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Category: Real Estate (page 209 of 266)

February 26, 2007

The Sunday Real Estate Section Advertisement Problem

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

REMAX Listing Sheet from papersLet’s all agree on the following:

  1. Most home buyers begin their home search on the Internet
  2. Most home buyers use Web-based software to “preview” homes online
  3. Most home buyers receive regular email/web updates from their agent about new homes worth previewing

If we know all of this to be true, why does my local newspaper’s Sunday Real Estate section get larger and larger every weekend?

If it’s to reach home buyers, I am going to laugh. That’s like advertising White Sox Gear for sale in a Cubs fan magazine — your target market is not in the audience.

So, I think you can make one of two arguments about Sunday Real Estate advertising: that the advertising is there is to make the seller “feel good”, or that it’s there to promote the brokerage’s brand.

Either way, it’s worth a re-evaluation.

For the money that is spent on newspaper advertising weekly, real estate agents could be providing more personalized services for home sellers including single-property listing URLs with custom Web design, better videography of the home, and higher-quality signage.

These are all items to which a buyer would respond favorably. In theory, that should lead to higher sales volume and nothing builds a brand name better than having “SOLD” hanging from a listing sign.

Image courtesy: The Village News

February 26, 2007

The truth will set you free — but your chains are forged from sob stories . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was at a party about 13 months ago, a going away party for one of my clients whose house we had just sold. I had sold the hostess her house, and somehow or another we started talking about 80/20 loans — nothing down financing. She had just refinanced to retire the second mortgage, so she had 20% equity in her home at next-to-nothing in out-of-pocket costs.

All around the room, people started nodding and saying 80/20, 80/20. They had all done the same thing, a room full of young homeowners with their homeownership made possible by the no-PMI piggy-back loan.

This is Peter Coy in Business Week’s Hot Property:

Is Your Mortgage Choking You?

For an article in BW, I’m looking to interview people who have subprime ARM mortgages and are feeling squeezed by resets.

A few weeks ago, Coy admitted that margins of error in statistical reporting render much of it meaningless. I have never worked with a sub-prime borrower, but I would expect that, among the stories of people being “choked,” there must also be stories of people who bought homes they would not otherwise have been able to purchase, homes they have subsequently refinanced with conforming loans.

“Proof by anecdote” is bogus in the first place, since anecdotes abound (and they’re much easier than real estate to improve). But surely there are countervailing anecdotes for almost any phenomenon. This might seem to argue for presenting “both sides” of the story. To me, it suggests a better approach. An anecdote in a news article is almost always a fallacious Appeal to Emotion dressed up as testimony. With two or three sad tales, the reporter implies that a situation that might be quite rare is in fact ubiquitous — and that the “solution” propounded requires no rational defense. Facts are facts, and surely thoughtful people can digest them without all that saccharine. Why not leave the anecdotes out altogether…?

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February 26, 2007

Sales Success Training?

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Stack of $100 bills - smallerMost of the national real estate sales trainers training today are selling worthless crap. Want proof? Buy their stuff and see if you can apply any of it and actually make your business better.

Most of the real estate magazine articles that are chock full of “what agents ought to be doing” are written by well intentioned people who either were never successful at selling real estate for a living or never did.

One of the most high profile agents in the world endlessly promotes that he will share (if you sign up for his fabulous training program) how he became so successful. He is quite successful and it would seem logical that he could share quite a bit that would help. One of the main things he “shares” is a cluttered looking clone website that you can buy from him. I’m not quite sure how that website helped him so much as he was fantastically successful before the internet existed.

One trainer (rhymes with fairy) knowingly lies from the stage.

Most agents who enter the business (13 out of 14 by actual count) will be gone in a year or two. Can that be changed by “learning about success”? I really doubt it, as most of them didn’t have much commitment to ever really apply themselves. But that doesn’t include everyone – there are a LOT of people in the real estate business who want to do better and aren’t sure what to do next.

I’m planning on doing something about that. Over the years I have figured out what is involved – exactly – to go from “0 – 60” and I also know what is not involved. We are going to make that information broadly available. Free. Free, in the sense that we won’t be charging any money for any of it. Period. We won’t be endlessly attempting to get new people to listen to the audio or watch the videos because it makes us more money. Our only goal will be to see Read more

February 25, 2007

Interviews Are Back on Track

by

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

Author website

I have two great interviews coming up this week; I think you’ll enjoy them. The interviews are with real, honest-to-goodness BROKERS.
Lenn Harley is an agent in the DC suburbs and runs a firm called Homefinders. I’m reading background about her now and her story about how she became one of the original “internet brokers” is compelling.

