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Month: February 2009 (page 4 of 5)

February 15, 2009

Making the Scene: How to create new public Scenius scenes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about Scenius scenes, but, until lately, we’ve kept the scene creation praxis fairly close to our vests. I had documented the process very early for the folks who were involved in the original discussion of the Scenius idea, then shared that video how-to with other folks by email.

But we’re doing things differently than we were last November. And I took up the topic of scene creation in public in Seattle both Thursday and Friday. On Friday, I promised to cook up newer, better documentation by Monday.

I’m a day early. Click on this link to be swept off to a comprehensive site on how — and why — to create a public Scenius.net scene.

The site features three videos, including a link to the one made by Jim Reppond at Friday’s presentation.

There are also links to some of the pages mentioned in the first video, which is intended to be the canonical scene creation reference, as well as links to BloodhoundBlog posts on the how and why of Scenius scenes.

Let me know when you create a new public scene and I will add it to the index at Scenius.net.

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February 14, 2009

Living that Seattltude: Bloodhounds listening above the Sound

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Still recovering from two exhausting days in Seattle. Brian Brady and I both had a great time. Taught a ton, learned a ton and met a lot of truly wonderful people.

The Zillovians were excellent hosts, pulling out all the stops for both the BloodhoundBlog Unchained event and for REBarcamp Seattle. They basically gave an entire floor of their offices to the RE.net, with spaces big and small for people to get together.

Zillow’s offices are on the 41st and 46th floor of a vast office tower. I would marvel that the building has its own Starbucks, but so does every other structure in Seattle. Here’s the view, looking north and east over the Puget Sound:

Here’s a panel from the Unchained conference featuring Rhonda Porter, Marlow Harris, Brad Coy and Rich Jacobson.

We capped off the day with a debate featuring Glenn Kelman and me. The photo shown here was taken by Marlow Harris. Marlow also shot some video clips, and I may post those later today.

REBarcamp Seattle was a lot of fun for me, mostly because I just did my own stuff and didn’t worry about it. Here’s Zillow’s Drew Meyers delivering the convocation:

On Thursday night, Scott Cowan approached Brian, asking him if he thought I might have time to talk to him on Friday. Brian laughed at the question saying, “If I know Greg Swann, he’s not going to go to any classes. Just grab his ear and ask what you want to know.”

Brian knows me better than I know myself. He signed us up to lead a session on group blogging, then later sent me off to teach a class on setting up Scenius scenes (for which I will provide better documentation Real Soon Now). Other than that, I spent my day in small offices (with incredible views) going at things one-on-one with anyone who wanted to talk to me.

Notably…

Al Lorenz is building a media empire in bucolic Lake Chelan, Washington. He wanted to learn how to build a Scenius scene, but he ended up teaching Brian and me a ton of juicy tidbits about Joomla.

Al later drove the computer Read more

February 13, 2009

Keeping It Light For Friday The 13th

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Sometimes You Have To Push The Seriousness Away. Seriously.

Fellow blogger April Winchell posted this little tidbit a few days back:

If you’ve ever read President Obama’s Dreams From My Father, good for you. I couldn’t get past the foreword.

I wish I had. Because today I discovered that there’s a fairly juicy little subplot in the book, involving one of Obama’s high school friends.

Ray, a fellow classmate of Obama’s, was also bi-racial, and also trying to define himself. But what set him apart was his colorful manner of self-expression. Ray cursed like a motherfucker.

This would all be snickerworthy enough, but it turns out that Obama actually read the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father.

And that means he read Ray’s quotes.

And that means you’re about to hear the President of United States using language that would finish Cheney off once and for all.

Warning: Mature Content

http://tinyurl.com/cvrbap

(Don’t shoot me – I’m only the messenger)

February 12, 2009

De-Commodotize Your Listing Content

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

This is in response to Greg’s post about Jim Flanagan’s question, “What does today’s real estate consumer want in (on) a real estate brokerage’s website?”  “Listings” was the predictable, correct answer.

It’s no secret that Real Estate Web site users are primarily interested in listings. That’s why everyone has them, and that makes listings a commodity.  That begs the question: When everyone offers the content that your target audience is looking for, how do you set your site apart?

Blogging is one answer, but at the outset most consumers are not looking for you or your expertise, they are looking for listings, so at the end of the day, listing content is still the most powerful thing you have control over when it comes to attracting users to your site.

Before I spent most of my time on Real Estate (I heard you get to make your own hours and its easy money, plus I am a real “people person”), I managed eCommerce sites for a living.

If there is one golden rule of successful B2C eCommerce, it is this: Content is currency.

Consumers are used to the wealth of content that Amazon puts around a copy of Home Buying for Dummies. They are not impressed by cheap, 50-word “descriptions” full of Real Estate jargon and one or two grainy pictures from the IDX feed that feature cat boxes, dishes in the sink, and amateur porn lighting.

Google is not impressed when the content you offer on your own site is identical to the content that is offered on sites it considers more authoritative than yours.

The answer is to add value to your currency. Start by minting rich content and then stop giving it away and you will get more visits from both Google and humans. It’s a three-step process:

Step 1: Develop rich content for your listings, or for listings that you get permission to modify on your site. At a minimum, that means a few hundred words of grammatically correct English, lots of decent photos, and the right meta data in the right places.

(There have been many posts on BHB about how to write decent listing Read more

February 12, 2009

The Way of the Farmer in Downtown Seattle

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll be doing a different version of The Way of the Farmer in Seattle today. I know we won’t be able to do a lot of hands-on stuff, but still I’m keen to take on some practical, real-life marketing problems.

Here’s my syllabus, for which I have about a zillion open tabs:

  • Expired package, physical and PDF
  • Listing card, physical and PDF
  • Set up a Scenius scene
  • Engenu
    • Set up a single preview page
    • Incorporate that pages into a site
    • Add a day of previews to the site
    • Add another day of previews
    • Completely recast the structure
    • Build a site composed of PDFs
    • Engenu and real estate weblogging
      • Historics
      • Investors
    • Illustrate Beryl sites
  • Listing praxis

I don’t know what we’re doing in the way of recording today’s event, so my advice is to be there if you can. See y’all later today.

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February 12, 2009

Has real estate reality taken all the fizz out of FSBOs?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been fun dealing with years-old academic studies of the real estate market insisting that For-Sale-By-Owner marketing is just as good as listing with a Realtor.

It might have been, during the boom, when any idiot could sell a house. But it’s been kind of sad to watch people in our current declining market trying to sell by themselves — or trying to sell with the Help-U-Fail style of discounters — or trying to sell with the usual crew of spelling-impaired white shoe Realtors.

For owner-occupants clinging to the last of their equity, there is no substitute in this market for actual real estate marketing. The white shoe boys will shine you on, and the rape-and-run guys will beat you up on price once a week, but to actually sell a premium-quality home at a premium price, somebody has to make a sales effort.

This is what FSBOs normally do worst, of course. Even the typically-clueless rain-dancing Realtor at least gets the basics right, when many by-owner sellers are busy finding unique and original ways to get in their own way.

But the market tells, doesn’t it? A short bit in Fortune hints that the fizz may be gone from the FSBO highball:

“I used to get a phone call a day from people interested in FSBO Web sites,” Zwiefelhofer says. “Now it’s maybe one call a week.”

So were FSBO sites just flashes in the pan? Murray says that with properties harder to sell these days, sellers are returning to brokers for professional marketing help, causing the unassisted slice of the market to slip to around 15%. But he expects the FSBO market to bounce back – eventually.

Not all by-owner sellers stink at the job. BloodhoundBlog Contributor Richard Riccelli is scary-good at marketing his own properties — witness 214Calhoun.com — and here in Phoenix, the people most likely to adopt our style of listing tactics are FSBOs — a sad commentary on the so-called “professionals.”

But in a market where even well-prepared, well-priced, well-promoted homes are taking a long time to sell, doing everything you can to make things hard on buyers is obviously a sub-optimal strategy. Read more

February 11, 2009

How can you benefit from the sexiest search site in the Real Estate 2.0 world without becoming an employee? Redfin.com is going into the referrals business

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had this news last night, under embargo, but I was tied up with geek stuff. The Cliff’s Notes: In areas where Redfin.com has MLS reach but does not have its own agents on the ground, starting today it will begin offering client referrals to agents it has screened and whose performance it will monitor and publicize on its website.

What follows is a piece of an email sent me by Redfin.com CEO (and BloodhoundBlog contributor) Glenn Kelman:

Maybe this seems like deck chairs on the Titanic because it doesn’t fix sub-agency – which I agree needs to be fixed — but it seems like a step forward to us. I mentioned it when we increased our prices and offered unlimited tours, that we had one more rabbit in the hat.

Starting tomorrow Redfin is going to start connecting folks in outlying areas to real estate agents who work for other brokerages. This has been done many, many times before, and it’s something Redfin could have done years ago, given all the traffic we have in outlying areas.

The Redfin twist – and the reason we waited so long — is that we wanted to do in a customer-centric way that also works for agents. Here’s what that means:

  1. Data: We suck in data about all the agents’ deals for the past year and we survey all their clients and then we publish *everything* — reviews, deals – on a continually updated web page. We survey every new deal too. The reviews we got are mostly good – too good right now – but that’s because response rates are low for long-past deals with only happy people replying. We do show every no-response, and every deal where the agent did not provide an email address for a past sale (they can’t do that going forward).
  2. Consumer in charge: The consumer is in charge, choosing the agent he wants to work with based on all this performance data (see attached screenshot) & he can fire the agent any time – no procuring-cause, no leads, no fees for leads, & the consumer always knows what he’s signing up for.
  3. Referral fee Read more
February 10, 2009

Should We Be A Good Society?

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

lunt new construction

Every morning – even in near zero degree weather – I walk my two dogs around my neighborhood – the jaunt is roughly 4 miles with a brief but necessary Starbucks break. While I’d like to admit the motivation is to remain healthy, the reality is the required expresso jolt is what gets me up in the morning.

A little over halfway through my walk, I pass by the sign I have posted – proudly identifying the Neighbors for Responsible Zoning’s (the Zoners) disdain for profiteering Realtors, developers et al. Evidenced now by the presence of two mediocre-ly constructed mini-mansions, the realtors and developers undoubtedly profited.

My neighborhood may be one of the most ethically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. Short of bucolic, it is an established neighborhood with mature trees that canopy the cross streets lined with woodframe victorians, brick Prairie-inspired architectural gems and classic Chicago courtyard buildings. Many of the residents have lived in the area their entire lives, having watched the tide of transients transform the neighborhood. In the frenzy of the condo boom, affordable housing became in short supply. There is definitely a strong sense of community. People care about preserving the past as well as the semblance of community.

While the Zoners may not have had success in staving off the wave of new development, they have acted in the interest of preserving what they value.

This sign has really had an impact on me lately. In light of the many recent discussions regarding the impact of the current stimulus package – the implications on the housing industry – so much of the focus has been on the financial impact.

Ideology has drawn the line – we can’t interfere with the market for fear of socialism – government intervention simply prolongs the inevitable.

Admittedly, I have subscribed to that line of thinking, however, recently I struggle with the lack of balance to the enormous social costs – many yet unseen – to this financial mess. It is difficult to have sympathy for many people that Read more

February 10, 2009

Swanepoel’s Top 10 Real Estate Trends matter to me — and to real estate — quite a bit less than my own list of burning issues

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stefan Swanepoel sent me a copy of his Top 10 Real Estate Trends Report, which was gracious of him, considering that neither me nor any of the Bloodhounds nor BloodhoundBlog itself are mentioned anywhere in the book — at least as far as I could detect on a cursory examination. I don’t mind, mind you. I’d be amazed if we were cited. That kind of attention is reserved for the likes of Sellsius and Agent Shortbus — the biggest little PR3 weblogs in real estate. Every pundit or entity even remotely connected to the official world of real estate honors us by ostentatiously affecting to ignore us. And: Even then: We care a lot.

I did surprise myself by actually cracking the book. I had it last year, too, but I don’t remember if I looked at it. And I don’t want to seem to be hyper-critical of Swanepoel’s effort. It ain’t for me, that much should be obvious. I can’t think of anything in the tome that strikes be as being either important or non-obvious — or non-trivial. The whole thing, and everything and everybody in it, seem like deck chairs on the Titanic to me — but so does everything else even remotely connected to the world of official real estate.

Here are the issues Swanepoel takes up:

  • Nightmare on Elm Street: What if Your E&O Insurance No Longer Existed?
    If the tenth biggest issue in real estate is a FUD factor, we’re in better shape than we knew. Excellent reason for getting rid of the broker’s license, but, of course, that doesn’t come up.
  • The “Real” Energy Crisis: Factors Shaping Housing Values and Development
    Predictions about energy are as reliable as predictions about the weather.
  • Winning the Gold: Green Movement Gains Grassroots Support
    If we assume an energy problem, much of the green issue will concern money, not the environment. For now, I read it all as a fad.
  • Information Highway Congestion: Too Much Traffic Creates a Virtual Parking Lot
    More FUD, in this case I suspect fuddy-duddy FUD. We are overwhelmed by information. Our only hope for salvation will come from Luddite real estate brokers who can’t Read more
February 9, 2009

What are the Stimulus Plan and TARP II going to mean for the housing and mortgage markets?

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

While I could write for a LONG time about it, I’m going to limit it to what I feel are the top 6 things that I think could very well happen.   Keep in mind, this is being written after watching President Obama’s press conference but before anything gets passed.

1. The market is expecting that both the Stimulus Plan and TARP II will provide “the answer” to the problems that are currently plaguing our economy.   With that being said, I believe the markets will be disappointed because the problems facing the economy are way more complex and urgent than what one or two bills can solve.   The disappointment will put downward pressure on stocks and upward pressure on rates.

2. The $15,000 tax credit for home buyers will pass but rather than jumpstarting the housing market, it will instead cause a few people to buy homes, mainly first time home buyers, and will extend the inventory problems that we have because prices won’t adjust as they should.   We won’t get nearly the “bang” for the $Billions that will be spent on the tax credits.   I’m sorry but I really think the main beneficiaries of the $15K tax credit will be mortgage lenders, real estate people and the relatively few people who were already thinking of buying.   Will it reduce inventories?  No, other than taking some bank owned inventory (for first time buyers) off the banks, the rest of the people will be “shuffling” inventory because they all have a house to sell.

3. Between the Stimulus Plan and the TARP II funds, we’ll (yes, it’s you and me) will be spending close to $1.2 Trillion.   Do we have the money?   No, we don’t, so we’re going to borrow it.   What will that mean to the market?   A couple of things are going to happen (obviously in my opinion):  1) The government is going to flood the market with debt in order to finance this spending.   That’s going to push the supply demand equilibruim off base and that is going to put upward pressure on mortgage rates.

4. What about that 4.5% mortgage rate?  Is it Read more

February 9, 2009

How bad can the weather in Seattle suck? Come see the Bloodhounds this week and find out

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have been in Seattle in the late Summer, an idyllic time of year when it barely rains twenty inches a day and when the Banana Slugs start to think about snuggling up with you for warmth. I have been on Mount Rainier on Labor Day — playing in the snow.

(People say “ray-near,” but it should be pronounced “rainy-er.” I live among a bunch of mountains, but not one of them suffers from excess precipitation like Mount Rainier.)

Brian Brady and I are in Seattle later this week. We’re flying up to do a BloodhoundBlog Unchained preview, then we’re hanging out through Friday for REBarCamp Seattle.

The weather in Phoenix actually sucks right now, but, by state law, I’m forbidden to disclose just how badly it sucks. But our sucky weather is utterly nothing compared to what I have to look forward to later this week in Seattle:

Water freezes at 32 degrees. That never happens where I live, in North Central Phoenix. It can happen once or twice a Winter out in the sticks, but in town ice is something we buy at the supermarket to make Irish Whiskey more refreshing.

My plan is to go totally gnome, comfortably numb, in-to-it like an Inuit. A vast and cumbersome leather overcoat, with a sweater, a scarf, maybe even a hat. To understand how big an exception this is for me, right now I’m wearing a tee-shirt and shorts, no shoes, no socks. And I’m sweating.

Totally gnome for my presentation, too. Everything we do at Unchained is going to be hands-on, learn-by-doing, but I can’t count on being able to do that in Seattle. Instead, as with The Way of the Farmer from last May’s BloodhoundBlog Unchained, I’m going to go through a lot of hard-headed, practical stuff that you can take home and deploy at once, if you like — if you take good notes.

It seems likely to me that I’ll be sneezing and sniffling, too. I moved to Arizona from North Andover, Massachusetts, which makes Seattle look like a tropical resort. For the life of me, I cannot remember how I used to survive Read more

February 9, 2009

Some ugly questions about that $15,000 home-buyers tax credit…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I let the hoopla over the $15,000 tax credit for home-buyers of all incomes slide last week. There’s way too much sick-making news coming out of Washington right now, and, somehow, Republicans dancing in triumph because they had managed to squeeze out a little theft for the rich — and for the NAR — was more than I wanted to try to digest.

Actually, my pet bette noir last week was the ridiculous idea of a compulsory 4% mortgage rate. What this economy really needs is a mandatory 720 FICO score!

Pinocchio — the NAR — is a vampire, a dead thing that feeds on the living, we all know that. But I was writing about that $15,000 gift from the taxpayers to the NAR this morning, and some ugly question came to me.

For one thing, this is a direct transfer of funds from the Federal budget to the housing industry. Normally I love the idea of starving the government, but the net effect of this tax credit is that we will artificially buttress home prices, delaying but not avoiding the ultimate price decline that we have to go through to achieve a true recovery.

Am I wrong? I read the tax credit as being a net reduction in taxes paid. If you owe $15,000 in taxes, but if you bought a primary residence, you pay no taxes.

I can’t see lenders resisting a bait like that. They will find a way to lend you the dough now, and you pay it off over the next 12 — or 24 or 36 or 360 — months. Your $15,000 can pay for up to 10% of the purchase price of the home, and your net tax liability will be reduced by $15,000 next April. If you have another $15,000 in cash — set aside for taxes, perhaps? — you’ve got an 80/20 loan on a $150,000 home with no PMI.

Let’s go once better: $15,000 down on an FHA loan gets you to a $428,571 purchase price — in excess of the jumbo limits in Phoenix. Have you been craving that $400K house up the block. It Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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

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