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Category: Real Estate (page 173 of 266)

August 9, 2007

In closing… and on hiatus.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

To be fair, Sweet Digs in its current form is innocuous enough. It didn’t begin that way, but that’s where it has landed.

And, to be fair, my mini-eruption this morning had nothing to do with Sweet Digs but everything to do with the role Redfin has assumed of industry hate monger. Take the Forums.

I made reference to a comment posted on the Redfin Forums in which the writer referred to traditional agents as conniving and greedy con artists. I had seen this remark a week ago and the words had been on a slow boil in my brain since. Redfin the Real Estate Company didn’t pen these words, but in effect they did. Their rhetoric from inception has been carefully crafted to incite riot. When I go to an appointment with a buyer or seller, I go intent on demonstrating how I bring more value than my competitors. What I do not do is attempt to elevate my position in their minds by criticizing and demeaning others whom they may be considering.

And, now we have gotten to the bottom of my recent attack on their little locally focused blog, and my sudden unease with even talking about this Redfin stuff at all. I listened to Glenn himself say recently that you should never promote yourself; let others do it, and it becomes viral. Is cancer a virus? By just “putting it out there”, I am giving their business model and their business practices (which I find offensive on many levels) increased exposure and credibility. By lambasting that with which I am in disagreement, I do them one better. I set myself up to be portrayed as that agent living in fear of their “new and better way”, the personification of the old industry guard which has become their poster child for all that is evil in the world.

Traditional agents hate us, traditional agents fear us, traditional agents are pond scum – These are the battle cries of a Redfin trying to get noticed. While they are so obviously wrong on each count, every Redfin rant I post will suggest otherwise to Read more

August 9, 2007

I went duck-hunting with Elmer Fudd and came home with a radically different approach to real estate prospecting

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

About fifteen months ago, we were preparing to list a home for someone we had known for quite a while. The house was a cosmetic flip in an excellent location. We had been consulting with the seller for months to get the repairs and upgrades done the way we wanted them. The seller had great equity, even if he were to sell it at the fix-up price. But he kept trying to cheap out the remodeling, which we thought was the wrong thing to do in a luxury location.

We even paid to have the home inspected, pre-listing, to get another set of eyes on the problems we had identified. The major items on the punch-list were addressed, but not in a way appropriate to the price-range of the neighborhood.

Okayfine. There are listings you can’t get away from — family, old friends, past clients. So knowing that close-enough was going to have to be good-enough, we priced the house as it would be delivered into a buyer’s market: $425,000.

The seller wanted $475,000, which would have been easy to get if the home had been improved to the quality of the location. But it hadn’t. Whoever bought it was going to live in it as-is, or, more likely, they were going to spend that extra $50,000 to bring the house up to its true potential. Ether way, there were competing listings at both prices points, so no one was going to confuse the one for the other.

At $425,000, we could have sold that house in 30 days or fewer, even against all the competition. Lucky us, the seller let us off the hook. He insisted on $475,000, by phone, and he got so mad that he hung up on me.

Dang! I lost a $475,000 listing, which at 3% of never-ever-sold would only have netted out to a loss of around $2,500 for us, not counting our labor.

It takes us a solid week to get a home on the market — photos, floorplans, signs, web site, open house cards, etc. The house was listed the next day — for $479,000. The extra $4,000 might Read more

August 9, 2007

“They are conniving and con artists” – Redfin launches Southern California Sweet Digs

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

And for the record, Redfin, the title was a quote taken from one of your Southern California Forum posters, and it was directed at me, or rather my ilk. I started writing this with every intention of giving you the publicity you asked for, the “don’t promote yourself, let others do it, and it will become viral” marketing which has been your hallmark. I changed my mind.

This morning Redfin issued a press release announcing expansion of the “Online Magazine Formerly Known As”, well, something else.

SEATTLE — August 9, 2007: Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today launched its online real estate magazine, “Sweet Digs,” for Southern California. Home-buyers in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego neighborhoods can read daily, local real estate market information via the Sweet Digs blog or email newsletter.

