BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 111 of 266)

July 2, 2008

Video from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs: Introduction to The Way of the Farmer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We got the manufactured BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs on Monday. I’ve been watching them as I work at my desk in order to approve the manufacturing job. Believe it or not, this is first I have seen of this video. It was shot to tape at the event, we had it mastered into DVDs in Scottsdale, then I immediately shipped it off to Texas for manufacturing. All along, I was expecting it to be kindasorta disappointing, and, so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. For a one-camera video shoot, it’s coming off okay.

There are tragedies, alas. In my convocation, I introduced all of the Bloodhounds who had come to Phoenix. For some reason, the videographer cut this off, so only Teri gets introduced. I’m sorry for everyone, but especially for Geno Petro, because I had pointed out for all posterity what an exceptionally fine writer the man is.

Appended below is about thirteen minutes from The Way of the Farmer, a presentation on hi-tech geographic farming.

If you’ve paid for DVDs, they’ll be shipping this week. If you have a real estate weblog, Brian Brady has a special offer coming up for you, but, if you don’t, you might want to click the button in the sidebar to get your own set of Unchained DVDs.

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July 2, 2008

We’re off to beat the Wizard…

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I found BloodHoundBlog by following a link from a comment Greg made on an Inman story that I had also commented on. It was pretty typical Inman fare — “Blog your way to a Fortune in Real Estate” was the implied headline. When I arrived here I felt like Dorothy waking up in her bed back in Kansas.

I am new to the Real Estate “industry”. I put that in quotes, because “industry” implies the production of something other than nausea when sellers see the commission they paid (BA DUM DUM – Crash! But I kid the Realtors…). I began working with brokers after building a career as an eCommerce consultant. That was in the real world, which for the purposes of the metaphor I will beat to death in this post, we will call “Kansas”.

That makes Real Estate “Oz” for all the many reasons that have been documented here over the past two years.

Full disclosure: I have spent the last two years trying to bring eCommerce Best Practices from Kansas to Oz. The centerpiece of that effort is a IDX Search platform called “Foyer” that is powered by Google Search Technology. I guess that makes me a vendor, but I am not a carny barker. So far, every gig we have is from a referral. Its been a slow way to grow, but its kept us honest. Its also the best marketing we can afford.

With that out of the way,  you want to know why you should bother to read what I have to say, so to give you an idea of where I am coming from, I will finish the beating of the metaphor.

If I’m Dorothy, then, in no particular order:

Lollipop Guild: Real Estate Agents. Obviously.

The Wizard: The NAR/Move Inc/Realtor.com cartel. Behind the scenes of an imposing edifice The Wiz is an old man pulling big levers (one is labeled “MLS”) that are no longer attached to anything. The Wizard’s power is derived from the size of the Lollipop Guild. The stature of the Guild members indicates the height of the barriers to entry set by the Wiz. When Bloodhounds Read more

July 2, 2008

Lead Generation — Quantity Or Quality? Whatever Works For You

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Turns out I learned about the whole lead generation thing painlessly and without knowing what I was learning. The best part was how it led to meeting so many cool folks of the estrogen persuasion. As a newly unattached 40-something guy in San Diego, I hadn’t dated since Nixon was in office. It was 1999 — I didn’t need a primer, I needed a new chip installed. Talk about clueless? I missed out on three very nice ladies ‘cuz I didn’t know ‘Why don’t we catch a cup of coffee some time’ was a clear sign of possible romantic interest. I just thought women these days were big time coffee fans. Thankfully the higher tech ladies in the office, when they stopped laughing and could breathe again, gave me the heads up on what was what.

It’s the same thing in lead generation. The goal is different. There’s not as much coffee or dancin’, but it’s the same thing.

Early on, it’s my opinion the agent/LO must decide with what kinda leads they wish to work. I see it as two well defined choices.

A. High quantity — must sift through for the quality lead — stellar system needed.

B. Few leads — very high quality — high conversion rate.

The initial requirement was to develop a viable Purposeful Plan. The first two questions you must answer — Where are you now? Where do you wanna be?

I was single — I didn’t wanna be single.

