Month: March 2008 (page 10 of 10)

March 3, 2008

The $800,000 Crier

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

I posted a piece early on in my blogging experience entitled The $800,000 House. Six months later, after discovering I could actually have a little fun with this medium and that people were actually visiting my site on an occasional basis, I wrote a second post called The $4,000 House. I even embedded the same funny picture of a lean-to shack, with good old location x 3 (Real Estate Fodder 101) and literary flashback (English For Amateurs 101) being common threads between the two essays. At the end of the year I was a little disappointed (but not at all surprised) when the Pulitzer commitee didn’t include me on their long list of nominees for my literary tongue-in-cheekiness. Come to find out, more would eventually be revealed…

And now, several more months hence, and fresh off a whirlwind tour of buy-side advocacy (driving internet clients around in my car and showing property every day for the past two weeks), I am finally able to kick back, relax at my writing desk, and fire off the third and final part of a real estate trilogy I envisioned 18 months ago when this whole real estate blogging thing began to make sense to me. My spellchecker is dusted off and the dog is at my feet. I’m wearing my LA Dodgers cap on backwards and my coffee cup is well within reach. Now, if I can just get my Right Brain to cooperate…

The $800,000 Buyers; Where Have They Gone? ……Wait….I’m stalling. Allow me to digress for a few paragraphs as a brief, temporal decompression seems to be in order.

You see, I can’t write and sell at the same time. Apparently every other notable real estate blogger I read can. Ardell can. The likes of Greg Swann and Russell Shaw certainly can. But I can’t. I am right brained and left footed when it comes to combining these two (to me) incongruous activities. In other words, I have to sell real estate to support my lifestyle but what I really yearn to do on a daily basis is sit at my computer, write about what I see, and listen to the radio. When Read more

March 3, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “Free has emerged as a full-fledged economy”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I’m sorry to keep going outside the RE.net for the Odysseus Medal competition, but that’s where the news is right now. Inside the RahRah.net, present company excepted, everything seems to be devoted to mutual back-slapping — which would be boring even if it were warranted. In any case, The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Chris Anderson for Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business:

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be “really special … and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.” This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand’s original aphorism from 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.”)

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try Read more

March 3, 2008

The Perfect Real Estate Relationship

by Mike Farmer

Real Estate Broker

At least for me and how I envision my future. A lady from Arlington, Va called me last week. She didn’t say “Can I go look at some houses next week when I’m in Savannah?” — No, she had read my business blog and understood I recommend we do first things first. She asked to meet me in the lobby of the hotel where she’s staying so we can discuss a game plan.

She has a home to sell (attention all Arlington Va agents!), and when she sells it, she wants to move to Savannah. We sat in the lobby and over coffee and bagels discussed her vision of what she wants. She described what she’s dreaming of and I described areas in vivid detail and we went back and forth until we narrowed it down to a couple of areas.

It turns out our esthetic tastes are quite similar, so it made the conversation flow easily. She asked what the negatives are moving to Savannah and I told her without violating any laws. She decribed her life to me, how she had worked in several different fields, how she’d been a nurturing mother (still is, I’m sure) and a wife, and how now it’s just her — retired but still wanting to be active, how part of her dream is to become active in the historic preservation efforts in Savannah, that she would like a little cottage, airy and light, preferably near water, but close to town — she described how she loves diversity, doesn’t want to sound like a northerner, but doesn’t want to live in a place with a single, limited mindset — how she likes cosmopolitan eclectism. I understood her.

This is the personalization and context that I’m not sure machines will ever understand, it’s the human contact of real estate that I love, and it’s the service I want to provide — to take this lady’s story and to be an active part of it as it goes into another chapter, to help her accomplish a goal to personalize her lifestyle plans in a home she can feel a part of, that reflects her personality and sense of life.

First Read more

March 3, 2008

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

Last week we built a custom weblog to help you sell your home. This week, let’s dress it up a little.

Some of the things I’ll be talking about are free, but others cost money. Your Realtor may have a marketing budget, so that could be a source of funding. But even if not, with only a few buyers chasing a very large number of homes, stinting on marketing costs may not be your best strategy.

Here’s something you can do for free: Go to Google Maps and build a map to your home. At a minimum, you should also provide driving directions from the nearest freeway exit. But, if you sign up for a free Google account, you can link to an elaborate custom map for your home.

