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Category: Real Estate (page 116 of 266)

May 29, 2008

Damn-straight department: “Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Real Estate Success Tools CEO Matthew Hardy speaking on BrokerIPTV.com:

Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now. Greg has a perspective on understanding that this is a bottom up industry, that the individual real estate agent, their ability, their ability to own their own technology, to own their own systems, to own their own approach to business, is what is changing the entire industry. It is wrapped up in this thing called Web 2.0, but it is all based upon the idea of control and the power for the individual real estate agent to do what they want to do for their business.

You bet. We’ve known Matthew for more than a year, and his approach to business is very much like ours. If your income depends on milking underlings you think you have hypnotized into believing they need you, I cannot wait for the hammer of justice to fall on your head…

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May 29, 2008

Agent branding is good, but Trulia.com is still deliberately hi-jacking street addresses, frustrating the interests of sellers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m still digging out from Unchained, so this is not as timely as it might have been.

First, I think we might have gotten distracted by whatever cozy arrangement does or does not exist between Trulia.com and Number 1 Agent.

Second, I think Trulia’s recent announcement that agents can “brand” their own listings is a move in the right direction. Trulia has always seemed to me to play favorites with the White Shoe set, and giving the grunts on the ground a chance to compete with their bosses for their own business is… damned near decent.

But: I am not prepared to yield on the main issue. When Trulia.com puts a “nofollow” on the link back to my single-property web site for my listing, it is depriving my sellers of the natural dominance they should have in Google over their own street address.

The issue is one of canonicity. If Truila were giving my URL an ordinary HTML anchor link, then Google would know that my site is canonical and Trulia’s is derivative — which is undeniably the truth.

By putting the “nofollow” tag on what is in fact a JavaScript link, Trulia is falsely implying that it is the canonical resource for information about that property.

That much is a lie, but it gets worse: If someone Googles the street address for my property and finds my single-property web site, my sellers — through me — have an uncontested opportunity to sell their home to that potential buyer.

If instead that potential buyer finds Trulia’s link to that home, the buyer is thrust into a vast supermarket of real estate, and the sellers are deprived of their opportunity to sell their home and their home only.

This is not a dual agency issue here, this is simply a matter of giving sellers the best advantage they can possibly have from searches on their own street address.

Because Google would regard a normal link as leading to a more canonical resource — regardless of differences in Page Rank — by putting a “nofollow” tag on its links to agent- and broker-supplied real estate listings, Trulia.com is deliberately hi-jacking the street Read more

May 28, 2008

What Hi-Tech Tool Helps Agents/Lenders The Most — Bottom Line Most

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Though I think I know the answer to this query, the answers might just surprise many of us. Also, it makes sense the answer for me might be third best for you, right? Hi-tech tools, not toys, are what we’re lookin’ for here. Though for some, blogs and/or websites might top the list, I’m eliminating them from the menu. For me they simply don’t qualify as hi-tech. I’m lookin’ for what you closet geeks out there are leveraging to the max.

An incomplete list might include spreadsheets, presentation apps, Blackberrys, iPhones, data bases, and the list is almost endless.

Or maybe there’s an office machine to which you attribute increased income. What hi-tech tool is performing like a champ in your business these days? How much impact has it actually had on your bottom line?

For the legitimate geeks on steroids out there, what hi-tech stuff have you combined in order to build your personal Frankenstein tool? Or maybe there’s a group of apps out there that play well together.

There’s no right answer here. Well, that’s not really the case. I think there’s a right answer, but what’s right for my operation might be on your B-List. As I’ve been known to say once or twice in the past, bottom line results is what we’re searchin’ for with this question.

There you have it. Now, what’s performing for you from the Hi-Tech menu that’s translating into dead presidents?

