BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: March 2008 (page 4 of 10)

March 21, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Photography

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read somewhere the other day, I forget where, about a web site for a listing that had 47 pictures. The author of the post clearly thought that was a lot of photos.

Cathy organized her first batch of photos for the web site I will be building today. We will be adding other photos later, but this is by far the biggest batch.

How many? Not a huge number for Cathleen — only 221, about 28 megabyte’s worth. The finished web site probably won’t have many more than 300 photos — not counting the virtual tour and the video we have planned.

Is that overkill? We don’t think so. Everybody knows how to turn off the TV, but if you want to know everything about the home, we want to show you everything about the home.

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March 20, 2008

Hubcaps on breadcrumbs? How BloodhoundRealty.com builds single-property web sites — and why they sell homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vance Shutes left a comment to my post about how we use web sites and web pages about particular houses as “breadcrumbs” to lead potential clients back to BloodhoundRealty.com. My response to him is long enough that I’m turning it into a post of its own.

Vance:

I’m intrigued by this concept. Will you be expanding on it during Unchained?

At BloodhoundBlog Unchained I will show you two different ways to leave a breadcrumb at every home you might ever want to sell. Each of those ways will result in a different kind of market penetration, but each should make you very easy to find and very hard to miss in your target markets.

Put into practice, these two ideas are worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in gross commission income just by themselves. I don’t normally keep secrets, but I wanted a big blow-out for Unchained. We have been quietly testing one of the two ideas and the results are coming in quite a bit better than I had predicted.

Are you setting up a separate page for each listing at BloodhoundRealty.com, or are you setting up a separate domain for each address?

For homes we are previewing for clients or photographing for other reasons, we host the pages on on Phoenix real estate web site, on our main file server. I don’t even know how many we have out there. Hundreds, certainly, possibly over a thousand. Someday I want to create a database of links so we can find them without having to hunt too hard.

For listings, we do a single-property web site on a separate domain. These are pretty elaborate, usually running to 60-100 megabytes of content before we’re done: Dozens of photos, an interactive floorplan of the house, a live Google map of the neighborhood, PDFs of the listing and the flyer, along with any historic photos or documents we have of the house, etc. If there is any question we can answer about the house on the web site, we do it.

Then we promote the home’s URL with everything else that we do: The custom yard sign, the business-card-sized open Read more

March 20, 2008

All things are ready if our minds be so: Author 21 doesn’t hold her manhood cheap, and goes once more unto the breach

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I know this post is a private party, completely self-indulgent on my part, but this is my little one year anniversary of becoming a Bloodhound. I don’t do much looking back so I’ll make this short and sweet, well, maybe not so sweet. Here’s the original post that brought me here:

The folks at ActiveRain are putting together a contest. It’s Pygmalion for webloggers, wherein experienced real estate webloggers take eager young blogging caterpillars into their tutelage, and, Henry Higgins-like, bring forth beautiful blogging butterflies in a few months’ time. The winning pair of bloggers will split $5,000 amongst their favorite charities.

(I predict my favorite charity will turn out to have something to do with stray animals.)

In any case, I’m looking for a patsy, er pigeon, er victim, er volunteer — I’m looking for a volunteer to learn the art and science of real estate weblogging with me as your tutor, er mentor, er insufferable bastard.

To disclaim is to disclose: I am not the gentlest teacher in the world. But I know a lot about weblogging, and I can teach you as much as can be taught about this art, this praxis, this obsession.

If you are at or very near the stage of being a total wannablogger with a will to make the leap to something that can blow kisses at true greatness, you’re my ideal candidate. I love you best in Phoenix, but if you’re not here, you’re just not here.

If you want to learn to do real estate weblogging wisely and well, with style, with grace, with humor and panache — I’m your volunteer.

To me, that looked like fun. Did I say that out loud? It isn’t supposed to be fun here, is it? It’s serious business on the Bloodhound Blog, right? Bloodhounds don’t have fun, nor do they have a sense of humor, do they? If that’s what you think, or if there is some part of “insufferable bastard” you don’t understand, please go away, this isn’t for you.