Highlight parks, playgrounds, schools and shopping. Saying anything at all about churches might invite Fair Housing complaints, but you can draw attention to other nearby amenities. Even better, you can attach pictures and internet links to your map markers, so that buyers can really get a feel for the neighborhood.

Online real estate sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com want to know that your home is for sale. You can add photos to those sites and link back to your custom weblog, which will bring you more traffic. On Zillow.com, you can “claim” your home, updating details on any upgrades you have made to it.

We like to use floorplans. You might be able to get one to scan (or better yet, an Adobe PDF file) from your home’s builder. We use a company called FloorPlansFirst.com because they make interactive web-based floorplans. Buyers can move their furniture into the home to see how it will fit. This costs money, but it sells houses.

For virtual tours, we’re switching to Obeo.com. Their tours cost more, but they offer a category-killer feature: Virtual redecorating. Your buyers can discover how much they’re going to love your house after they’ve remodeled the kitchen and repainted the exterior.

And the only stronger Read more

March 3, 2008

Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It

by Brian Brady

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

I’m talking to Teri Lussier about Twitter, a lot. I didn’t get it until I decided to post relevant mortgage market information on the Twitter feed. Let’s assume you HATE Twitter (or just don’t get it). Let’s assume that you don’t have the time to Tweet.

Q: How can your business benefit by using Twitter?

A: Eyeballs- Be the destination place.

Think of Twitter as the television airwaves, twitter streams as “TV channels”, and your blog or website as the cable company. If you can host multiple channels (Twitter streams) on your website/blog, you win eyeballs. More importantly, you win loyalty as the destination place for real-time, user-generated information.

I’m starting an experiment, for Andy Kaufman to analyze, in his Twitter presentation at our upcoming Unchained conference. I’ll be asking input from Andy and Teri Lussier as I try this idea. The goal is to drive more traffic to my web log and become an information destination for potential customers;

I want to be San Diego’s Twitter Cable Company. Here’s my plan:

1- Create a landing page for my web log (www.TwitDiego.com) with a “channel guide” for Twitter streams,

2- Evangelize the utility of Twitter as an information tool to relatively low-tech users. The Saint James Academy Parents (and faculty), The Lomas Santa Fe Country Club, The Villanova Alumni in San Diego, Pacific Beach nightlife, Gaslamp nightlife, North County restaurant reviews, The San Diego State University, RealEstate.com agents, etc, etc.

3- Offer streams or “channels” to each user group.

4- Market www.TwitDiego.com to everyone I meet. I did this yesterday, at the beach, to a soccer mom. She’s setting up a Twitter account and accepted my offer of a webinar for the soccer moms.

Sit back and watch my mortgagereport profile on Twitter get more followers, my web log get more traffic, and my community grow.

This is a wild hare idea. All CONSTRUCTIVE comments or suggestions are welcome.

March 3, 2008

Bloodhound Lit: The art, science and business of writing interesting and profitable real estate weblog posts

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

By his good example, Kevin Warmath reminds you to get busy on your BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry. We’re about to talk about writing, so let me remind you that I wrote a post on how to write a Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry that advances your interests — and that one post is a virtual how-to on producing profitable real estate weblogging content. If you were to write nothing but mix-and-match variations on that one post format, you could produce a killer blog — interesting to read, very attractive to search engines and a reliable generator of new business.

We have written a lot about writing. The truth is, we have written a lot about everything, but weblogging is a self-referential art form. Blogging about blogging is baked in the cake. The subject comes to my mind now because we were linked last week from the Guardian Unlimited, the web site of the Daily Guardian newspaper in London.

Why them? Why us? They were linking to a preface to a Joseph Conrad novel that I had posted as both a discussion of effective writing and as a thrilling demonstration of Conrad’s premises in action. We Google up first on Conrad’s text, which is how the Guardian found us. And that preface is truly exemplary writing advice, a breathtaking tour de force that is its own best proof of its arguments.

A few days later, I put up my own frail defense of those same arguments:

This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to the senses, writing actions and events that feel to the reader like actual experience.

The point is to think in active, expressive verbs, and particular — granular — nouns and adjectives, using images and metaphors to connect ideas. To write not as discourse but as exposition — the creation of that fascinating dream-like state of hyper-reality in the reader’s mind.

