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Category: Real Estate (page 220 of 266)

January 8, 2007

Metro Brokers’ new map site: First we take Colorado, then — the world!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Colorado real estate brokerage Metro Brokers announced it’s new map-based search engine at Inman Connect. From the Denver Post:

Starting today, consumers will be able to go online to find all homes on the market in Colorado.

Denver-based Metro Brokers Inc. is launching ColoradoHomeStop.com at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York.

The company spent two years and more than $2 million to develop the site, which ultimately will incorporate the state’s 22 multiple listing services into one site, said Mark Eibner, chairman of Metro Brokers’ information technology committee. The initiative was paid for by the organization’s 2,000 members.

The advertising-free site takes the map-based real estate search to a new level of interactivity, building proprietary AJAX technology onto the Google Maps mapping platform.

Metro Brokers partnered with WhereToLive.com to integrate the company’s real-time SmartMap search technology into the website.

Among the features it offers are:

Street-level, aerial satellite and hybrid views of the property;

A photo tour of each property;

Neighborhood and school information specific to a property;

A map of each property and driving directions.

Users also can print property brochures, request additional information, schedule showings via the web and compare up to four properties side-by-side.

Metro Brokers has purchased the ColoradoHomeStop domain name in all 50 states in anticipation of launching the site – and the real estate company – nationally.

My take? Highly detailed. Kinda slow. The initial view if you don’t specify a search is every listed home in Colorado, so that’s gotta grind some gears. But zooming in takes a while per double-click, with more waiting for the map to re-render. The site makes very intelligent use of Ajax tabs to cram a lot of detail into one browser window.

(Hat tip: Dave Barnes)

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January 8, 2007

What’s Yours is Mine?

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Ah, the personal versus real property dilemma. We all know what a fixture is, right? There is the real estate agent definition – If you can pick it up and haul it out, it’s yours. There is the dictionary definition – “An item of movable property so incorporated into real property that it may be regarded as legally a part of it”. Then, there is the definition we learn in our licensing courses, which is something along the lines of – An appurtenant item permanently attached to the structure in a manner that it can be considered an integral part thereof.

I had cause for exasperation this week when an agent for the buyer of one of our listings decided to challenge me on this issue. She was so full of conviction (full of something, anyway), that she suggested ended up giving me some helpful business advice. No doubt in the spirit of cooperation, she suggested I “consult my attorneys”.

On an almost daily basis, I am exasperated, so this is nothing new. And that frustration usually results from the absurd roles I invariable end up playing during the course of a transaction. I have swept garages, I have bartered furniture on my client’s behalf, and I have attended a client’s garage sale and not only bought their stuff but helped sell what I didn’t buy. ( I’m still smarting that I didn’t grab that gently used Mystery Date game while I had the chance), I’ve, of course, met the plumber, yet I have been the plumber; I have taken out trash, cleaned out refrigerators, and cleaned out toilets. While this latest frustration didn’t involve manual labor, it frustrated me no less.

So I ask you, just in case I am missing something, which of the following would you consider to be a fixture versus personal property in the transfer of real property?

fixture_ a

fixture_b

fixture_c

Option (a) was a gimme. The microwave oven is clearly built in, and the contract is very clear on this point. Option (b) was likely not much of a challenge for you either, although Read more

January 8, 2007

Hey, buddy . . . Wanna buy a Zip Code . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eppraisal.com and Zillow.com today both announced Zip Code based advertising programs to allow agents to display ads to people searching in their particular farm areas.

Under the Eppraisal.com plan, agents will sponsor particular Zip Codes for a fee of $20 a month.

If you are a real estate professional, you can sponsor any zip code in America and begin connecting with the eppraisal.com users who are eager to understand how much their castle is worth. You’ll be exposed to consumers who are ready to take action on buying, selling or re-financing a home. By sponsoring a zip code, or multiple zip codes, you gain exclusive access to users within the area as well as premium advertising opportunities to those targeted zones for only $20 per month.

Zillow’s plans are not as definite at this point:

Today at Real Estate Connect NY, Zillow president Lloyd Frink talked about a new advertising product coming during the first quarter of this year, one that allows agents and other real individual estate professionals to buy inexpensive, targeted advertising on the site.

