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Category: Real Estate (page 127 of 266)

March 31, 2008

Bad Marketing Candy from RSS Pieces

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Mary McKnight wrote an article last Friday called Real Estate Blogs are Stores, Not Websites – So Blog Like You are Selling Houses, Not Writing For Your Local Paper and it made the short list for the Odysseus Medal Sunday.  It is well written and provocative.  Mary McKnight is recognized as one of the premier web site designers and SEO experts in Real Estate.  I have a great deal of respect for her knowledge as it pertains to web sites and SEO.   If you have not read it, please do;  and then answer this question for me: How is it possible that someone so good at creating real estate web sites, can be so wrong when it comes to real estate marketing?

The Sugar Coating
Let me preface this by saying that I have a great deal of respect for Mary McKnight.  Add to which a lot of people for whom I also hold a great deal of respect use her services and listen to her advice.  But when she says Your real estate blog is a store, not a newspaper, I find myself asking the obvious question: If it is a store, what do you sell?  If you answer “homes” I am going to assume you work at a mobile home dealership.  Otherwise you clearly do not understand your product.  Here’s a hint: you see your product every day in the mirror.  You no more sell homes than you stock them… which is why you are not a store.  You are a service and your product is your expertise.

The Creamy Middle 
The point of her article is …to get you to understand that if your business is about real estate and you want to attract customers that have a real estate need you MUST write about real estate, not skateboards and restaurants.  This is true on a very grand scale:  most of your articles and certainly your “look and feel” must tell the reader that you can and will be the best agent they have ever had.  But does that mean you should only write about real estate?  When Mary says it

is inconceivable to (her) that Read more

March 30, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute Hour: Your first six months as a real estate licensee — use your time now to make money then

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

For years I lectured at the pre-licensing classes of the the college professor who taught my own real estate pre-licensing classes. I hadn’t done this for the last couple of years, but I did a class on January 24th, 2008. We made a video tape of my talk, but I hadn’t done anything with it until Sean Purcell’s post, What’s Your Six Month Plan?, got me off the dime. Sean’s program is more thoroughgoing. I’m just leaning on a bunch of kids to get busy now, rather than waiting for money to come raining from the skies six months from now.

I’m linking an audio podcast from BloodhoundBlog.com and the video in iPhone podcast form from BloodhoundBlog.TV. The video is basically just Fred Flintstone shuffling around and waving his arms around a lot, so you might do just as well with the audio-only version.

I know there are a lot of brand-new and soon-to-be-brand-new Realtors reading BloodhoundBlog, so I hope y’all take this to heart. We talk a lot about passive marketing here, but selling is always active — belly-to-belly. If you can’t push yourself to get belly-to-belly now, with people who already know and like you, you will not somehow achieve miracle results later by direct marketing, social media marketing or any other form of passive marketing.

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March 30, 2008

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have 13 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 74 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, again this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

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 ( "Barry Cunningham -- Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson? Are you a Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson?”,
“Barry Cunningham — Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale“,
“Chris Johnson — Rapport Rapport: You Don’t Matter. You Are Here To Add Value“,
“Daniel Rothamel — Getting Myself Organized Getting Myself Organized (with a little help from Chris Brogan)“,
“Darren Rowse — Should I Change My Website Into a Blog? Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?“,
“Jeff Turner — Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705 Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705“,
“Jim Cronin — Blogging SEO All You Ever Needed To Know About Blogging SEO, But Were Afraid To Say So.“,
“John Coley — Talk Like a Woman? Can My Real Estate Blog Help Me Talk Like a Woman?“,
“Mark Collier — 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic“,
“Mary McKnight — 1 Month of blog topics 1 Month of blog topics: Ultimate guide to building real estate blog content that gets results“,
“Mary McKnight — Real Estate blogs are stores Real Estate blogs are stores, not newspapers – so blog like you are selling houses, not writing for your local paper“,
“Sean Purcell — What’s Your Six Month Plan? What’s Your Six Month Plan?“,
“Tony Schuricht — Make your buyers Read more

March 30, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Everything we do to list historic, architecturally-distinctive and luxury homes for sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a detailing of the things we do to list a home for sale. We don’t do every one of these things on every home. For example, we know that if we list in a newer tract-home subdivision, much of the noise we try to make will fall on deaf ears. If I am listing a tenant-occupied investor-owned home, we won’t do much beyond the normal MLS, lockbox and sign kind of listing. But this is what we do when we pull out all the stops for those homes that are likely to excite the most attention among buyers.