May 28, 2008

A Little Tough Love: We Don’t Get Paid For Tryin’ — We Get Paid For Doin’

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Before beginning, and to head off the ‘you’re so mean’ crowd at the pass, I’m talking here of those things in our careers for which we, more or less, hold the reigns. We never totally control everything when it comes to our scorecard (read: results), but we can reasonably agree most (80/20?) of what we wish to accomplish is under our control to a greater or lesser extent.

There was a short period when I was a trier. I empathize with those who say they tried hard in this business. I don’t feel sorry for them, but I empathize. I realize it sounds hard-hearted, but for Heaven’s sake, they don’t even believe themselves. They were the ones not doing what they knew what had to be done to produce results, right? My money says they were there at the precise moments they weren’t doing them.

In other words, around here‘The dog ate my homework’ will fall on deaf ears.

I made a comment on Russell Shaw’s most recent post. I’ve always loved the way Russell pokes good hearted fun at old sayings. In this case it was, ‘work hard, play hard’. I’m with him in saying, whatever that means. I prefer to work hard and play however it pleases me. Isn’t that at least part of the reason I’m working hard in the first place? Duh. Sorry, I digress.

Anyway, he pointed out the difference between ‘having to’ and ‘wanting to’. As usual with Russell, he nailed it. Russell inspires me with his uncanny ability to do surgery painlessly, yet without anesthesia. His post is what brought to mind the whole Try vs Do thing with which we all have struggled at one time or another.

Here’s my comment verbatim.

I truly don’t mean to be harsh here, as there is some real suffering out there amongst the RE community. Still, there are two classes of agents.

Those who DO, and those who Try.

Do you ‘try’ to prospect daily, or do you ‘prospect daily?’

Labeling this line of thinking as ‘positive thinking’ replaces doing with trying.

Those for whom results are the only measuring stick, don’t ‘try’ Read more

May 27, 2008

NAR/DOJ settlement: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

After years of song and dance, the DOJ reached a settlement with the NAR that seems to have achieved absolutely nothing — except the waste of a bunch of tax and dues money. At least that’s what you would think if you read nothing but the NAR’s spin. In fact, the NAR lost the major point of contention, the attested right of brokers to withhold listings from Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). From eWeek.com:

The Department of Justice said May 27 it has reached a settlement in its long-running legal dispute with the National Association of Realtors. Under the terms of the settlement, the Realtors will enact a new policy that guarantees Internet-based brokerage companies will not be treated differently than traditional brokers. 

Under the new policy, Realtor-affiliated brokers participating in multiple listing services will be prohibited from withholding their listings from brokers who use virtual office websites, generally known as VOWs. The Realtors agreed to a 10-year settlement to ensure the group continues to abide by the requirements of the settlement.

“Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The Realtors also agreed to adopt antitrust compliance training programs that will instruct local associations of about the antitrust laws generally and about the requirements of the proposed settlement. The National Association of Realtors is a trade association of more than 1.2 million residential real estate members who operate in local real estate markets nationwide.

That sounds like something, but it ain’t. For one thing, the NAR gets to define what a VOW is. From its own press release:

The terms of the proposed final order validate NAR’s position – that MLS members must be actively engaged in real estate brokerage by actually helping people buy or sell homes. This will ensure that MLSs are used for what they were originally intended to do – to help real estate professionals find Read more

May 27, 2008

Building Content for Others …when is it right?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

First off, I’d like to thank Eric Bramlett for a great post explaining the BASICS of links and linking to other sites. What he was doing was setting a good foundational understanding based on known facts and avoid much of the speculation that exists out there in the world today about Search Engine Optimization. What he did not go into of that basic foundation, I’d now like to explore a bit further.

