If you are a Blackberry user, you can now access your Zestifarm on the go.
Thank you, Zillow! Blackberries are industrial strength communicators. They have the best keyboards and battery life in the business. Another reason I like them is that they have insurance available for the time when you drop it and it doesn’t dent the concrete. And one more thing… you can take a call and look something up on your phone without hanging up. That seems to be a big deal these days. Now you can see Zillow on a Blackberry as well. Are there any other happy blackberristas out there?
Category: Real Estate (page 46 of 266)
With all the talk lately about the new lending regulations that will apply on April 1st, a similar set of new laws and regulations has been completely overlooked. I felt it prudent to bring this unsettling situation to light.
As you may or may not be aware, over the past few years there have been quite a few problems “percolating” in the retail coffee business. It seems that some customers have been over-charged, while others have ordered coffee that was too hot or just plain did not satisfy. This is a serious situation, not only because of the expense involved, but also the very real danger of severe burning.
The House sub-Committee on Agriculture and Imports has been holding hearings into this matter. They brought a number of new regulations to the full Congress, which were subsequently voted into law and take effect April 1st of this year. These new regulations govern the coffee purchase transaction within a retail coffee vendor.
I’ve highlighted some of the key components below:
- The server must be paid (or tipped) the same for all beverages and may not earn more based on the time or effort involved. (E.g. there is no difference between an Iced Cocoa Cappuccino 1 pump mocha, 1 pump white mocha, non-fat milk with a drizzle on top and a plain black coffee.
- Customers must pay by credit card or cash, but never both. If paying by credit card, they may not leave any cash tip for the server.
- The Coffee House must distinguish between beans grown / brewed in-house and beans that are imported. With beans grown / brewed in-house, the server must decide what to charge the customer before the customer ever enters the establishment and must then charge ALL customers that exact same amount. (The server may only change what they charge once per “qualified period”.)
- If a customer orders a beverage from the grown / brewed in-house selection and pays with a credit card, the server may receive no tip. (For purposes of this section, even the owner of the Coffee House is considered a “server”.) Instead, they must be paid according to a compensation plan the Read more
Or is it getting interesting out there?
I showed to twelve different parties this week, and I put the ball through the basket four times — two of those with Property Management Agreements after COE. At least two leases, too, with other leases still in doubt. I’m working all day from my car, but that’s always been my favorite place to be.
Is it just me, or has the worm turned?
I was trying to respond to Jeff Brown’s last post about successful blogging and my comments just kept getting too long. So I thought I would send it to Greg as a blog post and see what he thought about posting it. Now, here we are! Thanks Greg!
While some people are out there looking for the most experienced, thoughtful, succinct and eloquent agent they can find, I actually think those folks are in the minority. I have always felt like the average Joe doesn’t think that we are rocket scientist type consultants, they think we are salesmen.
Most sellers are looking for the listing agent who has the most signs and success in their neighborhood, or someone who has been referred to them. A few will call based on good blogging, but the vast majority finds the agents that help them by looking at homes that are listed in their area. They have two ways of contacting them, either by calling on the sign or by finding them online in someone’s IDX.
Most buyers don’t think they need an agent to help them; they just want to see houses.
A successful blog in my opinion doesn’t have to necessarily convince the potential seller or buyer that you are the one; it has to convince Google that your site has enough authority to place it near the top of the results when someone searches for real estate in your area. Blogs do this in two ways. The first is that Google just loves the blog format. I have written a blog post hit “publish”, realized I had a typo in the title, fixed it immediately and found it indexed in Google with the typo. The post was indexed within 3 minutes of posting. My website is a blog, even though it has 128 static pages and I have only posted 28 posts. The posts add content; the comments add content (my 28 posts have about a thousand comments). I would like to post more but I am too busy dealing with the leads.
I would suggest that when you are measuring bankable results from a Realtor Read more
How could Dan Connolly need an introduction? He’s been running with the dogs in our comments for years. My fault for not inviting him to join us sooner, but Dan took the hound by the ears in his own behalf. He’ll have a post up for us shortly to let us know what we’ve been missing.
