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August 25, 2010

Want More Showings and Quicker Offers? The “Secret” Source of Buyers.

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

In a recent comment on his own post: Are you closing on the wrong objectives? The most insidious form of sales call reluctance is proudly racking up empty “accomplishments.”  Greg Swann, the author, said this:  “we devote a lot of effort … to closing on the buyer and on the buyer’s agent. Salespeople need something to say, so we go to great lengths to get them to say what we want said.”  That’s a very good point, as far as it goes – which is not far enough.

A couple of days ago, in a post by Glenn Kelman comparing days on market to listing activity level the discussion led, as it should, to actual offers in comparison to days on market.  I wrote a comment that in our local market, “If you go more than two weeks without an offer, you’ve done something wrong… which, generally speaking, means you’ve priced it poorly.”  Again, true as far as it goes – which is not far enough.

Agents don’t realize who their target market is or, if they do, agents don’t act on that knowledge.  Who sells a home?  The buyer?  No.  The buyers’ agent.  According to the latest statistics from NAR, when asked where they found the home they eventually purchased, the number one answer is: agent.  Think about that for a second: the primary referral source for the actual buyer who purchases your listing is the buyers’ agent.  Do you think maybe they merit a little of our marketing focus? Duh…

I co-host our weekly Brokers’ Open Caravan.  I have a few minor responsibilities: inject a little humor, keep the energy in the room up, and a weekly “Marketing Minute” presentation.  But my primary job as MC is to keep the highlight on the Listing Agents who are there to pitch their property.  Most agents, God bless ’em, get up to the front of the room, drop their head down into their notes and, in their best impression of a sleep aid, recite the Agents’ Manifesto of Facts: “This beautiful home has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1400 square feet.  It’s offered at…”  Shoot me now!  Good Grief Myrtle, I already have that info right here Read more

August 24, 2010

React to this idea, if you would: “BloodhoundBlog Unchained and Unwired in Las Vegas: The Return of the Sales Monster.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was talking to Scott Cowan this morning, and he asked me about future Unchained events. It happens that I’ve been thinking about doing something, and Scott and I explored a few ideas.

Here’s one I really like: BloodhoundBlog Unchained and Unwired in Las Vegas: The Return of the Sales Monster.

I’m thinking Friday, November 26th, 2010, the day after Thanksgiving. One day, one big room like we did in Orlando, 9 am to 9 pm, bop ’til you drop. You could fly in Thursday night after the family stuff or early Friday morning. Arrive when you can, leave when you have to, and maybe we do streaming video and a webinar all day as well.

For content, I think I want to focus on selling, rather than marketing. We can be counted on to cover a lot of wired marketing just in passing, but, as I have been writing, there’s is a lot of ground on the sales side of our business that we’re leaving uncovered.

I also want this to be a Stone Soup project, if we can get that done. I want to keep it cheap, so you can afford to come, and I want to keep it simple, so that I can coordinate things without going up in flames.

So tell me: Is this a good idea? Would you come?

Also: Hit me with ideas. Content ideas in particular, but I’m game for anything you have to say. We might set up the room in “rounds” so that we can structure the day half as formal group sessions and half as mini-kennels, self-coalescing unconference sessions.

I’ll listen to a sponsor if you’ll pay for the room and two rounds of snacks-‘n’-beverages, and I’ll give you banner space, a meet-and-greet table and a 30 minute speaking slot in exchange. Conference space should be cheap in Vegas right now, so we might not be talking about a very big check.

I truly don’t know if this is worth doing. I think Realtors need to get back to selling basics, but the great mass of wired agents seem to be so infatuated with selling small talk to each Read more

August 24, 2010

We’re all Vendors, Every one

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

It should come as no surprise that the average “good customer,” doesn’t spend a lot of time (or wish to learn) anything about the Real Estate Industry.  Even when it serves them–even if they should know.   The average “good customer,” would prefer that their real estate was “handled,” for them, that they could swallow a house selling pill and the house would get itself sold, with maximum convenience and minimum hassle.

