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Want to join the cool kids at Bloodhound Blog Unchained? How about the freaks and geeks?

There have been some fantastic posts on BHB this week. Alas, this isn’t one of them.

I whined about conferences, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been to one.  I’ve been to enough conferences and conventions to know that what happens outside the conference can make the difference between having a good experience and a great experience. For the record, I never have a bad experience- I simply don’t allow that to happen.

I’m not picky about hotels because I don’t spend time in them. My criteria is this: No roaches, no bed bugs, and no DNA left by previous guests. That covers any cleanliness issues and that’s my biggest concern in a hotel. On the other hand, I do like to be around the people I like, so a few weeks ago I sent out a tweet asking if anyone had started looking at hotels. I have enough experience with this to know that since my hotel needs are fairly spartan, if someone else wants to do the research, I should step aside and let them. So I did.

Brad Coy and Andy Kaufman were on it, and they have more narrow criteria: They wanted free wifi, and walking distance to the Heard Museum. They talked to Brian Brady who told them about a hotel with a lovely outdoor pool- if this is a family vacation, that might be worth looking for- but I’m from Ohio and have the tan to prove it. No pool for me.

I don’t mind staying alone, but I really fall into the more-the-merrier category with these things. Packing a lot of people comfortably into a hotel room makes things interesting, if not fun, so I was game when HouseChick, Kelley Koehler, and I decided to share a room. We both conceded hotel research to the cool kids, who just this week made an executive decision: Fairfield Inn. Free wifi, walking distance, breakfast, Fairfield Inns work for me- they are not notoriously dirty. I read the Trip Advisor comments, always with a grain of salt, and the reviews were mixed, which is typical. Noise issues mostly, but no one who booked a suite complained. Sweet- they have suites. Read more

Geno’s Wrong (bang a gong)

I’ve heard tell that a baby’s first post-partum sensation is a visceral experience of himself and his mother as One. Thus, being too new in Life to yet separate himself from the outside world, little baby Geno mentally concludes mommy and he are the exact same entity. And when the light bulb finally does go off in the infant’s bald little noggin a few months down the lifeline and he realizes he’s been maternally duped by Nature, the very first ‘Separation Anxiety’ is then experienced and all future disappointments in his ensuing  mortal journey can be traced back to that very instant. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Either that or I dreamt it in one of my other, more enlightened lives when I wasn’t so monetarily attached to my livlihood.

I’ve also read somewhere that when one person moves to thumb down, and snap the mutual wishbone, ending a personal or business relationship abruptly, that the mental decision was made long before the actual ax hit the proverbial turkey’s neck; that the severing party (axer) grieving period had already begun long before fatal action was actually taken and thus, comes off as being the more ‘heartless’ of the separated duo. The turkey (axee), on the other hand, is cast immediately into a state of shock and is forced to run around ‘headless’ and very quickly come to terms with his own extremely short future as a team member in this world.  Somewhere between these first two paragraphs lies my point (allow me a few moments to dig it out as I simultaneously fret over a handful of my difficult Listings with a combined market time of almost 3 years) but I can tell you right now; headless, heartless, whatever…I’d rather be the axer than the axee.

I thought about this quite a bit as I escaped the silent treatment market torture in Chicago and flew home to visit with my 80 year old parents over Easter weekend. As I walked through their front door I was instantly greeted by a lifetime of childhood reminders, familiar tastes and nearly forgotten episodes. I sat there for hours keeping company with the two people I’ve known longer than any two souls on this earth, wondering where all the time went. I told them I felt so different lately, with barely a speck of child left in my psyche. They Read more

Surreal Times: Election 2008

Every day around the world there are brilliant people going to work performing complex tasks that make all our lives better. There are companies developing and implementing service oriented architecture (SOA), information technology solutions more sophisticated than the world has ever known. Few people outside the inner workings of these companies know what is happening, because it isn’t reported. The leaders in industry building incredibly complex systems that respond with such a high degree of flexibility that reaction time to market changes is almost immediate are mostly unknown — they aren’t sexy and they aren’t political.

There are brilliant people making discoveries around the world: scientists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, programmers, biologists — they are mostly unknown. There are entrepreneurs with vision reshaping the way we do business in a 2.0 world. These people take chances and gamble on innovative ideas — they step forward, yet most people don’t notice them.

