BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: August 2006 (page 7 of 8)

August 7, 2006

A Long-range vision for Long-term benefits . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There is a nice feature in today’s Arizona Republic about John F. Long’s plans for the SR-101 corridor:

More than a half century ago, John F. Long began building the first of tens of thousands of ranch-style homes that would become west Phoenix’s Maryvale community.

Later, he would shift his focus to developing retail centers, providing residents with such commercial outlets as grocery stores, banks and pharmacies.

Now 86, the longtime Valley philanthropist and developer is turning to his three grown children to help him realize his latest vision: the Algod?n Center, a 1,000-acre business and medical office park expected to bring thousands of jobs to the West Valley.

I’ve been watching that land for years. It’s striking, because, as you’re driving down a major freeway, there are thousands of acres of undeveloped land on both sides of the road. John F. Long owns or controls a lot of that land. The shoe dropped in the paper today because the Cardinal’s football stadium opened Saturday. Long is ready to make his move, now that the land has substantially increased in value.

Without John F. Long, Phoenix would be a radically different place. And he’s not done yet…

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August 6, 2006

Trulia trooper . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last kiss of my mail for the day. Waiting for me was this, sent at 8:12 PM MST:

Hi Greg,

Thanks for contacting Trulia. Your feed has been received by our engineering team and you can expect to see your listings live within 72 business hours.

Thank you for your patience.

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions,

Susan Raye
www.trulia.com
Customer Service Representative

Jeff took care of me last week, and I’ve been processed at least twice since then, but this is impressive anyway. When Jeff is dishing up feeds and philosophy into the wee hours and when a CSR is punching out pulse checks on a Sunday night — both of them doing this for a non-cash-customer — somebody must be doing something right in management. I hope they have sense enough to reward and acknowledge this kind of dedication. Hard to find, easy to lose, impossible to get back.

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August 6, 2006

What’s wrong with real estate weblogs? I might run this way and that, but never hot and cold . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Price at Mike’s Corner posted a fascinating interview with Russ Cofano of Rain City Guide on the subject of real estate weblogging and the ‘bloginars’ Russ and Dustin Luther, also of Rain City Guide, have been running. The interview is extensive, and I’m only going to touch on a piece of it, so you should go read the whole thing.

The meat of the matter for me is Russ going through his ideas on do-s and don’t-s for real estate weblogs. Like this:

Here is a list of 10 posts that make for great blog content:

Stories
Data (Charts, Tables, Maps)
Book Reviews
Current Events
Neighborhood Descriptions
Local Events (Fun Stuff!)
Links
Interviews
Advice for Buyers/Sellers
Advice for other Agents

I don’t hate this stuff, but some of it seems to tread dangerously close to the turf Seth Godin calls a Cat Blog. Couple that with “Advice for other Agents” and we trip on the schizophrenia that seems to afflict many real estate weblogs — and BloodhoundBlog is guiltier than most.

Witness: Most real estate weblogs are run by agents or brokerages, and at least one meta-goal is to scare up business. But what is interesting to potential clients is very different from what is interesting to the weblogger. Data, current events, neighborhoods — all that stuff is great, but news about it is not in short supply, and it’s not always easy to come up with an original take on it. On the other hand, the business of the real estate business is endlessly varied and fascinating — even though it might be boring or even completely off-putting to potential clients. We seem to end up talking two games, client-focused material that can too-easily slip into blatant advertising, and inside-baseball commentary for well-schooled insiders.

(I’ve thought about writing a Wiki-fier in PHP that would pre-process a web posting, tagging delimited terms with Wikipedia look-ups, in case I’m assuming that readers know the jargon I’m using when in fact they don’t.)

(The Latin root of the word discursive, as in discursive prose, is discurro, which literally translates to, “I run this way and that.” Discursive prose is the means by which we tame our scattered minds Read more

August 5, 2006

Market-Basket of Homes: Values down 1.83% on slow sales

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Market-Basket of Homes: Values down 1.83% on slow sales

The July BloodhoundRealty.com Market-Basket of Homes is available. Prices down, sales volumes down, but — interestingly — inventory is down. Make of it what you will:

This fall in Valley schools, the faces of the teachers may change, but the kids may be the same. The annual selling season, when parents move in time for children to start the school-year in their new neighborhood, for the most part has not materialized. Home prices for July were down 1.83%, compared to June, in the BloodhoundRealty.com Market-Basket of Homes. More significantly, only 151 home sales were recorded, a fairly low number for this time of year. Average sales prices were down $4,715, from 257,999 in June to $253,284 in July. Values are down $16,591, or 6.15%, from the December 2005 high of $269,875. Market-Basket homes spent an average of 74 days on market, five days more than in June.

As has been the case in recent months, most Market-Basket homes are selling at or above list price. A few deeply-discounted properties pulled down the average, and average discounting netted out to 1.61%, down from 1.75% in June.

A total of 151 Market-Basket homes were sold in July, down from 176 in June. However, inventories of available homes have declined. There are now 1,506 homes available for sale in the Market-Basket, where there were 1,525 in June. With sales of only 151 homes, the implied absorption rate is almost 10 months, but, interestingly, there are 179 Market-Basket homes currently listed as “Sale Pending.” A six-month absorption rate is considered normal.

In the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service at large, 6,101 homes have sold against an inventory of 46,269, an implied absorption rate of 7.6 months. There are 6,262 properties listed as “Sale Pending.”

The historical numbers make it plain that we did not experience the traditional selling season, but they also make it plain that a simplistic year-over-year analysis — which we can expect from the Arizona Republic a week or more from now — is misleading.

Number of Homes Sold (with Days on Market)

March 2003 6471 Read more

August 4, 2006

How to make fast, flexible web pages . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Sellsius° has a big bag of how-to’s but I’m from Missouri. I like how-to articles that tell exactly how to do something.

One from me: How to make fast, flexible web pages. This is Realtor 2.0 stuff: Full-service Realtors who plan to compete need to learn how to punch out lots and lots of new web pages with dispatch. For one thing, this is where all those photos I keep talking about are going to go. We do most of our pages with software and I’m not going to tell you how we do that — because I plan to send my kid to college with that software. But here is a road map to kicking out new pages with minimal effort. There’s a bonus to doing things this way, too, which I’ll get to at the end.

Vide licet:

That’s PHP, and if you’re on an Apache web server, you’ve got it. This is really simple code, but that’s the point. The whole purpose of PHP is to generate HTML on the fly, so I can only show this code as a picture and talk about it by paraphrasing.

What does it do?

It generates a complete web page: Title, meta-tags, CSS, internal Javascript, body copy, and graceful exit. If you look at the source of any web page in your browser, you’ll see a lot more than seven lines of code. That would be the case here, too. The two “included” files, “top.php” and “bot.php” are going to explode into a bunch of HTML.

To set this up, you take your standing dummy web-page, the one you’re using to create new web pages. Configure the first three lines the way you see them in the picture. The title tag doesn’t have to come first, but it can, so let’s make it come first. Then copy everything from the first line after the title down to the last line before the actual changeable content of the page. Paste that into a new file named “top.php”.

Then go to the first line after the changeable content of the page and copy from there to the bottom of the Read more

August 4, 2006

Real estate photography snapshot: Composition is salesmanship . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Coming back to this, I wanted to spend a few minutes on photo composition techniques. That’s almost absurd: Who doesn’t know how to take a picture? Almost everybody, it turns out. We’re not talking about Ansel Adams levels of perfection, we’re talking about taking real estate photos that sell the property but don’t require a lot of back-end effort on your part. That means that we want to take a photo we’re ready to show off as-is, not one that requires cropping or re-touching in PhotoShop.

Here’s an obvious rule first: A camera is not a gun, and a house is not its target. If you look at published real estate photos, again and again you’ll see the house centered in the frame with miles and miles of do-nothing sky above it. This is wrong. Fill the frame with whatever it is you’re drawing attention to. If you think you might want to crop the image later, why not crop it now by filling the whole frame?

We like drama, so often we’ll get in really close at a point of view much lower than normal (it’s called crouching or kneeling; even old people can do it). In this case we also blasted hard with an electronic flash — even in bright sunlight outdoors — in order to bring out the details that would otherwise be in shadow.

Another way to lend drama to a scene is to go higher than eye-level and look down. Most digital cameras have a video viewfinder, so it’s easy to frame photos while holding the camera overhead.

If the ceiling is interesting, it should be in the photos. The wide angle lens on your camera will include the floor and ceiling of your interior shots, so you should be watching for things to bring out. Here in Arizona, ceiling fans are worth money, so we make sure we show them off.

Here is the value of a very wide angle lens: We can see this whole bedroom in two photographs. The human eye is much more adept at apprehending visual information than any camera. Our eyes-forward range of vision is Read more

August 4, 2006

“Don’t be chicken about the real estate market . . . “

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

An easier Friday for me, nothing to torque the brokers. Maybe I’ll hear from weary sellers instead. Me in today’s Republic. Here is the permanent link.

During our recent run-up in values, the Chicken Littles couldn’t stop clucking about imminent doom. Since then the market has cooled, but the Chicken Little chatter is hotter than ever. The real estate market must collapse. It simply must.

This prediction will lay an egg. But don’t hold your breath waiting for an admission of error. And if you yourself are waiting for the explosive report of the real estate bubble popping, you might just hear a pin drop instead.

Here’s why:

  • Real estate and securities are both leveraged, but the real estate market is not the stock market. Stocks are instantly transferable. You can acquire or liquidate a portfolio in seconds. Moreover, while stocks are subject to margin calls, it would be insane for lenders to call their mortgages en masse.
  • More to the point, homes have intrinsic value. A stock is worth what someone will pay for it, right down to nothing. In any place where it rains, snows or gets really hot, homes will be worth something.
  • Which leads us to demand. Some locales have more houses than occupants. No bubbles will burst in those places, either, but their values will slowly deflate. In a market like metropolitan Phoenix, long-term demand exceeds supply. As long as it does, our long-term trend in values should be nothing but upward.
  • Finally, sellers in a buyer’s market are a lot less time-sensitive than buyers in a seller’s market. In the latter case, the longer that buyers delay acting, the greater their costs. Hence, the frenzy. But if sellers stand fast in a buyer’s market, they might suffer a loss. But they might do better by waiting. Or the marginal cost of waiting may be less than taking a low-ball offer. Or they may elect simply to wait out the market.

The bottom line is, Chicken Little be fried, the real estate market will be fine.

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August 3, 2006

My friend, Richard Riccelli . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My friend and esteemed colleague Richard Riccelli called tonight to talk about the custom yard signs — among many hundreds of millions of other things.

I’ve known Richard since the day I found out that my son Cameron was certifiably enwombed — fifteen and a half years ago (wow!). When the boy was born, Richard was the first person to call him “Cam” — and then right away “Cambo.” I can picture both of those events — meeting him and his applying diminutives to my son — just like they were yesterday.

This is not happenstance: Richard Riccelli makes an impression. He walks, talks and — especially — thinks at a blistering pace. He throws off ideas the way the rest of us shed skin cells, dozens a minute. When he is focused, he is so much like a laser that you expect his eyes to burn through paper — through tables, walls, concrete. When he lets his mind float freely, he can glance pinball-like across a universe full of wonders in the span of a moment. At the end of a Richard Riccelli soliloquy, you will be left gasping, but you will have grasped a perfect metaphor, a unique and elegant way of uniting that universe full of wonders in a way you had never thought of before.

Richard Riccelli is our personal marketing god. He has been advising us since we began this business — not formally, but again and again with the perfect idea at the perfect moment. He is the reason that our logo looks the way it does — and why the dog in the logo smiles. He has been along for each of the three versions of our signs — along with many other marketing decisions, large and small. We don’t always do what he says to do, but we think very carefully about everything he says.

Which isn’t easy, given how many stunningly original ideas he can cram into a single sentence! In tonight’s call we agreed that custom real estate signs are essentially direct marketing, inherently testable — and Richard has no use for marketing that is Read more

August 3, 2006

Is the Blame Game best played solitaire?

by

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

In case you missed it yesterday, Jonathan J Miller from Matrix gives us a truly great mental image in his posting, The Housing Blame Game. As a real estate professional, of course all of this has been on my mind. While all of our buyer clients have done very well in the Phoenix market, I’m aware that a big part of their success is that they bought without intending to flee the market if and when it changed — and they used good sense funding the houses they bought. Our sellers, too, have done pretty well in general. Certainly those who agreed to list their houses at the right price in the first place have achieved their goals. So, I admit that I have found myself guilty of playing the blame game a bit myself. With all the oracles out there writing articles that foretell the doom of the real estate market, I keep hearing a mental replay of FDR’s voice warning our nation in the depth of the Great Depression that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In contrast, here we are living in a wonderfully prosperous nation, having just gone through a period where more people probably than ever were able to realize the dream of owning their own homes. And yet so many doomsayers are wringing their literary hands that things must get worse for those homeowners, based on the simple fact that things have until just recently been so good!

I am not unsympathetic to the fact that some of those new home-buyers or mover-uppers may have gotten in over their heads. Some may be going through life changes that create a need for them to move before they are able to stay in their new homes long enough for the new-home smell to have faded. But, in general, anyone who must sell in this market who has owned his house for at least two years, will be able to sell and make a handsome profit, as long as he didn’t make poor decisions regarding refinancing during the past year, and is not making Read more

August 3, 2006

Time of the signs times two . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here are a couple of demos of custom signs for listings. These aren’t built to size (24×36″), they’re just scale models (~27%) so that I can see how things work together. Our normal riser will sit atop these, with a rider with the price hanging below. The whole Bloodhound sign idea is to stop traffic, and I think these could be very effective.


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August 2, 2006

On the Nickel with the boys . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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 the same way that their belief in the efficacy of browbeating is an attribute of the browbeaten and their conviction in the ubiquity of corruption betrays only too completely the contents of their own souls. This is the stuff of the Brownshirts, of the Bolsheviks, of the Khmer Rouge and the Klan. This is the stuff from which the ugliest episodes in human history are sprung.

And yet it is still a sorrowful spectacle. I’m not absolving them. If you dig deeply enough into any sort of human squalor, at the bottom of everything you’ll find some combination of laziness, deceit and envy — usually about 112% of each. But every one of these boys would be a better man if he had more to do. The curse Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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