The new Southern California Sweet Digs will offer as many as 40 candid, saucy and analytical write-ups each week of recent sales, price reductions, open houses and real estate trends in local areas, including Beverly Hills, Irvine, Newport Beach, Ocean Beach and Westwood. Southern California already boasts some of the top real estate blogs, and Sweet Digs complements them with its hyper-local, data-driven format written by real estate fanatics, not agents.

We are talking about real estate fanatics here, as in, people marked by extreme enthusiasm for real estate, not agents, since we all know real estate agents have little interest in real estate. Fanatics, as in people being paid to show extreme enthusiasm for that for which they were paid. One of my first jobs was at Bob’s Big Boy (during the Steel Age). I was fanatical about the Big Boy Combo, but this was in large part due to the fact that the Big Boy cut my paycheck.

Okay, in all fairness, I know what you were trying to say. The newsletter-blog thingy will be written by non-industry professionals. I get that, and I can see an appeal. And, in the name of fairness, I wouldn’t enlist contributors to my Blog who were Redfin disciples.

Sweet Digs launched December 2006 in Seattle and February 2007 in San Francisco to provide Read more

August 8, 2007

Real Estate Bloggers — Why Are You Blogging? What Currency Does Your Banker Accept?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Since BloodhoundBlog isn’t about blogging for its owner’s business — the following doesn’t apply. In fact, Greg seems to abhor even the suggestion this blog might be construed as financially beneficial to him. He wants Bloodhound to be the best place to go when you want real estate information or expertise. His mission is to inform and educate — period. I’m sure there are other blogs who also exist only to distribute valuable information to their readers. This isn’t aimed at them either.

11th commandment

Let’s begin with what everyone who knows me realizes pretty quickly — I’m not a tech guy, and surely not a blogging expert. However, after blogging for a year now, I’ve noticed a few things in the so called blogging world. Wanna be a blogging expert? Just call yourself one. No kiddin’, that’s just about all you need to do.

In my first few months these so-called experts would write blogging commandments as if they’d found them on the third tablet Moses lost on his way down the mountain. You would have thought the 11th commandment was for blogging experts only — hidden in a secret place known only to them. At first I took them seriously. My mistake. My audience started to ask me what was up. What was up? I was listening to the experts, that’s what.

Kris Berg’s post on this subject was spectacularly on point. She then followed it up with the perfect satirical application of what she learned from the experts in San Francisco.

small dinner

Since I’m not in the house side of the business my subjects are……..different. They’re like a full dinner. They involve, at least much of the time, some relatively complex principles and concepts. They can’t be half a small bowl of broth. Uh, usually it’s the principles adding up that make a concept. Duh. Yet, I was constantly feeling like I was being criticized by the experts because my posts were too long. They said I needed to be short and snappy. As Kris quoted the experts: “Readers are scanners…….five paragraphs……max.”

Here’s some exaggerated examples of what they wished I would adhere to. Read more

August 8, 2007

President Bush says “No” to an Uncle Sam Bailout

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

neil-cavuto.JPGAfter reading BENN‘s, Michael‘s and Greg‘s articles today, my ears were uber-perked regarding the current market conditions. In preparing to blog today, I had Fox News on in the background and loved Cavuto’s analysis of the current conditions so much that I cared enough to pause, play, pause, play and transcribe his “Common Sense” piece. Do you agree or disagree with the following?

“Sometimes, the toughest thing about freedom is recognizing that you are also free to screw up, to make mistakes, to not read mortgage fine print or to understand that adjustable rates can also adjust up. In a free society, you are also free not to learn these things; you are free to assume that when you make the biggest purchase in your life, you do not have to do the most amount of research on the purchase in your life. You are free to study everything, or study nothing. You are free to be duped. It is not fair, my friends, it is not right.

