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Category: Real Estate (page 192 of 266)

May 10, 2007

Hey, can I hop a train to that shack? ShackPrices.com introduces proximity to mass transit as a search criterion

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the most innovative of the map-based real estate search portals is ShackPrices.com. A house is a house and a neighborhood is a neighborhood, but a home is a lifestyle, and ShackPrices is doing more than anyone else to integrate lifestyle data in its databases.

The latest innovation is showing proximity to present or future mass transit services in its search results:

Beginning today, home buyers can search from thousands of homes for sale near bus stops along one or more King County Metro Bus lines or near Sound Transit Rail stops. Home buyers can combine their search for homes near mass transit lines with a variety of other factors including price, size, and keywords using ShackPrices’ intuitive map search.

“By letting home buyers search for properties near current and future transit stops, we are giving the public a valuable tool to find homes that fit an environmentally friendly lifestyle,” said ShackPrices.com co-founder Galen Ward, “Most importantly, we’re giving home buyers the opportunity to find a home that should substantially increase in value when transit lines are complete. Homes within 500 feet of rail lines are worth as much as $40,000 more than similar homes just a little farther away.”

I, personally, don’t like taxpayer-subsidized mass transportation, but “people like pie.” In the urbanosphere, proximity to mass transit is a very common question. Answering this question visually and automatically would seem to be painfully obvious — except no one else is doing it.

My frank assessment: ShackPrices.com should post a “Make Me Move” price to see if anyone in Seattle has brains enough to write an eight-figure check.

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May 9, 2007

Realtors Can Pre-Qualify Buyers If A Lender Isn’t Handy

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

It’s Sunday afternoon and the Phillies game approaches the top of the ninth inning. You, the professional Realtor, look at your watch and notice it’s 3:40PM. You’ll be locking up the door, uprooting the signs and heading home after a long afternoon at a particularly slow open house. You can almost smell the dinner your loving spouse has prepared.

A couple walks in to the home and tells you that they are just in Philadelphia for the weekend. Dad’s finishing up his final negotiation for the new job and Mom’s trying to figure out if the kiddies will adapt to Philly.

They toured open houses all weekend. They need a Realtor with whom they connect. Mom announces that YOU are the perfect Realtor for them while the Phillies put away the Dodgers in the background. One catch… they REALLY want to see a home across town but it wasn’t open today.

“Will you represent them?” they ask.

You explain that your policy is pre-qualified buyers with a Buyers’ Brokerage Agreement.

“No problem !” they exclaim.

You dial your favorite lender while Mom and Dad review and sign the BBA. No lender answers your call.

Do you load them up into your SUV and show them properties?

You CAN pre-qualify that buyer in about five minutes; you just need to know what to ask. Seven Realtors from Active Rain gathered today to listen to my 20 minute presentation about “How Realtors Can Pre-Qualify a Buyer”

In this 20-minute podcast, I reveal:

1- How to talk about money without sounding intrusive.

2- The “Three C’s of Lending”

3- The one question that separates the buyers from the wannabes.

4- Red flags that require a conversation with a lender

5- Green flags that signify that a loan is imminent.

Download it to your iPod and get prepared for next Sunday afternoon (or just listen to it here).

May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

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May 8, 2007

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves Read more

May 8, 2007

A Case (by Case) For and Against Dual Agency

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Trevor Smith’s answer to Dual Agency?

Let the buyer represent himself, and give him the commission regularly paid to the Buyer’s Agent. (Granted, this would still leave the buyer relatively unprotected, but at least if something goes bad, its his own fault and not the agents).

Your obvious question is, “Where are the customary apostrophes to indicate a contraction or possessive noun?” No, wait, that is just me. What you are really thinking I suspect is that this sounds suspiciously like a Redfin philosophy, but then, Trevor is not so coincidentally a Redfin agent from Seattle.

By the way, according to Trevor, Redfin’s Blue Collar Spokesmodel, they are gaining market share there at warp speed. In 2006, it was reported that Redfin closed over 200 transactions. Now, it seems they are putting those deals to bed at a clip of 90 a week. I feel a press release coming on!

In light of Trevor’s recent remarks, I’ll take the opportunity to open old dual agency wounds. Is dual agency truly the root of all evil? It depends on who you ask. Even here at the Kennel Club, we have two camps. Now, let’s make that three.

I fall somewhere in the middle on the subject. Steve and I have acted as dual agents in many transactions. We do not like it, and we do not seek it out, but at times it is so very appropriate that any argument suggesting we are compromising our agency duties is simply ludicrous.

BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS ME

Greg Swann is a well-known critic of dual agency transactions.

Disclosed Dual Agency cannot possibly be effected — in reality — without repeated, overt agency violations.

I will offer one example of how this statement is not only wrong but offensive to those of us that bend over backwards to protect the rights and interests of our clients – all of them. We closed escrow recently on a transaction involving our listing and our buyer. The reasons dual agency worked in this situation relate back to Russell Shaw’s contention that we have less control over our client’s decisions than one might imagine.

