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Author: Mark Green (page 1 of 2)

Database Marketing Expert

December 26, 2010

The Ten Commandments of Buyer Side Representation

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Merry Christmas.  Happy Hanukkah.  Happy Kwanzaa… Festivus… all that stuff.  Lovely… now let’s get down to business.  I’m buying a house.  Along the journey, I’ve paid close attention to how the average Real Estate Agent operates.  I’m sharing these thoughts with my fellow Bloodhounds at the risk of offending some – or perhaps all – of you.  But it all comes from the right place and I hope you enjoy…

Commandment #10:  Have a freaking take.

Are you the type of Real Estate Agent who likes to open doors for clients and then stand silently with a pleased expression as they walk through the home?  If so, I suggest you consider a new profession.  Look, I want to know what YOU think about a home too… that’s one of the reasons I hired you.  I might agree with you, I might not.  But when you have a take, you engage in critical dialogue with your clients.  In my case, I’d trust you more if you tell me what you don’t like about something.  It would make me feel like you’re looking out for me.

Commandment #9:  Don’t tell me you’re a Top Producer.

Because if you are, I probably know that already and all it sounds like is bragging (which most of the time… it is).  Just let your work do the talking for you.  Oh, and here’s just a bit of a peeve… if you’re in the “Million Dollar Club” is that really something worth crowing about anymore?  What is that… 3, 4, maybe 5 houses a year? 

Commandment #8:  Avoid this question:  “So what do you want to do?”

This commandment is closely associated with #10 above.  One agent I was working with loved to interrupt me with that magical question and eventually I told her what I wanted to do:  fire her.  Instead of asking what your client wants to do (which, by the way, they could easily figure out without your counsel)… you ought to continue tossing ideas/suggestions at them.  And if you REALLY want to impress your clients, give them the upside and downside with every suggestion you make.  Then listen.  Simple.

Commandment #7:  Read more

June 30, 2010

The Evolution of a Salesman

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When I graduated college in 1992, I couldn’t wait to put what little I’d learned into play.  Fortunately, I had a role model (“Who We Are”/”People”/”Ken Jones”) willing to let me shadow him like a puppy dog twelve hours a day.  Before long, I became a pretty solid “ad man”.  But it wasn’t the media planning or copywriting that inspired me.  It was consulting with our clients.  It was listening to their problems and challenges – and finding creative ways to solve them.  Problem was, the company I worked for at the time was fat and happy.  They had “enough” business to pay for our waterfront office space and their German automobiles.

I thought that mentality sucked.

At the time, I was low man on the totem pole.  Frankly, I’m not even sure my status qualified for a head on the totem pole.  This was a status I gratefully would never relinquish.  Yet, typically it was either me or Ken who opened shop every morning and the two of us would inevitably lock up every night.

After finishing the annual Port of Miami print media plan three months into the year – and by the way, you ain’t lived until you’ve duked out a 12-insertion deal with Inbound Logistics magazine – something strange happened… I ran out of things to do.  We in the real estate/mortgage profession can’t even fathom this ever happening, right?  I was getting a paycheck every two weeks and was doing absolutely nothing to earn it.

Apparently, my ass-sitting didn’t bother the owners of our ad agency very much.  But it bothered the hell out of me.  We needed some new clients – and if the owners weren’t going to get off their duffs to find some, hell… I would.  Now if you’d known me then, you’d probably be laughing right now.  I was barely old enough to buy a beer.  I’d literally just gotten my degree.  I had absolutely zero business experience.  And I was picking up the Yellow Pages and cold calling some of the largest and most prestigious advertisers in the Tampa Bay area.  I was too young, stupid and naive to know it wasn’t going to work.

Have you Read more

June 6, 2010

Another Life Lesson Courtesy of MLB

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I love sports.  My wife – well, she pretty much despises them.  Why, she’ll ask, do I so often waste my evenings watching a game between two teams I barely care about?  I typically reply with “Sports are the ultimate in reality TV”.

It seems every week or two we’re dealing with another example of athletes making complete shit storms of their lives.  Tiger Woods.  Ben Roethlisberger.  It’s a long list.

However, this week something happened that inspired me.  It was a complete injustice – a robbery.  Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga did something no other Detroit Tiger has ever accomplished.  He threw a Perfect Game.  Heck, the feat has only been accomplished 20 or so times in the history of Major League Baseball.  Only, on the way into the history books, something happened.  In case you haven’t seen it, you can find the video replay here.

