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Archives (page 205 of 372)

April 10, 2008

What happens when a hi-tech entrepreneur sells real estate in Silicon Valley? Introducing Steven Leung, our newest contributor

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Steve Leung was the second person to win The Odysseus Medal. This was before I started the formal competition, but, at the time, I made a standing offer to Steven to join us if he wanted to do. More than a year later, here he is:

Steven Leung has too many credentials to list: An MIT graduate, he has worked for Microsoft, Oracle and several internet start-ups. He brings that hi-tech experience to the hi-tech Silicon Valley real estate market.

If you read the Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog, you know the kind of thoroughgoing analysis Steven brings to real estate. I’m delighted to have him here.

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April 9, 2008

What Is a Good Free Gift To Give Them?

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

A follow up email with a question:

You have mentioned to me a couple of months ago on the phone to give 150 people that I know something that would make me go “thanks, that is a cool gift”, and right before I leave turn around and say “oh by the way I am in real estate if you know of any one who wants to buy or sell property, give me a call” (Something around that format). This I idea that I came up with would be giving the a TEN dollar gift card from TIM HORTONS. ( Big Coffee Province loves this coffee) because almost every person in Ontario goes to Tim Horton’s Coffee shop at one time or another.

Do you think that this gift would work for what you are talking about? How do you feel about the amount being spent on the gift or is there a certain amount you should spend?

Do I think it is a good thing to drop off to a hundred people you hardly know? No, not really. Here’s why, first you would – at $10 each – be paying about $1,500Free Gift Inside and a prepaid coffee card would have a very short shelf life.
The list I am talking about is anyone who would recognize you on sight. Not a list of people who have sent you business in the past. For a short list like that, do I think a prepaid coffee card could be a nice thing to give them? Yes, absolutely.

What you are looking for is something that might wind up on their refrigerator or bulletin board. Something that a person might want to keep – someplace they can see it, so they could easily find and and refer to it. Some kind of list. Restaurants, movie theaters, sports events, anything that you would be happy to get. Surveys are the key to stats (what do they really really want?) so normally I would want to find out the answer to that question first. But the person I am “doing the survey” on, in this case, is you. The reason? I want you Read more

April 9, 2008

Working with engenu; a painless geek tool even an ‘I’ can love!

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I am not a geek!

I like geeks. I get along with geeks, but I ain’t one. Let’s just get that out of the way up front and now you know where I coming from.

I’m a lucky girl; I’ve been playing with engenu. I’ve been on board with the idea of engenu since I first heard about it. It’s very exciting for a lot of reasons, some have been discussed here, but I’m sure there are other uses for engenu that we will discover the more we use it.

You really need to understand that I’m not a geek. On the DISC profile, I’m an ‘I’ with a healthy dose of ‘D’. ‘C’ barely registers. I cannot explain how engenu works so if that is something that is important to you then I shall direct you here. One other thing I want to make clear- Greg didn’t ask me to write about this. I’m writing this because I’m assuming that there is someone else sitting out there reading Bloodhound because you are hungry for something different, something that can differentiate you and the way you do business, and something that gives you control over your marketing. You might be looking at engenu saying to yourself, “easy for you to say Mr. Swann, but what about me?” Me too. All that php and html and whatever else is something I should learn, and should know, and some day I probably will- through osmosis if nothing else- but today I simply want to know what’s in it for me and my clients, and I want it to be easy to use or I’m going to bail.

Well, I’m happy to report that I have been using engenu to help some first time buyers relocating from Florida. They are not looking for suburban starters, they want to get their hands dirty and rehab a historic home. Not too much rehabbing, but they are looking for the charm, the character of older homes and they want to share that love with their neighbors. We talked about the pros and cons of several areas, and they’ve settled on South Park. No, not Read more

April 9, 2008

“Our role will remain strong, firm, indispensable. All we must do is adapt.” Wanna bet? The dinosaurs of the pre-web world of business will be supplanted, not disintermediated

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli fingered this article on intimations of irrelevance in the advertising industry. Richard and I lived through the demise of professional typography, so I have a different take than some others here about the dreaded word “disintermediation.”

If the triumphant yelp is that some travel agents and some stockbrokers still have jobs, I will point out that some blacksmiths still have jobs, too. Attention must be paid and horses must be shod. That much is utterly beside the point.

Here’s my take on the matter: Don’t think in terms of disintermediation. Use the word “supplantation” instead. The dilbert in the advertising article is insisting that he is not a dinosaur — because he knows he is. He is being supplanted by much smarter ways of doing his job, and he will never, ever catch up — first because he doesn’t want to change, and second because the first-mover advantage is too great.

In the same way, there is no need to start a revolution to get rid of the pestilential NAR. They have no intention of changing, nor any ability to change — but it doesn’t matter. We don’t need to storm the Bastille, we just need to get on with what we’re doing. The NAR will persist in a state of increasing irrelevance, a rotting husk like the neglected Sunday newspaper out on the front porch, but it won’t matter at all in due course.

The same goes for everything. If we are not all the way onboard with the way business will be done, we will be left behind at the station. The work we do will be superficially similar to the work others have done in the past — but those others won’t be doing it any longer.

Will they have been disintermediated? Not if you insist that they haven’t. But they will have been well and truly supplanted.

When will that happen? Ask a blacksmith — if you can find one.

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April 8, 2008

Does This Describe You?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

We’re so often imprisoned by technology which is designed to do just the opposite. I’ve turned down lunch meetings with other pros who make the meeting meaningless because of their irrational need to stay in touch. There’s been a term going around for quite awhile, describing some of the worst of this ‘syndrome’. Crackberry.

Are You Addicted To Your Blackberry? lends credence to what many of us have wondered about — often about ourselves. Are we addicted to technology? Does it adversely affect our relationships with family and friends? No?

Are we in denial?

After reading the post, I double checked my normal business day. Returning an email promptly is cool, but my life isn’t altered if it takes longer than a few minutes, even a few hours. I’ve refused to own a Blackberry, though my future may include an iPhone.

Living our lives under our control — not dictatorial hi-tech tools — should be jealously guarded. Though my refusal to meet professionally with clearly addicted peers has raised a few eyebrows, I literally couldn’t care less.

Nobody’s that damn important. And that includes all of us. Nobody.

HT/The Dirt Lawyer

April 8, 2008

80,000 Members And Only 300 Have Anything To Sell?

by

Real Estate Broadcaster and Investor

Author website

In addition to questioning certain real estate agents as to just what they do that justifies the commission that they charge, we also have wondered aloud if the real estate market is in the state that it is because there are “no buyers”or is the real estate market in the state that it’s in because most real estate agents don’t know how to work in this market.

How many Realtors are properly trained to respond to the challenges that are readily found in today’s real estate climate? How many Realtors simply have thrown in the proverbial towel and are merely hanging out in the barber shop telling war stories of the good old days?

This market requires specialized training and even more…it requires a lot of enthusiastic ambition. If you are content to self-prophecize about there being no buyers, then there will be no buyers. What are you truly doing to generate revenue on a daily basis? If the fish aren’t buying then you have basically one or two problems, and only one of two problems.

First, you may be using the wrong bait, second you are not fishing where the hungry fish are. That’s it. Really simple, now you’re problems are solved.

Active Rain, with it’s 80,000+ members seems to be more the barbershop than the bastion of capitalism that it could be. We assumed, that with such a high contingent of Realtors hanging out in one locale that it would be simple to get in touch with some Realtors who have property to sell.

One would think that by reading some of the posts that most of the agents there actually had listings and that the purpose of those listings was to actually seek buyers for them. Shame on me for assuming.

We made a post on Active Rain declaring in the fashion of Billy Ray Valentine and Louis Winthorpe that we are actually buying.

In addition to that, we have a growing network of buyers across the USA that are aggressively looking to buy. You would have thought that the bell would be sounded on the trading floor and it would have been a Read more

April 8, 2008

Redfin.com wakes up, smells coffee, staples galoshes to forehead: Now Redfin buyers will be able to see homes in an almost-normal way

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The uncontested brilliance of the free market is that it is self-correcting. People like me have been bitching all along that Redfin.com’s approach to buyer representation was misguided if not outright evil. Conceding some huge chunk of the buyer’s agent’s commission to the buyer was certainly consumer-friendly, but pushing the cost of buyer representation off onto the listing agent was vile. “Stick it to the man” rhetoric might play well with Leslie Stahl, but we have no way of knowing how often the listing agent is working for one percentage point of the sales price — or even for nothing.

But: So what. So long as listers were too cowardly to contest Redfin’s claims to having earned the buyer’s agent’s commission even when it had violated the everyday understanding of procuring cause, every erg of outsized bitching was just so much wasted energy. If the Redfin experience was satisfying to its buyers, not much else seemed to matter.

Except…

Of course, the Redfin experience wasn’t satisfying to buyers. As much as they might like the idea of shopping for homes from an on-line catalog, when it came time to actually squeeze the fruit, a surprising number of them wanted to actually squeeze the fruit.

So: Redfin had to provide home tours when its cost structure was built around not providing home tours. Then it had to start charging cash fees for home tours. Then it built an elaborate mechanism whereby buyers could schedule two home tours for free, then pay $250 a pop for additional tours. And today, without fanfare, Redfin.com announces its Redfin Select program, whereby buyers can schedule unlimited home tours in exchange for a reduced commission rebate.

First: All hail The Market, which speaks lucidly even to deaf ears.

But second: Ugh.

Listen to this:

With Select, we take you on tour twice a week, every week, until you find a home.

That “twice a week” sounds a little school-marmish, doesn’t it? “You will walk in single file, boy-girl, boy-girl, in a neat and orderly fashion.” God help the poor relos in town from Thursday to Sunday. Twice a week means twice a week, pal.

Okayfine. Progress is Read more

April 7, 2008

What a Seller / REALTOR relationship should NOT feel like.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Several years ago I was at a pretty exclusive real estate conference for large brokerages held in Denver. As part of the conference a representative from a major online lender presented an “emotional model” of what an online buyer’s experience was like. It was a roller coaster ranging from the “high” of deciding to look for a house and starting the search, to the “low” of applying for the mortgage. I thought at the time that since many folks tend to avoid pain MUCH more readily than move toward pleasure, if we simply offer a buying experience with LESS negatives, we would gain more sales.

That has proven to be true. We continue to look for ways to do this in our operation. As we find them, we implement them. It has paid off in spades.

Then a thought struck me this past weekend. I am SURE that it is not new. It was the culmination of many posts read here and elsewhere. It was / is a principle that is at once amazingly simple and yet difficult to execute with precision.

CREATE THE SAME PAIN FREE PROCESS FOR SELLERS.

It is to accomplish EVERYTHING that needs to be done to MARKET and SELL a home, with as little pain (or even ANTICIPATION of discomfort) as possible. And, of course, then the process needs to be turned into a system and scripted. In short, a seller / REALTOR relationship should not feel like this:

proct.jpg

When you saw the image above, you felt the discomfort that the neuroassociations of the image immediately brought to mind. The seller feels these same things. Let’s take a trip into things THEY find discomfort with.

1. How much they owe on the home.

Many of our agents prefer now to look up what is owed on the property ONLINE since we have access to courthouse records and all liens without leaving the comfort of our computer screens. This allows the REALTOR to reacts with sensitivity where needed and to (as importantly) make good marketing decisions with honest information. We can then use statements like “I understand that you feel pinched right now…let’s Read more

April 7, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “It makes no difference what has happened. That is the past. Live in the future. Create it.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think I have a pretty good track record at picking contributors for BloodhoundBlog. The people who write here are a cut above, clearly, but I think what sets them apart is that they are all so interested in getting better. We’re all constantly reading, learning, thinking, inventing, re-inventing, and we all end up driving each other to new ideas. I love this, as you might guess, since it pushes me to do better, also.

Here’s a true confession: When Russell Shaw approached me to write with us, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. It was still just me and Cathy in those days. We knew of Russell, of course — no one who lives in Phoenix does not know of Russell Shaw. I have no idea what Russell’s firing clause looks like, but I built our firing clause from the literal words on his radio commercial: “Fire me at any time.”

Even so, I would not have thought to trust the Russell Shaw I knew through the radio. I had no reason to distrust him, nothing except the generalized mistrust in which I hold all Realtors I don’t know. In truth, there are a lot of genuinely nice people out there, but our business attracts more than its share of crooks, misanthropes and morons. I had no reason to think ill of Russell, but I had no reason to think well of him, either.

Two facts swung the balance for me. Second was Russell’s having mentioned that he had read Hugh Hewitt’s book on weblogging. Anyone who actually prepares for a new undertaking can’t be all bad. But first, I had read in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent that Russell knew that in the previous year his team had gotten 519 listings from 912 listing appointments. My impression of Russell was changed from then on — not the production, but the presence of mind to have tracked the statistics.

You can laugh at me, if you want, for having been so careful about what has turned out to be such a great decision. BloodhoundBlog is what it is because we don’t Read more

April 7, 2008

Who knew? It turns out condotels stink as a real estate investment

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Hey, pal, let’s make a deal. You can be in the taxi business just like that! Here’s how. You buy my cab, see? You own it, pay the note on it, handle the maintenance, all that stuff. But you won’t have to work all those crazy hours driving the cab, see? I’ll drive it for you, and we’ll split the meter. How can you lose?”

Or, to put an even funnier spin on it: What, would you suppose, is an even stupider real estate “investment” than a time share?

The Wall Street Journal has all the answers…

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April 7, 2008

I Want To Be A Lister – The Listing Presentation – The Objections

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

– Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner

About a year ago I wrote what was really part 1 of The Listing Presentation. Anyone wanting to increase their listing skills will likely find time spent on this post Money Down The Drainand
that first post time well spent. I have mentioned the short list of different things a seller might say (or objections they might have to listing) to you. All good listers know these objections and are not startled or thrown off by the seller bringing them up. In fact, great listers know the objections so well that they want the seller to bring them up and if the seller does not bring them up the agent will bring them up. That’s correct. If you already know what they are thinking, why not just address it before they even mention it? It is usually fun to hit a softball when it is a slow underhand pitch.

As the nature of the objections has never really changed it is really sort of silly for any agent wanting to take a lot of listings to not know – in advance – that these are the concerns of the seller. I know that the internet and these new-brand-new-all-new-discount-really-really-low-maybe-even-no-commission companies have changed the very nature of life on earth, as we know it – but I am pretty sure the main objections that you could hear from a home seller back in 1968 were still the same in 1978.  They are still the same in 2008. I am thinking they may be still quite similar in 2048. Just a guess, but if you are planning on sticking around in this business for a while, perhaps it might be a good idea to know how you are going to respond when they bring these up.

As a really humorous aside, there were also discount companies in 1978 that would list and sell homes for practically nothing. Those companies too were going to change the very nature of how real estate was done. Read more

April 6, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have 14 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 96 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. This week’s Short List is all Zillow Mortgage Marketplace posts, all of them written by lenders. If you’re not interested, you’re just not interested, but I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be.

Four of the Short List contestants wrote two posts each, so I’m going to count a vote for either as a vot for that person. If one of them wins, I’ll split the People’s Choice Award between both posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Zillow Mortgage Bourse Zillow Mortgage Bourse: How To Acquire Long-Term Clients”,
“Brian Brady — Zillow Mortgage Marketplace Zillow Mortgage Marketplace: One Way Transparency Like A Bad Online Dating Site“,
“Dan Melson — Zillow\’s New Mortgage Quote Forum Zillow’s New Mortgage Quote Forum“,
“Gina Gardner — Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends Dog Eat Dog: Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends in Selling“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community Zillows Mortgage Community. The Consumer is Ready, But is The Mortgage Professional?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp of an Anonymous Transparent Credit and Personal Information eXchange Between Mortgage Professionals and Consumer, to Create a Highly Trusted Mortgage Transaction Community“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Mortgage Launches Zillow Mortgage Launches – How do you rate?“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Quotes Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Rate Quotes“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillows On Line Mortgage Leads Zillow’s On Line Mortgage Leads: Is It For You?“,
“Todd Carpenter — I have a war to fight I don’t have Read more

April 6, 2008

Can’t wait? “Coming soon: superfast internet”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Times of London::

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

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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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