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Category: Real Estate (page 61 of 266)

January 21, 2010

Heckuva Job Brownie

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

I believe in change.

I do not believe in politics as usual.

Horse trading behind closed doors isn’t change.

Has Scott Brown’s election defied the norm that all politics are local?

Yup.

Does Scott Brown’s victory represent change?

Jury hasn’t even been seated.  However, I suspect it may actually be the first green chute to all of this change business.

I can honestly say that I was pleased with the results.  Not because I am in alignment with his Republican cohorts, but because voters sent a message – not just locally, but nationally.

Now I openly profess that I voted for Obama despite the Neo-Con rhetoric bombarding me at home.  In my short few months living back home in Texas, my father has almost convinced me that our President’s name isn’t Barack Hussein Obama, but God Damn Obama.  While he hasn’t quite branded me with the cast iron “liberal” prod on my backside, he has broadly casts his brush to paint me with the same blue color – “you and your liberal friends” … needless to say, perhaps I put a smile on my father’s face after admitting Brown’s victory was a good thing.

I think I am more in alignment with the 51% of Massachusetts voters who identify with the Independent political affiliation … they are still in Massachusetts, let’s not kid ourselves – perhaps they’re not blue – maybe light blue.

I’m happy with the results because I want change.  I buy that health care reform is a priority, but the option(s) presented by Congress today represent neither change nor reform.  Again health care reform is important.  I personally agree it’s a priority, yet under our current economic turmoil, is it job number one?

No.

In this morning’s Dallas Morning News I read an interesting article that may share a common theme with Scott Brown’s victory defying the politics is local norm – maybe all real estate is NOT local.  While it doesn’t come as any surprise to all of us – except perhaps Congress – jobs do play a fairly significant role in driving the housing market.  In fact, when people are employed, they tend to purchase homes.

Fascinating.

According to the Read more

January 20, 2010

Honored To Be Here…

by

Breathtaking Real Estate Photographer

Author website

So the problem is this:  When Greg Swann visits your blog, comments favorably and asks if you’d like to write for Bloodhound, you get excited.  In a good way.  You consider how Greg and the other contributors to this forum have helped shape your thought process as a real estate professional and you feel a sort of rush come over you.  Greg has invited you to write anything you like and assured you that it will be published and consumed by a large national audience.  You feel an obligation – to yourself, to your industry, to your mother.  You hit the reply button and type “Yes!  Count me in!”, because that is the right thing to do.  And it feels good.

A bio and a headshot later you get another email from Greg:  “You’re up.  Post at will.”  Again, excitement – but this time different.  More like anxiety, really.  More like “everyone – and I mean everyone – who writes for Bloodhound is so literate, so intellectual, so experienced…so prolific and poetic, both!”  It’s easy to wonder what you can possibly write that won’t pale in comparison to the posts being submitted by everyone else.  It’s easy to wonder what you can write about that anyone will want to read – or that hasn’t already been written more elegantly by someone else.

My name is Harry Bisel, and I am honored to have been asked to contribute occasionally to this space.  Honored and just a bit terrified.  I am a professional real estate photographer, which is the perfect mash-up of my two previous careers – commercial photography and residential real estate, where I had the pleasure of serving as an agent, a managing broker, an MLS Board member and a coach (although I was never comfortable with that title).  Real estate has been very good to me and I am grateful to those who gave me the opportunities I enjoyed so much along the way.

Having followed my passions away from the management side of real estate and back to photography, I now have two missions.  To create a profitable business, clearly.  But more Read more

January 18, 2010

Adding two hounds to the pound: Introducing Harry Bisel and Scott Schang

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As promised, I’m adding two new writers to our pack today.

Scott Schang is a long-time contributor to our comments threads. Scott has come to both of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained events held in Phoenix, and he may be the best success story to come of Unchained so far. Scott has devoted his attentions to honing his prospecting and conversion systems, and he’ll be talking to us about that and more.

Harry Bisel has led a rich, full life. A commercial photographer who made the shift into real estate, and then shifted aback out into real estate photography. Harry’s photos are simply breathtaking, awe-inspiring, everything real estate photography should be.

Both of these gentleman have a ton to teach us. I’m delighted to have them writing with us.

January 17, 2010

What does “information wants to be free” really mean? It doesn’t matter how long you spent making that mudpie, it’s worth nothing to me.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting on Jeff Brown’s post on economics, which in turn referenced an argument by Malcolm Galdwell, I made a short movie explicating the meme “information wants to be free.”