The story, however, only begins when Galarraga’s foot steps on the first base bag.  The juicier – and more compelling – story comes out of the aftermath.

Photo: from nbcsports.com

Jim Joyce, the umpire who missed the historic call was devastated when he saw the TV replay:

“It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the [stuff] out of it,” Joyce said, looking and sounding distraught as he paced in the umpires’ locker room. “I just cost that kid a perfect game.”

No excuses.  No attempt at rationalization.  It was a bang-bang play that routinely gets botched by first-base umpires.  If this happened in the 3rd inning rather than with two outs in the 9th, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.  And the wonderful life lesson wouldn’t have been shared:

1)  Jim Joyce owns up to his mistake.  He then offers a sincere and heartfelt apology to Galarraga and all Detroit Tigers fans who were broken hearted that evening.  Not two weeks later, but immediately.

2)  Armando Galarraga accepts the apology and takes the high road.  “I have a lot of respect for the man. It takes a lot to say you’re sorry and to say in interviews he made a mistake.” said Galarraga.  Here’s Read more

January 23, 2010

Why Stop With the Bath Water When You Can Throw Out the Baby At No Additional Charge?

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Full disclosure: I’m neither Democrat nor Republican. I’m neither Mortgage Broker nor Mortgage Banker. I am a consumer – just like you.

I haven’t been over here to play as often as I’d like because of some other projects I’ve been passionately pursuing.  My bad, because this is still the place to be for people with a take.  And I’ve got a take:

What the American public doesn’t know is what makes them the American public, alright?

– Dan Akroyd as Ray Zalinsky in the movie “Tommy Boy”

For the rest of this article to make sense, I’d ask that you take 2 minutes to read this letter authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke dated Dec. 24, 2009.

Here’s the cliff’s notes version the way I read it:

  1. Mortgage brokers are crooks.
  2. The subprime debacle happened because consumers were “tricked” into loans they couldn’t afford to repay.
  3. Eliminating the Yield Spread Premium (YSP) will fix our problems.

To support his argument to kill YSP, Merkley cites a NY Times editorial piece painting the mortgage broker as unethical and the root of the subprime debacle.  Here are a few questions I’d like to pose to the pound for thought and discussion:

  1. YSP existed in its current form up until Jan 1, 2010 – when the new Good Faith Estimate and RESPA rules took effect .  By the way, is there still such a thing as a “subprime loan”?  What banks are writing “subprime loans” today?  Six months ago?  A year ago?
  2. Did it EVER make any sense that a bank would knowingly extend a loan to a borrower who had demonstrated a propensity to default and thus would be more likely than normal to default on their mortgage?  Where is the mention of the “stated income” loans in Merkley’s letter.  Certainly THAT didn’t contribute to the subprime mess, right?
  3. FACT:  today, the mortgage broker CANNOT earn YSP.  YSP belongs to the borrower and may only be rebated to the borrower.

I’m going to repeat that for effect.

  1. Senator Merkley, less than one month ago
  2. Authored a letter (co-signed by approximately 20 other Senators)
  3. In the guise of consumer protection
  4. Calling for the elimination of Read more
November 17, 2009

Taking the Genius of Brian Brady to the Next Level: How to Pipe Linked In Network Updates Into Your Feed Reader

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In the spirit of my #1 Bloodhound Blog Unchained takeaway, here’s a 70% ready-to-roll video.  Brian Brady was kind enough to teach me his brilliant way of leveraging Linked In to establish new relationships.  I haven’t been executing the Brady Principles consistently enough.  Check out a little something-something I stumbled upon (no pun intended) today:

Here are some related links if you’d like to learn more about Brian Brady’s Linked In techniques or Google Reader:

Brian Brady Training on Linked In (awesome webinar we recorded in March)

Google Reader vs. Twitter Lists (why I disagree with a recent article Scoble wrote vs. Google Reader)

Introduction to Google Reader (great article by Mark Madsen, fellow BHB contributor)

November 15, 2009

33 Quality Touches for Real Estate Agents

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In Gary Keller and Dave Jenks’ game changing book “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent”, the authors recommend a “33-Touch” follow-up system to stay top of mind with “mets”.

