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Category: Real Estate (page 83 of 266)

February 21, 2009

In the world of internet marketing, Realtors and lenders have to know how to solve their own on-line marketing problems

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen encouraged me to take exception to Jeff Brown’s most recent post, and, by the time I was done, I had a whole new post.

Quoting from Jeff:

If you honestly believe your income is higher with you spending time changing your own hi-tech oil, then continue along that path — it’s obviously working for you. On the other hand, if you think putting yourself in front of 50 more serious prospects a year might be more productive for your bottom line, AND that would make you happy, you may want to modify your approach.

This is a false dichotomy.

First, you do not have to change your own oil, so to speak, but if you don’t know how to change your own oil, you are at the mercy of every money-hungry automobile service writer on the planet.

Second, assiduous hi-tech marketing, going forward, is the best path to belly-to-belly appointments. This could our best year ever in volume of sides (not, alas, volume of dollars), and much of it — and all of the multi-home buyers — came from our web presence. There is room to be impressed by lo-tech success stories, but the two details left out are these: Buyers and sellers are increasingly shopping on-line, and the cost-per-conversion of old-school lo-tech marketing is comparatively very high. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much makes it all the way home.

Third, as should be obvious from everything I talk about, the kinds of chores Realtors and lenders need to keep a fat thumb on are those that would be too costly, too onerous or too error-prone if done by vendors.

As an example: Cathy and I made more than 1,400 engenu pages last year. The end result is work product that was done faster and made a much better impression on our clients than trying to communicate by other means. This stuff knocks the socks off clients, which I consider to be our most important sales function in everything we do. But those pages also put 1,400 new, permanent breadcrumbs on the web, so that other clients can find us in the future. As Read more

February 21, 2009

Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

President Barrack Obama came to Mesa Wednesday to announce his new housing initiative. The location made for good political theater, given that metropolitan Phoenix is one of the hardest-hit real estate markets.

The president promises millions of refinanced or renegotiated mortgages, at a price tag of $275 billion. The putative beneficiaries are homeowners, who may be able to negotiate their monthly payments down to less than 30% of their monthly incomes. But it is the lenders who will cash in, if the Obama plan works.

How’s that? Obama is hoping to shove a floor under still-declining home prices. Lenders will take a hit on millions of reformulated mortgages, but the hope is that this will save them even more money, in the long run, by stemming the rising tide of foreclosures.

In other words, the Obama plan is a price-support scheme. The market argues right now that homes are overpriced — which in turn suggests that the available supply of homes substantially exceeds existing demand.

That’s important. Prices for premium-quality homes are very low, and interest rates are still hovering at historic lows. Mortgage money is easily available to owner-occupants, and Fannie Mae just loosened its standards for rental-home investors. Even so, the number of homes being offered for sale at current prices still exceeds the number of buyers willing to pay those prices.

In reality, prices need to continue to drop until demand matches or eclipses supply. It wouldn’t hurt to convert some housing to other uses, or simply to tear it down altogether.

But forcing an arbitrary floor under prices is unlikely to have happy consequences. Despite his rhetoric, Obama’s plan can only reward our economy’s wasteful grasshoppers, at the expense of its thrifty ants. A price-support will serve to delay recovery, since it will do nothing to solve the supply and demand problem. And, as the worst of all foreseeable consequences, a price-support plus the $8,000 tax credit from last week’s stimulus bill could Read more

February 20, 2009

What’s the best way to deliver the Heap-specific universal contact form? With a Heap-specific form, of course.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m not too dumb, I’m sure. Just dumb enough. When I released the Heap-specific version of the universal contact form, for some reason it didn’t occur to me that I could build a version of the form to deliver the product.

This omission I do hereby correct:

If you want a copy of the Heap-specific universal contact form — guess what? Fill out the form:

< ?PHP $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/SendTheFormForm.php"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?>

It’s a pure geek thrill, but everything that happens after this is automated via Heap, untouched by human hands…

But I am always a sucker for the implications of my epiphanies, howevermuch they might be delayed.

So: This kind of thing would be ideal for that “Send for our free Relocation Guide” appeal.

