BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: November 2008 (page 3 of 6)

November 17, 2008

The just-exactly-how-clever-are-you marketing-spam of the morning: SuperCuts shows you how to cut your database marketing costs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is pure spam, as far as I know, completely unsolicited. I read it and loved and now I’m sharing it with you:

Here’s a web-based version, if you’re having trouble reading it.

I read this as Harrah’s-style database marketing at its best: I’m offering you an incentive to sign up to be touched at your natural buying points. That’s a mutually-reinforcing loyalty, with the merchant, of course, taking care of the up-keep for the relationship.

The issue: How to translate it to real estate. It’s not enough to have an offer. Free moving boxes are a one-off freemium, and what you want are regular reasons to touch your people.

Richard Riccelli has a great idea for synergistic offers, but you’ll have to use your imagination to retool it for real estate. He suggests giving a free magazine subscription as a freemium. For us, it might be Dwell or Cottages. In your market, it might be your local city mag. The challenge is turning the offer into natural, organic touch points. One solution might be to feature something from the magazine in your monthly newsletter. Another might be simply to call your subscriber clients to talk about issues raised in the latest issue.

A comps search is a way to stay in touch with past buyers. These were a lot more fun when prices were going up, but it’s still a nice way to stay in contact. I’m assuming everyone knows what this is: An MLS-based search of stone comps to the buyer’s home, with email alerts going to them and to you every time something changes. They get to see what’s going on in their hyper-hyper-hyper-local market, and you get a golden opportunity to talk them every time a comp is listed or sold.

What else? I wish we could have a couponable event every four to six weeks, like SuperCuts, but what other things can we do to create pull-based relationships that give us natural, organic opportunities to stay in front of our clients?

Technorati Tags: ,

November 17, 2008

Unchained Notes: It’s a Greek Thing

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts sharing some of the gold I found at the Unchained Orlando Conference on Social Media Marketing for Real Estate.  In the first post: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Hound Pound,  I talked a little about the theme that emerged through all the speakers.  In this, the second post, the theme reveals its philosophy.

Imagine someone handing you a list with ten actions you could use right now to improve your marketing.  Now imagine not only being given the list, but an understanding of the “why” behind the actions on the list.  You would go from an agent that is hungry, to an agent eating a fish, to an agent who knows how to fish in rapid order.  That is what Greg Swann, our first speaker, accomplished when he shared his Unchained Epiphany.

Greg pointed out that most civilizations will do just what is needed to survive and no more.  When faced with a new problem they will do just enough to overcome it but again, no more.  He did not come right out and say it, but I couldn’t help myself thinking of us as a civilization.  All of us involved in the real estate business.  We have our own language, our own goals, our own methods for determining hierarchy and possibly most important, we have our own culture.  We also suffer from the same problems Greg was describing: often doing just what is needed to get by; just enough to solve a problem, pay the bills and move on to the next thing.  Not all cultures operate this way.

The Greeks, as Mr. Swann pointed out, were the first culture to come along and reach for more than just surviving; to become, as Greg said: “a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake.”  We, each and every one of us, has that opportunity.  We are free to succeed and we are free to fail.  We are free to control our business and we are free to believe others Read more

November 17, 2008

The Difference Between the Best Website and Results

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

The Web Marketing Association has an annual competition in 96 industries to recognize what they believe are the best websites. In the real estate section, they list 7 criteria they look for:

  1. Design
  2. Ease of use
  3. Copywriting
  4. Interactivity
  5. Use of technology
  6. Innovation
  7. Content

All seven are subjective, which is fine: the organization giving the award gets to set the criteria. But looking at the winner last year, their award is doing a great disservice to any real estate agent who uses that site as their inspiration. Here is a link to the site.

Now I don’t know the people who built the site, and I don’t know those agents or their company. Nor do I have anything against them, or the award.

Personally, I think the site is fine but not spectacular in execution for what it is: a nice-looking website.

But there’s not one mention in seven criteria of results.  My assumption is that most businesses want a website that is going to help them get results (i.e. generate visitors and turn them into leads). And here’s why this site is at a severe disadvantage.

It is invisible to search engines.