Millionaire RE AgentIt was actually a brilliant idea – for Keller.  KW agents immediately began flooding the market with (expensive) calendars, post cards, and chotchkies – building the Keller Williams brand in the process.  While Century 21 squandered ad dollars sponsoring the MLB All Star Game and RE/Max floated its balloon on expensive and largely ineffective national TV ad buys, Keller Williams gained market share without spending a corporate dime.

Back in 2004, when the book was published, I felt strongly that 33 annual touches was too high a frequency for real estate professionals.  But that was before I started exploring social media.  Today, it’s very conceivable for a real estate agent to reach their database with 33 quality touches per year.  Below, I’ve mapped out a sample 33-touch program.

Postal Mail:  5 touches

Direct mail is relatively expensive when compared to some of the vehicles we’ll discuss below – but I still believe it should be a core component in any CRM campaign.  Of critical importance – your direct mail efforts need to look and feel as if they are “one-to-one” correspondences.  I have never preferred post cards and “newsletters” because they are clearly mass-mailing efforts.  We want your contacts to believe that you specifically thought of them when we reach them via direct mail.  Direct mail ideas:

  • Birthday cards for the client and co-client
  • Thanksgiving card (rather than the stale holiday card approach)
  • Market updates (make these a mail-merged professional letter, not a bulk-mail blast)
  • Announcements (invites to charity events, new hires, testimonials/case studies, etc)

E-mail:  12 touches

I’ve written a few articles about the trials and tribulations of email marketing on the Top of Mind Blog – all of which boil down to common sense.  Email is cheap and easy.  This low barrier to entry creates more and more emails being dumped into our inbox every day.  Clutter is a marketer’s worst enemy.  Your email correspondences must meet an extremely high bar in order to maintain readership and response over the long Read more

October 8, 2009

A Bloodhound’s Proven System for Sniffing out Hotel Deals

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Hi everyone!  I’ve been reading BHB religiously but have been a very naughty contributor.  This is still my favorite blog and it’s an honor to be a part of this community.

I recorded a 6 1/2 minute video detailing a fun little system I’ve been using to save thousands – yes, thousands – on my hotel costs.  I hope you find it worthy.  If not, flame away and I’ll stick to what I know best next time.

June 26, 2009

Vultures to the Rescue – HOORAY!!!

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Here's the email - I added the red boxes

What the hell is a Forensic Loan Audit you ask?

According to the SPAM email (above – I drew the boxes for emphasis) that landed in my inbox last night, a company called National Loan Auditors provides a service that:

1)  Markets to loan originators with the purpose of providing loan file audits that

“expose federal, state, county and statute violations, along with any unethical predatory lending practices.”

2)  So mortgage professionals can

“leverage [their] company or firms ability to assist [their] past and present customers, helping them negotiate better mortgage rates and terms with their existing lender…”

3)  Oh, and by the way the mortgage professional can also

“earn up to $1,700 on each case file”

Um, so what you’re saying is that I can market to my past clients, identify errors, omissions and fraudulent activity that occurred when I originated their loan AND pocket $1,700 in the process?  Seriously.  Am I reading this incorrectly?

Our company used to provide loan file audits to our clients too.  [If we could have made money doing it, we still would be.]  The purpose of our audits was to help identify these same types of errors and omissions.  The difference was in our motivation:  our clients used our feedback to improve their compliance scores on future originations.  From experience, I can tell you that even the cleanest and most ethical shops had compliance errors in their files – most of which were innocent, victimless mistakes.  For example, in the State of Georgia, an originator is considered to have taken a Loan Application when collecting any financial information from the borrower – and of course a Good Faith Estimate is required to be sent within 72 hours of the loan application.  This is a common mistake originators make (both banker and broker by the way) – one of many easy to make errors.  There are 20 other similar examples I could point out here but let me get back to the point…

Now you have these vultures performing similar audits with the malicious intent of leveraging even the most benign of errors into strong-arming banks into loan modifications.

Does this type of value proposition help illuminate why the large Read more

June 10, 2009

If You Will Not Assist Us With the Shrubbery, We Will Be Forced To Say “MORTGAGE!!”

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Oh, what sad times are these when loan originators can say such words as “Free” and “Mortgage” at will to their contact database?!?!

For if thou doest seek thine Holy Grail, or at least a decent shrubber, ye shalt best consult thy Book of Armaments here before lobbing thine Holy Hand Grenade of Drip Email upon thy database.

