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Archives (page 273 of 372)

July 13, 2007

Teri Lussier, blogging star

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From email from Teri Lussier:

By the way, I’ve changed brokerages. Another agent and I have teamed up — he found me through TBR. He asked me yesterday if I subscribed to a blogging service for content feeds. “No, I write it myself.” I’m adding content he never considered. He’s a former IT guy, and he teaches the brokerage’s tech class. I know more about blogging than he does, so yesterday he tapped me to teach the blogging portion of the next tech class. REWL101 bookmarks for everyone! And I’m thinking of offering to hire myself out to guest blog — to plug in regular content for any agent who would like. Great fun.

I seem to remember there being some kind of weblogging competition, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how it’s being judged…

Furthermore: The girl is nothing but class…

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July 13, 2007

Realtor.org’s inner-geeks peer into the iPhone

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Center for Realtor Technology Web Log (there’s a mouthful) has a Realtor-oriented review of the iPhone:

On the real estate side of things, though, there were a few disappointments. I went to Trulia, Zillow, and Realtor.com. All three had some rendering issues from a missing MAP to elements on web pages covering each other (making filling out a search impossible.) One issue is that one of the sites has their map via Flash, which isn’t yet supported on the iPhone. I visited some of the sites on Safari and Mac and Windows and didn’t have the same rendering issues, but did still have the same missing non-flash map elements. The rendering issue I saw on the iPhone could be a bug in that version that will hopefully be corrected soon. Don’t get me wrong, they were still mostly usable, but it wasn’t as clean an experience as most of the non-real estate sites I’ve visited. It could just be luck on my choices either way.

We’re not ready to make the leap yet, but it seem clear that this device — or a near-term competitor — is inches and hours away from shipping my laptop off to the Museum of Computer History.

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July 12, 2007

Bankrate.com Encourages Stupid Mortgage Banker Tricks

by

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

Author website

Here is a sampling of mortgage offerings on Bankrate.com. (for July 11, 2007)
I chose a $252,000 loan for a $315,000 purchase price in Phoenix. Income and assets need to be verified. Credit score of at least 620. I assume a 1% origination fee and about $1200 in APR loan costs. I would have priced that loan on July 11, 2007 at 6.5% with an annual percentage rate of 6.679%.

Take a look at the variances on Bankrate.com . Can you see the stupid mortgage banker tricks that can be played? The lower rate offerings are stacked with APR fees. In reality, those “fees” are truly discount points but the advertisers know that the consumer eschews the term “points”.

Bank of America and Countrywide have been advertising “No Closing Cost” loans on television. So, why does B of A reference their no closing costs loan but quote a rate with .537 discount point and $1155 in APR fees? It’s the rate, stupid! Mortgage shoppers won’t call if they published the rate of over 7% for their “no closing cost” loan.

Confused? Bankrate.com would be better serve a consumer if they isolated a rate for a specific loan offering and insisted that the advertisers compete on fees. Then, rank those advertisers from lowest fees to highest fees.

That’s assuming that mortgages are a commodity. Even Bankrate.com knows that just ain’t true.

July 12, 2007

What might make the idea of community work on Zillow.com? The individual autonomy we have learned to expect on the internet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We live and work right on the Arizona Canal in North Central Phoenix. North Central is a nebulous geographical region. Properly speaking, it runs from Seventh Street to Seventh Avenue, Missouri Street to the Canal. Within those boundaries, you will find some of the most prosperous and powerful people in the city — two categories from which we are more than amply excluded.

People living as far east as 16th Street and as far west as 19th Avenue might claim to live in North Central, and it would be considered churlish to contradict them. But this courtesy would not be extended to anyone living north of the Arizona Canal. North of the Canal is Sunnyslope, one of the worst neighborhoods in Phoenix.

What’s the difference? About $150,000 right now. In other words, the house you could buy just north of the Canal for $250,000 would cost you at least $400,000 if you were to buy it just south of the Canal. Location, location, location.

Now suppose you have joyfully paid that price premium to own, use, enjoy and profit from a home in North Central. If you went to your neighborhood page on Zillow.com, what might you not want to see?

I added the highlighting, just to put a finer point on the slur. In fact, this is just the kind of ham-handed stupidity you would expect from a robo-bartender, which, if you think about it, is one of the bogus roles a social network can take on.

Full disclosure: I am a social networking skeptic. The youthful fetish clubs are immensely popular with people who are determined to stay forever young. The commerce-oriented sites are full of self-promoters, every bit as interesting as the Friday morning business card exchange at the Denny’s over by the freeway. It could be there is something else I’m missing, but I’m not predisposed to care.

The truth is, I’m an introvert, as are many smart, technically-oriented people. My skin doesn’t actually crawl when I’m around other people, but my social interactions are always project-focused, and I’ve never been to a party that I didn’t want to leave before I got Read more

July 11, 2007

Zillow.com to launch Realtor rating system

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From John Cook’s Venture Blog:

As an investor and board member at Avvo, I asked [Zillow.com’s Rich Barton] when Zillow might roll out an online rating system for real estate agents. That idea is in the works, with Barton saying that the company also is trying to develop ways for consumers to search for agents based on specific criteria. Stay tuned…

First we’ll milk ’em for free content as the only persistent members of our “community.” Then we’ll sell ’em astoundingly low-yield advertising. Then we’ll get anonymous misanthropes to write poison-pen letters about them. That sounds like a plan…

Am I missing something, or is this evidence of an unbounded cluelessness?

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July 10, 2007

Zillow.com’s latest release me-too’s Trulia.com’s recent me-too release: Can either make the leap from ghost-town to community?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

With its Z6 software release, which goes live tonight, Zillow.com adds a neighborhood level of user conversations, similar to Trulia.com’s Trulia Voices feature released in May of this year.

From Zillow’s press release:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today added a number of new community features, opening up the site even further to user contributions. Chief among these additions are individual neighborhood pages in more than 130 U.S. cities (more than 6,500 neighborhoods in all). The pages are seeded with rich local demographic and real estate information, but are built for communities and neighbors to make their own. Anyone within a community has the ability to add photos, events, local news, engage in discussions and ask or answer questions about neighborhood real estate.

“Adding the ability for neighbors to meet, share information and learn about their local neighborhood is a natural next step for Zillow. We started with individual Web pages and Home Q&A for more than 70 million homes, and today we’re bringing the conversation out to the neighborhood level,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we’re adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online — and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process.”

Neighborhoods are accessed from any of the 70 million Home Details pages within Zillow, or via the “local real estate” link at the bottom of every Zillow page.

There’s more, but we’ll come back to it.

First: Is this a surprise to anyone? The new features were accidentally pre-announced last week in an inadvertently transmitted email. I understood the portent of that email, as I’m sure did everyone else in the RE.net who got it: Responding to Trulia was Zillow’s obvious next move, and they’re fairly steady at doing major upgrades once a quarter. The only real surprise was that the hermetically-sealed start-up actually leaked something.

But could it be that Zillow and Trulia are stuck in a tennis volley of answering each other’s features? Truila Voices was the loud claim from the Read more

July 10, 2007

A Real Estate Recovery in Early 2008, Don’t Be So Sure…

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Chicken Little made the famous quote, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Would he have been more believable if he had said the sky is falling, but I expect it to ease down slowly and rebound early in 2008? This is exactly what many real estate professionals have been doing for the past six months.

Here are just a couple examples:

Bob Toll of Toll Brothers, one of the nation’s largest home builders reports to CNN,

I don’t see the market getting better until, at the earliest, April of 2008. But I do think that when a recovery occurs, it will be much quicker than it has in the past because of pent-up demand. You’ve got decent job growth, low unemployment, low interest rates, great corporate earnings reports and tons of money being created and sloshing around the world.

Why April? Why 2008? Since Bob Toll, like myself is a Cornell graduate, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will assume he has concrete data for this projection, but I really have to wonder if he is looking at the big picture. Access to capital has reversed course significantly and has now become a major stumbling block for many would be home buyers. Additionally, Congress is considering adding more rules and regulation to the banking arena, which will inevitably make lending tougher. On the other side of the equation, supply is hitting an all time high. Not only have many of the home builders over built, but adding foreclosures, and longer than average time on the market for regular stock really makes the picture look grim for sellers. It will be very hard for this equation to right itself in less than a year.

Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp. in Cleveland, writes at Bloomberg.com,

We’ll hit bottom in 2007 in terms of sales, but we’ll continue to see price declines into 2008. Prices tend to weaken for about six months after inventory normalizes, and we probably won’t see that begin to happen until the end of this year.

While Richard shows a bit more pessimism than Toll, he too Read more

July 10, 2007

Ignore the so-called experts: Blogrolls are good, m’kay?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

No one is better suited for a discussion of the value of blogrolls in viral weblogging than South Park’s Mr. Mackey. (“Drugs are bad, m’kay?”)

Some supposed experts have done extensive research by reading other weblogs and they have come up with (and reiterated) this startling conclusion: “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?”

I would link to the source, but that might turn out to hurt their SEO prospects. I have, out of thoughtful consideration, removed them from BloodhoundBlog’s blogroll. Not, mind you, because, “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?” but because I don’t want to promote pernicious nonsense.

Why are blogrolls thought to be bad? Because they might look like a link exchange, and they might get brand new weblogs temporarily sandboxed by Google.

What are we talking about? SEO results, yes?

What should be your objective in producing a real estate weblog? Viral marketing, yes?

If we stipulate Mr. Mackey’s case without contest, would blogrolling being bad for SEO imply that blogrolling is bad for viral marketing?

Take it apart. The masque of Mackey is bullshit: Brand new blogrolls don’t have extensive blogrolls, and, even if they did, there is no reason to suppose that Google is penalizing them. More likely the contrary. Google likes links.

But even arguing to the contrary, would a hypothetical Google-that-doesn’t-like-links make any difference in your viral marketing strategy?

First, lightning can strike with an over-the-transom lead from Google, but it’s not very likely.

Second, the objective of your viral marketing strategy should be to nurture a substantial community of people who are predisposed to use you when they have a real estate need. This has almost nothing to do with SEO results.

Ergo, everything you do with your real estate weblog — and with other viral marketing tools — should be focused on nurturing relationships with people who can and will do business with you, not with attracting random hits from all over the world. In other words, if your primary concern is SEO, you’re spinning your wheels.

So what does this imply about blogrolls? In a community-focused real estate weblog, a blogroll of other weblogs and web sites focused on that community is an immensely powerful viral marketing Read more

July 7, 2007

More construction photos from Las Vegas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We did more in Las Vegas than tour construction sites, but you’d never know it from the snapshots. Here are some more projects in the works — nothing like all there are to be explored.


This is a view across the Bellagio to the CityCenter site. In the middle foreground is the old Jockey Club, being remodeled in the course of being assimilated, Borg-like, into the new Cosmopolitan hotel-condo-casino-resort.


The CityCenter site from behind.


The new Encore tower at Wynn Las Vegas.


The new Palazzo tower at The Venetian.


Ground-level construction on the Palazzo tower.


On the left is the first of two Trump Towers. On the right is the Encore tower. In between is a lot of future construction on the North Strip.


From the Encore tower to the Palazzo tower.


With the Palazzo tower in the background, a chunk of the Harrah’s section of the Monopoly board.


Caesar’s empire. Behind the Augustus tower, on the right, will be another high hi-rise hotel tower. The steel shed in the bottom right will be replaced by new convention facilities. At the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard, now occupied by an open-air plaza, Caesar’s will build 37,000sf of new casino space.


And not to forget dowdy old Downtown, the Landry restaurant chain, new owners of the Golden Nugget, are planning to build a new hotel tower behind the old Pioneer Club.

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July 6, 2007

HARD MONEY: Buy at Eight. Sell at Twelve. Repeat.

by

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

Author website

Imagine a business with a 50% markup. No employees, no warehouses, some liability, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. I’m not trying to introduce you to the hottest multi-level marketing craze nor am I trying to convince you to open a franchise.

I want to talk to you about becoming a buyer and seller of money. Mortgage money. I’m talking about the private mortgage marketplace.
Let me start off by showing you how to get the money you need. If you own a home with a bunch of equity (and many of you do), you have a lousy investment. Robert Ashby, President of Solid Rock Mortgage in Florida, tells us that home equity earns you nothing and may actually shrink over the next 6 months to 6 years (depending when your local market turns around). If your boss left a bunch of inventory in the warehouse and it was in danger of losing value, he’d be looking for another job in a few years. Turn that “dead” inventory into money producing inventory by borrowing against your home equity. You can do that for about 8% in today’s marketplace.

Disclaimer: The private mortgage as an investment, aka “trust deed” or asset-based lending (READ: hard money) is a very specialized market. I talked about this marketplace in Life As A Legal Loan Shark. I try to refer would be trust deed investors to the basics of trust deed investing and ultimately send them to the California Department of Real Estate explanation.

Now that we have the appropriate disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about how you make money. Let’s secure you a HELOC for $225,000. We’re going to leave $25,000 in what Jeff Brown refers to as the Sominex account. Subprime borrowers are not always the best at paying the loans back in a timely manner so we want to have access to 10-12 months worth of payments in reserves. That way you can weather a storm.

Now, we’re going to have you Read more

July 6, 2007

Clip show: The Fabulous Baker Boys

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote about The Fabulous Baker Boys at New Years. This is another film where the conflicts are painfully real and where everyone is a better person at the end.

In the clip linked below, Michelle Pfeiffer sings More Than You Know as a way of summarizing the argument of the film. As with Pleasantville, this is a film I can watch over and over again.

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