  1. Setting the stage for staging. Cathleen Collins will go though the house with a fine-tooth comb, often taking many photos. She will make lists of repairs, touch-ups and redecorating she wants to do, and she will plan her staging strategy.
  2. Home-warranty pre-inspection. We put a home warranty on our listings covering the listing period and the buyer’s first year in the home. We use ServiceOne, and they do a fairly rigorous pre-inspection so that any pre-existing conditions can be addressed.
  3. Repairs, painting and cleaning. This can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week. Everything’s a trade-off, and we can’t always do everything we might wish for, but we want for our homes to be as clean, as homey, as livable and as turn-key as we can possibly make them.
  4. Staging. This is Cathleen, and she is a master at it. We own about three houses worth of furniture, and she is always trawling Craigslist to find more — period, modern, eclectic. She has tons of art and decorator items as well, and her modus vivendi is to take everything she thinks she might need to the house, then move back what she doesn’t use.
  5. Professional photography. We have just switched to Obeo for our virtual tours. They send in a local professional photographer to do hi-resolution and panoramic photos. In addition to forming the basis of the virtual tour, the hi-rez photos are also used for Obeo’s Style Designer, virtual remodeling of selected spaces.
  6. Floorplan measurement. We put an interactive floorplan on the Read more
March 29, 2008

If you don’t have to sell into the current Phoenix real estate market — don’t. But what if you do have to sell…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
If you don’t have to sell into the current Phoenix real estate market — don’t. But what if you do have to sell…?

Here’s a piece of real estate marketing advice that should be obvious: If you don’t have to sell your house right now, don’t.

If you are living in your home — or if you are an investor and you have a tenant — and you are making your payments and don’t have any exigent need to sell — sit tight.

We are probably nearing the bottom of the downturn in Phoenix, but the path to the bottom is likely to be pretty steep. If you don’t have to compete against deeply-discounted lender-owned homes, don’t.

Will the market go back up after we hit bottom? Eventually, yes. How long is eventually? It could be a long while. But prices should stabilize after the bank-owned inventory has cleared the market. What you can get for your home may not be all you want, but you won’t be facing competition priced 20% or 30% less.

But suppose you do have to move right now. You’ve taken a job out of state or you have a pressing financial need and need to tap your equity. How can you compete effectively against the lender-owned homes in your neighborhood?

The bad news is, the price pressure on you is still downward, and probably will be for longer than you can afford to wait. That means you cannot set your price above the market and hope for an offer anyway. If you price your home above the recent high sales for your floorplan — where recent means the past 60 days — your home might not show at all. There is simply too much inventory for buyers to bother with an overpriced home.

The good news is that the lender-owned homes are almost certainly trashed. Filthy, in bad repair, with overgrown lawns. Investors know those problems are easily addressed, but owner-occupants want turn-key homes.

That works to your advantage. If you are willing to put your home in turn-key condition — Read more

March 28, 2008

Don’t blog your listings? How about this? Don’t try to pass sales call reluctance off as social media marketing expertise

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I know, I know — I owe, I owe.

I owe Jeff Brown a discussion of every little last thing we do to launch a new listing with maximum impact.

And I owe The Lovely Wife a discussion of the role of self-promotion in real estate weblogging.

But…

We listed two homes today — Mutt and Jeff, $400,000 and $60,000 — go figure. And, while the prep work leading up to a listing can be time-consuming, the actual day of listing is often an 18-hour blur of activity.

Part of my effort was to write weblog entries about both of these homes. My primary reason for doing this was simple: I want them sold! But I also wanted to demonstrate that weblogging about listings is not only an appropriate use of a real estate weblog, if it is done right it can be a very effective sales tool.

So: In both cases, I am explicitly telling the readers that I am selling them on the home I am talking about — and I close, in both posts, with a bald-faced call to action. Take that, wannabe social media marketing experts rationalizing your sales call reluctance!

Witness:

I say a lot of memorable things — so many not even I can remember them all. 😉 But there are two precepts that came out of this extended discussion of whether or not to blog listings that I think are worth remembering:

  • The purpose of real estate marketing is to sell real estate.
  • Nothing sells houses like houses.

I love new things because I have a young and eager mind, but I don’t confuse new with better. Nor old with better, for that matter. What I’m interested in — all I am interested in — is better, pure and simple and clean and cool and quiet and breathtakingly elegant. I know that good promotional copy sells homes. Imagine how effective it Read more

March 28, 2008

Arizona Short Sales Not For The Faint of Heart

by

Realtor, Audio Engineer

Author website

 

I’ve commented before about short sales on this blog, but not to much extent, and I haven’t seen many of the other contributers do it either. I wonder why? Does everyone abhor them? Are they afraid of them?

I have taken a lot of advice around here, and one of the best pieces of advise I have gleened is to write about something that interests me, and build a long tail. Well, the long tail has actually been working. I have written on my home blog about The Ins & Outs of Arizona Short Sales,  and lo and behold, people started coming out of the woodwork. And I don’t mean a few. Let us just say it’s been a fabulous return on investment.

I have agents calling me from around the country asking for short sale help. I have homeowners calling me (from around the country, no less) about the possibility of doing a short sale on their home. I refer them out. (Incidentally, if you are from some other state than AZ, and you are familiar with short sales, send your contact information to me, I may have clients for you.)

I would like to first give a shout out to the new Barry. His Real Estate Radio USA  has been very cool and helpful for me professionally, and is entertaining to boot.

When I say that short sales are not for the faint of heart, I mean that in two distinct ways: for realtors, and for sellers.

 

Realtors are running up against brick walls with “The Gate Keepers.” That’s what I call the people who protect the actual “loss mitigators” like the Swiss Guard protects the Pope. Loss mitigators are behind bullet-proof glass, tucked away somewhere in a bunker under the Potomac river, without email, without phone lines, without fax machines; they are completely incommunicado. They send messages between the bunker and the outside world by carrier pigeon. The particular brand of pigeon they use is not one of the kind where you separate it from its home turf by a thousand miles, thow it up in the air, where it circles a few times and Read more

March 28, 2008

What’s Your Six Month Plan?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Every now and then I get to talk to someone just coming into the real estate business or contemplating the move.  My initial response is often a surprise to them but I bet many of you would agree with me when I tell them, “Great!  This is the best time to get into real estate.  If you come in with a good plan, establish the right habits and market consistently you will become a producer while times are tough and a star when times are good.”  They usually look at me a little crooked and then smile.  I guess they have a lot of people telling them they should have their head examined for going in when so many are getting out.  Maybe they should, but I always found the party a lot more fun after the wanna-be’s and coulda-beens were done posing and said their good-byes.

The Three Questions 
Following my response the potential new agent will inevitably tell me about their past experience and how it gives them a great sphere of influence in which to market.  They share with me their personal motto about discipline and the pledge they gave their cousin – the copier salesman – to never stop marketing.  I applaud all of this.  Mottos and pledges and enthusiasm are all important, maybe even indispensible.  But the first admonition about coming in with a good plan, the one they missed, is the most important.  Where is your business plan?  I have yet to hear: “I agree with you Sean.  I have a business plan written out and I am excited to begin.”

So here are the three questions I pose to all new agents:

  1. Why do you want to become a real estate agent?
  2. Do you have a written business plan?
  3. What is your six month plan?

The first question is really just a leading question designed to get people to open up and talk about their passion.  If you do not have a passion for some aspect of this business it is going to be awfully tough to work through the rejections.  The second question is meat and potatoes.  I call it Read more

March 28, 2008

Geno’s Wrong (bang a gong)

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I’ve heard tell that a baby’s first post-partum sensation is a visceral experience of himself and his mother as One. Thus, being too new in Life to yet separate himself from the outside world, little baby Geno mentally concludes mommy and he are the exact same entity. And when the light bulb finally does go off in the infant’s bald little noggin a few months down the lifeline and he realizes he’s been maternally duped by Nature, the very first ‘Separation Anxiety’ is then experienced and all future disappointments in his ensuing  mortal journey can be traced back to that very instant. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Either that or I dreamt it in one of my other, more enlightened lives when I wasn’t so monetarily attached to my livlihood.

I’ve also read somewhere that when one person moves to thumb down, and snap the mutual wishbone, ending a personal or business relationship abruptly, that the mental decision was made long before the actual ax hit the proverbial turkey’s neck; that the severing party (axer) grieving period had already begun long before fatal action was actually taken and thus, comes off as being the more ‘heartless’ of the separated duo. The turkey (axee), on the other hand, is cast immediately into a state of shock and is forced to run around ‘headless’ and very quickly come to terms with his own extremely short future as a team member in this world.  Somewhere between these first two paragraphs lies my point (allow me a few moments to dig it out as I simultaneously fret over a handful of my difficult Listings with a combined market time of almost 3 years) but I can tell you right now; headless, heartless, whatever…I’d rather be the axer than the axee.

I thought about this quite a bit as I escaped the silent treatment market torture in Chicago and flew home to visit with my 80 year old parents over Easter weekend. As I walked through their front door I was instantly greeted by a lifetime of childhood reminders, familiar tastes and nearly forgotten episodes. I sat there for hours keeping company with the two people I’ve known longer than any two souls on this earth, wondering where all the time went. I told them I felt so different lately, with barely a speck of child left in my psyche. They Read more

March 28, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Jeff Brown, discount lister?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other morning, Bawldguy Jeff Brown left this note in a comment:

I’m jumping back into the San Diego investment property market as a lister. I’ve been ignoring my home folks since late ‘03.

I’m gonna be offering a broadly different choice for the seller. I’ll charge NO listing commission, but a small monthly fee for ongoing marketing, and my carrying costs at Starbucks.

Now that’s intriguing, ain’t it?

It’s been gnawing at me, so I called Jeff to talk to him about it. He explains it in his own words in the podcast linked below, but stop for a moment and generalize, if you will.

If you’re in a market with a surfeit of inventory, sellers are not the kind of blue chip asset they might have been a few years ago. Qualified buyers on the other hand…

If you can sell your sellers on the idea that, like Jeff, you will give them a knock-your-socks-off listing at a price that will save them some money, you will have acquired inventory you can use to attract buyers. I think you would have to list like Jeff plans to, totally turn-key — and you’ll have to decide where you stand on dual agency. But if listing stronger for less attracts more buyers, what do you have to lose?

Since he’s working with investors, Jeff’s strategy is even more intricate than that. Give a listen and see what you think.

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March 27, 2008

Urbanologist Joel Kotkin: Why growth-oriented cities like Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta reflect the future of global commerce

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin is the only American urbanologist who can tolerate actual living human beings. In consequence, he can write about the organic growth of cities as they really are, rather than as he might remake them with enough tax money and firepower. This is a long extract from a much longer article about Houston’s emergence as a world-class city, this despite the scorn that might be heaped upon it — at tax-payer expense — by urban monument-builders like Richard Florida. In this section of the article, Kotkin discusses what makes young, growth-oriented cities so dynamic by comparison to older, more-typically-urban urban environments.

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.

Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.

Chicago, the great growth city of the late Read more

March 27, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Using the synergy of the internet and low-cost printed promotions to sell your product, build your brand and give you an affordable — testable — marketing strategy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the first of a series of Black Pearl Marketing Minute podcasts that Brian Brady and I will be putting together. We want to take marketing ideas that we have discussed on BloodhoundBlog and flesh them out to real-life strategies while connecting them to other synergistic tactics.

In this inaugural episode, we start by talking about my post on using the business card form factor for doing low-cost broadcast door-to-door promotion. We talk about some ways that we deploy custom-made business card-sized promotional pieces, how we make and print them, and our distribution plan.

Brian then connects that idea to a marketing plan that emerged from our comments threads, partnering with local merchants as an online/offline farming technique.

Earlier today, someone known only as Jacksonville Real Estate posted a comment on my post about using low-tech promotional schemes to bring traffic to a single-property web site:

It’s an old idea and it’s not mine … but if you are targeting just a certain areas then getting your flyer on the local pizza delivery box can work wonders.

