Archives (page 287 of 372)

May 11, 2007

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

May 11, 2007

Heads Up All NASCAR Fans

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

An email I received today:

no hassle listing was not my experience. Your representative sent to install my sign refused to put the sign where the realtor and I agreed to. He was too busy talking on the phone to listen to
me. And when I asked for the 5th time to move the sign the crack head acted like he was going to attack me with a 5′ foot steel pike. I promptly told your sign installer to get the sign and his self off my property. Regardless of weather he was a contractor or not he is your representative. I expect anyone involved in the listing of my home to be drug free, not tweaking on speed and making threatening gesture. AND I QUESTION THE PROFESSIONALISM OF YOUR COMPANY even considering sending this company
back to install my signage. The experience was more than a hassle. It was a nightmare. I have wasted valuable time and effort dealing with Russell Shaw to list my home. Also the lack of

response to correct the matter was simply unacceptable.

I will be filing complaint’s with board of realtors, State of Arizona , better business bureau, and all of the local TV investigative reporters.

I also plan to use my 24′ enclosed racecar hauler and racecar to advertise to the valley my experience with no hassle listing. Look for me at the fall nascar event…

May 11, 2007

Trulia Voices: Can Bigoted Bastards Flourish?

by Brian Brady

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

We’re covering the launch of Trulia Voices with great interest on Bloodhound Blog. Greg took the lead this morning with his initial analysis and I lauded Trulia for appearing to be the more Realtor-friendly choice over Zillow.com.

I started tinkering in the Trulia Voices section. This is where people can ask questions about real estate issues on a national, regional, local, and hyper-local level. I am particularly interested in the Financing section and the cities of San Diego, Phoenix, and Long Beach, CA.

I’m no expert on the Fair Housing Act. However, like Justice Potter Stewart commented on pornography, “I don’t know how to define it but I know it when I see it.”. These questions seemed particularly disconcerting to me on Trulia Voices:

Any red flags I should know about?
There are a lot of listings in Maryvale on Trulia and the prices seem great. What are the downsides to living in this area?

What areas in Phoenix are best for raising kids?
You’ll notice that Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, does an excellent job at answering this question.

Where are the best places to buy in Phoenix for a young family?
Would love to learn about an affordable area with great parks and entertainment options for a 30-something couple with young kids. Nothing too suburban, but obviously safety
counts!

Is Orlando good for families with children?
Why or why not?

San Francisco? I think we have a problem. My interpretation of the Fair Housing Act leads me to believe that a professional could get themselves into VERY hot water by answering those questions. I think the Trulians would explain that the questions are REAL and indicative of how REAL people (read: consumers) talk. The questions seem to have been posted by employees of Trulia This leads me to wonder if the Trulians are bigoted bastards or just ignorant of how real estate brokerage really works.

Harsh Criticism? Perhaps…I think if you create a site which relies upon participation from real estate brokerages and you host potential traps for employees of those brokerages, you are culpable. The organizations that sue for damages for violations of the Fair Housing Act Read more

May 11, 2007

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.

Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.

But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.

What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 11, 2007

Trulia.com versus Zillow.com revisited: Are your end-users temporary or permanent?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

This is me last month, at the time of the Zillow.com’s most-recent software release:

In the world of Trulia.com — and other listings.bots focused on evanescent listings — users come and go. On the idealized Planet Zillow, users come and stay.

Home buying is at most an 18-month effort undertaken every seven to ten years, on average. Home ownership is continuous. Zillow attracts a lot of sellers, and it seems certain that it hopes to attract a countervailing cadre of buyers. But what Zillow is really doing, I think, is aiming at the 100 million-plus Americans who own their own homes. Some may come every day — to see new listings, to see new home photos, to ask or answer questions. Some may come only once in a while, when they have a particular need.

But its databases are permanent and accretive, constantly improving. I think Zillow’s goal is not to compete with Trulia or Google Base for home shoppers in the short run. I think its goal is to suck every bit of oxygen out of the residential real estate space as a vertical market. I’m not implying malice. But where others see this opportunity or that opportunity, I think Zillow.com sees the information marketplace for homeowners as a single unified whole, and I think the company’s goal is to dominate the whole thing in its entirety.

Today’s changes have the potential to make Trulia.com a stickier experience. But will it retain end-users after their homes have closed?

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

May 11, 2007

Is Trulia.com the UnZillow? Realty.bot emerges from beta with a new Q&A feature and robust, system-wide automated alerts

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Come with me to the newly-reconfigured Trulia.com, freshly emerged from beta status. Let’s search for an ideal house. The criteria we can use are limited — location, type of structure, price range, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage — but we can still scare up some results. Plus which, if you really know what you want — for instance, by winnowing the location down to a particular zip code — you won’t have a huge number of listings to sort through.

My search turned up four houses. Not a big number, but all of them are reasonably well-suited to my needs. But: None of them is a perfect fit. Here’s the cool part: I can instruct Trulia to send me email updates or an RSS feed of changed data in that particular search. When a new home matching my criteria is listed at Trulia.com, I’ll learn about it right away. Or, if I like a particular house, but I don’t like the asking price, I can subscribe to get an email notification of future changes made to that one listing.

I can set up any number of tightly focused searches, each with its own email alert or RSS feed. That much is not news to Realtors. We do this every day, with much more robust search tools. But we do it for clients. The clients themselves don’t have direct access to the MLS system. Some added-cost IDX systems permit saved searches with email updates, but then the search is not terribly more robust than Trulia’s.

But wait. There’s more. The new improved Trulia.com, will alert me when the house of my dreams becomes available. This is essentially the complementary counterpart to Zillow.com’s “Make Me Move” feature. Using a database of tax records, you can select a particular residence and ask Trulia to inform you by email or RSS feed when that home comes on the market.

Neither of these features is without problems. For example, where Trulia turns up four homes that match my criteria, either Realtor-listed or For Sale By Owner, the Arizona Regional MLS system unearths 146 active listings for the same search. And, at Read more

May 11, 2007

Podcast interview with Trulia.com’s Heather Fernandez: “Real estate professionals are going to be able connect directly with consumers”

by Brian Brady

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

Linked below is a podcast interview I conducted with Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez, Trulia.com’s Director of Marketing. Heather takes us through all of Trulia’s new functionality. At the end of the recording, I raise the idea that Heather might be getting a lot of email about the upgrade, so it seems appropriate to share her email address: heather@trulia.com. Let her know what you thnk of the new Trulia.com.

May 10, 2007

The NAR’s Operation Tip-Off: How to make yourself look guilty by protesting your innocence

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Matthew Hardy of Real Estate Success Tools sends along a copy of the NAR’s press release on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes Redfin PR puff piece.

We are led by buffoons, avidly drawing attention to the stuff they want everyone to ignore. Two words is too many in reply to this crap: So what? Discount Realtors are nature’s perfect revenge on people who crave real estate discounts. The intelligent response is not to shout, like Redfin, “We’ll do nothing for even less!” but to offer a quality product at a fair price — and then actually deliver it.

Technorati Tags: compensation for buyer representation, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

May 10, 2007

Cri de coeur meets The Long Tail: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet to be released, finally, on DVD

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

How long is The Long Tail? Long enough, even, for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, ten long years after its theatrical release. I despair for the state of staged drama, and not just in the chip-on-its-shoulder burgs, but this, in Horace’s phrasing, is “a monument more lasting than bronze.”

The news: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is to be released on DVD, at last.

We’ve been on the waiting list at Amazon.com for years, and I’d like to hope that this is a vindication of the waiting list idea, a social tug-of-war to stretch The Long Tail.

I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The Cameron you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet‘s theatrical release.

Hamlet past his bedtime

I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting — or buying.

My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.

Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked Read more

May 10, 2007

Hey, can I hop a train to that shack? ShackPrices.com introduces proximity to mass transit as a search criterion

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the most innovative of the map-based real estate search portals is ShackPrices.com. A house is a house and a neighborhood is a neighborhood, but a home is a lifestyle, and ShackPrices is doing more than anyone else to integrate lifestyle data in its databases.

The latest innovation is showing proximity to present or future mass transit services in its search results:

Beginning today, home buyers can search from thousands of homes for sale near bus stops along one or more King County Metro Bus lines or near Sound Transit Rail stops. Home buyers can combine their search for homes near mass transit lines with a variety of other factors including price, size, and keywords using ShackPrices’ intuitive map search.

“By letting home buyers search for properties near current and future transit stops, we are giving the public a valuable tool to find homes that fit an environmentally friendly lifestyle,” said ShackPrices.com co-founder Galen Ward, “Most importantly, we’re giving home buyers the opportunity to find a home that should substantially increase in value when transit lines are complete. Homes within 500 feet of rail lines are worth as much as $40,000 more than similar homes just a little farther away.”

I, personally, don’t like taxpayer-subsidized mass transportation, but “people like pie.” In the urbanosphere, proximity to mass transit is a very common question. Answering this question visually and automatically would seem to be painfully obvious — except no one else is doing it.

My frank assessment: ShackPrices.com should post a “Make Me Move” price to see if anyone in Seattle has brains enough to write an eight-figure check.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing

May 10, 2007

A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

We saw a performance piece called “Love, Janis” last week. It wouldn’t do to call it a play. It was more of a fictionalized chronicle of Pearl cavorting with her inner child while blasting through her greatest hits at top volume. The music was beyond excellent, and the interstitial crap was no worse than Ray or Walk The Line or The Doors — no act of evil or self-destruction is ever your fault if your records chart well. Creepy and dopey (no pun intended), maudlin and mopey, but ultimately nothing. If they had cut all that and doubled up on the music, it would have been a knock-out tribute show.

Here’s the beef: Was this raucous rock ‘n’ roll encomium performed at an Indian casino, alternating with the Tina Turner and Michael Jackson impersonators? No, alas. Was it the 8 and 10 o’clock headliner act at an off-Strip locals resort in Las Vegas? Guess again. No, “Love, Janis” is part of this season’s “drama” from The Arizona Theatre Company, one of eight “plays” to be presented this season to audiences of rich white people, whose seats will be graciously subsidized by poor black and brown people.

This is “theauhtuh, dahling,” an allegedly high-brow undertaking undertaken in that high-brow “performance centre” downtown — itself graciously subsidized by people who only make it downtown when they are dispossessed by fate and taxes. And although I am speaking of Phoenix, particularly, everything I’m saying goes for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America. “We can’t be a true city without theauhtuh, dahling,” even if that “theauhtuh, dahling” turns out to be a complete joke.

What’s the real point of this ugly charade? Wealth is waste, but how can one justify the indulgence of a thousand-dollar gown if there is no “theauhtuh, dahling?” No symphony? No opera? No ballet? None of these boondoggles is profitable, and that by itself is an excellent argument for doing away with them. Mozart can’t make money, but neither can “pops” music conducted by TV’s Doc Severinsen. Cage fighting turns a buck, as do rodeo and tractor pulls, but how can one wear a designer Read more

May 9, 2007

Realtors Can Pre-Qualify Buyers If A Lender Isn’t Handy

by Brian Brady

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

It’s Sunday afternoon and the Phillies game approaches the top of the ninth inning. You, the professional Realtor, look at your watch and notice it’s 3:40PM. You’ll be locking up the door, uprooting the signs and heading home after a long afternoon at a particularly slow open house. You can almost smell the dinner your loving spouse has prepared.

A couple walks in to the home and tells you that they are just in Philadelphia for the weekend. Dad’s finishing up his final negotiation for the new job and Mom’s trying to figure out if the kiddies will adapt to Philly.

They toured open houses all weekend. They need a Realtor with whom they connect. Mom announces that YOU are the perfect Realtor for them while the Phillies put away the Dodgers in the background. One catch… they REALLY want to see a home across town but it wasn’t open today.

“Will you represent them?” they ask.

You explain that your policy is pre-qualified buyers with a Buyers’ Brokerage Agreement.

“No problem !” they exclaim.

You dial your favorite lender while Mom and Dad review and sign the BBA. No lender answers your call.

Do you load them up into your SUV and show them properties?

You CAN pre-qualify that buyer in about five minutes; you just need to know what to ask. Seven Realtors from Active Rain gathered today to listen to my 20 minute presentation about “How Realtors Can Pre-Qualify a Buyer”

In this 20-minute podcast, I reveal:

1- How to talk about money without sounding intrusive.

2- The “Three C’s of Lending”

3- The one question that separates the buyers from the wannabes.

4- Red flags that require a conversation with a lender

5- Green flags that signify that a loan is imminent.

Download it to your iPod and get prepared for next Sunday afternoon (or just listen to it here).

May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

May 8, 2007

What Barenaked Ladies Taught Me About Scripting And Delivery

by Dan Green

Mortgage Planner

The most important part of my job as a loan officer is helping clients understand how mortgages work.

It’s a tall order sometimes and that’s why I spend a ton of time crafting answers to common questions and then rehearsing them until I can recite them backwards, forwards, and from any point in the middle.

This is called Scripting and Delivery.

Why do I do it? Because over the course of my career, I have heard the same questions from my clients thousands of time. Naturally, that’s fine with me. The more times I am asked a particular question, the more I know just how important it is to people.

“I’ve heard that interest only loans are dangerous. What do you think?”
“Our family is about add another baby. How should we incorporate that into our mortgage plan?”
“I just paid off a credit card. Should I close the card?”

Each of these questions is a springboard to bigger, more important discussions about mortgage planning. That’s when I am thankful that I know what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. A carefully-crafted answer makes a far greater impact to my clients that if I just spoke off the cuff.

But, scripting alone, though, doesn’t cut it. It has to be backed up with flawless delivery, too.

This is where a lot of mortgage and real estate professionals fall short. They rely on their experience/expertise and just figure that they’ll wing it when the time comes to respond to a client’s question.

Look: It doesn’t matter if you know what to say if you don’t know how to say it clearly. And I’m going to prove it.

Below, are the lyrics for the Barenaked Ladies tune “One Week”, courtesy of Rock It Old School. Look them over, print them out, put them on an adjacent screen, whatever — just get a copy you can reference while you watch the embedded YouTube video above.

You’ve got the “script” in-hand so how hard can it be to just sing along?

If you failed on your first go around, try again. If you fail on Read more

May 8, 2007

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves Read more

BloodhoundBlog

Archives (page 287 of 372)

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

by Greg Swann

Heads Up All NASCAR Fans

by Russell Shaw

Trulia Voices: Can Bigoted Bastards Flourish?

by Brian Brady

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

by Greg Swann

Trulia.com versus Zillow.com revisited: Are your end-users temporary or permanent?

by Greg Swann

Is Trulia.com the UnZillow? Realty.bot emerges from beta with a new Q&A feature and robust, system-wide automated alerts

by Greg Swann

Podcast interview with Trulia.com’s Heather Fernandez: “Real estate professionals are going to be able connect directly with consumers”

by Brian Brady

The NAR’s Operation Tip-Off: How to make yourself look guilty by protesting your innocence

by Greg Swann

Cri de coeur meets The Long Tail: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet to be released, finally, on DVD

by Greg Swann

Hey, can I hop a train to that shack? ShackPrices.com introduces proximity to mass transit as a search criterion

by Greg Swann

A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling

by Greg Swann

Realtors Can Pre-Qualify Buyers If A Lender Isn’t Handy

by Brian Brady

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

by Greg Swann

What Barenaked Ladies Taught Me About Scripting And Delivery

by Dan Green

A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by Greg Swann

Search BloodhoundBlog

Subscribe to our RSS feeds

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Back of the house

Media Contacts