Every day there are improvements to the cars we drive, the medicine we take, the homes we live in — online search makes information easy and useful to access, buying and selling goods and services is offered up improved and less expensive, medical procedures extend our lives and add to the quality of our lives, entertainment is offered in diverse packages that make our lives more enjoyable, private charities are getting help to needy individuals in more creative and efficient ways. It’s all due to the myriad individuals who use their minds daily and development better and better management and delivery. The real leaders of the world, for the most part, go unnoticed.

Not only do they go unnoticed, they are disparaged directly and indirectly by politicians building power bases. It’s especially noticable this election year. You would think the world revolves around and depends on the choice between three people. Government has positioned itself in the hearts and minds of many people and in the press as the true leadership that will reshape the world and improve mankind. If this idea wasn’t so dangerous, it would be hilarious. All one has to do is sit back objectively and consider the brilliant people at work each day building, innovatiing, managing and delivering Read more

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Jeff Brown, discount lister?

The other morning, Bawldguy Jeff Brown left this note in a comment:

I’m jumping back into the San Diego investment property market as a lister. I’ve been ignoring my home folks since late ‘03.

I’m gonna be offering a broadly different choice for the seller. I’ll charge NO listing commission, but a small monthly fee for ongoing marketing, and my carrying costs at Starbucks.

Now that’s intriguing, ain’t it?

It’s been gnawing at me, so I called Jeff to talk to him about it. He explains it in his own words in the podcast linked below, but stop for a moment and generalize, if you will.

If you’re in a market with a surfeit of inventory, sellers are not the kind of blue chip asset they might have been a few years ago. Qualified buyers on the other hand…

If you can sell your sellers on the idea that, like Jeff, you will give them a knock-your-socks-off listing at a price that will save them some money, you will have acquired inventory you can use to attract buyers. I think you would have to list like Jeff plans to, totally turn-key — and you’ll have to decide where you stand on dual agency. But if listing stronger for less attracts more buyers, what do you have to lose?

Since he’s working with investors, Jeff’s strategy is even more intricate than that. Give a listen and see what you think.

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Urbanologist Joel Kotkin: Why growth-oriented cities like Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta reflect the future of global commerce

Joel Kotkin is the only American urbanologist who can tolerate actual living human beings. In consequence, he can write about the organic growth of cities as they really are, rather than as he might remake them with enough tax money and firepower. This is a long extract from a much longer article about Houston’s emergence as a world-class city, this despite the scorn that might be heaped upon it — at tax-payer expense — by urban monument-builders like Richard Florida. In this section of the article, Kotkin discusses what makes young, growth-oriented cities so dynamic by comparison to older, more-typically-urban urban environments.

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.

Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.

Chicago, the great growth city of the late Read more

Eyeball Marketing – Are You a Pioneer?

What do running shoes, firefighters’ air tanks and cordless drills have in common? They are all direct spin-offs from the Apollo Space Missions (and before anyone comments, neither Teflon nor Tang was a spin-off from the Apollo missions or NASA in general).  Why is this important to practitioners of the 2.0 arts? Because Social Media Marketing is, at this time, a lot like the Apollo Space Mission.  It is young and unexplored.  It is obviously a new way of doing something and most would agree that it is quite powerful, but many more question its real use.   Apollo was questioned.  Many accused the entire program of being a boondoggle: powerful, but of little practical use.  “What is the point, even if you do succeed?”  Sound familiar?

The Eyeball Marketing theory is simple: if you can put enough eyeballs on you, someone will pay to access the brains (and wallets) behind those eyeballs – might even be you.  There is no shortage of people with products or services to sell that will gladly pay you to get in front of your group.  This is the basis of most large, multi-day seminars.  (You didn’t think they were paying those big names full boat to come and hock their books did you?)  Lots of people have something to sell, but few have the ability, the reach and the vision to put butts in seats and eyeballs facing forward.  Quick self quiz: how many of you have paid for leads in the past?  If you have then you are someone with a service to sell willing to pay someone else for the eyeballs they generate.

I suggest that there are two basic forms of marketing.  When we talk about past clients, sphere of influence and a community of raving fans we are talking about marketing to a target.  When we talk about hyper-locals, mass mailings and Google juice we are talking about marketing for eyeballs.  They are not mutually exclusive; in fact, the goal of eyeball marketing is to gather enough people into a specific group that you can market to a target.  Blanket an area with Read more

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Using the synergy of the internet and low-cost printed promotions to sell your product, build your brand and give you an affordable — testable — marketing strategy

Linked below is the first of a series of Black Pearl Marketing Minute podcasts that Brian Brady and I will be putting together. We want to take marketing ideas that we have discussed on BloodhoundBlog and flesh them out to real-life strategies while connecting them to other synergistic tactics.

In this inaugural episode, we start by talking about my post on using the business card form factor for doing low-cost broadcast door-to-door promotion. We talk about some ways that we deploy custom-made business card-sized promotional pieces, how we make and print them, and our distribution plan.

Brian then connects that idea to a marketing plan that emerged from our comments threads, partnering with local merchants as an online/offline farming technique.

Earlier today, someone known only as Jacksonville Real Estate posted a comment on my post about using low-tech promotional schemes to bring traffic to a single-property web site:

It’s an old idea and it’s not mine … but if you are targeting just a certain areas then getting your flyer on the local pizza delivery box can work wonders.

Brilliant! Never thought of it, but that’s why I love this place: We bring bright minds together and set off a blinding brilliance. My reply:

Oh, very cool. I tend to think in terms of things we can do on our own, but this is actually an interesting cross-promotion:

“Visit our custom web site for 123 Mulberry Lane and your next pizza is on us!”

Build a PDF coupon in the site and redeem them with the pizza joint once a week. Meanwhile, your contact info is on the fridge for weeks or months.

That’s a Brian Brady-style idea. I must be channeling…

It’s a Guerrilla Marketing kind of idea, actually, a Duct Tape Marketing kind of idea — maximum bang for minimum bucks. It’s most completely a BloodhoundBlog kind of idea, in the sense that it combines (and recombines) physical with online marketing.

But nothing’s perfect in the first draft. My correspondent thought springing for the whole pizza might be too expensive as a “pay per click.”

Okayfine. How about this?

Buy the soda instead, then. It’s an upsell for the pizzeria — bigger Read more

Did you miss out on the super-low Guerrilla-only price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained? The price is still low, but you need to act fast — Brian Brady wants to raise it again soon

Here’s a valuable question for the Web 2.0 world: Can people really appreciate a bargain? Everybody loves “free” — but do they love it at full value? My thinking is that LinkedIn would be a much more valuable place to network if it charged members $350 a year, but would anyone pay a buck a day for Facebook?

This is a question that has been bugging Brian Brady — gnawing at him as only a good marketing problem can. We priced BloodhoundBlog Unchained at $149 and sold a bunch of tickets. We bumped the price to $199 and sold a bunch more. We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to make seating distribution choices — and Brian wants to raise the price to our estimated retail — dollarized — value: $350.

We know that amount is low. The next time we do this, the early-bird price will be more than that, and the last-minute price will be more than double that amount. We’re going to give you a year’s worth of ideas to deploy, so, even at $350, we’re still only a buck a day. If you do just one extra deal as a result of something you learn at Unchained, the ROI could be 20-1 or more.

Looked at that way, Brian is right: It’s plausible that, by charging too little, we’re encouraging people to set their expectations too low. I find that amazing, considering how much value we deliver here at BloodhoundBlog every day. But I was stunned to discover that people didn’t know that Unchained will not be the typical buy-me! buy-me! vendor show. I would have thought that my own graduated hostility to vendors would have made that plain.

In the other corner, there is me, slugging it out for the starving grunts in the trenches. No one is really starving — I hope! — but our lean months have become our lean years, and there ain’t too many of us getting fat off the fat of the land just now. I would rather keep the price as low as we can for as long as we can, Read more

The NAR Is A Sex Offender’s Best Friend

“Hello Mr. Agent, I like this house. I could see my family living here. Just one question, are there any sex offenders nearby”? A simple question that based on information from the National Association of Realtors does not have to be answered by the agent.

The answer the NAR wants agents to proffer is, “Well Mr. homebuyer you’re just going to go look that up yourself”.

Ralph Holman, associate general counsel for the NAR says “What agents should do is tell buyers about their states’ registries.”

Go look it up yourself! That’s the answer that the NAR wants agents to give. An individual who is held out in NAR advertising and lobbying as a professional on par with doctors and lawyers wants their rank and file members to dodge this question as much as possible.

This certainly bestows credibility and trust with the American consumer doesn’t it? This surely will make the public more sympathetic to the plight of Realtors shouldn’t it? You would not expect a “professional” who is being paid upwards of 6-8% to facilitate the sale of a housing purchase to actually tell the truth would you?

If not for information and said coordination of the sale what exactly is the agent being paid such a hefty commission for? Why would any agent or the NAR encourage a culture of deceit? If not deceit, then call it ignorance and unprofessional. In any event, if you are selling a product as important as where someone wants to house their wife and children, then is it not too much to expect that the consumer is relying on the agent to inform and disclose all defects, not the ones they choose to disclose?

Has the NAR declined in credibility so far as to instruct their agents to actually feign ignorance or have there agents slid so far as to actually buy into degrading their “profession” by bamboozling the consumer?

A professional should not have to question whether such information is pertinent. A professional should deliver the information willingly and should openly and freely desire to offer full disclosure.

USA Today recently ran a story wherein a spokesman for the National Association Read more

Jerry Rubin Died A Stockbroker

The point of my title might not be obvious, and it’s not meant to discount youthful exuberance — God knows we need youthful exuberance. However, Peter Pan and Michael Jackson aside, we all grow up. What does that mean — grow up? I take its meaning as maturation, becoming wiser, thinking long term, becoming responsible to self and others.

Organizations, even countries, like individuals, seem to go through the growing up process — from infancy, to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to the twilight years. If companies and countries can continuously reinvent themselves between young adulthood and middle age that’s a good thing. The analogy with individuals breaks down here, for the most part, because individuals can only “remodel” so much before the realities of age take over completely. However, individuals can stay fresh in mind and spirit for quite a long time through constant learning, reflection and openness. This freshness of mind and spirit coupled with maturity and wisdom is an attractive combination in individuals — these are the people I gravitate towards.

RE internet companies seem to be in their mid twenties. There is an emphasis, a feel, a persona, if you will, of “youth” with companies like Redfin, Zillow, Trulia and the rest. What is their phiolosphy? It’s like most 20 somethings; it’s a mixture of style, doing good, distrust of tradition, worship of change, but very little mature, rational long term vision. Unlike Realtor.com, they play their music loud, dress in t shirts and jeans, talk funny and love to give stuff away to their buds.

They are the RE version of Google starting out, just doing stuff with no business model, having fun, being different with an attitude and declaring like grandiose young mini-gods they will “Do No Evil“. Oh, I’m sure there are grown ups developing plans and thinking about making money, but this is the sense, the feel, I get from these companies.

Do they have to “grow up”? Can they survive in the business world by hanging out with their friends, creating stuff and giving it away? They will make more and more friends, that’s for sure, but Read more

Less is More

If I asked you “what business are you in” and your answer is “the real estate business,” you (like 98% of REALTORS®) are wrong according to Michael Russer of Russer Communications.  Michael is a genius of sorts; he claimed the title Mr. Internet before we even found out that Al Gore invented it.  Russer was tech before tech was cool. He made quite a name for himself in real estate circles back in the 90’s with his Mr. Internet moniker and a passionate belief that the Internet is not about technology, it is about connecting people. Now he flies all over the world telling real estate and other businesses how to use the Internet to market themselves and connect with clients and customers. 

So why does Michael Russer think 98% of agents don’t know what business they are in?  Actually, he asks his classes a different question.  He asks attendees at his seminars if they have a specific target market that would be recognizable by visiting their personal web site.  98% do not have such a specialty or niche market.  In other words, only 2% of REALTORS® are NOT generalist.

I am not a REALTOR®, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, and that empowered me to come up with a few niche market suggestions for those of you who might want to stand out from the 1.3 million other REALTORS®.  One of my strong beliefs is that if you try to be everything to everybody, you will end up being nothing to nobody.  This is as true for an association of REALTORS® as it is for each individual member.  It is also true in every other part of our lives.  Remember High School?  If you did not find your niche (band, AV Club, football team, etc.) you really struggled to fit in – to be relevant. 

Why then, do 98% of REALTORS® fail to develop a niche within the overall real estate industry?  For the same reason many other businesses fail to find a target market – they fear that limiting the pool of potential clients will Read more

Redfin.com beats the field again, this time in both Seattle and San Francisco: Buyers pay less and reap commission rebates, too

Redfin.com has news this midnight, but it’s the sort of thing I would normally ignore: It’s basically the kind of rah-rah-for-us stuff I leave for the vendor cheerleaders and the mainstream media. But: I gave Redfin a lot of grief last year when they made a similar announcement, so today I’ll give them a bit of their own back:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today published an analysis of the last 12 months’ public real estate records in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area that shows its buyers and their Redfin agents negotiated a better price than buyers who used other brokerages. Redfin’s average negotiating advantage was $5,048. The company also reported a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate for users of its home-buying service, and an average commission refund of $10,520.

This is the actual news, which you will not find in any news source: Redfin beat the field for the second year in a row. Is it plausible that particular agents beat Redfin? Not just plausible, highly probable. I don’t know of any teams of buyer’s agents like the kind of team Russell Shaw runs for listing agents, but a team like that would be much more useful for comparison purposes than the entire field of Realtors in three MLS systems. But give Redfin its due: The company deploys the kind of task specialization common to every sort of business except residential real estate brokerage. It’s very hard to resist the idea that specialist negotiators, more often than not, could out-dicker ordinary jack-of-all-trades Realtors.

And all of that is caviling, and wasted caviling at that. Stand in awe as Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman illustrates the high art of PR triangulation:

“Why do Redfin customers consistently tend to negotiate a better price, in different markets and different market conditions?” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Last year, we concluded it was because of our agents, whom we pay bonuses based on customer satisfaction rather than commissions. Others argued that it was because of our deal-savvy customers, who benefit from Redfin’s transparency to take a more active role in the deal. Today, we think it’s Read more

The Real Estate Bailout Act of 2008

When successful financiers achieve a certain level of success, they up the ante and practice social engineering. Robert Rubin, Jon Corzine, and Hank Paulson  advanced to government service after piling up the pesos at Goldman Sachs (in financial circles, we say those two words with hushed reverence). After decades of whipping and driving the markets, the titans answer the call of noblesee oblige and decide to play with EVERYBODY’s money. While I haven’t risen to the austere positions Messrs Corzine, Rubin, and Paulson have, my friend Nick and I

have a little idea about how to save the American real estate market.

Let’s start with the premise that lenders are taking 20-30% hits on short sales. Then, let’s have the US Treasury loan 30% of the balance, of the aggregate debt, to homeowners whom request it, in order to pay down the first mortgage (or second mortgage). If I have $200,000, in aggregate liens against the property, the US Treasury will lend me $60,000, to pay down those aggregate liens, to $140,000. This reduces the lenders exposure.

What type of loan will the Treasury make to homeowners?

The term can be for the lesser of:

1- the remaining term of the first mortgage

2- 65 less the age of the primary borrower.

The interest rate can be the corresponding term treasury rate, plus .5% (for administrative costs). Maybe we can use some of that “yield spread” to coerce a few mortgage brokers to “originate” this government debt (okay, that was completely self-serving). For a 42 year old, with a 27 year term on his first mortgage, the term of this new government loan (in second position) would be 23 years (65-42=23). If a 23 year treasury bond yields 4.1%, than the note rate for the new loan will be 4.6%.

The borrowers never have to make a payment on this debt; it accrues like a negative amortization loan. In the aforementioned example, the balance would grow to about $168,000, after 23 years. With a first mortgage paid down to $140,000, we’re banking on Read more

Commission

There were a number of interesting articles last week regarding the value of a real estate agent.  Essentially asking the agent to justify their commission.  I know it got heated up over on Active Rain and there was some discussion on AgentGenius as well.  Here at BHB we enjoyed two very good posts.  You can read Brian Brady’s post here and Barry Cunningham’s post here.  I disagree with both of them, which is all the more reason to recommend you read them.  That and the fact that they are both very good reads.

Let’s Clarify the Question
First things first: the timing of the whole “justify your commission” question is counter-intuitive.  It is coming up a lot lately, yet one would expect clients to question commissions when home sales are rapid and appreciation high. During those periods it appears simple to sell a home but, probably because of the prices being greater than the seller assumed, we rarely hear this conversation.  Yet times like the current, when homes are not selling and people are most in need of a professional agent, you get the most questions about commissions.  This has a lot to do with the fact that they are making less money than they expected.  So let’s start by clarifying the true nature of the question.  It has little to do with the agents’ value and everything to do with the clients’ profit.

Also, the question of value is directed primarily to the listing agent.  There are some who will question the selling agent about their commission and they will do so regardless of the market.  But for the vast majority of clients the selling agent has very little to do with this conversation.  Why?  Because the selling agent’s commission is already loosely tied to the market and so a function of supply and demand more than intrinsic value.  When homes are moving quickly and inventory is small, the seller and the listing agent discuss what to pay the selling agent and often arrive at 2.5% or even 2% because there is no demand to pay them more (supply of buyers is high).  When the market is slow like it is now, we begin to see the seller and listing Read more