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The Perfect Real Estate Relationship

At least for me and how I envision my future. A lady from Arlington, Va called me last week. She didn’t say “Can I go look at some houses next week when I’m in Savannah?” — No, she had read my business blog and understood I recommend we do first things first. She asked to meet me in the lobby of the hotel where she’s staying so we can discuss a game plan.

She has a home to sell (attention all Arlington Va agents!), and when she sells it, she wants to move to Savannah. We sat in the lobby and over coffee and bagels discussed her vision of what she wants. She described what she’s dreaming of and I described areas in vivid detail and we went back and forth until we narrowed it down to a couple of areas.

It turns out our esthetic tastes are quite similar, so it made the conversation flow easily. She asked what the negatives are moving to Savannah and I told her without violating any laws. She decribed her life to me, how she had worked in several different fields, how she’d been a nurturing mother (still is, I’m sure) and a wife, and how now it’s just her — retired but still wanting to be active, how part of her dream is to become active in the historic preservation efforts in Savannah, that she would like a little cottage, airy and light, preferably near water, but close to town — she described how she loves diversity, doesn’t want to sound like a northerner, but doesn’t want to live in a place with a single, limited mindset — how she likes cosmopolitan eclectism. I understood her.

This is the personalization and context that I’m not sure machines will ever understand, it’s the human contact of real estate that I love, and it’s the service I want to provide — to take this lady’s story and to be an active part of it as it goes into another chapter, to help her accomplish a goal to personalize her lifestyle plans in a home she can feel a part of, that reflects her personality and sense of life.

First Read more

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

Last week we built a custom weblog to help you sell your home. This week, let’s dress it up a little.

Some of the things I’ll be talking about are free, but others cost money. Your Realtor may have a marketing budget, so that could be a source of funding. But even if not, with only a few buyers chasing a very large number of homes, stinting on marketing costs may not be your best strategy.

Here’s something you can do for free: Go to Google Maps and build a map to your home. At a minimum, you should also provide driving directions from the nearest freeway exit. But, if you sign up for a free Google account, you can link to an elaborate custom map for your home.

Highlight parks, playgrounds, schools and shopping. Saying anything at all about churches might invite Fair Housing complaints, but you can draw attention to other nearby amenities. Even better, you can attach pictures and internet links to your map markers, so that buyers can really get a feel for the neighborhood.

Online real estate sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com want to know that your home is for sale. You can add photos to those sites and link back to your custom weblog, which will bring you more traffic. On Zillow.com, you can “claim” your home, updating details on any upgrades you have made to it.

We like to use floorplans. You might be able to get one to scan (or better yet, an Adobe PDF file) from your home’s builder. We use a company called FloorPlansFirst.com because they make interactive web-based floorplans. Buyers can move their furniture into the home to see how it will fit. This costs money, but it sells houses.

For virtual tours, we’re switching to Obeo.com. Their tours cost more, but they offer a category-killer feature: Virtual redecorating. Your buyers can discover how much they’re going to love your house after they’ve remodeled the kitchen and repainted the exterior.

And the only stronger Read more

Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It

I’m talking to Teri Lussier about Twitter, a lot. I didn’t get it until I decided to post relevant mortgage market information on the Twitter feed. Let’s assume you HATE Twitter (or just don’t get it). Let’s assume that you don’t have the time to Tweet.

Q: How can your business benefit by using Twitter?

A: Eyeballs- Be the destination place.

Think of Twitter as the television airwaves, twitter streams as “TV channels”, and your blog or website as the cable company. If you can host multiple channels (Twitter streams) on your website/blog, you win eyeballs. More importantly, you win loyalty as the destination place for real-time, user-generated information.

I’m starting an experiment, for Andy Kaufman to analyze, in his Twitter presentation at our upcoming Unchained conference. I’ll be asking input from Andy and Teri Lussier as I try this idea. The goal is to drive more traffic to my web log and become an information destination for potential customers;

I want to be San Diego’s Twitter Cable Company. Here’s my plan:

1- Create a landing page for my web log (www.TwitDiego.com) with a “channel guide” for Twitter streams,

2- Evangelize the utility of Twitter as an information tool to relatively low-tech users. The Saint James Academy Parents (and faculty), The Lomas Santa Fe Country Club, The Villanova Alumni in San Diego, Pacific Beach nightlife, Gaslamp nightlife, North County restaurant reviews, The San Diego State University, RealEstate.com agents, etc, etc.

3- Offer streams or “channels” to each user group.

4- Market www.TwitDiego.com to everyone I meet. I did this yesterday, at the beach, to a soccer mom. She’s setting up a Twitter account and accepted my offer of a webinar for the soccer moms.

Sit back and watch my mortgagereport profile on Twitter get more followers, my web log get more traffic, and my community grow.

This is a wild hare idea. All CONSTRUCTIVE comments or suggestions are welcome.

Bloodhound Lit: The art, science and business of writing interesting and profitable real estate weblog posts

By his good example, Kevin Warmath reminds you to get busy on your BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry. We’re about to talk about writing, so let me remind you that I wrote a post on how to write a Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry that advances your interests — and that one post is a virtual how-to on producing profitable real estate weblogging content. If you were to write nothing but mix-and-match variations on that one post format, you could produce a killer blog — interesting to read, very attractive to search engines and a reliable generator of new business.

We have written a lot about writing. The truth is, we have written a lot about everything, but weblogging is a self-referential art form. Blogging about blogging is baked in the cake. The subject comes to my mind now because we were linked last week from the Guardian Unlimited, the web site of the Daily Guardian newspaper in London.

Why them? Why us? They were linking to a preface to a Joseph Conrad novel that I had posted as both a discussion of effective writing and as a thrilling demonstration of Conrad’s premises in action. We Google up first on Conrad’s text, which is how the Guardian found us. And that preface is truly exemplary writing advice, a breathtaking tour de force that is its own best proof of its arguments.

A few days later, I put up my own frail defense of those same arguments:

This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to the senses, writing actions and events that feel to the reader like actual experience.

More:

The point is to think in active, expressive verbs, and particular — granular — nouns and adjectives, using images and metaphors to connect ideas. To write not as discourse but as exposition — the creation of that fascinating dream-like state of hyper-reality in the reader’s mind.

There is a sense in which this is about writing as art, but the other way of looking at things is to see all works of the minds as expressions of the artist within. Sometimes a grocery list is just a Read more

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

Continuing, briefly with the idea of chokepoints and the economics of abundance:

Broadcasting — radio and television — offers us a perfect example of how much bigger the economics of abundance is than mere data processing.

Broadcast outlets, at their beginning, were both natural and man-made chokepoints: There were a limited number of available frequencies, and access to them was regulated by fiat of law. Cost-based chokepoints affected the other major media of the era — newspapers and magazines. This resulted in very lucrative markets for the owners of mass media outlets — and in media products that tended to be at least as dissatisfying to consumers as they were appealing.

But then three things happened:

  1. Printing got a lot more efficient, creating the era of narrowcasting in publications — not one generic bike-riding article a year in Look magazine, but a dozen specialized monthlies just for different flavors of serious bike racers — with a dozen more for mountain biking, and a dozen more for bicycle fitness training.
  2. As a consequence of better scientific research in electro-magnetics, electronics, signal-processing and information theory, the radio spectrum itself became much more abundantly divisible — creating still newer kinds of narrow-casting, right down to cell phones and private-network walkie-talkies.
  3. Finally, the internet itself resulted in a massive explosion of available bandwidth in mix-and-match wired and wireless networks.

What’s the result? One of the richest businesses in the entire history of chokepoints is being disintermediated into oblivion. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

Emphasizing that, I cannot get enough of this movie:


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

We have 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 91 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, again this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

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 ( "Dan Green -- The NEXT Time Mortgage Rates Plunge How To Get Ready For The NEXT Time Mortgage Rates Plunge”,
“Daniel Scocco — Poor Writing Skills Overshadow
Can Poor Writing Skills Overshadow Good Content?“,
“Dave Smith — Create Your Own Backlinks Hyper Local Target Marketing Create Your Own Backlinks“,
“James Hsu — Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but what are your pictures actually saying?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Page Rank and SEO Just Write Relevant, Compelling Articles About Real Estate and/or Mortgage and You Won’t Have to Worry About Page Rank and SEO“,
“Jeff Pabian — Smart email campaigns begin at home. responsible email marketing for real estate professionals“,
“Jim Cronin — The Real Estate Business Is Content The Real Estate Business Is Content, Not Home Selling“,
“Jim Kimmons — Your Website Why Your Website Isn’t Bringing You Clients“,
“Jim Watkins — Real Estate Mail Marketing Real Estate Mail Marketing: Pull the Right Strings“,
“Mary McKnight — Target a Typo SEO Tip of the Week: Target a Typo of a Common Keyword and Increase Search Traffic by 30%“,
“Milton B. Yates — Short Sale Opportunities Every Short Sale Opportunity isn’t Worth Chasing – More Time – Bigger Checks“,
“Milton B. Yates — Subject to Foreclosure Buying \”Subject to\” Existing Financing – Subject to Foreclosure“,
“Scott Buresh — Sam’s Club SEO Sam’s Club Wants to Read more

Say goodbye to Chokepoint Charlie: In a world without walls, free is the new green of the internet economy

I have been talking about the economics of abundance literally from Day One of BloodhoundBlog:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others.

I was talking about phenomena like weblogging and open-source software, but, ironically enough, I was also talking about an article by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson.

This week Anderson is back with another important article, this one called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. He’s writing about the net.economy, and what he has to say is fascinating, even if I think he might be missing the bigger picture. He’s also writing in support of his new book, a for-pay product I don’t intend to pay for.

Anderson likens the idea of free razors, which we’ve also talked about, with the modern net model of using free web-based software to create massively-viral effects. Interestingly, he documents six broad categories of no-cost-to-the-user internet business models.

His thesis is that the plummeting cost of data-processing hardware, coupled with a software-cost-per-user that approaches zero, requires vendors of web-based information and services to find other ways to monetize their efforts. If one vendor won’t cut the price to zero, the next one will.

We’ve been talking about this much, too, also since the birth of BloodhoundBlog:

[T]he people most immediately affected are the ones who are currently paid a salary or wages based on the sale of information. Either the information is going to get much, much better — or the number of paychecks is going to get much, much smaller.

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. Read more

Virtual Tour Videos on YouTube…a soon to be no-no…

A growing trend among REALTORs has been to replace their old school Virtual Tours with a You Tube video that they incorporate into their blog, site and even onto REALTOR.com. Actually, the cool part was that you could put them ANYWHERE.

No problem!

Well ummm…actually there is a problem with that. YouTube’s Terms of Service are for personal or non-commercial use according to a recent article in REALTOR magazine.

I just wanted to pass this along as FWIW (for what it’s worth) to Bloodhound Blog readers who may be currently putting your Virtual Tours on YouTube.

People who write too much: One Bloodhound’s manifesto

Mike Farmer’s post on philosophy got me thinking. I knew I had written fairly extensively, fairly recently, on some of the same ideas, but I couldn’t remember where. I write a lot, and I don’t always remember what gets posted where.

What I was thinking of was Todd Carpenter’s “Blogger Spotlight” interview with me. That post was much longer. In the extract below, I’m clipping out the Big Issues philosophy. The confluence of recent events — webloggers-at-war and the death of William F. Buckley — seems to have left us a little more open than we might otherwise be to new ideas. This is an exposition of the ideas that move me, in particular, my personal manifesto.

 
Todd Carpenter: One of my mottoes in life is that everyone has an ax to grind. I blog for money. Most RE agents blog for money in the form of clients. On the other hand, you don’t even have Amazon affiliate links attached to the books you recommend. What’s your ax to grind? Why are you doing this?

Greg Swann: In order that it might be done, and done properly. I don’t think I fit your theory about having an axe to grind. I may be as close as one can come in the modern world to being an actual Attic Greek, a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake. People often accuse me of having ugly motives — which says a lot more about them than it does about me. But there is a sense in which you could say that I don’t have any motive for the things I do, none other than the doing itself. I like for things to be done. I like for them to be whole and complete and perfect and esthetically beautiful and mathematically elegant and philosophically sound. I work very hard on everything I do, and I can concentrate very intently on what I am doing, and I don’t like to do anything except what I am doing right now — but I love to Read more

Why’d Benn Have To Go And Do That?

I’m pleased that we received a hearty endorsement from Benn Rosales, at Agent Genius, for the BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference, brought to you by Zillow. I’m pleased but I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised because I’ve gotten to know Benn these past six months. He’s a marketer and a fine one at that.

Some bloggers doubt the utility of the content we’re discussing; I completely understand that doubt. While UNCHAINED will talk a lot about the power of the web log, it is not JUST a bloggers’ conference. UNCHAINED is a marketing conference; a social media marketing conference. Not all bloggers are marketers; they are accidental beneficiaries of the explosion of the Web 2.0 evolution.

Web 2.0 is not “new”. Social Media Marketing started about 10-15 years ago. Interactive marketing is about engaging the consumer, using the far reach of the internet.

I remember starting a Yahoo Chat room, called “Phoenix Real Estate”, in the late 90’s. It was a destination spot I hosted for consumers and professionals to share information, each night, from 9PM-10PM; I often sat alone in that “chat room”. Some nights, a real estate agent or consumer would show up to ask questions; those were the best nights. I found that Sunday nights became the best time for consumers to interact with me and limited the chat room to a scheduled weekly event.

Hosted forums were another great way to engage consumers before LinkedIn broke onto the scene. When LinkedIn hit the net, it gave us a chance to engage the consumer on our terms. Rather than wait for an anonymous person to hit a forum or chat room, we were able to use demographic data to target certain “prospective customers”. If you’re a long-term player in this industry, LinkedIn represents a great chance to engage people in an interactive community.

Myspace offered a completely new paradigm to SMM. Here, users post personal profiles, robust with demographic data, to be “searched”. Through groups and “friend lists” a site-specific address book can be created Read more

Speaking in tongues: Making more-professional-looking CraigsList HTML ads — even if you don’t know how to code in HTML

[I’ve amended this post somewhat based on our recent experiences with CraigsList, which are discussed in the comments. The point of this post is not CraigsList, but, rather, learning how to extract HTML from existing code, this as a means of learning to write HTML on your own. In the comments, a number of vendor solutions are discussed, and these my be worth exploring, if only as a prophylactic against censorious behavior by CraigsList users. But your need to produce professional-looking HTML can extend far beyond the major on-line services. As an example, Cathleen Collins pulled buyers out of an ad we were able to post on a church’s bulletin-board-like system. –GSS]

 
A couple-few weeks ago, I was on a conference call with Jerry Matthews. He’s a one-time grand poohbah in Realtor Association politics, but now he works as a consultant to the NAR and certain state-level Associations. I was the waxed-fruit-flavor-of-the-day in a series of calls with Association executives, so that they might take the pulse of market innovators. I think I might have been the Designated Radical. If so, I promise you I did not disappoint.

As one stage, I was talking about how new licensees might market themselves cheaply in what is, for now, a hard world to get a break in. I mentioned a lot of different ideas, including CraigsList.com, which may be the single most effective advertising medium available to Realtors or lenders right now.

I said, “Of course, most CraigsList ads stink, so, with just a little bit of HTML you can really make yourself stand out?”

“But how is a new agent supposed to know anything about HTML?” someone asked.

I didn’t say, “Young people know a lot more than you give them credit for.” Instead, I pointed out that weblogging software like WordPress creates HTML for you, even if you don’t know what it’s doing.

So you could do something like this:

  1. Create a weblog post about a house you’ve listed — or, with explicit permission, that another agent has listed
  2. Write a good, compelling headline about why buyers should want to see that house
  3. Write good, clean — error free — Read more

It is a mistake to think that the language of the bureaucrats is merely an ignorant, garbled jargon. They may not always know what they are doing, but what they are doing is not haphazard. It works, too.

More, for Diane Cipa and others who have commented. You can’t buy Mitchell’s books, except used. The man is an incredible gift America mostly never bothered to unwrap. The fun part is that you can have everything he wrote as The Underground Grammarian at no cost. That’s not the same as “for free,” of course. If you’re going to get anything out of Richard Mitchell, you have to have the means to pay attention.

 
The Voice of Sisera

by Richard Mitchell

The invention of discursive prose liberated the mind of man from the limitations of the individual’s memory. We can now "know" not just what we can store in our heads, and, as often as not misplace among the memorabilia and used slogans. Nevertheless, that invention made concrete and permanent one of the less attractive facts of language. It called forth a new "mode" of language and provided yet another way in which to distinguish social classes from one another.

Fleeing the lost battle on the plain of Megiddo, General Sisera is said to have stopped off at the tent of Heber the Kenite. Heber himself was out, but his wife, Jael, was home and happy to offer the sweaty warrior a refreshing drink–"a bottle of milk" in fact, the Bible says. (That seems to find something in translation.) It was a kindly and generous gesture, especially since Sisera asked nothing more than a drink of water.

Having drunk his fill, the tired Sisera stretched out for a little nap and told Jael to keep careful watch, for he had good reason to expect that the Jews who had cut up his army that day were probably looking around for him. Jael said, Sure, sure, don’t worry, and when Sisera fell asleep, that crafty lady took a hammer and a tent spike and nailed him through the temples fast to the earth.

I suppose that we are meant to conclude that the Kenites, not themselves Jews, were nevertheless right-thinking folk and that Jael’s act had a meaning that was both political and religious. I’m not so sure. I’d like to know, before deciding, just what language it Read more

A Season To Be Objective

Modernism, or post-modernism, has little use for philosophy . Pragmatism is most people’s mind bent. Tough-minded pragmatism has a lot going for it, but when it denigrates philosophy it might be acting a little too tough. Isn’t philosopy that old-timey pursuit back when intellectuals talked endlessly and abstrusely about whether we really exist or just a bundle of impressions. What good did any of that talk do? It doesn’t pay the rent, by God, and it doesn’t bring the bacon (tofu?) home.

Others are more mystical about life, therefore philosophy is an illusory construct created by dead white European males to rule by reason and logic, or to confuse the issues with consistency — there is nothing consistently true for mystics, and all the intellectualizing in the world won’t reveal the mystical flow of The Great Unknown to the puny mind of reason — it’s intuitive, soft and open in spirit — felt by those connected to the universal spirit.

One looks at “what works” as the only marker for value, and the other goes by “what feels right”, what can be intuited as the marker of value. There are many variations of these two types of believers. And there are many who are mostly social, who don’t think much at all about the larger issues of life; they want to belong and be accepted, and merely being a part of a group is fine with them. They might take a stand if it’s to protect a friend or if they feel like their group is being threatened, but mostly they just want social comfort.

The second definition of philosophy from The Free Dictionary is — 2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods.

The first definition is — 1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.

Very few people live by, or hold ideas to the test of, a set of principles that they’ve forged through a consistent philosophy. They usually go by antecdotal evidence, snapshots of reality taken out of context, as their measure to make decisions. “I have a cousin who did this and got this result, and it seems to be Read more

If You Want To Be On HGTV, Read This

I received the email posted below the graphic yesterday. Rather than forward it to a list of handpicked people, I am posting it here so anyone who is interested can respond.

HGTV - Meet Russell

From: Conrad, Melissa mailto:MConrad@HighnoonEntertainment.com]

Subject: Hello!

Hello,

I am with HGTV’s show called “My First Place”. We chose Arizona to film our next 10 episodes and we are having a hard time finding people and realtors to be on the show. I am a casting producer and I would love your help to find some great AZ realtors with first time home buyers that would like to get an expensive gift from HGTV. These episodes will get national attention and since we are one of the top rated shows on HGTV, we hope it will bring positive attention to your beautiful city. Hopefully it will bring more home buyers in your direction! Also the realtors who are on the show get on screen credit so they can be contacted nation wide. Everyone who has been on the show has had a great time and our producers are very fun to work with.

If you are interested in being a part of the show along with your first time home buyer, I will send you over an application that we need them to fill out. It will start off our casting process so we can set up a casting interview with all of you. Thank you so much for your help and I hope to hear from you soon!

Melissa Conrad
Associate Producer
High Noon Entertainment
303-349-6800
303-712-3209

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

From Less Than Words Can Say

by Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It was about my goals in teaching, and it asked me to assign values to a number of beautiful and inspiring goals. I was told that the goals were pretty widely shared by professors all around the country.

Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man who sent it had promised, in writing, to “analize” my “input.” That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn’t do as he had promised, and I had lost all interest in questionnaires.

This one intrigued me, however, because it was lofty. It spoke of a basic appreciation of the liberal arts, a critical evaluation of society, emotional development, creative capacities, students’ self-understanding, moral character, interpersonal relations and group participation, and general insight into the knowledge of a discipline. Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it seemed to me, on reflection, that they were none of my damned business. It seemed possible, even likely, that some of those things might flow from the study of language and literature, which is my damned business, but they also might not. Some very well-read people lack moral character and show no creative capacities at all, to say nothing of self-understanding or a basic appreciation of the liberal arts. So, instead of answering the questionnaire, I paid attention to its language; and I began by asking myself how “interpersonal relations” were different from “relations.” Surely, I thought, our relations with domestic animals and edible plants were not at issue here; why specify them as “interpersonal”? And how else can we “participate” but in groups? I couldn’t answer.

I asked further how a “basic” appreciation was to be distinguished from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of my colleagues were in the business of teaching appreciation. It seemed all too possible that they would have specialized their labors, some of them teaching elementary appreciation and others intermediate appreciation, leaving to the most exalted members of the department the senior seminars in advanced appreciation, but even that didn’t help with Read more