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Category: Blogging (page 5 of 84)

August 12, 2009

Introducing Tony Gallegos: The Mortgage Cicerone as guide dog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joining us today is mortgage expert Tony Gallegos. You’ve known him for years as The Mortgage Cicerone. Tony has just left the cloistered confines of corporate lending and struck out on his own. As a secondary benefit of making this move, he promises to tell BloodhoundBlog readers the unvarnished truth about the world of mortgages.

He’s been a friend of BloodhoundBlog for a long time, and he’s personally acquainted with quite a few of the dogs, so I know y’all will have no trouble making him feel welcome.

June 29, 2009

Building the perfect Bloodhound, three years into the job

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen took most of my client contact off my hands Sunday so that I could have time free to play with a new API the FlexMLS folks are getting ready to release to their client MLS systems. I love FlexMLS, and I haven’t said nearly enough good things about it here, but let this stand as endorsement enough: If your MLS is on the cusp of its vendor contract, get FlexMLS. It’s plausible to me that other companies might have cool stuff, but other companies don’t listen to geeks like me. FBS is wicked smart to begin with, but they’re smart enough to know that nobody knows everything. By listening to the user base, they’re able to grow their product in ways that will matter a great deal to all of us going forward.

So for Act one, I worked out how to build radius searches from any valid street address. By software, I mean. I want to be able to work from street addresses to build searches on the fly.

Act two was just brute force API programming, building semi-custom searches into 11,000 or so unique pages. (I’ve mentioned that Realtors have a publishing problem, but I’ll bet you weren’t thinking in the thousands of pages.)

Act three was a quick-search form. A lot of folks already have stuff like this from their IDX vendors. The difference is that I can build as many as I want, as elaborately as I want, using the most common or the most arcane fields in the MLS system. As an example, imagine a weblog post about central vacuum systems coupled with a quick search form featuring homes with central vac. Can your IDX system do that?

That’s innovation, y’all, and there is a point at which it is nothing more for me than ars gratia artis — art for art’s sake. I play with new ideas not to make money or to skin elephants, but because I love new things, and I love to wring every last drop of implication out of anything I lay my hands on. I can find the marketing — and, one hopes, Read more

June 19, 2009

To celebrate BloodhoundBlog’s third birthday, let’s celebrate all of the insanely great ideas we have come up with…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last week I was working, late at night, plugging street addresses into encartus, in preparation for building a bunch of new engenu pages for a new web site we’re building, an exposition of truly-distinguished homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona. While I was working, I got pinged by an incoming email, a moderated comment to Brian Brady’s first post on the idea of disclosing all real estate purchase offers.

While I was reading all the other great comments to that post, I got pinged again, this time a private email asking me what I thought about the nominees for Inman’s most-innovative blog award.

To misquote a line many Bloodhounds love: I don’t think about them. I will stop in at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy once or twice a month, and I know I’ve been to MyTechOpinon and the Clean Slate Blog. But I don’t associate any of those sites with innovation. They’re just weblogs, that’s all.

This is not sour grapes. I don’t give a rat’s ass about beauty contests, and I’ve deliberately painted Inman “News” into a corner: By consistently ignoring what is obviously the most innovative weblog in the RE.net, they come off looking like petulant crybabies even as they despoil their reputation as a “news” source. And does this malign neglect hurt us? Uniquely among RE.net weblogs, we’re a PR6, as is the Inman “News” web site. With no capital investment and nothing but part-time, amateur writers, we’ve pulled even with the life’s work of a big-baby billionaire. One would think the idea of gamesmanship was invented yesterday.

And please don’t post treacly little comments about how you get good ideas everywhere. I have no objection whatever to the Special Olympics, so long as you don’t insist on calling the contestants Olympians. The three innovations cited in the first paragraph of this post, three among hundreds, are more than enough to split BloodhoundBlog away from the herd.

But that’s the point. BloodhoundBlog is ten days away from being three years old. In those three years, we’ve pioneered a vast host of jaw-dropping ideas. If we stopped writing on June 29th, our anniversary, we Read more

May 20, 2009

What’s the best way to use ALT Tags on a web site?

by

Realtor, Tech Connoisseur

Author website

I usually use a dozen or more photos for EACH neighborhood, and want to include neighborhood name in each Alt Tag:

For Instance: Berkeley 4th St “what it is”

Berkeley 4th St Spenger’s

Berkeley 4th St Peets Coffee

Berkeley 4th St Amtrak Station

Will the repetition of “Berkeley 4th St.. ” in the beginning (or end) of the Alt Tag be considered keyword spamming if EACH of the 12 photos on that web page has an Alt Tag starting (or ending) with the same expression?

Ira

May 15, 2009

Unchained Freedom “Friends Keep Friends In The Business”

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

As I was driving back to Las Vegas after a full week of hanging out with the Bloodhound crew at Unchained, my mind was racing to get a grasp on all of the new real estate marketing possibilities that I could achieve by the end of the year.

The confidence I gained through the relationships built at Unchained was all I needed to fully execute my online marketing plans.

I believe that everyone is an expert at something, and we all have a ton to learn from each other.

The Scenius sessions at Unchained were a great example of this concept:

  • After a full day of building blogs, Eric Blackwell, Ryan Hartman and I stayed up until 3 am discussing some SEO strategery for Battleback.com.
  • Greg showed me how simple it would be to syndicate my mortgage content on all of my real estate agents’ blogs with just a little bit of technical savvy.
  • Brad Coy and Brian Brady helped me figure out how to easily integrate a Twitter or Facebook presence into my weekly relationship building routines without having to spend too much time being social.
  • Al Lorenz and I talked about the benefits of owning the social media platforms that our clients and referral partners participate on.
  • Sean Purcell’s brainstorming session over a $100 casino chip got me excited about top of mind sales and branding tools.
  • Kerry Melcher’s “Small Town Phoenix Living” reminded me of how important it is to connect with the emotional needs that may impact our clients’ decisions to do business with us.
  • Scott Cowan and I compared our local markets and shared similar opinions about how much online social networking really matters in the long run.
  • Scott Schang and Mark Green opened my eyes to the power of holding online webinars for the purpose of building a loyal database.

I could go on and on about all of the great conversations that I had at Unchained.

My main objective for that week was to fill in a few technical gaps with my blogging skills.  As Greg has mentioned many times, real estate professionals have a publishing problem.

There are so many ideas that I haven’t been able to Read more

May 14, 2009

How we say_What we say_Is important

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

This is actually a post about transparency, but as you’ll see, I am not a big fan of the ‘word’ itself. The idea of belaboring a word all of you seem to take for granted came about as I was talking with Scott Schang a few days ago. We were just enjoying each other’s company, doing real work, a lender and real estate guy talking about the industry, our own ideas, sharing and laughing, scribbling notes and taking stock of the ideas that just never seemed to quit coming.

For me transparency is about saying what you want to say, showing what you want to show, sharing what you want to share, and doing it in a manner and method that is most likely to allow the reader or listener to understand. In order for that to happen the writer or creater of thoughts and ideas, facts or fictions, must decide up front HOW they will present the information.

Let me give you some examples.

Greg Swann

“I write well. I’m a tough read here, but I can be much, much more difficult to read. I understand grammar the way other people understand cars or football or cooking, and I can build perfectly valid sentences in English that almost no one can understand, much less diagram. The English language is like Jazz to me, and it ripples and rolls through my head all the time, making connections like lightning strikes that take many paragraphs to explain to other people.

Brian Brady

“I posed this question at Unchained Phoenix ‘09 and you would have thought I asked the REALTORs to walk on coals…at first. A few bright agents listened to my reasoning:”

Geno Petro

“When I awoke from my dehydrated coma and rack focused my blurry vision toward the general direction of the deactivated alarm clock on my night stand, the numbers 7:07 burned my retinas digital red. I jumped up in a virtual panic, threw on a suit and Hermes noose, splashed on a handful of Bulgari, gargled a Red Bull and Diet Coke highball and flew out the door in search of my car. Alas, God was looking Read more

May 8, 2009

Multiple blog hosting and your files. A Project Bloodhound inquiry for DIY WordPress publishing.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

I’m in need of clarity. Being mostly clueless to the concept of file management and hosting in general has led me here by way of looking to publish more then one blog.  That, and after spending far too much time with “online and phone help” with what should be a simple domain name transfer for Yahoo to Godaddy, I’m at my wits end.   Word to the wise.  If someone offers you a domain name for $1.99, don’t bite.

Here’s the deal. I have a “deluxe hosting account” with Godaddy which runs me, I think, around $6.50 a month and gives me what I need. ( I know your bluehost mediatemple whatever is better and that’s not the fix here ).  Focus.

When I started another blog, I created a new database via my SQL database and now this blog lives in a folder under the main account as well (see below).

hosting-control-center-file-manager-1

So from what I gather, with 25 databases I can run 25 different sites under this one account, right?   The databases (sites) just become sub-files of the main account.  If I’m off, just let me know.

One other thing that puzzles me (utter ignorance) is the file placement in my directory.  I was going by the intructions given to me by the help desk at Godaddy, and what you see is what I ended up with.   Could you all give me a little insight to whether this looks OK or not?

Assuming that everything is set up right so far, my next question would be, what is the advantage of opening up a separate account for a new site?  With each and every domain I purchase, I am offered a free “Economy hosting account”, which of course will not allow you to host WordPress.   To do this, I would need to open another “Deluxe hosting account”.

Any insight here would be appreciated.  I plan on helping my wife with her own site and hosting and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to get her set up separately or just run hers with mine.

Many thanks. If I get somewhere with this, Read more

May 6, 2009

Twitter? I barely even know ‘er.

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

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 11, 2009

Wanna Piss Off The RE.net? Succeed with Online Sales Letters

by

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

Author website

I forgot how much I love Copyblogger.  Greg Swann is echoing its posts on a scene in the sidebar.  I just clicked over to the one which explains that the death of ugly long-copy is overexaggerated.  That article links to an article that asks “Is Your Tribe Holding You Down?”  When you read about “the Cool Kids”, does it remind you of the RE.net?  A few wealthy tech guys and a whole lotta bloggers with a real estate license, pontificating about how consumers “might” behave.

Then there’s the “IM crowd” who remind me a whole bunch of the BHBU grads.  Speaking of which, where are all the BHBU graduates lately? I think I know the answer to that because I’ve talked to a lot of them on the phone.  The BHBU grads are JUST like the “IM” crowd Copyblogger talks about; they’re hella busy.

If  you’re all worked up, you can skip the rest of this rant and yell at me.  Otherwise, keep reading

THIS burns my ass- agents and originators marketing the way the “cool kids” tell them to rather than doing what they KNOW works.

Take a look at this.

“EEEEWWWWWWWW” says the RE.net (usually over on ActiveRain).

Okay…but what about this?  This agent is using long copy techniques in a her video.   Is what she is doing much different than this?

Check this! This Unchained graduate is  inviting people to register for free homebuyer education courses (and building a HUGE opt-in database).  If you think he’s a genius, he’s not.  He ripped a page from the Dan Kennedy playbook.  (Scott will admit that, too- ask him in a few weeks at Unchained)

Here’s another example of ugly marketing.  I don’t know how many agents have told me that they have inventory problems.  Could you turn to CraigsList to find properties, that aren’t listed,  for your buyers?  Before you criticize the messenger, consider the message.  Few agents reverse prospect for home buyers.  While we talk about single property websites, nobody is discussing single-buyer websites.   Think old-school cover letters, accompanied with offers, to tug at the heartstrings of hard-hearted sellers…on the internet.

Which is more important to Read more

April 6, 2009

Hello, Wisconsin! Introducing Jolenta Averill

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I went questing last week for a Realtor in Madison. I heard from precisely two people. One was a paranoid dinosaur who was convinced a free referral must be a scam. The other is a star in the making, I think.

I don’t know yet if she’s a good fit for my budding real estate investor friend, but I was so knocked out by the seriousness of her commitment to real estate that I asked her to join us here.

So: Permit me to introduce Jolenta Averill, an independent real estate broker from Madison, Wisconsin:

Jolenta Averill is a Realtor and independent broker servicing South Central WI. With a background in trading floor technology and customer service, she’s building a boutique cyber brokerage in Madison WI to help free agents from the chains of big box brokers.

Jolenta is convinced we’re smart and amazingly great writers, so I hope y’all can let her down slowly. Meanwhile, make her feel welcome and we can all watch he star ascend into the heavens.

March 12, 2009

My ZinePal wish list: Editors copyfit by cutting and adding copy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an email I sent last night to Frank Worsley of ZinePal. Also copied on this email were Teri Lussier, Brad Coy, Cheryl Johnson, Brian Brady, Sean Purcell and Eric Blackwell, the folks who have been talking about ZinePal privately. I’m sharing this in the hopes that it will spark other ideas.

Frank Worsley: > Let me know if you have any feature requests or run into any problems and I’ll try to fix it for you.

Okay, Frank, you asked for it.

This is my wish list for ZinePal, but I’m copying these other good folks because we’ve all been playing with the software. We’re all affiliated with BloodhoundBlog.com, a real estate industry-focused weblog. We love ZinePal because we have huge and unending publishing needs.

Emphasize that: We love ZinePal. I’m going to ask for a lot of stuff, and the others here will chip in with their own ideas, but I don’t want you to despair in any way. We’re happy to help you make ZinePal better, if we can, but you’ve already kicked our teeth in and left us smiling about it. We’re in your debt, never doubt it.

My background: I was a typographer when that word meant something. Even so, I understand that the world has changed — and I have changed, too. I want a certain amount of typographic control, if I can get it, but I’m not prepared to jump out the window if I can’t have it.

