There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 93 of 266)

Absolute War

ABSOLUTE WAR (1944)
General George S. Patton

Now in war we are confronted with conditions which are strange.
If we accept them we will never win.
Since by being realistic, as in mundane combats fistic,
We will get a bloody nose and that’s a sin.

To avoid such fell disaster, the result of fighting faster,
We resort to fighting carefully and slow.
We fill up terrestrial spaces with secure expensive bases
To keep our tax rate high and death rate low.

But with sadness and with sorrow we discover to our horror
That while we build, the enemy gets set.
So despite our fine intentions to produce extensive pensions
We haven’t licked the dirty bastard yet.

For in war just as in loving, you must always keep on shoving
Or you’ll never get your just reward.
For if you are dilatory in the search for lust and glory
You are up sh*t creek and that’s the truth, Oh! Lord.

So let us do real fighting, boring in and gouging, biting.
Let’s take a chance now that we have the ball.
Let’s forget those fine firm bases in the dreary shell raked spaces.
Let’s shoot the works and win! Yes, win it all!

May this Nation never forget: Freedom is obtained through military victory. God bless all the brave men and women that have and continue to serve in the military.

How I spent my Orlando vacation, or; The exquisite feeling of an exploding brain

I completely by-passed the NAR, Orlando is big enough to do that. I was in Orlando for BHBU, and as a participant in both BHBU I and BHBU II, I can say that Orlando out-rocked Phoenix, but wait, there’s more! Greg and Brian are about to blow your mind. How do I know? I experienced it myself.

The presentations were great, but the scenius rocked my world.

You ever walk into a room that crackles with energy? Ever had the privilege of hanging out with the very best at anything? You know that synergy that ignites and sparks ideas and discussion? Hanging out with the Bloodhounds was an incredible experience for that. Watching these minds toss out ideas and information to each other was a real treat. Yeah, I was there, but I felt like a fly on the wall most times- I can’t keep up with these guys. They would dial back occasionally, just as my brain exploded, tangent off to another subject and- cue the squealing tires- 0-60 in 3 seconds. They have Ferrari brains and Lamborghini brains, while I have a minivan brain. 

As the resident X chromosome, it was a joy to not have to suffer through a pissing contest. These guys seriously respect each other for their unique outlooks, their unique strengths, and most wonderfully, they respect an atmosphere of sharing. If you are used to a world where hording information and knowledge is the norm, Bloodhound is a luxurious foray into a rain forest of ideas.

I was lucky if I got 4 hours of sleep a night, but I am energized by the weekend, and ready to tackle the work that I need to do and take on the world- that doesn’t happen too often at a conference, not to me anyway.

I am a very fortunate girl, I understand that more than anyone else. But you have an opportunity to put yourself in my shoes for a few days. If you’ve ever thought that one-on-one training or hanging out with the resident brainiacs and salesmaniacs sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it is- then jump. Unchained is now Read more

Thinking out loud about BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

Here’s where we start, and we knew this last May in Phoenix, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to pull it off:

BloodhoundBlog Unchained is not a conference or a seminar, it’s a workshop, a lab. We don’t want to talk about or teach or lecture about our style of marketing strategies, we want to deploy them. We want for the people who entrust us with their time and their minds and their money to come away having implemented their own unique versions of our tools, tricks, tips, tactics and techniques.

So that’s the beginning: Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing.

This is a Unique Selling Proposition — totally unlike all of the redundant twitwit echo-chamber festivals — but don’t get too excited yet.

Why? Because overhauling anything is a big job. What we’re planning will take a lot of time, a lot of hard work, a lot of skull sweat and possibly repeated conquests of your own self-imposed mental limitations. Translation: We plan to wear you out.

When we first started talking about this “boot camp” kind of approach, we thought about doing it in two tracks, one more advanced, one less so. In both cases, it makes sense to me to work toward the goal of a complete overhaul of your marketing profile. How do the journeymen gain access to the master-track material? Don’t worry. We have plans for that, too.

So now we look like this: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hard-charging boot camp for journeymen and masters at modern real estate marketing. I worked out a class schedule yesterday, and I think we can cover — and I mean thoroughly cover — eight major topics over the course of three days.