I asked Dan for a brief bio, and this was his response:
Bio? I was licensed in 1986, w/RE/MAX since 88… Internet marketer… family man.
I don’t like to toot my own horn.
I am committed to ethics and will always go the extra mile.
I don’t really know what else to say.
Ah, well, the man might be demure, but I don’t think we’ve ever found him to to be shy of thoughtful opinions. Please make him feel welcome.
This is a response to a comment from Robert Worthington. I’ve turned it into a post because I talk too much.
> On average how many visitors are you getting monthly to your site?
I have no idea. I’ve never been fastidious about analytics, and by now I’m useless. I have no idea which pages are tickling Google (known to my stupid soul as Urchin — that’s how long it’s been since I bothered with any of this) and which are not. Most everything is new, so most pages, presumably, are not even hitting my Analytics account, which I have not visited in years, in any case. I suck at SEO, too. And my CRM-life is CRM-free, still, after years of kvetching about it.
I need a high-C to bring order to my life, clearly, but there’s more:
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook. I don’t write much on my real estate weblog and I never go off topic. I don’t get many comments from normal people, I don’t unmoderate comments from real estate professionals, and I don’t encourage comments in any case. The calls to action are email or phone. I write here and there and nowhere else.
I do not believe my clients need me to be their buddy.
I do believe they need me to be an expert on residential real estate and how to go about buying, selling, renting, leasing, improving and profiting from it.
So: I have written tons of content over the years, and I deliver it all on my real estate blogsite. I have no idea how many people see it, nor how many dig in and read it. But I know that the people I hear from are almost always pre-sold on working with us, and most of those contacts turn into closed transactions — many of them multiple transactions, some with multiple-transaction referral trees.
On top of that, we deliver tons of dynamic content, mostly in the form of MLS listings. Every dipwad in town has search, but we have the best MLS search available from any Phoenix real estate brokerage, and we’ve optimized it in ways that other brokerages Read more
My tenth house for this year is closing today, and I may be leasing up my two vacant rental properties between now and five o’clock. I know, I know — I’m missing out on all those wonderful paper fish on TwitBook, but my experience is that paper-fish chowder doesn’t make for a fulfilling meal.
Oh, well. Each man to his own saints. But, unlike TwitBook, where spitballs cast at other Realtors come back a thousand fold, when I say the words “I have a no-fee referral,” what that means is pretty simple:
I have an opportunity for you to catch a real fish — and cash a real paycheck — and all you have to do is deliver the frolicking goods!
It’s not nearly as much fun as wasting time on line while you pretend you are doing work, but everything’s a trade-off, ain’t it?
Here are the notes from the seller:
I am a huge fan of your blog. And though I am not a real estate agent, I used many of your sites articles and initiative to help me locate and buy my current home. Unfortunately, I never came across an informed agent who understood the value of proper high tech research and the value I was bringing to the deal. Sadly, the agent that I settled with for the purchase was nothing more than a functional tool for me to direct. Much disappointment (though I worked a great 25% off market buy in the end!)
And as I now I am selling my previous house – I beg you assistance: How can a well prepared seller locate a forward-thinking agent?
I do want a energetic agent. I do want a marketing savvy realtor! I do want a custom yard sign that shows the price! I do want the listing to appear where the buyers are looking online. And on and on.
Get it? You have to be a Bloodhound. You’ve got to be prepared to do the work.
