BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 15 of 43)

March 20, 2008

HousingPanic ALMOST Got It Right: How To Overcome Commodization By Employing The Dollarization Discipline

by

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

Author website

Housing Panic (housingpanic.blogspot.com) ALMOST got this one right.

I frequent Activerain.com; I cut my blogging teeth there and have made many friends and business connections through Activerain.com. Though I criticize the site frequently, I criticize it because I love the sense of community there and want it to thrive.

New Bloodhound, Barry Cunningham, hosted Broker Bryant (see Bloodhound interview here) on RealEstateRadioUSA, Tuesday. The topic was defending the fees you charge your customers. The interview is pretty interesting and the Barrys couldn’t quite get Broker Bryant to articulate it the way they might have liked. I’m lucky; I know the Barrys and listen to RealEstateRadioUSA. I think they were looking for a practitioner to properly define the services he offers and “dollarize” the offering- Bryant didn’t do that.

Broker Bryant defended his position, on his Active Rain web log, and tried to flip the question around to the Barrys. I think Bryant walked in unprepared for the interview. He usually does an excellent job defining his value, in public, and has hundreds of happy clients who comment on his ActiveRain web log. I don’t think the Barrys wanted Bryant to line-item his “costs” as much as they wanted him to line-item the value the costs incurred bring to the consumer. The Barrys are quite meticulous about defining your value to a consumer; I remember that on each and every customer call, now.

Here’s where the Housing Panic boys ALMOST got it right. They exposed a featured post, on Active Rain, about how fees are split. REALTOR Kim Carpenter did a great job with graphics explaining how she greases lots of people to get a house sold. That’s EXACTLY what a consumer DOESN’T WANT TO HEAR. I don’t care who YOU have to pay to sell my house, I care how much I pay to get my house sold. Here’s Kim’s conclusion:

So, there it is! Please don’t ask me to cut my commission. It has been cut! FOUR times, it has been cut! I promise I will give Read more

March 20, 2008

What’s the future of residential real estate signage? I think it’s like the recent history of digital printing — only much, much bigger

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“The Barrys” on Real Estate Radio USA have a burning yearning to know just what it is that listing Realtors do to earn their commissions.

It’s a question that plagues me, too. As much as I talk here about on-line marketing, we draw a lot more attention from sellers with our real-world marketing efforts. We’re all about selling the house, and, oddly enough, this makes an impression on other people who want their houses sold.

But we’re deliberately not listing very much right now. We’ve turned down a bunch of houses we would have liked to have handled, but we will not list a house for sale if we don’t feel certain we can sell it. There was a span of eleven days when we turned down over $3 million in new listings — but every one of those homes is still unsold, despite repeated price reductions.

We’re gearing up to list 1322 East Vermont Avenue in North Central Phoenix. The house doesn’t go live until March 28th, but, because of an Easter-egg hunt in the neighborhood, we’re holding it open this weekend in advance of the MLS listing.

We’re going to be documenting everything we do to list this home for sale, both as an enduring record of the kinds of efforts we undertake for our sellers and as a step-by-step guide for Realtors who follow BloodhoundBlog.

The house has been repaired, touch-up painted and and staged. Some of the photography has been done, but I have not yet built the home’s single-property web site as I write this.

But because we want to have our yard signs up by the weekend, I built the signs today:

I’ve built an engenu page with bigger versions of the signs along with a link to an engenu site discussing our sign philosophy in detail.

Our yard signs are just one part of our listing strategy, but they form at least a piece of the answer “The Barrys” are looking for. We believe in marketing our listings, and we do everything we can think of to get them sold quickly and for top dollar. As we build out the engenu site Read more

March 20, 2008

Destination: Vertical. Zillow houses “hot or not” for homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dig this. Dumb but fun. A sticky way to see a lot of ads — but fun anyway.

Serious reflection #1: Another way for Zillow to be a sticky, top-of-mind vertical search portal. Get ’em there. Keep ’em there. Satisfy all of their real estate needs.

Serious reflection #2: The design sense in this new feature is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from Zillow so far. I’m talking about a much higher standard of graphic elegance. Not jaw-dropping, but much better.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

March 19, 2008

Zillow.com makes its first MLS-wide feed agreement and, in the process, disintermediates its first IDX cartel

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the PR, which the vendor cheerleaders will have reported:*

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com and MLS Property Information Network today announced a partnership to feed listings from the New England area MLS to Zillow.com on a daily basis. This partnership initiates the first participation at the MLS level in Zillow’s Listings Feed program, which launched in November 2007. To date, the Zillow Listings Feed program has attracted several top brokerages for participation, and now allows all customers of MLS PIN to automatically gain free marketing exposure for their listings on one of the most-visited real estate sites in the country, while providing Zillow’s users with a more robust search experience.