They don’t (generally speaking) want to know anything about how you get paid, why a Divorced Real Estate Commission is better, or how many homes that you’ve sold.  They don’t give a rat’s rear about who owns what shortcodes, about your social media marketing, or anything else save the HUD-1 at the end of the month(s) it takes to sell.  Because of the time spent (and also because the NAR seems to benefit from marketing the anxiety inherent in the real estate transactions) Realtors delude themselves to think that their clients want new friends.  Realtors have made a world where “who you know” and “rapport” are more important than “what you know” and “fiduciary obedience.”

Realtors (and we vendors) delude when we think client-o-mers want new BFFs. Clients like congeniality, they need fiduciary obedience.  But they have families, lifelong friends and unless it’s happenstance, we ain’t amongst them.  Sure, our businesses require have frequent interactions when we are engaged, but we’re not friends with people because they needed a website (or a mortgage, or a house).  We are their servants, dutybound (and moneybound) to do the work that we say we are to do.

The charlatan or confidence man becomes a friend as a way to again divorce accountability from the results–either consciously or unconsciously.  If we become friends, then we get the “friendly” treatment should the webiste not rank or the home not sell for the price we promised.

If our customers could simply eat a pill and have everything “get handled” they would.  And many of them did, from 2000-2006, with the maniacal mortgage funding process.    When you leave your financial decisions to those folks that benefit from churn, well, then, Read more

August 23, 2010

Are you closing on the wrong objectives? The most insidious form of sales call reluctance is proudly racking up empty “accomplishments.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to talk about being a sales monster, so I want to issue a disclaimer first: We are all about value. I get paid for closing real estate transactions, and I like getting paid, but I never want to get paid for encouraging a client to do the wrong thing. I’m going to be talking about closing in a lot of different contexts, but I am never talking about arm-twisting or even the mildest kinds of suasion. The ancient Roman law of agency is respondeat superior — let the master answer — and this is how we conduct our business.

But still, as a salesman it’s my job to close. That’s important just by itself. It’s one thing to be an ethical salesperson, as above, but it is quite another to fail to close at all. My job — always — is to move the process to the next logical step. If my client wants to make a deal, it’s my job to make it happen, and the way I do that is by closing on the step of the deal-making process that happens next in the sequence.

That’s Salesmanship 101, except that no one teaches salesmanship these days. And, alas, many of the salesmavens who taught this discipline in the past were creepy, oily, slimy, smarmy moral degenerates. Selling is not a confidence game, and there is nothing at all wrong with helping your client take the steps necessary to achieving his objective.

Because marketing on the web is so cost-efficient, I can do a lot of my closing with software — passively, automatically, at any hour of the day. But: I still need to close.

When a new vistor lands on one of our web sites, I’m closing on one idea: More. Stick around and read — there’s lots of content. Or swap over to our free Phoenix MLS search. At an absolute minimum, I want you in our internet universe, so I do a lot to attract people, then I do a lot more to hang onto them.

When we get someone to do something we want them to do, we call Read more

August 23, 2010

Now or Never

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

Redfin published more data today arguing that a listing overwhelmingly gets most of its traffic on debut: about four times more than it does only a few weeks later. What we didn’t discuss was the correlation between traffic and a transaction. Is the day-one traffic spike due mostly to rubber-neckers?

My sense from watching how listings actually sell is that the spike is real, and that it behooves clients to focus on a perfect debut.

The question was still on my mind when we got together for a monthly business review with Dave Billings, who runs Redfin Seattle. When the conversation turned to listings we’d been struggling with, Dave commented that if a listing doesn’t sell in 60 days, we almost never sell it all.

He also noted that, as time goes on, our system of surveying clients sometimes make agents recalcitrant to tell a long-time client what he really needs to hear, for fear that the client will resent the advice he fills out the survey.

What’s your take? Do most of your sales occur in under 60 days? Or does it take longer for reality to set in?

August 20, 2010

How to succeed at failure . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this in the Summer of 2001, also. At the time, my friend Richard Riccelli convinced me to sit on it because it’s pretty arch. Even so, this is the counterpoint to Shyly’s delight.

