looks on DistinctivePhoenix.com in the image to the right. It’s built to adopt the look-and-feel imposed by your weblog’s theme’s CSS file, so it should look just right when you deploy it. I deliberately made it narrow because sidebars can be pretty tight places.

    The code itself is pretty simple, so if you feel comfortable editing PHP, you can go in and modify it to your heart’s content.

    But if the thought of editing software makes your brain ache, you can deploy this form by editing only five lines of code, all very simple.

    First, you have to email me to get me to send you the form. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get a PHP file to download from our server without executing. I can email you a zip file, but our anonymous FTP is so anonymous I can’t figure out its true name.

    Anyway, when you get the PHP file, you’re going to do this — in a text editor, not in Microsoft Word: Edit the second through the fifth lines. They’ll start out looking like this:

    $myName = "Firstname Lastname";
$myCompany = "The Almagamated ClusterFunk Team";
$myEmailAddress = "MyEmailAddress@MyFileServer.com";
$myWeblogAddress = Read more
    January 23, 2008

    Is Roost.com roosting on the brass ring? Start-up Realty.bot comes to market with two firsts: MLS listings and a business plan

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    What if somebody built a Realty.bot that seemed to make sense from Day 1? What kind of goof-ball strategy is that in the wacky world of Web 2.0?

    I don’t know if Roost.com really has a business to bank on. The search.bot horizons are starting to look a little crowded. But unlike past entrants, the company is entering the field with two unprecedented features: They’re working from real MLS listings, via member-brokers’ IDX feeds, and they actually have a strategy for monetizing their efforts.

    Yawn! YAMBS again? That’s Yet-Another-Map-Based-Search, a transition in the course of two years from the cool to the commonplace. I haven’t been able to play with Roost.com yet, but my guess would be that they’re behind the curve on cool-factors. The search tools seem to be more than adequate, but Roost is all about search, with none of the social-theater-of-the-mind games the older Realty.bots have been rolling out.

    This is nothing but residential real estate search, with 13 major markets being served at today’s roll-out. Since the listings come from IDX feeds, Roost.com needs at least one broker relationship for every MLS system it wants to service.

    There’s more. Roost.com plans to make money by delivering prospects back to member brokers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. In one scenario, as in the screen-shot above, the broker can have his own private-label Roost.com IDX system hosted on a third-level-domain — e.g., tarbell.roost.com. Every click originating on that site would go back to Tarbell.

    Alternatively, brokers can participate directly on the Roost.com system, with the end-user click-throughs being distributed in a manner similar to Google’s Adwords program: Participating brokers would be selected at random based on their desired spending goals.

    I’m eager to play with the system, because what I’ve seen of it so far seems cool. As an example, the image below shows a windolet of photos. You can have more than one of these open at one time, so you can compare photos from multiple properties.

    Roost.com is essentially a free IDX system for brokers that they would only have to pay for when they are receiving benefits from it — this in the form 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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