We’re calling it EZAds — and it’s pretty simple — an easy, online way for individual agents and other real estate professionals to buy and customize ads on Zillow.com, targeted to specific searched ZIP codes. The ads show up on ZIP code-specific areas throughout the site, including map pages and home detail pages.

No word on pricing, nor availability.

Curiously, neither site elected to follow the Realtor.com business model of selling outrageously large farming areas to multiple, competing agents…

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January 8, 2007

Carnival of carnivals . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog is broadly represented in this week’s weblog carnivals:

Kris Berg‘s post Kibble and Bits can be found at the Carnival of Real Estate at @ House Values.

Jeff Brown‘s entry The S & P Is Up Over 16% In 2006! is among the winners at the Carnival of Real Estate Investing at Cash Flow Treasures.

Sadly, Dan Green‘s excellent article detailing What Isaac Newton Knew About Mortgage Lending did not make the list of finalists at the Carnival of Business at My Money Forest.

But: We thought Dan’s post simply killed, so it is this week’s Carnival of BloodhoundBlog Winner…

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January 8, 2007

Was BusinessWeek bamboozled? “Twist” doesn’t know what she doesn’t know . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a copy of email I just sent to Peter Coy of BusinessWeek with respect to false claims made last week about deception in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. Cliff’s Notes: False alarm resulting from “crackpot claims, the end product of a fervid imagination and a Rube Goldberg spreadsheet.”

From: GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com
Subject: Problem solved — “Twist” doesn’t know what she doesn’t know
Date: January 8, 2007 2:13:57 AM MST
To: Peter_Coy, Twist
Cc: Jay, Jonathan, John

The mystery unraveled.

1. Ms. Averett does not have access to the ARMLS system.

2. Her analysis is based on summary reports issued by the ARMLS staff, presumably for PR purposes.

3. Those reports omit many categories of residential listings, presumably to make the summary fit on a single page.

4. The three columns of Ms Averett’s analysis that buttress her claim — New Listings, Delisted, and Ratio Sales/Delisted are not obtained from these summary reports. There may be some other source, but they’re not in the ARMLS reports — at least not in those I looked at.

5. As has been demonstrated by four Phoenix-area Realtors working independently but directly in the ARMLS system, Ms. Averett’s contentions about the months of November and December of 2005 and January of 2006 are not only false, they bear no resemblance to reality at all. I have also demonstrated that her contentions with respect to the same months one year earlier are also false.

6. Given that the methodology she deploys is dubious at best, and probably completely devoid of meaning, it seems reasonable to surmise that all of the rest of her claims with respect to ARMLS are also false. This is not to imply that the ARMLS system is fault-free, but simply that the fault Ms. Averett claims to have identified does not exist. She does not understand the ARMLS system well enough to make any sort of informed statement about it.

7. The other weblogging Phoenix-area Realtors copied above may have more to add as they peruse Ms. Averett’s work product. John L. Wake surmised from the beginning that Ms. Averett was working from ARMLS-issued summaries rather than directly from the database.

8. My Read more

January 7, 2007

From Rotating Careers To Gold Fish Johns

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Though always searching for cool real estate blogs, once you’ve been looking for awhile the nuggets are discovered much less often. Happily I ran into one I’m sure many of you already know about. For those of you on the late bus along with me, I recommend you click over to Sacramento Real Estate Blog. John Lockwood at times shows how to take transparency to new levels.

His post promoting his newsletter is inspired. I Take It All Back speaks for itself. His transparency in the post reviewing the past year was a story I’ve seen repeated over and over. Yet, John lets us inside his head as he roams back and forth, struggling to discover just what he really wants to do.

John is smarter than the average bear, and funnier than the average blogger. Take a look, you won’t regret it. The guy is worth your time, I promise. He’s also faster than I am. Imagine my surprise to find a post, in part about a simple comment I made on his site yesterday.

Seriously, take a look at this guy.

January 7, 2007

Trade or trade shows? The business of real estate is transacted face-to-face . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The RE.net is abuzz about this week’s Inman’s Real Estate Connect in New York, but the coming week owns an embarrassment of trade show riches.

Also on tap this week: The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And, best of all: The Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

These are all basically vendor shows, despite the hype — or, rather, in support of the hype. The big news will come from Apple, of course, and much of the ‘news’ coming out of the other two shows will be fun to make fun of. I get no end of mileage out of the goofy crap corporate weenies try to foist off on long-suffering Realtors.

