There’s always something to howl about.
The short list is no shorter — twenty posts so far — but there’s still room for you — or for someone whose work you think deserves attention. The entry form is here.
Voting for The People’s Choice Award will start just after Noon PDT/MST.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
If you’re seeing this post, you’re finding BloodhoundBlog on our new file server. A word of caution: Domain Name Servers attach like Velcro, at little at a time. You may yet see Delia’s Gone again before we’re done. By Monday or Tuesday, any flakiness should be gone. I’m just warning you, that’s all.
I know, too, that email to me has been bouncing since yesterday as a consequence of this switch. If you got something back, send it through again, if you would.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
No apologies for the topic. As many problems as exist in the real estate industry — many more than the practiced elites would like to acknowledge, many fewer than the bubbleheads need to satisfy their tantrums — Redfin has made itself a prominent example of how not to improve things.
A few days ago in a comment section I wrote that Glenn Kelman’s a phony. It was the heat of the moment and I only wrote it because, well, he is a phony. He has to be.
On the one hand he has to corral capital and customers by feeding the realtor stereotype of the venal do-nothing narcissist, exemplified here in the Sixty Minutes shtick. But on the other he desperately needs the cooperation of the very people he’s trashed if his model has any chance of succeeding, thus the apparent charm exuded at Inman Connect. He creates a crisis of disdain for the full service agent, sets himself up as the champion of the little guy to quell the crisis, then calls on the full service agents to help him do it. Quite a dance, that.
But.
I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time on the Redfin website. It’s not in my market, and I’ve read and seen enough to know it’s a model that’s not likely to succeed. I’ve left the particulars to others and the market to its natural flow.
But I never thought the champion of the little guy would be dumb enough to try to con: the little guy. The following comes from a BHB reader, Leonard Wallace, who…I’ll let him tell it:
I’m a broker in Maryland where Redfin arrived last month. I’ve read many of your [BHB] posts about Redfin, but I haven’t seen anyone comment on their blatantly false advertising. Here’s a screen shot of a listing in the Washington area:
Leonard goes on to point out:
Redfin’s minimum commission on any buyer transaction is $3000. That never came out in the Sixty Minutes piece or anything else I’ve seen: note here, the first page of the ‘how to buy’ section. That’s why, I suppose, a $500,000 selling price Read more
This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
How to take away the objections to drawbacks in a home
I was looking at the web site for a For Sale By Owner home the other day. In the site menu was a heading called, “Drawbacks.” I thought this was an excellent idea at first blush, the kind of inspired salesmanship I almost never see.
The fact is, everything is a trade-off. Everything has advantages and disadvantages. This is not a secret. Buyers already know that every home they look at will have drawbacks.
What is inspired — what could have been inspired — is calling the drawbacks to the buyer’s attention. Why? Because then you can take away the objections.
Like this: “We know this room is small for a bedroom, so we pre-wired it for digital cable and two phone lines. That way, you can use it as a home-office and also as a guest bedroom.”
The buyers will see that the room is small, but by acknowledging and addressing the defect in advance, you can help them see around the problem.
I said the idea of a “Drawbacks” page could have been inspired. Instead, when I clicked through to the page, I saw this:
“There are no drawbacks! Come and buy this house right away!”
This is far beyond being uninspired marketing. This is the kind of ham-handed ignorance and arrogance we associate with Hollywood’s idea of a venal Realtor.
Since you know exactly what objections buyers are going to raise with your home, your best strategy is to acknowledge and address them in advance. This communicates that you are honest, that you are not trying to pull one over on your buyer, and it also gives you a chance to reframe objections in a way that can help to sell the home.
If you don’t want to admit that your home has drawbacks, say nothing. Every buyer’s biggest objection is the fear of being hustled into a bad decision. If you go out of your way to look like a hustler, you will scare buyers away even if your home really is close to perfection.
Technorati Tags: real estate, Read more
Fellow BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw is a fountain of practical real estate knowledge… so when Mr. Shaw recommended a Xerox Phaser color printer to us – I took him up on the offer.
The street price for this particular printer is $1100, so I had to think hard about this purchase. There are so many other things that I could spend a thousand bucks on… but after all – it was a highly recommended purchase by Russell.
After checking out Ebay, I found a seller with a few of these printers brand new in stock at a [gasp] shockingly low price. So… I jumped on it.
