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Category: Real Estate (page 129 of 266)

March 20, 2008

Real Estate is Entertainment – Are You Entertaining?

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

Last week I heard my pal Walt Baczkowski, CEO of the Metropolitan Consolidated Association of REALTORS®, make the statement, “real estate has become entertainment.”  The statement struck me like one of those V8 smacks to the head.  The more I thought about it, the more the statement became true.  Just look at the local TV cable listings and you’ll see shows like Flip That House, Home Makeover, Designed to Sell, House Hunters, etc.  Real Estate is Cold; Real Estate TV Hot proclaimed RealityTVWorld.com recently. 

In addition to reality TV, many shows like Two and a Half Men and Reba have supporting characters that are real estate agents.  Unfortunately, these shows often portray agents is a rather unflattering manner.

In my little neck of the woods, real estate has been one of the top 10 news stories for the past 4 years (number 1 for a few years), and we have 2 or 3 media inquiries a week wanting an interview for this or that real estate issue. 

So if you buy into the premise that real estate has become entertainment, I ask you “are you entertaining?”  If you are a REALTOR®, you are likely charming and engaging (I think that is required by Article 18 in the Code of EthicsJ), but are your marketing efforts interesting, informing and/or humorous?  Are you using YouTube for the goldmine it can be?  Are you still doing the same ad layouts you used 5 years ago? 

This post is not intended to give you the answers, but I hope it will help you understand the questions you need to ask.  Below are links to some examples of entertaining REALTOR® marketing efforts.  You probably do not want to copy these, but you should seek out your niche in this new paradigm.  Consumers want something in return for paying attention to your marketing – what will you give them?

The Hot Tub REALTOR® – This YouTube marketing gets 5 stars for creativity, 2 stars for execution, but is probably not going to have too many copycats.

FSBO Site Video – this non-REALTOR® gets it.

REALTOR® Web Site – This is a local Charlottesville firm Read more

March 20, 2008

What’s the future of residential real estate signage? I think it’s like the recent history of digital printing — only much, much bigger

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“The Barrys” on Real Estate Radio USA have a burning yearning to know just what it is that listing Realtors do to earn their commissions.

It’s a question that plagues me, too. As much as I talk here about on-line marketing, we draw a lot more attention from sellers with our real-world marketing efforts. We’re all about selling the house, and, oddly enough, this makes an impression on other people who want their houses sold.

But we’re deliberately not listing very much right now. We’ve turned down a bunch of houses we would have liked to have handled, but we will not list a house for sale if we don’t feel certain we can sell it. There was a span of eleven days when we turned down over $3 million in new listings — but every one of those homes is still unsold, despite repeated price reductions.

We’re gearing up to list 1322 East Vermont Avenue in North Central Phoenix. The house doesn’t go live until March 28th, but, because of an Easter-egg hunt in the neighborhood, we’re holding it open this weekend in advance of the MLS listing.

We’re going to be documenting everything we do to list this home for sale, both as an enduring record of the kinds of efforts we undertake for our sellers and as a step-by-step guide for Realtors who follow BloodhoundBlog.

The house has been repaired, touch-up painted and and staged. Some of the photography has been done, but I have not yet built the home’s single-property web site as I write this.

But because we want to have our yard signs up by the weekend, I built the signs today:

I’ve built an engenu page with bigger versions of the signs along with a link to an engenu site discussing our sign philosophy in detail.

Our yard signs are just one part of our listing strategy, but they form at least a piece of the answer “The Barrys” are looking for. We believe in marketing our listings, and we do everything we can think of to get them sold quickly and for top dollar. As we build out the engenu site Read more

March 20, 2008

Destination: Vertical. Zillow houses “hot or not” for homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dig this. Dumb but fun. A sticky way to see a lot of ads — but fun anyway.

Serious reflection #1: Another way for Zillow to be a sticky, top-of-mind vertical search portal. Get ’em there. Keep ’em there. Satisfy all of their real estate needs.

Serious reflection #2: The design sense in this new feature is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from Zillow so far. I’m talking about a much higher standard of graphic elegance. Not jaw-dropping, but much better.

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March 19, 2008

Looking for long tail search results from your on-line real estate marketing efforts? Don’t clean up your breadcrumbs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:

Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.

This is the web page I had built for 1415 East Flower Street in the Cheery Lynn Historic District of Central Phoenix.

That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.

We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.

What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?

Nothing.

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.