First thing the office ladies told me was to join some online dating services. (I’m not the bar type.) Within 24 hours I was the proud member of four sites. Then they all looked at my profile and said it simply wasn’t cuttin’ it. Had to talk more about my kids. And it wouldn’t hurt to mention I didn’t live in Mom’s basement, did have my own car, made more than $10/hr, and knew how to use real silverware. Done. By the way, I absolutely refused to say how much I liked long walks on the beach. I had my standards, and wanted to keep my Read more

July 1, 2008

Away, and in the dirt…

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

In the 1968 movie adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, Ned Merrill (portrayed by Burt Lancaster) stands on a neighbor’s poolside terrace in Speedos, gazes out at the Westport, Connecticut suburban landscape, and contemplates swimming across all the backyard pools in the upscale valley to his own grand residence and waiting family, somewhere on the distant horizon of his rapidly waning psyche.  As he proceeds on this symbolic journey throughout the running time of the film, Merrill’s unfortunate personal tale unfolds and the viewer bears witness to an allegorical undoing of a once flush ad agency man (total 1960’s protagonist profession) who has obviously come upon more pressing, dire circumstances in recent months. In the final scene we find a shivering Merrill/Lancaster grasping the rusty gates of a boarded up estate, his own foreclosed home, in total mental cataclysm, alone, and with no apparent hopes of redemption.  Judging from the total nothingness he is left with in these last crumbling moments of the story, he obviously cheated on his wife.

I made reference to this very film just last Friday as my Buyers and I pulled up to a padlocked, once grand executive residence in an affluent neighborhood of Northbrook, Illinois. Before us stood 4,000 square feet of rambling, rat bitten, mold ridden, and overgrown memories plotted on a once bucolic, but irregular, single story setting. The original white exterior clapboard is now green and soaked with moisture, the cedar shingle roof sagging like a sway-backed horse. Shards of broken glass and rusted carriage bolts from half-hanging shutters lay strewn across slick mossy patio pavers while the kidney shaped swimming pool, abandoned except for 5 feet of rubbish and tree limbs and swamp water, sinks quietly into the back corner of the overgrown trapezoid. Ghosts of a late 1960’s cocktail party society hang from the gray, weathered latticework and peer out from the tilting gables above the gutterline; their faint voices and forgotton laughter lacing the early summer breeze. A single wind chime dances somewhere in the backgound.  What a dump.

“Somebody definitely cheated on someone,” I say as I wedge the entry key into the oxidized padlock. The house is not only a foreclosure, it is a foreclosure of a foreclosure.  Literally.  A whole lot of things have to go wrong for something like that to happen.

My Buyer and his wife just stare at me and the house in silence. It definitely showed better on the MLS, I conclude.

“The Swimmer, with Read more

July 1, 2008

Making the pack: How to break your way into BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lately, I’m getting two or three requests a day to write with us. They come from sweet, smart, earnest people, and, while I look at everything they send to me, I usually don’t have time to write back and decline their requests. That’s the one part of this job I really hate, because I’ve always hated being on the receiving end of that kind of transaction. On the other hand, I know from experience that the attention of readers is not something I give, nor something you get, but, rather, something that the writer seizes, takes by the irrepressible force of sheer talent. I’m in the unique position of being able to share this rostrum we have built with other people. But I can’t make anyone listen — not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

I had email yesterday from John Rowles, and, on the strength of that one email, without looking at anything else he had written, I invited him to join us. John’s letter was simply riveting. I read every work, all the way to the end, but I knew by the fifth paragraph that he would be writing with us. I can think of a dozen things I might think about, if I am deliberating about a potential contributor, and I will sometimes appeal to Brian or Teri or Cathleen for advice. But when a writer knocks my socks off — knocks them all the way across the room — there is nothing to think about.