I think the President in his discussions with me today cut to the core of the problem in some mortgages today. Some didn’t know what they were getting into. Some buyers didn’t read, some did not care, some stories did not end well. Some presidential candidates say ‘make the government make them well. Help them out, bail them out.’

But, the President today offering me a not so politically correct answer- “no.” No bailouts, no gains, no money for the very same folks who some say created the mess in the first place. FORCE them to be transparent? Yes. Force them to write in English? Yes. Forcing them to do everything to help borrowers before dumping them on Uncle Sam? Yes. But, you don’t correct a problem by throwing more money at the problem. I think that what the President was saying is that in the end, it is up to US to know when we’re getting in too deep.”

August 8, 2007

The National Association of Realtors is Simply Outrageous

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

This title truly comes from the heart. Reading the Wall Street Journal today, I stumbled across the latest report from the lead economist at the National Association of Realtors. In the face of overwhelming negative information and despite their own lowered forecasts, Mr. Lawrence Yun states,

Existing-home sales should be relatively stable over the next few months, holding in a modest range, with some pent-up demand growing from buyers who’ve been on the sidelines.” He continues on to say, “A modest upturn is projected for existing-home sales toward the end of the year, with broader improvement to include the new-home market by the middle of 2008

Perhaps he considers the third time he tries to shovel this to the markets will be the charm. I am not sure what it takes to be an economist, let alone head of economic research at the National Association of Realtors, but the first interview question must be “Do you have a pair of unbreakable, impenetrable, gigantic Rose Colored glasses?”

Before I move forward, I want to say that I understand that there are many different economic philosophies out there. From Regan’s supply side economics to our own Jeff Brown’s interesting economic theories, there can be many ways to interpret various economic indicators. Instead of spouting my own point of view, I will layout simple economic trends and let you the reader be the judge of where you think the market will go.

The Current Market Climate:

  • The Subprime mortgage market has been shut down, shutting out at least 10% (probably more) of the buying market
  • Alt-A (Loans below prime, but above subprime) mortgages have taken a huge hit, shutting out another indeterminate amount of buyers (~2-5%)
  • Fed chose to hold interest rates steady, resulting in higher expected mortgage rates
  • Adjustable rate mortgage resets hit many consumers in their wallet very hard
  • Time on the market has increased significantly for most markets and overall
  • Defaults have been climbing and have showed no signs of slowing. Additionally, defaults significantly lower market values, resulting in lower selling prices
  • Leverage finance troubles in the broader economy will have an effect on real estate Read more
August 8, 2007

Sun Microsystems draws free pictures of the twenty-first century; to be shown to barbarians to illustrate the path to relevance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s the opposite of an antiquated product in a useless form-factor being hoarded behind a paywall? Sun Microsystems has developed the world’s fastest microprocessor — and is making all of the design details available by Open Source:

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, “Niagara 2” – named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community – whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

The economics of walls and safes and locks and chains is based in fear, hostility, suspicion, anger and doubt. Resources are presumed to be scarce, so if I don’t hoard them with an ugly vigilance, I’ll starve.

The economics of abundance is built on the opposite premises: Openness, candor, an effortless joy that flowers into pure splendor: The only true economic resource is human intelligence, a resource infinite in potential. By sharing with you everything I know, I will enrich us both: You will have the wealth I have created so far, and I will have the wealth you will create from that starting point.

These startling innovations are as new as Socrates, at least, so people can be forgiven for not having learned them after twenty-five centuries’ time. But there are two unhappy consequences to the economics of hoarding. The first is the tax on human dignity that comes from wresting treasure away with a thief’s cunning, hiding it and cowering over it, like the baubles in a raven’s nest, with a stingy, guarded greed. But the second is the vast riches that are foregone by this idea of wealth as trinkets to be withheld, rather than as ideas to be shared and cultivated.