There is a sense in which this is about writing as art, but the other way of looking at things is to see all works of the minds as expressions of the artist within. Sometimes a grocery list is just a Read more

March 2, 2008

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Continuing, briefly with the idea of chokepoints and the economics of abundance:

Broadcasting — radio and television — offers us a perfect example of how much bigger the economics of abundance is than mere data processing.

Broadcast outlets, at their beginning, were both natural and man-made chokepoints: There were a limited number of available frequencies, and access to them was regulated by fiat of law. Cost-based chokepoints affected the other major media of the era — newspapers and magazines. This resulted in very lucrative markets for the owners of mass media outlets — and in media products that tended to be at least as dissatisfying to consumers as they were appealing.

But then three things happened:

Printing got a lot more efficient, creating the era of narrowcasting in publications — not one generic bike-riding article a year in Look magazine, but a dozen specialized monthlies just for different flavors of serious bike racers — with a dozen more for mountain biking, and a dozen more for bicycle fitness training.
As a consequence of better scientific research in electro-magnetics, electronics, signal-processing and information theory, the radio spectrum itself became much more abundantly divisible — creating still newer kinds of narrow-casting, right down to cell phones and private-network walkie-talkies.
Finally, the internet itself resulted in a massive explosion of available bandwidth in mix-and-match wired and wireless networks.

What’s the result? One of the richest businesses in the entire history of chokepoints is being disintermediated into oblivion. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

Emphasizing that, I cannot get enough of this movie:

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

March 2, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

We have 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 91 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, again this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Dan Green -- The NEXT Time Mortgage Rates Plunge How To Get Ready For The NEXT Time Mortgage Rates Plunge”,
“Daniel Scocco — Poor Writing Skills Overshadow Can Poor Writing Skills Overshadow Good Content?“,
“Dave Smith — Create Your Own Backlinks Hyper Local Target Marketing Create Your Own Backlinks“,
“James Hsu — Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but what are your pictures actually saying?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Page Rank and SEO Just Write Relevant, Compelling Articles About Real Estate and/or Mortgage and You Won’t Have to Worry About Page Rank and SEO“,
“Jeff Pabian — Smart email campaigns begin at home. responsible email marketing for real estate professionals“,
“Jim Cronin — The Real Estate Business Is Content The Real Estate Business Is Content, Not Home Selling“,
“Jim Kimmons — Your Website Why Your Website Isn’t Bringing You Clients“,
“Jim Watkins — Real Estate Mail Marketing Real Estate Mail Marketing: Pull the Right Strings“,
“Mary McKnight — Target a Typo SEO Tip of the Week: Target a Typo of a Common Keyword and Increase Search Traffic by 30%“,
“Milton B. Yates — Short Sale Opportunities Every Short Sale Opportunity isn’t Worth Chasing – More Time – Bigger Checks“,
“Milton B. Yates — Subject to Foreclosure Buying \”Subject to\” Existing Financing – Subject to Foreclosure“,
“Scott Buresh — Sam’s Club SEO Sam’s Club Wants to Read more

March 2, 2008

Say goodbye to Chokepoint Charlie: In a world without walls, free is the new green of the internet economy

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I have been talking about the economics of abundance literally from Day One of BloodhoundBlog:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others.

I was talking about phenomena like weblogging and open-source software, but, ironically enough, I was also talking about an article by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson.

This week Anderson is back with another important article, this one called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. He’s writing about the net.economy, and what he has to say is fascinating, even if I think he might be missing the bigger picture. He’s also writing in support of his new book, a for-pay product I don’t intend to pay for.

Anderson likens the idea of free razors, which we’ve also talked about, with the modern net model of using free web-based software to create massively-viral effects. Interestingly, he documents six broad categories of no-cost-to-the-user internet business models.

His thesis is that the plummeting cost of data-processing hardware, coupled with a software-cost-per-user that approaches zero, requires vendors of web-based information and services to find other ways to monetize their efforts. If one vendor won’t cut the price to zero, the next one will.

We’ve been talking about this much, too, also since the birth of BloodhoundBlog:

[T]he people most immediately affected are the ones who are currently paid a salary or wages based on the sale of information. Either the information is going to get much, much better — or the number of paychecks is going to get much, much smaller.

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. Read more

March 1, 2008

Virtual Tour Videos on YouTube…a soon to be no-no…

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

A growing trend among REALTORs has been to replace their old school Virtual Tours with a You Tube video that they incorporate into their blog, site and even onto REALTOR.com. Actually, the cool part was that you could put them ANYWHERE.