That is, rather than having made yet another feed agreement from a brokerage or a franchise of brokerages, Zillow will be taking a feed of every listing from MLS PIN — a fairly big MLS system.

Okayfine. Now here’s the actual news:

Each listing will include a description of the property with multiple photos and contact information for the listing agent, including links back to the listing brokerage’s Web site where they can find more information and connect with a sales associate to guide them through the home buying and selling experience.

That is to say, whatever form the IDX agreement takes at MLS PIN, it is being cast aside for the Zillowfied listings. The IDX-like policy of concealing the listing broker’s and agent’s contact information will not be the policy for Zillow’s echo of the MLS PIN feed. (I find this so amazing that I’m avidly listening for some back-peddaling.)

There’s more. If a listing agent creates a profile on Zillow.com, that will be linked through from that agent’s listings. The MLS PIN feed will provide information for Zillow’s Virtual Sold Sign program, which is another way of promoting individual listing agents. This is all of a piece with Zillow’s general policy of promoting individuals rather than organizations.

But the important fact is that Zillow’s agreement with MLS PIN splits up the clubby conspiracy against the consumer that is the MLS philosophy. If buyer’s agents are squealing in Massachusetts today, the proper target of their Read more

March 16, 2008

BloodhoundBlog is the number one real estate weblog? Technically true for a brief moment, but we still have some growing to do

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A tiny trophy, a huge victory — to come.

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

We had a helluva week last week, our best ever — until now. So what did we do this week to top last week’s numbers? How about almost double?

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

The real estate category on BlogTopSites is the home of truly competitive real estate webloggers. We’ve always held our own there — the respectable low teens until lately, in the higher single digits so far for 2008. The top of the list has almost always been dominated by bubble blogs, but BloodhoundBlog has been among the top RE.net blogs — and almost always first among real estate industry weblogs — for quite some while.

But we’ve never been first overall before, and the chances are good that we won’t be again, not for a while. But first place on that list is ours to earn and ours to keep — eventually. We deliver so much more content — so much better content — that we will own the top of that list in due course. Just not yet.

So what gives? How did we get to be number one at the start of this brand new week?

Earlier this week, Brian Brady gave us all a practical demonstration in how to dominate a Google search. On Thursday, he wrote a post about Ashley Alexandra Dupree that was first, fastest and best — from Google’s point of view. He’s spent the past three days on the first page of Google for a number of Ashley Dupree-related search terms — sitting squarely atop major news organizations and A-list webloggers. As I write this, Brian’s post is second for ashley dupree — and first place is off-topic.

So what happened? With that first Ashley Dupree post and a follow-up about Ashley’s singing career, Brian by himself brought over 14,000 unique souls as hard clicks into BloodhoundBlog this week. He beat all of last week by himself. Yesterday we had over 8,132 unique visitors, of which at last 6,000 were brought here by Brian Brady alone.

Yeah, but, but, but– It’s just an SEO trick. No, it’s not. It’s an SEO demonstration. Brian Brady Read more

March 14, 2008

BloodhoundBlog is the most popular real estate industry blog, but for now we’re the fourth most popular real estate weblog overall

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

The last time BloodhoundBlog scored this high on BlogTopSites was May of 2007. At the time, I said: “It may not happen again for a while…”

What’s going on? Brian Brady is showing you why you will reap huge benefits by attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained. This is just the beginning…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

March 14, 2008

Ashley Alexandra Dupree on AmieStreet.com: How To Profit When The Long Tail Search Is YOU

by

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

Author website

Ashley Dupree turned into a media target, in 36 hours, and AmieStreet.com immediately started selling her tracks. In the tradition of making hay while the sun shines, Ash uploaded a new single, Move Ya Body and compiled an album, “Unspoken Words“, both offered on AmieStreet.com.

Look at the world we live in; social media marketing. Ashley Dupree was “outed” through her MySpace profile (which promptly drew over 2 million hits in 18 hours- after she took my advice) and started profiting off the exposure.