We’re not set in stone on these, but here are some classes that make sense to us:

Search Engine Optimization
    Guerrilla SEO — Optimizing your blogsite
    Advanced SEO topics

Search Engine Marketing
    Maximizing organic SEO results
    PPC, Analytics and ROI

Social Media Marketing
    Establishing a ubiquitous presence
    Working in the salt mines to bring home the salted bacon

Living in a web-wise world
    Building, customizing and maintaining a web presence
    Practical PHP for non-geeks

Direct Read more

Basic SEO: How to Choose a Domain Name

Lately I seem to be getting this question a lot. At BHB Unchained it was asked of me several times. Finally, a good friend asked me today: I am looking getting a site and choosing a domain name and I KNOW I need to get one full of keywords.

“How about CityRealEstateStateHomes.com?”

My response?
“How about
CityRealEstateStateHomesCondominiumsSaleBestAgentHomeSearch.com?”

I mean, if you are gonna get (what we call at EricOnSearch) a marketing turd, why not go all the way? (grin) ( I know, I am being absurd…but hopefully this helps illustrate the point.) I think THAT one is available.

I made the statement at Unchained. From an SEO perspective, QUIT trying to keyword stuff domain names, thinking that you’ve just helped yourself in a hugely meaningful way to get great rankings. I said it. I meant it.

If there is ANY benefit, it is small (there are exceptions to this, which I will explain.) and it is MORE than offset by the marketing damage that you are doing by SOLELY looking at your domain name through SEO eyes. Notice I am NOT saying there is NO benefit. I AM saying simply that it isn’t worth it.

Do yourself a favor and use marketing eyes and not SEO eyes alone when buying domain names.

Now before people start throwing tomatoes, please allow me to explain in detail:

Search engines are smart.

Depending on how you break them down, there are hundreds of variables that make up a typical search engine’s algorithm. The name of the domain is only ONE (1) of those. So even if ALL of the possible variables carried the same weight, it would still NOT be a big deal.

Google (and other search engines) evaluate apply different weights to these characteristics to determine where your site will rank. They KNOW which of these characteristics are easily spammed. They know which ones are NATURALLY self correcting.

A Title Tag is somewhat self correcting in that it forms the TITLE that you see in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Characteristics that affect how text looks on the screen are also likely to be self correcting since it makes Read more

Links to the Unchained: How people attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando saw the event

We lucked into WiFi in Orlando. I was convinced until my shoes hit the dirt on Thursday that we weren’t going to have it. But because people could connect, they did, working on social media sites in real time. A number of people also took exhaustive notes on their laptops, and here are some posts people have put up documenting their Unchained experience:

Eric Blackwell weighs in with My Top 10 Take Homes from BHB Unchained Orlando.

Greg Staker provides a nice summary of each of the presentations with How can my attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando help you buy or sell Florida real estate?

(I could be wrong, but I think Eric Blackwell may have had an influence on that headline. 😉 )

By far the most comprehensive note-taker was John Sabia, a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. His contribution to he discussion is called Unchained in Orlando.

If you have written up your Unchained experience hit me with the link and I will amend this post.

 
Further notice: Brian Brady at Active Rain: NAR Orlando: All Work and No Play Makes Brian A…, Daniel Rothamel at The Real Estate Zebra: I am not the audience, and what I plan to do about it.

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Unchained Notes: An Outsider’s View From Inside the Hound Pound

Random Thoughts
A day and a half since I left Unchained Orlando, but my head is still spinning.  Maybe it was Orlando – the home of Disneyworld – that added to the surreal nature of the experience.  If you haven’t been there, Orlando is beautiful in a Disney kind of way: everything is clean and bright and just a little plasticized.  Maybe the buildings all use the same 7/8 scale that Disney uses, or maybe Unchained was just oversized… hard to say.

Over the next few days I am going to share a few of the gold nuggets I panned from the rapid flood of information that was one long, intense, ecstatic day at Unchained.  But not today.  Today I am still sifting and understanding.  Today I have only themes and simple data – points of interest that do not connect into a greater whole.  For new information to infiltrate and impact our daily activities it must be processed and that is where I find myself: clarifying the headers, organizing the outline and slowly expanding the void with pages and pages of ideas handed to me while I was there.  Bloodhound Unchained in 36 hours.  A blur of activity, a multitude of speakers – each sharing freely and every last one of them speaking much too quickly for my longhand chicken scratch – and laughing.  Laughing so much at times my sides hurt.

