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Category: Real Estate (page 68 of 266)

September 6, 2009

Queen for a Day

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

Stop whatever you’re doing (and in this case you’re reading my post), and make sure you’ve read Al Lorenz’s most recent Pulitzer Prize winning article. Well, technically it’s not a Pulitzer Prize winner, but when you consider this year’s actual Pulitzer winners, I think Al’s expose is as clear thinking, well reasoned and as well penned as some of these touted journalists.

An Al Lorenz and Geno Petro I am not, so what you’re going to get from me is a more visceral playing out of what Al so succinctly writes about in his article.

Greg Swann commented in Al’s post with:

“And: Where is the NAR on all this? Almost always on the side of the expropriation of property rights, of course.”

And now, Greg, Al, and everyone, here’s NAR’s response to this most important, intricate and far reaching debate. I’m calling it “Queen for a Day”, based on an old TV show that used to captivate American TV viewers because of its “Robin Hood” approach to the world around us. Got a problem? We’ll take care of you. Need a helping hand? If you get enough applause (i.e. demonstrate that you need, don’t have, and want), you win.

I couldn’t make this up. Here it is, straight from NAR:

NAR wants YOU to create propaganda for THEM, to use on YOU, to benefit THEM.

Al writes near the end of his article:

“The thing to fear is what is already happening every day in both my neighborhood and yours as our property rights are peeled away by each group of citizens wishing to take something away from the others. Remember the end game when you celebrate the tax credits for home buyers and lobby for more.” (My emphasis)

Will the 1.1 million NAR members play the PR game, or will this group of 1.1 million members rebuke NAR and celebrate, discuss and learn from Al Lorenz and his expose on the government takeover of real estate?

If you’re a NAR representative who was involved in the making and dissemination of the “Let’s Read more

September 5, 2009

The Government takeover of Real Estate is well underway

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Earlier, there was a discussion of the possibility of a government takeover of real estate brokerages. We had a bit of a lively discussion about the possibility of a governmental takeover of real estate brokerages.  But I’m here to tell you, it will never happen because in the end, the government will have no need for brokerages.

The government takeover of all real estate is already pretty far along.  Growth management, shorelines management, local municipalities, county, state and federal regulations have all taken unprecedented freedoms from landowners and redistributed them to government in the name of the “public.”  Many cities’ zoning codes are in the process of not only defining what uses to allow for land in their jurisdictions but they are implementing design standards that strictly control how such structures must look.  In the county that I live, government already owns 88% of all the land and that percentage is increasing.

Oppressive property taxes in many areas are themselves rent on the land from the government who believes itself to be the true owner.  Don’t pay those taxes and you quickly find out who really owns the land.  Generally based on assessed valuation, property taxes in periods of increasing value are a tax on an unrealized gain to the property title holder who is then taxed on the gain, as both a capital gain and an excise tax, when it is realized.

You may remember a Supreme Court ruling in Kelo vs. City of New London in 2005 that greatly expanded eminent domain to include seizure of privately owned property for redevelopment and resale to other, more politically favored, private owners or developers!  Since that ruling governments can, and have, taken private lands for any reason, including simply selling them to preferred private owners.

The drumbeat continues.  The new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is using Fair Housing laws as justification for new requirements he is placing on cities and developments to provide diversity of housing to obtain a “fully integrated society.”  “New Urbanism” and “Smart Growth” are simply terms for the latest planning fads of social engineering under the guise of “public” Read more

September 5, 2009

Even though much of the current real estate “news” is really just hype, there can still be good reasons for you to be in the market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Get a load of all that great housing news! Median prices are up! Sales volumes are up! The prognosis for the future? Up, up, up!

Here’s a different take: If it looks, walks and talks like hype, it’s probably hype.

Are houses selling well, compared to a year ago? They are — but the federal government is giving first-time home-buyers $8,000 in free money to buy houses right now. If that tax credit is not extended or replaced with something even more generous, the music will stop on November 30th.

And while median home prices may be up, prices for homes that normal working people actually buy are flat at best — and they have been trending downward since December of 2005.

But what about the shortage of available homes you have read about? What about the multiple offer scenarios, with homes selling for thousands of dollars over list price?

What would you expect to happen when you artificially stimulate demand at the same time that you artificially limit supply? We should be doing what your grandpa used to call “a land-office business.” Instead, even with $8,000 in free money, prices are still trending downward.

And that artificially-limited supply — all of the foreclosed homes that banks are withholding from the marketplace — will flood the market sooner or later.

If you’re in the real estate market right now, what you should do depends on your circumstances.

If you’re a seller, make a deal. Your carrying costs will almost certainly exceed any gain you can hope to realize by waiting out the market.

If you’re a first-time home-buyer, jump. If you’re not under contract by October 15th, you’ll probably miss out on the tax credit — and houses are not easy to get, taking account of the artificially-limited supply.

Buying with a loan? Interest rates are low for now, but they may not stay that way.

Buying all cash? Sit tight. As sweet as prices look right now, it seems likely they’ll get a lot sweeter when the banks finally release all the homes they’ve been hoarding.

 
Spread the word: Click here for a Read more

September 3, 2009

Speaking of Liberty

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

For months now I have watched the political field of action, players, on-lookers, naysayers and pundits. Is there no clarity?

My highest regard for that clarity sometimes springs from this very site, its authors, contributors and readers. So today, I introduce again a contributing voice to the clarity that originates from reason, Ayn Rand.

Watch her eyes throughout this. She understands what is to come in the form and substance of the questions, and when given the opportunity, she is clear, resonant and reasoned. Oh, and she’s right by the way.

September 1, 2009

Does your smart-phone hold within it the future of real estate marketing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Do you have a smart-phone like the iPhone, Blackberry or Palm Pre? How much time do you spend on it? Is it possible that your smart-phone is your primary interface for accessing the internet? If you’re not there already, can you foresee a day when that might be the case?

It’s certainly that way for us, and we see smart-phone surfing as the next big wave in internet use. Because of that, we’re devoting more of our marketing efforts to promoting real estate by smart-phone.

As an example, we just added SMS messaging from a company called Drive-Buy Technologies. If you happen to drive by one of our listings, you can text a short message to a pre-set SMS account number and you will get a return SMS message with a link to a mobile web site featuring property details, photos and a link to that property’s main web site.

I’ve never been a huge fan of video as a real estate marketing tool. But smart-phone technology is changing my opinion. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is so seamless that touring a home by video — as you sit outside in your car — is suddenly a viable option.

Another use for real estate video on smart-phones would be a sixty-second neighborhood tour — photos of houses, nearby stores and restaurants, schools and parks. And that video might link back to a Google map of the neighborhood, with each featured landmark shown on the map.

We’ve also just added the SmarterAgent smart-phone MLS client. This is a tiny app that gives you access to the full Phoenix-area MLS database. You can search for homes any way you want — by address, zip code, school district, MLS number. Even cooler, the app will use your smart-phone’s built-in GPS system to show you listings at your current location.

Is the smart-phone the future of real estate search? Maybe not, but when you spot the house of your dreams, won’t it be nice to find out all about it — right there on the spot?

 
Spread the word: Click here for Read more

August 23, 2009

If You Want to Close Deals, Force Registration

by

Real Estate

Author website

Let me repeat that: If you want to close more deals, force your users to register to view property listings on your website.  I can back this up with hard data.  I can back this up with recent data.  If you allow open registration on your IDX/RETS site, you do not receive better leads than the broker/agent with forced registration.

Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. They either have no data, have never analyzed their data, have never tested, or have never sold or been involved in helping agents sell real estate. Let me repeat that: They have no idea what they are talking about.

I have confirmed these findings with:

Each person listed above gets a minimum of 300 visitors per day from qualified sources – SEO, PPC, or social media ads.  Two people listed above have significantly more data that proves this.

If you don’t get at least 100 visitors per day of potential customers to your site, then you have no real data to confirm or deny these findings.

Every person I know who has tested forced vs. open registration who has significant traffic has opted for forced registration, and has seen an explosion in the number of leads, no degradation in lead quality, and as a result, has closed more deals.

Someone please prove me wrong.  With hard data.

If you want to close more deals, force registration.  The only thing open registration will do for you is get you a table with the cool kids at the conferences.

August 23, 2009

Via Video – Smoking Mr. Potato Head

by

Retechulous...

Author website

No doubt. Real Estate agents (and arguably all biz people) should be creating content and publishing it to self hosted blogs that syndicate anywhere and everywhere on a regular basis. At the very least, the act itself makes us all better, (more thoughtful) practitioners at whatever it is we do. At the very best, google blesses us with huge amounts of juicy, free, profitable, organic traffic.

From a practical point of view, I understand that most folks can’t spew out 500 words of relevant original stuff over a cup of coffee like the folks around BHB can, but I’ll argue that thanks to video it takes almost no real effort or talent to generate interesting online content that yields a high Return on (Time & Money) Invested!

For The “Record” : Writing = Crappy Relative ROI

I’ve got proofs empirical from managing and watching the analytics on a nice handful of blogs: Visitors spend much more time on and are more likely to interact with sites that offer a gallery of videos. How much more time? How much more interaction? Try double… YEAH DOUBLE! No poop. Not kidding. You can double the amount of real live interaction you generate from your social media efforts if you finally embrace this video stuff.

Video’s been the next big thing for years, I know…

So why aren’t more real estate agents leveraging video to generate lots more biz for themselves?

1. They don’t know what to record.
2. They perceive a technical barrier to getting ready for consumption video onto a web page.
3. Broker Owners still just don’t get it. Put simply, this stuff should be encouraged, enabled, and rewarded by ownership… but it’s not. (yet…)

Over the next few days, I’ll try to show how easy and profitable leveraging video can be by providing what should be an easy to follow technical roadmap for any agent who chooses to drink the kool aid.

In the meantime… in order to get some more eyeballs on this venture, here below is “Smoking Mr. Potato Head.” It took 5 minutes to record and get him live on this page. Read more

August 22, 2009

Unleashing the power of internet technology on real estate transactions

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

We’re wired Realtors, and we always have been. The very first thing I did as a Realtor was to set up a web site to attract clients. We made money on the internet from the very beginning.

Since then, we’ve adopted every new idea that’s come around, along with inventing quite a few of our own. We publish a national real estate weblog — BloodhoundBlog.com — to help other wired Realtors come to grips with technology.

Because I’m working with a lot of buyers right now — and because buying a home has become such an ordeal — I’ve been working to make my technogeek status even more robust. Good enough is not good enough any longer. If I want for my clients to get the home of their dreams, my offers have to be first, fastest and best.

To that end, I just bought a new Apple MacBook Pro, and I’ve been outfitting it with the software I need to do contracts from anywhere, in the fastest possible time.

The Arizona Association of Realtors gives us all a program called ZipForms as part of our dues. In the abstract, ZipForms makes filling out forms fast and painless. It falls somewhat short of that ideal in reality, but it will do for now.

But ZipForms integrates with a web-based service called DocuSign, which permits me to capture signatures on-line, in the form of e-signatures.

So I can whip out a purchase contract in ZipForms while standing in the kitchen of the house we’re buying. Mrs. Buyer might be at her mom’s house in Albuquerque, while Mr. Buyer is in New York on business.

No matter. I can set up DocuSign for each buyer to sign the contract in sequence, then have it come back to me for my own signature, then forward the whole package to the listing agent. We can literally do the whole job in a half-hour or less — a big improvement over printing and faxing and running documents around to get signatures.

There are more new technologies we’re playing with. I’ll talk about some others next Read more

August 22, 2009

Bing: Not indexing some and indexing others

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Over the last week or so, I have had several people contact me regarding indexing problems with Bing. They claimed that Bing’s search engine has the following maladies:

1) New sites are OFTEN not indexed for weeks, where Google is picking them up in a MUCH more timely fashion. Yikes (kinda). This lack of indexing occurs even after many links have been pointed at the new site. Some have suggested going to Bing Webmaster Tools (Google that 😉 ) and submitting a sitemap, but that has not worked 100% for me either.

2) Existing sites that were NO FOLLOWED and NO INDEXED and were getting no exposure in Google, were showing up on Search Engine results in Bing. Yikes Yikes.

I had a few distractions this past week, but have found several examples of each of these things. Let’s start with No index, No followed sites being indexed in Bing.

This is a big thing. Many folks have “private” blogs or pages that are now less private or at least may be less private. The problem was acknowledged by a Microsoftie here and he claims that they are working on the problem.

My opinion on the other issue (Not indexing new sites) is simply this. It appears to me to be one of two things. Either it is a well designed plan on their part to focus their spidering on NEW pages on existing sites rather than on putting new domains into the index…or it is a glitch.

My opinion so far: Glitch 😉 This is, after all, Microsoft err Bing.

NOTE TO BING FOLKS: Love your interface. Spending $100MM in advertising to overpower Yahoo was a great move…BUT…if you are going to compete with G! you need to truly be as good as they are.

And while we are at it, you (Bing guys/gals) have not fixed the Atlanta Real Estate issue yet (Bing that). How many listings for the domain atlantarealestate.net need to appear on the first 10 pages of your results? (grin)

August 21, 2009

DriveBuy listings: Plug-n-play procedure, knock-out presentation

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We use the term “drive-by listing” to refer to the kind of listing you get with almost no human contact: “The key’s under the doormat. Look it over and tell me what we can get. Email me the paperwork.” I have five of these right now, investor-specials that came in over the transom.

DriveBuy Technologies makes a cooler use of the “drive-by” sound, though. BloodhoundRealty.com is an official DriveBuy client as of yesterday. I had built a sign on Wednesday, and I put the ad for that sign together today.

Here’s the sign for the property:

We’re in a sign-restrictive HOA, so we had to do things differently. On our normal signs, the DriveBuy ad-code would go on the big sign, along with the phone number and the URL for the web site.

The editing process on the DriveBuy web site was a piece of cake. Everything is template based, so, while your choices are limited, so are your opportunities for screwing things up. If you’re more adventurous than I’ve been, so far, you can learn the DriveBuy CSS and build your own mobile-browser pages.

But: If you do work with the templates, adding or revising your SMS ads and their respective web pages is a chore you can offload to whomever is already doing your Zillow and PostLets stuff. There is nothing there to to flummox your assistant.

This is the main web site for 1946 East Vista Drive, and this is the DriveBuy site I built this morning. Obviously, the mobile-browser site is a lot more limited (and you’ll note that it looks a lot like the demo page Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy made for us). But Cathleen had no trouble pumping in a dozen photos, and the page features all the mission-critical information, along with a link back to the main web site.

I’m in love with this already, and the DriveBuy folks are interested in hearing ideas about how to improve the product. Over the weekend, I’m going to play with building a page for my investor-special listings. My rating so far: Totally rocks.

August 20, 2009

A Pig with Lipstick – The Financial Services Oversight Council

by

Mortgage Technologist

Author website

With the push to establish the Financial Services Oversight Council, is President Barack Obama just recycling flawed regulatory measures by reshuffling the current regulatory deck and coining it with fresh “changed” names? From all indications, that is exactly what it appears; or to leverage one of the presidential campaign terms…”it’s a pig with lipstick.”

In March of 2008, President Obama made a campaign speech at the Cooper Union in which he vociferated a need for a “modern regulatory scheme.” In his speech to the black suit and red tie attendees in New York, he stated:

“Old institutions cannot adequately oversee new practices. Old rules may not fit the roads where our economy is leading.”

While most individuals would not disagree with his rather broad and all encompassing generic/comprehensive statement, his actions have in fact been in conflict with what he stated. For example, under his leadership, the Public-Private Investment Program (P-PIP) and Temporary Asset Relief Program (TARP) have been directed and managed under the same regulatory bodies. In addition, the same antiquated or obsolete regulatory apothegms he referenced in his Cooper Union speech have also been extended to non-banking organizations such as Chrysler, GM and AIG.

