But remember: A little mustard goes a long way.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Real Estate (page 205 of 266)
In celebration of Hillary Clinton’s breathtaking reification of the economics of real estate, I thought I’d share with you “Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics, Translated.”
Hat tip: Donald Luskin.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Way over here in San Diego our business model has been simple: We always keep in mind we’re the professionals our clients are looking to for solid, winning, advice. We leave nothing for our clients to do for themselves if we or our associates can do it better. Our clients are family — for life. If they prefer, they can execute a tax deferred exchange involving two states and never leave their own living room.
Our business plan on the other hand has been battered in the last few years by outside forces totally out of our control. Although Purposeful Planning is still the V-12 engine driving the plan, the marketing arm has taken a severe hit in the last few years.
What’s driven the growth of the company has been the ability to market directly to potential clients through highly targeted mailings. Our letters are rich in content, having more detail and humor than our competitors. When we’ve surveyed clients and prospects alike they’ve all agreed they responded to our letters because they seemed more real to them.
So what’s the problem?
All the cold calling in all the industries combined resulted in the no-call legislation. This led to many of them turning to, you guessed it, sending letters. This meant our letters were getting lost in the pile of dung they were receiving daily. We simply got lost in the shuffle. How bad was it? Before the new law, it wasn’t uncommon to generate more than 30 phone calls from a 3,000 piece mailing. Twice as much as marketing folks will tell you is better than average. About two years ago we sent out a 16,000 piece mailing and received not one phone call.
By the way, deep breathing really does help keep you calm. 🙂
We employed our own concept of Purposeful Planning as we searched for a solution. So for the last 28 months or so, we’ve been focused like a laser beam, searching for a new marketing approach. Can’t cold call, mailing is pretty much dead, and postcards are the only thing we’ve seen that can generate less than a 0% response. Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I can’t wait to see the blue-vested, loan originating octegenarian explain the truth-in-lending statement to the first-time home buyer at this new entrant to the mortgage business.
“We’ve got to take action … the economy is not supporting home ownership the way we need it to.” Say what?I? The highest rate of homeownership in the history of homeownership is not enough? Surely whatever is done will make everything worse. Von Mises lived and died for some reason, but no one can remember what it is…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
>Do I really need single-property websites?
>Which is better, Postlets or VFlyer, or why can’t my website template provider just give me a darn feed to my property pages so I can avoid the whole mess altogether?
>Does Dustin have a ponytail? (I like to think so, but it is hard to tell conclusively from his thumbnail photo).
These are the things that weigh heavily on me this morning. So many thoughts, yet I don’t know where to begin. Writer’s block? I have come to the conclusion that this is not so much a condition in which you have nothing to say but the symptom of a loss of focus.
Real estate, unless you operate a finely tuned machine in the Russell Shaw spirit, is a highly cyclical business. Over the years, I have found the cyclical nature of the work and, yes, the paycheck to be the most difficult part of what we do.
Just Say “No”
Life, too, is cyclical. I have been living blog-free for the better part of two weeks. We have joked about the addiction, and an addiction it is. Much like the addict who chooses abstinence to cure the compulsion yet finds himself consumed with the very thought of the “abuse” every moment of the day, I too have struggled with the “I should, but I can’t” demons. The difference is that my abstinence wasn’t a choice.
Life happens, and an event in my personal life recently sapped my every ounce of energy and demanded that I instantly realign my priorities. Enter loss of focus. I suspect we all get somewhat derailed from time to time, and the true challenge is finding your way back, is in not letting your paralysis linger. Don’t get me wrong; it was just a bump in the road, but the tendency in the aftermath is to focus eyes on the pavement while denying yourself the awe of the distant views.
>Why does the sleazy local agent, possessing such an underdeveloped frontal lobe that he undoubtedly signs his contracts with an “X”, get so much business?
>Should I go to the Inman Conference this summer? (That might answer my Read more
Ya see?! We should be listening to Russell Shaw. You can list all day and all night, and never be too busy to scratch your nose. It’s that chasing around with buyers that downs perfectly good Realtors.
Cathy had a buyer-rich day. A final walk-through on a new build. The signing on the same. Then an inspection on a resale home. No lunch, of course. Not much water — and we’re already in the mid-90s in Phoenix. She capped her day with a hair appointment…
…And promptly swooned under the hair dryer. Literally fainted. The salon called me, and I raced off to pick her up.
I will get my hair cut any place that’s close, fast and cheap, and, since I’m ugly to start with, I don’t really care about tonsorial talent or post-tonsorial pulchritude.
Cathy, by contrast, will only go to a tony salon that is twenty minutes from our home in no traffic. In rush hour, it’s forty minutes at least.
I hadn’t even made it to the freeway when the fire department called me to say they were taking her to the hospital.
I met her there, and that was beyond fun. Apparently, hospital employees are world champions at not making contact. And it turns out that the treatment for hunger, dehydration and exhaustion is no food, no water and no sleep. If this “service” costs less than a thousand dollars, I’ll be amazed.
Ah, but I can bitch like a thunderstorm when I need to. Eventually we got free of the hospital. Food. Water. Bed.
Jeff Brown talked about mentoring, and I realized I have been remiss in not leaning on the girl to take advantage of those unexpected opportunities in a busy day when you can grab a bite to eat. Realtors eat like hell, but at least they should have sense enough to eat when they can.
Listing agents, on the other hand, are creatures of leisure. While Cathy was running around like a dervish, I was in the office attending to what is, in fact, her listing:
No Open House this Sunday, though. We had two offers at last Sunday’s Open House, and Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Let me tell you a story about how the subprime mortgage market collapsed and millions of baby boomers had to accept less money in retirement. If you liked the Da Vinci Code, you’re gonna love this one. It’s not wrapped up in sex, or murder, or corruption, just good-old fashioned “pass the buck” and “what the little guy doesn’t know won’t hurt him” attitudes.
WARNING: If you are prone to believe conspiracy theories, you are going to curse, kick the cat, and be extremely pissed off after you finish reading this.
Here is the dirty little secret of the mortgage securitization boom of the last 5-10 years: The little guy gets stung with the losses.
First, a little history lesson. It’s kind of boring but stick with me here. Mortgage backed securities (MBS) were originally the old Ginnie Mae pass-through certificates. The VA or FHA packaged up their loans and sold them through Wall Street to little old ladies who wanted to “juice up the yield” on their portfolio. They were safe because they were backed by a government agency. They yielded more than treasuries because they were a conglomeration of various mortgages. The money was loaned at, oh… 14% (remember the early 80’s ?) and the investors received, say…12%. It was a good deal because the little old lady could only get 9% on Certificates of Deposit. The difference was spread among loan servicers, Wall Street, and even the gub-a-mint agency by employing this securitization tactic.
The problem was that loan principal was returned, along with the interest, on the old Ginnie Mae pass-throughs. Little old ladies didn’t care because they weren’t going to live long enough to spend all of their money (these were 30 year issues). However, Wall Street had problems selling these deals in bulk to institutions because of the prepayment features.
An ambitious mail-room clerk named Lew Ranieri worked at Salomon Brothers and saw an opportunity in the mid 80s. Salomon Brothers was hiring rocket scientists to create a new breed of mortgage-backed security, a collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO), designed to more accurately predict the prepayment speed of the mortgages backing Read more
The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it holdeth not in every point, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we may thereby both see and remember almost all the passions before mentioned. But this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost; and in it: To endeavour, is appetite. To be remiss, is sensuality. To consider them behind, is glory. To consider them before, humility. To lose ground with looking back, vain glory. To be holden, hatred. To turn back, repentance. To be in breath, hope. To be weary, despair. To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation. To supplant or overthrow, envy. To resolve to break through a stop foreseen, courage. To break through a sudden stop, anger. To break through with ease, magnanimity. To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity. To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. To see another fall, disposition to laugh. To see one out-gone whom we would not, is pity. To see one out-go we would not, is indignation. To hold fast by another, is to love. To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. To hurt one’s-self for haste, is shame. Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die. — Thomas Hobbes
There is much to criticize in the RE.net. But one would hope that we would criticize criminality, venality and intentional transgressions, rather than honest, even if thoughtless, errors. From the former, we want not the correction of the bad behavior, but rather its elimination. For the latter, we can be big enough of spirit to help our brothermen learn to do better where they might have done badly. It is certainly within the bounds of reason to argue that Hobbes was more than unnecessarily dour.
Alas, we have a new candidate for The Cheez-Whiz Prize, a new weblog devoted to derision called “realweenie.” (I won’t link to this for the same reason I’ve stopped linking to Housing Panic.) It’s a Six Apart weblog, Read more
We scheduled the room for four hours, but Russell Shaw was convinced we could only manage to fill three hours. Instead, he spoke from 6 pm to 9:58 pm, exceeding his own goal by 33%. In a night dominated by discussions of goals, goal-setting and goal-achievement, it was an impressive accomplishment.
Allen Butler recorded all four hours in audio, and we have much of the evening’s event recorded on video as well. At this point, we don’t know how much, if any, of this we will be distributing.
As we’ve discussed, the underlying purpose of the event was to elicit questions from audience members to be used as curriculum points in future audio and video podcasts. This goal was also eclipsed by a wide margin.
Russell will be speaking at the March 29th StarPower event in Phoenix. He came last night bearing discount coupons, but there weren’t enough to go around. If you would like to attend this event, click here for a discount coupon.
We have at least one more Sales Success Seminar planned, but we don’t know for sure where or when yet. I’ll post more information when I have it.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
FBS Blog. It’s brand new, but if you care about tracking MLS tech topics from the vendor side of the table, subscribe to the feed and see what emerges…
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at RE Agent in Connecticut. This week’s winner? Our own Michael Cook with Real Estate Investment Theories that can Actually Help You Make Money.
Michael has been an outstanding addition the the BloodhoundBlog roster. This is his second win at the Carnival of Real Estate Investing. If you missed it, take a look at Jeff Brown’s encomium to Michael’s brilliance. Brian Brady also wrote a sweet tribute at Active Rain.
Michael Cook is birthing an investment book before your eyes — strong on academic theory, stronger on hard-won first-hand experience. And you get to watch as it emerges from his brain, topic-by-topic, chapter-by-chapter, innovation-by-innovation…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Seth:
Driving home, I started to think about the discontinuity in the graph of salespeople. Discontinuities are interesting, because that’s where you can see how a system works. In this case, it’s obvious that a great salesperson is going to sell far, far more than a good one. Nine women working together can’t have a baby in one month, and ten good salespeople still aren’t going to close the account that a great one could. That’s because it’s not a linear scale. The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.
Come see Russell Shaw tonight and find out what you’ve been missing…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
The lending roller coaster is just starting to roll
Most real estate professionals have to deal with an occasional unexpected consequence involving lenders… but not a string of them like this revelation.
A client of mine decided to be a generous friend. He’s not a wealthy man in the strictest sense of the word, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to help his fellow man – or woman, in this case.
Some of you might know a little about him, as he is Jack in my interview with noted investment real estate broker Jeff Brown on my website.
Jack has a friend who has been living in a drafty house owned by a slumlord. Although she didn’t live in a slum – the owner was treating the building as if it was. She was paying as much as $300 or more each month to heat her little place, as the cold wind blew through it like Swiss cheese.
While looking at other investment opportunities for Jack, he asked me to find a condo that he could buy for this friend – thus allowing her to get out of this awful place she was living in.
Remember – no good deed goes unpunished
My favorite mortgage broker found the perfect program with Countrywide – an 80/20 loan for non-owner occupancy… and I found a perfect condo that Jack’s friend really liked – and with a price that worked.
Our offer, though aggressive, was accepted. So far – so good.
Enter the lead aggregator LendingTree. Jack logged onto their website to look at doing a refi on his home. What Jack did NOT know is that LendingTree would give his info to a dozen lenders who would all pull Jack’s credit (not pulled once and shared with member lenders like you might believe).
So what difference does this make?
Plenty. While Jack was rearranging his finances and paying off debts – he was draining his cash reserves down. The refi was going to bring cash back into the picture for the rehab of his next real estate acquisition.
The trouble is that when all those LendingTree lenders pulled his credit – his credit Read more
It appears the Wall Street Journal has sniffed out major issues in the sub prime lending market only two weeks after Brian Brady broke the news here first. They focused on one of the strongest lenders, New Century, who is now poised to take the biggest fall because of their lax lending practices and perhaps illegal accounting. So why do I bring this up? Simple, it’s a great time to talk about some great investment opportunities on the horizon.
Let me start by saying that this truly is a tragedy. Many unsuspecting people will lose their homes because of poor lending practices. Additionally, many mortgage companies will go under costing thousands more their jobs. While this does not appear to be the 1980’s S&L crisis reborn, it will have some serious repercussions on the mortgage and asset back securities industries.
So where is the opportunity for the investor? Essentially, the foreclosure market will be flush with properties in the coming years. As defaults continue to rise, foreclosures will soon follow. Worse yet, many of the banks that make these loans will be trying to get them off their books as soon as possible. This creates great investment opportunities in markets that might have been inaccessible before. Lots of these loan products were/are huge in markets like California and New York, where prices have sky rocketed. Additionally, with the influx of bank owned properties on the market, expect housing price increases to slow in these markets.
Furthermore, many mortgage companies are now tightening their belts. Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, has completely stopped doing 100% financing. Since they are the industry leader, it is safe to assume many of their peers will follow. This practice will push more people to renting because essentially less people will be able to afford to buy.
This is one example of a way to makes lemonade from some pretty bitter lemons. The ripples of the sub prime fall out will be far and wide, but make no mistake, there will be people that do pretty well because of it. Regardless of your opinion on how or why this situation Read more