Cliff’s Notes: When a market good is so redundantly abundant as to be, essentially, ubiquitous and unavoidable, its market price will tend to plummet to zero. It doesn’t matter what the sellers of those goods might want to earn. All that matters, in this context, is what buyers are willing to pay. If the discounted probability of procuring an acceptable alternative is very high, then the price will tend to be very low.

Ordinary information is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and, therefore, the market price it can command is effectively zero. What the sellers or anyone else thinks about that is irrelevant. I have no reason to pay even a penny to you if I can get “just as good” next door for free.

That in turn references the very first post I wrote for BloodhoundBlog:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

The answer? Almost always zero.

In the clip I talk about the difference in the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Ironically enough, there comes news this morning that the Times plans to finish off its slow suicide with yet another tilt at a paywall. Much good may it do them.

Here’s the video:

January 17, 2010

Google’s Challenge to China’s Communist Party

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Google’s 2006 decision to enter the Chinese market on the Chinese government’s terms, which include censorship, is often held up as the symbolic moment when its mantra of “Don’t be evil” conflicted  with a hard business reality. In the end, pragmatic capitalism won out over principle, and Google.CN was launched.

Google’s rationalization that censored access to Google was better for the Chinese than no access to Google has always rung hollow to me. “Don’t be evil unless it is going to give competitors an edge in the world’s biggest market” still has “Don’t be evil” in it, but slippery slopes are paved with caveats. With that decision, Google merged off of the high road, joining the rest of the multinationals on the highway to the Chinese market.

Now, the Chinese government has turned its significant cyber warfare skills, honed by years of attacking US government and military networks, on Google in order to track dissidents and critics.

Google has,  surprisingly and righteously, reacted like Ralphie towards the end of A Christmas Story. The company wheeled around on the bully Chinese government and boldly defended itself by publicly stating that the Chinese governement is a hacker, and that censorship is wrong. It looks like they may well take the Google-logo colored exercise balls strewn across their Chinese operation and go home.

Cynics have pointed out that Chinese Internet users don’t engage in a lot of eCommerce so Google may be taking the opportunity to abandon a drain on its resources while repairing some of the PR damage its decision to go into China caused in the first place.

I doubt it. The lure of the sheer size of that market is still very strong. Last year Chinese consumers bought more cars than American consumers, and you don’t hear Microsoft (whose decision to grant the Chinese government access to Windows source code is the genesis of the Chinese cyber warfare program) talking about pulling out.

Chinese consumers are following the American consumer’s trajectory but with the huge booster of digital technology and our map:  Today, they are hooked on the freedom of the automobile the way we were in Read more

January 15, 2010

Internet Conversion For The Real Estate Solopreneur

by

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

Author website

Renee Burrows is a real estate agent in Las Vegas whom I respect.  I met Renee through Active Rain and have visited with her and her family when they visit Pacific Beach in the summers.  I’ve watched her develop from an agent who was struggling with the down Vegas market into a transaction machine, putting buyers into homes in the Valley of Fire.

Renee shared her internet conversion system, written when she was building a “team”, behind the Members’ Only wall on Active Rain.  What was interesting to me is that Renee eschewed the “team” approach for a referral-based system.  She reduced her fixed costs and has the flexibility to refer buyers to agents whom “buy-in” to her servicing system.  If business slows down, Renee handles the buyers herself.

I liked the fact that she chose ubiquity by syndicating her blog posts and listings to over 100 sources on the internet.  Renee writes a lot of time-sensitive market reports so I think ubiquity trumps the fear of being penalized by the SERPS for potential duplicate content:

You have to be an internet  marketing generation machine (or have a department) to start having the leads filter in to you!   I have my hands in so many cookie jars:  craigslist, point 2 agent, active rain + outside blog (both syndicated to numerous sources and by numerous I mean 100-200, not 10-20,)  facebook, twitter, print (flyers, business cards, postcards, door knocking, etc.)  Now I don’t own major Las Vegas NV SEO keywords, but I do own quite a bit of long tail real estate (you get higher quality leads this way!)

