There’s always something to howl about.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog. It’s for posting only, but you should be able to handle most admin tasks from Safari. There are alt.themes out there that will reformat your weblog for the iPhone/iTouch screen. I’ll have more to say about these if we ever actually lay hands on a 3G iPhone. More at WordPress.org.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
It’s humbling to blog. You want to share your thoughts and ideas, so you do, but what sometimes happens, in my case anyway, is that eventually either experience or someone with more experience comes along, shows you the error of your ways, and suddenly you are faced with a public record of a half-baked idea. So it is with my Bloodhound Twitter posts, which now read like a high school romance.
Oh! I had such a mad crush on Twitter. It was so much fun to be around, but when Twitter experienced sudden ginormous growth, my Twitter gated community lost power, literally, and then it got looted, literally, and I had to lock the gates on my darkened community to keep out the riff-raff.
With the huge growth of Twitter came a lot of “followers”, and perhaps it’s semantics, but I don’t want to follow people. I wanted to converse, discuss, have that big family table experience, but without the family dynamics. I was looking at a Twitter stream full of a lot of followers, a few leaders I didn’t want to follow, and damn, that’s when it hit me: Twitter- I’m just not that into you.
Twitter, I still want to be friends. You rock for the fastest way to get news, but I’m finding that here in Dayton Ohio, I don’t need news that quickly, it doesn’t add to my life in any meaningful way. I still adore my local Twitterpals, and I’m becoming their go-to real estate pro. We tweet-up when we can, so I do check into Twitter for that reason.
Twitter, I like you, but not in that way, ya know? I just don’t feel the excitement any more. We’ve settled into a routine- an understanding- if you will. I don’t need to tweet, and you don’t miss me when I’m gone.
Via email, Greg Swann recently declared Twitter a cesspit of groupthink. Hey! That’s not nice, and that’s not true. Well, okay, it’s half true- the groupthink part is on point. In fact, one of the ways you can use Twitter is to gauge groupthink. You can follow Twitter discussion Read more
I’m way behind on introductions, but time marches on. Today we’re adding Thomas Hall to the roster. He is the creator of a weblog called It ain’t all Big Hair and Cadillacs, and that little bit of insolence by itself is more than enough to qualify him for membership in the pack.
Here’s Thomas speaking in his own behalf:
I am truly a frustrated management consultant who sells real estate. I am at a certain point in my “career” in that I want to be more involved in the mindshare of real estate technology while continuing to be a practitioner. I have clear ideas about the role of technology in real estate — I believe the basic model needs a rework, but I am firmly entrenched in finding better ways for realtors to work with consumers. I don’t think technology replaces the role of an agent — it should enhance it.
Smart guy. Good writer. A Bloodhound kind of attitude. Let’s see how he howls.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Q: What’s the difference between cows and Realtors?
A: When they get the urge to be milked, cows don’t fly to trade shows at their own expense, wandering from booth to booth with their udders out.
Well. I certainly feel vindicated. The RSSPieces clusterfrolic is further proof of the advice I gave about dealing with vendors a year ago:
1. Avoid hosted software systems
2. Avoid proprietary technology
3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices
BloodhoundBlog has been vindicated much more than I expected this year. On issue after issue, we’re the only national real estate voice to be heard on the topic:
In March, I noted that much of the RE.net had gotten in bed with Brad Inman. Minions of the NAR — I called them the “nice niche” and Teri Lussier is turning it into a meme — have made their incursions as well. The result is that, at the national level, we are the only consistent voice left for consumers and for the grunts on the ground, the people who actually do real estate — rather than strive to find new ways of milking Realtors and lenders of their income.
We are what we are, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I just didn’t expect to have the entire battlefield abandoned to us. Obviously we can more than bear the load. I worried for a while about Vlad’s Legal Defense fund, but we’ve more than covered what we’ve needed so far. For a time I was mildly dismayed that too much of the wired world of real estate seems, per Emerson, “to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression” — but that certainly doesn’t describe anything that happens here.
Real estate is a vendorslut industry, Read more
This Idea Is Submitted With Tongue Buried Deep In Cheek
Sometimes I can only shake my head as I look at some of the listings in the MLS. Most good agents won’t take a listing that is overpriced… and if so, it’s usually not overpriced by much.
When studying recent sales, I notice that the trend for a home to sell within a few percentage points of its current list price continues. Ultimately, it all comes down to supply and demand. If we can’t increase the demand – maybe we should restrict the supply… especially of overpriced listings.
Well I came up with an idea. What would happen if a property tax reassessment could be made when a seller put their property on the market?
As my good friend Jeff Brown would say, ‘Now don’t jump the gun, locomotive breath.’ This knife would cut both ways. For those who are paying low property taxes – they would see a tax hike. But for foreclosures and other distressed properties – they would see a tax reduction.