The idea that the Read more

May 7, 2007

Pachelbel versus Warhol: Taking desktop real estate video to the streets

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I stand accused of being the “Andy Warhol of real estate video”. I’m pretty sure them’s fightin’ words, but, rather than exacting my vengeance by making a nine-hour film of a dripping faucet, I have chosen instead to assert my classical roots.

Vide: I had planned to do a video for this listing, but it sold before I could get it done. So I did one now for practice. This is just another randomized slide show with music, but it works better for me than the kind of slow, blurry pan and stammer we see too often in real estate videos: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.”

But: I’m learning a lot by playing with this software. I have this same slide show in a rock video-style presentation, Ken Burns-style fauxtion with angled cuts and dissolves — completely MTV-creepy. What I want to learn how to do is supplant the images from recorded video, retaining the audio, so that the kind of interview I put together last Friday becomes more visually appealing and more informative.

This is doable. As with high-end graphics production, the software is takin’ it to the streets. Neither desktop publishing nor desktop video are necessarily as high in quality as a professional might achieve. But the price is right, and, most often, close enough is good enough.

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May 7, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at Lansner on Real Estate at the Orange County Register. Writing from The San Diego Home Blog, Kris Berg took fifth place for her playful rant on open house signs. Russell Shaw came in second place with his not-at-all-playful rant on the folly of real estate discounting.

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at the Real Estate Investing Blog. We entered a great Jeff Brown post, but Jeff and the CoREI are writing the other chapters of The Secret — The Law of Mutual Repulsion — so he didn’t win. He’ll be crushed if he ever does, so here’s to his unbroken streak of ratifying if not totally gratifying disappointments.

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May 7, 2007

What’s the antidote for a dubious statistic? A countervailing dubious statistic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seventy-seven percent of home-buyers start their home search on the internet. Except, sixty-nine percent of Americans think the internet is a pain in the ass. What’s the real truth? I like to say that forty-seven percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. It’s not true, but, unlike all the other dubious statistical “news”, it’s funny.

May 5, 2007

The Almeria Files: 318 photos in 60 seconds

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made another short movie to demonstrate that real estate videos don’t have to be small and crappy and void of colorful details. Better than this, it seems to me to illustrate the real life of the wired listing agent. Believe it or not, the film features every photo we took for the Almeria listing — in 60 seconds.

This is for your eyes only. I’m not sharing it with potential buyers. If I can impose a theme upon it, it’s about the accelerated crush that goes into putting one of these listings together. I think the music — Midtown by Tom Waits — sets just the right tone…

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May 5, 2007

Renovation Project

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Never one to sit idly by, Greg has come up with another of his “Insanely Great Ideas”. A video tour essentially hosted by the seller, to me, is shear genius. The fact is, we are selling not a bunch of sticks and stucco but a lifestyle each time we market a property. What better way to make it personal than to bring the potential buyer into the home through video, not as someone panning and zooming their way through a bunch of lifeless rooms but as an invited guest to a conversation over coffee?

Now, Greg’s video deals with a renovation, so it is hard to achieve the warm-and-fuzzies where this particular home is concerned, but I think the possibilities are exciting. The problem for me becomes one of time and time management.

I would venture a guess that most of us here have a hard time with delegation. The fact that we are participating on blogs would suggest that we have some grasp of the power of the technological tools at our disposal, and anyone with a feedreader knows that forty-seven hundred (give or take) new spiffy ways to advertise our properties and ourselves are born every nanosecond. Unless I am a Realty.bot with an arsenal of tech geniuses at my disposal, I have to value engineer my way through the maze of exposure opportunities.

Take the process and importance of having killer property photos. I finally had to acquiesce and admit that photos taken by a true professional are superior to any I can take with my own, albeit very expensive, digital camera. All of our properties, from the one-bedroom condo to the multi-million dollar estate now enjoy professional photos. True, there is an added cost involved, and I still cling to the notion that given the right equipment and time commitment I could achieve somewhat comparable results, yet there is a cost savings… of time. My forty or so photos are now delivered to me within 24-hours in hi-res and web-sized format. No more resizing, no more hours on end of Adobe fun, which frees me to do other things. And Read more

May 4, 2007

Not-ready-for-HGTV: My alternative to the listing video

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am not hugely in love with the idea of video for listings. My problem is simple enough to state: I think photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And: Because they hold still. Video has geek-appeal to geeks and age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if video overcame its crappy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

However: I do want that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more than our competitors can on our listings. And: If I can soak up another twenty minutes of a potential buyer’s time, that’s twenty minutes that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with our listings, even if video competes poorly with digital photography.

So what I wanted was a video format that made sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. This film was made this week — and, yes, I know: I suck as a videographer. The particular home is an extensive restoration, so taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch — this is a way of turning video into a true added-value asset in the listing package.

The next time this seller refurbs a house, we’ll shoot video all along, memorializing the major changes. It might be slick to mount a web-cam from the ceiling to snap a picture every five minutes while work is going on: Time-lapse remodeling.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images — there’s luck! — but we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 4, 2007

Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

Here’s the brutal truth about the real estate market in the Valley of the Sun: There are nine homes for sale for every motivated, qualified buyer.

So what should you do to make sure that your home is the one in nine that will sell this month? Everything you can.

For our listings, we’re pushing our way up the technology ladder as fast as we can. We’re doing custom yard signs for each listing, custom Web sites or Weblogs, interactive floor plans, virtual tours, even video tours featuring interviews with the sellers.

It goes without saying that the homes are priced right, in perfect repair and staged to encourage buyers to move themselves in mentally. Ideally, we want an inspection report, with the repairs documented, and an appraisal to demonstrate that the price is fair — and that an offer will make it through loan underwriting.

Not everyone can do all this work, but there is a simple technology available to everyone that can make a huge difference in marketing your home.

What is it? Digital photography.

An MLS listing can have up to six photos, but many have only one — or none. A flier can have even more pictures, and a simple Web page can feature photos of everything that matters in the home. Photography hasn’t been expensive since the days of George Eastman, but digital photography is virtually free.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Good real estate photos should be taken with the widest-angle lens you can lay hands on. And while multiple mega-pixels sell cameras, for a real estate photo to be useful it needs to be a small file size: 640 x 480 pixels is perfect. Fill the frame, showing what’s important, omitting what isn’t, and be sure to work with plenty of light.

Virtual tours draw eyes at Realtor.com. People will watch videos, if only for the thrill of watching “TV” on the computer. Poetic copy instills dreams. But nothing sells the buyer’s imagination on a home like a wealth Read more

May 4, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #5

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the fifth of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 3, 2007

FHA Streamlined Refinance Loans: Originators, Git You Some !

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Loan originators, subprime mortgage blues got you down in the dumps? Let’s talk about a way to get your pipeline phat again. I’m going to give you a step-by-step plan to start, what Todd Duncan calls, the 90-day burn. If you follow these steps, and you don’t close 10 loans in the next 90 days, quit the business.

I’ve long been a believer in campaigning. A campaign is where you focus your promotional and sales efforts on a particular product type. The benefits of campaigning are astounding. You crank up the action volume (calls, door-knocking, mailers, e-mails, etc.) so SOMETHING happens. You learn a specialty because you must study the product to campaign. Consequently, you close a bunch of loans and half of them won’t be related to the campaign. Don’t worry about that.

Step One: Learn the FHA streamlined refinance guidelines. This loan program is designed for the greenest originator. I cut my teeth on this product when I started in the business. No credit scoring, no income documentation, and a current mortgage and you get an approval.

Step Two: Find a bunch of FHA loans . I’d call your favorite title company and get a list of HUD loans, closed within 10 miles of your office.

Step Three: Go on a mission. Go forth and communicate to these homeowners about the FHA streamlined refinance program with the zeal of a newly ordained priest. This is your career your fighting to save so pull out all the stops. Mail a postcard, call the customers (if they are not on the do not call list), even go so far as to knock on their door and hand them your card while explaining that you are an FHA streamlined refinance expert. If you are not an expert, dedicate three hours to this loan guidelines link and you’ll be one.

Step Four: Track your activity items. You should be able to talk to 20 people per day within the first 60 days. You will have Read more

May 3, 2007

If you were the cutest dog at the dog show, would you work for world peace, or would you just go for the contact info?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Give Shaun McLane of EKDAY.com credit for self-promotional skills, anyway. He has started a new site called Posh’d, which is — I kid you not — a beauty contest for real estate web site.

Say that again: He is finding the least ugly of — let’s face it — the ugliest stuff on the web, and featuring it on a one-page gallery site, which links back to the designated beauty queens. I can’t but think that this will win Shaun the Mister Congeniality award, but the idea is still kind of a stretch.

For example: BlueRoof.com is featured first and should be. It is a stunning site. But right next door is Realtor.com, looking as dowdy and dated as the Yellow Pages.

(For younger readers, the Yellow Pages is a big, useless book perfect for exhausting landfills. The Council of Residential Specialists publishes its own version, which is even stoopider.)

The rest of the dog show, including BloodhoundBlog, is not awful. But it’s not great, either. Better than average, maybe, but that’s hardly an accomplishment. I know there are some sightly sites among the Realty.bots. For example, Eppraisal.com has the coolest Web 2.0-like Weebils. My guess is that there is more and better to be found in The Undiscovered Country, the world beyond weblogs.

So: Here’s for everyone except BlueRoof getting kicked out of the dog show by ever-prettier dogs. Even better: Here’s to clinging by claws to our vaunted status by revising our sites into something useful and beautiful — with no movies, no MIDIs and an absolute maximum of 937 links on the home page. Who ever heard of anything like that in real estate?

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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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