We’ll be here, taking it all in, of course. But mainly we’ll be here working. This is the first selling weekend in the New Year. We’re showing. We’re listing. And we’re not wasting the precious time of a finite life. Fun is fun, and, of the three trade shows, I’d probably pick CES — just to be in Vegas. But I don’t go even a little bit North in the Winter, and, in any case, the business of real estate brokerage is not transacted at trade shows…

Further notice: A much-expanded version of this is posted at Inman Blog.

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January 6, 2007

Think globally, blog locally: If you want local leads from your real estate weblog, pursue local interests . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog tends very strongly to cover news and views of interest to real estate professionals nationwide. And — guess what? — our audience, by an overwhelming majority, consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Here’s the bad news: If you have a real estate weblog, the chances are excellent that your objective is to attract interest from buyers and sellers in your local market. But — guess what? — your audience, by an overwhelming majority, very probably consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Why should this be so?

There are three reasons:

First, the permanent audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals all over the country — all over the Anglosphere, really, those countries most strongly influenced by the English language, its customs and traditions.

Second, to the extent that consumers are finding your real estate weblog by long tail search terms, they are evanescent — fleeting. For one thing, their interest in buying or selling a home has a limited time window; when they’re done, most of them are done for a long while. And, for another, they’re flitting in and out from Google just as you do, when you’re searching for something on-line.

But third, and most importantly, you don’t have a local audience because you are not cultivating a local audience.

This year portends to be the Year of the Locality in real estate weblogs. Active Rain is starting a new site call Localism.com, which is to be devoted to engendering very high long tail organic search engine rankings for locality and neighborhood-level keywords. MyHouseKey.org, to debut this week, is pursuing the same strategy.

These are not awful ideas, but they’re not great, either. As with your current conundrum, a long tail searcher is apt to be ephemeral, landing on and lasting at your weblog only an instant.

The better plan, I think, is to get local consumers to come and stay, to come and come back, to favorite your weblog, to — O, holy of holies! — blogroll your real estate weblog.

I have two ideas on how to do this, one great and one insanely great. I’ll share the great one, but my Read more

January 6, 2007

Selling Out

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Larry Cragun posted yesterday on a Pittsburgh report that applying for a home loan could result in the sale of your personal information. What about listing your property in the MLS?

I got a call yesterday on my cell phone. Hello, this is Kris Berg. The surprised voice on the other end said, “Oh, you’re the agent. I was trying to reach the owners”. Why? “I am from (ABC Moving Company). I see that they sold their home, and we want to set up a time to give them a quote. I will just find their number somewhere else.” Click. Dial tone.

I could kick myself for not remembering the name of the company or saving the phone number. I want to report them. Now I know that last time I moved, I got a daily mailbox full of generous offers to sell me everything from moving services to mini-storage space to new living room furniture, but I didn’t stop to question how they might have been tipped off to my impending relocation. My address was not a secret, nor was the fact that my home was in escrow. What bothered me in this instance was that someone, who I can only presume was not a licensed agent, had access to the MLS printout for my client’s pending listing. Since this home was a “call listing agent to show” situation, they could have only gotten that information through MLS access.

We have “agent” printouts and “client” printouts of MLS listings, with the latter excluding the personal information of the sellers and the confidential remarks, for very good reason. Confidential remarks often include things such as gate codes, security system codes for disarming, and other personal information which is not considered appropriate for public consumption. While listing information can be found in many, many other places than through the local MLS, the personal information including client phone number can only be found there. In this case, the helpful service provider either was given the information by an agent (a big Board no-no), was licensed themself and was using this information to (illegally?) solicit business, or Read more

January 6, 2007

Lessons from the Epicenter

by

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

Author website

I am biased towards Phoenix. I should be. I lived in the Valley of the Sun for twelve years. I was married in St. Mary’s Basilica, celebrated that conjugal union at Heritage Square, and watch my daughter come into this world at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I’ve lent money on mansions in Mesa and mobile homes in Marana. I’ve dined at Durant’s and drank beer at the Downside Risk.

I love living and working San Diego but have bias towards Phoenix. Bias nothwithstanding…
Phoenix is the epicenter of Real Estate 2.0. That’s fancy term for interaction between the consumer and real estate professionals. It gives the consumer a chance to get to know you (the principle of transparency) and get valuable information about communites (the principle of local content).

