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Category: Real Estate (page 206 of 266)

March 12, 2007

Passive marketing can swing sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was too busy doing this last week to talk about it. This is me from Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Passive marketing can swing sale

How much time and effort should you expend to sell your house? The answer is simple: whatever it takes.

Last week, we talked about pricing, repairs and staging. Let’s talk now about passive marketing.

You’ll have a sign in your yard. Is it effective? There’s a flier box out there. Are any fliers in it? You have a listing in the MLS systems. Six photos are permitted. How many will you have? Is your listing on Realtor.com? Other Internet listing sites?

On Realtor.com, buyers often skip listings that don’t have a virtual tour. Does yours have one? Does it have its own Web site? A video podcast? A floor plan?

Your house is in great repair, it looks fabulous, and it’s priced right. This is where passive marketing can succeed or fail.

Here are some ideas we have been exploring:

  • We’re building custom, full-color signs for our listings. The point? Stopping traffic.
  • We do full-color fliers, but we also do a full-color, business-card-size flier we hope will be retained.
  • We build a custom weblog for every home we list, with dozens of photos. We do one or more virtual tours of the home and neighborhood, and we’re planning to do video podcasts of listings. The MLS listing, the flier and an interactive floor plan will all be available on the weblog, along with any other documentation.
  • We make everything we can available on the MLS system, on Realtor.com and other listing sites.

Why go to all this trouble? If someone is interested in the house, we want to answer every conceivable question. And the more time buyers spend exploring the listing, the less time they will have available for other homes.

You can call this “aggressive passive” marketing if you want, but this is the kind of effort that can swing the balance in your favor in this real estate market.

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March 12, 2007

Reminder: Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar tomorrow

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As a reminder, tomorrow is the first of the Russell Shaw Sales Success seminars.

The event will be held Tuesday March 13, 2007, at the offices of North American Title, 3200 East Camelback Road, Phoenix, AZ 85018. The event will run from 6:30 PM to approximately 9:30 PM, and refreshements will be served.

There is no charge to attend.

Russell will handle two meta-topics, followed by question and answer sessions, with a short break between.

North American Title and Worldwide Credit Corporation are sponsoring the event.

I’ve made a poster you can hang up in your office to let other agents know about the seminar. All the details plus driving directions.

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March 11, 2007

We’re not MENSA members – but real estate is a dream job

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

The following was on the front page, just under the masthead of Sunday’s Arizona Republic:

Home Values rise despite slowdown

Despite falling prices by year’s end, leftover momentum from the Valley’s housing boom pushed 2006 values above the previous year’s values in almost every city.

Median price increases in Maricopa County ranged from 2% in Higley to 47% in Tonopah. Only Waddell and Youngtown experienced declines, according to The Republic’s latest Valley Home Values survey.

So what now? Analysts agree the market is in transition. Some believe the market has not yet hit bottom; others predict a turnaround.

“This is a good market,” analyst Jay Butler says. “It’s good vanilla ice cream. It’s not gourmet ice cream.” – Glen Creno

I’ve met Glen Creno and honestly believe him to be a good person. Also, I have no reason to believe that Jay Butler is anything but a decent man, as well. Unlike someone like Keith Brand or Mike Ferry who will knowingly spread lies and mis-information in order to achieve their goals – a social personality may err, but they aren’t doing it on purpose.

Using the median sales prices of an area (which almost all economists and others doing sales data analysis seem to want to do) may be quite useful in Not MENSAdetermining which city has the best (or worst) affordability. Median sales prices have no meaningful value if used to determine short-term movement of home prices. NONE. The median price of a home can go down and that does not mean that the actual selling price of any home in that area went down even one dollar! The median price can go up and it does not even begin to suggest that “the prices went up”. Everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.

How do I know? I’m a member of Not MENSA. I know and use the MENSA pick up lines. I don’t have a PHD so I don’t have to take loads of statistics and churn out predictions for the valley or the nation. Based on a survey that NAR wrote about, I’m happy; I have a dream job. A real big part of my dream Read more

March 11, 2007

The Death Of Printed Newspapers: The Sooner, The Better

by

Real Estate Marketing Executive

Author website

I don’t care how printed newspapers die.