The end of Project Blogger would have been the perfect time for me to make a graceful exit, but they couldn’t Read more

March 20, 2008

HousingPanic ALMOST Got It Right: How To Overcome Commodization By Employing The Dollarization Discipline

by

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

Author website

Housing Panic (housingpanic.blogspot.com) ALMOST got this one right.

I frequent Activerain.com; I cut my blogging teeth there and have made many friends and business connections through Activerain.com. Though I criticize the site frequently, I criticize it because I love the sense of community there and want it to thrive.

New Bloodhound, Barry Cunningham, hosted Broker Bryant (see Bloodhound interview here) on RealEstateRadioUSA, Tuesday. The topic was defending the fees you charge your customers. The interview is pretty interesting and the Barrys couldn’t quite get Broker Bryant to articulate it the way they might have liked. I’m lucky; I know the Barrys and listen to RealEstateRadioUSA. I think they were looking for a practitioner to properly define the services he offers and “dollarize” the offering- Bryant didn’t do that.

Broker Bryant defended his position, on his Active Rain web log, and tried to flip the question around to the Barrys. I think Bryant walked in unprepared for the interview. He usually does an excellent job defining his value, in public, and has hundreds of happy clients who comment on his ActiveRain web log. I don’t think the Barrys wanted Bryant to line-item his “costs” as much as they wanted him to line-item the value the costs incurred bring to the consumer. The Barrys are quite meticulous about defining your value to a consumer; I remember that on each and every customer call, now.

Here’s where the Housing Panic boys ALMOST got it right. They exposed a featured post, on Active Rain, about how fees are split. REALTOR Kim Carpenter did a great job with graphics explaining how she greases lots of people to get a house sold. That’s EXACTLY what a consumer DOESN’T WANT TO HEAR. I don’t care who YOU have to pay to sell my house, I care how much I pay to get my house sold. Here’s Kim’s conclusion:

So, there it is! Please don’t ask me to cut my commission. It has been cut! FOUR times, it has been cut! I promise I will give Read more

March 20, 2008

Real Estate is Entertainment – Are You Entertaining?

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

Last week I heard my pal Walt Baczkowski, CEO of the Metropolitan Consolidated Association of REALTORS®, make the statement, “real estate has become entertainment.”  The statement struck me like one of those V8 smacks to the head.  The more I thought about it, the more the statement became true.  Just look at the local TV cable listings and you’ll see shows like Flip That House, Home Makeover, Designed to Sell, House Hunters, etc.  Real Estate is Cold; Real Estate TV Hot proclaimed RealityTVWorld.com recently. 

In addition to reality TV, many shows like Two and a Half Men and Reba have supporting characters that are real estate agents.  Unfortunately, these shows often portray agents is a rather unflattering manner.

In my little neck of the woods, real estate has been one of the top 10 news stories for the past 4 years (number 1 for a few years), and we have 2 or 3 media inquiries a week wanting an interview for this or that real estate issue. 

So if you buy into the premise that real estate has become entertainment, I ask you “are you entertaining?”  If you are a REALTOR®, you are likely charming and engaging (I think that is required by Article 18 in the Code of EthicsJ), but are your marketing efforts interesting, informing and/or humorous?  Are you using YouTube for the goldmine it can be?  Are you still doing the same ad layouts you used 5 years ago? 

This post is not intended to give you the answers, but I hope it will help you understand the questions you need to ask.  Below are links to some examples of entertaining REALTOR® marketing efforts.  You probably do not want to copy these, but you should seek out your niche in this new paradigm.  Consumers want something in return for paying attention to your marketing – what will you give them?

The Hot Tub REALTOR® – This YouTube marketing gets 5 stars for creativity, 2 stars for execution, but is probably not going to have too many copycats.

FSBO Site Video – this non-REALTOR® gets it.

REALTOR® Web Site – This is a local Charlottesville firm Read more

March 20, 2008

What’s the future of residential real estate signage? I think it’s like the recent history of digital printing — only much, much bigger

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“The Barrys” on Real Estate Radio USA have a burning yearning to know just what it is that listing Realtors do to earn their commissions.

It’s a question that plagues me, too. As much as I talk here about on-line marketing, we draw a lot more attention from sellers with our real-world marketing efforts. We’re all about selling the house, and, oddly enough, this makes an impression on other people who want their houses sold.

