BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2007 (page 1 of 7)

May 31, 2007

Tennessee commission rebate ban signed into law

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the the Nashville Tennessean:

Gov. Phil Bredesen has signed a bill reinstating a ban on cash rebates for home sales and other real estate transactions, despite opposition from consumer advocates and federal antitrust officials.

The bill signed late Wednesday reverses a decision made earlier this month by state regulators to repeal the ban under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Many flat-fee and discount real estate brokerages use rebates to reduce their commissions, which are set by home sellers. Justice Department lawyers have challenged cash rebate bans in several states, saying the bans hinder competition among agents.

But the Tennessee Association of Realtors urged lawmakers to reinstate the ban. They said the ban protects consumers from backroom deals between agents and outside parties, such as referral services and mortgage lenders.

The association also said discount brokerages can reduce their commissions by offering non-cash incentives, such as gift cards and services, or by renegotiating commission rates with sellers and their agents.

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May 31, 2007

Trulian overdue improvement: Zillow.com makes Home Q&A searchable by location

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Zillow Blog:

One request we received over and over again (including impassioned pleas from our own president, Lloyd Frink) was to let people see a list of Home Q&A in their city or ZIP code. Agents and other real estate professionals want to see what questions are being asked in their area and to help answer those questions. Homeowners want to see what people are saying about homes in their specific neighborhood.

Well, as of Tuesday night, your requests have been answered. On the Zillow home page, just below the two sample Home Q&A’s, is a new link that says “See Home Q&A in your area.” Click on it, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can type in any city and state or ZIP code and see the most recent questions and answers being asked about homes in that area.

This is an important catch-up to Trulia.com’s recent upgrades.

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May 30, 2007

OC Register’s Matt Padilla talks mortgages, blogging, and the main-stream media

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

On my home blog, Blown Mortgage, I have the honor of talking with some of the best people in our industry about their take on the current market and the forces that are shaping each of our lives in this profession. I’ve interviewed housing bears, loan originators, marketers and more. The level of ability and professionalism in our industry amazes me each time I have the opportunity to talk with someone new.

This week I had an opportunity to speak with Matthew Padilla. Matt is the Real Estate and Mortgage reporter for the Orange County Register. I was looking forward to this interview because it marked the first time I had a chance to speak with a member of the main-stream media about the mortgage and real estate markets. I was interested in hearing him talk to what he has heard from his investigative reporting (since he does get to spend all day chasing down the stories).

While his insight on the market is, in my opinion, spot on and valuable; the reason I wanted to share it here with you is that Matt provides interesting insight in to how blogging has impacted his reporting and coverage. Speaking with him it became very apparent that what we do as bloggers has caused a paradigm shift in how the main-stream media thinks about, generates, and disseminates news. Matt talked at length about how and why he uses a blog, how he designates pieces for the blog versus the paper, how other blogs drive his research, and a wide range of other topics about the interface between the new and old mediums.

I think that all of us that blog each and every day should always remain aware that what we are doing is of extreme importance and consequence. Each blog post, each insight, each story and personal experience shared by experts such as those I have the privilege of writing with here at Bloodhound is shaping the news that is told tomorrow. If you ever wonder if anyone is listening and you wonder if it is worth Read more

May 30, 2007

Teri Lussier: There are no do-overs in weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Derek Sterling Burress has an in-depth interview with Teri Lussier, owner of TheBrickRanch.com real estate weblog, Project Blogger contestant, and BloodhoundBlog contributor:

Derek Sterling Burress: Since you are fairly new to the world of blogging, what has been some of the most difficult things you have had to learn as a blogger?

Teri Lussier: The hardest thing is that what you write is potentially there forever. Once it’s there, you don’t really get a do-over, as someone could copy and paste it elsewhere. That’s intimidating in some respects, but it makes you think about what you are saying and choose words very carefully.

It’s a nice long interview, a lot of fun to read. Go see for yourself.