Brian: Sign up for our free on-line webinar and find your way into our database funnel. And after the event, as the first of many, many touches, we’ll send you a free link to an iPod-ready version of the webinar so you can review the material while you work out.

By linking a PayPal button with a smart email client, I’m thinking you’ve got a hands-free on-line business using Heap. You can bet I’ll be playing with all of Unchained’s PayPal buttons.

I know there are walls we’re going to run into with Heap. Some we’ll surmount by being clever, but others are going to require growth in the feature set of the product. But I like the games I’m able to play so far.

February 20, 2009

Bankrupt Ideas for Changing Bankruptcy

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Two excerpts from a local article:  Bankruptcy reform could help hard-up homeowners

Overwhelmed by debt from credit cards, a $536-a-month truck payment, $8000 in overdue property taxes and two mortgages, the single homeowner is hoping (San Diego bankruptcy attorney) Colwell can remove the $84,000 second loan on his home, which is now worth about $100,000 less than what he originally paid.  (emphasis mine)

———————————

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (says) Congress is prepared to act on the (bankruptcy) legislation so “responsible homeowners can stay in their homes.” (emphasis mine)

The obvious question here is: Does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi know she’s a caricature?

But let’s go beyond the obvious for a moment and take a rational, economically based look at President Obama and Congress’ plan to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages.  Why?  Because the effect of this legislation will impact not only home buyers, real estate agents and lenders but pretty much anyone who plans on using a mortgage to purchase or refinance a home in the foreseeable future.

This is not the venue to bore you with arcane language and minutiae on how mortgage back securities work.  Suffice to say that, as with all investments, investors in mortgage backs (upon which all mortgage rates are based) are happiest when they feel safest.  The more comfortable they are in their expectation of future redemption rates, the less profit they expect in return for purchasing mortgage backs.  Translation: a safe & happy mortgage back investor equals a low mortgage rate.

But, when you give a bankruptcy court the power to modify a loan at their own prerogative, you introduce the unknown and unstable into the world of our happy little mortgage back investors – you introduce risk.  Confronted with an increase in risk, investors naturally want an increase in reward.  That means higher rates across the board. This is not rocket science.

Says Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Association,

“If there’s the fear that judges can at any time modify mortgages, it’s no long the safe investment it was, and investors will charge mortgage bankers more to buy the loans – costs that will be passed on to Read more

February 20, 2009

Real Estate Brokerage Is Rocket Science — NOT

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Show of hands. How many real estate brokers/agents reading this were recruited by M.I.T.? Crickets. Yeah, thought so. Me neither. I can spell technology. I’m not a TechnoGeek by anyone’s flimsy definition. Folks who know me are laughing at the thought. My blog? I know how to write posts then click the publish button.

I realize the online community by nature is composed of a far higher percentage of technologically gifted people than the population in general. Really, I get that. But they talk to each other so much about how wonderful this app is vs that app, they don’t realize the Gomer down the hall who’s making half a million a year by physically farming, or God forbid, calling people on the phone, avoided more in income taxes last year than they grossed.

Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Geekoids. That’s what they do — help guys like me. If they studied what I did for a year, they still wouldn’t know half of what I’ve forgotten. Same with me and what they do, except I could study into my next three lives and still fall short. This isn’t about right or wrong. This is about how much you want to earn, and how you’re gonna skin that many cats.

I’m in the business of investment real estate. You a broker/agent? What business are you in? I’m not gonna belabor the point of hours spent on activities you’ll claim are directly related to your bottom line. The only thing related to your bottom line is closed escrows. The rest is what makes you feel good about doing what you were gonna do anyway. And for the record, if messin’ around with the hi-tech part of your business floats your boat, more power to you. But pulllease stop trying to convince yourself and others it’s time well spent. Write that speech, print it, put it in the crosscut shredder, then spread it on your lawn. Before long you’ll have the greenest grass in town.

Let’s bring the dirty little truth about hi-tech in real estate out in Read more

February 20, 2009

If I could show you how to leverage your marketing efforts to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of added value, added reach, added impact and added sales — would you be willing try on some new ideas?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Pre-script: Here’s one of the secret benefits of working at BloodhoundBlog: If you screw up in really interesting ways, Direct Response provocateur Richard Riccelli will phone or email to tell you what you’re getting wrong. I’ve recast this post in response to a very instructive voicemail from Richard.