In Addition to Nee, Pang and Nuuuwon, Ye Shalt Also Avoid:

Okay, enough of the silly talk.  I’ve got actual work to do.

1)  Free + ________: Permission Marketing proponents love giving free stuff away.  Make it a point to avoid this evil word your email subject lines.

2)  Mortgage: Perhaps the evilest word of them all!  How do you avoid this one if you’re a loan originator?  I guess you could substitute nuuuwon.  Or you can just make it a habit to check your subject lines for keyword spam infractions before sending.  Either will do.

3)  Low Interest Rates: Not that we have a problem with that right now.  So I’m announcing a temporary hunger strike until rates drop back below 5%.  Or at least until dinner.

carrot-top-steroids1Hey, you’ve been a great audience.  Now I’ll turn the stage over to not a good friend of mine who definitely has not been doing any steroids or performance enhancing drugs.  His jokes sucked before he looked like this too.

June 5, 2009

Please Help Me Welcome NAMB President Marc Savitt To Web 2.0 – Action Step Requested

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I wrote an article at Lenderama yesterday.  Here’s the deal:

I’m a card carrying NAMB Basher and have been for several years.  And I’m hardly alone.  The other day, I had a 10-minute phone conversation with NAMB President Marc Savitt.  The conversation inspired me to write the article you’ll find on Lenderama.

If you’d be so kind to read that article, and if compelled, please leave a comment letting Mr. Savitt know that if he engages us, we’ll respond – and above all that you appreciate his efforts.  Now, more than ever, the mortgage industry needs to come together as one.  Brokers, bankers, supply chain… all of us.

Please help me give Marc Savitt a warm welcome to the world of Web 2.0.  Thanks in advance.

May 28, 2009

If Not Us, Who?

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I’m in a lousy mood today and I need your help.

The crooks are resurfacing.

If you thought the bad guys have been flushed out of the system, I’ve got some bad news for ya.  We spend an inordinate amount of time debating who and what caused the mortgage meltdown.  We spend very little time debating how we make sure it never happens again.  The key word I want to emphasize here is “we”.

It’s not up to the government to fix this mess.  It’s not up to NAMB, or NAR or Ghostbusters.  It’s up to US – the folks in the field and on the street that see the dishonesty and suck in the stench seven steps before it gets packaged into mortgage backed securities.

I wrote an article entitled The Code:  How the Mortgage Industry Could Self Regulate a few days ago.  Alas, my baby blog is a PR2 and I doubt too many people saw it.  I think it’s an important concept and I am grateful for a venue like Bloodhound Blog to facilitate the conversation.

If you leave it up to your government, you get lame-brain ideas like HVCC.  I’m telling y’all right now, right here that I’m going to do my little part to protect the general public from the bad guys.  We need to clean up our own industry.  Brian Brady has it right in my book:  you do wrong and he’s gonna “come down on you like a ton of bricks”.  People look to us as fiduciaries, and I do believe in buyer beware.  But unfortunately the doofus who doesn’t do his homework and gets himself ripped off just lowered the property values of every smart guy on his block.

So here’s the question I want to pose to the Bloodhound Community:

I know a bad guy, a predatory lender who ripped off hundreds of borrowers.  He went away for a while and now he’s back.  What can I do about it?  How do we take our industry back?

May 24, 2009

Show Me “Paint the Fence”

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I have a confession to make:  CRM isn’t as complicated as people tend to make it.  Take a look at an app like Salesforce and they purposely build the interface to look like you’re piloting a 747 jet when in reality all you’re looking to do is deepen a few hundred relationships and organize your life.  We CRM experts like to try and look a lot smarter than we actually are.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some easy action items that will make managing your database a snap.  WARNING: I’M FLORIDA EDUCATED SO I TEND TO KEEP THINGS AT A 7TH GRADE LEVEL.  GREG SWANN: INITIATE LOBOTOMY NOW.

Lesson #1:  Paint the Fence

Remember when Mr. Miyagi made poor Daniel Son paint the fence?  And wash the car?  And paint the fence again?  If we’re gonna make you a black belt database manager, you’re going to have to suck it up too.  One must not deliver kick to opponent family jewel without proper training.

The most common problem I notice when consulting with mortgage/real estate professionals:  the quality of your data sucks.

  1. Lazy Data Entry:  If you’re populating data from an internet form, expect respondents to take as little time as possible getting to the goodies you’re dangling.  No less than 50% of your data will come in with capitalization, punctuation and other grammatical errors.  There are some automated ways to help clean this data, and I’ll leave that for another day.  But in the meantime, I’m asking you to make a habit of cleaning data as you go.
  2. Incomplete Data:  For the belly-to-belly folks:  I have my salespeople take the extra 120 seconds to visit a new prospect’s website as they enter data into our CRM system.  When I find records with just a name and email address, I get pissed.  When you take the extra time to dig for granular data on a contact, you’re in essence learning more of their story in the process.  Did my prospect give me a fake phone number (easy to learn if the the phone number on their website is different than the one they gave you!)?  How Read more
May 6, 2009

Twitter? I barely even know ‘er.

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More speculation this week surrounds Twitter – word has it Apple’s dangling $700 million in front of them.  Well roll me up in saxony carpet and toss me on down the stairs – but I don’t get it.

If I’m understanding this correctly, the object of Twitter is to get as many complete strangers as possible to “follow” you.  In return, you’ll be a swell guy and follow them back.  The next step is to “Tweet” mindless nonsense so your “followers” can ignore you in 160 characters or less.

Now that’s not to say that everyone’s Tweets are nonsense and ignored.  Only about 99.5% of them.  The other .5% are gems worthy of “Re-Tweeting”.  Huh?  I guess blogging’s become oh-so-2006, which is a bummer because I’m just starting to get the hang of it.

As Twitter-mania spins out of control, we have CNN battling Ashton Kutcher in a race to 1 million followers (which got me thinking, what’s Ted Turner’s commission rate on the $700 million?).  An NBA player is reprimanded by his coach for “Tweeting” during halftime of a game.  Oh the humanity!

I have a lot of questions, and I know that the Bloodhound Nation is the right place to turn for answers:  Is Twitter the new SPAM?  What happens when each of us follows 2,500 people and 2,500 people follow us?  Do we then just hire an assistant to sort through our daily tweets?

If you’re pro-Twitter, I’d love to hear how you’re putting it to work for you.  Are you seeing tangible results?  If so, are they scalable – ie:  will they diminish w/ clutter or do you foresee future success as Twitter grows?  Where does Twitter rank in your Social Media hierarchy?

More importantly, is Twitter a fad?  Apparently Apple doesn’t think so.  Where do you guys see Twitter a couple years down the road?

April 20, 2009

“No Matter How Good You Get, You Can Always Get Better…

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… and that’s the exciting part.”  End Quote.

That’s a peek into the mind of the man who arguably will go down as the most dominant athlete of all time – Tiger Woods.

For those of you who aren’t golf fans, let me rewind a few years.  Tiger Woods was firmly entrenched as the #1 player in golf.  And by firmly entrenched, let’s just say that the #2 player in the world couldn’t even carry Tiger’s bag.

Yet, at the height of his dominance, Woods shockingly fired his “swing coach” and re-engineered his entire mechanical approach to the game.  Virtually everyone in golf thought he was nuts.  And the results were far from immediate.  In fact, some players on the PGA Tour even began referring to Tiger as “beatable”.

We all know what happened next… he won last year’s US Open with what basically amounted to a broken leg.  Woods refers to this victory as his greatest ever.

Here’s the thing:  Tiger Woods doesn’t share his secrets of success with his peers.  Any golfer looking to supplant Tiger as the world’s greatest player is going to have to figure it out for himself.

But for some reason, the sharpest minds in the real estate industry are willing to share what makes them successful with the rest of us.  Here are some of the questions I asked myself before committing the time and money to attend Unchained:

  • Can you create your own website without any help from anyone?
  • If so, how long does it take you to publish something worth seeing?
  • Are you ranking for the keywords your prospects are Googling?
  • Are your systems outdated and archaic?
  • Is there someone in your market who’s about to catch and pass you because they know more than you do?

Here’s another Tiger Woods quote from early in his career:

“Second sucks.”

If you live within 500 miles of Phoenix and you’re not committed to attending Unchained, chances are good there’s someone down the street who will be nosing up alongside you very soon.

I’ll be honest with you – I get the feeling my competitors are crawling up in the fetal position right now… cutting costs and wondering where Read more

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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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