BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 69 of 266)

August 19, 2009

Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies used the Bawldguy technique to promote SMS marketing by social media — and sold his product to the biggest-nosed sneezer in the RE.net

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Not to undermine Chris Johnson’s message about salesmanship, which is spot-on and very-much-needed, but Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies, in agreeing with Chris, demonstrated the value of social media marketing to the sales process.

How?

By posting a comment to Chris’ post, he drew attention to his product — a product we have been actively shopping for.

SMS promotion is next on my radar. I want to be able to add SMS marketing to our signs: “For more information about this property, text HOUND7 to 88000.” We got this from SmarterAgent for our MLS client (text HOUND to 87778), and we knew at once that it would be wicked cool to have as a tool for promoting our listings.

As with our signs, we knew what we wanted before we knew it even existed. Over the weekend, I web-shopped some generic SMS marketing vendors, but I hadn’t moved beyond the window-shopping stage.

And then today Ian posted his comment. And the product is precisely what we need, precisely the way we want it. The price is sweet — eight bucks a month per ad-code — and the codes are reusable. We’ll start tomorrow with five ad-codes, then grow as the business grows. For $40 a month, paid monthly, I’ll have something way better than IVR that delivers tons of value to our listing clients and to our buyer prospects. That totally rocks, and it’s a nice proof of the Bawldguy technique of comment-based marketing.

I have a feature request, of course: We’re moving to SalesForce.com as our CRM — probably next month — and I would love it if DriveBuy would devote some attention to direct integration with SalesForce. They’re already there with TopProducer.

Ian Greenleigh works on commission, just like us. If you buy his product, reward his enterprise by buying from him. The link at the start of this paragraph is his email address. His direct phone number is 512-410-0282.

(As a matter of disclosure, I have no financial stake in promoting DriveBuy. But they’re doing a job I want done, so I want to help them and Ian make more money. If you bristle at the Read more

August 18, 2009

And you thought being a REALTOR was tough…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

You know, it is funny…

Brad Coy sent me a nice note last night and just while I was appreciating that, my wife started laughing and sent me this little snippet from Fox News.

Two quick points.

1) Apparently REALTORS are not the only ones with an industry image problem. My line of work has it too! (grin)

2) Friendless? Note to my industry…if you are not making friends and networking as you go, you are not building True Authority. You are doing it wrong. (too funny…) I suppose that we all sit in our basement and hack all day as well….grin

I did not pick my profession, it picked me. And I certainly did not select it because I wanted to be anti-social. Far from it!

August 15, 2009

Fishing for the details takes all the fun out of real estate fish stories

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“You won’t believe the deal my buddy got on his house. He paid thirty cents on the dollar!”

“You’re right. I don’t believe that.”

“I’m not fooling with you. The house was worth $300,000, and he picked it up for a hundred grand.”

“It was worth $300,000 when?”

“Huh?”

“He got it for $100,000 in what condition?”

“Huh?”

“The house might have been worth $300,000 four years ago. And it might have been in great condition back then, too. What was the list price when your friend put the house under contract?”

“It was listed at $97,500. But the original listing was for $300,000!”

“I don’t doubt it. A lot of homes have been on the market for years. What kind of shape was it in when your friend saw it for the first time?”

“It was great! I mean, there were some holes in the walls, and some of the doors were missing. But it just needed some touch-ups on the paint. And the carpets were hardly stained at all!”

“What was the kitchen like?”

“Cherry! All it needed was a range, an oven, a dishwasher, a microwave and a fridge.”

“In other words everythng but the kitchen sink.”

“No, that was gone, too. But the counters and cabinets were in great shape, just missing a few knobs.”

“So some nice folks bought more home than they could afford during the housing boom. They couldn’t make their payments, so they put the home on the market for more than it was really worth, even back then. It sat on the market for four years, through a normal listing or two, through a short-sale listing, and then it finally sold to your friend as a lender-owned home. Is that about right?”

“You bet! He got a smokin’ deal!”

“Except he didn’t pay thirty cents on the dollar, he paid $2,500 over list.”

“Oh, whatever. Did I tell you about the trout I caught last week at Lake Pleasant? I swear, it was bigger than my arm!”

“Now that I believe.”

 
Steal this book: If you want to use this column on your real estate weblog, feel free. Just give me a link back to http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/

August 13, 2009

Hey Zillow, hey Trulia, hey SmarterAgent: Here’s what I really want in a smart-phone app…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Not for me — for our lenders…

Until lately, lenders and title people never really lived in our world. You could get ’em on the phone all day long — so long as it wasn’t Sunday, so long as it wasn’t 9:30 at night.

That’s changing, thank goodness, especially with lenders.

But: If I need a Loan Status Report (that’s Arizonan for a pre-qual form) at 9:30 on a Sunday night, I need it.

So here’s what I want for one (or more) of y’all to make for lenders:

1. Give them whatever kind of pre-qual calculator they need — with internet access, of course.

2. At the lender’s option, issue the pre-qual information in any extant state association of Realtors form, along with something generic and an auto-generated cover letter.

3. Email as a PDF or send an e-page with a URL to a PDF on your server.

As dumb as these forms are, and as perniciously useless as they sometimes can be, it’s getting to be impossible, in Arizona at least, to submit a contract without one.

So: If you would, please make it easy for lenders to make loan commitments.

Feel free to charge ’em for the app, of course. We all know they’re loaded… 😉

August 12, 2009

Am I being Paranoid about what the NAR is calling the “Recovery?”

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Our helpful friends at the NAR have apparently sent out press releases about the increase in home sales in the second quarter being a sign of a “recovery.”

I saw this on MSN today (yes, I look at MSN):

WASHINGTON – U.S. home sales grew in the second quarter in 39 states, another sign that the ailing housing market is finally coming to life.

Total quarterly sales rose 3.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.76 million, from 4.58 million in the first quarter, but were still about 3 percent below a year ago, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. – MSN Home sales grew in second quarter in 39 states

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a recovery.  I would love to see a recovery.  Did I mention that really strong sales would be great?  The issue for me is that sales that are still 3% below a year ago doesn”t look like a recovery to me.

Yes, sales are higher than the first quarter of 2009.  However, around here, second quarter sales are always higher than first quarter sales.  I would wager that third quarter sales will be above second quarter sales, as always, too.  But that doesn’t mean they will be above the third quarter of last year.

Help me here, what am I missing?  With help like this from the NAR, it’s no wonder folks don’t trust Realtors.

August 12, 2009

Introducing Tony Gallegos: The Mortgage Cicerone as guide dog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today is mortgage expert Tony Gallegos. You’ve known him for years as The Mortgage Cicerone. Tony has just left the cloistered confines of corporate lending and struck out on his own. As a secondary benefit of making this move, he promises to tell BloodhoundBlog readers the unvarnished truth about the world of mortgages.

He’s been a friend of BloodhoundBlog for a long time, and he’s personally acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, so I know y’all will have no trouble making him feel welcome.

August 11, 2009

Makin’ Impressions — Being a Pro — Oh, and Lookin’ the Part

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I’ve learned to expect a lackadaisical attitude about what makes a pro in the real estate business. What’s been surprising is the way something as basic as physical appearance has seemed to be unrelated to any particular generation. I’m talkin’ about how agents choose to dress while on the job.

So much is said, often with the stentorian tone and diction reminiscent of Charlton Heston’s role as Moses. “It’s all about being professional.” “The public is looking for the agent who ‘gets it’ — somebody who is a real pro from A to Z.”

Blah blah blah.

Look, I get it about untenable summer weather. I’ve been in Phoenix in August. It sucks like a turbo charged Dyson. But correct me if I’m wrong, agents in hot climes don’t have client conferences, sign contracts, or meet with prospects in the middle of the Costco parking lot at 1:30 in the afternoon. It’s my guess they’re meeting, if not in the office, somewhere the wonderful invention of air conditioning is in use.

You wanna make the impression on folks you’re a pro? Act like one. Have an office like one. Dress like one. Behave as if a bored housewife couldn’t do your job just as well with 13 hours training. Pretend you actually understand why the public sees real estate ‘pros’ in general as not professional at all. The level of denial I’ve observed both off and online is scary when it comes to this stuff. I’m sure there are jeans support groups.

Casual Friday? How ’bout Casual Decade?

A professional real estate broker/agent with a tie on, meeting a prospect in a well appointed office, demonstrating obvious knowledge, experience, and expertise, is perceived as a real estate professional.

I used to love it when I worked for several years in a huge national office. My office was designed by a pro. I was always professionally attired. When you arrived you were greeted by a very well dressed assistant, and led to either my personal office or a larger conference room if necessary. By the time a prospect had been in my office Read more

August 11, 2009

Why Withhold Addresses for Internet Display?

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

What’s going on in Long Island?

Over the past week, we noticed that 66% of Long Island listings require prospective home-buyers to register on a website before seeing the address.

Why would a listing agent do this? These homes get 42% fewer online viewings on Redfin, and are on the market 54% longer.  And any listing that requires registration to show an address can hardly be found on Google.

It doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps some clients want privacy. But that can’t be the only reason. It seems like in most cases, rather than having to deal with every Tom, Dick and Harry off the Internet, listing agents decided to try to find a buyer through their own network, perhaps so they could earn both sides of the commissions.

We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in San Diego, where about 12% of listings aren’t published to the Internet at all. Is inventory-hoarding what’s really at work? What are the situations where limiting or entirely withholding Internet publication would increase sales?

I used to be more willing to concede that it might not matter much at the very high-end — where buyers may be more likely to handle everything face-to-face — but lately we’ve seen foreign investors browsing our site from Asia before coming to the U.S. to put millions in capital to work.

August 10, 2009

The National Association of Realtors, in perfecting the idea of Rotarian Socialism, not only sanctified the criminal violation of the property rights of innocent people, it also robbed us of the highest and best uses we might have achieved with our real property…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back up to the top because it fits so well with the recent posts from Al Lorenz and Doug Quance. –GSS

 
I’ve understood since I was 18 or so how real estate develops organically, in a truly free market, so I have known all my adult life how horribly the real estate market has been disrupted by the idiotic intrusions of Rotarian Socialism. It’s all about who can steal a few bucks by strong-arming his neighbors, and no one ever stops to wonder what gets mucked up in the process.

So: I said:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

And Brian Brady said, in a comment to that post:

When it’s a 1-4 unit property, held for investment purposes.

Ten words. What am I missing?

What he’s missing is the definition of commercial real estate. If Brian owned 1-4 rental tuxedoes, should he call that his personal wardrobe? Just because the tax laws engender dumb distinctions, we don’t have to ignore reality, do we? Rental property — including a solitary rental house — is commercial real estate. It is owned in pursuit of profit, not as the residence of the owner.

So again:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

The answer is that it should not. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are going to suffer because — at the bidding of the National Association of Realtors — they took their eye off the ball. There is nothing rare about a tract home. If it gains in value ahead of other consumer goods, there has to be a cause — usually one that originates in the criminal use of force against people innocent of all wrong-doing.

As we have discussed, the precipitating cause of the real estate boom in the southwest was criminal land-use restrictions in the costal metroplex of Southern California. The land there is not inherently scarce, but governments made its development difficult or impossible, driving prices up faster than they would have gone otherwise. Investors falsely believed Read more

August 10, 2009

It is time for a new Civil Rights Movement

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

After seeing all the fuss over Doug Quance’s post about A Governmental Takeover of Real Estate Brokerages, I thought a more thorough answer from my perspective to his question might be appropriate.  Last week, a couple of sentences from a superb article by Yaron Brook at the Ayn Rand Center literally twisted at my thoughts.  The sentences are:

  • Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.
  • The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Those sentences are basic premises of the Constitution, of human dignity and of what freedom and liberty are based on.

But apply those thoughts to the current maelstrom swirling about health care, and one’s “right” to health care has a wholly different meaning.  In Mr. Brook’s own eloquence:

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services–no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a “right” to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care. – http://www.aynrand.org

Our entire national debate Read more

August 9, 2009

A Governmental Takeover Of Real Estate Brokerages?

by

Associate Broker

Author website

An Extrapolation Of Epic Government Involvement

At this moment, the President and Democrats in both Houses of Congress are finalizing a health care reform bill that not only no one understands – it won’t  even be read by any of them prior to its passage.

The stated reason for this takeover is the spiraling cost of health care in this country. But health care costs are not the single largest expense that Americans pay for their existence. The single largest expense is housing.