 
I had an email from Matt McGee — I had had it around Christmas, too, but Matt was kind enough to send it again. I’m going to deal with it as a colloquy.

Cari and I were chatting last night about Unchained ’09 and we’re both curious about the way you’ve been describing it on the blog:

We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

Can you provide some more detail on what you mean there — the stuff about not teaching, but doing? For example, if Cari’s there, she’s not going to be able to (nor does she want to, nor will I want her to) FTP in to her main web site or her blog and start rewriting pages, updating page titles and other SEO stuff, tweaking keywords, etc., on the fly.

Why wouldn’t she want to know how to do this? It’s easy to do, more unfamiliar than arcane, and we’re going to be right there, talking about what to do, how to do it — and what to do if something goes wrong.

BloodhoundBlog was less than a month old when I first wrote about the skills Realtors will need to compete in the age of the internet. We each of us should know how to do these things, both to solve our own problems, when we need to, and to make sure that hired vendors aren’t ripping us off. A big part of the work I have done here since then has been talking about the kinds of tasks Realtors and lenders can and should be doing on their own — to control costs and quality and simply to make sure these jobs are getting done Read more

February 19, 2009

Monetizing What Counts – Don’t Rain on Their Parade

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

My brother called me late last week. He lives in Dallas with his wife and kids – he’s in his early 40’s, smart, tech-savvy and owns his own business. He wants to buy a new home. The home he wants isn’t currently listed with a real estate agent – it’s a pocket listing FSBO so to speak -the owner would like to sell but doesn’t want to actively list and sell it. She’ll sell at the right price – she’s not going to go out of her way to find a buyer.

My brother has bought and sold a few homes, rarely with the assistance of a real estate agent – he’s open to cooperating with an agent when he wants to sell his home, but simply not keen on paying a commission for something he feels he is more than capable of doing himself.

I am not an evangelist. If he wants to do it himself, more power to him.

Funny thing happened, however – his call was a plea for help. He wanted me to review the standard real estate sales contract – he doesn’t know what boxes to check – or at least wants to make sure that he’s checked the right ones. He needed to move relatively quickly so he could get his hook into the “unlisted” home before word got out that she would entertain offers.

“Listen Tom, I really need your help – I’ll even pay you.”

Putting the whole lack of being licensed in Texas aside, a smile came across my face. ALAS, my brother of all people understands the value of expertise and knowledge – and you know what, it ain’t free.

I asked him how he knew whether or not the house he wanted to buy was actually worth what the seller wanted?

Not sure but felt her price seemed reasonable. I told him to go to Zillow and find out what it’s Zestimate was – the good news was it fell within a few thousand of the seller’s target price of $1M.

I walked through the contract with my brother Read more

February 19, 2009

The bad news: Obama’s housing relief plan is a giveaway to lenders, not homeowners. The worse news: It won’t work, anyway.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you read the news this morning, you’ll find Realtors all over the country rejoicing that President Obama has surged into the depressed real estate market on a white charger, bearing with him an heroic plan to rescue everyone — borrowers, lenders and especially Realtors. No discouraging words? To the contrary. Some Realtors think Obama’s promise of $275 billion in mortgage bailouts does not go far enough.

Here are two important questions to put the matter into perspective:

1. By how many dwellings will the standing inventory of housing be reduced under Obama’s plan?

2. By how many households will Obama increase demand for housing?

Since the answer to both of these questions is zero, we can predict with certainty that President Obama’s housing relief plan will do nothing to relieve the housing crises.

What will it do? The true essence of the plan is Rotarian Socialism for lenders. Obama’s hope — probably hopeless — is that if lenders take a lot of small hits now — by refinancing homes for substantially less than is owed on them — they can avoid a lot of much bigger hits later — by not having to foreclose on those homes.

But the real problem — in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Sacramento, South Florida, the Rust Belt, etc. — is that the residential real estate market is overbuilt. There are more houses seeking homeowners than there are homeowners (or tenants) seeking houses. The real estate crisis will not end until supply is reduced, demand increases — or both.