I owe formal introductions for John, and for all the wonderful writers we added last week. For now, here is John’s email in its entirety:

Hi Greg:

1995-6: I was 26 and four years out from earning my BA in journalism when Web 1.0 happened. I spent those four years tending bar and working in ski shops while I started to build a portfolio of feature-length articles. My girlfriend  managed an apartment complex, and I met Bill while hanging out in her office. Bill had a computer setup straight out of the movie War Games, complete with a voice modulator (“Hello, Bill. Would you Read more

July 1, 2008

Project Bloodhound: Picture this: A big wall of text.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Yes folks, it’s the question that never goes away: Why don’t you post more images? Short answer: I don’t like to read posts with images. Unless we are talking about specific property, images rarely add to the writing, and to me, they almost always take away from the writing.

When discussing property, you do need photos, and I do post images- now I post them in engenu. I take a lot of photos, I post a lot of photos of real estate, however, since they are used for buyers and I’m not the listing agent, they don’t always get posted on my blog. But this email wasn’t refering to real estate photos, the writer was lamenting my lack of just, ya know, images in general.

Here’s the thing: Real estate bloggers ask me about my lack of photos, but other bloggers never ask me this question, and I don’t see a lot of images in the blogs I read. So the way I see it is that since I’m not writing to other real estate bloggers, I’m writing to consumers, some of whom are in fact, non real estate bloggers, and they aren’t bothered by my Walls of Text, why do something that doesn’t make any sense to me?

I’ve been accused, and am occasionally guilty, of being stubborn, I suppose there is the tiniest, itty bitty chance that I’m wrong so I’m willing to listen to reason. I’ve heard and heard and heard some more from the RE.net about this, but I’d love to hear from the anyone outside the industry- are images a help or a hindrance to reading a blog?

And, because I love a good compromise and I love multi-tasking, I’m sharing a video- an image! The sentiment of this song is for Vance Shutes and Tom Vanderwell. We have begun sharing ideas about living a full life in the Rust Belt. And I suppose this song could be considered another Unchained Melody. But mostly, it’s here because it’s a very clever compromise between text and image. I’ve been told that a picture is worth a thousand words. Read more

June 30, 2008

Project Bloodhound speaking in tongues: To whom am I speaking?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a lady phone me the other day who would rather have emailed. She was on our Phoenix real estate web site and she couldn’t figure out how to email me. In fact, my email address is associated with every post, just like here, but that wasn’t obvious to her. I revisited the sidebar, which is a topic to which we will return. But for most real estate weblogs, there is an ever more exigent problem: Who the hell am I speaking to in the first place?

If you’re the only person writing on the weblog, you might think you can get away without a byline on your posts. I think this is a mistake. Yes, people can go to your About page, but your job is to make connections, not to make people work. I think our way of doing things — an avatar plus every which way of grasping onto more content — is a better way of going at things.

We do our avatars with custom PHP, but I know they can also be done with the Gravatar software — I just don’t know how. I’m going to show you everything we’re doing at BloodhoundBlog — not because you should do all this, but just to show you how to do it.

The theme files you will want to edit will be named index.php, search.php, archive.php and possibly some others. You are looking for files that contain “the loop,” the means by which WordPress extracts posts from its MySQL database and displays them. The code for “the loop” looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : 
while (have_posts()) : 
the_post(); ?>

Any files that contain that code will need to be edited.

Edited where? Look for the div that already contains posting information — usually the date. You’ll be editing within that div. You can start with index.php, working iteratively until you get to something you like, then copy that code over to the other files you need to edit.

Important: Work on copies of your theme files! If you screw something up, you can always go back and start over.

This is what BHB is Read more

June 30, 2008

How I avoided deleting 23 different cliches for an introduction by taking the easy road and just saying Happy Birthday.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

Allow me to further the B-day round of toasts at Bloodhound by introducing my relationship to these very pages.

It is with great pleasure that I’m allowed to share thoughts on the pages on Bloodhound.  You see, I have been a long time reader of the posts that put thought to action in Real Estate the way no other blog does.  My interest go back to turning to the web to try and find clues to help with marketing as a newb to Real Estate.  The requisite “Realtor type” mags et al did not cut it for me from the begininng.  Already finding success with buying and selling merchandise, reading the Times, and do I dare say dating through the web, I knew that at least trying to leverage the power of my trusty notebook to crush the competition was worth looking into.  What I found at the time were plenty of shiny buttons to poke at and play with.  I must have bookmarked upwards of 500+ pages of plans, actions, and helpful hints on RE I thought might be of interest.