Here are some facts that we know about Building Content on other peoples’ sites:

Fact 1: Adding content on another person’s site builds opportunities for them to build internal links. Internal links (read: pages) have value

Item #1 that he did not go into was internal links vs external links. Internal links are the links to and from pages within your site. Let’s (for now) avoid the temptation to go into page rank sculpting, internal link sculpting, or the details of internal page structure. Please note that I have linked to a couple of resources there on the subject for your further reading if desired. Do we KNOW exactly how Google values internal vs external links. NO. Is there much speculation and testing on the concept. YES. True search engine professionals TEST these concepts as they change over time and they RARELY comment on them publicly. They often compare notes with other search engine professionals who are testing similar concepts. What we do know is that experienced webmasters can made GOOD use of hundreds or thousands of indexed pages to internally link and support pages that they want to rank for a given term. They would not be SCULPTING it if it did not have VALUE.

Fact 2: Adding Content on another person’s site provides opportunities for more people to EXTERNALLY link to their site.

Whether I write here on the Bloodhound Blog, on Real Estate Webmasters, or as a columnist on RE/MAX Times Online, people who read that can link to it externally. This is also true of comments on blogs and forums, LISTINGS and really, on ANY online community that you choose to participate and spend time in. This not Read more

May 24, 2008

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I finally had a chance to take a long nap today, and I’m substantially revivified. The ideas the Barrys threw off at the end of their interview with Brian about working in Orlando have me all pumped up, so I thought we might talk a little.

First, doing Unchained the Barrys way opens up quite a few opportunities for hour-long breakout sessions. We would devote four rooms to this, maybe more, so there could be a lot of speaking opportunities. I’d like to see sessions for beginners, geeks, brokers, lenders, etc. I don’t hate it if you’re a vendor if you’re a vendor in our world. To make that more plain: We’re doing this show to help Realtors avoid wasting money on useless crap. If you’re delivering value in the Web 2.0 world, there’s room — and hope! — for you. 😉

The point of all this: If you would like to do one of these breakout sessions, speak up. Figure a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A as the room is being turned over.

Second, we want to preach to the masses. This is not a money-making endeavor, at least not so far. We want to carry the message to the masses, to advance this idea of wired excellence in any way we can. To that end, I’m interested in hearing suggestions about how we can get a lot of Realtors to lend us eight hours of their time, while they’re in Orlando for the convention. One thing we can do is affiliate programs for real estate weblogggers, but, even better than that, we can set up off-line affiliate programs. In other words, we can help you help your co-workers get a price break on Unchained Orlando, say with a coupon code or something like that. What other things should we be thinking about to fill the pews?

I’m wicked excited about this. In my email I’m advised to speak quietly, so as not to stir the beast. My take is that the NAR should make a very public effort to stay the hell out of our way. But whatever they do, Read more

May 24, 2008

Brian Brady does a BloodhoundBlog Unchained post-mortem on Real Estate Radio USA

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I missed this when it happened: Brian Brady did a great post-mortem rundown on BloodhoundBlog Unchained on RealEstateRadioUSA.com. Brian talks about key moments at the conference and about some of the Web 2.0 ideas that we had built into the event to emphasize the points we were trying to make. Near the end, Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson offer some excellent ideas for making BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando a successful event.

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May 24, 2008

What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com — suddenly stopped producing.

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.

But here’s the interesting part of the story:

It does not matter.

The growth of this community has never depended on Google. Obviously some people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:

  • Links from other weblogs or web sites
  • Comments I left on other weblogs
  • Press mentions Read more
May 24, 2008

Was BloodhoundBlog Unchained so much work that it made you sick?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We told you for months that we were going to give you a lot of work at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We knew we weren’t going to teach much, if anything, to Andy Kaufman or Brad Coy, but Joseph Runtz is trying to figure out how to eat an elephant. (One bite at a time, Joe.) Mark Eckenrode is erecting a secondary market in Unchained study aids, which I think is wicked cool.

But: Apparently, not everything was a raging success. Sue Griman had to leave during Glenn Kelman’s keynote address. By late evening, she was dreadfully ill, and she still isn’t back to full capacity. Laurie Manny reports that became ill when she got home in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, and she says the same illness may have affected Marlene Bridges and Lynda Eisenman at about the same time. Geno Petro’s post from yesterday suggests that he may have been sick and not just exhausted by the time he got back to Chicago on Wednesday night. [Geno confirms that he was ill, blaming a steak he ate Tuesday night.]