The benefit of using this system is that sellers would be much more reluctant to put their property on the market for some ridiculous price. The tax assessor would be able to say – Hey, you’re the one who said your property was worth that much – quitcherbitchin.
On the other hand, buyers like some of my current clients would get a break on the purchase of their next homes. For example, on one property we are considering, the current taxes are nearly $7000 a year – but those taxes will be reduced by at least 40% after the purchase and subsequent reassessment. Having that reassessment right now would reduce the upfront costs of the purchase – not to mention that more buyers could qualify to purchase a property like this.
There you go. I’ve tossed a grenade out there for you. Anyone feelin’ froggy?
I mentioned the Saturday Afternoon Marketing Circle yesterday. Richard Riccelli, Jeff Brown, Teri Lussier and I have been talking about an ugly marketing problem and how to get around it. I left off last night with this:
You can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error. You can only persuade people who are listening to you.
I could go further than that to say that people only change their behavior in significant ways when the pain of their errors exceeds their inertia in emending them. In that respect, this real estate market is a good friend to Realtors like us, who intend to do a whole lot more to earn the business. In a normal market, no one is listening. Right now, a lot of people are tuned into the idea of better and worse results.
That notwithstanding, Teri offers up this observation to the idea that “you can’t market into indifference or into firmly-established error”:
Why not? I’m not being a snot, I really don’t understand why you’d say this. Can’t great (legendary) marketing overcome a wide variety of objections?
We want to teach salesmanship at Unchained in Orlando, and this question illustrates why we want to cover this stuff. To wit:
An objection is a buying sign.
If someone raises an objection to something you’ve said, they’re not only already listening to you, they’re listening hard. If you can pull out every objection and address them satisfactorily, you’ll make a sale. In many ways objections are better than placid acceptance, since the placidity may be masking unstated objections.
But that’s not what Teri and I are talking about. The issue is this: How do you get the attention of people who are already consciously or subconsciously convinced that they don’t want to hear what you have to say?
Teri put it this way in our discussion:
So your weakness is not marketing listed homes, but marketing to convince the seller to do things your way from the beginning.
But exactly. Our efforts are remarkable. Our results, even in this market, have been very strong compared to the agents we compete against. But as I discussed with Jeff the other day, Read more
Dan Green is a great believer in the power of the media to promote a business, where I am quite a bit more skeptical. He asked me once about the commercial value of my column in the Arizona Republic. Quoting former Vice President John Nance Garner on the value of that elective office, I said, “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Dan loves the mot juste — and I will promise you that, in reality, Garner was more redolent in his retort. But: We just did the math lately and it turns out I’m wrong. The Republic column is worth $1,800 an hour — while I’m writing it.
The essence of good writing — the gist of the mot juste — is to sweep the reader along with you as you go. The corpus of writing is enshrouded in rules, but the rules don’t mean anything if the reader doesn’t care enough to participate. It’s a tragedy to be ignored entirely, but it seems to me still worse to be missed — to be skimmed and scanned and dismissed without ever having been read. I play the way I do, when I write — not as prose, not even as poetry, but as a kind of scat music where the sounds and the meanings of the words play off of each other like kittens and a butterfly on opposite sides of a window — I play this way both to reward attention and to penalize inattention. If you don’t read me with your whole mind, you won’t get it — and that’s the idea.
This is writing about writing, the most perfectly human action there is, and this is the one place you can turn to in the RE.net where the minds are serious enough to write about writing. Teri Lussier was talking about our archives, and I wish we had some organization to them. I wish I could send you off just to all of the many posts we have written about writing — some our own work, some extended quotations from giants of English literature.
There’s this, at least, Read more
Huge news in the world of search: Google now publishes search volume for specific keywords through the Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. In the past, we’ve had Overture (which went away,) or Wordtracker to turn to. Both of these tools were fairly inaccurate. The new data that Google released appears to be far superior to either of these tools.
I’ve long been a fan of Google Trends, and I’ve wasted many an afternoon looking up the strange search habits & statistics of Googlers in different areas & cities. Want to know if Keller Williams is more popular than Re/Max? Google Trends can give you a good idea.
The new data that Google has opened up to us gives us very powerful information about mind share, or public awareness. It logically follows that the more people are searching for a specific brand, the more generally aware the public is of that brand. We can now put a “search score,” in points on any specific brand.
So….how did everyone stack up? you can click on the image for an easier to read doc, and more information
OK, I will confess.
Up until we started Project Blogger, I had NO idea EXACTLY what being a green REALTOR was all about. I mean, I understood the general concept, in a promote conservation and sell the benefits of green housing sort of way… But I really did not understand HOW a green real estate blogger would connect with a GREEN customer, until I was faced with the challenge of helping a NEW green blogger in Louisville–here in our office. It is a new challenge for me.