Marketing to the masses can produce “wasteful” contact and Renee has installed a few “fences” for prospective customers to hop:

Since I have a good number of leads coming in, they come in several ways:  phone and email.  I use a good spam filter to filter out the spam (of course) and it requires a verification code to be entered for me to receive the email in my inbox.  I also use an evoice receptionist that allows me to create separate extensions and it allows up to three phone numbers Read more

January 14, 2010

2010 Mortgage Broker Renaissance

by

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

Author website

Is the business of broking mortgage loans dead?  About two years ago, Morgan Brown predicted our demise on Blown Mortgage.  His conclusion was that the industry would need a scapegoat for the poor lending practices and that “blaming” mortgage brokers was convenient (and not necessarily fair).  His conclusion suggested that the big lenders were trying to gobble up market share to the detriment of the consumer.

Morgan predicted that the brunt of the regulatory changes would be aimed squarely at the mortgage broker; he was correct.  He predicted that the big lenders would tighten up their standards and practices in the wholesale lending channel; he was correct.

That scheme backfired on the big banks. Congress is really pissed that they haven’t been doing more with the TARP funds federal largesse to make loans and they are coming down hard on whom President Obama calls the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street”.

Bawld Guy Axiom:  Lenders Lend

Brady Corollary: Lenders lend unless it’s more profitable to do something else.

Government-subsidies proved that in 2009.  The TARP funds allowed big banks to borrow money at a ridiculously low cost-of funds.  The government guarantee on all agency products indemnified those big banks from losses.  Essentially, the big banks could buy their product  (a dollar) for $1.01 and sell it for $1.05; that’s a 500% markup and a helluva business.  It would be natural for them to “crowd out” mortgage brokers, through poor pricing and horrible service, to benefit their retail lending channel.

Here’s what those big banks didn’t expect:  public outrage over bonus pay and a proposed “windfall profits tax” on their guaranteed profits.  While I hate excessive government interference, you gotta wonder why the bankers thought they could get paid like Gordon Gekko as wards of the Government.  One would think they’d lay low at a GS-15 salary, for a year or two, after they repaid the TARP money.

The profits party is over for bankers and now they have to EARN those bonuses.

Guess what they’re doing?  They’ve turned to mortgage brokers again as a viable loan delivery channel. How do I know this?  The biggest banks (Bank Read more

January 14, 2010

Let’s have a RE.net birthday party!

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

I know Teri is really busy today. But busy never stopped this crew from having a party!

Happy Birthday Teri!


 

Work hard-Play hard. Now back to work. This video was created at Animoto. Last year when our last listing sold, I terminated our visual tour account because the video upload for You Tube took forever to render and it cost $30/month. Animoto costs $30/yr. I grabbed the thumbnails from the sidebar for our party hounds. Animoto takes about 20 min to render the embed code, but they send you an email when it is ready and you can start another while you wait. They have freemium option that gives you a 90 sec. clip from your photos. Give it a try

I hope you enjoyed the party. Happy Birthday Teri!

January 13, 2010

Some Ideas For Unchained…Or…I’ll kick Your Asymptote.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Perfect never happens, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue it.

I am better than I was six months ago by a wide margin.  I’ll be better in six months by a wider margin, I hope.  I’m hoping that I improve at an improving rate.  I work hard to do so.  The silly math is that if you improve your efficacy by 1% each day then you double every 68 days or whatever.  Every year then you’d through five cycles and then be 2*2*2*2*2 better.   Nice theory, but it doesn’t happen that way.   Google grains of rice and chessboard.

You CAN however improve a bunch, and have times where you are like Neo.

My focus is on lead generation.  I’m good at it, and getting better.  I’ve learned bigger gains are made in other areas, but lead generation is still what I like because we gravitate to what we’re good at.  But that’s not the only area where we can get good.  Lead gen rocks because I like getting leads that are above average.  Nobody has time to sift through morons, but anyone has time to deal with motivated and interested buyers.  That’s why Search.Twitter.com is such a beautiful breeding ground.

Anyway, here’s a fun idea.

What’s the best customer experience for a loan process?

What’s the best possible customer experience for a Real Estate Sale?

For a contract negotiation?

For a listing?

What wows?  Author # 8 touched on this a while ago.  You create the perfect experience from the buyer’s perspective.

How long they’ll take.

How much they’ll know.

You make it customer focused, high touch and high tech.   And you make it utterly destructive to all of your competition.  Make it so much better than it anything that exists from the knowledge the buyer gets to the resposnsiblity you take.  Widen the gap with things that make people feel better…even if most of the effort isn’t used.

