BloodhoundBlog

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Month: March 2007 (page 6 of 9)

March 16, 2007

Introducing Teri Lussier, my Project Blogger protege

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s get the introduction out of the way first, a brand new BloodhoundBlog contributor:

Dayton, Ohio, is the life-long home and territory of Teri Lussier, the newly-minted Realtor become newly-minted real estate weblogger who is Greg Swann’s co-contestant in Active Rain’s Project Blogger.

I didn’t like the Project Blogger logo, so I made one just for us:

I wrote about this real estate weblogging contest nearly a month ago, but it’s taken a while to iron out all the details. You can read all the rules at Active Rain. I’ve already been building stuff as course material for the contest.

And this will continue. A great many very interesting people campaigned to compete with me in this contest. I picked Teri because she was game and fun, and because she was the greenest candidate overall, both as an agent and as a weblogger. But, even though I could only pick one co-contestant, everyone is invited to play along with the BloodhoundBlog team.

How’s that? Because we’re going to conduct the entire contest in public, of course. I’m sure Teri is aghast to discover that she is now a BloodhoundBlog contributor. I didn’t tell her I was planning this. Her charge, going forward, will be to talk to us about the challenges she faces as we build a weblog for her back in Dayton. Meanwhile, I cannot keep my own trap shut, so you can figure pretty much everything will get blogged about by one or both of us.

I don’t care if we win. Cathy will just give the prize money to indignant cats. But I do care that we do this job properly. Teri is her own person, and there is only so much I can teach her. But I will endeavor to teach her — and you — everything I know about real estate weblogging.
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March 16, 2007

Databases fall short of needs at realty.bots

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Databases fall short of needs at realty.bots

Realogy, the giant, publicly traded conglomerate of big-name brokerages, recently announced a deal whereby it will feed all of its listings to realty.bots, Trulia.com and Google Base.

That’s a mouthful. First, what’s a realty.bot?

A realty.bot is an Internet start-up that plans to undertake some part of residential real estate transactions, usually as an adjunct to selling advertising.

Trulia.com, Google Base and PropSmart.com are listings.bots, acquiring listings by scraping Web sites, direct entry and data feeds.

Zillow.com and several others are AVMs, or Automated Valuation Methods, and Zillow is graduating to a direct-entry-only listings.bot.

Redfin.com can seem like a realty.bot, but, as with many other new entrants, it’s really a brokerage with a higher-tech front end.

A better bright-line dividing point might be face-to-face, end-user contact. We may come to the point that a realty.bot is distinguished from other vendors by being untouched by human-hands, a completely automated real estate product offering.

What’s interesting about Realogy’s initiative is that it moves millions of real estate listings onto realty.bots. The natural conclusion to be drawn is that realty.bots are the new MLS.

This is false. Online real estate search tools (their name is legion) are a great place to shop for a home, but they turn out to be a poor place to search for a home.

There are hundreds of searchable data fields in a true MLS database, as compared with a few dozen in a realty.bot’s dataset. Moreover, MLS systems are policed for accuracy and availability, with fines assessed for errors.

I tend to communicate in listings, with both buyers and sellers. In addition to all the other things a professional Realtor can do with the MLS system, it’s the absolute best tool in our arsenal for pricing homes.

Even after we’ve found your perfect home, we’ll be talking back and forth in listings to make sure the price is right, to assess future resale value, to make sure we didn’t miss something better in the neighborhood.

These functions require a full, robust MLS database.

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March 15, 2007

Business Models — Business Plans — Facing Transitional Challenges

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Way over here in San Diego our business model has been simple: We always keep in mind we’re the professionals our clients are looking to for solid, winning, advice. We leave nothing for our clients to do for themselves if we or our associates can do it better. Our clients are family — for life. If they prefer, they can execute a tax deferred exchange involving two states and never leave their own living room.
Our business plan on the other hand has been battered in the last few years by outside forces totally out of our control. Although Purposeful Planning is still the V-12 engine driving the plan, the marketing arm has taken a severe hit in the last few years.

What’s driven the growth of the company has been the ability to market directly to potential clients through highly targeted mailings. Our letters are rich in content, having more detail and humor than our competitors. When we’ve surveyed clients and prospects alike they’ve all agreed they responded to our letters because they seemed more real to them.

So what’s the problem?

All the cold calling in all the industries combined resulted in the no-call legislation. This led to many of them turning to, you guessed it, sending letters. This meant our letters were getting lost in the pile of dung they were receiving daily. We simply got lost in the shuffle. How bad was it? Before the new law, it wasn’t uncommon to generate more than 30 phone calls from a 3,000 piece mailing. Twice as much as marketing folks will tell you is better than average. About two years ago we sent out a 16,000 piece mailing and received not one phone call.

By the way, deep breathing really does help keep you calm. 🙂

We employed our own concept of Purposeful Planning as we searched for a solution. So for the last 28 months or so, we’ve been focused like a laser beam, searching for a new marketing approach. Can’t cold call, mailing is pretty much dead, and postcards are the only thing we’ve seen that can generate less than a 0% response. Read more

March 15, 2007

Here comes trouble: Hillary Clinton calls for subprime mortgage action

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“We’ve got to take action … the economy is not supporting home ownership the way we need it to.” Say what?I? The highest rate of homeownership in the history of homeownership is not enough? Surely whatever is done will make everything worse. Von Mises lived and died for some reason, but no one can remember what it is…

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March 15, 2007

Recovering Addict

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

>Do I really need single-property websites?
>Which is better, Postlets or VFlyer, or why can’t my website template provider just give me a darn feed to my property pages so I can avoid the whole mess altogether?
>Does Dustin have a ponytail? (I like to think so, but it is hard to tell conclusively from his thumbnail photo).

These are the things that weigh heavily on me this morning. So many thoughts, yet I don’t know where to begin. Writer’s block? I have come to the conclusion that this is not so much a condition in which you have nothing to say but the symptom of a loss of focus.

Real estate, unless you operate a finely tuned machine in the Russell Shaw spirit, is a highly cyclical business. Over the years, I have found the cyclical nature of the work and, yes, the paycheck to be the most difficult part of what we do.

Just Say “No”

Life, too, is cyclical. I have been living blog-free for the better part of two weeks. We have joked about the addiction, and an addiction it is. Much like the addict who chooses abstinence to cure the compulsion yet finds himself consumed with the very thought of the “abuse” every moment of the day, I too have struggled with the “I should, but I can’t” demons. The difference is that my abstinence wasn’t a choice.

Life happens, and an event in my personal life recently sapped my every ounce of energy and demanded that I instantly realign my priorities. Enter loss of focus. I suspect we all get somewhat derailed from time to time, and the true challenge is finding your way back, is in not letting your paralysis linger. Don’t get me wrong; it was just a bump in the road, but the tendency in the aftermath is to focus eyes on the pavement while denying yourself the awe of the distant views.

>Why does the sleazy local agent, possessing such an underdeveloped frontal lobe that he undoubtedly signs his contracts with an “X”, get so much business?
>Should I go to the Inman Conference this summer? (That might answer my Read more

March 14, 2007

Buyer representation fells another one

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ya see?! We should be listening to Russell Shaw. You can list all day and all night, and never be too busy to scratch your nose. It’s that chasing around with buyers that downs perfectly good Realtors.

Cathy had a buyer-rich day. A final walk-through on a new build. The signing on the same. Then an inspection on a resale home. No lunch, of course. Not much water — and we’re already in the mid-90s in Phoenix. She capped her day with a hair appointment…

…And promptly swooned under the hair dryer. Literally fainted. The salon called me, and I raced off to pick her up.

I will get my hair cut any place that’s close, fast and cheap, and, since I’m ugly to start with, I don’t really care about tonsorial talent or post-tonsorial pulchritude.

Cathy, by contrast, will only go to a tony salon that is twenty minutes from our home in no traffic. In rush hour, it’s forty minutes at least.

I hadn’t even made it to the freeway when the fire department called me to say they were taking her to the hospital.

I met her there, and that was beyond fun. Apparently, hospital employees are world champions at not making contact. And it turns out that the treatment for hunger, dehydration and exhaustion is no food, no water and no sleep. If this “service” costs less than a thousand dollars, I’ll be amazed.

Ah, but I can bitch like a thunderstorm when I need to. Eventually we got free of the hospital. Food. Water. Bed.

Jeff Brown talked about mentoring, and I realized I have been remiss in not leaning on the girl to take advantage of those unexpected opportunities in a busy day when you can grab a bite to eat. Realtors eat like hell, but at least they should have sense enough to eat when they can.

Listing agents, on the other hand, are creatures of leisure. While Cathy was running around like a dervish, I was in the office attending to what is, in fact, her listing:

No Open House this Sunday, though. We had two offers at last Sunday’s Open House, and Read more

March 14, 2007

BAD LOANS: Buried In The Back Of The BreadBox

by

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

Author website

Let me tell you a story about how the subprime mortgage market collapsed and millions of baby boomers had to accept less money in retirement. If you liked the Da Vinci Code, you’re gonna love this one. It’s not wrapped up in sex, or murder, or corruption, just good-old fashioned “pass the buck” and “what the little guy doesn’t know won’t hurt him” attitudes.

WARNING: If you are prone to believe conspiracy theories, you are going to curse, kick the cat, and be extremely pissed off after you finish reading this.

Here is the dirty little secret of the mortgage securitization boom of the last 5-10 years: The little guy gets stung with the losses.

First, a little history lesson. It’s kind of boring but stick with me here. Mortgage backed securities (MBS) were originally the old Ginnie Mae pass-through certificates. The VA or FHA packaged up their loans and sold them through Wall Street to little old ladies who wanted to “juice up the yield” on their portfolio. They were safe because they were backed by a government agency. They yielded more than treasuries because they were a conglomeration of various mortgages. The money was loaned at, oh… 14% (remember the early 80’s ?) and the investors received, say…12%. It was a good deal because the little old lady could only get 9% on Certificates of Deposit. The difference was spread among loan servicers, Wall Street, and even the gub-a-mint agency by employing this securitization tactic.

The problem was that loan principal was returned, along with the interest, on the old Ginnie Mae pass-throughs. Little old ladies didn’t care because they weren’t going to live long enough to spend all of their money (these were 30 year issues). However, Wall Street had problems selling these deals in bulk to institutions because of the prepayment features.

An ambitious mail-room clerk named Lew Ranieri worked at Salomon Brothers and saw an opportunity in the mid 80s. Salomon Brothers was hiring rocket scientists to create a new breed of mortgage-backed security, a collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO), designed to more accurately predict the prepayment speed of the mortgages backing Read more

March 14, 2007

Do you want Cheez-Whiz with that weenie?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it holdeth not in every point, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we may thereby both see and remember almost all the passions before mentioned. But this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost; and in it: To endeavour, is appetite. To be remiss, is sensuality. To consider them behind, is glory. To consider them before, humility. To lose ground with looking back, vain glory. To be holden, hatred. To turn back, repentance. To be in breath, hope. To be weary, despair. To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation. To supplant or overthrow, envy. To resolve to break through a stop foreseen, courage. To break through a sudden stop, anger. To break through with ease, magnanimity. To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity. To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. To see another fall, disposition to laugh. To see one out-gone whom we would not, is pity. To see one out-go we would not, is indignation. To hold fast by another, is to love. To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. To hurt one’s-self for haste, is shame. Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die. — Thomas Hobbes

There is much to criticize in the RE.net. But one would hope that we would criticize criminality, venality and intentional transgressions, rather than honest, even if thoughtless, errors. From the former, we want not the correction of the bad behavior, but rather its elimination. For the latter, we can be big enough of spirit to help our brothermen learn to do better where they might have done badly. It is certainly within the bounds of reason to argue that Hobbes was more than unnecessarily dour.

Alas, we have a new candidate for The Cheez-Whiz Prize, a new weblog devoted to derision called “realweenie.” (I won’t link to this for the same reason I’ve stopped linking to Housing Panic.) It’s a Six Apart weblog, Read more

March 14, 2007

First Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar eclipses goals by 33%

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We scheduled the room for four hours, but Russell Shaw was convinced we could only manage to fill three hours. Instead, he spoke from 6 pm to 9:58 pm, exceeding his own goal by 33%. In a night dominated by discussions of goals, goal-setting and goal-achievement, it was an impressive accomplishment.

Allen Butler recorded all four hours in audio, and we have much of the evening’s event recorded on video as well. At this point, we don’t know how much, if any, of this we will be distributing.

As we’ve discussed, the underlying purpose of the event was to elicit questions from audience members to be used as curriculum points in future audio and video podcasts. This goal was also eclipsed by a wide margin.

Russell will be speaking at the March 29th StarPower event in Phoenix. He came last night bearing discount coupons, but there weren’t enough to go around. If you would like to attend this event, click here for a discount coupon.

We have at least one more Sales Success Seminar planned, but we don’t know for sure where or when yet. I’ll post more information when I have it.

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March 13, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…is up at RE Agent in Connecticut. This week’s winner? Our own Michael Cook with Real Estate Investment Theories that can Actually Help You Make Money.

Michael has been an outstanding addition the the BloodhoundBlog roster. This is his second win at the Carnival of Real Estate Investing. If you missed it, take a look at Jeff Brown’s encomium to Michael’s brilliance. Brian Brady also wrote a sweet tribute at Active Rain.

Michael Cook is birthing an investment book before your eyes — strong on academic theory, stronger on hard-won first-hand experience. And you get to watch as it emerges from his brain, topic-by-topic, chapter-by-chapter, innovation-by-innovation…

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March 13, 2007

Great salespeople are playing a totally different game

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth:

Driving home, I started to think about the discontinuity in the graph of salespeople. Discontinuities are interesting, because that’s where you can see how a system works. In this case, it’s obvious that a great salesperson is going to sell far, far more than a good one. Nine women working together can’t have a baby in one  month, and ten good salespeople still aren’t going to close the account that a great one could. That’s because it’s not a linear scale. The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.

Come see Russell Shaw tonight and find out what you’ve been missing…

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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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