We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine Read more

March 19, 2008

RealEstateRadioUSA.com’s Barry Cunningham is going to show us all what it sounds like when a big dog howls

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re not listening to RealEstateRadioUSA.com, you’re missing out on the most entertaining real estate education your money cannot buy. You can listen live at 1/2/3/4pm, west to east, but the show is also available every day by MP3, so you can take “The Barrys” with you in the car or to the gym.

Today Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham joins us as a Bloodhound:

What’s that big, booming voice, piling comedy upon careful calculation? It’s Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham, who with co-host Barry Johnson teaches a daily master class on real estate and investing.

Barry is a big man with a big voice, a big personality, and a great big heart. But, ignoring all that, he’s a serious real estate investor with a wealth of hard-won experience. It will be interesting to hear how a really big dog can howl.

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March 19, 2008

Zillow.com makes its first MLS-wide feed agreement and, in the process, disintermediates its first IDX cartel

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the PR, which the vendor cheerleaders will have reported:*

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com and MLS Property Information Network today announced a partnership to feed listings from the New England area MLS to Zillow.com on a daily basis. This partnership initiates the first participation at the MLS level in Zillow’s Listings Feed program, which launched in November 2007. To date, the Zillow Listings Feed program has attracted several top brokerages for participation, and now allows all customers of MLS PIN to automatically gain free marketing exposure for their listings on one of the most-visited real estate sites in the country, while providing Zillow’s users with a more robust search experience.

That is, rather than having made yet another feed agreement from a brokerage or a franchise of brokerages, Zillow will be taking a feed of every listing from MLS PIN — a fairly big MLS system.

Okayfine. Now here’s the actual news:

Each listing will include a description of the property with multiple photos and contact information for the listing agent, including links back to the listing brokerage’s Web site where they can find more information and connect with a sales associate to guide them through the home buying and selling experience.

That is to say, whatever form the IDX agreement takes at MLS PIN, it is being cast aside for the Zillowfied listings. The IDX-like policy of concealing the listing broker’s and agent’s contact information will not be the policy for Zillow’s echo of the MLS PIN feed. (I find this so amazing that I’m avidly listening for some back-peddaling.)

There’s more. If a listing agent creates a profile on Zillow.com, that will be linked through from that agent’s listings. The MLS PIN feed will provide information for Zillow’s Virtual Sold Sign program, which is another way of promoting individual listing agents. This is all of a piece with Zillow’s general policy of promoting individuals rather than organizations.

But the important fact is that Zillow’s agreement with MLS PIN splits up the clubby conspiracy against the consumer that is the MLS philosophy. If buyer’s agents are squealing in Massachusetts today, the proper target of their Read more

March 19, 2008

Biz 2.0: Super Real Estate Companies

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

When I first started in real estate my goal was to own a big operation after getting my broker’s license. A quintuple bypass changed my plans and I now operate a boutique operation, small, profitable and simple. I spend my extra time doing things I enjoy like golfing, reading and writing.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about big. It’s my belief that most large RE companies don’t fully exploit the advantages of being big, with access to resources largely going to waste in offices run from defensive modes with key players protecting turf rather than striving for excellence and market domination. Internal competition has been a weakness of big RE companies, along with the lack of talented employees with broader skills than RE skills. There’s a time and place to compete and there’s a time and place to bring talented individuals together to co-operate.

All companies and all offices differ, but from what I’ve seen much is missing. Big doesn’t have to mean slow, stubborn and infected with in-fighting and politics. I admit, I have idealistic binges that sometimes border on drunkenly naive, but I also know what people working together can accomplish — I’ve witnessed it through personal involvement and I’ve read the stories of companies who’ve achieved excellence through new ways of thinking, co-operation and a dedication to talented people given free reign to think, act and innovate. I also have no knowledge of the sophistication involved with large franchises, but I know that even independent offices with 50 to 100 agents can develop 2.0 systems that drastically improve their ability to compete.

It starts at the top with leadership. I should say enlightened leadership. Fearless and open-minded leaders are rare; hell, most everything I’m about to describe is rare — that’s what makes it special, and that’s why great companies achieve the largest market share in their line of endeavor. Good leaders are an amalgam of psychologist, priest, coach, cheerleader, protaganist, antagonist (questioning his/her own leadership), hero(ine), visionary and sage. That’s asking a lot, but good leadership demands a lot. From Alexander the Great to JFK to Lee Ioccoca, the styles are different and the scope greater or less, but the key elements of Read more

March 18, 2008

Sean Purcell: A mind that glows, a passion that burns, a wit that sparkles — a life that pops

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another new hound in the pound today, Sean Purcell, whom you will recognize from our comment threads and from his weblog, A Life That POPs. He’s on pace to become Jeff Brown’s favorite hyper-local weblogger, and Sean has been working on BloodhoundBlog Unchained warm-up events with Brian Brady. It’s time and past time that we brought him into the pack.