I’ve read the pundit’s opinions on why they WILL die. Some of them make sense. Some of them don’t. Laurie Manny even pointed out that the New York Times publisher is predicting the death of print. I have a few opinions of my own I could add to the mix. But I don’t care.

I only care that the printed newspaper SHOULD die, and sooner than later. Sulzberger’s five year prediction is too long for my taste. Why?

newsprint waste 2Let me throw out some numbers. 38.9% of the waste stream in the United States is paper. (1) Paper! How much of that total is newsprint? I have no idea. The newspaper industry certainly isn’t going to tell us, but let’s just consider this:

Each and ever day in the USA, American’s trash 44 Million newspapers. (1) Repeat that out loud and see how it rolls off the tongue. Does it feel good? I read that number and thought to myself, “Holy crap!” And here I thought the number of napkins wasted at In-N-Out was a problem. It pales in comparison.

In November, the latest numbers I could find, total newsprint consumption was 719,000 metric tons. Newspapers accounted for 567,000 tons of that usage. (2) The way I was taught math, that’s 73%. It’s staggering.

I’m not even going to go into the environmental impact of pulp mill production, or the energy savings that comes as a result of NOT producing the paper in the first place. If you’re interested, you can read more about it here.

I haven’t purchased a printed newspaper in more than four years. I simply don’t have a reason to. I read newspapers online. The times I have picked a “real” newspaper up – on a seat next to me at the airport, or at my door in a hotel – my thought is always the same; I’ve already read about this. I’m certainly not alone in this thought.

What an incredible waste of natural resources.

I was talking to my neighbor, Mike Whitman, about this and he said, “Well yes, that’s fine for you and me. I don’t Read more

March 10, 2007

What is the difference between a weblogger and the press?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

The other day I was on the phone with Jessica Swesey from Inman News and 17 bigfoot real estate webloggers. We were discussing the plans for the Bloggers Connect event at this summer’s Inman Connect. Someone suggested that a panel could address how bloggers can come to be treated as “press.”

To which my instant reaction was, “Ew!”

I really like Jessica Swesey, but, to me, “media” or “press” or especially “mainstream media” suggest the worst kind of teacher’s pet, hall monitor, establishment toadyism. Support the blood drive! Adopt a puppy! Come to the Ladies Auxiliary Bake Sale! It’s not the intense fascination with bad news that riles me as much as the plastic-smiled saccharine boosterism. I am least comfortable when I don’t know if I am being lied to. When I lend my mind to the “press,” I feel like I am being lied to in one way or another most of the time.

This is exactly what weblogging evolved to eliminate. Love him or hate him, Charles Johnson is never trying to hustle you or pander to you. Webloggers say exactly what they mean, and they document every controversy with copious links. Doubt me? Please do! Here’s how you can find out everything I know, with links at each stop to further amend your knowledge. You will die trying to pursue all the links, but — unlike all the preening Read more

March 9, 2007

Stopping traffic to sell houses

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is another level of our hoped-for untouchable assault on the marketplace. I’ve talked about our custom signs before, but this is what everything looks like on the post. We compete against broker’s signs — never custom but really, really ugly. We built a promo postcard out of the main sign, just to rub it in.

We are a boutique brokerage. There are just the two of us, so we are certainly a very tiny brokerage. It would not be wide of the mark to insist that we are an experimental brokerage. I, personally, would rather play with new ideas than do anything else. But, house by house, and piece by piece of this listing puzzle, we are going to take the market for these kinds of homes. The kinds of things we do would be useless on other homes. At $400,000 and up, there is no limit to what we can do, and no limit to the demand to have those things done.

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March 9, 2007

Single-property weblogs: Our latest vision

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been slugging away for days on a new single-property weblog for 909 West Culver Street in Phoenix. Sandboxed for now, and who knows if the extra searchability will matter. The ease of editability for people who aren’t me is a huge bonus. The idea of using WordPress as a CMS only really works if the upfront investment is going to pay off over time, which is not the case here. But the fixed-first-post idea in WordPress 2.1 is perfect for our application, putting the “cover” plus eleven slide shows all in one spot.