To you, me, and anyone else with a Flash plugin, this is what the site looks like to human eyes:

What does this site look like to Google? Here’s a visual of the actual page using a text-based browser:

It looks like nothing. Want proof?

One entry.  Name.  Rank.  Serial Number.

A site exists.  Beyond that?  No information.

This site leaves money on the table. For my real estate site, according to Google Analytics, 73.4% of my 150-250 visitors per day come from search engines.

But the only way to find their site from Google is by its own name, “Elizabeth Lofts”, and if one goal of marketing is to get people who don’t already know your name to contact you, then this site had failed by that criteria.

And as of today, you won’t find it under “Pearl District” or “Pearl District Condominiums” (until the purgatory of page 5) so it wouldn’t have generated leads from people who express interest in that district.

Worse, this site has plenty of information Read more

November 17, 2008

Part 2 of 4: Tracking Goals in google Docs.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Setting goals: whatever gets measured gets improved. So, if we want to get after it, live a life of splendor, we want to track some of our inputs, the 2.0 way.

It’s lightweight, it’s custom, and it utterly rocks.

We want to track stuff so we live in reality. Ask failure agents and they always never know quite how much business they’ve done. They always rounded up, and I call that agent math. This takes that excuse away and lets you create the reality you will live in.

We’ll soon know what pace we are on. This one’s short, the next one is longer. It’s recorded on viddler at 800×600 res, and i think you can pop it out without leaving the site. Thanks to SnapZ pro for making the video:

The way to do it in the cell is =SUM(OTHERSHEET!C2:C200) where ‘other sheet,’ is the other sheet you are messing with by name. I rename them because of minor glitches across browsers.

November 16, 2008

Thus does Big Mother make gonophs of us all: How to keep your house by taking taxpayers for a ride

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is choice, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

To qualify, you must be at least 90 days delinquent and live in the home as your primary residence. You must owe at least 90 percent of the home’s value. It’s fine if you owe more than it’s worth.

Your mortgage must be owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or held by one of the participating loan companies.

If you meet these requirements and can document your income, your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment – including property taxes, insurance and association dues – to 38 percent of your gross income.

The reduction can be accomplished in one or more ways:

— Reducing the interest rate, but not below 3 percent. (The new rate, if below market, goes back to a market rate after five years.)

— Extending the term of the loan up to 40 years.

— Reducing the principal on which monthly payments are calculated. Unpaid principal is added to the loan balance and due when the homeowner sells or refinances. The reduced interest payments never have to be repaid.

If you owe more than the home is worth, the plan will only reduce principal down to 100 percent of market value, according to an official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If all three of these maneuvers can’t reduce your payments to 38 percent of income, you won’t get a fast-track modification but could still request a customized deal, says the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The streamlined process looks only at income, not assets. If you refinanced your home to buy a Mercedes or own another home, you won’t be expected to sell them to pay your mortgage.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to Read more

November 16, 2008

The House of Atreus

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I watch him, through the French terrace doors in the living room, as he ambles across the sidewalk and up the limestone steps of my still unsold 1.5 million dollar McMansion. He double parked his Escalade next to my X3 without bothering to put on his flashers, its mere shadow swallowing my embarrassingly sensible Bimmer. He’s wearing an Urlacher jersey, number 54, size XXL would be my guess. It’s tight. Squirrels scatter and birds empty the barren trees into the charcoal, cloudless drape that’s been hanging for a year over this soon to be expired listing. For some reason I immediately re-calculate my own net worth like I always do when this guy shows up. It only takes a few seconds.

“Still got this Moose?” he asks, smiling. Our inside joke. The ‘Talking Moose,’ my unsold 6 bedroom Behemoth jammed shoulder to shoulder into a block of Chicago brick bungalows.

“Last day,” I tell him. “If Jesus Christ doesn’t walk through the door in the next half hour the Builder is moving his family and all his in-laws in.”

He looks at me as if to ask ‘hey, what am I, chopped…?’ I’ve written about this guy before, a derivatives trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He calls me Dino. He thinks I’m Greek. He knows a lot of Greeks down at the Merc, he tells me again although I’m quite certain he’s probably never read one.