Sue thought she had food poisoning, and Laurie said the same thing, but the spaced-out timing would tend to suggest a virus or a bacterial infection, a contagion of some sort. Either way, while we certainly meant to send you home queasy with the workload, we didn’t intend to achieve actual nausea.

Even so, if you had a problem, let me know. If the problem really was food poisoning, we can let the caterers know about it. And if not, at least we’ll know more than we did before.

In any case, if BloodhoundBlog Unchained made you sick in any way at all — either physically ill or just dyspeptic at all that homework — you have our deepest apologies.

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May 23, 2008

How much is that Bloodhound in the window?

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’m a mutt, I’ll admit it–half Italian, half Heinz 57, solid C average across the board–any board.  No papers. I may have been a little smarter (transcript wise) had I attended easier schools in the early years but hey, I was always a low hanging fruit grabbing kind of guy.  I was born in Levittown, Pennsylvania where they planted a low hanging fruit grabbing tree in every front yard, for crissakes. It was included in the $9,999 List Price along with a garden hose and a rose bush.  Environmental Determinism, I argue.

My parents stood in line to buy their asbestos and plywood dream home, along with every other aunt and uncle in the Petro family, back in the early 1950s.  I, my one sister, and at least 17 of my 27 first cousins, were all conceived under identical roofs over identical floorplans and given the limited TV Guide lineup of that particular era, possibly with the same program airing on the tube during many of our respective magic moments…as it were. Reruns, Vatican I et al…

This inauspicious start in life is not to imply that I don’t have good taste; or an appreciation of the finer things in the universe; or a penchant for all treasures classic, or rare, or unique. On the contrary, I love all those things. I embrace the perfect example of anything. I’m all about pinnacles. (I may even suffer from a little pinnacle envy, if you must know.)  I’m just saying…putting it out there, as it were…that I may not be a 100% blue blooded, redbone Bloodhound.  Somewhere along the line, I misplaced my registration, or forgot to apply, or didn’t qualify by the published AKC Flemish Hound Standard as follows:

Temperament: Extremely Affectionate. (Points taken off immediately)

Expression: Noble and Dignified. (Ditto)

Gait: Elastic. (I can see that. Give me a point)

Weight: Male–90-110 LBS. (Whack me double)

Head: Narrow in proportion to its length.  (See where I’m going with this?)

We all saw the You Tube video. My big fat head is not narrow or proportionate to anything. As I told  Don Reedy, my table mate and new BFF at Unchained,

“I look like my grandfather. He was a butcher. Five foot nothing and bald as a polished walnut.”  Not Read more

May 23, 2008

Unchained at the sign printer: How we make our custom yard signs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think this might be less than useful, but it keeps coming up in my mail. I love it that people are trying to make custom yard signs for their listings, but it seems plausible that the best technical advice will come in the comments.

Why is that? Because I use professional pre-press tools that most people don’t have.

Our signs are made in QuarkXPress for the Macintosh at one-sixth scale. In other words, the big sign with the full-bleed photo is made at 25p6 x 37p6 — one pica scales to one inch. The reason for working at this scale is simply to keep the Quark files manageable.

When we’re dummying up a sign, I will often work with low-resolution versions of the photos, this to enable faster printing so we can see what the sign looks like.

For the finished version, I use Adobe PhotoShop to produce very high-resolution CMYK EPS photo files to be placed back in Quark, there to be scaled and positioned. It’s possible to do everything I’m talking about within PhotoShop, but Quark is much better for both positioning and typographic control.

We take our listing photos at 5 megapixels. The camera will do more than that, but since most of these photos are going to be down-sampled to 640 x 480 pixels, we make a trade-off between resolution and the number of available photos on the memory card.