 
How to succeed at failure

I work in sales, and while I don’t have many role models for success at my job, I am lucky enough to have an immense number of role models for failure. My co-workers fail all day, every day, and they are gracious enough to share ideas with each other about how to fail even more. Watching them and listening to them, I’ve been able to abstract the principles of a whole new self-help discipline: How to succeed at failure.

There is no better field in which to succeed at failure than straight commission sales. If you succeed at failure in education, they make you the principal. If you succeed at failure in politics, they elect you president. But if you succeed at failure in straight commission sales, you slowly starve to death… Top that!

And succeeding at failure in straight commission sales is easier than you think!

Here are a few simple rules:

First, start late and leave early. Some people try to make failure an endurance contest. This is a mistake. If you spend too much time in the office, sooner or later someone is going to buy your product from you just because no one else is around.

In the same way, when you do get to work, immediately do something useless, irrelevant and unproductive. The newspaper is a good bet. So is the restroom. The two together make for a perfect combination. Take your time. The point is to establish to yourself, to your co-workers and to the world that doing business is the last thing on your mind.

Once you get to the office — stay there. Don’t go out looking for business, make the business come to you. Show the customer who’s boss. That way you’ll have plenty of time to complain to your co-workers that customers just don’t appreciate all you’re doing for them.

Find innovative ways to waste your work-day. Do research about Read more

August 20, 2010

If you are a working Realtor — if you list and sell residential real estate for a living — the time you spend on social media sites is almost certainly anti-marketing, doing you more financial harm than good.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Chris Johnson pulled this out of our phone conversation the other night, quoting me on Twitter:

People don’t want a relationship with you. They just want your damn services.

We were talking about real estate weblogging, but the principle applies even more firmly to the world of social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The notion that strangers are seeking out Realtors in order to befriend them is absurd. For a Realtor to get invited on a getaway weekend with three people who are not old school chums would require that all the undertakers and life insurance salespeople they know are already engaged. We all know what to expect from Realtors in any sort of social setting — which is why there is an entire mini-industry of RE(education)Camps to train Realtors to resist their smarmy, deal-probing impulses on-line.

That’s point number one, neatly Tweeted by Chris — who is, don’t forget, a vendor: You are the means to your clients’ ends, not an end in yourself. Even though you might sometimes hit it off just right with a client and forge a serious friendship, in virtually all cases — including those where you make a friend — it’s the mission-critical job that matters, not your sweet personality.

And that friendship? It will seem serious to you alone. If you are any good as a Realtor, your deep, deep friendship will be invisible to everyone else. You should be much too busy to be anyone’s friend. If you make a stout effort, you can hold up your end with your spouse and kids, but, beyond that, you should expect to hear this from the people you think of as being your friends: “The only time we ever get to see you is when we’re buying or selling a house!” That is real estate in real life.

Here’s point number two: “Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit. Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it Read more

August 19, 2010

A weblogging strategy for non-writerly Realtors. Or: How you can learn to stop worrying and love your blog.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was on the phone yesterday with Chris Johnson, talking with him about Realtor weblogs. He mentioned that some of the buyers of his real estate weblogs are having trouble coming up with regular content.

I have a solution for them.

What should they do? Stop worrying about it — and solve the real marketing problem instead.

Instead of building a blogsite around a regularly-updated weblog, it would make more sense to me for reluctant writers to build the blogsite around the mission-critical content instead.

Here’s the deal: There are a finite number of topics that you absolutely, positively need to cover. Whatever target-marketed niche the blog is concerned with, you need to document that niche in a fairly comprehensive way.

How many articles would that take? Five? Ten? Surely not twenty. If you’ve done what you need to do, you can ignore the blog except when you’re burning up with something to say.

A WordPress theme like Equilibrium would give your weblog a magazine-like look and feel. The “featured” section could highlight the three or six or nine posts that are mission-critical for your niche. And the “latest post” section can document your more-recent musings. If you write something crucial later on, you can rotate it into the “featured” section.

Here’s the thing: Everything so-called weblogging experts (including me) have told you about real estate weblogging is probably wrong.

You are not trying to build long-term relationships with regular visitors who will wait for your latest pronouncements with bated breath. Instead, the objective of your blogsite should be to provide mission-critical information to people who will find you by Google when they need you and who will be happy to forget you just as soon as they no longer need you. The magazine-style blogsite fits that approach perfectly.

The purpose of your weblog is not to be available for lonely people looking for friends. It is not to make you one of the cool kids, so that Realtors from all over the world can show up at your place to grouse about how awful the real estate market is. The purpose of your blog is certainly not to make Read more

August 18, 2010

Lucha Libre Mortgage Reform

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

Last week there was some discussion about what was to have happened today in Washington. This discussion centered around whether the government would or would not take certain steps to protect the housing market through a mandated deficit funded mortgage bailout.

Today, we have some new information on what Tim Geitner and a host of invited banking executives chit chatted about.

Seems that much of the talk in a few of the posts here centered on whether we could expect the Obama administration and industry executives to continue along socialistic lines, (Wall Street still knows better than Main Street), or whether lightning would strike and we’d decide to take our lumps now.

The answer’s in.

Obama administration invited banking executives Tuesday to offer advice on changing the government’s role in the mortgage market. Their response: stay big.

While the executives disagreed on the exact level of support needed, the group overwhelmingly advocated the government should maintain a large role propping up the nearly $11 trillion market.

Bill Gross, managing director of bond giant Pimco, said the economic recovery required more government stimulus, particularly in the housing market. He suggested the administration push for the automatic refinancing of millions homes backed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac.

Refinancing those homes at the lowest mortgage rates in decades would give Americans more money each month. That would boost consumer spending by $50 billion to $60 billion and lift housing prices by as much as 10 percent, he said.

Without such stimulus in the next six months, Gross said, the economy will move at a “snails pace.”

Treasury officials have said they have no plans to enact such a plan, which has been the subject of intense rumors on Wall Street in recent weeks.

So it was just a rumor after all????? But wait….there was more…

Geithner did not offer a specific exit strategy for Fannie and Freddie. He agreed that the government could remain involved in the mortgage system by guaranteeing investors in mortgage-backed securities get paid, even when borrowers default.

There is a “strong case to be made” for such an arrangement, Geithner said.’

This is just like a professional Read more

August 17, 2010

Master Seller-Financing To Beat The Mortgage Market Freeze of 2011

by

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

Author website

I’m not so sure I want to play hockey against Bryant Tutas.  He thinks like Wayne Gretsky.

I cautioned about the coming mortgage freeze and asked what agents might do to prepare for it.  I’m a mortgage guy so I think in terms of institutional financing.  I completely forgot about seller-financing.  Bryant Tutas answered:

I’m ready for it. I just listed my 3rd property this month where the seller is offering financing. Seller financing is going to be very popular over the next few years. I’ve also been marketing to foreign investors with cash to spend. Once they purchase a home we turn right around and offer it for sale with financing. It’s a win all the way around.

Are you kidding me?  It’s so time-tested but underutilized it’s brilliant.  I forgot all about it!

What do you know about seller-financing?

First, you have to have a seller with some equity but…. ain’t nobody got no equity no mo’.  What’s a hustler to do?

Foreigners are looking to pay cash for U.S. homes and are finding great bargains at auction.  In San Diego, we see investors buy properties at auction and sell them for 20-35% higher, 60-90 days later.  The problem with some of those properties is that they aren’t appraising.  Seller financing doesn’t require an appraisal nor does it have  those pesky underwriting guidelines.  Bryant Tutas mentioned that he is prospecting foreign investors, to buy properties and sell them with financing terms.

This is the ultimate form of private financing.  Before you embark on this strategy, you might advise your sellers to require the following when considering offers:

  • a tri-merged credit report– you definitely want to check for tax liens, judgments, and large charge-offs.  All of those can become liens on title
  • It’s a good idea to require some income documentation– if your buyer’s housing expense doesn’t exceed 50%, you’re kosher in California but it’s probably a good idea to make sure that all of his/her debts don’t exceed 50% of gross monthly income
  • A down payment is going to assure your buyer has something to lose if the deal goes sour.  I might suggest Read more
August 17, 2010

Nobody Cares About Your M.O. ‘Till They See It’s Skinnin’ Cats Big Time

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

In almost every baseball game you’ll ever see, there comes a point when the starting pitchers run into a situation on which the game’s outcome will likely pivot. Take last night for instance — the Padres/Cubs game in Chicago. Padre’s starting pitcher Keven Correia had a rocky first inning. The first two batters hit safely, resulting in men on 2nd and 3rd with nobody out, and the heart of the order now due up.

Nobody scored.

Kevin went on to pitch shutout ball ’till lifted for a pinch hitter in the seventh inning. That first inning could’ve gone either way. But he skinned that cat in short order. He’s not Bob Gibson, in that he can’t overpower hitters. He gets batters out the old fashioned way — by pitching, not throwing. When the season’s over, Kevin will have won 13-15 games, a total which is distinctly in the upper echelon of major league results.

HIs fastball can be hit by high school players if not located well. His curveball reminds nobody of Sandy Koufax. Yet he keeps skinnin’ more of his share of cats. Why? Cuz even though his ‘stuff’ ain’t hall of fame caliber, he knows how to make the best of what he has, and consistently does what all winning pitchers do, regardless of what they’re throwing. He disrupts batters’ timing. I know this first hand, as I had the pleasure of havin’ the dish once when he was a junior college pitcher in San Diego.

It ain’t rocket science– but a helluva lot easier said than done. It’s analogous to success in real estate brokerage. Those who do what produces consistent results — skin the most cats — win. And to quote all of our grandpas, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Last Thursday I wrote a post about a guy on the east coast who’s been skinnin’ cats at a pretty impressive clip, almost all on the buyer side. (He’ll close 70 sides this year.) Exclusive of any referrals, 100% of his business comes directly from his online efforts, which generate about 7-8,000 leads Read more

August 16, 2010

The End Product of Appeasing the Collective: Chris Pearson, GPL and Matt Mullenweg

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

This post contains a Bawld Guy axiom, some tech wank, and more.

For those people that do what I do (what is it that I do–if anything?  I often wonder), there was kind of a big debate this past month.  It involved WordPress–open source GPL software–Thesis, formerly proprietary software that capitulated to no avail.  Matt Mullenweg, an unstable genius that seems hell bent on harming his community (more on that in a moment), Chris Pearson, a narcissistic genius that seems hell bent on blowing a hole in his leg because you can’t tell him what to do.

The gist: the Thesis theme (a theme that I deliver something like 60% of my sites in) was not GPL.  Despite the fact the only lawyers that claimed that it needed to be worked for a free software foundation, AutoMATTic was pursuing them to become GPL.  Ma.tt started calling Chris out on Twitter, not suing, no, just acting like a goon.  There was a delightful Mixergy where Chris Pearson and @@photomatt fought amongst themselves.

I love me some good wank as much as the next guy, so I had to chime in.   I didn’t add much new–the whole situation was utterly ugly all around and very unfortunate, but some of the WP types dropped in to comment (and I love posterous for its simplicity.  But I digress.)

Our dear friend WP Tutorial god Ben Cook summarizes it better than I do for those of us  that love a nerd war.

The Point, If I have One: Don’t Comply With The Hive, They Never Stop.

So after a lot of wrangling–and even a Mashable write up, Copyblogger Brian Clark (who dissolved his partnership shortly after this incident) got Pearson to stop it already and adopt GPL–and probably that should have been done to begin  with for practical reasons.  Note: I hate when people try and force my hand.  Huzzah for Harmony, and Ma.tt was initially thrilled.

But not so fast, last week (meant to post this a while ago, left Macbook in Seattle)  opened another salvo against a compliant opponent, and like France in WWI, Matt is  demanding reparations.   This Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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