When it came down to it, the one thing that mattered is what I found on the blog pages of the Real Esate community.  No one did it better than those here that howled.  Aside from shadowing my broker as he wheeled his vehicle throughout the hills of SF and walked and talked the business, reading  and getting involved in the discussions that take place on these very pages are what motivated me to win.  The creative thinking and ideas that we come up with when we are challenged to the fullest is what gives birth to opportunity.   The contributors that currently write here and have passed through have given me giant shoulders to stand on.  They are passionate entrepreneurs of the new medium of Real Estate technology.  We are still far into the early days of blogging, and we know how slow our industry has been to keep up.

With all that said, I personally know my way pretty well when it comes to all things social media and the like Read more

June 29, 2008

How Can The San Diego Union Tribune Compete Against Bloggers? Build SDBackyard.com and Invite Them To Contribute

by

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

Author website

SD Backyard.com is the San Diego Union Tribune’s answer to competition from citizen journalists.   I get the majority of my news from the internet but the local fishwrap does a nice job on the obituaries.  I’m a serial obituary reader (I love people) so the U-T is my Sunday companion on the beach.

I damn near jumped off the blanket this afternoon!

This mainstream medium invited the bloggers into the big tent.  Editor and Publisher magazine reports:

The paper plans to reverse publish some of the content of sdBackyard into community publications.

“sdBackyard.com embraces the growing trends of user-generated content and social media by giving users the tools to create and share content online, with the added benefit of reverse publishing some content into a print product,” George Bonaros, marketing director for the Union-Tribune, said in a statement. “The unique geographic targeting allows small businesses, nonprofit organizations, clubs, and other community groups opportunities to promote themselves in print and online.”

Maybe it’s a content grab but I think the quid pro quo is more than tilted to a business blogger.  Needless to say, I set up a profile, uploaded a ton of video content from Bloodhound Unchained, published a blog post, and keyworded everything.  Like Home Gain Blog, the platform will be shared with the established, stronger home website (in this case, SignOnSanDiego.com) so the “find-ability” via SERPs should be strong in 3-6 months.

It’s too early to tell if the “Community Editors” will go overboard by limiting content but I’m enthused about the possibility SDBackyard.com offers.  Oh, here’s the other cool part; it’s free ! If you thought about building a hyper-local weblog, this very well may be the platform you seek (as long as you back up the content).  I expect that I’ll see Don Reedy in Oceanside, Sean Purcell in La Mesa, Kris Berg in Scripps Ranch, Jeff Brown talking about investment real estate, and Dan Melson talking about mortgages, in the not too distant future.

This is a new project and I’ll be reporting back how the mainstream media embraces its local citizen journalists.  The courtship was painless; let’s see how the marriage proceeds.

June 29, 2008

BloodhoundBlog at two: The scene of the real estate scenius

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog came into this world two years ago today. I had tried twice before to craft a workable real estate weblog. The second attempt donated its 60-odd posts to BloodhoundBlog on the way in. But BloodhoundBlog was different from our prior attempts right from the start. We were focused on the national real estate industry from the beginning, mixing good writing, deep philosophy and radical new ideas into what has seemed to be a consistently heady brew.

In our first two years, we’ve served over 1.4 million pages to over 750,000 unique souls. We’ve written more than 2,800 posts and hosted more than 25,000 comments. As I write this, we have 600 Technorati links and 67,000 Yahoo backlinks. Those are interesting numbers, but these are more interesting to me: In the past two years (less than that, really, since we didn’t start tracking for about two months), 37,347 people have visited here here 200 or more times. Just short of 151,000 people have visited us nine or more times. And keep in mind that we live by RSS and email subscription. The flip side of this is that just short of half-a-million souls have come to the site only once, which I think is a nice illustration of the relative value of search-engine borne as against more-organic sources of traffic.