Phoenix is the epicenter of Real Estate 2.0. Bloodhound Blog is here. The Phoenix Real Estate Guy is here. Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog is here. Boatloads of Bubbleheads are here. Today, I was here with 20 other front-line evangelists discussing the Gospel according to Google. Here are the lessons we learned.

January 6, 2007

Avoiding a close shave with Occam’s Razor . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dale Gribble: You see, what they do is, they send everyone from the MLS office home early on Christmas Eve.

Then they go in and edit thousands of records.

That makes things look good when they’re really bad, get it?

Then they call Twist and fool her with the false information.

Then they change all those thousands of records back, before anybody has a chance to notice.

It’s a sinister and diabolical plan, faultlessly executed every year!

It might sound like a lot of trouble, but it’s nothing compared to what they went through to fake the Zapruder film!

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January 5, 2007

BloodhoundBlog’s Brian Brady hosts Phoenix-area webloggers forum

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

About twenty Phoenix-area webloggers, many of them Active Rain participants, attended a real estate weblogging forum hosted today by BloodhoundBlog weblogger Brian Brady at the Phoenix Public Library in Downtown Phoenix.

Today’s event was a sort of get-acquainted meeting, with the attending bloggers introducing themselves and talking about their weblogging experiences and marketing goals. Brady anticipates coordinating events like this on a quarterly basis.

Cathleen Collins and I were there, along with Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy and Jonathan Dalton. In a perfect expression of the weblogging ideal, Jonathan already has an excellent post up on the event.

One of the things I spoke about, and promised to elaborate on in a post, is the push toward local content, local interest, and, especially, local inbound links. I’ll write that up over the weekend.

Afterward, Brian, Cathleen and I spoke at length about Big Picture issues relating to real estate weblogging. One thought we had was to emulate the Bloginars held in Seattle and other cities by Dustin Luther and Russ Cofano of Rain City Guide. No promises — life is short — but a turnout of twenty people today was impressive — in a city that is home to thousands of Realtors…

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January 5, 2007

Uptown hound: BloodhoundBlog to contribute to Inman Blog . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jessica Swesey at Inman Blog has invited webloggers from six real estate weblogs to contribute posts to Inman’s real estate blog. Our initial post is a summary of my thoughts on MGM-Mirage’s Project City center in Las Vegas.

Going forward, I will be highlighting other great posts from BloodhoundBlog’s star-studded roster of contributors. Think of it as a sort of daily Carnival of BloodhoundBlog.

This is a great honor for us, of course, and, in recognition of this, I think I should hustle Odysseus off to the groomer…

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January 5, 2007

Communication a good reason to use Realtor

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Communication a good reason to use Realtor

Why do you need professional representation when you buy or sell a home? It’s not because of the Multiple Listing Service. As we have seen, Realtors can put a transaction together in ways you hadn’t foreseen. More importantly, an experienced Realtor knows how to keep your transaction from falling apart.

My wife had a house close on Dec. 22, just in time for Christmas. She was the listing agent, and the house sold in 21 days. The buyers came in without a contingency on the sale of another home. But they were coming from out of state, and their communication with their lender was beset by delays.

The sellers were buying their next home in Boise, Idaho, and that transaction was contingent on the sale of their home in Arizona.

Without discussing the date with either my wife or with their buyer’s agent in Boise, the sellers scheduled their closing in Boise for the same day as their closing in Arizona, Dec. 15. They scheduled their movers to deliver their furniture on that same day. And they invited their whole extended family to spend the holidays with them in their new home.

Now God loves the uninitiated in real estate transactions, and he graces them with the unshakeable faith that things always work perfectly. Especially with out-of-state buyers. Especially with delayed and incomplete communication with the lender. Especially with contingent sales. Most especially with simultaneous closings — in two states.

Consider the disclosure chain: The buyer’s lender to the buyer’s agent to my wife to the Boise buyer’s agent to the Boise seller’s agent, with my wife also keeping the lender on the Boise property in the loop, and with each Realtor and lender keeping their clients and the title companies up to date.

The buyer’s lender was late, making everything else late, with dozens of phone calls among the parties to keep everything together. Everything closed a week late, barely averting the disaster of a huge extended family spending Christmas in a motel.

Who needs Realtors? That’s easy.

Anyone who doesn’t do this Read more

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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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