There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 11 of 43)

An Unchained expostulation: Guess who is not coming to Inman?

We made a ton of video clips at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. BrokerIPTV.com made a bunch more, and theirs feature strange and esoteric production elements like good lighting and audible sound. The difference is, ours were on YouTube right away, and theirs took a while to gestate. One that I’ve been waiting for finally hatched today, yours truly on the subject of being Unchained:

If you watch that clip, this should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: I don’t tell people what to do. There are no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors. I don’t like rules, but I also don’t like working with people who need to be told what to do — and I really don’t like working with people who try to tell other people what to do.

That paragraph is predicate to this one: Since there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on anything, it should be obvious that there is no Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect. Bloodhounds have been invited to speak at the last couple of events, and I, personally, have no feelings about this one way or another.

But, oddly enough, for this summer’s event, only one Bloodhound has been invited to speak, Estately.com’s Galen Ward. That’s not completely true. Just after Unchained, Brian Brady was approached, perhaps as a ham-handed divide-and-conquer strategy. But Cheryl Johnson was not invited to teach PhotoShop, Eric Blackwell and Eric Bramlett weren’t invited to teach SEO, Geno Petro wasn’t invited to teach the art of mesmerizing an audience. Mike Farmer, Sean Purcell and Jeff Brown are, each in his own way, reinventing the real estate brokerage, but this is not a topic of interest at Inman Connect.

In other words, there does seem to be an Official BloodhoundBlog Policy on Inman Connect, but it doesn’t originate here.

So be it. We care a lot. As is discussed in the clip, BloodhoundBlog Unchained set a new standard for training events in the wired world of real estate in our first swing at the ball. We dropped the ball completely on the drinking and partying and killing time in the hallways categories, but I know we traded a Read more

What does Zillow.com understand that Trulia.com is missing? “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

I think that there may have been a time, in the blue-sky days of gray-skyed Seattle, when people with two-digit badge numbers at Zillow.com actually thought they might be able to disintermediate Realtors — much as Expedia.com had disintermediated travel agents. No one at Zillow will admit to this, but I suspect that a notion like this could have been in the original design parameters for the hypothetical software they were brainstorming in those days.

If this is true, then, to their credit, they came to their senses. Presumably, they realized, first, that the National Association of Realtors is a ferocious criminal mob that will do anything to destroy perceived competition, and, second, that, as simple as it might seem from the outside, real estate representation is too complicated to be automated cost-effectively, at least for now. Instead, Zillow.com made a conscious and thorough-going decision to partner with real estate agents and lenders, offering them exposure on its platform in exchange for building out its content.

You could argue that Trulia.com made a similar resolution, but it seems more likely to me that the San Francisco start-up is simply aping Zillow’s partnership with individual practitioners without really understanding it.

From a distance, the differences in the partnering relationships of the two companies could not be more stark. At Trulia, the most important kind of partner is the one who can deliver the most listings. The hierarchy runs from brokerage chain to brokerage to broker to agent to seller.

Zillow’s hierarchy is the other way around: The most important source of information about a home is that home’s owner. Next comes the agent, followed by the broker, the brokerage and the brokerage chain.

In both cases, higher parties on the hierarchy have the power to override — and thus usurp — the contributions of lower parties. What this means in practice is that sellers and their listing agents are regarded as being the least authoritative sources of information at Trulia — and therefore the last in line to receive practical benefits from the leads that might be generated by the on-line reiteration of the agent’s listing of Read more

Imagineering Unchained Orlando: The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Everything about taking BloodhoundBlog Unchained to Orlando is in flux until we find out what we can do about meeting rooms. Even so, I’m swimming in ideas for how I want it to work.

As before, as always, I want for there to be a ton of hard-headed content. We set a new high-water mark for real estate conferences in Phoenix, and I want to bump that mark quite a bit higher.

Here’s how my thoughts run right now, all subject to amendment by cruel reality and subsequent brainstorms:

This is a one-day affair, and so it has to be a concentrated dose of that Unchained attitude. We also have to accommodate the comings and goings of the conventioneers, since it seems less than likely that they will all be available for the same one huge block of time.

What I thought we might do is run the circus from 8 am to 8 pm, with Brian and I doing a four-hour show three times or a three-hour show four times — thus to deliver the most that we can to the greatest number of people. An even better idea: Two different three-hour shows, each delivered twice. Unchained in Phoenix was eleven-plus hours of content, but we could condense that down to a very highly-concentrated six hours of material.

Then, in the next room over we could have a trade show floor with vendors we trust having an opportunity to present their value propositions and give away tee shirts and frisbees.

And then in a third room, this one cut into three or four breakout rooms, we could offer hour-long breakout sessions aimed at every level of geek, from infra to ultra. We need beginner sessions. We need expert sessions. This is a way we can meet a multitude of needs. Twelve hours times three rooms could accommodate up to 36 unique class sessions. I would expect many sessions to be repeated through the day, but 36 class slots presents a lot of teaching opportunities.

In the end, we end up with a sort of All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Show up when you can, stay for as long as you Read more

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.”

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

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

NAR/DOJ settlement: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…”

After years of song and dance, the DOJ reached a settlement with the NAR that seems to have achieved absolutely nothing — except the waste of a bunch of tax and dues money. At least that’s what you would think if you read nothing but the NAR’s spin. In fact, the NAR lost the major point of contention, the attested right of brokers to withhold listings from Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). From eWeek.com:

The Department of Justice said May 27 it has reached a settlement in its long-running legal dispute with the National Association of Realtors. Under the terms of the settlement, the Realtors will enact a new policy that guarantees Internet-based brokerage companies will not be treated differently than traditional brokers. 

Under the new policy, Realtor-affiliated brokers participating in multiple listing services will be prohibited from withholding their listings from brokers who use virtual office websites, generally known as VOWs. The Realtors agreed to a 10-year settlement to ensure the group continues to abide by the requirements of the settlement.

“Today’s settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement. “When there is unfettered competition from brokers with innovative and efficient approaches to the residential real estate market, consumers are likely to receive better services and pay lower commission rates.”

The Realtors also agreed to adopt antitrust compliance training programs that will instruct local associations of about the antitrust laws generally and about the requirements of the proposed settlement. The National Association of Realtors is a trade association of more than 1.2 million residential real estate members who operate in local real estate markets nationwide.

That sounds like something, but it ain’t. For one thing, the NAR gets to define what a VOW is. From its own press release:

The terms of the proposed final order validate NAR’s position – that MLS members must be actively engaged in real estate brokerage by actually helping people buy or sell homes. This will ensure that MLSs are used for what they were originally intended to do – to help real estate professionals find Read more

Taking it to the man: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exposed, Exposing & Exposure of Capitalism’s Inherent Blessing

Unchained has wrapped up and, by all accounts, done a stand-out job exposing Social Media Marketing and the power of the individual.   I was bummed I could not attend.  Funny thing though: if you are hungry enough you get fed anyway.  My hunger was sated in seeing how a democratic, capitalistic, free economy continues to reveal our greater selves.  This past Friday that idea was brought home in a powerful, if disjointed, way in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

There were three, seemingly unrelated, articles that taken together gave me great joy.  From time to time we need to polish our appreciation for the economically empowering era we live in (and sometimes take for granted).

> Guy Sorman wrote an op-ed piece exposing the massive cracks in communism and the potential for political fall out that stems from the natural disaster of an earthquake.  The buildings whose failures caused the most damage – the schools and the hospitals – were those constructed by the state.  The graft and corruption that leads to the crushing of school children does not go unnoticed by the people.

So it is with China and with tyrannical regimes: The party is convinced it controls everything. But it is often the unexpected events that reveal fault lines in the system, the hypocrisy of public discourse, and the most unbearable injustices.

Tyrannical or sublimated, political or economic: the chokepoints of the world are slowly exposed

> The second article was a front page celebration of Erin Callan, the most powerful woman on Wall Street.  A free economy coupled with a free exchange of ideas is contributing to women taking their place in the most powerful of positions.  Even better, in my humble opinion, is what Ms. Callan has become known for and, one must assume, what helped move her to the very pinnacle of the economic pecking order:

She aggressively roots out rumors, even while pushing her bosses to disclose more financial information.

The open and transparent exposing of information leads to success.

> The third article discussed CEO Willie Walsh of British Airways PLC.  The company saw a record performance to end the year and is paying an annual dividend for the first time in seven years.  The staff will share in Read more

Black Pearls: Controlling your own destiny in your hi-tech real estate practice: Three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors

[This post came up yesterday in a discussion at Unchained, and I’m kicking it back to the top of the blog because the issue of data portability is so important for people who might be coming anew into the world of Web 2.0/Social Media Marketing. –GSS]

 
Would it surprise you to learn that host, hostage and hostility are cognate terms? They come to us by way of French and German, but that hos idea in Latin trips lightly from guest to stranger to foreigner to enemy.

I happen to be thinking of these English words — host, hostage and hostility — because I wanted to come up with a very simple rule for dealing with technology vendors. Alas, I think the best I can do is three simple rules:

  1. Avoid hosted software systems
  2. Avoid proprietary technology
  3. Pursue commodity solutions — and prices

I bought and populated two new domains tonight. We buy all our domains from Godaddy.com — a commodity vendor — to simplify management and renewals. I control all of our hosting through a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com, which means that I pay nothing extra to propagate a new domain. I have to pay for the domain registration, but I pay no additional charges beyond our regular flat monthly fee for hosting as many domains as I want.

I’m at the far right edge of the Realtor geek curve — as of tonight, we control 79 domains — but, with one exception, we control all of our data, with no need to fear the vicissitudes of vendors. (What’s the exception? Our virtual tours are hosted through VisualTour Obeo.com, which seems to us to be less odious than the other odious virtual tour vendors.)

Why does this matter? If you don’t control your own data, you don’t control your business. You are at the mercy of the vendors who do control your data. If you lose faith in them — or if they look like they might fail the test of the marketplace — you may find out much too late that applying my three rules would have made good sense.

So: Let’s go through them again in detail:

  1. Avoid hosted Read more

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

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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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…

[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

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

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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