No problem!

Well ummm…actually there is a problem with that. YouTube’s Terms of Service are for personal or non-commercial use according to a recent article in REALTOR magazine.

I just wanted to pass this along as FWIW (for what it’s worth) to Bloodhound Blog readers who may be currently putting your Virtual Tours on YouTube.

March 1, 2008

People who write too much: One Bloodhound’s manifesto

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Mike Farmer’s post on philosophy got me thinking. I knew I had written fairly extensively, fairly recently, on some of the same ideas, but I couldn’t remember where. I write a lot, and I don’t always remember what gets posted where.

What I was thinking of was Todd Carpenter’s “Blogger Spotlight” interview with me. That post was much longer. In the extract below, I’m clipping out the Big Issues philosophy. The confluence of recent events — webloggers-at-war and the death of William F. Buckley — seems to have left us a little more open than we might otherwise be to new ideas. This is an exposition of the ideas that move me, in particular, my personal manifesto.

Todd Carpenter: One of my mottoes in life is that everyone has an ax to grind. I blog for money. Most RE agents blog for money in the form of clients. On the other hand, you don’t even have Amazon affiliate links attached to the books you recommend. What’s your ax to grind? Why are you doing this?

Greg Swann: In order that it might be done, and done properly. I don’t think I fit your theory about having an axe to grind. I may be as close as one can come in the modern world to being an actual Attic Greek, a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake. People often accuse me of having ugly motives — which says a lot more about them than it does about me. But there is a sense in which you could say that I don’t have any motive for the things I do, none other than the doing itself. I like for things to be done. I like for them to be whole and complete and perfect and esthetically beautiful and mathematically elegant and philosophically sound. I work very hard on everything I do, and I can concentrate very intently on what I am doing, and I don’t like to do anything except what I am doing right now — but I love to Read more

March 1, 2008

Why’d Benn Have To Go And Do That?

by Brian Brady

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

I’m pleased that we received a hearty endorsement from Benn Rosales, at Agent Genius, for the BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference, brought to you by Zillow. I’m pleased but I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised because I’ve gotten to know Benn these past six months. He’s a marketer and a fine one at that.

Some bloggers doubt the utility of the content we’re discussing; I completely understand that doubt. While UNCHAINED will talk a lot about the power of the web log, it is not JUST a bloggers’ conference. UNCHAINED is a marketing conference; a social media marketing conference. Not all bloggers are marketers; they are accidental beneficiaries of the explosion of the Web 2.0 evolution.

Web 2.0 is not “new”. Social Media Marketing started about 10-15 years ago. Interactive marketing is about engaging the consumer, using the far reach of the internet.

I remember starting a Yahoo Chat room, called “Phoenix Real Estate”, in the late 90’s. It was a destination spot I hosted for consumers and professionals to share information, each night, from 9PM-10PM; I often sat alone in that “chat room”. Some nights, a real estate agent or consumer would show up to ask questions; those were the best nights. I found that Sunday nights became the best time for consumers to interact with me and limited the chat room to a scheduled weekly event.

Hosted forums were another great way to engage consumers before LinkedIn broke onto the scene. When LinkedIn hit the net, it gave us a chance to engage the consumer on our terms. Rather than wait for an anonymous person to hit a forum or chat room, we were able to use demographic data to target certain “prospective customers”. If you’re a long-term player in this industry, LinkedIn represents a great chance to engage people in an interactive community.

Myspace offered a completely new paradigm to SMM. Here, users post personal profiles, robust with demographic data, to be “searched”. Through groups and “friend lists” a site-specific address book can be created Read more

Month: March 2008 (page 10 of 10)

The $800,000 Crier

by Geno Petro

The Odysseus Medal: “Free has emerged as a full-fledged economy”

by Greg Swann

The Perfect Real Estate Relationship

by Mike Farmer

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

by Greg Swann

Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It

by Brian Brady

Bloodhound Lit: The art, science and business of writing interesting and profitable real estate weblog posts

by Greg Swann

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

by Greg Swann

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by Greg Swann

Say goodbye to Chokepoint Charlie: In a world without walls, free is the new green of the internet economy

by Greg Swann

Virtual Tour Videos on YouTube…a soon to be no-no…

by Eric Blackwell

People who write too much: One Bloodhound’s manifesto

by Greg Swann

Why’d Benn Have To Go And Do That?

by Brian Brady

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