One of our agents approached me. She already was a beginner in our blogging group and she asked if I would help her get a DIFFERENT blog up and running. “What’s your niche or hyperlocal?” “That’s just it,” she said. “I want to blog about environmentally friendly housing. I want to be a GREEN blogger.” I instantly knew that this was a MUCH better fit for her than the niche she was in.
This was something that she IS passionate about. Her other niche was more because she found it to simply be attractive business wise. We have a saying in our little blogging group in our office: “Blog about baseball if that is what you are passionate about. You will sell more real estate that way.” The point is, by being passionate and authentic, you will ATTRACT more people to you. You will connect with others in a meaningful way. And Dawn, the agent in our office will connect and sell and enjoy the process more because her voice will be authentic.
When you CARE, your writing emits an almost magical quality that it doesn’t have when you are writing for money alone. Stephanie, I don’t have her blog up and running yet. She is on vacation with her family for a week or two, but if you don’t mind, I’d love to get the two of you together via email or whatever. I have already sent her to your blog and she came back going.”..wow….”. (That’s a quote.)
I guess every day here at the office just reinforces the point to me that authenticity and passion Read more
Google your name. The dogs are still barking and their favorite mic is back ON. (It was ON all the time, but now we can turn up the volume a bit more!) And we like it LOUD.
Congrats Greg! Looks like things are back on track! I hope you did not post this earlier and I did not notice…been on vacation and been buried with work this week once I got back.
Note to onlookers…this is kind of an “inside baseball” way of saying that Google is now back in love with BHB the same way that Technorati is…
Eric
These signs don’t exist yet; they won’t be finished until Friday at the earliest.
This is the first time we’ve done this, custom signs with one side in English, one side in Spanish. The flyer is done in both languages, also, one on each side of the sheet. I may echo some of the copy on the web site in Spanish, also.
Just because we can, we’re using four unique photos on each side of the sign. The sign printer is digging this stuff beyond all measure. We came to them two years ago with these ideas, and, so far, no one else has even bothered to ask them what we’re doing. Meanwhile, we keep coming up with new things to try. I want for them to enter our work in sign-makers’ competitions.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Which one of these loans is better?
A- Loan docs at 6.5% with 1 point cost, disclosed at 6.5% with 1 point cost 30 days earlier…OR…
B- Loan docs at 6.5% with 1 point cost, disclosed at 6.25% with 1 point cost, 30 days earlier, but the originating broker negotiated the 1 point cost before application ?
There is more than one correct answer:
If you said A, you appreciate integrity of expertise and execution. You understand that the originating broker stuck her neck out at quote time and delivered on her promise, regardless of the changes in underwriting and market fluctuation. She assumed the interest rate risk and underwriting risk of the loan after reviewing a borrower’s application, supporting documentation, and credit report. She may have earned an extra .5% by properly executing the rate lock (because she subscribes to MBS pricing)
If you said B, you appreciate the integrity of hyper-transparency in lending. While the originating broker may have made some mistakes in lock execution and underwriting analysis, he did act in the borrower’s best interest and collected only what he negotiated.
If you said that neither were acceptable, you probably haven’t had a transaction close in the past 8 months.
Which will you choose as the better customer experience?
This started out at a response to Jeff Brown in John Rowles’ “dinosaur” post, but it grew to take on a life of its own.
Jeff Brown:
Sellers, at least in my experience, have been excellent at discerning one thing — who produces results.
Oh, would this were so! I can take you through Phoenix, neighborhood by neighborhood, and show you in which neighborhoods the sellers are paying attention and in which they aren’t. We compete very aggressively in the neighborhoods where sellers are wide awake, but there are places we are called upon to go where the neighbors could not care less who sells what for how much in how long a time. It’s just not on their radar — nor is any tactic or technique for optimizing results. We only work with sellers who care, so it makes a huge difference to us.
The brokerage — not agent — we are most likely to lose business to has done an excellent job of promoting its long-standing reputation. For the most part the agents do nothing that we would consider exceptional, and their time on market and LP/SP ratios are horrible right now, but we can only penetrate that marketing veil if the seller is paying first-hand attention.
I had a surprise yesterday. The Arizona Republic column brings me a small number of deals, but they tend to be very interesting. We’re working one now, two listings and a purchase. One of the listings is in Sun City, a Del Webb original, unmolested, on the golf course. We listed it our way last Friday, because that’s what we do. Yesterday I was out there to deal with the sign and almost all of the flyers were gone. When our flyers seem to evaporate, it almost always means that the neighbors are interested — not in the house, but in us as listers. I’ll be interested to see if the sellers out there really are paying attention. The houses don’t sell for huge amounts, but if the sellers are willing to work our way, it might be worthwhile to pioneer a second niche out there.
Our timing Read more
