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May 29, 2008

Damn-straight department: “Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Real Estate Success Tools CEO Matthew Hardy speaking on BrokerIPTV.com:

Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now. Greg has a perspective on understanding that this is a bottom up industry, that the individual real estate agent, their ability, their ability to own their own technology, to own their own systems, to own their own approach to business, is what is changing the entire industry. It is wrapped up in this thing called Web 2.0, but it is all based upon the idea of control and the power for the individual real estate agent to do what they want to do for their business.

You bet. We’ve known Matthew for more than a year, and his approach to business is very much like ours. If your income depends on milking underlings you think you have hypnotized into believing they need you, I cannot wait for the hammer of justice to fall on your head…

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May 29, 2008

Mortgage Rates Higher at the End of May

by

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

Author website

Here’s how bad it gets when the mortgage-backed securities market deteriorates:

From May 21:

This is a chart for the last 30 days for mortgage-backed securities.  When MBS prices go up, mortgage rates come down.  In this case, I noticed a meteoric rise in MBS prices in the last week in April (off a low of 99.5).  I called for clients to lock on May 2, 2008, when the 30 year fixed rate mortgage was at 5.875%.  Today, it has improved to 5.625%.

Today, mortgage rates are over a half a point higher (in rate) :

This is panic selling that we’re seeing in the fixed-income securities market.  I knew it would happen but I was early.  The 30-year fixed rate mortgage was at 5.625%, nine days ago.  Yesterday, it went to 6.0%.  Today a 30 -year fixed rate mortgage is at 6.25%.  Expect rates to be above 6.0% for the next two weeks; we should see them creep down by the end of June to the sub-6 level.

Don’t fret- they’ll be back.

May 29, 2008

Agent branding is good, but Trulia.com is still deliberately hi-jacking street addresses, frustrating the interests of sellers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m still digging out from Unchained, so this is not as timely as it might have been.

First, I think we might have gotten distracted by whatever cozy arrangement does or does not exist between Trulia.com and Number 1 Agent.

Second, I think Trulia’s recent announcement that agents can “brand” their own listings is a move in the right direction. Trulia has always seemed to me to play favorites with the White Shoe set, and giving the grunts on the ground a chance to compete with their bosses for their own business is… damned near decent.

But: I am not prepared to yield on the main issue. When Trulia.com puts a “nofollow” on the link back to my single-property web site for my listing, it is depriving my sellers of the natural dominance they should have in Google over their own street address.

The issue is one of canonicity. If Truila were giving my URL an ordinary HTML anchor link, then Google would know that my site is canonical and Trulia’s is derivative — which is undeniably the truth.

By putting the “nofollow” tag on what is in fact a JavaScript link, Trulia is falsely implying that it is the canonical resource for information about that property.

That much is a lie, but it gets worse: If someone Googles the street address for my property and finds my single-property web site, my sellers — through me — have an uncontested opportunity to sell their home to that potential buyer.

If instead that potential buyer finds Trulia’s link to that home, the buyer is thrust into a vast supermarket of real estate, and the sellers are deprived of their opportunity to sell their home and their home only.

This is not a dual agency issue here, this is simply a matter of giving sellers the best advantage they can possibly have from searches on their own street address.

Because Google would regard a normal link as leading to a more canonical resource — regardless of differences in Page Rank — by putting a “nofollow” tag on its links to agent- and broker-supplied real estate listings, Trulia.com is deliberately hi-jacking the street Read more

May 28, 2008

What Hi-Tech Tool Helps Agents/Lenders The Most — Bottom Line Most

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Though I think I know the answer to this query, the answers might just surprise many of us. Also, it makes sense the answer for me might be third best for you, right? Hi-tech tools, not toys, are what we’re lookin’ for here. Though for some, blogs and/or websites might top the list, I’m eliminating them from the menu. For me they simply don’t qualify as hi-tech. I’m lookin’ for what you closet geeks out there are leveraging to the max.

An incomplete list might include spreadsheets, presentation apps, Blackberrys, iPhones, data bases, and the list is almost endless.

Or maybe there’s an office machine to which you attribute increased income. What hi-tech tool is performing like a champ in your business these days? How much impact has it actually had on your bottom line?

For the legitimate geeks on steroids out there, what hi-tech stuff have you combined in order to build your personal Frankenstein tool? Or maybe there’s a group of apps out there that play well together.

There’s no right answer here. Well, that’s not really the case. I think there’s a right answer, but what’s right for my operation might be on your B-List. As I’ve been known to say once or twice in the past, bottom line results is what we’re searchin’ for with this question.

There you have it. Now, what’s performing for you from the Hi-Tech menu that’s translating into dead presidents?

May 28, 2008

A Little Tough Love: We Don’t Get Paid For Tryin’ — We Get Paid For Doin’

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Before beginning, and to head off the ‘you’re so mean’ crowd at the pass, I’m talking here of those things in our careers for which we, more or less, hold the reigns. We never totally control everything when it comes to our scorecard (read: results), but we can reasonably agree most (80/20?) of what we wish to accomplish is under our control to a greater or lesser extent.

There was a short period when I was a trier. I empathize with those who say they tried hard in this business. I don’t feel sorry for them, but I empathize. I realize it sounds hard-hearted, but for Heaven’s sake, they don’t even believe themselves. They were the ones not doing what they knew what had to be done to produce results, right? My money says they were there at the precise moments they weren’t doing them.

In other words, around here‘The dog ate my homework’ will fall on deaf ears.

I made a comment on Russell Shaw’s most recent post. I’ve always loved the way Russell pokes good hearted fun at old sayings. In this case it was, ‘work hard, play hard’. I’m with him in saying, whatever that means. I prefer to work hard and play however it pleases me. Isn’t that at least part of the reason I’m working hard in the first place? Duh. Sorry, I digress.

Anyway, he pointed out the difference between ‘having to’ and ‘wanting to’. As usual with Russell, he nailed it. Russell inspires me with his uncanny ability to do surgery painlessly, yet without anesthesia. His post is what brought to mind the whole Try vs Do thing with which we all have struggled at one time or another.

Here’s my comment verbatim.

I truly don’t mean to be harsh here, as there is some real suffering out there amongst the RE community. Still, there are two classes of agents.

Those who DO, and those who Try.

Do you ‘try’ to prospect daily, or do you ‘prospect daily?’

Labeling this line of thinking as ‘positive thinking’ replaces doing with trying.

Those for whom results are the only measuring stick, don’t ‘try’ Read more

May 27, 2008

All roads lead to Rome, but where three roads converge, the trivia that is yet another meme game is to be found

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eight questions, eight mostly inadequate answers:

1. Who is your favorite musical artist? (post a youtube video)

I like so much stuff that this becomes completely unfair. If you watch my choices of videos on BHB, those doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of my tastes. The folks at Unchained got to hear songs from my iTunes library, which includes a lot of bootlegs and otherwise unobtainable stuff. All that notwithstanding, if I had to pick one first-among-equals favorite, it would be Bob Dylan. But just writing that feels like a betrayal, because everything I love in art comes from a kind of visceral honesty that Dylan almost never achieves — mostly studiously avoids. But take a look at this:

The real Blind Willie McTell was a fairly ordinary early blues musician. He was nothing compared to Skip James, in my opinion. And why is Dylan celebrating the blues in a ballad? I think McTell is a cypher for Dylan in this song, and I think this is as close to an auto-encomium as we can ever expect from the man. In any case, this is great art from the first note to the last, an Apollonian frenzy made more violent because it is so tightly constrained.

2. Who is your favorite artist (post a flicker photo)

I don’t have a favorite visual artist. Of everything I’ve seen, Rodin is the most interesting to me, this because he is truly in love with humanity. I’ve worked in photography most of my life, at one time very seriously. I hate almost everything associated with the visual arts.

3. Who is your favorite blogger?

Again I must disappoint. Everything I love in art is a form of literature — even the music I love best. Almost no one in the history of literature was able to write both very quickly and very well. Shakespeare could, as could Mencken, but they don’t update their blogs that often. There’s no one in the world of weblogs who makes me crazy like the great writers of the world’s literature. How could there be? That’s an unfair standard to judge by. To have Read more

May 27, 2008

NAR/DOJ settlement: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

After years of song and dance, the DOJ reached a settlement with the NAR that seems to have achieved absolutely nothing — except the waste of a bunch of tax and dues money. At least that’s what you would think if you read nothing but the NAR’s spin. In fact, the NAR lost the major point of contention, the attested right of brokers to withhold listings from Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). From eWeek.com:

The Department of Justice said May 27 it has reached a settlement in its long-running legal dispute with the National Association of Realtors. Under the terms of the settlement, the Realtors will enact a new policy that guarantees Internet-based brokerage companies will not be treated differently than traditional brokers. 

Under the new policy, Realtor-affiliated brokers participating in multiple listing services will be prohibited from withholding their listings from brokers who use virtual office websites, generally known as VOWs. The Realtors agreed to a 10-year settlement to ensure the group continues to abide by the requirements of the settlement.

“Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The Realtors also agreed to adopt antitrust compliance training programs that will instruct local associations of about the antitrust laws generally and about the requirements of the proposed settlement. The National Association of Realtors is a trade association of more than 1.2 million residential real estate members who operate in local real estate markets nationwide.

That sounds like something, but it ain’t. For one thing, the NAR gets to define what a VOW is. From its own press release:

The terms of the proposed final order validate NAR’s position – that MLS members must be actively engaged in real estate brokerage by actually helping people buy or sell homes. This will ensure that MLSs are used for what they were originally intended to do – to help real estate professionals find Read more

May 27, 2008

Building Content for Others …when is it right?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

First off, I’d like to thank Eric Bramlett for a great post explaining the BASICS of links and linking to other sites. What he was doing was setting a good foundational understanding based on known facts and avoid much of the speculation that exists out there in the world today about Search Engine Optimization. What he did not go into of that basic foundation, I’d now like to explore a bit further.

Here are some facts that we know about Building Content on other peoples’ sites:

Fact 1: Adding content on another person’s site builds opportunities for them to build internal links. Internal links (read: pages) have value

Item #1 that he did not go into was internal links vs external links. Internal links are the links to and from pages within your site. Let’s (for now) avoid the temptation to go into page rank sculpting, internal link sculpting, or the details of internal page structure. Please note that I have linked to a couple of resources there on the subject for your further reading if desired. Do we KNOW exactly how Google values internal vs external links. NO. Is there much speculation and testing on the concept. YES. True search engine professionals TEST these concepts as they change over time and they RARELY comment on them publicly. They often compare notes with other search engine professionals who are testing similar concepts. What we do know is that experienced webmasters can made GOOD use of hundreds or thousands of indexed pages to internally link and support pages that they want to rank for a given term. They would not be SCULPTING it if it did not have VALUE.

Fact 2: Adding Content on another person’s site provides opportunities for more people to EXTERNALLY link to their site.

Whether I write here on the Bloodhound Blog, on Real Estate Webmasters, or as a columnist on RE/MAX Times Online, people who read that can link to it externally. This is also true of comments on blogs and forums, LISTINGS and really, on ANY online community that you choose to participate and spend time in. This not Read more

May 26, 2008

The Unchained Originator: Ken Stampe

by

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

Author website

I was disappointed with the low turnout of loan originators at UNCHAINED. There were two local originators, who attended our Mesquite library performance, and my buddy Ken Stampe. Ken and I met in 2006, on Active Rain. He was one of the first to sign up for Unchained. His only condition was that I buy him a beer in Phoenix.

Of course, a thousand bucks is a lot to pay for a cold Bud so he was hoping for a whole lot more. He got his money’s worth by showing up. That’s the name of the game in mortgage origination today; showing up. There were some 70 REALTORs at Unchained. Some are beholden to the local originators and I might have impressed a few but Ken Stampe was the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan Horse, as told in Virgil’s Aeneid, depicts the Greeks as guerrilla warriors, using the Trojans’ strength against them.

Ken Stampe is a modern day Greek. While originators were bellyaching at TAMB conferences , Ken dressed up in a Web 2.0 costume, and penetrated the walls of the RE.net. Now before some smart fella reminds us of the saying the Trojan Horse story inspired,

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts“,

let me tell why Ken’s strategy is flawless. He is ONE OF YOU, now. He’s playing on the social media marketing playground. By definition, he knows the rules of web transparency. He screws up? You blog about him. He plays the bait and switch game? Zillow’s consumers will crucify him. I know Ken so I know him to be impeccable in his business practice but good fences make good neighbors. The transparency of the Web 2.0 world makes us better originators which, in turn, makes you better REALTORs.

Here are four things Ken did by attending UNCHAINED:

1- He met me. Seriously, that’s important. Originators need support systems across the country. We call each other frequently to bounce ideas off one another. While we were phone friends, Ken cemented an already strong relationship.

2- He Read more

May 26, 2008

Memorial Day 2008 – Taking A Long View

by

Real Estate Broker, Investor

Author website

Today we remember and honor those who gave their lives in service of our country. Is it fitting and proper that we do so. 

But ours is a young country, our conflicts are recent, and the memories fresh in our collective conscious.

Proud and brave young lives have been sacrificed through out human history.

Imagine the Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus surveying the blood soaked battlefield of Asculum in 279 BC. Pyrrhus deployed 40,000 calvary and infantry and 20 war elephants. The Romans under Publius Decius Mus deployed 40,000 calvary and infantry and 300 anti-elephant devices.

After a two day battle, the Greeks were victorious. The Romans lost 6,000 men; Pyrrhus, 3,500, including many of his officers. Pyrrhus looked on the devastation and stated “One more victory like this, and we shall be utterly undone.”

This Memorial Day, while I pause to honor the sacrifice of our country’s great heroes, and express my deep gratitude, I will think, too, of sacrifices made throughout history, even back to antiquity, sacrifices that formed civilization as we know it today. And I will say a tiny prayer that somehow, someday, humans will indeed find a way to put an end to war.

May 24, 2008

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I finally had a chance to take a long nap today, and I’m substantially revivified. The ideas the Barrys threw off at the end of their interview with Brian about working in Orlando have me all pumped up, so I thought we might talk a little.

First, doing Unchained the Barrys way opens up quite a few opportunities for hour-long breakout sessions. We would devote four rooms to this, maybe more, so there could be a lot of speaking opportunities. I’d like to see sessions for beginners, geeks, brokers, lenders, etc. I don’t hate it if you’re a vendor if you’re a vendor in our world. To make that more plain: We’re doing this show to help Realtors avoid wasting money on useless crap. If you’re delivering value in the Web 2.0 world, there’s room — and hope! — for you. 😉

The point of all this: If you would like to do one of these breakout sessions, speak up. Figure a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A as the room is being turned over.

Second, we want to preach to the masses. This is not a money-making endeavor, at least not so far. We want to carry the message to the masses, to advance this idea of wired excellence in any way we can. To that end, I’m interested in hearing suggestions about how we can get a lot of Realtors to lend us eight hours of their time, while they’re in Orlando for the convention. One thing we can do is affiliate programs for real estate weblogggers, but, even better than that, we can set up off-line affiliate programs. In other words, we can help you help your co-workers get a price break on Unchained Orlando, say with a coupon code or something like that. What other things should we be thinking about to fill the pews?

I’m wicked excited about this. In my email I’m advised to speak quietly, so as not to stir the beast. My take is that the NAR should make a very public effort to stay the hell out of our way. But whatever they do, Read more

May 24, 2008

Brian Brady does a BloodhoundBlog Unchained post-mortem on Real Estate Radio USA

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I missed this when it happened: Brian Brady did a great post-mortem rundown on BloodhoundBlog Unchained on RealEstateRadioUSA.com. Brian talks about key moments at the conference and about some of the Web 2.0 ideas that we had built into the event to emphasize the points we were trying to make. Near the end, Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson offer some excellent ideas for making BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando a successful event.

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May 24, 2008

What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com — suddenly stopped producing.

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.

But here’s the interesting part of the story:

It does not matter.

The growth of this community has never depended on Google. Obviously some people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:

  • Links from other weblogs or web sites
  • Comments I left on other weblogs
  • Press mentions 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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