We come back to Cain and Abel. Abel’s wealth is the raven’s wealth, gems and metals, portable and enduring but finite in quantity. Cain’s wealth is the fruit of Read more

August 7, 2007

Looking for a traditional listing agent when Redfin.com lets you down? 60 Minutes has got that covered, too!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Beau Betts in Seattle writing about the 60 Minutes commercial for Redfin.com:

60 Minutes also interviewed Deborah Arends from Re/Max and represented her as having the “old school” real estate mentality and didn’t really portray her in the most positive light.

Well, I just started laughing when I was browsing the mls just now looking for home for a client of mine and saw a house that I think could possibly be a good candidate for them. One thing that I noticed was that the home had been on the market for almost 100 days. Here’s the amusing part, the home was originally listed by Redfin back in late April and they just lost the listing to none other than Deborah Arends.

Arends took a beating by proxy for the rest of us. It’s good to see her getting a bit of her own back.

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August 7, 2007

Greg plays PHP games with ZeeMaps: The story for July in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kris Berg and Jonathan Dalton have been making good use of ZeeMaps to show sales activity in their local market areas.

I’ve been digging this, but at StarPower, I discovered that I am smart and lazy — good at figuring out how to avoid hard work. So: I built a little bot that, in conjunction with our MLS system, will build ZeeMaps of ideas I want to illustrate visually. Here, for example, is MLS activity in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Phoenix for the month of July: Active, Pending, Expired and Cancelled. I have the bot set up to use different colors for Sold, Active With Contingencies and Temporarily Off Market, as well.

We’ll use this for DistinctivePhoenix.com, to show off the neighborhoods we farm, but we will be able to use it for any purpose we can imagine — listing appointments, price-adjustment meetings, etc. We can make a map out of any search we can run. It’s not a mapping search interface, but it’s something while we wait to get a mapping search interface.

August 7, 2007

New York Times discovers Earth: “Mr. Sulzberger, tear down that wall!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Says the New York Post, the New York Times is about to remove the paywall that conceals from public awareness its once-famous (even if smarmy and tendentious) op-ed columnists:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives – including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.

The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis would only say in an e-mailed statement, “We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com.”

While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.

I’m told there is something like this in real estate — news of dubious value jealously hoarded behind a paywall — but, since I don’t pay for ordinary information, I can’t say for sure.

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August 6, 2007

In Search of Excellence

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

That, of course, was the name of a best-selling management book that came out in the early eighties. It not so much defined my market philosophy as confirmed what I’d already learned from Nordstrom: Concentrate on excellence and rewards will follow. Concentrate on rewards, and you’re pretty much assured of being consigned to mediocrity.

What’s been interesting to watch in the twenty five or so intervening years isn’t so much that nearly every business gives lip service to the tenet, but what’s happened to the definition of ‘excellence’. The education establishment meets failing test scores by dumbing down the tests. Grades are allocated not on merit, but on the perceived sensitivities of the students, just as soccer games are played without keeping score so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. You can get an undergrad English Lit degree at the University of Washington without ever having studied Shakespeare. In the frenetic twenty-first “I want it now!” century reading has become a chore, replaced by vapid visual stimulation and fifteen minute podcasts. Writing skills have devolved to YouTube. Joseph Conrad need not apply.

So what? Here’s so what: Words matter. Reading builds vocabulary, writing exercises its use. But not only is someone who draws on 150,000 words able to communicate concepts better than one who’s limited to the normal 50,000, but he or she is infinitely better able to conceive them in the first place. I’ve said — often — that good writers invariably make good thinkers, largely because they do.

All of which was going through my mind as I read this weekend’s BHB posts.

Whew. Excellent.

Before I started my own RE blog I searched the internet to see how others were doing it. Lots of people giving advice, most of it in the genre of Kris’ exquisite satire: Keep it short, be witty, illustrate cleverly. Most blogs seemed to keep diligently to that formula, but two things were apparent: that A) Most were blogging just to be blogging, and not to be actually saying anything; and B) the “Keep it short” formula was necessary to mask an inability to string words Read more

August 6, 2007

Vale, carne vale: Recasting The Odysseus Medal as a carnival of real estate weblogging excellence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m pretty fed up with the Carnival of Real Estate. It is what it is, and there have been times over the past year when it has blown tender kisses toward the sublime. But much too often it has chosen to rut around in the mud, and, in any case, it is much too much of everything to be anything at all.