Sharon Simms is an associate broker with RE/Max in St Petersburg. FL. She started her real estate career at Merrill Lynch Realty (remember that experiment?) . She manages a team of agents (including her daughter and son). Her post about how architecture makes neighborhoods shows that she is hardly another licensed hack banging on doors.

I’ll be asking them both questions this week. Feel free to add any that you might have for them in the comments box.

February 25, 2007

Feed guarding: Protecting your weblog content from theft — or worse fates . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Back in the dark days before the turn of the millennium, if you saw something I had written, down at the bottom there would be a little addendum: “Join my email update list.” If you did this, you would get a copy of every new essay or story I wrote at the time that I made it public. Not as convenient (or as annoying) as a Listserv, but you wouldn’t have to scrounge around on Usenet to find my deathless prose. Back then, a lot of people distributed content this way.

Dave Winer, the Tesla of weblogging, saw how stupid this was and invented a much more efficient alternative: RSS syndication. Instead of an email pushed from an email client, an email of updated content was pulled from a newsreader. Not only would I not have to undertake any special effort to send the email, you could receive it only if, as and when you wanted it. Genius!

What’s important about this is that, from the standpoint of my copyright to my original content, nothing has changed. Before I was pushing emails to individual readers. Now individual readers are pulling emails. But, simply because an RSS feed is easy to obtain, easy to repurpose, easy to resyndicate — this does not imply that I have waived any rights to my intellectual property.

People sometimes argue that RSS syndication creates a gray area in IP law. It doesn’t. In the United States, a transmissible work of the mind is presumed by default to be copyright protected. The presumption is rebuttable — for example by a waiver of copyright. But if you have not waived the rights to your work, you do not need to assert them by filing a copyright notice or by appending a copyright symbol to your work product. Your work is yours, and, except for fair uses for non-commercial purposes — e.g., a quote with a link in a weblog post — no one has the right to republish your content without your expressed permission.

So: Your fine young weblog gets splogged: Your feed is “scraped” and republished with a lot of creepy Read more

February 23, 2007

Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman issues a non-apology apology: This is what it sounds like when pigs fly . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, good grief…

If Redfin.com wants to make peace with the real estate industry, all it has to do is hold up its end. If it wants to be a cowbird bottom-feeding parasite — defaulting on its responsibilities and disbursing that default as “savings” — it has to live with the contempt fully earned and deserved by cowbird bottom-feeding parasites.

Glenn Kelman should take solace — or take a drink — or just take a nap — however. The contempt Redfin.com earns doesn’t originate in his inflammatory comments — even if these are really, truly, honestly, please-please-you-must-believe-me a real estate-specific form of Tourette Syndrome.

Did any one of us make it through middle school without understanding demagoguery? If so, here are the review notes:

The skinny kid spewing half-witted insults is a coward who is terrified of two things: That his posturing is ludicrous, and that you know it…

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February 23, 2007

Make Your Mark

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

We have talked a lot about the public’s negative perception of real estate agents and the industry as a whole. We have blamed our image crisis on too few barriers to entry, and more recently I placed some blame with the Brokers and their hiring practices.

It is time for some agents to accept some responsibility as well. As one of a large herd, what image are you projecting? Forgive the tired play on words, but with so many out standing in our field, why aren’t more agents aspiring to be outstanding?

Distinguish Yourself

We picked up another business card from a listing yesterday that is heading directly to our marketing Wall of Shame. The agent had no website address and her email address was listed as agentname8@hotmail.com. To add to the shame, the back side of her card carried only the following message: Business Cards are FREE at www.companyname.com! Now, as a consumer, doesn’t that give me just a bunch of confidence in this agent’s ability to provide me with professional service?

To all of the agents out there afraid to invest in themselves, let me give you some free advice. For fewer than ten bucks a year you can own your own domain! Add another ten bucks, and you can have a professional-sounding email address which will foward to any free hotmail or gmail or other email account of your choosing!