For the smaller photos on our signs, I normally down-sample to 2400 x 1800 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. For the large photo, I normally up-sample to 16000 x 12000 pixels at 300 ppi. If you get very close to that big image on a sign, you’ll see some pixelization. This is not visible at normal distances.

Once everything is in place in Quark, I save the page as an EPS file. The raster images — the photos — will be encapsulated as is, with the positioning and scaling information conveyed in PostScript. The type, rules and logos are vector images, infinitely scalable.

I import the EPS file into PhotoShop, scaling it to 25.5″ x 37.5″ at 300 pixels per inch. This Read more

May 23, 2008

To Sir, with love: A rundown of the links in the Unchained chain

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brian already cited some of the constructive criticism we have received about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and that’s as it should be. I think we did a nice job, for a first swing at the ball, but the whole BloodhoundBlog idea is about doing better. Praise might be sweet to the ears, but it is criticism that puts us on the path to perfection.

Even so, I promised some link love to people who blogged about or wrote to me about their experience at Unchained, so I’m going to discharge that duty in this post. We’re very grateful to the people who gave us their minds and their time and their funds, and I am more than delighted to pay back what I can.

Don Reedy paid more than most of us to attend Unchained. While he was in Arizona, his dog, Sir, a one-time Universal Studios movie star Rotweiller, made the run for the last exit. Don made the decision to forge ahead at Unchained, keeping us up to date as his wife nursed Sir through one medical procedure after another. But by the time Don got home late Tuesday night, Sir had passed away.

If you’re not a dog person, it might not mean anything to you. Cats and other pets have their charms, but a good dog is like a playful four-year-old child who never grows up and moves away. I don’t delude myself. I spend a lot of time thinking about the epistemology of dogs. But to have a friend that game, that loyal, that full of heart — always thrilled to see you, always eager to be involved, always there for you no matter what — that’s a love unbearable to lose.

Even so, we have to force ourselves to press on regardless. Sir’s life is over, but life goes on. Here’s to Don and to his wife, Beth. And here’s to another great dog they will learn to love, when their grieving for Sir has waned to something easier to endure.

Vance Shutes wrote about his experiences at Unchained. He also wonders if we’re going to run out of water. Not before Read more

May 22, 2008

Profiling our Zillow.com profile: Using landing pages and photos to try to create a compelling long-copy ad for our brokerage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We talked quite a bit at Unchained about profiles on Social Media Marketing sites. Once you’ve made a commitment to a site, you’ll be adding a significant amount of content to that platform. When someone comes across something you’ve done, their natural impulse is to click through to your profile. If they do, what will they see?

Chances are, when you first signed up for that site, you blew right past the profile page, plugging in the minimum necessary information to get your registration done. You wanted to get to the content, after all, to find out if that site even met your needs. You discovered over time that it did, but you probably never thought to go back and complete your profile.

This is a mistake. Your profile is the space that web site provides for you to sell yourself. At a minimum, you can direct interested people back to your own weblog or web site. Some sites will provide multiple links. Some will let you flesh out a free-form “about me” section, so that you can say exactly what you want in your own words. Some will permit fairly elaborate HTML coding, with links back to specific landing pages on your web site: You can sell relocation to relos, rentals to investors, re-fi’s to the equity-enriched.

A couple of different times, I mentioned my Zillow.com profile. Zillow is pretty liberal in the kind of coding you can do — allowing links and photos in the “about me” section, for example.

Vance Shutes asked me to share my Zillow profile with him. I thought it might be better to take up the issue in the blog. I can talk about what I’m doing, you can talk about what you’re doing, and we all can learn better ways of building Social Media Marketing profiles.

So: Between the horizontal rules is the code we use on our Zillow.com profile, as well as on other sites:

Why do we deliver so much more value for our clients? For one thing, it’s a great strategy for marketing our real estate brokerage. But even before that, we love selling real estate, 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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