What’s new in what we’re doing?: The slide shows and the interactive floor plan. I tried using a Google API map, but it clobbered MSIE 7.0, so I have a static map for now. I’ll be adding a video podcast, but that ain’t there yet.

Not as pretty as Dan Green’s site, I don’t think, but what could be?

Take a look and let me know what you think. We’re aiming at complete untouchability — a listing so rich in value-added features that none of our competitors can touch us. Are we wide of the mark?

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March 9, 2007

Real Estate Investment Theories that can Actually Help You Make Money

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Some of you may have noticed a drop in my postings over the last two weeks. The driver behind this has been mid terms. For those of you who don’t remember what that was like when you were in school, imagine doing all of the work you do in a typical month in a week. All of my studying got me really thinking about this issue of theory vs. practice. One of my pet peeves about most educational experiences is that there is too much theory and not enough practice. Worse yet, many of the theories do not work in practice. I thought I would spend some brief time outlining a few higher level theories that work and their implications in practice (don’t click away, I promise there is good practical knowledge to come).

Theory #1: Most markets tend to have a natural vacancy rate and there is a mean reversion tendency if prices get too high or too low. A lot of very complicated math proves this out for most markets

Practice #1: Most markets tend to stay at a certain vacancy rate. If the level of vacancy gets too high, rents come down until the natural vacancy rate is achieve. If vacancy gets too low, expect prices to increase until this vacancy rate is achieved.

How can the investor use this? Take a look at the historical vacancy of a market. If you are technically literate a simple chart will give you an idea of the natural vacancy rate. If you are not, you can probably simply eyeball it and be close. Try to buy when vacancy levels are above the natural vacancy rate. Properties will be cheaper and you will experience appreciation by simply waiting for the market to correct itself. This is a simple strategy that really works in practice. Smart buying can keep an investor in profits in an up or down market. This point is an interesting twist on buy low/sell high. Essentially buy vacant, sell full.

Theory #2: Interest rates affect cap rates directly and indirectly. As interest rates rise, cap rates rise and property values fall. Additionally, Read more

March 8, 2007

Mortgage Brokers and Used-Car Salesmen

by

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

Author website

Q: What do mortgage originators and used-car salesmen have in common?

A: Their customers like to negotiate.

Wanna hear about how I screwed up this week?

I read Jeff Corbett and think highly about what he preaches; mortgage transparency. I read Pat Kitano and think he is on the right track with transparency in real estate. I have practiced and written about transparency since I started originating mortgages. I used to do it this way:

Mr. Customer, there are certain fixed costs associated with every loan. Appraisal, underwriting, etc.. Then there is our margin. We like to make $X,000 per loan. If I am able to retain that margin, and close 8-10 transactions each month, I can make a pretty good living for me, pay the light bill, the broker, the supplies, etc., and give you a pretty good deal. Now, I’m about to let you in on a secret…

We all do this in the mortgage business. I choose to do this upfront and give you access to my wholesale ratesheets. I’m going to “pull back the curtain” and give you “access to the great and powerful Oz” (The great and powerful Oz is Wall Street). Let’s get in the game together and make this happen. I think you’ll get a really good deal if we do this.

Some people love this transparency approach; many do not.

I ran this idea past Laurie Manny today. I’m helping one of her customers with an investment property purchase in Long Beach, CA. Her comment ?

“What-ever! I trust you to do my client right.”

Laurie further cautioned that not everyone practices transparency in the mortgage business and I could be eliminating myself from the transaction by my inability to flexibly negotiate terms. She brought up a great point; people LOVE to “get a deal”. She reminded me that the reason I “captured” her client was because of the way I confidently quoted terms and “closed” her.

I was in Phoenix earlier this week to meet with a would-be home buyer; I Read more

March 7, 2007

What’s The Rate?

by

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

Author website

There are so many ways we were taught in mortgage sales training to answer that question:

1) Well…that depends on your…credit…income…equity…purpose for the loan , etc.

2) What rate are you trying to get?

3) It would be unprofessional of me to diagnose your problem…blah…blah…blah

I realize that when a guy asks you that question, on a plane from Phoenix to San Diego, he’s making small talk and wondering what the market is doing. I know that he means the 30-year fixed rate, for loans under $417,000, 1% origination fee, no points, full-documentation, 80% loan-to-value.