AmieStreet.com is an online music download site where the community determines the price of the downloads by “bidding” the price from FREE to 98 cents. Ash is maxed out at the top bid- for BOTH of her songs. While her Myspace profile has 6 million hits, her “page views” on Amie Street are over 264,000. Here’s the cool part; her “listens” are over a quarter of a million. Virtually everyone who clicks through to Ashley Dupree’s AmieStreet.com store is listening to her music.

Would we even be talking about this in 2004?

Of course not. Social media marketing was buying advertising links on MySpace or “cold-calling” people you met on LinkedIn. I tried it a few times and was confused about the ROI so I abandoned it. I focused on building communities on both sites, instead.

I’m fascinated by this whole Ashley Dupree story because the mainstream media came into OUR world, the Web 2.0 world, to break the story. Equally as fascinating is the fact that OUR world, the Web 2.0 world, allows Ash to immediately profit from her art. Ashley Dupree disintermediated the onerous process of a recording contract, studio time, and pre-release marketing and got her product to market in less than 36 hours!

We all talk about the “long tail search” and how we can profit immensely off the consumer niches exposed to us by the internet. What I’m learning from the Ashley Dupree story is that it’s no longer the big who eats the small, it’s the fast that eats the slow…which begets this Read more

March 10, 2008

NAR and the Use of MLS in a URL

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

I’ve written about this before. This is an issue that just isn’t going to go away. Like most oppressive rules and laws this bad rule (at least as it is currently interpreted and practiced) was a sincere attempt to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the current rule creates a whole new type of problem. The solution is the new problem.

Should any misleading or deceitful statement statement be permitted on a website? No and the NAR Code of Ethics already covered that. But this issue – at least as it now stands – is a good example of “an innocent dolphin caught in a tuna net”. The very idea that an NAR committee came up with a restriction for Realtors that our competitors – who are trying to put us out of business – don’t have to follow is just absurd.

NAR will have no ability whatsoever to stop, inhibit, or prevent anyone BUT Realtors from using the term “MLS” in their URL. So why would it be alright to inhibit a Realtor while other companies are using the term and will continue to use the term (both as a meta tag and as part of the URL)?

__

Here is another letter Steve Westmark passed along to me.

From: Jim Lee

To: gary@garyashton.com ; steve@stevewestmark.com

Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 10:35 AM

Subject: Fwd: Letter to NAR VP Cliff Niersbach

Gentlemen, Another Realtor friend of mine, Bill Holt who is in the Outer Banks area of North Carolina, has a URL with those troublesome magic letters “MLS” (www.obxMLS.com) and is having the same issues we are.Fortunately Bill has a member of his board who is on the NAR Professional Standards subcommittee, Policy and Interpretation, or some such name. He has talked with her and another long time member of that subcommittee named Ted Kelly. They both seem to feel that to be in violation of the new COE’s Article 12 that a member’s intent would be very important, i.e. are you trying to pass yourself off as ‘THE’ MLS. Mr. Kelly gave Bill Cliff Niersbach’s name who is some sort of NAR VP to talk with. Bill is sending him Read more

March 8, 2008

Another record-breaking week: Is 2008 the Year of the Bloodhound?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog has had one record-breaking week after another in 2008, but this week was the first time we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, an average of 2,000 “uniques” a day.

Nothing exceeds like excess: We add new subscribers every day, our Technorati links are on the upsurge, and we are pushing 100,000 backlinks. If the RE.net is like the Roman Republic, then we are like Gaius Marius, Caesar’s uncle: New on the scene, rude, crude, vulgar — and very powerful. That’s a role that suits me just fine. I’m happy to leave the Patricians squabbling amongst themselves over emoluments and honors. I’m much more concerned with the work-a-day Plebeians — and with the Barbarians at our gates.

Why are we the biggest? Because we deliver the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. How are we going to grow even bigger? By delivering the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. It ain’t rocket science.

Russell Shaw is convinced we have reached the “tipping point”, the point past which everything we say here can have an impact on the way our business is conducted. I retain my doubts, but I do not doubt for a moment that our words have a deep, a penetrating and an enduring reach. And to that notion, I cannot but shout out some slightly edited sentiments from latter-day America’s greatest satiric philosophers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker:

America! [Heck] yeah!

In the Web 2.0 world — in the disintermediated world — in the world without middle-men — delivering the goods is all that should matter. The BloodhoundBlog idea is simple enough — keeping the wealth that you alone produce in your own pocket — but it is in a sense a very ancient idea, a very Greek idea. The Hoplite Greeks were their own men, and this is why they fought better — and why they thought better — than any human beings who had come before them. The BloodhoundBlog idea is but a small reflection of the Hellenic revolution, but it is an idea that should win, that should prosper in a world where no middle-man can squelch an idea or Read more

March 8, 2008

Kevin Kelly will teach you everything he knows about the economics of abundance — for free

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Farmer is the gift that keeps on giving. Last night at his place, and today at our place, he takes us deep inside the mind of Kevin Kelly.