Let’s design the best experience possible.

And then, let’s figure out how to deliver it with modern tools.

After we’ve done that, let’s figure out what the most critical and different elements are. And let’s focus on building an experience with today’s tools that delivers that…level Read more

January 13, 2010

Whoa! How did he get in here?

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

I have been wandering around this Acropolis for a while
now and yesterday I got an email from the proprietor.

Are you game? It’s okay to say no, but
I think you would be a fun, very irreverent
addition.

My response was: What I think- Wow. Of course I would love to contribute to BHB.
It’s like being asked to join the Delta Force middle aged, overweight and not being able to shoot straight.
I consider it a huge honor. Let me know what your publishing requirements are.

So, how did this happen? As any chubby chumley knows, the way to get past the bouncer
is to have a smoking hot chick with you.   Now, I know that Greg is head over heels in love with
Cathleen, so the short skirt ploy is probably out.

I come with a hot chick in a fur coat.

Hot Chick in Fur Coat

Once I made it past the bouncer, like any job you have to pass the security check. Believe me, these guys are tough. Greg should consider contracting with Homeland Security. No underpants bombers here!

More secure than the TSA

So here I am, still wandering around in a daze. Thank you for inviting me, Greg. I hope that I can add something to this discussion that is worthy of my illustrious colleagues to the right.

January 13, 2010

From the what-took-you-so-long? department: Introducing Tom Johnson

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today as a contributor is a frequent commenter and long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, Tom Johnson.

I’ve thought about adding Tom to our roster more than once over the year, but I never pulled the trigger. It was my soul’s sister in Dayton, Teri Lussier, who made the connection I had been missing.

Tom is a Realtor in Houston, which necessarily implies that he likes to drive a lot. Wife, kid, dog. What else do you need to know?

Seriously, the gift Tom brings to our conversations is a wry irony, pungent without being cynical. His bullshit detector is finely tuned, and his sense of humor is honed to a razor’s edge.

I’ll be adding another writer next week, as well as cleaning house, something I haven’t done for a while. I have mail from a bunch of folks who want to write with us, and I’m thinking I want to come up with a new way of dealing with that. I’ll announce the new policy when I figure out what it is.

Meanwhile: Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, Tom. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to this sooner, but I know we will all be delighted to have you here.

January 11, 2010

What form should BloodhoundBlog Unchained take this May?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve heard from a number of people privately asking about the prospects for another BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix this May. So far I’ve not done anything about this — this for a couple of reasons.

First, I don’t know what to do in terms of content. We’re doing a lot of interesting things, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of material I can teach. Of course, there’s all kinds of other stuff out there, but I’m not sure how it coheres.

Second, I don’t know what to do about the show. The format we used last year — 72 hours of total immersion — was very successful, but it was also a boatload of work. (When the RE.net trolls get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they like to come here and insist that Unchained is a profit-making business. I’m sure my wife will be gratified to learn this.)

To my mind, the most satisfying Unchained experience so far was the
Scenius on Swallow Hill Road. Not the show we did in Orlando, which was good, but the more or less continuous Scenius we ran from the house we rented as our accommodations for the trip.

That’s an appealing scenario, but it’s decidedly limited in the number of people who can attend. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — for me — but it might not work so well for you.

So: I think I need to hear from you. If you want to do Unchained this year, speak up. But if you do want to do this, be prepared to put up your money. Whatever we choose for meeting space and accommodations, they’re going to want to see the dough before they commit to anything.

Here’s my pledge, in return: If we do Unchained this year, we will do it to nine decimal places, as always. We will take you places no one else is going, to put you even further beyond your competition.

But don’t dawdle. I’m going to have to make a go or no-go decision shortly. If you want to do Unchained this year, make the leap now.

January 9, 2010

Principal Reduction Or Interest Rate Decrease?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

My stompin’ ground is San Diego. When the bubble burst here, the median price for a single family residence was within shoutin’ distance of $600,000. To give you some perspective on that number, my first ever listing was a 4 bedroom home in a blue collar area in October of 1969 — $18,100. It didn’t sell during the 90 day listing period, as it was um, a tad overpriced. Gimme a break, it was my first day on the job, and I was just 67 days past my 18th birthday.

