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Category: Disintermediation (page 16 of 43)

March 5, 2008

Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Russell Shaw taught a symposium today in Phoenix on Geographic Farming. Cathy and I were there, and Russell was sweet enough to give a plug to BloodhoundBlog Unchained. At the break, I was swarmed by people wanting more information on Social Media Marketing, especially weblogging — most regretting that they hadn’t gotten started sooner. Teri Lussier is a scorching read on those same kind of ideas today. Both events put me in mind of this post, which I wrote on July 23, 2006 — a Sunday — I can remember the day. This is flagship content for BloodhoundBlog, one of the posts that established who we are, our steady position in this discussion. But it’s amazing to me how timeless this advice has turned out to be — how much we are all still “situated at various points from painfully awful to Insanely Great on the continua for each one of these skill sets.” This one is worth studying — and worth pursuing the links. –GSS, 03/05/08]

 
People leaving comments at BloodhoundBlog keep confusing Cathleen Collins for me, so I decided to steal an idea from Rain City Guide and put our photos beside each of our posts. That entailed revising BloodhoundBlog’s weblog template, of course, which also meant adapting its Cascading Style Sheet. A significant number of people reading this already don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll endeavor to lose most of the rest: I had to rewrite a few little bits of PHP to make everything work.

Like this:

That puts the pictures, which I had prepared in Photoshop, in place. This code:

is the actual name of the photo. That dumb little bit of PHP says, “Get the ID number of the current author and replace everything from the < to the > with that number. The photos are named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc., so the PHP substitution makes the right photo show up for the right author.

PHP is an amazingly robust and incredibly loose language, but the amount and kind of PHP you use to manage a WordPress weblog is minor and very simple — baby-steps PHP.

But this occurred to Read more

March 4, 2008

Redfin.com builds new listing oversight tools for sellers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the news, snipped to the quick:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released Redfin Listing Metrics, a dashboard for Redfin’s listing customers to analyze neighborhood inventory trends and recent sales, and to compare their listing’s online traffic to that of other listings in the neighborhood.

That sounds slick, doesn’t it? A Redfin listing is a hybrid between a full-service listing and a for-sale-by-owner. This new software is a hybrid, too. On the one hand, Redfin is providing real-time access to information you wish you were getting to your sellers once a week. On the other, the Seattle start-up clearly intends for sellers to micro-manage their own listings:

The Listing Metrics dashboard, currently available only to Redfin listing customers, graphs how key marketing and pricing trends change day to day and week to week:

  • Online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com as compared to the neighborhood average, so Redfin customers can determine if their listing is competing for online buyers’ attention;
  • Sources of online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com, so Redfin sellers can evaluate the effectiveness of promoting their listing on other sites;
  • The number of competing broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can evaluate supply and demand to determine if pricing conditions are changing; and
  • The average days on market for broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can determine if their property is taking too long to sell.

The dashboard also provides an overview of nearby similar listings, so Redfin sellers can compare their listing’s pricing, photos and amenities to those of its competition, and an overview of recently sold properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin sellers can evaluate closing prices as well as listing prices. Using the dashboard, Redfin customers can also schedule and promote open houses.

Okayfine. Few blessings come to us unmixed. Sellers will surely like the greater control, even though an experienced lister might try — and fail — to warn them about the unhappy consequences of “over-marketing” a listing. But, guess what? Their house, their money, their risk. Redfin might not be giving sellers what you or I might think they really need, but it is proving itself Read more

March 4, 2008

The All-Spin Zone: The big news from the Inman News relaunch is that much of the RE.net is now in bed with Brad Inman

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had mail from a vendor just lately asking me if I might be interested in a forthcoming story. This was my reply:

Just so as not to disappoint, this is the way we work:

Good for consumers, agents or lenders, we eat it up.

Good for the vendor, we ignore it.

I should think this would be obvious, but much of the RE.net has gone into pure PR mode — more high-fives than your kid’s soccer match — so I just wanted to be clear.