Obama is trying to shove a floor under home values. But since this does nothing to correct the systemic problem — oversupply — he is simply pissing away money while delaying the ultimate and unavoidable market correction.

Want a true housing relief plan?

Here in Arizona, we could do ourselves a huge favor by repealing the employer I.D. check law that drove all of our undocumented friends out of the state — just at the wrong time.

And it would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

But those Read more

February 18, 2009

Pin Money

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

1960

“Genie… here’s a quarter. Now run down to the corner and get me a Hershey’s from the store.  You keep the extra coppers for pin money.  Don’t tell Big Gene.”

My father’s mother was sneakier than any of her twenty-one grandchildren when it came to copping a candy fix in broad daylight.  A final stage diabetic, her pancreas barely running on fumes, Grandma Petro somehow managed, through simple fear of the Lord and all that His wrath might subsume in the afterlife beyond, to squeak out a few extra years of existence in the back bedroom of my uncle’s Levittowner before slipping away forever one snowy afternoon in front of  the 13″ black-and-white that rose above the medicine bottled landscape of  her night stand.  The last words I remember her telling me shortly before she died were,  “Remember Genie, God did not put us on this earth to be happy.”  I looked around her tiny room and dwelled on the thought as she prepared in her own way to pass away. I’ve tended to resist the pundits, across the board, ever since.

I was  the only youngster in the clan she trusted enough to routinely make the street corner run and actually return with her chocolate dope; the few copper coins from the grocer, a meager compense for my silence. “Pin money,” she’d insist. Whatever that meant.  The woman terrified me and loved me at the same time.

For half a generation, eight people lived under the pitched roof of that modest three bedroom, one bath tract home just north of Philly and across the river from Jersey.  Grandma occupied the tiniest room in the back; my aunt and uncle, the largest; the five children of varying ages and gender split the square footed difference with blankets and pillows strewn in every remaining  corner of carpet.  By 1968 the family finally added another bedroom and bathroom to the tax rolled address along with three more kids and a foster child.  Life trickled on.

1980

On occasion of the long anticipated and touted Mortgage Burning Party celebrating the last and final payment to the Savings and Loan, Read more

February 17, 2009

A big heap of Heap goodness: Revising my universal contact form to create Heap records, assigning initial drip campaigns to them

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve rebuilt my universal contact form to be Heap-friendly. Now, in addition to emailing you and the prospect with a quick follow-up, as well as optionally epaging you, the form will also optionally create a new Heap lead with the contact information and with the name of an initial drip campaign to be assigned to that prospect.

The revised form draws upon a new initialization file, which is called “HeapInitialization.txt.” This file works along with “HeapContactMeForm.txt” to specify the unique variables that apply to your situation.

So, for example, the first line of “HeapInitialization.txt” will contain your Heap account name, which is used along with your email address to establish your bona fides when we are communicating with Heap.

The next lines of “HeapInitialization.txt.” comprise the menu of choices you will make available to your users. This is the default menu:

Buying a home|Buying
Selling a home|Selling
Relocating to Phoenix|Relocation
Acquiring income properties|Investment
Real estate advice|Consultation

To the left of the vertical bar is the menu text. To the right is the value that will be assigned to that choice — and which will be transmitted to Heap along with the contact record. Ideally, that value should also be the exact name of an existing event template in your Heap installation.

You can edit either the menu text or the menu values at will, to reflect your unique circumstance.

If you elect to omit the menu lines, the form will revert to a text box in that position, and whatever text the prospect enters will be transmitted with the emails and epages. If you leave “HeapInitialization.txt” empty or delete it from your server, everything will work as before and nothing will be transmitted to Heap.

You can see the Heap-specific form live at our Phoenix real estate weblog.