Let’s say you and I are partners in a bank making real estate loans in San Diego. In January of 2005 we approved a couple’s application to refinance their well located 2,500 foot home with a view. Our own appraiser came in with a value of $675,000. The borrowers wanted 80% which was $540,000 — very doable considering their 770+ FICOs and impressive credit history. The interest rate was 6% fixed for 30 years — a payment of $3,237.57 monthly. Add taxes and insurance — just under $4,000!

Their home is now worth $450,000 — more than $100,000 above the current median price for the county. She’s had to resume full time work due to her husband’s job loss. He’s now workin’ two jobs at drastically reduced pay. They’re goin’ through their savings like a mower spits out grass on Saturday morning.

What do we, as the lender wanna do?

Our Board of Directors thinks either the government or the market will eventually save us. But then the White House floats a plan calling for principal reduction. Crap on a cracker.

Even if we reduce the loan balance by $90,000 (Almost 17%), the payment will only be reduced by $540 — hardly a real life solution when we consider the couple’s severely reduced income.

If we offered them a significant reduction in interest rate, say 4.5% with interest only payments for two years, then 5% the next three years, then 5% fixed for 30 years fully amortized — it would make the difference in going through foreclosure or not.

Their payment the Read more

January 8, 2010

RPR™ Demo Provides a First Look at the Future of Online Real Estate. Or maybe not.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

To date, I’ve not paid a lot of attention to RPR™, the REALTORS Property ResourceTM, because so far it’s just a big roll-out hoo-ha PR wingding, which I try to ignore, so the pros and cons and discussions about this being a game changer or not and how are brokers and local MLS going to respond, are online, you can read those yourself.

If you haven’t seen the RPR™ demo yet, go grab a cup of coffee and take a look. At 30 minutes, it’s a nice overview of some of the best features the RPR™ has to offer, and I’m sure there is other stuff for us to discover. Features are nice: Market stats, the ability to keep private and public property notes online, the ability to add layers of information- like a sidewiki- about property, neighborhoods, etc. It’s rich with data, and invites sharing more data and information with other professionals, as well as with our clients. That’s powerful, and empowering if you stop to think about it. All this real estate information that we compile in our heads could be shared with each other online.

But, I’m a simple girl with simple needs. What I want to know right now is this: Does RPR™ offer anything of value for me to share with clients? And the short answer is, yes, it does appear that way. You’ve been doing this for awhile- researching information, compiling that information, presenting that information, and what RPR™ does it make it super simple to research, gather, present, and share property, neighborhood, and market information with our clients, in a very professional, complete, concise manner. In a matter of moments I can compile a professional report to either email or pdf for my clients that includes market stats, neighborhood info, property info, a glossary… Informed clients make the best clients. This is good for consumers.

I know, I know, the path ahead is rife with uncertainty. All that transparency is both liberating and chafing at the same time. Should the NAR mess with this at all? Are there turf wars involved? Why is this information still behind Read more

January 6, 2010

DISCerning my ideal real estate team: Which personality profiles will work best in which position?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about a foreclosure caravan in South Florida. It was the usual NYT sob story, but what popped out at me was the real estate agent. All through the piece he is arm-twisting his victims, and in several places his is plainly guilty of unsolicited — and very likely ill-advised — financial planning.

This morning on ActiveRain I read a post from an agent essentially boasting that he blacklists certain agents listings, keeping them from his buyer clients so that he won’t have to deal with practitioners of whom he disapproves.

I’ve been a real estate broker since October of 2005. If you’ve ever wondered why we don’t have agents, those two examples are perfectly illustrative. Presumably both of these Realtors are acceptable to their own brokers, but I would sever both of them in a heartbeat. They are each one of them a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I could not be rid of either one of them quickly enough.

Except that I will probably never have this problem, because, even when we do start to recruit agents, I will never have anything to do with people who would even think of putting their own interests ahead of the client’s.

You may at this point want to protest that I am being too harsh, but my belief is that Caesar’s wife must be above reproach. Never-been-sued is not a mark of pride. What we want is to achieve a level of rigor and candor in the work we do such that there is no room in our clients’ mind for even an implied accusation. We will have done our jobs the way I want them done when there is no possibility of even a hint of a doubt that we would ever serve our own interests at the expense of the interests of the people we work for.

People here and elsewhere have written a lot about the ideal post-Web-2.0 real estate brokerage. I’ve not participated in those discussions, because it’s not something I’m interested in. I don’t care how someone is going to make a brokerage of 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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