As evidence of this phenomenon, witness the fawning coverage for Inman News’ relaunch this weekend. For all the hype, what actually happened was that they moved the furniture, and gave everything a coat of paint — hardly earth-shaking events.

Interestingly, it’s still a for-pay site, but, as far as I can tell, the “news” is now free. Here’s an unencrypted telegram from Secret Agent Slobbering Dog to Brad Inman: Regulating access to the news was the chokepoint. No one should pay for ordinary information — mostly regurgitated vendor press releases, just like Realtor magazine. But no sane person has any reason to pay a hundred-and-fifty bucks a year for an official Inman News sippee cup.

Of course, while everyone else was fawning over that boffo furniture-moving job, we were talking about strangling the last of the chokepoints in the twenty-first century marketplace. Oddly enough, we have the idea that what is important is what is important to you — not to the people we have drinks with — or hope someday to have drinks with.

My take is that people can crave affection or admiration or companionship entirely too much. The same goes for prestige. What makes real weblogging work — and what makes most corporate or commercial or vendor blogging fail — comes down to spin, juice, PR. You either shun it or you embrace it, and there really isn’t any middle ground. It’s a nice thing that Inman News did a little sweeping up. But that ain’t news.

On the other hand, there is ample room in these events to draw inferences. BloodhoundBlog has nothing to gain or lose. I set it Read more

March 2, 2008

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Continuing, briefly with the idea of chokepoints and the economics of abundance:

Broadcasting — radio and television — offers us a perfect example of how much bigger the economics of abundance is than mere data processing.

Broadcast outlets, at their beginning, were both natural and man-made chokepoints: There were a limited number of available frequencies, and access to them was regulated by fiat of law. Cost-based chokepoints affected the other major media of the era — newspapers and magazines. This resulted in very lucrative markets for the owners of mass media outlets — and in media products that tended to be at least as dissatisfying to consumers as they were appealing.

But then three things happened:

  1. Printing got a lot more efficient, creating the era of narrowcasting in publications — not one generic bike-riding article a year in Look magazine, but a dozen specialized monthlies just for different flavors of serious bike racers — with a dozen more for mountain biking, and a dozen more for bicycle fitness training.
  2. As a consequence of better scientific research in electro-magnetics, electronics, signal-processing and information theory, the radio spectrum itself became much more abundantly divisible — creating still newer kinds of narrow-casting, right down to cell phones and private-network walkie-talkies.
  3. Finally, the internet itself resulted in a massive explosion of available bandwidth in mix-and-match wired and wireless networks.

What’s the result? One of the richest businesses in the entire history of chokepoints is being disintermediated into oblivion. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

Emphasizing that, I cannot get enough of this movie:


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March 2, 2008

Say goodbye to Chokepoint Charlie: In a world without walls, free is the new green of the internet economy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have been talking about the economics of abundance literally from Day One of BloodhoundBlog:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others.

I was talking about phenomena like weblogging and open-source software, but, ironically enough, I was also talking about an article by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson.

This week Anderson is back with another important article, this one called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. He’s writing about the net.economy, and what he has to say is fascinating, even if I think he might be missing the bigger picture. He’s also writing in support of his new book, a for-pay product I don’t intend to pay for.

Anderson likens the idea of free razors, which we’ve also talked about, with the modern net model of using free web-based software to create massively-viral effects. Interestingly, he documents six broad categories of no-cost-to-the-user internet business models.

His thesis is that the plummeting cost of data-processing hardware, coupled with a software-cost-per-user that approaches zero, requires vendors of web-based information and services to find other ways to monetize their efforts. If one vendor won’t cut the price to zero, the next one will.

We’ve been talking about this much, too, also since the birth of BloodhoundBlog:

[T]he people most immediately affected are the ones who are currently paid a salary or wages based on the sale of information. Either the information is going to get much, much better — or the number of paychecks is going to get much, much smaller.