What happens when a Princeton psychology major goes to Wall Street? Sean Purcell came to his senses and moved to San Diego to train as an Ironman and establish himself as a Web 2.0 real estate success coach.

I have one more Bloodhound to add, but, right now, he’s spinning and spinning in front of a digital camera, praying to god that, somewhere, he as a good side.

We are always interested in adding new voices, but it is getting harder and harder to make the cut. I’m turning down nineteen out of twenty, by now, but that’s not a very good standard to judge by. Most of the people who approach us want to use our popularity to promote their businesses, which is not what we’re doing here. I am endlessly interested in points of view we don’t already have. But, even then, you have to be able to keep up with this pack of wild dogs — which means you have to be swift enough to run with us, but you also have to accept that at BloodhoundBlog we are each of us free to run as we choose.

In any case, Dave Phillips set such a blistering pace yesterday that I’m interested to see what Sean can do. Nothing like a little pressure to bring out the best in a man, right?

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March 18, 2008

Your rental home in Phoenix will generate positive cash flow — but will it appreciate significantly in the coming years?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Your rental home in Phoenix will generate positive cash flow — but will it appreciate significantly in the coming years?

It’s still a buyer’s market out there, but is it an investor’s market? The answer to that turns on three other issues: Vacancies, values and cash flows.

Lenders get all the blame for the downturn in home values, but that’s not entirely fair. Another big share of the blame goes to the builders, who built new homes far beyond any reasonable estimate of demand. So, even though folks who might have gotten home loans two or three years ago are stuck renting for a while longer, is there enough tenant demand to keep a rental home profitably occupied?

Even if there is, will the prices of Valley homes continue their decline? This seems likely, at least in the near term. There is still a tremendous amount of inventory in the MLS system. The best bargains, though, are houses that are in the foreclosure process. These can be hard to wrest away from lenders, but they may be a leading indicator of the bottom of the market.

More significantly, will a rental purchased at a bargain price throw off positive cash flow? Unequivocally: Yes. To qualify for an investor loan, you will need to have great credit and a 20% down payment. But interest rates are still very low, and rents have held up just fine through the downturn.

So the big bet boils down to this one question: If you buy a rental home in the Phoenix market now, will you be able to sell it at a significant profit eight or ten years from now?

Alas, no one can predict the future. If you pick the right rental home — good house, good location, good orientation, easy access to schools, playgrounds, shopping, freeways and jobs — it should rent well now and resell well later. If you get the right loan and don’t refinance, your income property will actually produce income — which means it will pay for itself and still throw off a Read more

March 17, 2008

Rate Your REALTOR® – Why Are Agents Scared Anyway?

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

I’ve had little luck selling the idea that REALTORS® should embrace an Internet rating system.  Local associations, individual REALTORS®, other association executives, NAR, and even other bloggers have rejected the idea of allowing clients to rate their agent.  Twice last week I pitched it to influential leaders in the industry, but both times the conversation died with no support.  Here are a few typical “reasons” this idea is rejected by the industry:

  • My competitor will give me bogus ratings
  • One bad rating and I’ll look bad even if most of my clients love me
  • Only clients who are upset would be motivated to rate me

I did hear one legitimate argument last week, but it was not a deal killer for me.  A wise REALTOR® explained that ratings would not work in the real estate business because a transaction was often a confrontation between a buyer’s rep and the listing agent.  Since the agents were working for opposite sides, the other party’s client was bound to think poorly of you.  Okay, there is some truth to that, but a properly set up rating system could make sure readers knew if the evaluation came from your client or from the other side. 

The reason this idea will not leave my head is that I sit in many industry meetings and listen to REALTORS® and association executives whine about the lack of training and professionalism from their competitors or members.  The common answer for most people to this problem is to require more training before and after licensing.  While more education can help, it will never weed out the bad from the good.  Taking more courses will not make you more ethical, professional or pleasant to work with unless you want it to change you.  Only the power of the consumer will require you to change or quit. 