The printer arrived a few days later (all 60 pounds of it) and it installed very easily. It’s nice having a network printer, for a change. I can send it a print job from any of my computers without worrying about a particular computer being on.
The prints are great – regular magazine quality… all nice and glossy.
The next day, I went to print some flyers and – nothing. No power lights, no indicators, nothing. I checked Xerox’s website to follow their troubleshooting guide… but to no avail. It would appear that I now had a rather large paperweight.
So I called Xerox, and they were nice as they could be. They contacted the local service representative and he came out the next day to install a new power supply. When you buy one of these printers, you get a full year of on-site service including parts and labor… a nice benefit. Russell advises us to purchase the extended warranty, as well.
Well I am tickled with this purchase… and I would like to publicly thank Mr. Shaw for his recommendation.
Now if any of you might be thinking about following Russell’s advice, perhaps I can save you a few dollars. Here’s another one from the same seller on Ebay for $599 (or $629 with Buy It Now.)
You can thank me after you thank Russell. 🙂
I tell people we live in the last affordable ghetto in North Central Phoenix. We live right on the edge of the neighborhood, the place where $400,000 makes its leap to $750,000 on the way to a million. We moved here knowing what the neighborhood had to do, and, so far, it has not disappointed us.
This morning, I’ve been drooling over this listing. The comp value of this home in turn-key condition should be around $600,000, maybe more. Sad for the sellers, and I could kick them for letting the house go to hell, but this is a sweet opportunity that will bear fruit right about the time Persephone comes back from Hades.
This is my friend and client, investor Richard Nikoley, writing yesterday:
Probably not what everyone is thinking, right now, but if I’m going to keep my head about me and keep a market perspective on the market, then I have to consider that when some people sell out of fear, panic, to preserve diminishing profits, or to stop losses, there’s always someone on the other side of that trade. So the question arises — and one should always, always try to discern the motivations behind each side of a transaction — why are an equal number of people buying, right now, what so many are selling, right now? Could it be because others are selling at cheaper and cheaper prices and those buying are seeing bargain-basement prices? If you had to guess, who would you suspect is likely getting the advantage?
For some reason, people don’t tend to think of the stock market like they do most other things. In other areas, it’s called a sale. There’s always someone, somewhere, wanting to get out of an asset — for whatever reason — and depending on their motivation, they’ll take less and less for it. Others lie in wait for such opportunities in order to accumulate assets at relatively low prices.
Everyone is welcome to their doomsday, economic collapse, chickens-coming-home-to-roost scenario, or whatever. But do keep in mind that what is going on is essentially and mostly an exercise in total freedom and Read more
Bernanke answers the call to lower rates. We’re already hearing mixed reactions ranging from “it’s not enough” to “he shouldn’t have made a cut.”
What’s your take? I’m no Realtor and I’m not a lender, so I’d love to hear what everyone thinks. Comments are encouraged.
You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.
In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.
Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.
I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Don’t worry, my husband doesn’t need this service; I’ve got it covered! PingMe.com is a free reminder system that reminds me of an advancement on the Outlook calendar function. I typically set up Outlook “reminders” for everything ranging from “follow up on Lakeline listing” to “email April” but get irritated that I can’t direct it to my phone or to my Yahoo account.
So, if you don’t get nagged enough from your wife (or children if you are the wife), here’s how PingMe works:
1. Create a ping/ name your task. For example, “Clip Toenails.” Whatever, you know you forget. You’ll also note if this is a recurring task or not.
2. Determine the pestering function. This is how often you would like to ping yourself until you’ve told PingMe you’ve completed the task. “Clip Toenails” is important, but I would probably set the pester to go off every 30 minutes in case we’re on a date or something… I’ll get to it.
Come to think of it, this could be a great “oh I have to go” interrupter making your phone ring mid-meeting… just act important and walk away from the encyclopedia salesperson (you’ve got an important pretend call to tend to)!
3. Select a target. You can assign places for your reminder to go- your work email, your cell phone, wherever. For my reminder to “clip toenails,” I would probably have it remind my phone; it’s a pretty important task.
3. Assign a Tag. Like in blogging, this organization will help you to sort through your to do reminders in an orderly fashion.
4. Save, creating a sticky note. PingMe will email to your designated location your desired task reminder. But hey PingMe, just because I say you should remind me of something doesn’t make you the boss of me. Got it?
So, consider this your reminder to go sign up for PingMe. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. >Ping complete.