Whether you fall into the left, middle or right politically, each person must acknowledge Obama’s abnegation to regenerate our regulatory structure, did not come to fruition when he announced his Financial Regulatory Reform Plan. Instead of constructing a fresh regulatory approach and foundation, he simply reconfigured the same regulators, coined new titles and utilized the same rules of regulatory application he had previously disqualified as antiquated in his Cooper Union speech.

As part of the Financial Regulatory Reform Plan, Obama proposes the Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) plus four other agencies form what is labeled the Financial Services Oversight Council. The macro intent of The Council is to gather the identified regulatory agencies and have them work cooperatively to identify unsafe financial instruments and organizations systematically at risk. It is also tasked with providing direction to the Federal Reserve to help them identify Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies that Read more

August 20, 2009

How to Run a Real Estate Business: Finding Wisdom in a Baseball Storm

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

“Last night I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out.”  (Ba-da-bum-ching.) That’s an oldie but a goodie.  I had a similar experience recently:  I went to a baseball game and a business class broke out.  About an hour north of me is the Padres Single A affiliate, The Storm.  If you’re a fan of baseball and haven’t made it to a minor league game, you really should; they are a blast.  But that’s a different story.  Because I attended the game with a friend from the Padres organization, I was lucky enough to meet the Storm’s President, Dave Oster and we got to talk a little business.

What’s that you say?  What does minor league baseball have to do with real estate?  By now you should know that business is business.  In the end, if you’re an agent, you’re running a business and I suggest we take every opportunity we get to learn from other successful business people.  As a matter of fact, I’m going to come right out and say you learn more from someone running a business different from yours than you’ll ever learn going to another 5000 seat auditorium and listening to some “real estate expert” who hasn’t sold anything but seats for years.  (Sorry… another tangent).

When Dave and I first got to talking, my goal was to ask him about his marketing philosophy.  I am always interested in learning what someone can share on marketing.  It’s been my experience that most people (and agents in particular) do a poor job of it.  Actually, that’s misleading.  The problem most people have is they don’t know the difference between advertising and marketing.  Genuine Chris Johnson wrote a post yesterday (and Jeff Brown is famous for them 🙂 ) wherein they lay out that difference, but I wonder how many people are seeing it.  In any case, that’s another post for another day because Dave gave me a humdinger of an answer.  During the course of our conversation though, he said something you almost never hear, yet it may be the most important concept in running a Read more

August 20, 2009

Real Estate Branding, Post-Google

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Do real estate brands mean anything to homebuyers post-Google?

When the MLS was printed in a binder that brokers hid under their desks and consumers had to shop for an agent first, brand mattered to buyers.

Now, buyers come armed with a list of properties that are relevant to them and each property comes with an agent, a broker, and a brand attached.

Consumers don’t need agents in order to shop, so relevance trumps brand on the buyer side. That has huge implications if you are a listing broker or agent.

I manage B2C eCommerce sites outside of real estate.  It is apparent to me that, until the moment a consumer contacts an agent and becomes a “homebuyer”,  listing brokers and agents are B2C eCommerce merchants, and your product is the content you develop around your listings.

Listing content = product. Think about it:  Merchandising is about tapping into learned behavior. Most homebuyers are in the market once every 10 years, so for the last 10 years today’s homebuyers have been buyng books on Amazon and shoes on Zappos.

In their lizard brains, when they are on a real estate site looking at properties they are just on another eCommerce site looking at a product.

But brokers and agents devalue their product by giving all of  it away, for free, in the name of advertising.

There are many best practices from the wider world of B2C eCommerce that can be applied to real estate, and it starts with understanding how to develop product content and how that differs from advertising.  Plus, using an eCommerce framework to understand and influence consumer behavior is the kind of thing you can point to where brand does still matter — with sellers.

Sellers still shop for an agent or a broker. Sellers may feel that one local broker can market their property better than other brokers. Feelings can be influenced by branding, and branding works best when it is backed up by real differentiation.

Showing sellers that you understand how to package their listing as an eCommerce product that is distinct from the adverting that you use to get interested buyers to that product/property detail 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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