“So,” I begin. “A lot has gone apeshit since the last time we spoke.” And it has. In the past month the whole world economy has been thrown off its axis. This we all know.

“Body bags, dude,” he says. “Go long on body bags.” I know he’s kidding but I still ponder the notion as I imagine turning my Wachovia water into wildcat wine in one frenzied trading session. I think back over the last 500 days on this Open House assignment and wonder if he hasn’t been leaving me obtuse investment tips all along.

“I’m just a sniper,” he continues. “I’m a sniper in a grassy knoll…”

“Nice ride,” I say, motioning to his Escalade, changing the Read more

November 16, 2008

Can California cultivate anything better than the seeds of its own destruction? Urbanologist Joel Kotkin tallies the state’s ills

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin on the rise and fall of the Golden State:

Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I coauthored a book called California, Inc. about our adopted home state. The book described “California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.”

As relative newcomers at the time, we saw California as a place of limitless possibility. And over most of the next two decades, my coauthor, Paul Grabowicz, and I could feel comfortable that we were indeed predicting the future.

But much has changed in recent years. And today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.

Since 2000, California’s job growth rate— which in the late 1970s surged at many times the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration. Texas has replaced California as the leading growth center for Hispanics.

Out-migration is a key factor, along with a weak economy, for the collapse of the housing market. Simply put, the population growth expected for many areas has not materialized, nor the new jobs that might attract newcomers. In the past year, four of the top six housing markets in terms of price decline have been in California, including Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles. The Central Valley towns of Stockton, Merced, and Modesto have all been awarded the dubious honors of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation during the past year.

Even with prices down, many of the most desirable places in California are also among the most unaffordable in the nation. Less than 15 percent of households earning the local median income can afford a home in L.A. or San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, or San Jose, it’s less than a third. That’s about half the number who can buy in the big Texas or North Carolina markets. Moreover, state officials warned in October that they might have to seek Read more

November 15, 2008

A workout loan can be a win-win solution to avoiding foreclosure

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
A workout loan can be a win-win solution to avoiding foreclosure

We talked last week about lender “workout” loans — a scheme lenders have come up to keep homes from falling into foreclosure. The premise is simple: If you can’t pay your mortgage, the lender will write you a new loan that anyone could pay.

I’m not kidding. Let’s say you bought a house in 2005 for $300,000. If you put nothing down, your payment might be $1,500 a month — not counting taxes and insurance. But the market value of the home is now $150,000 — a $750 mortgage payment.

As an investment, your home isn’t performing all that well. You bought at the top of the market, and you probably can’t even sell at a loss.

Worse news: Your hours at work have just been cut back.

You’re not in foreclosure. You’re making your payments. But you are an excellent candidate for what lenders call “jingle mail” — mailing in your keys and your deed. This would wreck your credit — for a while — but you’re looking at wrecked credit anyway.

But wait. Your lender’s workout department wants to speak to you before you do anything rash. If you qualify — which means if you have income — they might suggest something like rolling both of your mortgages into a new interest-only third mortgage at a very low interest rate.

Your existing monthly obligation of $1,500 will accrue month-by-month as new debt by negative amortization. In two or three or five years, you will resume paying on your old debt while you continue to pay down the new debt accrued on the third mortgage.

If this sounds silly, it’s because it is. The lenders are doing everything they can to make bad debt look good — temporarily. But a workout could be a win-win for you. If the market rebounds strongly, you can refinance all three notes. And, if not, you will have lived almost rent-free for the next few years before you lose the home in foreclosure.

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born Read more

November 15, 2008

Adding a Print Stylesheet to Your WordPress Blog

by

Real Estate Broker, Investor

Author website

I have a Dead Tree Addiction.  Somehow words seem clearer and truer, and their cadence more lovely when I read them on a printed page, rather than a computer screen.

So, when I read a well written blog post, one that addresses an important issue, one that speaks clearly to me,  my first inclination is to hit “PRINT”.  And all rational reasoning to the contrary, sometimes that urge to PRINT just simply cannot be denied.

Unfortunately many WordPress theme designers neglect to include a print stylesheet in their theme files, and the resultant printer output often contains an endless jumble of sidebar images and unusable navigation link text.

If you’d like to make it easy for your readers to print your posts, add a print stylesheet.  Here’s how:

In a plain text editor (Windows Notepad works just fine) create a new file named print.css

Paste this CSS code into your print.css file

#nav {display: none; }

#sidebar {display: none; }

#content {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;}

a:link, a:visited {color: #000000}

That’s it, that’s all.  The code is saying: “Don’t display the navigation bar, don’t display the sidebar, don’t print the links in fancy colors, and fill the entire width of the page with the post content”.

Save the print.css file, and upload it to your WordPress blog host.  Place it in the individual theme’s folder; the most likely path would be something like mysite.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/mytheme.

Now at the WordPress dashboard, go Design -> Theme Editor -> and in the Theme Files – Templates column, click on header.php to open the file.

Paste the code below into your header.php file, right below all the other lines that start with link rel=”stylesheet”

<link type=”text/css” media=”print” rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/print.css” />

Make sure it is above the line that reads </head>. Click Update File.  This little piece of code is telling the system that if it receives a “print” command, to apply the print stylesheet instead of the “media” styleheet.

To test, click Visit Site, click File -> Print Preview

Notice that I did not remove the Footer.  If you’d like all printouts to include your contact information, the footer can be Read more

November 14, 2008

NAR Responds to FSBOGate

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

With a friend/partner you trust, but verify.  Since Realtor.com is not seen around here as a friend, many of you adopted a new slogan: Don’t trust and don’t verify.  I make it a rule to never believe anything that doesn’t seem to make sense. 

The NAR/R.com response…

NAR, REALTOR.com Set Record Straight on Erroneous FSBO Claims

A press release issued on Wed., Nov. 12, by ForSaleByOwner.com contained inaccuracies and misleading statements about its ability to place unlisted for-sale-by-owner information on REALTOR.com, the official Web site of the National Association of REALTORS® operated by Move Inc. NAR and REALTOR.com are setting the record straight with the following clarifications:

1) The settlement agreement between NAR and the U.S. Department of Justice made no provision to allow unlisted properties, such as “for-sale-by-owner,” to be posted on REALTOR.com.

2) ForSaleByOwner.com does not in any way enable home sellers to advertise their home on REALTOR.com without broker representation; every property on REALTOR.com must be listed by a licensed real estate broker.

3) REALTOR.com has not authorized ForSaleByOwner.com to resell REALTOR.com’s Showcase Listings Enhancement package.

4) There is no relationship between ForSaleByOwner.com and REALTOR.com.

5) There are no unrepresented homes on REALTOR.com. Every property on REALTOR.com must be listed by a licensed real estate broker, and unrepresented properties would not qualify to be submitted to a REALTOR®-owned and operated MLS.

REALTOR.com® has asked ForSaleByOwner.com to issue a retraction. ForSaleByOwner.com did not discuss in advance the statements in its press release with REALTOR.com® nor did it request or receive permission to use the REALTOR.com® name in its press release. For more information contact Lucien Salvant 202/383-1176.

November 14, 2008

SplendorQuest: kiss me…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

kiss me your glory i kiss you my joy
kiss me your giggling girlishness
     i kiss you my mannish boy

kiss me your tickling i kiss you my laughter
kiss me your before your before your before
     i kiss you my ever after

kiss me your promise i kiss you my prayer
kiss me your fire i kiss you my air
kiss me your hunger i kiss you my need
kiss me your giving i kiss you my greed
kiss me your worship i kiss you my vow
kiss me your present your presence your presents
     i kiss you my endless now

kiss me your seeking i kiss you my knowing
kiss me your staying your staying your staying
     i kiss you my never going

kiss me your wisdom i kiss you my clever
kiss me your always your always your always
     i kiss you my always forever

November 14, 2008

Another Year, Another Challenge For Greg Swann

by

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

Author website

Who said, “If you do it right, you can have all the business you can stand.” ? If you guessed Greg Swann, you were right.  Click the link to hear his exuberance about the power of weblogging.

Here he is bragging about being the second best real estate blog in the country.  This is one of the few times you’ll hear him get excited about coming in second place.

One of my favorites, Greg talks about the OLDEST sales tool and why everyone MUST have one.

Here’s Greg trying his hand as an anchorman on Bloodhound Blog TV.

This came from a phone call we recorded about a year where Greg tells you why we should “think globally and blog locally“.

Here’s Greg on national televison (advance to the end of the 20 minute video) where we find out that he sat in the same seat as former Presidential candidiate, John Mc Cain.

…and Greg’s inaugural interview with Russell Shaw.

Why the Greg-Fest?  It’s his birthday today !

Wanna wish him a Happy Birthday?  Don’t do it here rather post it on his Facebook page.  Greg’s presence is woefully inadequate on that social platform.  You aren’t connected to him?  Friend him up!

Happy Birthday, Padnuh!

November 13, 2008

Let’s Crash Some Markets

by

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

Author website

European Leaders lauded our free-market system when they were making money.  Today, their answer is more regulation of financial markets in an effort to move our system towards the Euro-Socialist model:

Leaders from the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies are being hosted on Friday night and on Saturday by a U.S. president who will be out of office in little more than two months and who is under pressure from Europe to agree to stricter market regulation than he prefers.

A lame duck President, George Bush has a chance to make a stand for free markets at this conference.  European leaders will most likely tolerate his stand while they lick their chops for January 20, 2009.  Europe’s favorite American President, Barack Obama, will face intense pressure from our ancestors to conform to their models next year.

President Bush:

“While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today’s problems is sustained economic growth,” Bush told a New York audience. He said critics were “equating the free enterprise system with greed, exploitation and failure” and objected to it.

“The answer is not to try to reinvent that system,” Bush said. “It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people around the world.”

Germany:

German officials said before the meeting that it will discuss “a new balance between market and state,” possibly a more ambitious aim than the Bush administration favors.

France:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy sounded an aggressive note on Thursday as he prepared to head for the summit.

“I am leaving for Washington to explain that the dollar, which after the Second World War was the only currency in the world, can no longer claim to be the only currency in the world,” he said. “What was true in 1945 cannot be true today.”

Great Britain:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed on Wednesday there was growing support for increased fiscal measures globally to help weather the crisis and indicated he might press that theme at the summit.

Monday-morning quarterbacking is one thing but over-regulation is how the Read more

November 13, 2008

Podcast: Teri Lussier talks about using weblogs to build relationships at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In the song Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple sings, “I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” You might take a census of the Bloodhounds to see to whom that sentiment applies. I know it does to me. I think it does to Teri Lussier, too. She’s not cranky or irascible, but she has a keen awareness of how far from perfect things can be — how much better they could be if we were to work a little harder.

Teri spoke at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on using weblogs to build and sustain relationships. Linked below is an MP3 podcast file of her presentation, but we’ll precede that with an Unchained Melody, a bootleg video of Fiona with Nickel Creek:


Technorati Tags: , , , ,

November 13, 2008

REALTOR.com features FSBO listings- The Excrement hits the Oscillating Rotary Blades

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Hat Tip to Jay Thompson

OK, here’s the Press Release

UPDATE: According to Mr. Brunner CEO of Virginia Association of REALTORS, he has talked with the general counsel of NAR and there is NO relationship between ForSaleByOwner.com and REALTOR.com. Ms Janick apparently as well told him that there are NO unlisted properties on REALTOR.com.

I want to make sure that we provide accurate information (which has been difficult in this case).

With that in mind and IF that is true then much of this post is now irrelevant.

We still have no official word from REALTOR.com saying that this press release was not accurate. (Would have made getting the truth out much easier.)

I am literally too P.O.’d for words. I have long considered REALTOR.com an enemy to the REALTOR. But this is a bridge too far. Whoever did this at REALTOR.com HAD to know what they were doing (IMO).

For them to allow FSBO’s onto REALTOR.com WITHOUT being on the local MLS shows CLEARLY who these @##%#$%’s are. They are no different than any other interloper.

My message to the folks at NAR on this one is short and sweet:

“You’d better come down HARD and FAST on this one… or this will make Bastille Day look like a picnic. And you know what? That might not be a bad thing.”

Thoughts?

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts