Archives (page 132 of 372)

April 22, 2009

Redirect: HeyCentralPa.Com –> CentralPaLiving.Com

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

301 Time — I’ve Found A Guinea Pig! What a relief… I think I’ll take the daily updates over to HouseYourMom.Com, posting only a high quality weekly update here, and sparing everyone the daily gory detail midnight rants…It just feels a little awkward hogging up everyone’s feed readers with this stuff. Seems more appropriate to do it on my own dime I guess…

🙂

So anyway.

Here’s Walt Wensel, RE/MAX Patriots (York Pa) responding to my pitch earlier today:

I like it, with some reservations. Can we effectively create what you want without alienating my customer base? Pictures of you and the orangutan taking a dump are cute, but not who I’m going to trust to make a $400K deal. I think we need fun and edgy, but we need York edgy, not Philly edgy.

Can you believe a guy with a pic like this sent me a response like that?

I’m just busting Walt’s chops. He’s exactly right, and I have no problem with a tone down now that I’ve got what I was looking for. A tech-literate open minded team leader with an eye toward creating value that will result in organic, sustainable expansion.

So check it out: HeyCentralPa.Com now 301’s to CentralPaLiving.Com [I spent an hour or so last night in CSS heaven cloning Walt’s soon to be delivered IDX portal being provided by Terabitz. Sorry again Dwellicious. I tried…(again…)]

So thanks everyone for bearing with my nuttiness over the past week or so…If you’re actually interested in the nitty gritty day by day posts and screencast chronicling how this thing is taking shape, please feel free to use the form on my subscribe page to receive the HouseYourMom.Com daily email updates.

April 22, 2009

Go ahead, Google me and see what happens

by Brad Coy

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Really. Google “me” in your search bar or Google home page and see what happens.

I was going to post about this yesterday and I’m glad I didn’t, because as of today, searchers who enter only the word “me” in the search box will be given an opportunity to set up or edit their Google Profile.

3465457272_970fe637c6_o

The personal profiles are not new. I did share some of my thoughts on this in Unchained in Seattle. They’ve been around for a while now, it just seems that every time I take a look at them they add more features. First with a curious name verification process, then just last week with custom URLs. They now support a pretty good amount of info on someone depending on your settings. Numerous links to sites, an ‘about me’, contacts, and a Flickr or Picassa feed for photos.

None of this might be relevant except for the fact that Googling you is what people do. Even my wife (against my personal preference) told someone to just look me up on Google the other day. That person found me in a heart beat.

Profiles are already showing up at the bottom of page 1 search results and for those with common names there G will sport 4 profiles per page. I suppose the more you share on you profile the better your results. So far, there’s only one of “me“.

While the big G says they are not having a run at Facebook’s social network action, google profiles still would be a good place to stake your claim. Especially if you like using any of their other services, such as Maps or anywhere else your profile will be linked to…

brad

Now if all that’s for nothing, then consider this. I reviewed my first message via my profile that simply read “Loved looking through your material. When I decide to move back to SF, I’ll give you a call.”

Create your profile

Update: For promotion, Google is giving away 10,000 sets of 25 business cards to go with your new profile page. Get em’ while they last.

7506-23285621f74bdbcc_1-1185661780-jpeg-image-338x194-pixels

April 21, 2009

Feeling Overwhelmed? Turn To Ayn Rand

by Chris Johnson

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Again, I found this:

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. -Ayn Rand

If your reading this, chances our, the world is yours. Don’t get discouraged by the losers, mediocrities and mealy mouthed pieces of excrement that want to homogenize the best among us.

April 20, 2009

Sin IDX (6 of 365)

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

The best leads I get at PropertunityKnocks.Com are direct inquiries in response to my vids. And now on HeyCentralPa I’m going to take a stab at not measuring a real estate internet marketing campaign’s success by the daily number of “Mickey Mouse” and “Heywood Jablome” registrations.

In tomorrow’s episode, I’ll hedge my bets by begging for e-newsletter subscribers via AWEBER, but for today, I’ve grabbed a 30 day Dwellicious Pro trial and integrated it into the Hey Central Pa Property Search Page.

What’s everyone think? If our content is plentiful, dynamic, and populated with not so salesy lead capture elements, can we forgo an IDX integration? Can we get them to hang around just because they like us?

Is this Real Estate Tech Blasphemy?

I don’t know, but the Dwellicious integration could be interesting. I mean, the content better be darn good, right… because we’re telling people to go search elsewhere?

Will I be able to get agent contributors on board with this strategy?

Might I have a squabble with fee seeking local MLS boards on my hands? (Have there been any MLS v. Dwellicious run-in’s nationwide?) Or has the real estate search + social bookmarking experiment not yielded enough adopters to even be seen as any kind of threat?

April 20, 2009

Technology’s Challenge: Understanding How Cats Part with Skins

by Thomas Hall

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Several recent posts have had me thinking about just how technology isn’t addressing the needs of cats. Needless to say, there are many different types of cats – cats that roam alleys picking through the remnants of fish bones versus the ones that eat Fancy Feast and sit on the laps of chauffeur driven owners who may, on occasion, stop at a traffic light seeking Grey Poupon. It could happen.

I suspect the cat population is quite diverse – many having different likes and dislikes, perhaps differing motivations as well. Given that some cats roam alleys versus sit in the lap of luxury, perhaps the roamers may be more self reliant- the “fat” cat perhaps in need of greater doting, relying on others to take care of their needs. Needless to say, there’s a larger, even more diverse range of cats beyond the alley cat and the fat cat.

I reckon there’s a parallel between cats and consumers.

When it comes to measuring the success of a broker and/or agent, furry walls are often designated as a sign of success. Jeff recently commented that his hirsute success is based on results. I have absolutely no doubt that his superior service would make him the Rockefeller of fur trading. He knows his cats – but more importantly, his cats know him. Perhaps not all his cats are “fat”, but they have a taste for Grey Poupon.

On the flip side, Greg’s recent post highlighted the self reliant cat’s approach to selling a home. From Greg’s picture, it may be a good thing that cats have nine lives, because this cat is dead.

How are current technology solutions really addressing the differing needs of cats … er… consumers?

I found Glenn Kelman’s recent survey results enlightening.

Well last March we surveyed 1,058 people who were using our site about what they wanted in a real estate agent. Some of the answers were gratifying for us to see — transparency was tops on the list — but one that stood out was the answer as to why people who had already chosen a traditional agent had decided against using Redfin: 47% Read more

April 20, 2009

“No Matter How Good You Get, You Can Always Get Better…

by Mark Green

Database Marketing Expert

… and that’s the exciting part.” End Quote.

That’s a peek into the mind of the man who arguably will go down as the most dominant athlete of all time – Tiger Woods.

For those of you who aren’t golf fans, let me rewind a few years. Tiger Woods was firmly entrenched as the #1 player in golf. And by firmly entrenched, let’s just say that the #2 player in the world couldn’t even carry Tiger’s bag.

Yet, at the height of his dominance, Woods shockingly fired his “swing coach” and re-engineered his entire mechanical approach to the game. Virtually everyone in golf thought he was nuts. And the results were far from immediate. In fact, some players on the PGA Tour even began referring to Tiger as “beatable”.

We all know what happened next… he won last year’s US Open with what basically amounted to a broken leg. Woods refers to this victory as his greatest ever.

Here’s the thing: Tiger Woods doesn’t share his secrets of success with his peers. Any golfer looking to supplant Tiger as the world’s greatest player is going to have to figure it out for himself.

But for some reason, the sharpest minds in the real estate industry are willing to share what makes them successful with the rest of us. Here are some of the questions I asked myself before committing the time and money to attend Unchained:

Can you create your own website without any help from anyone?
If so, how long does it take you to publish something worth seeing?
Are you ranking for the keywords your prospects are Googling?
Are your systems outdated and archaic?
Is there someone in your market who’s about to catch and pass you because they know more than you do?

Here’s another Tiger Woods quote from early in his career:

“Second sucks.”

If you live within 500 miles of Phoenix and you’re not committed to attending Unchained, chances are good there’s someone down the street who will be nosing up alongside you very soon.

I’ll be honest with you – I get the feeling my competitors are crawling up in the fetal position right now… cutting costs and wondering where Read more

April 20, 2009

How to sell every house in the neighborhood — except your own…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Even with as much grief as I lay on practitioners, I feel myself obliged to confess: I do not believe that any so-called professional real estate salesperson could come with with a marketing strategy quite as repellent as this:

Tipped by Barry Bevis: “Drove by this yesterday while showing clients homes in the same neighborhood. Average house in this neighborhood is $175,000. Nothing the age of the FSBO home selling for $200K. My clients laughed. We just put their house on the market ‘Bloodhound Style” and had it under contract in four days. I wonder how long the FSBO will be for sale!”

(PS: Our friendly visitors from the cute little yellow school bus have taught me that one cannot possibly be too obvious, so it is incumbent upon me to point out that the phone number and email address are not obscured on the original sign.)

April 19, 2009

I’ll Do It For Free… – “That’s What She Said!” (HeyCentralPa.Com: 5 of365)

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

My screencast on installing plugins (“Plugin: ‘That’s What She Said'”) is up at HouseYourMom.Com. [I’m particularly proud of the intro this time.]

Here are the plugins that I’ve loaded up on the HeyCentralPa wordpress install so far:

Advanced Category Excluder
Cforms
Exec-PHP
Foreclosure.Com
Headspace2
NextGen Gallery
Similar Posts
SimplePie & SimplePie Core
TubePress
WP-O-Matic
Kimili Flash Embed

I plan to go a lot more into these as I implement each one, but for now I’m wrestling with getting Tubepress to work correctly with the P2 page template. It works fine with posts, just not pages. (Anyone wanna take a crack at helping me find the problem? I’ll happily hook up some ftp access..)

On the “how’s this gonna go down” front, I’m still looking for that big (open minded) Central Pa Broker to sweep me off my feet. Despite my tough talk the other night, I’m chickenpoop to try to establish a whole new practice in a totally new market and am more interested in other endeavors, so how’s this for an offer?

If you’re a broker in CentralPa and you want to give all of your agents free hyper local niche pages on HeyCentralPa.Com, I’ll set it all up, manage the technical details, and do free “how-to-blog” workshops in your office for free!

Why? What’s the catch? Need more details? Use my spiffy Google voice button to get in touch!

April 18, 2009

Mortgage Market Week in Review….

by Tom Vanderwell

Mortgage Officer

Well it’s hard to believe, but another week has flown by. Rather than spending a Saturday working on mortgage stuff and writing about mortgage stuff, I spent the day taking my 8 year old to a birthday party, cleaning out the garage and getting the pool ready for the season. It was a good day for that.

But enough about me, it’s time to take a look at what’s happened in the financial markets this week. Let’s look at a couple of key economic reports/financial news items:

Foreclosures – for the first three months of this year, many of the big banks and Fannie and Freddie had foreclosure moratoriums on. What does that mean? Basically that they stopped foreclosing on homes. But, many of the big banks lifted the moratorium shortly after the 105% refi plan was announced and Fannie and Freddie lifted their ban on March 30. The reports that I’ve read (and written about on Straight Talk About Mortgages ) show that foreclosures are spiking way up again. What does that mean? A couple of things: 1) Our inventory problems aren’t going to go away any time soon. 2) Bank earnings problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.

New Construction –Housing starts and permits both came in at pretty close to historical lows. But frankly that’s not a horrible thing from a long term standpoint. Let me explain: We have too much inventory. In virtually all price ranges and virtually all markets, there are too many houses for sale. So we don’t need builders building more houses right now because it adds to the inventory problems. Also, we have a situation where in most markets, the number of foreclosures that are on the market is raising the discrepancy between the cost of existing homes and the cost of building a new home. According to many of the developers who I’ve talked to, it’s almost impossible, in many markets, to sell a brand new home at a profit because of the pricing pressures. So, until we can work through the inventory and also address the jobs issues Read more

April 18, 2009

Finally: A Heap of Daylite at the end of the tunnel (Finding a CRM that doesn’t blow)

by Chris Johnson

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Let me be honest. I’ve been using Google Docs as my CRM for a while. It’s been fast–I’ve got it mapped to a hotkey, and also on my Mac’s dashboard. I can collect info on clients, contacts fast. And I can highlight the ones I follow up with, owe something to, whatever. It’s not perfect–I was trying so hard to love HEAP. Heap has an utterly perfect ethos in what a CRM should be, but it’s not ready yet. It’s tantalizingly close, but seriously, it’s not ready as a point of fact.

Your mileage may vary, but my CRM requirements are as follows:

Hotkey accessible. Taking the time to interrupt your thought, mouse over, click a menu, work the mouse over the word you want is a clumbsy solution. I want to create contacts, appointments, tasks, documents and emails with a keystroke.
Activity Series Oriented: If I build blogs, there are the same tasks that have to get done with each little project. Install Theme, tweak CSS, whatever. I don’t want to have to remember all of ’em for the different things we do over and over again.
Desktop Speeds: My data. I own it. I need it fast. I don’t wanna wait for a web query when I’m at my desk.
Email that works, auto drip marketing. I want to assign criteria based drip marketing campaigns and have it get handled. (A second feature would be compliant opt outs, but I don’t care that much)
Documents of some type/mail merges: I don’t wanna work around the software.
Custom fields and custom views: I wanna put what I want in the damn thing, and I wanna see it how I wanna see it.
Custom Lookups: I want to look up by WHATEVER i want to look it up by. Nothing in the twitter field? Whatever.

Heap does much of this, but the interface is aggressively bad. User/Contact/People/Leads. All that stuff makes no sense, and the tagging feature is stupid and bolted on, and it’s not good enough to be a ‘daily driver.’

The best CRM I’ve ever used was ACT! 6.0. Alas, ACT! was bought from Symantec by BEST software, and Read more

April 18, 2009

Sometimes It’s Good to Go Home

by Thomas Hall

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

I just returned from a brief respite – short of 2 weeks – in Dallas. I went home.

I needed to get away from the day-to-day grind that my life had become, seemingly caught up in the negative energy that seems to have taken over. My dad just had knee replacement surgery and I thought it would be a great opportunity to help out and reconnect with my folks, my brother and his family. I also wanted to spend some time refocusing my efforts on my business plan to create a web-based community for do-it-yourself buyers and sellers of real estate as well. I had a full plate.

While I did get a plan down on paper regarding my new business idea, I realized I accomplished so much more – quite honestly, it was a significantly more valuable exercise.

I became grounded again.

Ever feel like you’ve lost your mojo? Needless to say, many of us are facing really troubling circumstances, but it so important to keep perspective on our lives. Sometimes when we take a brief moment in time to step away from our crazy lives, we get to experience timeless treasures.

I consider myself blessed to have wonderful, loving parents. My folks are getting older – edging into their late 70’s. Still in great health and active, but beginning to show the signs of lives entering into dusk. I wanted to be around to help out – let my mom have some time to do her own thing. Just be there.

But something both unsettling and comforting at the same time happened. I saw for perhaps the first time my dad completely vulnerable. This is a man that never cracked. A West Point Grad – a man who served his country. Raised 7 seven kids. Proud, disciplined, smart, kind, but a tough son-of-a-bitch. He’s mellowed over the years for sure – but my brothers and sisters and I often laugh that he’s gone from a Type A++ personality to maybe an A-. The surgery seemed to have broken him – just a bit. I wasn’t prepared to see him like that. I felt like I Read more

April 18, 2009

Audience Participation Request: Wanna Try Out The First Self-Hosted, Social Networking Real Estate Blog? (HeyCentralPa.Com: Part 4 of 365)

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

Yep, I’m head over heals for Auttomatic’s P2 WordPress Theme.

HeyCentralPa.Com is now up and running and awaiting your participation!

Here’s what’s gone on today:

Customized the CSS with the help of this great free palette generating tool.
Generated A Horizontal Menu (P2 Doesn’t Come With One).
Uploaded and Activated A Great Custom Registration Plugin and included the appropriate login/register links on the site.
Tweaked The Main Index Template File So That The Part Showing Up Below The Pictures Would Be SEO Cool and hopefully Properly Draw In Visitors.
Integrated The Slideoo Horizontal Flickr Sharing Script so my header would be dynamic, colorful, and engaging. (I know, probably not the best for SEO? Eric?)

Which brings me to my final feat of the day. I used the flickr integration explained in this screencast to make it dead simple for me, or any of the site’s contributors to post to the site.

So please…go ahead and give it a try by forwarding any old pic as an attachment to an email to “mores26into2blog(at)photos.flickr.com” ! [Please feel free to have fun and send some crazy stuff 🙂 — I’ll remove the test posts after we all have a good laugh…]

I’m really trying to create an environment that will make it dead simple for agents-partners and other contributors to help enhance the site with their content. So if I may ask one more favor…If you have a minute, head on over to http://heycentralpa.com then register yourself and post a comment on the home page letting me know what you think of how it’s coming so far.

Thanks much!

April 17, 2009

Three songs for freedom, fellowship, and the resistance to oppression

by Brad Coy

Realtor, Urban Jedi

It’s been ages since we’ve heard any Unchained Melodies and we’re just under two weeks away folks. Don’t you think it’s about time?

All three from Eddie, to me, to you. This one’s for my friend Nick, the Unchained attendees, and believers in freedom.

“Rise”

This ones for The Dean of Geeks, who I’m sure is up crafting the edges of the next scenius. The 2008 theme song.

“I won’t back down”

… and thanks for the gift of admin rights on BHB 🙂

This one’s for young Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and a story that won’t leave anyone alone, even the main stream media, who otherwise would ignore such a tragedy.

“Don’t be shy”

You all have a good weekend and love one another.

April 17, 2009

Loading Up A Twitterfunky Theme + “Hey…this aint no Localism!..If I Ditch The Ad Revenue Angle and Build My Own Darn Team Will You Believe Me?” (HeyCentralPa.Com: 3 of 365)

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

A Screencast on HeyCentralPa.Com’s theme choice and a bonus cast on ditching BHB style ugly permalinks are up over at HouseYourMom….

I’m going to go ahead and give the very young and probably buggy P2 WordPress theme a shot I think. It touts a twitter like interface that will allow visitors to interact with eachother, or hopefully the agent contributors on the site. In the coming days I’ll tweak it up so that the “Hey Watcha Up To” reads something more target keyword and audience appropriate, but otherwise, I think this might have been a great find.

Why? Well I mentioned in the comments of my post yesterday that I plan to do a lot of belly to belly promotion of this thing all around the Central Pa area. So my conversation with local business owners might go something like this:

“Hi I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind me taking a quick video of your establishment and posting it on HeyCentralPa.Com, the new web magazine I’ve created. I’ll also be happy to post a link back to your website alongside the video. Oh yeah…and if you’d like to freely plug yourself or your business on the site, I’ll be happy to email you login info so that you can freely self plug on our home page.”

What’s everyone think?

Blammo Right! Will I need to cold call expireds or sit open houses with a networking hook like that?

And going back again to yesterday’s post….

Teri helped me realize in the comments of that post that the ad revenue generating, get-agents-to-blog-for-greed’s-sake approach could be flawed. This thing is pretty much meant to be a “take the juicy agent content back from localism” play, so I’ve happily begun to rethink agent involvement piece of the puzzle. But I’m still Redfinning my gameplan to a certain extent…

Any suggestions out there other than:

“Ryan…Suck it up! Ditch the mom jokes and the freelancing real estate tech guy charade and build this MMBB thing for YoSelf!” Stop trying to find an enlightened broker so far from a major metro! Quit dreaming about building an selling a Read more

April 17, 2009

Personal Relationships 1, Cold Technology 0

by Glenn Kelman

CEO, Redfin.com

I hate to admit it — I so often have to — but Greg Swann was right. A few months ago,we got into a debate about whether venture-funded technology companies were squashing little brokers. I told Greg the little brokers had no brains — why aren’t they all trying to build a great search site? And Greg said we had no heart — which comes in handy when you’re trying to connect with a client as a human being.

Translation: Greg was right. It’s probably why our partner business — which allows people using our site in the Inland Empire or the California wine country to meet a partner agent right off the bat — converts better than our direct business.

Meanwhile, with our own agents, Redfin will keep trying to strike a new balance. My movie script for Redfin’s place in real estate has always been “Revenge of the Nerds.” Greg’s has always been something written by Aeschylus. In fact, Redfin’s story is more like one of those crazy Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books written for 12 year-olds, which is only to say that we’re still finding out way.

Of course, it’s telling that our guide on this journey is a big pile of data. We didn’t believe Greg until we ran a survey with 1,000 data points soI guess that proves Greg’s point right there!

by Ryan Hartman

by Brad Coy

by Chris Johnson

by Ryan Hartman

by Thomas Hall

by Mark Green

by Greg Swann

by Ryan Hartman

by Tom Vanderwell

by Chris Johnson

by Thomas Hall

by Ryan Hartman

by Brad Coy

“Rise”

“I won’t back down”

“Don’t be shy”

by Ryan Hartman

And going back again to yesterday’s post….

by Glenn Kelman

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