And, in reality, none of that matters. BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very loud voice in the RE.net, but BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very serious about big ideas. From the earliest days of the blog, we staked out a ground — the philosophy by which the most serious, most dedicated real estate professionals would thrive in the Web 2.0 world — and defended it with the ferocity of real Bloodhounds. We are always about the grunts on the ground, never about the bosses and vendors who seek to bilk them of their hard-fought earnings. We’ve built an audience not by dumb SEO stunts, not by kissing up to the NAR or the Inmanosphere, not by fawning or flattery or appeals to pity, but simply by delivering the goods day after Read more

June 29, 2008

Project Bloodhound: URL Structure

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

When you start browsing through blogs and as you click from post to post and page to page, watch the address bar. Here are some examples:
http://www.ericonsearch.com/greatest-real-estate-agent-in-the-world-your-name-here/
This is the one from the post that we chose for the SEO contest.

WordPress Security – More important these days.


Here is one of my posts on BHB

Why the difference?
First off, Greg uses what is known as the default permalink structure. The one that comes out of the box. He did this because when he fired up BHB, it made referencing the posts easier for him. There is NOTHING wrong with this. Optimization is about making choices and trade offs, not about good and evil.

I chose a more keyword based structure that has become pretty popular these days. Here’s how you do it:
In WP go to Settings: and then Permalinks. You will see this:

Here’s a closer look:

These are your choices and you can see that I went to “Custom” and typed in /%postname%/ and hit save changes. Simple as that. IMPORTANT NOTE: On a few hosts this will barf up an error saying that the Permalink structure cannot be changed. If you are on GoDaddy or 1and1, feel free to email me and I will tell you how to solve this.

The effect of this is that any posts you write will include the title of the post in the url. For me, it makes it easier for the reader AND for the search engines. Doing something SOLELY for the sake of search engines is rarely if ever wise. Ideally, what enhances user experience and adds relevance will help you rank (having a site made of FLASH would be a BIG exception to that…)

Why you should NOT just arbitrarily go and change this with an established blog. Simply put, the search engines already knows where all of Greg’s posts are. He is right IMO to NOT change things and move their “cheese”. You can and redirect the old posts’ URLs to the new ones with a 301 redirect, but that can be WORK. I wanted to keep this simple. And while they figured out where everything was / is, he would lose some Read more

June 29, 2008

Happy Birthday Bloodhound Blog

by

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

Author website

Bloodhound Blog is two years old tonight.  Congratulations to all the Bloodhounds.  Here’s a little something from the archives to demonstrate my  improvidence:

How can this development persist in a real estate market that all experts predict to plunge? The simple answer is that demographics are on California’s side:

1- Population still grows here statewide at a 1.5% annual clip. Now that may seem like anemic percentage growth compared to Nevada and Arizona but look at the astounding number of people moving to the Golden State. California enjoys a net gain of some 700,000 people each year.

2- There is a housing shortage in California. The affordability index may not be an applicable measure moving forward.

3- California employment is holding steady, in fact, a net gain of higher paying jobs are coming into the state. Why? California has high taxes and is hardly business friendly. Businesses want to be near the huge consumer base (the fifth largest economy in the world) that are California residents.

4- People would rather live in California than Buffalo.

Oops. I was bit early with the recovery prediction.

Congrats Greg and Cathleen.

June 28, 2008

Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Okay, BloodhoundBlog will be two years old in less than an hour. Here’s one more little bit of our past in celebration. This is from May 31st, 2007. –GSS]

Question #1: Why did Microsoft call its new table-top touch-screen interface “Surface”?

Answer: “It” and “Thing” are trademarks of The Addams Family.

Question #2: What makes a great real estate weblog?

Answer: Whatever you do, don’t ask Inman Blog.

I don’t write about everything that tickles or rankles me. I couldn’t, even if I didn’t have other things to do. But I thought it was particularly ironical for Joel Burslem and Jessica Swesey to talk about weblogging in a video. Joel has proven blogger credibility. Jessica is a good reporter who has never impressed me as actually understanding weblogging as a distinct medium. I have told Brad Inman in private that he doesn’t “get” weblogging, to which criticism he issued testy but irrelevant rejoinders. If putting marks on phosphors in reverse-chronological order is weblogging, then there really are 70 million webloggers.

But take a look at this, as an example (and I’m picking on Inman because they’re professionals and, I hope, thick-skinned enough to bear up to the scrutiny):

In the middle of the 16th Century, the Great Chinese Wall was built to keep enemy armies out and to create a perception of invincibility. Gated communities were built in the US suburbs in the 1980s to keep urban criminals out and to create prestigious residential compounds. The building of walls and fences along the Mexican border are being built to keep workers and terrorists out and to appease a multitude of American nationalistic fears. The Great Chinese Wall did not work; gates in the burbs were irrelevant to safety and fences on the Mexican border will not stop people from risking their lives to find work. One of the ugliest walls in history was the Berlin Wall, which came down when freedom persevered over human repression.
Walls and fences are an admission of our failure to solve problems in a civil way. They divide people; they exclude; they fracture societies and communities.
In the 1950s in my small hometown of Carlinville, Read more

June 28, 2008

No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is a multi-stop time-travel journey. I’m writing this text, here within these brackets, on June 28th, 2008. I’m reprising a BloodhoundBlog post from September 15th, 2006, that in its turn reprises a PresenceOfMind.net post from September 14th, 2004, which in its turn is unearthing a rant I wrote in 1996. It will all make sense if you let it. This is more birthday celebration — the subject is disintermediation — but I happened to think of this because we latched onto Radio Paradise, today, an amazingly excellent Triple-A internet radio station in Paradise, CA. All of this fits together, I promise, and the argument about media from 1996 is still right on point. One of the things that I, personally, love about BloodhoundBlog, is that our audience has always been so outrageously bright. It’s very liberating for me to be able to be my whole self at work. Never doubt my gratitude. –GSS]

 
No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

I got XM Radio two years ago to the day, yesterday. Two years from now, the whole deal may be done: Between the iPod, streaming internet radio and Wi-Max, the eternal footman may already be snickering for satellite radio. Sic transit gloria mundi — and orbits nearby.

That’s a disintermediation story by itself, and we’re about to nest ourselves two layers deeper in order to talk about massive, earth-shaking cases of media disintermediation. The argument made here parallels the one made earlier this week by Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato: The exponential growth of bandwidth increases the power of individuals at the expense of elites.

But: I could just as easily argue the contrary: Feeding Dan Rather to the lions is exactly what a Roman Emperor would do to sustain his power while seeming to placate the mob.

That’s a larger question than I’m prepared to settle on a Friday night. Instead, we can think about the future of real estate while we revisit the history of radio. There’s quite a lot here that relates to weblogging, as well — which Read more

June 28, 2008

In the battle of the baseball cards, the biggest shoe-box wins — but Realtors who master the art of marketing homes will be fine

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This post appeared on BloodhoundBlog on June 30, 2006, our second day. I’m reprising it now as a part of our birthday celebration. It’s fun for me to see how much of what I talk about here was with us on our very first days. –GSS]

 
Cathleen and I live pretty much continuously in a fairly intense business conference. We’re both paying very close attention to everything, and we are in nearly-constant contact. On the ground, we’re aware of what we like in the work product of our competitors, what we don’t like, what we think might be worth improving upon and what we know from rigorous testing is a complete waste of time and money. We pay even closer attention to the net.world, because that’s where our own bread is buttered, and because the internet will someday be the entire bakery. We’re about to skip away to Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we’re taking three books on marketing — not real estate marketing, just marketing — with us.

That brings me to this, an argument that representation of sellers trumps home marketing. I don’t absolutely hate the premise. I have made a similar argument myself. What’s interesting to me — fascinating to me, a full-time obsession for me — is the idea that real estate marketing is somehow imperiled by internet-based disintermediation.

First, what is being done on the internet, so far at least, is not marketing. It’s listing, at best, the compilation of baseball-card-like stats, and if Realtors conflate the two, it’s because they have never understood marketing to begin with. “The houses sell themselves,” we say to ourselves, and there is a truth to this. If you take buyers where they want to be, they’ll pay to stay there. In crucial respects, buyer representation is the easiest sale in the history of sales. In other respects, it’s impossibly hard, of course, which is why the failure rate among Realtors is so high. But, unlike virtually every other type of sales, you do not have to convince the client to want your product before you can attempt to sell 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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