I’ve been catching notices of Kelly’s name in the tech blogs, but I haven’t made time to read him. Big mistake on my part, corrected at some length this morning.

Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans forms the basis for a survival manual for exemplary-service Realtors and lenders.

His Technology Wants To Be Free is a much deeper discussion of the “free” economy than the Chris Anderson essay I talked about last week.

I may go into greater detail later, but you don’t need to be bottle fed. Get yourself to the Technium and drink from the fire-hose.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

March 7, 2008

Zillow Nation? Zeelocation?

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

As I wrote about just a couple of weeks ago, Zillow and other online players have an opportunity to do something incredibly different as the national/local problem begs to be resolved. With the new Zillow announcement regarding mortgage connections, the network gets closer to realization of true partnerships. I believe, and I might be wrong, that Zillow is testing the waters — mortgages are a safer micro-experiment. It’s not that Zillow is creating tough criteria and selecting the best to recommend, but they are establishing criteria.

A couple of more steps and you might have something like this:

Zillow announces today it’s new Zeelocation Program. What Zillow will be doing is inviting RE professionals from around the country to join a partnership in an attempt to strengthen its online efforts to provide consumers with cutting-edge home searching experiences, and begin solving the problems of localism, personalization and context.

What does this mean? Well, the main home search experience for consumers will be unchanged. Home shoppers and home sellers still have free access to listings and all the useful functions Zillow has to offer. However, for those home-buyers who are more seriously and immediately looking for a home and who want reliable local information, Zillow will be creating what is called The Zeelocation Program. Consumers will pay a $15.00 monthly subscription fee for access to a list of RE professionals in the area of the consumer’s interest. These professionals have been vetted by Zillow and meet strict requirements for inclusion in the program. RE brokers, Mortgage brokers, RE attorneys, inspectors, etc.  from all areas of country, after meeting the criteria for acceptance, and after paying the yearly fee that Zillow charges for acceptance, will be local partners with Zillow and will be offered to consumers who have subscribed to the program.

RE professionals will be required to follow strict guidelines dealing with consumers in the Zeelocation program – for instance, all forms of spamming are a violation of the program’s guideline and can cause the RE pro to be dropped from the program. Consumers who subscribe to the program will be given a list of local RE pros along with contact information Read more

March 6, 2008

No more web sites in the remarks section? ARMLS drops the hammer on the one little bit of the 21st century it was getting right

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read about the outlawing of web site URLs in listings on the “Welcome to Tempo” page of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Services (ARMLS), but I wasn’t certain it meant what it seemed to mean. Since I have been a Realtor, we have promoted our single-property websites in the remarks section of the listing, as have many other agents. It seemed odd to me, given how anal ARMLS had been about contact information in virtual tours, but I thought it was a laudable concession to real life in the third millennium.

We talk in web sites — Bloodhound Realty does, particularly. We live in webbed-wide world. This is news to no one. The appropriate way to talk about houses is in web sites. Hurray for ARMLS! It doesn’t really “get it,” but it gets at least some of it.

Not so.

Comes today this email:

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Gregory Swann ABR CRS GRI,

Our new iCheck program identified the following Error. The Error and any related verbiage was removed on Thursday, March 6, 2008.

MLS#: 0000000 TEMPORARILY OFF MARKET/RES
Error: MLS Rule Error (000)
Description: Prohibited URL

No further action is required by you at this time.

Thank you for complying with the ARMLS Rules and Regulations.

I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. I understand, I just don’t approve.

First, this is an artifact of the co-broke, the archaic practice of buyer’s representatives being paid by the listing agent. If commissions were divorced, all of the Top Secrets of the MLS system — every one of which is a violation of the buyer’s agent’s fiduciary duty to put the buyer’s interests ahead of all others (which most certainly includes the seller and the listing agent) — would be swept away like the dusty relics of the anti-capitalist era that they are.

Second, the specific purpose of forbidding web site URLs in listings is to impose an artificial chokepoint on the free market. Buyer’s agent’s seek to hold their own clients hostage in the transaction. In order to secure their own compensation, they will withhold the fact of Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts