BloodhoundBlog

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Category: Real Estate (page 74 of 266)

May 14, 2009

What’s in a BBB Rating…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Earlier today, Louis from HomeGain posted about them having an A-plus BBB rating. I will buy that. I think HomeGain has come a long way on his watch and think they have earned it. But since I had not looked at BBB ratings in a LONG time, I was intrigued enough to check out some others in the Real Estate Sector:

The Brokerage where I work: A plus (woot! see you and raise you Louis! 😉 )
Most of our local competitors: A to A plus (well done!)
RE/MAX Intl: A
RedFin: A minus (kudos, Mr. Kelmann…an accomplishment in a tough industry.
Zillow: Z for yourself. Yikes. But Zestimates can be a tough thing to keep people happy with, no? And that can affect your Zcore.
HouseValues: C

BBB ratings are supposed to be about a business keeping it’s commitments to its customers and living up to its agreements. I would also go so far as to say that it involves customer service. Going the extra mile to take care of people is an important piece of that.

In the end it is not about a rating but rather a commitment to do the right thing…thoughts?

I’d invite you to drop by the BBB.org and see how you or your brokerage or business rate! Ratings are not everything, but the idea that the better we serve our customers and their needs, the better we will be is a solid principle in my opinion.

May 14, 2009

NAR Backs Off Labeling Google a “Scraper”

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I’m basing this on a flurry of tweets out of NAR Mid Year, but it looks like the NAR rules committee came to its senses.

I await the actual verbiage. It will be interesting to see what twisted hedge they come up with to distinguish an “indexer” from a “scraper”.

Still, the question remains: Was the original decision to back MIBOR a deliberate attempt to see if they could rally the Luddites to hobble IDX?

Or was it just plain vanilla cluelessness?

Either way, it begs the even bigger question that was asked hundreds of times on blog posts over the last week: What are NAR members paying for?

UPDATE: Not so fast. See Malok’s comment below. It’s not a done deal, apparently, and the twits are silent.

May 14, 2009

More Stuff On CRM: Know In Advance What You Want to Do.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

You can use Google Docs as a more effective CRM than most people do.  I know, for a while, I did. It’s better than what most CRMs do which is to hide you from your people.

Complexity is not your friend.  Also, having permanent storage is not that useful either, unless you’re in the business of collecting names.   FACEBOOK can more or less be permanent storage for your longterm loosely tied contacts.  Anyway.

Every time I add someone in, one of a few things needs to happen:

  1. I need to get more data on the guy TO call him.
  2. I need to call him/her.
  3. I need to assign an activity series to him.

These are separate events.  I can’t be doing all of them at once, so I seperate out the #1 part of the activity series.  I do my ‘who the hell am I gonna call’ research basically a couple of times a week.  I start with:

  1. People that Add me on twitter (I’m about 400 behind right now)
  2. People that I find in a couple of LinkedIn Groups that add me.
  3. People with truly shitty websites with no title tags, and a flash intro.

Because I practice a half assed version of GTD, I’ve got the ubiquitous capture habit down.  (Mac users: K-notes plus Dashboard is a winning combo for ubiquitous capture.  PC users:  My friend Amy from Twitter wrote a script called CunningNote)  So these people all get brought into something.  For me, it’s a sheet in a spreadsheet.  I put name, email, where I found ’em, twitter handle, phone number, industry and website.    Alt-Tab and I’m in, Alt-Tab and I’m out.  Takes 10 seconds and it’s good mental exercise to try and get it right without going back to look. I do this when my mental energy is sapped.  This is something that I intend to eventually have someone else do, but I need my revenue to triple before that can happen.

So, the next thing I do is make sure I have an inventory of about 150 people to call at the moment.  That way I never procrastinate calling and start doing ‘research.’  I batch ’em into Read more

May 14, 2009

How we say_What we say_Is important

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

This is actually a post about transparency, but as you’ll see, I am not a big fan of the ‘word’ itself. The idea of belaboring a word all of you seem to take for granted came about as I was talking with Scott Schang a few days ago. We were just enjoying each other’s company, doing real work, a lender and real estate guy talking about the industry, our own ideas, sharing and laughing, scribbling notes and taking stock of the ideas that just never seemed to quit coming.

For me transparency is about saying what you want to say, showing what you want to show, sharing what you want to share, and doing it in a manner and method that is most likely to allow the reader or listener to understand. In order for that to happen the writer or creater of thoughts and ideas, facts or fictions, must decide up front HOW they will present the information.

Let me give you some examples.

Greg Swann

“I write well. I’m a tough read here, but I can be much, much more difficult to read. I understand grammar the way other people understand cars or football or cooking, and I can build perfectly valid sentences in English that almost no one can understand, much less diagram. The English language is like Jazz to me, and it ripples and rolls through my head all the time, making connections like lightning strikes that take many paragraphs to explain to other people.

Brian Brady

“I posed this question at Unchained Phoenix ‘09 and you would have thought I asked the REALTORs to walk on coals…at first. A few bright agents listened to my reasoning:”

Geno Petro

“When I awoke from my dehydrated coma and rack focused my blurry vision toward the general direction of the deactivated alarm clock on my night stand, the numbers 7:07 burned my retinas digital red. I jumped up in a virtual panic, threw on a suit and Hermes noose, splashed on a handful of Bulgari, gargled a Red Bull and Diet Coke highball and flew out the door in search of my car. Alas, God was looking Read more

May 13, 2009

Need Maps? BatchGeocode.com is the easiest way to create them

by

Realtor, Tech Connoisseur

Author website

I used Batch Geocode yesterday to make a wonderful “quick and dirty” map of homes for a relo buyer

All it needs is Address, City & State.

Grab the info in Excel Format from your MLS Search, paste into the Batch Geocode Window, and it creates a great, scalable map with labelled balloons. The legend even includes the rest of the information from the spreadsheet data. WAY COOL.

May 12, 2009

Why Aren’t There ‘Guys Nights’ At Bars and Clubs? Duh

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

The logic is so simple, and the result is usually so predictable, having a ‘Ladies Night’ at the local bar or club is a no-brainer. The more foxy ladies there are, the more guys there’ll be to buy ’em drinks etc. Why else would a local bar be packed on a Wednesday night? Gimme a break.

Listings are our foxy ladies. If worked correctly, every night is Wednesday — if you’re a lister. Look, for the record, guys go to bars on Ladies Nights ‘cuz it makes sense to hunt in a guaranteed target rich environment, right? Same with real estate buyers — they tend to congregate where the listings are.

But let’s look at this through the Ladies’ eyes.

They’re the magnets and they know it goin’ in. From bank owned Barb to rehabbed Richelle to young and perky Pamela, they congregate together, knowing there will no doubt be more than enough guys to go around. There’s usually all kinds of gals for all kinds of guys. But make no mistake — no gals? No guys.

Buyer’s markets are what I often describe as a ‘get while the gettin’s good’ situation. Sellers, if possible, tend to stay home when they realize for every buyer there could literally be dozens of houses from which to choose. This is why you won’t find bars lasting long with an extreme undersupply of ladies. Though guys are surely an integral part of the equation, women are in the driver’s seat with rare exception.

This is even true when the gals out number guys on a given night. You know I’m right. See the trio of lovely young ladies over in the corner? They’re all pretty nice, but geez-a-lou, look at the one in the middle. Absolute perfection — a vision of everything that is feminine pulchritude. You think she’ll have a tough time meeting a cool gentleman even though the ladies out number the men 5-1? Yeah, me neither.

This is all my very roundabout way of pointin’ out the obvious. Buyers are a huge part of my business, no doubt about that. But Read more

May 12, 2009

A quick, random thought

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

It’s not that I couldn’t somehow get my hands on a late model Ferrari if I really wanted one (and I doubt I’m any different than most happily married men of my demographic in this regard). After the divorce, I’d simply have to move in with relatives, liquidate whatever is left for 100 pennies on the dollar, then slap down the balance on American Express between billing cycles, that’s all. With the proceeds I could probably score a pretty decent off-lease, if not road worn,  Enzo Berlinetta…in the least desirable color—with stock rims. I’m just saying.

I want one, but ideally…I want one 20 years ago.  (Actually, I’ll just take the 20 years ago and you can keep the Ferrari and this whole real estate business.)  A 32 year old Realtor in a Ferrari is a Bad Ass but a 52 year divorcee old living at home with mother is….well, just plain sad—especially when forced to park a high mileage phallus behind her Subaru in the driveway. (God how I hate that Freud.)

So this middle-aged guy zooms into my rear view mirror on the freeway entrance ramp last evening, hesitates for a double-bump tach rev,  then screams past me on the right in 1st gear. He was neatly tucked into a couple hundred thou of  handcrafted, precious scarlet metal and buttery cowhide.  His straw gray, combed-over tonsure hovered in the breeze above a sun-chapped bald spot. A rose gold Chopard watch, with matching cuff links, deflected all remaining rays of Envy as he dissolved into the North Shore Chicago smogset.  Judging from the pink gold blur, I pegged his left wrist alone at around 50 grand. Clearly, our little speedster’s got more jack than any man knows what to do with. His engine sounded like an amped-up Joe Satriani guitar riff in the dusky ether.  His license plate read RAINMKR. I’ve been behind this ass clown before.  He used to double park his banana cream Bentley at a renowned Viagra Triangle watering hole during happier hours. Must have gotten a divorce. If he got a red Ferrari then somebody got a house. Read more

May 11, 2009

NAR + IDX = FUBAR Rules

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Thanks to Ryan’s earlier post, I have spent the morning digging into the NAR’s attempt to label the Google Search Engine a “scraper”.