Most of America believes that God whispers that rate to Ben Bernanke every morning who sets it based on that daily divine revelation.

Without further wise-ass comments, that rate is 5.875% (for a 6.13% APR).

We are an equal opportunity lender.

March 7, 2007

Poster for Free Russell Shaw Sales Success seminar

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen has ironed out all the details for next Tuesday’s Russell Shaw Sales Success seminar.

As a reminder, the event will be held Tuesday March 13, 2007, at the offices of North American Title, 3200 East Camelback Road, Phoenix, AZ 85018. The event will run from 6:30 PM to approximately 9:30 PM, and refreshements will be served.

There is no charge to attend.

Russell will handle two meta-topics, followed by question and answer sessions, with a short break between.

North American Title and Worldwide Credit Corporation are sponsoring the event.

I’ve made a poster you can hang up in your office to let other agents know about the seminar. All the details plus driving directions.

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March 7, 2007

The Responibility To Be A Mentor

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Why aren’t you a mentor? Most experienced agents aren’t. And no, answering a question or two from a neophyte doesn’t make you a mentor. It means you weren’t too busy and were in the mood to look magnanimous. Mentoring is a serious missing piece of the real estate puzzle. It is probably a major factor in the huge turnover we see in the business every year, whether it was a boom or bust year.

Why is that?

If you’re an agent or broker, what was your first year like? Did you set the world on fire? Did you meet all your goals and make a name for yourself as a rookie? Not likely.

My first year I made about $3K or so. Of course the median price then was about $19K or so. I was a full time college student working weekends and a few hours before or after class during the week. But I was mentored and a half. 🙂

By the time I received notice from the state I’d passed my licensing test, I’d been attending seminars for two years, 90% of which were attended by me, myself, and I. The forms were old hat for me before I took the state test. I was grilled by Dad and his general manager, Wally Porter about all the finer points of being an agent.

Sometimes Dad would actually let me tag along when he took listings. There was no presentation. He spoke, they listened, they signed. For a naive teenager it looked the world to me like I’d be driving a Lincoln in no time flat.

The key to all the mentoring I received was how generously it was given. There were probably at least ten experienced agents/brokers who took the time to pass on their experience and to ensure I actually understood them. They taught me the things you just can’t learn in school. They also invariably reminded me that I’d no doubt be in the business long term and would have the obligation to do for others what they so graciously were doing for me.

What were the results of all their mentoring? Who really Read more

March 6, 2007

What’s a Realty.bot? Not me, alas . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re listing Thursday, and it’s been long enough since we’ve done one of these Grand Opera listings that I have a lot of new stuff to invent from scratch. Ideas are easy, it’s execution that’s hard. The sign and the collateral cards are built and being printed. We’re playing with a card that plays off of the sign to emphasize the differences you get by listing with us.

If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can monitor the changes in the web site/weblog named in the sign over the next 48 hours or so. The template is one I’ve been playing with for our brokerage web site (itself to be a weblog), but this version of it will be unique to this house.

I’ve got other balls in the air, too, so I might be thin on the ground for a little while.

James Hsu asked me to define Realty.bot, so here’s an on-stilts explication:

A Realty.bot is an internet start-up that plans to undertake some part of the residential real estate transaction, usually as an adjunct to selling advertising.

Trulia.com and PropSmart.com are listings.bots, acquiring listings by scraping, direct entry and XML feeds.

Zillow.com and several others are AVMs, Automated Valuation Methods, and Zillow is graduating to a direct-entry-only listings.bot, but they don’t like that designation.

Redfin.com can seem like a Realty.bot, but, as with many other new entrants, it’s really a brokerage with a higher-tech front-end.

Arguably, a true Realty.bot is strictly a media/advertising play, but that’s something that could change in time. ShackPrices.com, for example, plans to become a leads vendor, and it is not unreasonable to argue that this may be the ultimate business model for most/all Realty.bots.

A better bright-line dividing point might be face-to-face end-user contact. We may come to a point where a Realty.bot is distinguished from other vendors by being untouched-by-human-hands, a completely automated real estate product offering.

By then I will have made up different words.

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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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