Brilliant! Never thought of it, but that’s why I love this place: We bring bright minds together and set off a blinding brilliance. My reply:

Oh, very cool. I tend to think in terms of things we can do on our own, but this is actually an interesting cross-promotion:

“Visit our custom web site for 123 Mulberry Lane and your next pizza is on us!”

Build a PDF coupon in the site and redeem them with the pizza joint once a week. Meanwhile, your contact info is on the fridge for weeks or months.

That’s a Brian Brady-style idea. I must be channeling…

It’s a Guerrilla Marketing kind of idea, actually, a Duct Tape Marketing kind of idea — maximum bang for minimum bucks. It’s most completely a BloodhoundBlog kind of idea, in the sense that it combines (and recombines) physical with online marketing.

But nothing’s perfect in the first draft. My correspondent thought springing for the whole pizza might be too expensive as a “pay per click.”

Okayfine. How about this?

Buy the soda instead, then. It’s an upsell for the pizzeria — bigger Read more

March 26, 2008

Did you miss out on the super-low Guerrilla-only price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained? The price is still low, but you need to act fast — Brian Brady wants to raise it again soon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a valuable question for the Web 2.0 world: Can people really appreciate a bargain? Everybody loves “free” — but do they love it at full value? My thinking is that LinkedIn would be a much more valuable place to network if it charged members $350 a year, but would anyone pay a buck a day for Facebook?

This is a question that has been bugging Brian Brady — gnawing at him as only a good marketing problem can. We priced BloodhoundBlog Unchained at $149 and sold a bunch of tickets. We bumped the price to $199 and sold a bunch more. We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to make seating distribution choices — and Brian wants to raise the price to our estimated retail — dollarized — value: $350.

We know that amount is low. The next time we do this, the early-bird price will be more than that, and the last-minute price will be more than double that amount. We’re going to give you a year’s worth of ideas to deploy, so, even at $350, we’re still only a buck a day. If you do just one extra deal as a result of something you learn at Unchained, the ROI could be 20-1 or more.

Looked at that way, Brian is right: It’s plausible that, by charging too little, we’re encouraging people to set their expectations too low. I find that amazing, considering how much value we deliver here at BloodhoundBlog every day. But I was stunned to discover that people didn’t know that Unchained will not be the typical buy-me! buy-me! vendor show. I would have thought that my own graduated hostility to vendors would have made that plain.

In the other corner, there is me, slugging it out for the starving grunts in the trenches. No one is really starving — I hope! — but our lean months have become our lean years, and there ain’t too many of us getting fat off the fat of the land just now. I would rather keep the price as low as we can for as long as we can, Read more

March 26, 2008

The NAR Is A Sex Offender’s Best Friend

by

Real Estate Broadcaster and Investor

Author website

“Hello Mr. Agent, I like this house. I could see my family living here. Just one question, are there any sex offenders nearby”? A simple question that based on information from the National Association of Realtors does not have to be answered by the agent.

The answer the NAR wants agents to proffer is, “Well Mr. homebuyer you’re just going to go look that up yourself”.

Ralph Holman, associate general counsel for the NAR says “What agents should do is tell buyers about their states’ registries.”

Go look it up yourself! That’s the answer that the NAR wants agents to give. An individual who is held out in NAR advertising and lobbying as a professional on par with doctors and lawyers wants their rank and file members to dodge this question as much as possible.

This certainly bestows credibility and trust with the American consumer doesn’t it? This surely will make the public more sympathetic to the plight of Realtors shouldn’t it? You would not expect a “professional” who is being paid upwards of 6-8% to facilitate the sale of a housing purchase to actually tell the truth would you?

If not for information and said coordination of the sale what exactly is the agent being paid such a hefty commission for? Why would any agent or the NAR encourage a culture of deceit? If not deceit, then call it ignorance and unprofessional. In any event, if you are selling a product as important as where someone wants to house their wife and children, then is it not too much to expect that the consumer is relying on the agent to inform and disclose all defects, not the ones they choose to disclose?

Has the NAR declined in credibility so far as to instruct their agents to actually feign ignorance or have there agents slid so far as to actually buy into degrading their “profession” by bamboozling the consumer?

A professional should not have to question whether such information is pertinent. A professional should deliver the information willingly and should openly and freely desire to offer full disclosure.

USA Today recently ran a story wherein a spokesman for the National Association 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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