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Category: Blogging (page 14 of 84)

May 29, 2008

Damn-straight department: “Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Real Estate Success Tools CEO Matthew Hardy speaking on BrokerIPTV.com:

Greg Swann I believe has a better understanding of where the real estate industry is going than most people out there right now. Greg has a perspective on understanding that this is a bottom up industry, that the individual real estate agent, their ability, their ability to own their own technology, to own their own systems, to own their own approach to business, is what is changing the entire industry. It is wrapped up in this thing called Web 2.0, but it is all based upon the idea of control and the power for the individual real estate agent to do what they want to do for their business.

You bet. We’ve known Matthew for more than a year, and his approach to business is very much like ours. If your income depends on milking underlings you think you have hypnotized into believing they need you, I cannot wait for the hammer of justice to fall on your head…

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May 29, 2008

Agent branding is good, but Trulia.com is still deliberately hi-jacking street addresses, frustrating the interests of sellers

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m still digging out from Unchained, so this is not as timely as it might have been.

First, I think we might have gotten distracted by whatever cozy arrangement does or does not exist between Trulia.com and Number 1 Agent.

Second, I think Trulia’s recent announcement that agents can “brand” their own listings is a move in the right direction. Trulia has always seemed to me to play favorites with the White Shoe set, and giving the grunts on the ground a chance to compete with their bosses for their own business is… damned near decent.

But: I am not prepared to yield on the main issue. When Trulia.com puts a “nofollow” on the link back to my single-property web site for my listing, it is depriving my sellers of the natural dominance they should have in Google over their own street address.

The issue is one of canonicity. If Truila were giving my URL an ordinary HTML anchor link, then Google would know that my site is canonical and Trulia’s is derivative — which is undeniably the truth.

By putting the “nofollow” tag on what is in fact a JavaScript link, Trulia is falsely implying that it is the canonical resource for information about that property.

That much is a lie, but it gets worse: If someone Googles the street address for my property and finds my single-property web site, my sellers — through me — have an uncontested opportunity to sell their home to that potential buyer.

If instead that potential buyer finds Trulia’s link to that home, the buyer is thrust into a vast supermarket of real estate, and the sellers are deprived of their opportunity to sell their home and their home only.

This is not a dual agency issue here, this is simply a matter of giving sellers the best advantage they can possibly have from searches on their own street address.

Because Google would regard a normal link as leading to a more canonical resource — regardless of differences in Page Rank — by putting a “nofollow” tag on its links to agent- and broker-supplied real estate listings, Trulia.com is deliberately hi-jacking the street Read more

May 27, 2008

All roads lead to Rome, but where three roads converge, the trivia that is yet another meme game is to be found

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eight questions, eight mostly inadequate answers:

1. Who is your favorite musical artist? (post a youtube video)

I like so much stuff that this becomes completely unfair. If you watch my choices of videos on BHB, those doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of my tastes. The folks at Unchained got to hear songs from my iTunes library, which includes a lot of bootlegs and otherwise unobtainable stuff. All that notwithstanding, if I had to pick one first-among-equals favorite, it would be Bob Dylan. But just writing that feels like a betrayal, because everything I love in art comes from a kind of visceral honesty that Dylan almost never achieves — mostly studiously avoids. But take a look at this:

The real Blind Willie McTell was a fairly ordinary early blues musician. He was nothing compared to Skip James, in my opinion. And why is Dylan celebrating the blues in a ballad? I think McTell is a cypher for Dylan in this song, and I think this is as close to an auto-encomium as we can ever expect from the man. In any case, this is great art from the first note to the last, an Apollonian frenzy made more violent because it is so tightly constrained.

2. Who is your favorite artist (post a flicker photo)

I don’t have a favorite visual artist. Of everything I’ve seen, Rodin is the most interesting to me, this because he is truly in love with humanity. I’ve worked in photography most of my life, at one time very seriously. I hate almost everything associated with the visual arts.

3. Who is your favorite blogger?

Again I must disappoint. Everything I love in art is a form of literature — even the music I love best. Almost no one in the history of literature was able to write both very quickly and very well. Shakespeare could, as could Mencken, but they don’t update their blogs that often. There’s no one in the world of weblogs who makes me crazy like the great writers of the world’s literature. How could there be? That’s an unfair standard to judge by. To have Read more

May 24, 2008

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I finally had a chance to take a long nap today, and I’m substantially revivified. The ideas the Barrys threw off at the end of their interview with Brian about working in Orlando have me all pumped up, so I thought we might talk a little.

First, doing Unchained the Barrys way opens up quite a few opportunities for hour-long breakout sessions. We would devote four rooms to this, maybe more, so there could be a lot of speaking opportunities. I’d like to see sessions for beginners, geeks, brokers, lenders, etc. I don’t hate it if you’re a vendor if you’re a vendor in our world. To make that more plain: We’re doing this show to help Realtors avoid wasting money on useless crap. If you’re delivering value in the Web 2.0 world, there’s room — and hope! — for you. 😉

The point of all this: If you would like to do one of these breakout sessions, speak up. Figure a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A as the room is being turned over.

Second, we want to preach to the masses. This is not a money-making endeavor, at least not so far. We want to carry the message to the masses, to advance this idea of wired excellence in any way we can. To that end, I’m interested in hearing suggestions about how we can get a lot of Realtors to lend us eight hours of their time, while they’re in Orlando for the convention. One thing we can do is affiliate programs for real estate weblogggers, but, even better than that, we can set up off-line affiliate programs. In other words, we can help you help your co-workers get a price break on Unchained Orlando, say with a coupon code or something like that. What other things should we be thinking about to fill the pews?

I’m wicked excited about this. In my email I’m advised to speak quietly, so as not to stir the beast. My take is that the NAR should make a very public effort to stay the hell out of our way. But whatever they do, Read more

May 24, 2008

Brian Brady does a BloodhoundBlog Unchained post-mortem on Real Estate Radio USA

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I missed this when it happened: Brian Brady did a great post-mortem rundown on BloodhoundBlog Unchained on RealEstateRadioUSA.com. Brian talks about key moments at the conference and about some of the Web 2.0 ideas that we had built into the event to emphasize the points we were trying to make. Near the end, Barry Cunningham and Barry Johnson offer some excellent ideas for making BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando a successful event.

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May 24, 2008

What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com — suddenly stopped producing.

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.

But here’s the interesting part of the story:

It does not matter.

The growth of this community has never depended on Google. Obviously some people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:

  • Links from other weblogs or web sites
  • Comments I left on other weblogs
  • Press mentions Read more
May 24, 2008

Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

What happens when you bring the brightest Realtors and lenders from all over the country to Phoenix for a social media marketing conference? Great ideas are cross-pollinated, germinated, planted, take root and flower.

We run a national real estate industry-focused weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 24 contributors — Realtors, lenders and investors from all around the country — and hundreds of daily visitors. We’ve been doing this for nearly two years, and, in that time, we have avidly pushed for excellence among real estate practitioners, especially in the burgeoning internet side of the business.

This past week we hosted the inaugural BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. People came from all over — a third from Greater Phoenix, a third from the rest of the Southwest, a third from places where it rains and snows. Together for three days we explored the world of social media marketing in real estate.

What’s that? Social media marketing is the commercial arm of the participatory internet. As more and more people make the internet their primary means of interacting with the world, real estate professionals are learning how to move their own practices online.

The important question: What’s in it for you? The internet is a brave new world of commerce. No one likes sleazy sales people, but sleazy sales tricks cannot work on the internet, where every suspicious claim can be checked in an instant. Transparency rules, and the practitioners who succeed with net-empowered consumers are the ones who are prepared to back up everything they say.

The bonus for people willing to work this way is that consumers will have a much higher degree of trust in their Realtor or lender. Rather than picking a name out of a phone book or off of a yard sign, they will have gotten to know that person — passively and anonymously — online.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained was put on by me and my partner, Brian Brady of MortgageRatesReport.com. If you’d Read more

May 24, 2008

Was BloodhoundBlog Unchained so much work that it made you sick?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We told you for months that we were going to give you a lot of work at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We knew we weren’t going to teach much, if anything, to Andy Kaufman or Brad Coy, but Joseph Runtz is trying to figure out how to eat an elephant. (One bite at a time, Joe.) Mark Eckenrode is erecting a secondary market in Unchained study aids, which I think is wicked cool.

But: Apparently, not everything was a raging success. Sue Griman had to leave during Glenn Kelman’s keynote address. By late evening, she was dreadfully ill, and she still isn’t back to full capacity. Laurie Manny reports that became ill when she got home in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, and she says the same illness may have affected Marlene Bridges and Lynda Eisenman at about the same time. Geno Petro’s post from yesterday suggests that he may have been sick and not just exhausted by the time he got back to Chicago on Wednesday night. [Geno confirms that he was ill, blaming a steak he ate Tuesday night.]

Sue thought she had food poisoning, and Laurie said the same thing, but the spaced-out timing would tend to suggest a virus or a bacterial infection, a contagion of some sort. Either way, while we certainly meant to send you home queasy with the workload, we didn’t intend to achieve actual nausea.

Even so, if you had a problem, let me know. If the problem really was food poisoning, we can let the caterers know about it. And if not, at least we’ll know more than we did before.

In any case, if BloodhoundBlog Unchained made you sick in any way at all — either physically ill or just dyspeptic at all that homework — you have our deepest apologies.