Much more important to me is control over the copy. Typographers copyfit typographically. They have to follow the copy out the window. Editors copyfit by cutting and adding copy. Give me editorial control and I’ll solve my own typographic problems.

So:

1. I want control over the feeds. I need for a feed to be forgotten if I need to reimport it. I need for as many posts as I wish to come in with the feed. I can work-around this by using categories in WordPress, e.g,

http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=7

Category feeds seem to come in in their entirety.

2. But: Once I have the copy in ZinePal, I need to be able to edit it in place. If Read more

March 10, 2009

With zinepal.com you can create a targeted magazine in no time flat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Scenius set, set in motion by Teri Lussier, has been playing with a clever little web app called zinepal.com.

It’s a further elaboration on the kind of feed games we’ve been playing for months, but zinepal takes us into the world of atoms.

What does it do? Working from RSS feeds you feed to it, zinepal makes a newsletterish kind of magazine, saving your selected content as a PDF file and also as Kindle tinder.

What can you do with it? Teri saw zinepal as a physical magazine, and Brian Brady wanted to take it to every barber shop in town.

Brad Coy saw it as a way of promoting $800,000 starter-condos to impoverished San Franciscans.

I don’t care a lot about paper documents, but a PDF file is much better than formatted HTML for communicating print-like ideas in email. And if the person on the other end wants to print — or forward — your content — shazam!

Other folks had other ideas, and they can speak for themselves.

But what can you come up with? Take yourself to zinepal.com and see what you can put together.

I traded email with the developer today. He’s eager to improve the product, and there ain’t nobody with publishing needs like Realtors and lenders.

In support of zinepal, I implemented feeds in Scenius scenes today. That way, you could use a scene to aggregate content from multiple sources, then pass that one feed along to zinepal.

This is a cool tool. It could use more graphic control, and you can paint yourself into some unsightly corners. But for a quick and dirty tool for turning blog-based content into (real or virtual) dead-tree content, zinepal rocks.

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March 7, 2009

Here’s Some Piss Poor Journalism For Ya

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

Since Greg welcomed me aboard BHB last week, ideas have been racing through my head.  What would I write about first?

CRM execution tactics? Too predictable.

Skinned cats? I’ll leave that to my favorite cat skinner.

Then it occurred to me last night:  why not dive right in with an example of why BHB and blogs like it are putting the traditional fish rag out of business.

I’m a sports fan(atic).  I find it to be the ultimate in reality television.

But whether your remote is hard-coded to ESPN or not,  you’re surely aware of the ongoing steroid crisis in professional sports.

This week’s Sports Illustrated features an article about a former football player named Tony Mandarich, commonly known as the biggest bust in NFL history.  However, two decades ago, SI ran a story proclaiming Mandarich as “The Greatest Offensive Line Prospect in the History of Football”.  This story was written by a journalist named Rick Telander.

Now, twenty years later, Tony Mandarich Book Deal is ready to say he’s sorry for using steroids.  So he looks up good old Rick Telander Spineless Jellyfish and lands himself a feature article advertisement.

Here’s the article, please keep a barf bag nearby:  “Tony Mandarich is Very, Very Sorry”.

And here’s my favorite paragraph from said article (via Telander):

“… He lied to me.  Lied to everybody… I knew he was using steroids… but all I could do was hint at my suspicions…”

Um, Ricky baby… you knew he was taking illegal steroids, cheating and gaming the system but you, a Senior Writer for the most respected publication in sports were POWERLESS to do more than “hint at your suspicions”?

Telander’s article goes on to reveal that

  • Mandarich was known at his local gym as the “Doctor”

So what Telander’s telling us here is that he could have easily broken arguably the biggest sports-related story of the decade if he simply noses around the gym a little bit to explain how/why…

  • Mandarich magically transforms from a 6′ 3″ HS kid who rode the bench on his JV team into a behemoth that bench presses 585 pounds and “runs like a deer” in college

Wait a second.  This blog is supposed Read more

March 6, 2009

Don’t miss Part II of Matt Carter’s gripping series on AR vs Move

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I didn’t want to let this pass without remarking on it:

The second part of Matt Carter’s gripping series on the abortive takeover of Active Rain by Move, Inc. is up today.

I thought AR’s lawsuit against Move was a joke from the first, and there is nothing in the text to lead me to change my views.

But, man! The drama of it all! Matt Carter has the skeleton of a good book, a cautionary tale about what happens when the wide-eyed world of Web 2.0 comes up against a crew of grizzled Wall Street-trained veterans. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.

Here’s the moral, if you’re the skip-ahead kind of reader: Verbal agreements are not worth the paper they’re printed on.

Fascinating reading, both parts. Well worth your time.

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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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