While a majority of Americans are satisfied with their health care, the Democrats are in high gear to eliminate the health care system we currently enjoy – ostensibly to implement a system like Canada, the United Kingdom – or even Massachusetts. Many of these Americans are standing up against the Democrats in town hall meetings across the country.

But how many of  these Americans would stand up if the government chose to take over the real estate industry? After all, doctors and nurses are ranked in the top ten most prestigious careers in this country – while real estate agents and brokers are at the bottom of the list.

Think about it – an argument to nationalize housing could easily be more acceptable than the argument to nationalize health care. What would the cost of housing be if you could eliminate profit from the equation?

The largest single expense when selling a home is the brokerage fee, followed by the costs to obtain a  mortgage. What if these functions were performed by government employees with no profit motive?

Far fetched? The two largest purchases that most Americans make are houses and cars. And we all know who is now making the cars.

August 5, 2009

Grinders and Grinding

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I wake up each morning listening to various radio programs, all sports talk shows with one exception. They’re interesting most of the time, and since there are three of ’em, I can rotate ’till one grabs me. Earlier this week it was ESPN’s The Herd I think. Colin Cowherd talking about the difference between West Coasters and East Coasters and Midwesterners when it comes to discipline. Though they tended to generalize far too much geographically, their point was well made:

Great talent almost always loses out in the long run to great discipline. And great talent yoked to great discipline is nearly unbeatable.

When asked for an example he cited a couple elite teams — the Colts and Patriots. Both are Super Bowl Champs. Both have won far more than their share the last several seasons. Besides winning, they share another factor — they have more players with college degrees than the other teams. Discipline.

He then used Cincinnati as an example of a team with incredibly talented players but almost no visible discipline. Apparently Cincinnati, when translated, means Pay more attention to Me Me Me!! I think anyone who follows pro football can see the merit in these examples, as I did.

Don’t immediately jump to discipline in real estate or the mortgage business, look back on other things you’ve done in your lives that wouldn’t have been remotely possible without it.

I’ve had three hobbies in my life in which I’ve been involved at fairly intense levels. Bodybuilding, baseball umpiring, and running.

Anybody who’s done any of those seriously, knows it involves what Cowherd called grinding — or being a grinder. It’s a perfect description in my opinion. All three of those disciplines require very long periods of both learning curves, practice, and the gaining of real life, real time experience. All three of those is a grind, and there’s nobody but you doin’ it. You lift the weight, you study the rules and apply the correct on-field mechanics, you log the miles each day.

It’s a grind — there’s simply no pretty way to dress it up, is there?

Colin’s Read more

August 5, 2009

Prometheus without forethought: Using the Bloodhound meme to bring clients around to a conversation about quality in real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My mind is alive with themes for BloodhoundBlog posts that I’m not writing — the Principle of the Yes Man and the Elephant on the Balcony and Prometheus the Mind-Giver. I’d write more, except my having written so much over the past three years is paying off in spades — in diamonds, as it were.

But in the comments to Chuck Marunde’s marvelous post on the ubiquity of the part-time Realtor, the idea of improving the quality of practitioners came up again.

We’ve been through all of this many times before, and a search of the archives on the terms “licensing” should prove enlightening. But this is the Cliff’s Notes on my own position on the topic: Licensing laws serve only to enshrine mediocrity by implying that minimum standards are adequate and sufficient. To the contrary, a higher standard of care among real estate professionals will be achieved not by stricter licensing laws, and not by the National Association of Realtors, but by the persistent application of market-borne pressure. In other words, a higher quality of service among real estate professionals will come about when superior practitioners raise the bar — and tell the world they have done so.

To which sentiment I will amend this addendum: Ahem!

This is the BloodhoundBlog mission, of course, and, at our third anniversary, I wrote about how proud I am that the word “Bloodhound” has become a de facto meme for quality in the practice of real estate.

And: Nothing exceeds like excess. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. So I’ve made a little button you can put on your web site or weblog, if you like, to spark a Bloodhound-like conversation. That much is the Elephant at the Dining Room Table: Your clients aren’t thinking about quality because the state and the NAR have schooled them to look for meaningless imprimaturs instead. If you want for your clients to be able to identify the better from the worse, you have to initiate the conversation with them. The buttons you see below can help you get that discussion started.

Witness:

160 pixels square:

We're Bloodhounds. We teach our clients to demand better service from real estate professionals.

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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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