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. Read more

February 29, 2008

Speaking in tongues: Making more-professional-looking CraigsList HTML ads — even if you don’t know how to code in HTML

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’ve amended this post somewhat based on our recent experiences with CraigsList, which are discussed in the comments. The point of this post is not CraigsList, but, rather, learning how to extract HTML from existing code, this as a means of learning to write HTML on your own. In the comments, a number of vendor solutions are discussed, and these my be worth exploring, if only as a prophylactic against censorious behavior by CraigsList users. But your need to produce professional-looking HTML can extend far beyond the major on-line services. As an example, Cathleen Collins pulled buyers out of an ad we were able to post on a church’s bulletin-board-like system. –GSS]

 
A couple-few weeks ago, I was on a conference call with Jerry Matthews. He’s a one-time grand poohbah in Realtor Association politics, but now he works as a consultant to the NAR and certain state-level Associations. I was the waxed-fruit-flavor-of-the-day in a series of calls with Association executives, so that they might take the pulse of market innovators. I think I might have been the Designated Radical. If so, I promise you I did not disappoint.

As one stage, I was talking about how new licensees might market themselves cheaply in what is, for now, a hard world to get a break in. I mentioned a lot of different ideas, including CraigsList.com, which may be the single most effective advertising medium available to Realtors or lenders right now.

I said, “Of course, most CraigsList ads stink, so, with just a little bit of HTML you can really make yourself stand out?”

“But how is a new agent supposed to know anything about HTML?” someone asked.

I didn’t say, “Young people know a lot more than you give them credit for.” Instead, I pointed out that weblogging software like WordPress creates HTML for you, even if you don’t know what it’s doing.

So you could do something like this:

  1. Create a weblog post about a house you’ve listed — or, with explicit permission, that another agent has listed
  2. Write a good, compelling headline about why buyers should want to see that house
  3. Write good, clean — error free — Read more
February 28, 2008

Bebop and the brain — Thelonious Monk’s career advice to working Realtors and lenders: “We wanted a music that they couldn’t play”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We listen to Bebop Jazz in the office. If I talk about music, I tend to talk about Rock ‘n’ Roll or Country, just because they’re more inclusive. Bebop is demanding music even for Jazz, definitely an acquired taste.

Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.

I would argue that complex compositions — like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz — will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.

Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station at Yahoo’s LaunchCast on-line radio portal. Like all LaunchCast stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.


Creative Commons License photo credit: MikeLove

That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline

“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”

is practically a mission statement for Web 2.0-empowered Realtors and lenders.

Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming for each other. Over a very short span of time they created a brand new form of music, with a brand new music theory all its own.

The “they” in Monk’s Read more

February 26, 2008

The Network — No Easy Duality

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

To clarify my little vision yesterday it will be helpful to explain what I see happening. I see demands for online RE companies such as Zillow and Trulia to do two things: one a demand from investors to make a profit and another demand from consumers for better, more comprehensive information. When I speak of monetization it’s because it’s a reality for them. I think RE companies will be forced to create alliances with local brokers so that good, contextual information is available for consumers to go along with pictures of homes and out of context estimates and partial information.

I’m not really overly concerned about this, it’s just interesting to think about how they will survive and change. I understand the “free” experience of searching for homes without being badgered or spammed by RE agents and vendors of all sorts.

But if they don’t make money, they won’t survive. I hear Homegain is making money and it will be interesting to see how their model evolves.

However, the Network I’m talking about is more in line with with what Greg writes about here.

The Network will not be web 1.5, it’ll be more like web 2.5 and it won’t be designed to feel good about doing good, it’ll be  about being excellent and benefitting consumers. The Network will be about individuals connected to other individuals with no power or control over one another, just a recognition of excellence. I say the Network will be 2.5 because personalization and context won’t be mastered for some time.

So it’s not an easy duality of those who are greedy looking to make a buck and those who are enlightened and open and good, it will be a complex variation of efforts that I think will coalesce along several different lines. The RE companies will compete for consumers, and many will compete mainly for traffic in order to advertise. They will have to offer value and someone will need to be charged. If they don’t offer value, there will be no one to charge. I suppose the value of the Listing Sites will be to show listings in more creative, informational ways. This can be done locally much better, once consumers fully Read more

February 25, 2008

Do you want to understand what Web 2.0 means in your own life? On the internet, Socrates would have lived

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I just wrote this in a comment to Kevin Tomlinson, but it’s important, so I want to address it in the larger arena:

On the internet, everything is Kevlar.

This is for real, and it’s a lesson people are slowly learning all over the globe:

  1. Muscle power accumulates, brain power does not. A group of people is no smarter than its smartest member, and the sclerosis imposed by group decision-making will tend to make a typical group seem to behave as though it were dumber than its dumbest member.
  2. Groups cannot interdict the flow of information, so there is no longer any way to prevent most of the people on earth from discovering anything they wish to know. The middle-men who have been disintermediated first were the people who wanted to prevent the other members of their groups from gaining free access to the truth.
  3. Even when they manage to cohere, groups have no power where they cannot amass muscles or accumulate weapons.
  4. In consequence, any competent individual can take on and defeat any group of people on the internet, no matter how large it might be.

Ergo, on the internet, Socrates would have lived.

This is the triumph of the Greek ideal, an amazing, world-changing accomplishment.

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February 24, 2008

Has Web 2.0 Failed YOU?

by

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

Author website

Louis Cammarosano, of Home Gain, outlines his theory about the failed promise of RE2.0. He offers four thoughts to back up his premise:

1- Success has been marginal.

2- It’s TOO consumer-centric and neglects the real estate professional (I’m still trying to understand how the anonymous presentation from real estate professionals, at Home Gain, really puts the REALTOR out in front.)

3- User-generated content is biased and therefore irrelevant.

4- Re.net adopters are somewhat smug in our “secret” which eventually turns people off.

Louis is new to weblogging so I want to be welcoming. He’s also a big boy and can handle himself so I will pay him the compliment of being blunt. He started his weblog with the initial purpose of communicating with his subscribers. When he invited a bunch of real estate bloggers to contribute, he recognized that Web 2.0 has legs. The very platform he criticizes is the one he employs to deliver that criticism and that…makes no sense.

The kept promise of interactive marketing is independence. We look no farther than my co-contributor (on Home Gain) Jay Thompson for proof of that kept promise; independence. Web 2.0 disintermediates the BROKER and LENDER (in my case) if practiced correctly. It allows you to connect with consumers around the globe. 90% of the consumers are still going to use a real estate agent when buying or selling a home. While that percentage may drop, it will still be overwhelmingly large.

Why? Real estate agents (and mortgage originators) add value. If we can communicate that value proposition, directly to the consumer, without dependency on a Home Gain, a Countrywide, or a RE/MAX, to do our advertising, both we and the consumers win.

I continually proclaim that blogging isn’t the “little purple pill” to cure all of your marketing deficiencies. It is, however, an opportunity for you to find a large number of people, who when employing a long-tail search, want exactly what you can provide.

That’s not failure. That’s power.

February 22, 2008

Search Engine Guide is unleashed, but only the wild dogs are unchained

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jeff Brown found this promotional film for Small Business Marketing Unleashed and passed it on to Brian Brady, who forwarded it to me. Could someone be pulling a Davison on both BloodhoundBlog Unchained and the Daniel Rothamel video?

My take: Synchronicity. As you might recall, Unleashed was one of the names we considered on the way to picking Unchained:

Here is why I like Unchained:

  • The idea of free or even feral dogs
  • Unleashed implies has-been-leashed or will-be-leashed-again, but unchained can suggest never-having-been-chained
  • Again unlike unleashed, unchained has connotations of human slavery or imprisonment, and hence manumission or liberation
  • The word looks and sounds hard and edgy, promoting a hard and edgy graphic representation

These metaphors are not new to me, nor is the metaphor of dancing. I don’t actually care about dancing, but I care a lot about metaphors.

That’s actually kind of interesting as a comprehensive glimpse into our marketing prowess. But Search Engine Guide got to a slightly different place ahead of us.