Dark Theme Emerges
The one theme I find over and over again is most assuredly not on Greg or Brian’s agenda, but the results speak for themselves.  Allow me a few words on most of the speakers and tell me if you see a thematic element:

  • we opened with Greg discussing the Greeks and the disciplined violence that was the Spartans
  • you had Brian sharing the dark secrets of being a Ninja in social media marketing
  • Teri warned of a fatal addiction to the Tweet drug
  • there was Kelly exhibiting the cool, detached efficiency of a hit man targeting Google
  • Mitch covered 100mph and proved that speed does kill the competition
  • we were exposed to John’s killer app
  • and finally, Eric explained how to make the organically grown poison Read more

How the new president is going to prolong the housing bust

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

 
How the new president is going to prolong the housing bust

I’m writing this before the election, so I don’t know who will have won by the time you read this. But here’s something I do know: The forty-fourth president of the United States, whomever is chosen, will prolong the housing bust.

How do I know this? Because both candidates have promised to implement programs that will artificially buttress home prices above their market value. John McCain wants to refinance failing mortgages. Barack Obama wants a freeze on foreclosures. Congress and the fifty state legislatures have ideas of their own.

To make matters worse, lenders are putting a friendlier spin on the foreclosure process with elaborate workout schemes. If you qualify for a loan workout, instead of liquidating the home as a non-performing asset, some lenders will roll your existing loans into a new interest-only loan. You would make small payments for the next two or three years, and only then resume your full obligation.

What’s wrong with all these ideas? They’re simply delaying the inevitable. If you’re not making your payment now, you probably won’t make it after a refinance, after a foreclosure moratorium or after a three-year workout. Some people may find their salvation in these programs, but most of the affected homes are going to end up in the lender-owned inventory — later rather than sooner.

And that’s the problem. Our only way out of this mess is to clear the resale homes pipeline of foreclosure inventory. By delaying eventual foreclosures, we are preventing the real estate market from finding its bottom-dollar price. But we will see renewed appreciation only after the market has absorbed this glut of foreclosed homes.

The good news — for buyers: Homes are going to be selling very near their bottom-dollar price for the next few years. The bad news — for sellers: Homes are going to be selling very near their bottom-dollar price for the next few years.

The alternative is to let markets operate freely — a short, sharp pain followed by a robust recovery. But Read more

The scenius on Swallow Hill Road: A brief gloss on BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, November 7th, 2008

When we put together BloodhoundBlog Unchained In Phoenix, last Spring, we were gifted with the magnificent beneficence of Zillow.com. In consequence, we spent money like a college freshman with a Visa card. We knew Unchained in Orlando was going to have to be a leaner affair — and after this fall’s market collapse, it got quite a bit leaner than we had expected.

We knew were were going to have five or six Bloodhounds presenting, so I resolved to rent a house to save us all money on hotel rooms. We got a five-bedroom seasonal rental, in a community I choose to call West Disney, for $621 — a smokin’ deal for what turned out to be 5 dawgs plus Teri Lussier’s husband, Jamie.


Brian Brady with Teri and Jamie Lussier.

Emphasis: My objective in renting the home was to save money. That’s all.

Unintended consequence: The scenius on Swallow Hill Road.

Say what?

I’ve talked about the idea of a scenius before. A scenius is a kind of communal genius. When deeply-passionate, passionately-informed people get together to share what they know, the synergy of their interaction can throw off vast quantities of new ideas. This is what happened with us at our house on Swallow Hill Road.

The Unchained event was a rockin’ success. It was better than Unchained in Phoenix had been — which surprised no one more than me and Brian Brady. It’s unfair to say we topped ourselves, though. It was the speakers who made Orlando a killer event.

Here’s an example, a brief clip from the keynote address by Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate CEO Sherry Chris:

Brian has other videos, so we’ll see if we can get those posted in the next couple of days.

Sherry was great, but all of the speakers were at the top of their game. I don’t want to take anything away from anyone by saying that Kelley Koehler and Mitch Ribak were off the charts excellent — rich presentations full of practical, ready-to-implement techniques. John Sabia took voluminous notes that I’ll be linking to tomorrow, so you’ll be able to reap the essence of the day’s presentations.

Plus which, Read more

From an undisclosed location in Georgia…notes from BHB Unchained

Dateline: Motel room in Georgia on my way home

While many of the rest of the BHB gang are still in Orlando after BHB Unchained, I started my journey home yesterday. Since I stopped in Georgia to get some rest before driving the rest of the way to Louisville, thought it would be only appropriate for me to offer some thoughts and observations for those who might not have been able to come.

First off, I would be an ungrateful soul if I did not thank Greg Swann for letting me crash the party and stay at the house they rented. That was fun! It was a pleasure to finally meet you in person. I found you to be everything that I had hoped and more…and I had high expectations. Bless you, sir.

Secondly, Brian, Sean and Teri. You guys have been friends of mine for quite a while. It was so nice to finally meet and hang out with you. I learned so much from you guys and had a great time talking with you until 3am…hehe. For those who may wonder if the hounds that contribute here are real, honest, genuine, good people and that they care about others…just spend some time with them. They are purely authentic. Brian – pleased to hear about your success on Facebook.snort.

The 12 hours of Unchained was fun. If you were not able to be there to hear Mitch Riback, Kelly Kohler, John Rowles and the others that were speaking (I know that’s not a complete list, but hey, I am in a hotel in Georgia someplace-grin), you missed out.

I know the economic conditions crimped a lot of peoples’ travel plans and in many cases you’d have been there but for that. Not your fault. I think a lot of us felt that the travel and expense was a tough choice these days and we all have to make those decisions. It is part of being in business.

Well, maybe you didn’t miss out…they must have clipped the microphone to us for a reason…grin. I am sure they will let us know Read more

Appendix A: Linking to Author’s Profile in Multi-Author WordPress Blog

After setting up the author image code, I decided my next step in creating our new multi-author company blog would be linking the author name to the author’s profile page.  I decided on a  profile page rather than an email link to a). initially keep the reader drilling deeper into the blogsite for more information, and b). the profile page can then present offsite links to the author’s other blogs or website as well as an email link.

As Greg describes here, the code is simple enough

Posted by      <a href=”<?PHP the_author_url(); ?>”>
<?php the_author() ?></a> <br>

But then I started scratching my head.  Where the devil does the author URL come from?  How does the system know what it is? Am I going to need to construct a database of author URLs?  (People who know the answer are probably laughing out loud right now.)

I Googled frantically, and finally after reading and rereading this page in the WordPress Codex, the moment of epiphany came.

The author URL is the website address from the user profile page.

Click on Users in the upper right corner of the WordPress Dashboard.  Click on the username, scroll down to the Contact Info section, and at Website, paste in the URL of the author’s about/profile page.

Offering more service to buyers for a bigger slice of the buyer’s agent’s commission, Redfin moves closer to traditional real estate

When I represent buyers, I see my biggest responsibility as taking the fear away. Yes, I need to find and show houses. Yes, I need to write contracts and supervise inspections. Yes, I need to husband everything through the lender and the title company. But the job of jobs is to serve as a security blanket for the buyers, to make them feel safe and comfortable throughout the process.

Whatever Redfin.com’s buyer pool might think they want from a buyer’s agent, in general they’re not that different from other buyers. They might like the idea of a very robust search tool for identifying homes. They might like the idea of a streamlined purchase process, Amazon-does-residential-real-estate. But when the dollars hit the dirt, they want to know that they are being marshalled through the home buying process by an experienced professional — someone who can do all the chores that need to be attended to, but also someone who can inspire the quiet confidence that permits buyers to sleep through the night in what might otherwise be a nightmarish experience.

Today Redfin.com moves that much closer to traditional real estate. Redfin buyers will be able to choose the agent they work with, and they will be able to look at an unlimited number of homes at no out-of-pocket cost. But the rebate to buyers will be 50% instead of 67%. The website has been retooled to reflect the higher degree of personal service.

Also today, Redfin will offer new search features on its web site, including tools to make it easier for buyers to investigate the history of distressed and foreclosure properties across multiple MLS listings.

By email, Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman offered this explanation:

A lot of this is the culmination of a long process of figuring out we’re a customer-service company, not just a web company or a real estate company, which means we’ve gotten a lot more practical about how we blend online and personal service; we’re trying to do more of both.

Redfin’s on-line search tool is so much more robust than anything else available to consumers, I think the company might be a Read more

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando — Schedule of events

Okay, so now you have to be careful to make no more than $249,900. 😉

If you’re not already there, come see us Friday in Orlando. Here’s the class schedule:

08:00 Opening
08:15 Greg Swann – The Unchained Epiphany
09:00 Brian Brady – Ninja Social Media Marketing
10:00 Sherry Chris – Keynote Address
10:45 Teri Lussier – Building a Community Through Blogging
11:30 Lunch Break
12:15 Point/Counter-Point On Social Media Marketing
01:00 Kelley Koehler – What To Do When Google Doesn’t Love You
02:15 Mitch Ribak – Internet Marketing Conversion
04:30 Dinner Break
05:15 John Rowles on IDX
05:45 Sean Purcell – The Bloodhound Way
06:30 Eric Blackwell – Leveraged Search Engine Marketing
08:00 Closing

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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Are you in Orlando on Friday? Make some time to learn how to make more money in 2009 at BloodhoundBlog Unchained

If you’re coming to the NAR Convention in Orlando this year, the vendors are quite literally dying to meet you. It’s been a bad year already for their useless crap, and attendance will be way down this year. They cannot wait to sink their fangs into you.

If you’re going to be in Orlando anyway, pry open your day on Friday for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Yes, we’re going to charge you ninety-nine bucks for the program, but we’ll give you back twelve hours of ideas on how lenders and Realtors can make more money in 2009. Brian and I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the course line-up over the weekend, so we know that even if you can’t make it for the whole day, you’ll get great value for whatever time you can make available.

And to top it off, we’ll do it all without vendors and without their useless crap. Not everything we’re talking about will be cost-free to implement, but everything we’re always talking about is about how to reap maximum bang from minimum bucks. It’s not about being cheap — anti-marketing is worse than no marketing — it’s about being effective.

Even if you’re not going to the NAR Convention, you might give us your Friday. Gas is cheap, but the road ahead is fraught with peril. Make some time for us and we’ll show you everything we’re doing to acquire and convert new business — on the web and in the real world.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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Writing an office policy manual for Real Estate 2.0

As part of our current ongoing “expansion”, for the last few days I have been trying to cobble together something that resembles a real estate company policy manual.

I am going to post a few of my policy manual paragraphs here, in the hopes that my Bloodhound friends might suggest revisions or additional thoughts.

The issues addressed by these paragraphs aren’t exactly the sort found in sample policy manuals, so I’m kinda sorta winging it here:

Social Media

Salespeople and staff members are encouraged to create profiles and participate in conversations on social media sites such as Active Rain, Trulia, Zillow, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, RealSeekr, MyAgentBook, and others.

You are also encouraged to post frequently on the Company blog at www.bobtaylorproperties.com, and will be given a password and login. (Aside: I hope to make this work for the new folks as a “sandbox” site.)

Listings

In the interest of providing seller clients with a consistent experience, for each listing the Company will provide the following services at the Company’s expense:

  • The Company will create a single property web site with a .info domain name. That will leave the .com domain name available if you wish to create your own additional web site for the property.
  • The Company will create and install a unique custom sign for each listing.
  • The Company will create and print color flyers on standard paper stock. You are responsible for attaching a flyer box to the listing sign, and maintaining a supply of flyers at the property. You are encouraged to create additional flyers of your own design.
  • The Company will generate weekly postings on Craigslist.

So, would you guys write this stuff differently?  What other things would you address?  Thanks!

Restoring a bargain-priced lender-owned home is easy — if you have cash — but a HUD 203k rehab loan makes it easy even if you don’t

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

 
Restoring a bargain-priced lender-owned home is easy — if you have cash — but a HUD 203k rehab loan makes it easy even is you don’t

Last week we talked about troubled homes and how they can be restored to livability. That’s fine if you’re an investor with pockets full of cash. But what if you’re an ordinary home-buyer? How can you pick up a bargain-priced home and then refurbish it to its former homey comfort?

If you’re buying with an FHA loan, chances are the home is going to have to be at least partially restored before you can close on it. FHA loans require a more-rigorous appraisal, and any defects rendering the home uninhabitable will have to be corrected before you can proceed.

So if the range is missing from the kitchen, it will have to be replaced. If the water heater is broken, it will have to be repaired. If the pool is green, it will either have to be restored to swimmable condition or drained.

Who is responsible for these repairs? Normally, habitability issues would fall to the seller. But most foreclosure properties are sold “as-is” — take it or leave it. If you have cash, you can pay for the repairs prior to close of escrow and then move in as planned.

But what if you don’t have that kind of money?

One solution is to write your repair issues into your purchase contract. If the seller agrees to restore the pool and replace the range, you’ve dealt with the habitability problem in advance.

Another option is to take advantage of HUD’s 203k rehabilitation program. With a 203k loan the loan underwriter can attach what amounts to a construction loan onto the primary purchase loan. So you could buy a lender-owned home for $100,000 and finance an additional $10,000 to refurbish the kitchen after close of escrow. The appraiser will assess the value the home will have after the improvements have been made.

As you might expect, the fine print is extensive, but for an FHA 203k loan in Phoenix your purchase Read more