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May 30, 2007

Soul Searching (R-E-S-P-E-C-T)

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

When did people stop being genuine? In our uber-competitive world, it seems every gesture is intended or at least construed as self-serving. Professionally, we have all become salesmen; we sell our products, our services, and ourselves. We have become increasingly skeptical and cynical, our actions are premeditated and our lives are scripted. We have a script for our acquaintances, for the telemarketers, and for our customers and clients. “I’m fine, how are you?” (I’ve had a sucky day to end all sucky days); “Thank you, but we are happy with our long-distance service” (I have no idea who my long-distance service provider is, but I am currently watching Forest Gump for the eighth time); and, “It is important to list with an agent who cares about your family and your equity, wouldn’t you agree?” (I have said this so many times that it has lost all meaning and sincerity).

New agents and even the multitudes wanting to take their business to the “next level” are constantly being coached to learn and rehearse The Script until the objections can be overcome in their sleep. Knowing what you might say in a given circumstance is one thing, but spewing forth a rehearsed scene with the passion of a high school science teacher is another.

In all things marketing, I continue to believe that we should think like the consumers we in fact are. How would this ad impress you? Would that brochure inspire you to purchase the home or consider employing this agent in the future? Is the quality, content and overall flavor of the piece consistent with the image you really want to convey?

Our words are no less important. How do you react to a too-practiced sales pitch? Do you enjoy being pitched at all?

The reality is that we are all ego-driven, and being primarily motivated by self-satisfaction and personal fulfillment is not a character flaw, it is the human condition. Even the kindest, most generous among us practice magnanimity as much for the way it makes us feel good about ourselves as how it might serve another. The bottom line is that we Read more

May 29, 2007

Ask the Blogger: How much is eleven months in dog years?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in by email:

I find myself commenting on more and more of your blogs, because of my respect for some of your writers.

My concern is who are your readers?

How large is your audience?

Are we dealing with real estate professionals or the general public?

BloodhoundBlog is eleven months’ old today. We’re whipping up the batter for a first-birthday cake that — I assure you — Odysseus will be more than happy to eat.

Who are our readers?: Real estate professionals, by an overwhelming margin.

Weekdays are strong, weekends are weaker, but we average around 1,200 unique visitors a day. Those are click-through visitors, people who are actually landing on one or more of our pages. The overwhelming majority of them come from sites we know, mainly other real estate weblogs. A significant portion come from search engines, this because we tend to score very high on certain industry-related searches.

In addition, we have a very strong RSS subscriber base. How strong, precisely, I do not know, this because I don’t like routing traffic through third-party vendors. On top of that, we add new email-based subscriptions every day. For these latter, I see actual email addresses, so I know for sure we are appealing to real estate professionals.

There’s more I could say. For example, Google Analytics tells me that our readership is extremely “sticky”: Thousands of people have visited BloodhoundBlog hundreds of times. Since last August, when I installed Google Analytics, more than 42,000 individuals have visited us 9 or more times. Over 20,000 people have come here 51 or more times. Again, this ignores RSS subscribers. We are talking to a large, growing and very loyal audience.

Why does it work so well? I don’t suffer the curse of modesty, so I’ll tell the bald truth: We are as popular as we are because we deserve to be. We write wisely, wittily and well about things that matter to real estate professionals. We don’t divide our attentions trying to serve two divergent audiences, and we are so far-flung as to be completely location-independent. We are philosophically and temperamentally diverse, and yet we are able Read more

May 29, 2007

401(k)’s IRA’s & Urban Myths

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

In a recent post, Retirement — A New Class Being Created, I predicted a new class of retiree living a life tied to their free and clear home, with little monthly income. It inspired some interesting comments, and a question that is the inspiration for this post. One reader, Eric, was surprised to hear his 401(k) would be taxed when he retired and began taking distributions. So he asked the following question.

Help a young man out here – what tax bite do you speak of? Early withdrawal? I was under the impression that so long as a 401k built up to a certain age (65?) that it was relatively tax free?

Rain on my parade, I’m wearing my parka. 🙂

It’s not Eric’s fault (at least mostly) he thinks his withdrawals would be ‘relatively’ tax free. I’ve had many people in my office tell me what they know on the subject, most of it based on what some expert at work told them. But alas, it is taxed just like you’re being taxed now Eric. And if you’re not taking out what Big Brother thinks you should be by the time you’re in your early 70’s, they’ll make you take out more, or penalize your butt.