From the San Diego Union Tribune, dateline August 16, 2007:
Paleontologists studying pterosaurs had theorized that some the extinct flying reptiles fed by skimming along the water with their mouths open. However, a new analysis by British scientists indicates pterosaurs were too large and would have created too much drag to feed in this way.
And this is precisely why I see the traditional real estate agent not only surviving but thriving. Many predict the demise of the likes of me. They predict a future where I have been stripped of my MLS, at least in the proprietary sense, and where I have been stripped of my paycheck, rendering me crippled and ineffective chum.
Good, successful traditional agents find their sustenance in a much deeper ocean, while this point seems to be lost on the new fisherman, the alternative for-fee, for-less business models, and even the fish.
360-Marlow wrote last week about how Lennox Scott of John L. Scott Realty, speaking at the recent Inman Connect conference, “seemed unable to articulate why a commissioned sales person may be preferable to one paid on salary”. Well, let me give it a shot.
Thirty years of Elvis Lives. There will probably be more at Marlow’s place. This is John Hiatt and The Goners, with Sonny Landreth finger-picking slide on that pretty black Stratocaster.
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing, real estate photography
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Have you ever felt your stomach drop?
I received an e-mail, from reader Robert Kerr today, asking if I had seen Merrill Lynch’s downgrade of Countrywide Financial. Merrill Lynch believes that Countrywide might face bankruptcy. Make no mistake about it, a collapse of Countrywide Financial will give everybody in the real estate and mortgage industry a case of the “awshits”.
The Secret be damned! I said this was plausible back on April 1, 2007:
Here are some warning signs the painfullly paranoid (like me) might feed upon:
1- Countrywide Announces Change in Board Of Directors
2- Fitch Ratings Agency Downgrades 33% of Countrywide Loan Pools; particularly their “expanded criteria” guidelines which include Pay Option ARMs
3- Methinks he doth protesteth too much; Chairman and Founder Angelo Mozilo sold $140 million worth of stock last year while literally screaming that Countrywide should not be penalized by stock traders because of the subprime meltdown.
Negative amortization loans are an excellent financial planning tool. Countrywide has long been a favorite of originators because of their adaptability and innovative lending products. This time, I think they may have overreached. I’m raising our readiness condition to DefCon-4.
I’ve been getting a lot of traffic on my home weblog. The reason is simple; I’ve been writing a lot about Countrwide lately. If you Google, “Countrywide In Trouble”, I’m close to the top. This is not a pat on the back for my SEO technique, it’s a realization of how severe the reach of a Countrywide collapse may be.
Two weeks ago, I questioned why Angelo Mozilo wasn’t owning up to the severity of the problem and getting the bad loans off of the books so we could move on with our lives. More traffic on the weblog. That’s a bad sign. I followed up and wrote a little joke about a federal bailout of Countrywide by President Fred Thompson in 2009 and likened Countrywide to Chrysler. I played with fuzzy numbers and determined that Countrywide’s net worth could conceivably drop some 70% from defaulted loans. Huge traffic on the weblog! Google finance and Yahoo finance picked it up. I think I struck a nerve.
This is Read more
Central Phoenix, of course, but your boy doesn’t actually work at the library, he just hangs out there from 9 am to 9 pm. This is from Zillow.com:
Central City residents are distinct from people in surrounding areas because:
- A larger number did not complete high school.
- A higher proportion of them are divorced males.
- There’s a higher percentage of people who work in education, training, or library occupations.
Sorry, Zillovians, I just can’t get enough of this astute counter-marketing. Surprisingly enough, there have been no contributions to the neighborhood discussion fora. Maybe if Zillow offered free cigarettes — or booze — in exchange for real estate questions.
Here are some listings from this creepy neighborhood acrawl with divorced winos. The resident high school drop-outs can barely even get to six multiples of the median home value.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.
Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.
This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.
So: The rules are changed to this:
The Rules (few and fair):
Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.
I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:
You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:
That image links back to the information page for the competition.
We’re Read more
Here is an hour long interview I did today. It was a conference call that had about 200 agents listening and sending in questions. I received many emails from the agents saying it was a needed lift for them.
Curtis Johnson sent me the questions that were not answered due to not enough time and I will start posting video (and audio) responses to each of those questions by the end of the week. The external mic I needed to have decent sound quality for the video will be here in a day or two.
Achieving stable success in this business is at least 90% mental (as opposed to specific “techniques”) and that is what I will concentrate on delivering.