If you want a copy of your own — guess what? Fill out the form:

< ?PHP $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/SendTheFormForm.php"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?>

It’s a pure geek thrill, but everything that happens after this is automated via Heap, untouched by human hands…

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February 17, 2009

Marketing Advice from the Grave

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

San Diego lost a local icon last Friday.  George “King” Stahlman was a bail bondsman known throughout the county and I suspect, thanks to this once being simply a “Navy town,” parts well beyond the county.  His passing, while important to many, is not really the stuff of a national real estate blog.  But he was a master marketer.  I doubt you could  find a dozen people living in San Diego who can’t sing his latest commercial jingle:  “It’s better to know me and not need me, than to need me and not know me.”

Even in death, King Stahlman still has something to teach.  This, his motto, as reported in an article in the local paper announcing his death:  “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”

Vaya con Dios “King” Stahlman…

February 16, 2009

Piling onto Heap: I’ll trade you a big bunch of CRM development ideas for an affiliate link click-through

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If your contact information is on any of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained interest lists, I spammed you last week with a form email that pitched the then-upcoming Seattle Unchained preview as well as the still-upcoming BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix event.

The form letter was sent out as bulk email from the Heap CRM software application, and I played a few games with the software: The letter asked recipients to click on a link that opened a web-based form that in turn solicited them to complete and update their contact information — not just name and email but also phone numbers and snailmail address. That form in turn fed its input back to Heap, in effect semi-automatically scrubbing our Unchained database.

The response rate is over 25%, so far, which is just astounding to me, but the essence of the thing was to put Heap through its paces. As I discussed a little while ago, I want a highly-programmable CRM solution that I can use to automate our databases. Heap seems to be the best solution for the work we need to do, as a compromise between power and cost–per-user.

I’m going to be talking about everything I do with Heap, going forward. I’ll make the tools I build with it available, starting with a new version of my universal contact form that will not only create new contact records within Heap but will assign those contact to the appropriate drip email campaign.

After that, I want to build code that will do a truly robust round-trip contact scrub, because I’m thinking you can get people who really want to do business with you to tell you anything you might want to know.

For now, I need some help from you:

If you are signing up for Heap, I’d appreciate if you would use this link. I will get credit in Heap’s affiliate program. We’ll donate the affiliate fees to charity, but with each new sign-up, I will gain clout with the developer. As always, I’ll be sharing every new idea I come up with, but if we can demonstrate that wired real estate professionals are a significant portion Read more

February 16, 2009

The ActiveRain hokey pokey: You shoot your left foot off, you shoot your right foot off, you shoot your left hand off — and then you present the audience with an invoice…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What costs $360 a year and puts you in touch with vast hordes of sweet people who cannot do business with you? Starting today, Active Rain will cost $30 a month for new members.

That’s a load of dough. If you want to host your own WordPress.org weblog, a perfectly adequate hosting account at HostGator.com will run you $4.95 a month. Toss in ten bucks a year for the domain and you’re still less than $70 a year. For $7.95 a month, you can host unlimited domains, which puts two domains at $116 a year, three at $126, ten at $196. For $360 a year, you could host 26 unique domains. Or you could get a BloodhoundBlog.net blog for free, aliasing it to your own domain name for free.

The demurrer from ActiveRain will be that they are delivering added value. But most of that added value comes from selling the membership to each other — all with advertising and extra-cost features piled on top.

I met many of the AR folks in Seattle last week. Very nice people, fun and enthusiastic. But if your idea of a productive use of your time is schmoozing with other Realtors, Twitter is (still) free…

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February 15, 2009

Making the Scene: How to create new public Scenius scenes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about Scenius scenes, but, until lately, we’ve kept the scene creation praxis fairly close to our vests. I had documented the process very early for the folks who were involved in the original discussion of the Scenius idea, then shared that video how-to with other folks by email.

But we’re doing things differently than we were last November. And I took up the topic of scene creation in public in Seattle both Thursday and Friday. On Friday, I promised to cook up newer, better documentation by Monday.

I’m a day early. Click on this link to be swept off to a comprehensive site on how — and why — to create a public Scenius.net scene.

The site features three videos, including a link to the one made by Jim Reppond at Friday’s presentation.

There are also links to some of the pages mentioned in the first video, which is intended to be the canonical scene creation reference, as well as links to BloodhoundBlog posts on the how and why of Scenius scenes.

Let me know when you create a new public scene and I will add it to the index at Scenius.net.

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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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