[This post was redacted to correct factual errors addressed in the comments. –GSS]

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February 21, 2008

Zillow’s Virtual Sold Signs go live: Are yours up yet?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re a working Realtor, Zillow.com’s Virtual Sold Sign technology is another weapon you can deploy in your guerrilla marketing strategy.

I raved about this when it was announced, but now the feature has finally gone live.

What’s a Virtual Sold Sign? If you were the the listing agent the last time a particular home sold, Zillow will associate that home’s record with your Zillow profile, noting that the homes was “last sold by” — you.

Because Zillow has a database of almost all of the homes in the country, we have the unique opportunity to provide this feature.  Traditional listings sites just take a listing down once the transaction is complete, but we have over 4 million visitors coming to Zillow and viewing millions of recently sold homes each month.  In fact, over 35 million homes have been viewed on Zillow since we launched.  In some cities (Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, among others), over 90% of ALL homes in those cities have been viewed on Zillow.  Your sold homes are already getting viewed a lot on Zillow, with (until now) nothing to distinguish them as your sold homes.

The VSS program allows agents and brokers to continue marketing themselves on their sold properties for free, long after the home has actually sold.  Past transactions can even be submitted, to get attribution for listings that [sold] long before the Zillow Listings Feed program was even started.  It’s like leaving the “sold” sign up in the yard of each and every home you’ve ever sold.

Aside from the obvious benefit to agents and brokerages, the VSS program is beneficial to prospective sellers, and even buyers to find out who the top agents and brokerages are in their neighborhood, or the neighborhood where they want to move.

This is another piece of the marketing strategy that Brian Brady, myself and others have been working on, but which Tom Johnson has given the sizzling sobriquet “ZestiFarming.” Not to get too unhinged on the Unchained promises, but I’ll be teaching two hours of ZestiFarming techniques to enable you to completely dominate a geographic listing farm.

And this is also another demonstration of Read more

February 9, 2008

Who is vulnerable to Zillow.com? How about TopProducer.com?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m thinking the lending product, whatever it turns out to be, is going to involve some kind of Customer Relationship Management/Transaction Management component anyway. And what does everyone say made it worthwhile to drink the HouseValues.com KoolAde? Yep — CRM/TM.

Here’s my big-picture take: If you’re in any sort of business where the added-cost per additional increment approaches zero — all of TP’s costs are accounted for by customer #1, transaction #1; after that, they’re storing and swapping electrons — watch out. Anyone who is willing to eat your front-loaded costs can eat your lunch.

What’s the counter-measure? Price your product at zero. The plausible alternative to free is not-only-free-but-WAY-better. Otherwise, your installed-base should stay put, with all the new converts up for grabs. That’s a first-mover advantage, provided the first-mover stays nimble. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world…

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February 8, 2008

The Great Debates – Monday, Feb 11

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Dustin asks if Brian Wilson is really going to argue .. .. that Realtor.com is an agent’s friend with me taking the other side? Yes, is the answer. I met Brian in wilsonshawHawaii just a little over a week ago. We were both there for CRS Sell-a-bration.
I was a speaker (on how to correctly price listings in this market) and when I wasn’t actually teaching made it a point to either be out at the beach or doing something very non-productive. This time it was sitting in a hot tub. Brian greeted me by saying something about my posts on BloodhoundBlog. No one else in the tub knew what BHB was, but I wasn’t surprised, three of the other people were either fron Ireland or England and weren’t Realtors. Chatting briefly with Brian was all it took for me to instantly like him.

When he first sent me a list of ten different topics to debate I had to reject a couple of them just because I don’t know a damn thing about them. I don’t feel that way about Realtor.com. I do know about them and there are several things I really wish were different. Having seen Brian’s response to my first writing on the subject I have to say that I doubt anyone from Realtor.com could have done any better job defending them.

This isn’t to say that I won’t ultimately win the “debate” – as the “pro” position isn’t very defensible. You can see for yourself here.

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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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