Most of you reading this will say, as my children often so eloquently put it, “Well, duh!”. But I see too many addresses such as sarasotasamsellshomes2u@aol.com to believe that the majority of agents are getting it. You could be the greatest thing to real estate since the introduction of the BMW 7 series, but beerme@sbcglobal.net is not the image that will convey as much.

But My Company Has a Website!

And if you use your company “website” (which, for your purposes, is really a web page), that is exactly where all of your leads will end up – With your company. Your site does not have to cost thousands of dollars to design and thousands more to maintain, but it should be unique to Read more

February 23, 2007

The Blogfather Part II: I could have blogged all night . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The folks at ActiveRain are putting together a contest. It’s Pygmalion for webloggers, wherein experienced real estate webloggers take eager young blogging caterpillars into their tutelage, and, Henry Higgins-like, bring forth beautiful blogging butterflies in a few months’ time. The winning pair of bloggers will split $5,000 amongst their favorite charities.

(I predict my favorite charity will turn out to have something to do with stray animals.)

In any case, I’m looking for a patsy, er pigeon, er victim, er volunteer — I’m looking for a volunteer to learn the art and science of real estate weblogging with me as your tutor, er mentor, er insufferable bastard.

To disclaim is to disclose: I am not the gentlest teacher in the world. But I know a lot about weblogging, and I can teach you as much as can be taught about this art, this praxis, this obsession.

If you are at or very near the stage of being a total wannablogger with a will to make the leap to something that can blow kisses at true greatness, you’re my ideal candidate. I love you best in Phoenix, but if you’re not here, you’re just not here.

If you want to learn to do real estate weblogging wisely and well, with style, with grace, with humor and panache — I’m your volunteer.

But: I really, really like to win. So: Write to me and tell me why I should pick you as my co-competitor…
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February 23, 2007

Video can supplement photos and virtual tours in a listing, but it can’t supplant them . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

However…

BtoB:

One day someone will be driving through a neighborhood and they’ll see a sign with a podcast URL. A few minutes later they could be sitting in front of the property, watching a video tour on their cell phone.

When you create a brand new category, you’re a category-killer by default…

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February 23, 2007

Key Questions to Ask Your Realtor Before you Buy a Commercial Property

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Cooksquared Enterprises is very close to taking its first humble step back into investing after a two year hiatus. After a disappointing stint in Greensboro, we have settled on 32 units in Winston Salem, which is about an hour away. Over the past two weeks I have been going back and forth with the broker, asking a ton of questions, clarifying local business practices, and doing my best to get in touch with the seller. Through all of this I thought it might be helpful for other investors to understand the major questions I ask of my realtor when looking at a deal. For you veterans out there, read on and feel free to add some value in the comments section if I miss anything.

First, I am more of a new age investor. I do everything in Excel, using my own personal models painstakingly put together through trial and error. Even if you are not an Excel investor, I personally suggest writing down key learnings from every deal. It’s always good for a laugh when you look back at how long the list was from your first deal, plus it really helps you reflect on what you did well and what you can improve upon. For those of you interested in a very simple model to get you started, I am more than willing to share one if you email me (mc140@cornell.edu). Please remember that I am an apartment investor, so all of my models are based on purchasing apartments.

Once I put the deal in my model, the analysis begins. Typically, the first question to my realtor is where the numbers are coming from. There will be three main areas to focus: Rent rolls, expenses, and cap rates. Typically, Net Operating Income (NOI, which equals Rent roll minus recurring expenses) will be projected and then divided by the current cap rate. Watch out for two seller tricks. The first is to project an unreasonable NOI. For example, many sellers will simply increase rent rolls by 5-10% (or more) and not include a market vacancy rate. The second is either not Read more

February 23, 2007

HOAs don’t deserve hate; they have a purpose

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
HOAs don’t deserve hate; they have a purpose

One of the ironies of our gilded age is that the free-market system, which provides a vast abundance of goods and services ever more cheaply and of ever better quality, is all but universally criticized and derided.

Meanwhile, no amount of fawning attention is too much for our governments, which will happily ram their “benefits” down your throat if you are the least bit reserved in your fawning.

There is one glaring exception to this perverse pattern, however, the only truly voluntary form of government: the homeowners association.

I suppose you could argue that you “join” the government of Glendale or Surprise by moving there, but no form of government is easier to escape than an HOA.