Clearly, the intent is to stifle Realtor.com’s competition.

There is no other explanation for a rule that specifically targets SEO by dictating that we cannot put the content that consumers search for (addresses, MLS#s, the names of developments, etc.) in the places that Google looks for it (page titles, URLs, etc.), while Realtor.com continues to publish that same information in those same places.

How stupid is this? Let me count the ways:

  1. It’s legally stupid: The DOJ went after the NAR during the BUSH years and decided to settle last year. Do they really think the Obama DOJ is going to ignore such a blatantly anti-competitive (not to mention technologically indefensible) rule?Does the NAR really think the Obama DOJ would side with a cartel over the consumer when even the Bushies were like, “You know, we normally stick it to the little guy in favor of Republican donors but you guys are just ridiculous.”?

    The instant one of the boards we deal with tries to enforce this rule, I will be filing a compliant with both the FTC and the DOJ and mine will be one of many.

  2. The timing is stupid: Obviously, Real Estate is at the center of the economic storm that all Americans are weathering right now. Real Estate professionals are already distrusted (one study in the UK found that less than 10% of Britons trusted Real Estate agents).Such a ham-handed attempt to control information for their own economic benefit just feeds this perception, making the NAR (and, by extension, Realtors) an even more attractive target for the Obama DOJ.
  3. Trying to “protect” content is stupid: Ask the Recording Industry or newspapers how well clinging to an obsolete business model by “protecting” content works.Information wants to be free in a networked society. The Internet itself was built to re-route traffic around roadblocks, like a city that used to have phone lines getting nuked by the Russians.

    As roadblocks go, whatever the NAR throws up will be a joke. Ryan has already demonstrated that Read more

May 11, 2009

Making a virtue of necessity is usually an error…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:

Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage?  BAHAHAHHAAHA!

Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.

The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:

My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.

Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in Read more

May 10, 2009

Greg Swann: Duty, Honor, Country

by

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

Author website

I wasn’t born when General MacArthur gave “the speech“, at West Point but I’ve read it a hundred times.  I delivered it as an exercise for a public speaking class in college.

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

When I think of Greg Swann…my friend, my partner, my brother if you will, those three words, spoken by General MacArthur, come to mind:

Duty: If you have the good fortune to engage his services, you’ll find few real estate professionals who live the duty of “real estate advocate” like Greg Swann.  I once thought Greg’s definition of duty impractical; I was wrong.  Few real estate brokers or agents will choose Greg’s high standard of customer care.  That doesn’t make those brokers or agents immoral nor does it make Greg Swann impractical but it does define the relationship you, a buyer or seller of Arizona property, would receive should you choose to employ his brokerage.

Potential home buyers should read:

Dual Agency Smack-Down: Real estate in real life . . .

A consumer’s guide to the divorced real estate commission: Why buyers and sellers each paying for their own representation is the most significant reform that can be made today in residential real estate

Potential home sellers should read:

How single property websites promote your property in Google.

How custom-made yard signs stop traffic

Honor: Few real estate brokers wish for lesser competition for the sole purpose of raising the standard of customer care but Greg Swann does.  Greg organized three online real estate marketing conferences and is organizing one for this fall in San Diego.  Over 150 real estate and lending professionals have been introduced to a higher degree of customer care through his carefully organized curriculum.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and Read more

May 10, 2009

A real estate recipe for success: Scripts and Luck: Practice makes prepared

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I got lucky. I know it. But being prepared means you increase your luck, right?

So I got a call yesterday about a property I was advertising. It’s a HUD home, and one thing I love about HUD homes is that any broker who is signed up to sell them is encouraged to advertise them. So I have been doing just that. And it generates calls.

I received a call about one of these properties and I threw the play book out the window and just started talking to the caller. Just talking about the property- how much work it might take, and by the way, do you understand the HUD buying process? No? Well it’s different and here’s how… And are you in front of your computer? Okay then, go to this site and where it says Ohio, click there, and by the way, my site is The Brick Ranch so you can see more photos there, and Oh! you just bookmarked my site? Great! Thanks! So here’s more information and….

Suddenly. After 10 minutes of walking the caller through the process, and pointing them here and there, educating and giving away all the information I could in that time period, it occurred to me that maybe they were working with a Realtor. D’oh.