That’s when Chuchundra came in to soften things up for poor Eric. Chuchundra then offered some advice to Eric using the number one urban myth out there on the subject. In his comment, Brian Brady recognized this advise for what it was — pure urban myth. Chuchundra said:

If you have a standard, pre-tax 401K or IRA, you pay tax on your distributions. It’s considered regular income. You didn’t pay tax on the money you put in or on the capital gains that money made over the years, so you pay when you take it out. The idea being that you’ll be in a lower tax bracket when you’re retired, so the tax bite will be smaller.

Now that might very well be true for those who followed the Grandpa Economics school of How To Retire With A Free & Clear Home While Learning To Live On Coupons, Read more

May 28, 2007

Elaborating the video slideshow beyond all reason: Bert and Ernie BlogTourUSA, the movie

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I got Final Cut Express HD for the Macintosh on Friday. Call it semi-pro video editing software, appropriate to folks like me with significant commercial needs but with neither the time nor the talent to make use of a higher-priced spread.

What you get with Final Cut Express is multi-track video and sound editing with cable-channel-like titling and a blue million sound effects. It doesn’t do green-screen superimposition (I don’t think), but the fanatical home-movie mechanic has everything he needs to alienate an entire family reunion in one elaborate film.

What I want, for now at least, it to insert slide-show images over live video, and I spent a bunch of time playing with those toys over the weekend. Today I built what I think will be my final statement on the video slide show: No full-motion video, but loads of fun with transitions.

I have loads to learn, but I think this hangs together pretty well. Give it a look. It’s fun.

May 28, 2007

Separating the Buyer Agent Commission From the Listing Commission is a REALLY stupid idea

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

This is a continuation of Jeff Kempe’s thoughtful post below. At first, I was going to reply to his post via a comment. But as I thought about it I realized there was way more I wanted to say.

First things first: Welcome Jeff, Lani & Morgan! I’m delighted to have you here.

__

It is common for a person to have a completely false idea of why something is good or bad and for them to still be correct that it is good or bad. This can come about when the person looks to see why something is the way it is and not knowing the correct answer (real reason why) they then make up or invent an answer. This new datum is then used to explain away some situation or circumstance they observe. This is so common that you can see examples of it in almost every profession, industry and government. Failure to correctly observe the real “right why” is THE WHY for every failure any individual, organization or government ever had. A real WHY opens the door to handling.

Man too often finds that his “solutions” become his new problems. Most of the difficulties one faces on a regular basis (problems) are, in fact, themselves solutions to earlier problems.

I do not intend to be disrespectful here towards your friend and mentor, Jeff – but several of the things he has informed you about are completely incorrect. The thinkingcapidea that a Realtor not sharing a commission was passed into law in state after state after state, across the country, to “protect Realtors” or to somehow impede discounters is just flat wrong. I can’t say that any of those laws were the best possible solutions but they had nothing to do with “protecting Realtors”. In every state where a real estate license is required to legally earn and collect a commission (all 50 in the United States, last time I checked) there is some sort of rule or regulation that states commissions can not be paid to an unlicensed individual. In most every state there is a special exception to this rule for lawyers Read more

May 27, 2007

Tennessee, Oregon, and the State of Real Estate

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

This started as a reply to Greg’s post on the Tennessee legislature, which apparently insists going backward is the new going forward. But then I had The Conversation, and it’s developed into a post of its own.

Involved is someone I respect, a friend, a mentor, perhaps the one person more responsible for getting me into real estate than anyone. In the business over twenty years, he knows RE law better than most principal brokers, and has helped me enormously in the first three years I’ve been around.

Oregon is one of the eleven states that has a “Thou shalt not share commission!” law, passed at least fifteen years ago, notwithstanding Glenn Kelman’s Sixty Minutes inference that it was all about him. I wanted to know why it was passed in the first place: Assuming consumer protection against graft or corruption, I couldn’t figure out how that worked. The answer dumbfounded me:

“That protects us, our commissions. I’m glad it’s there.”

Oh, dear. Thank you for the candor. Elaborate?

“Look, I know you’re a free market kind of guy, but there’s nothing wrong with laws protecting us from consumers. People try to hack away at my commission every day on the listing side. This prevents the same kind of hacking on the buying side.”

Wait. Aren’t you worth the commission you charge? “Of course. That’s my point.” Then when someone asks you to cut your commission, what’s wrong with: No. Why do you need a law, especially a law that reinforces the public perception that we’re all self absorbed troglodytes?

“Twenty years ago, before the internet, we didn’t have that reputation. Now 80% of transactions don’t even really need a buyer’s agent.”

Say what?

It went on, defensively and testily. The internet’s the problem, we’re the victims. When I brought up separating buyer commission from listing commission, he said he hoped he was well out of the business before that happened.

It’s occurred to me: his opinion isn’t an anomaly; as I said here the biggest problem we face as an industry is our industry. I can’t begin to get my mind around treating clients as adversaries, Read more

May 25, 2007

MySpace Should Buy Trulia, Zillow and Active Rain

by

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

Author website

MySpace, Active Rain, Trulia, and Zillow. The perfect merger.

Active Rain: The best place for B2B sales in the real estate industry. Mortgage originators, title reps, and escrow officers who aren’t playing in the “Rain” are missing out on an incredible opportunity. I’m not going to expand on that anymore in the interest of greed. Realtors can juice their SEO on Active Rain, trade war stories, and learn the art of weblogging but they really aren’t having enough conversations with a consumer to warrant the time investment to have a presence there.

Zillow: The consumers I’ve “met” from Zillow tend to be “over-educated”. They are the “know everything” engineer-types who value real estate professionals only as a functionary. Contrary to tech culture belief, a business can not be built on commodity shopping; there is no incentive for participation from the real estate professional community. Zillow’s automated valuation model, however, may very well be the best use of technology for real estate. Consumers LOVE it regardless of it’s inaccuracies.

Trulia: Perhaps the best opportunity for a real estate professional to establish a credible web presence is in the Trulia Voices section. Just two weeks old, Trulia Voices is attracting consumers and providing a forum for professionals to answer questions. Buyers flock to Trulia because of the listings. Control the listings and you control the game.

MySpace: Last summer, Myspace just registered it’s 100 millionth user. Critics claim that MySpace is for teenagers and is not to be taken seriously. That is incorrect. Over half of the visitors on Myspace are over 35 years old as the site starts to mirror the population. Any MySpace user can tell you about the cultural shift these “graying users’ have brought to the site these past two years.

Why would I propose this “merger” of RE.net media? Zillow offers tools for the seller (or homeowner looking to refinance), Trulia owns the listings platform with the participation of the professionals. Active Rain has tech-savvy real estate professionals dying to interact with consumers over the web.

MySpace has the consumers. That is who we’re missing.

May 25, 2007

MLS ‘ad’ crackdown a waste of time, expert says

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

MLS ‘ad’ crackdown a waste of time, expert says

Here’s an interesting conundrum: MLS rules forbid one broker from advertising another’s listings without permission. The question is this: What is advertising?

At first blush, you might say that advertising is paid space or time in a publication or on a broadcasting outlet and that the rule is devised to prevent Broker Paul from advertising Broker Peter’s listings as if they were his own.

Surely it would be sleazy of Broker Paul to do that, but the rule itself is not without stain. Why wouldn’t Broker Peter want free advertising for his listings?

Because he wants to maximize his chances for representing both the seller and the buyer, taking commissions from both.

With the advent of the Internet, though, things are getting more complicated. Zillow.com, the Seattle-based real estate portal, will permit anyone, including Realtors, to announce that a particular home is for sale. Is this advertising another broker’s listings?

Seattle’s Redfin.com, a discount brokerage, built weblogs devoted to reviews of listed homes. The Northwest Multiple Listing Service has ordered the company to shut these sites down, assessing a $50,000 fine, claiming that the property reviews are advertising.

Two points to consider: First, nothing prevents ordinary people from saying whatever they choose, subject to libel laws, about a property. The only people to be restrained from speaking are MLS members, who presumably have the most information to share.

Secondly, these conversations will go on.

The Internet massively reduces the cost of sharing and acquiring information. The natural course of events for net-savvy consumers is to obtain as much information as possible before buying or selling anything.

Truly, resistance to this indefatigable quest for information is futile. So, smart vendors embrace it.

When you shop for a book on Amazon.com, at the bottom of the page you will find reviews by ordinary people, some positive, some negative — and the reviews themselves are rated by other users.

If Realtors, through the MLS, elect to exclude themselves from Net-based conversations about particular properties for sale, they will hurt no one but themselves.

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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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