But if you are, I’ve got a deal for you, all tied up with a bow, and all you’ve got on TwitBook is a Read more
I wrote the article below a couple of days ago for a blog on political and economic freedom. I’m reprinting it here after enjoying some discussion on the matter with fellow Bloodhound and VA mortgage expert Brian Brady. Besides it being a brilliant piece (of tin foil hat wearing rantings), the article does actually touch on an area that could be of great importance to our real estate buying clients: mortgage rates. You see (in an over-simplified explanation), when the world gets scared, money flows to safety. Safety, at least for the time being, still resides in US bonds. Though not always correlated, the interest rates on mortgages often travel in the same direction as those on bonds. So if, for some crazy, unforseen reason, the world becomes a little apprehensive over the next 2 weeks, we might see mortgage rates drop. The question is: when do you lock the rate for your client? Well, if we knew the actual date this crazy, unforseen event may occur, we could watch closely and lock right up to the day before. Why the day before? Because there are three possible outcomes to this disruptive event, and two of them are bad:
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It could turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, in which case money will quickly flow out of the bond market and interest rates will rise. (Because of the inverse relationship between bond prices and interest rates, when people sell bonds the price drops and the rate rises… I see people’s eyes rolling back in their heads… moving on then);
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Or, things could go as bad or even worse than expected and oil prices shoot up (geographical hint), causing inflationary fears. Because inflation erodes fixed rate returns, bonds sell off and interest rates rise in response;
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Or, things could go as bad or even worse than expected adding to the already existing fear – oil prices be damned; in which case even more money flows to the safety of bonds and interest rates continue to drop.
As you can see, of the three scenarios, two give rise to higher interest rates making us heroes for locking our client’s rate before the event. If, on the other hand, we find ourselves knee deep in the third Read more
Mom has moved to managed care in sunny Arizona. Daughter and son-in-law need to get the old family homestead sold. Zip code is 55418, and it looks fairly near into town. Zillow has it at $147,000, decent money if you’re willing to work.
But: You’ll need to be a hard-working dog. The sellers have sold and bought four homes with us, and they know what a good marketing effort looks like.
But if you’re the lister for this house, I’ll give you the referral no-strings-attached. I don’t want your money. I want you to take care of my clients.
Hit me by email if you want to talk to the sellers.
I changed the back of my business card. This is the new copy:
I agree with Jeff that giving good service while failing to achieve the main objective is a useless vanity. The Bawldguy champions results, but I would offer the further caveat that the goal of any business should be to achieve full customer satisfaction. That’s something that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, but I’ve been kind of tied up with, you know, actually doing it — and getting better at it, I hope.
Meanwhile, tomorrow is the first day of the last month of the first quarter of 2011. If your numbers so far are not all you’d hoped for, here is a March calendar to help you get started tracking your goals.
Warning : This post is purely REALTOR inside baseball
Around here, we live, eat and breathe marketing. Online reputation management and online publicity is what we do to get our clients houses sold and to find buyers who trust us enough to allow us to assist them in their home search. As a student of this stuff, I am flabbergasted by the news that a self anointed expert who in her own words, “started the Real Estate marketing revolution… and we are darn proud of it!” would attempt to extract money from a practicing REALTOR over 2,000 miles away who happens to use the same mascot, a Zebra. Now I understand that hard earned and promoted brands must be protected, but I really cannot see how Daniel Rothamel’s zebra mascot in Virginia, promoting Daniel’s real estate brokerage activity could in anyway damage The Lones Group in Bellingham Washington which uses a rainbow zebra on their website.
The Lones Group in Bellingham, WA and it’s owner, Denise Lones do not even perform real estate brokerage-they sell advice to those who do perform real estate brokerage. I am not sure I see how Daniel Rothamel, the Real Estate Zebra is damaging The Lones Group and their photoshopped rainbow zebra. I took a peak at the Lones Group website to see if perhaps they did business in Virginia and that was why they were picking on Daniel Rothamel, The Real Estate Zebra. Upon glancing at their testimonial page of happy customers, I only found clients in the Pacific Time zone, most of their clients were Washington REALTORS. I did note something peculiar about the Lones Group’s happy customers, as listed on their testimonials page. There are 28 testimonials displayed. Six of their happy clients had no website link. Six more happy customers of the Lones Group had links to… wait for it…dead websites. Now we find that the company that started the Real Estate marketing revolution has 25% of their happy clients who love the Lones Group’s work are not even linked to this powerhouse marketing firm and are hidden from potential clients. I may be Read more
Presented without comment:
President Barrack Obama released his proposed 2012 budget yesterday. The jeers greeting this event, from all wavelengths of the political spectrum, suggest that, at long last, people have finally begun to take the measure of this pathetic little man-boy. Even so, there is at least one tax increase in the midst of the typically Obamaesque frenzy of insanely excessive “spandering” — spending in pursuit of political pandering.