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May 23, 2008

To Sir, with love: A rundown of the links in the Unchained chain

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brian already cited some of the constructive criticism we have received about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and that’s as it should be. I think we did a nice job, for a first swing at the ball, but the whole BloodhoundBlog idea is about doing better. Praise might be sweet to the ears, but it is criticism that puts us on the path to perfection.

Even so, I promised some link love to people who blogged about or wrote to me about their experience at Unchained, so I’m going to discharge that duty in this post. We’re very grateful to the people who gave us their minds and their time and their funds, and I am more than delighted to pay back what I can.

Don Reedy paid more than most of us to attend Unchained. While he was in Arizona, his dog, Sir, a one-time Universal Studios movie star Rotweiller, made the run for the last exit. Don made the decision to forge ahead at Unchained, keeping us up to date as his wife nursed Sir through one medical procedure after another. But by the time Don got home late Tuesday night, Sir had passed away.

If you’re not a dog person, it might not mean anything to you. Cats and other pets have their charms, but a good dog is like a playful four-year-old child who never grows up and moves away. I don’t delude myself. I spend a lot of time thinking about the epistemology of dogs. But to have a friend that game, that loyal, that full of heart — always thrilled to see you, always eager to be involved, always there for you no matter what — that’s a love unbearable to lose.

Even so, we have to force ourselves to press on regardless. Sir’s life is over, but life goes on. Here’s to Don and to his wife, Beth. And here’s to another great dog they will learn to love, when their grieving for Sir has waned to something easier to endure.

Vance Shutes wrote about his experiences at Unchained. He also wonders if we’re going to run out of water. Not before Read more

May 22, 2008

Profiling our Zillow.com profile: Using landing pages and photos to try to create a compelling long-copy ad for our brokerage

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We talked quite a bit at Unchained about profiles on Social Media Marketing sites. Once you’ve made a commitment to a site, you’ll be adding a significant amount of content to that platform. When someone comes across something you’ve done, their natural impulse is to click through to your profile. If they do, what will they see?

Chances are, when you first signed up for that site, you blew right past the profile page, plugging in the minimum necessary information to get your registration done. You wanted to get to the content, after all, to find out if that site even met your needs. You discovered over time that it did, but you probably never thought to go back and complete your profile.

This is a mistake. Your profile is the space that web site provides for you to sell yourself. At a minimum, you can direct interested people back to your own weblog or web site. Some sites will provide multiple links. Some will let you flesh out a free-form “about me” section, so that you can say exactly what you want in your own words. Some will permit fairly elaborate HTML coding, with links back to specific landing pages on your web site: You can sell relocation to relos, rentals to investors, re-fi’s to the equity-enriched.

A couple of different times, I mentioned my Zillow.com profile. Zillow is pretty liberal in the kind of coding you can do — allowing links and photos in the “about me” section, for example.

Vance Shutes asked me to share my Zillow profile with him. I thought it might be better to take up the issue in the blog. I can talk about what I’m doing, you can talk about what you’re doing, and we all can learn better ways of building Social Media Marketing profiles.

So: Between the horizontal rules is the code we use on our Zillow.com profile, as well as on other sites:

Why do we deliver so much more value for our clients? For one thing, it’s a great strategy for marketing our real estate brokerage. But even before that, we love selling real estate, Read more

May 21, 2008

Satire is an evermore difficult and demanding art. Why? Because the world around us is often so risible as to be beyond parody…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Like this…

Unchained was promoted by Social Media Marketing only, most of it here. No advertising. No affiliate marketing. No ass-kissing. No taking crap from morons. No Inman.

If the lesson of this is lost on you, then you missed out on the biggest piece of what we were doing this week. I might try to convey the point in a satirical post, but how can I top the item linked above?

All of this broke out as I knew it would. We talk all the time about “What would David Gibbons do?” but this sequence of events came straight from the “What would Greg Swann do?” playbook. We’re not revolutionaries, despite the poses we might sometimes seem to strike. We’re all about supplanting what we see as negative forces, not up-ending them or making war on them.

So: What did Inman News do to itself this week — and in the preceding months? It ignored us, which did us no harm at all — but which demonstrated beyond all doubt that it is not devoted to news in the real estate industry.

It’s a dead letter, just like the NAR. In their heart of hearts, Brad Inman and his employees have known this all along. Now you know it, too.

In any case, here’s my great idea: No chokepoints. No bosses. No taking crap from morons. No Inman.

Feel free to add your own great ideas. There’s no “application form,” and you don’t have to kiss anyone’s “community” to win recognition for your brilliance.

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May 21, 2008

Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’m kicking this back up to the top. At the time I wrote this, I thought it might be enough to make the jackasses at ePerks.com come to their senses. Apparently not. If you are a real estate weblogger, and if you don’t want some sleazoid attorney pulling these stunts on you, you need to set your shoulder beside Vlad Zablotskyy’s and fight for your right to free speech. Let the world know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. –GSS]

 
Sleazeball lead vendor ePerks.com (corporate motto: “We don’t totally suck because we can’t get anything right!”) has found a great new way to respond to criticism: Censorship.

Real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy exposed ePerks to what by BloodhoundBlog standards amounts to very mild scrutiny. His posts elicited a number of horror stories from Realtors who had been misused in their dealings with ePerks.

So far nothing surprising. Lead vendors suck. They persist by virtue of creating an artificial marketing chokepoint, interposing themselves between consumers and the vendors who can satisfy their needs:

In the Web 1.0 world, lead vendors snapped up domains and fought hard for dominance on organic and pay-per-click keywords relating to real estate sales, mortgage origination and refinancing. By these means, they harvested contact information from interested parties, which they were then able to sell to Realtors and lenders, often for enormous fees. The lead vendors created an artificial chokepoint by marketing, then charged practitioners a premium to gain access to the consumers trapped at that chokepoint.

It is hardly shocking that most of the victims of lead vendors come to hate the scum who run these scams.

In the long run none of this matters. The Web 2.0 world disintermediates all man-made chokepoints. ePerks.com is one with the dinosaurs — and sic semper tyrannosauris!

But wait. There’s more. Instead of ignoring criticism on what is (sorry, Vlad) a low-traffic weblog, instead of asking itself “What would David Gibbons do?”, instead of engaging the enraged while retooling the chokepoint like Homegain.com’s Louis Cammarosano, ePerks.com chose to do the stupidest thing any corporation or government can do in the Web 2.0 world: It sent a Read more

May 21, 2008

What happens when a lion of the industry sticks his head in the lion’s own mouth? Glenn Kelman joins BloodhoundBlog as a contributor

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is one of those completely obvious ideas that only takes about a year to bubble up to the surface: We write about the real estate industry. We are not very shy about advocating change in the real estate industry. Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman is one of the key exponents of change in the real estate industry. Ergo: Glenn Kelman should be writing here.

I told the man yesterday that I bear my ignorance as a curse, and this is potent evidence of that fact. I should have seen all this long ago, but it didn’t cross my mind until last week. But all we can do, when we make an error, is put it right and strive to do better in the future. Here’s the putting it right part:

Glenn Kelman has been a lightning rod for controversy since the founding of Redfin.com. What we have all failed to notice is that he owns a gentle soul, a thoughtful mind and a prodigious writing talent.

I think this is admirable and courageous on Glenn’s part. I am never very kind to that nebulous population of folks I deride as “vendors,” but I have been especially rough on Glenn and on Redfin. I’m pleased that he trusts us to treat him with the honor and respect a guest in our home deserves, but I am beyond delighted that he has agreed to share the workings of his incisive mind with us.

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May 20, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained: Commencement news, and then to bed

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve already been to sleep once, briefly. After Unchained broke up this afternoon, we came home to knock out the essential work. Teri Lussier cranked out a solid hour of video clips today, so I started pumping those into the YouTube mill. I’ve got a lot more to talk about, but first I have to go to sleep.

So first: The news.

Glenn Kelman gave a knock-out keynote speech. He spoke about Redfin.com’s recent performance, as compared with the company’s initial assumptions, and we all came away with a better understanding of how more alike our businesses are than they are different.

When Glenn finished speaking, we announced that he will be joining BloodhoundBlog as a contributor. This is a stone obvious idea that should have occurred to me a year ago, but, in fact, it only came to me last week. We’ve talked to other bigfeet in the realty.bot and franchise worlds, but, where the flesh has been willing, the PR department, until now, has always turned out to be weak.

I think Glenn made a lot of friends for Redfin today, and it certainly was an honor to have him with us. Whatever differences we might have had, he’s a fine writer and a thoughtful man, so it will be interesting reading him here.

The other news was Brian Brady’s announcement that we will be doing another Unchained event in Orlando, Florida, at the time of the NAR Convention. We don’t have a date or a location yet, but it will be right around Friday November 7, 2008. We want to be there to catch the Realtors before they rush into the convention center to spend a ton of money on hokey gimmicks that won’t work. This seems like an appropriate mission for a couple of wannabe Jesuits.

Teri’s videos are chugging along, and I’ll get around to tagging them tomorrow or Thursday. Feel free to watch them anyway, as they get uploaded. In the mean time, here is Brad Coy doing what Cathy says is a spot-on imitation of me:

And just to share the love, Brad also gave a parody performance of Brian Brady:


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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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