“Are you working with a Realtor?”

“Well.”

Darnitall. I braced myself.

“We have a Realtor who is selling our house.”

Gah.

“But, ” her voice lowers, “we really aren’t happy with the job he’s doing, so we are looking for someone else to help us buy another home.”

Oh. Okay then. I remember this part of the script.

“Would you like me to email you a list of homes as they become available?”

“That would be great!!”

Perhaps the beauty of knowing scripts is that it enables you to do a better job of just being yourself.

May 10, 2009

Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but the BattleBack book…

I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.

(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)

But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.

Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.

I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.

It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process Read more

May 9, 2009

The goal of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained training conference is to push the bums out of the real estate business

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

We publish a national real estate industry weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 42 contributors from all over the country, each one an expert in his or her own right. Together we talk about real estate marketing and technology, lending and investment. If you want to know what Realtors and lenders really think, BloodhoundBlog is your keyhole into the industry.

The blog is all about the wired world of real estate, how the participatory internet is changing age-old paradigms of real property and mortgage marketing. When we started three years ago, the Web 2.0 idea of online interaction was still very new. By now, it’s hard to remember a time when these technologies were not ubiquitous.

BloodhoundBlog’s mission is to help Realtors and lenders keep pace with internet tools. In service of that objective, we produce an annual conference called BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Real estate professionals come from all over the country to learn how to market their services in what amounts to a post-marketing marketplace.

This year’s conference ran last week from Tuesday to Friday. We encamped in a hotel near Skyharbor Airport and worked all but continuously for 72 hours. Our world is changing so fast that we felt we had to work that hard, just to learn everything we need to know.

What’s all this to you? BloodhoundBlog is all about promoting excellence in every conceivable way. We do everything we can think of to train Realtors and lenders to provide a better-quality experience by every means attainable.

My objective, expressed baldly, is to chase the bums out of our business. Licensing purports to do this, but it has not. Trade organizations like the National Association of Realtors should do this, but they don’t. But if we can educate consumers to demand better service, better information, better representation, then the bums and the crooks will go get jobs. That’s the way free markets work, when they’re working properly.

Meanwhile, real estate professionals are just catching on to the idea that consumers can see everything we do. Drop in on BloodhoundBlog and keep an eye on us.

May 9, 2009

My own first-hand foreclosure story

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On April 27th, ironically the day before BloodhoundBlog Unchained commenced, IndyMac Bank posted a Notice of Trustee’s Sale against our home. I didn’t know about this until this week, although I had known it was a possibility.

This is really nobody’s business. But as a matter of steadfast policy, I have never let anyone make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself. I know I tend to excite the most evil sentiments in people with evil minds, so they may want to take this opportunity to further their self-destruction. This matters to me not at all. I live my life well to the right of the zero on the number line, and the only people I deal with or care about do the same. People who pursue disvalues are of no value to themselves, nor to anyone.

But so as not to introduce this topic and then leave it unexplained, here’s what happened: For the past three years, our outflow has exceeded our inflow. This is not an unusual story in the real estate business, and we have been lucky to have enough high-paying work to at least keep us within reach of profitability. During this same time, as you have seen here, we have completely reengineered everything we think about marketing, with the ultimate test of those ideas beginning only now.

But our debt load became severe enough last year that we had to make some hard choices. I elected to take a chance on our mortgage payments, since there was a plausible threat that we might lose the house anyway. Our choice was to keep the doors open at the risk of those doors themselves. I could see an upswing in our business activity, to the extent that I expected to catch up on the mortgage by the second quarter of 2009, and to catch up on everything by the fourth quarter.

I still expect this to be the case. My one mistake was that I didn’t think IndyMac would pull the trigger this soon. I played chicken and I lost, so now, in addition to buying back Read more

May 8, 2009

Query: Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I can’t believe I’m writing this, at this hour. My weariness from this week hasn’t had a chance to overcome my leftover weariness from last week. Sooner or later I’ll make enough money to check into a rest home!

But: Brian Brady, Richard Riccelli and I have been talking about this all week, and I thought I’d run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

So:

Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

If so, what book should it be?

I’m the worst anti-dead-tree snob there is, but the Gary Keller books have proved that print still has legs. We want a way to get through to the 99% of agents and Realtors who have but barely dipped a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. It seems clear that we have to carry the word to them in a format they can (literally) grasp.

So how would you advise us? I know what I want, and I know what Brian wants and what Richard wants. What do you want? What would you want if you were a punter on the sidelines wondering if the topics we take up here are worth worrying about? What might you want if you were a consumer, not someone in the real estate business?

I’m interested to hear where your thoughts run.

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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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