Which tax? The mortgage interest tax deduction is on the chopping block at last — at least for the most prosperous Americans. This will be hugely beneficial to the rest of the economy, as CNBC points out:
If we eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, we can stop re-directing capital away from innovation. Working Americans will be free to spend, save, and invest according to their own perceptions of their needs and their sense of the future.
I expect that eliminating the government incentives for spending on housing would promote dramatic innovations, making Americans more productive and allowing the economy to grow with renewed vigor. Instead of building up a Ponzi-scheme illusion of bubble-dependent wealth, we can genuinely improve our lives by allowing wealth to flow to where individuals perceive it will be best used.
[….]
In short, let’s unleash the genius of free markets on the capital of the American people simply by refusing to load the dice in favor of housing. Isn’t time to at least give the market a chance?
This is not what we will hear from the National Association of Realtors, of course, nor from very wealthy crocodiles shedding very salty crocodile tears.
Oh, well. Here is the very best thing prosperous people can do for their country in this hour most dire:
Get you fat, pouty lips off the welfare tit!
If you want to be free, stop pointing a gun at your own head…
That’s not what they’re actually saying. But the law of unintended consequences will win out in the end. From the Wall Street Journal:
All of the administration’s proposals envision a scaled-back role for the government. One includes a new government backstop of certain mortgages under a federal “reinsurance” model, while another would propose a more limited backstop that would scale up primarily during times of economic crisis. The third option proposes no such government backstop beyond existing federal agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration.
Owner-occupied transactions are already overwhelmingly FHA — with the result that HUD is well on its way to becoming the biggest player in the lender-owned market. Getting rid of Fannie and Freddie won’t matter at all if their role in underwriting bad mortgages for unqualified buyers is supplanted by FHA.
The Obamanation plans to offer up three proposals to eliminate FannieMae and FreddieMac from the secondary mortgage marketplace. Expect to hear much mournful keening, in coming weeks, from the country’s best enemy of private property, the National Association of Realtors.
More than two years after the government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Obama administration will recommend phasing out the housing-finance giants and gradually reducing the government’s footprint in the mortgage market, according to people familiar with the matter.
The administration is expected to include three options for a post-Fannie and Freddie world when it releases a long-awaited proposal for the future of the nation’s $10.6 trillion mortgage market, which could come as soon as Friday. Together with federal agencies, Fannie and Freddie have accounted for nine of 10 new loan originations in the past year.
The White House’s “white paper” will begin what promises to be a prolonged and fiery debate about the future of how homes are financed across the U.S. Any wind-down of Fannie and Freddie would happen gradually to avoid roiling markets, and the central, unanswered question is what kind of federal function, if any, the administration and Congress will invent to take their place.
Steps to reduce the government role in the mortgage market likely would raise borrowing costs for home buyers, adding pressure on the still-fragile U.S. housing markets. Consequently, analysts believe any transition could take years and would be driven by the pace of the housing market’s recovery.
The fight over how to restructure the housing-finance system has roiled Washington, and yet both parties have been hesitant to propose detailed legislation.
For conservatives, Fannie and Freddie played a starring role in the financial crisis, and any solution that is viewed as replicating their function could face fierce opposition from some Republicans. But more moderate Republicans may resist such an approach and could join Democrats who have said a federal role is necessary to ensure broad access to home ownership.
While advancing one detailed plan risks providing fodder for partisan battles, offering multiple proposals may help the administration force those views into the open, said Michael Barr, Read more