But we’re deliberately not listing very much right now. We’ve turned down a bunch of houses we would have liked to have handled, but we will not list a house for sale if we don’t feel certain we can sell it. There was a span of eleven days when we turned down over $3 million in new listings — but every one of those homes is still unsold, despite repeated price reductions.

We’re gearing up to list 1322 East Vermont Avenue in North Central Phoenix. The house doesn’t go live until March 28th, but, because of an Easter-egg hunt in the neighborhood, we’re holding it open this weekend in advance of the MLS listing.

We’re going to be documenting everything we do to list this home for sale, both as an enduring record of the kinds of efforts we undertake for our sellers and as a step-by-step guide for Realtors who follow BloodhoundBlog.

The house has been repaired, touch-up painted and and staged. Some of the photography has been done, but I have not yet built the home’s single-property web site as I write this.

But because we want to have our yard signs up by the weekend, I built the signs today:

I’ve built an engenu page with bigger versions of the signs along with a link to an engenu site discussing our sign philosophy in detail.

Our yard signs are just one part of our listing strategy, but they form at least a piece of the answer “The Barrys” are looking for. We believe in marketing our listings, and we do everything we can think of to get them sold quickly and for top dollar. As we build out the engenu site Read more

March 20, 2008

Destination: Vertical. Zillow houses “hot or not” for homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dig this. Dumb but fun. A sticky way to see a lot of ads — but fun anyway.

Serious reflection #1: Another way for Zillow to be a sticky, top-of-mind vertical search portal. Get ’em there. Keep ’em there. Satisfy all of their real estate needs.

Serious reflection #2: The design sense in this new feature is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from Zillow so far. I’m talking about a much higher standard of graphic elegance. Not jaw-dropping, but much better.

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March 19, 2008

Rhymes With Ferry

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

A couple of things. First, the largest real estate company in Arizona (based on number of agents) is now Homesmart. Homesmart was already pretty damn big but on Tuesday it was finalized – they bought Dan Schwartz Realty. Dan Schwartz Realty was, itself, was already one of the top 3 companies in the state for number of agents. So was Homesmart. It is my understanding that – at least for now – both companies will continue to operate with their current names.

A Little Bird Told Me

And now for the “big” news. I’ve just received a report that Mike Ferry’s coaching business is falling off. Big time. I have long considered him a predator, so I am happy to hear this. His company has had a pattern of high pressuring agents (who attend his free seminars) to sign up for coaching. Coaching is pretty much all he really sells – his events being a giant sales pitch for getting coached by his organization. For those who don’t follow the Mike Ferry coaching advice or who find it unworkable they are in for an additional shock, besides not having all that additional income they were sure to get. If they attempt to cancel their relationship they discover – as they have signed a contract – their account will be turned over to a collection agency.

It now happens that the state of California (EDD) recently ruled that all the coaches (I think he has averaged about 60 coaches at any given time since 1999) he has been paying as independent contractors are legally employees. Mike appealed and lost. Prediction: a big fine will soon be levied by California and I’m guessing the IRS will soon do the same. Also, from the very same little bird: a lawsuit from ex-coaches will soon be filed and made public to recover any money not recovered via the taxing agencies. My prediction: he will be out of money before any of them can collect anything.

Mike, once you see this you can have one of your attorneys send me a nice threatening letter. Here is my contact information.

March 19, 2008

Looking for long tail search results from your on-line real estate marketing efforts? Don’t clean up your breadcrumbs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:

Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.

This is the web page I had built for 1415 East Flower Street in the Cheery Lynn Historic District of Central Phoenix.

That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.

We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.

What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?

Nothing.

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.

We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine Read more

March 19, 2008

RealEstateRadioUSA.com’s Barry Cunningham is going to show us all what it sounds like when a big dog howls

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re not listening to RealEstateRadioUSA.com, you’re missing out on the most entertaining real estate education your money cannot buy. You can listen live at 1/2/3/4pm, west to east, but the show is also available every day by MP3, so you can take “The Barrys” with you in the car or to the gym.

Today Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham joins us as a Bloodhound:

What’s that big, booming voice, piling comedy upon careful calculation? It’s Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham, who with co-host Barry Johnson teaches a daily master class on real estate and investing.

Barry is a big man with a big voice, a big personality, and a great big heart. But, ignoring all that, he’s a serious real estate investor with a wealth of hard-won experience. It will be interesting to hear how a really big dog can howl.

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March 19, 2008

Zillow.com makes its first MLS-wide feed agreement and, in the process, disintermediates its first IDX cartel

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the PR, which the vendor cheerleaders will have reported:*

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com and MLS Property Information Network today announced a partnership to feed listings from the New England area MLS to Zillow.com on a daily basis. This partnership initiates the first participation at the MLS level in Zillow’s Listings Feed program, which launched in November 2007. To date, the Zillow Listings Feed program has attracted several top brokerages for participation, and now allows all customers of MLS PIN to automatically gain free marketing exposure for their listings on one of the most-visited real estate sites in the country, while providing Zillow’s users with a more robust search experience.

That is, rather than having made yet another feed agreement from a brokerage or a franchise of brokerages, Zillow will be taking a feed of every listing from MLS PIN — a fairly big MLS system.

Okayfine. Now here’s the actual news:

Each listing will include a description of the property with multiple photos and contact information for the listing agent, including links back to the listing brokerage’s Web site where they can find more information and connect with a sales associate to guide them through the home buying and selling experience.

That is to say, whatever form the IDX agreement takes at MLS PIN, it is being cast aside for the Zillowfied listings. The IDX-like policy of concealing the listing broker’s and agent’s contact information will not be the policy for Zillow’s echo of the MLS PIN feed. (I find this so amazing that I’m avidly listening for some back-peddaling.)

There’s more. If a listing agent creates a profile on Zillow.com, that will be linked through from that agent’s listings. The MLS PIN feed will provide information for Zillow’s Virtual Sold Sign program, which is another way of promoting individual listing agents. This is all of a piece with Zillow’s general policy of promoting individuals rather than organizations.

But the important fact is that Zillow’s agreement with MLS PIN splits up the clubby conspiracy against the consumer that is the MLS philosophy. If buyer’s agents are squealing in Massachusetts today, the proper target of their Read more

March 19, 2008

Biz 2.0: Super Real Estate Companies

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

When I first started in real estate my goal was to own a big operation after getting my broker’s license. A quintuple bypass changed my plans and I now operate a boutique operation, small, profitable and simple. I spend my extra time doing things I enjoy like golfing, reading and writing.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about big. It’s my belief that most large RE companies don’t fully exploit the advantages of being big, with access to resources largely going to waste in offices run from defensive modes with key players protecting turf rather than striving for excellence and market domination. Internal competition has been a weakness of big RE companies, along with the lack of talented employees with broader skills than RE skills. There’s a time and place to compete and there’s a time and place to bring talented individuals together to co-operate.

All companies and all offices differ, but from what I’ve seen much is missing. Big doesn’t have to mean slow, stubborn and infected with in-fighting and politics. I admit, I have idealistic binges that sometimes border on drunkenly naive, but I also know what people working together can accomplish — I’ve witnessed it through personal involvement and I’ve read the stories of companies who’ve achieved excellence through new ways of thinking, co-operation and a dedication to talented people given free reign to think, act and innovate. I also have no knowledge of the sophistication involved with large franchises, but I know that even independent offices with 50 to 100 agents can develop 2.0 systems that drastically improve their ability to compete.

It starts at the top with leadership. I should say enlightened leadership. Fearless and open-minded leaders are rare; hell, most everything I’m about to describe is rare — that’s what makes it special, and that’s why great companies achieve the largest market share in their line of endeavor. Good leaders are an amalgam of psychologist, priest, coach, cheerleader, protaganist, antagonist (questioning his/her own leadership), hero(ine), visionary and sage. That’s asking a lot, but good leadership demands a lot. From Alexander the Great to JFK to Lee Ioccoca, the styles are different and the scope greater or less, but the key elements of Read more

March 18, 2008

Bloodhound by Choice

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I was working with a local real estate agent yesterday on a strategy to achieve one of his goals.  When we were done he declared the strategy good and decided that, barring any bad luck, success might just find him this year.

—–

A few weeks back I was driving my two boys to school.  They are without doubt the most beautiful boys in the world and I speak with the absolute neutrality of an objective father.  At five and seven they are also completely present.  By that I mean they live in the here and now the way most children do.  The recent past has no more meaning than the near future.  Their focus and their conscience are in the moment.  It fills them with a constant sense of wonder and never ceases to amaze me.

So we are in the car and singing along to the radio when my seven year old sits up in the back and asks: “Daddy, do you believe in good luck?”  As an adult long separated from the freedom of childhood, I was twelve different place in my head when he asked the question and none of them were the present.  I absent-mindedly tossed off one of my favorite sayings to placate him.  “No,” I said, “I believe that the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

My son, however, pressed on.  “I believe in good luck Daddy, but I do not believe in bad luck.”  At this point I was blissfully reminded, once again, how very present children are and I snap out of my own thoughts.  I too get present and I pay attention.  I say to him “I do not think you can have one without the other.”  (At this point I must share a little background. I have taught my boys about the subconscious mind, calling it the “magic” part of their brain.  How it is always listening and recording everything we say.  How our thoughts have power and our words create our realities.)  I went on, “if you believe in the idea of good luck, I think you must accept the idea of bad Read more

March 18, 2008

Will the Fed Buy Mortgage Backed Securities In the Open Market?

by

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

Author website

I never post my Mortgage Rates Reports here.  They’re boring unless you are thinking about buying a home or refinancing your mortgage.  Today, it seems plausible that the Fed is shifting its open market activities from buying treasuries, to buying mortgage-backed securities, in order to bolster liquidity in the mortgage industry.

Here’s what I said:

We call this phenomenon stagflation and it’s REALLY  bad for the economy.  The Fed has been aggressively cutting interest rates and the declining housing market is closing down mortgage companies, investment banking firms, and real estate brokerages.  What more can the Fed do to help?

The Fed can (and will) buy mortgage-backed securities. 

Rather than to buy treasury notes in the open market, the Fed will be buying mortgage-backed securities.  They will want to get those assets off investment banking firms’ balance sheets and provide stability to the MBS market.  Remember when I said that only the uneducated pay attention to the treasury note to determine the direction of mortgage rates?  Today is proof.

The spread between treasury notes and mortgage-backed securities has been widening these past six weeks. Why?  America was considered to be a sub-prime nation;  everybody was expected to default on their home loans.  Expect the Fed to prop up the MBS market in the next 4-6 weeks.  That will be bad for treasury notes and good for MBS.

Remember when I compared this to the junk bond crisis of the early 90’s and advised you not to panic?   Now is the time to take action.  There will be some great opportunities to lock into a low mortgage rates during the rest of this month.  If you’re closing a loan in less than 14 days, lock your rate.  Otherwise, float and see mortgage rates decline a bit.

Thoughts?  I don’t care if it’s good or bad policy, I care if its a realistic move on the Fed’s part.  I think they’re doing it now and will increase that activity in the near-term.  If I’m right, we’ll see lower mortgage rates and the Treasury/MBS spread will narrow.

March 18, 2008

Sean Purcell: A mind that glows, a passion that burns, a wit that sparkles — a life that pops

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another new hound in the pound today, Sean Purcell, whom you will recognize from our comment threads and from his weblog, A Life That POPs. He’s on pace to become Jeff Brown’s favorite hyper-local weblogger, and Sean has been working on BloodhoundBlog Unchained warm-up events with Brian Brady. It’s time and past time that we brought him into the pack.

What happens when a Princeton psychology major goes to Wall Street? Sean Purcell came to his senses and moved to San Diego to train as an Ironman and establish himself as a Web 2.0 real estate success coach.

I have one more Bloodhound to add, but, right now, he’s spinning and spinning in front of a digital camera, praying to god that, somewhere, he as a good side.

We are always interested in adding new voices, but it is getting harder and harder to make the cut. I’m turning down nineteen out of twenty, by now, but that’s not a very good standard to judge by. Most of the people who approach us want to use our popularity to promote their businesses, which is not what we’re doing here. I am endlessly interested in points of view we don’t already have. But, even then, you have to be able to keep up with this pack of wild dogs — which means you have to be swift enough to run with us, but you also have to accept that at BloodhoundBlog we are each of us free to run as we choose.

In any case, Dave Phillips set such a blistering pace yesterday that I’m interested to see what Sean can do. Nothing like a little pressure to bring out the best in a man, right?

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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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