Even worse, as the potential for abuses among governments goes, the HOA is hated all out of proportion to the crimes it might commit. This HOA might get snippy about flagpoles and that one might have a minor league embezzler in its midst. But compared with the offenses municipal and state officials are routinely imprisoned for committing, an HOA hardly qualifies as a government at all.

Moreover, news is news because it is rare, not because it is commonplace. For every HOA that makes the papers because of some tawdry offense, there are hundreds humming away in the obscurity that is proficiency’s public reward.

Truly, the worst common offense an HOA can commit is being lax about upholding its codes, covenants and restrictions. Nobody wants to get a letter — or worse, a fine — from the HOA for an infraction of what may seem to be picayune rules.

But chaos spreads, and not slowly. When an HOA starts to neglect the little things, big things start to crop up almost at once. Before you know it, a once-delightful neighborhood will start to look seedy.

The purpose of the HOA is to maintain everyone’s property values. No one wants to suffer under an abusive HOA. But that’s a correctable nuisance.

A worse fate, possibly, is living with an HOA that has lost the will to lead.

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February 21, 2007

California is Still The Golden State

by

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

Author website

Everyone loves to point to California as the prime example of the excessive greed of the recent real estate boom. Media, bubble bloggers, and pundits predict that California will plummet to new lows and bring on a lengthy recession akin to the Great Depression. Even home-grown and respected PIMCO of Newport Beach predicts a heavy fog for the state’s real estate forecast.

Here are a few snippets about the “rising” real estate boom extracted from the Kiplinger California Newsletter:

Evanisko Realty and Investment plans an urban living project with 58 loft-style condominiums targeted at young professionals. The North Hollywood (NoHo) project will be called 4900 and is a conversion from an old theater and auto parts store.

OWR Development is planning 3000 The Plaza, a 200-unit condo tower project near the John Wayne Airport in Orange County. This is the first “urban living” high-rise project in Orange County.

Summerhill plans an urban living condo project at the site of the former Lou’s Village in San Jose. They plan 95 units with 10% of the units having a live-work capability. They expect the price point to be in the mid $600,000 range.

The Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco plans to build a 60 story condo complex ON TOP OF the hotel. There will be over 250 units.

The Towers on Capitol Mall in Sacramento is a 53 story mixed use project with over 750 condos, a four star hotel, and retail space.

The Downtown San Diego condo boom may be over but don’t tell it’s little neighbor to the south, National City. The little municipality plans over 4000 units. Prices could be as low as under $200,000.

How can this development persist in a real estate market that all experts predict to plunge? The simple answer is that demographics are on California’s side:

1- Population still grows here statewide at a 1.5% annual clip. Now that may seem like anemic percentage growth compared to Nevada and Arizona but look at the astounding number of people moving to the Golden State. California enjoys a net gain of some 700,000 Read more

February 21, 2007

Negotation 201: Dont Just Think about the Best Price

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Have you ever negotiated your way out of a good business relationship? I certainly have and I have often regretted it. Novice investors typically fall into two camps: the pushover or the bulldog. While there are certainly times to be both, the context of the situation should remain paramount. Some times the biggest winner in a negotiation can really be the biggest loser in the long run because of relationships that get crushed over a few dollars.

I will start by sharing a personal story. First, let me say that I fall squarely in the bulldog category. I have been getting my way since I was knee high by just about any means necessary (all ethical of course). Add to this all of seedy things I have heard about contractors and real estate agents and I became a real pain to negotiate with. In my first rehab, my wife and I were able to secure two workers, who happen to be down on their luck. They did great work, but really needed to be micromanaged. We really had all the power in this situation because they needed the work and didn’t really have any other leads. Long story short, they did a lot of work very cheaply, but as soon as they began getting other jobs we got the shaft (deservedly so). I squandered an opportunity to build a great relationship with two good contractors to save myself a few thousand dollars.

One of the most important life lessons I have learned is to pay people what they are worth. There will always be times when you have the power to under pay someone. I suggest you steer clear of that apple, no matter how good it may look. The hidden cost of putting the screws to someone when you can is evident in the form of decreased loyalty and a deteriorating relationship. Reflect back on the personal story I just shared. At the rate my wife and I were buying houses, we could have keep them in work for years. We would have enjoyed the benefits of getting honest reasonably Read more

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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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