This is not good.

There is a Carnival of Real Estate Investing and a Consumer-Focused Real Estate Carnival, both of which seem to do a decent job of staying on-topic. The Carnival of Real Estate should be devoted to excellence in real estate weblogging, broadly defined. Instead it has become a Carnival of Solipsism, a space where the inherent subjectivity of judging has given way to an overarching, overreaching subjectivism: The universe is whatever that week’s judge says it is. An entry that would have been judged the best by any rational standard can get buried beneath the judge’s whim, the testy assertion of a right to supplant enduring standards of excellence with a momentary fit of pique.

In rebuttal, one word: Bah!

For a first thing, I am done with the Carnival of Real Estate. I have supported it since its birthing. BloodhoundBlog has entered a post for every new edition, winning, despite everything, more than any other weblog. No more. I will no longer submit posts from BloodhoundBlog to the CoRE. If individual contributors wish to enter their posts, that’s their business, but I will no longer make an official entry from BloodhoundBlog, nor will I enter any of my own posts.

Second, I have recast The Odysseus Medal as a new carnival of real estate weblogging. This is the description of the new carnival from its home page:

A weekly carnival for real estate, mortgage, real property investing and housing weblogs — very broadly defined. The Odysseus Medal is awarded to the highest quality writing in real estate weblogging.

The Odysseus Medal competition will be hosted at BloodhoundBlog every week, and it will be judged by me alone. That is arrogance personified, but by doing things this way webloggers will be assured of Read more

August 6, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at RealEstateUndressed. Host Larry Cragun got around our having broken the rules on entries by breaking all the rules. In consequence, this week there will be two consumer-focused real estate carnivals and no Carnival of Real Estate.

Even so, our friend John L. Wake took second place with Landscape staging your home.

Michael Cook came in fifth with Can I Still Get a Mortgage in Today’s Lending Markets? With Cold Hard Cash and Great Credit, Certainly; Otherwise?

I respect the right of each weekly judge to do what he or she wants about the Carnival — the lord knows we do. But much more than that, I respect, admire, revere and exalt actual excellence in real estate weblogging. We’re going to do something different from now on. News later…

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August 6, 2007

Black Pearls: Two practical uses for video in real estate marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Someday soon I’m going to write a post with a title like “Why all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.” Here’s the one-word summary as a teaser: Bandwidth.

In the mean time, here are two ways of using video in real estate marketing that are actually useful and practical right now. These qualify as Black Pearls because Cathy thought up one of them while we we at the StarPower Conference.

Black Pearl #1: At your initial listing appointment, videotape the seller’s tour of the home
If you do this, you’ll able to revisit everything you saw in the home, to review every detail the seller divulged and to provide the basis for your notes on repairs and staging. You can use stills or clips from the video to show the seller what you want corrected. You may even be able to use clips from this video for your marketing video — even though all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.

Black Pearl #2: Videotape the seller’s instructions on the major systems
This may happen at the final walkthrough or some earlier time, but if you’re representing buyers of homes with complicated amenities — pools, spas, septic tanks, home theater or central vacuum systems — you should be writing training classes into the purchase contract. We use language like this: “Seller agrees to hold a two-hour class for Buyer at any mutually-agreeable time prior to Close of Escrow to teach the care and use of the pool, septic system and any other major systems, tools or appliances on the property.” If you’re the buyer’s agent, you should videotape this class, but you should do it even if you’re the lister if the buyer’s agent does not. Deliver it to the buyers as a DVD, split into chapters by major systems. This is a closing gift that keeps on giving.

We have a third idea, videotaping the reactions of visitors to our open houses, HGTV-style, but they’re always too shy. Besides, all available real estate video solutions suck eggs.

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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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