Overall, I find REALTORS® to be an amazing group of ethical and professional entrepreneurs, but a few bad apples and rotten eggs has left a bad taste in the mouth for many.  Surveys constantly back this up by showing that the public generally loves “their” REALTOR®, but rates the Read more

March 17, 2008

Introducing Dave Phillips, taking the lead role in a reenacted historical drama: St. Francis Xavier and the Bloodhounds

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That headline is a Jesuit joke, y’all. In fact, Dave Phillips, CEO of one of the most interesting Realtor associations in the United States, may be bravely putting his head into the Bloodhound’s mouth. (Ooh! The drool!)

We’ll find out. Behold the man:

Dave Phillips is the CEO of the Charlottesville (Virginia) Area Association of Realtors, a national pace-setter. He describes himself as “a writer, speaker, and facilitator on all things real estate.”

I hope Dave doesn’t try to convert us with the sword, but, again and again, Francis Xavier took the contest to the contestants, an exceptionally courageous act. My hat is off to Dave for exhibiting a similar valor.

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March 17, 2008

How to use engenu to reinforce your blog posts about listed homes you would like to sell, to build single-property web sites, and to achieve total global hyper-local long-tail search domination

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my response to a comment that Jennifer Castillo left on my post about the benefits of blogging about real estate listings you would like to sell.

Jennifer said:

My questions to you arise from this quote of yours, “For each house you preview, build an engenu page. That way you can show all the photos, captioned as needed, if someone wants to see everything. You can also link to appropriate offsite resources. This engenu page will be a permanent asset in your inventory of on-line content.”

Being a total n00b in this business I am very excited about what you have written in this particular post. My question to you is how do I build an engenu page? I have a blog at wordpress so can this even be done with my existing blog? Do I need any particular software?

Hi, Jennifer. I like your weblog. You have en eye for striking images.

engenu is software written by me. It runs on Apache web servers, or it will once I release it. It’s all but finished, but I keep finding small things I want to change. I’ll be releasing it as a public beta shortly.

I’ve written about engenu on BloodhoundBlog. In that post, I talk about a house we know and love. Cathy blogged about that house, and her weblog post linked back to the engenu site I built for 101 West Seminole Drive.

That’s an illustration of how you can use engenu to support a weblog post about a house. The post can highlight the features and photos you are interested in talking about, then you can link back to you engenu site for the folks who want to see everything. The post and the engenu site are mutually-reinforcing, both in terms of immediate marketing and in future long-tail search results.

The point of all this is that engenu permits ordinary people to build rich, elaborate, highly searchable web sites very quickly and without knowing any HTML or other coding languages. If you do know how to code, you can build almost anything you want, but the kind of sites we build every day to Read more

March 16, 2008

BloodhoundBlog is the number one real estate weblog? Technically true for a brief moment, but we still have some growing to do

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A tiny trophy, a huge victory — to come.

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

We had a helluva week last week, our best ever — until now. So what did we do this week to top last week’s numbers? How about almost double?

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

The real estate category on BlogTopSites is the home of truly competitive real estate webloggers. We’ve always held our own there — the respectable low teens until lately, in the higher single digits so far for 2008. The top of the list has almost always been dominated by bubble blogs, but BloodhoundBlog has been among the top RE.net blogs — and almost always first among real estate industry weblogs — for quite some while.

But we’ve never been first overall before, and the chances are good that we won’t be again, not for a while. But first place on that list is ours to earn and ours to keep — eventually. We deliver so much more content — so much better content — that we will own the top of that list in due course. Just not yet.

So what gives? How did we get to be number one at the start of this brand new week?

Earlier this week, Brian Brady gave us all a practical demonstration in how to dominate a Google search. On Thursday, he wrote a post about Ashley Alexandra Dupree that was first, fastest and best — from Google’s point of view. He’s spent the past three days on the first page of Google for a number of Ashley Dupree-related search terms — sitting squarely atop major news organizations and A-list webloggers. As I write this, Brian’s post is second for ashley dupree — and first place is off-topic.

So what happened? With that first Ashley Dupree post and a follow-up about Ashley’s singing career, Brian by himself brought over 14,000 unique souls as hard clicks into BloodhoundBlog this week. He beat all of last week by himself. Yesterday we had over 8,132 unique visitors, of which at last 6,000 were brought here by Brian Brady alone.

Yeah, but, but, but– It’s just an SEO trick. No, it’s not. It’s an SEO demonstration. Brian Brady 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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