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Category: Disintermediation (page 3 of 43)

December 21, 2009

Who’s Afraid of Redfin.com?

by

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

Author website

Bob Haywood, an Owasso, OK real estate agent makes a case for why you should be aware of Redfin.com.  Bob articulates, from behind the cloaked wall on Active Rain, why Redfin.com is the REAL agent of change in the real estate industry.  Read what Bob has to say:

You should pay as much or more attention to Redfin and what they are doing than you do to Zillow. Am I saying we should ignore Zillow?  No!  But the group who has the potential to really change real estate is Redfin, not Zillow.  And here’s why…Zillow is just an information source.  So they give lots of information.  Yippee.  The information real estate vault is now open to the public.  Zillow is just one of many players in the information delivery game.  And guess what?  Zillow exists at the 20,000 foot level.  Their information is not very accurate.  You and I exist on the ground level.  We know our local real estate market in ways that Zillow will never know.  We know what actually sold.  What it sold for.  What it is actually worth and often, what is about to come onto the market.

Fear Zillow.com?  “Not so much”, says Bob and I agree with him.  Zillow introduced the  Zillow Mortgage Marketplace and it has had no impact on my business these past 18 months.  Only one consumer has referenced Zillow’s mortgage rate quotes in their negotiation with me.   That consumer did speak a lot about the Zestimate and its inaccuracy; that inaccuracy actually helped me in the negotiation with the consumer because it threw a shadow of doubt upon the accuracy of the mortgage quotes they offer.

And that is why you should watch Redfin. Redfin is a ground level company.  They are attempting to take the information and link it to agents on the ground.  That’s what makes them dangerous.  If they ever get their feet under them and decide that they actually want to be a player nationwide, they could just change the way real estate is bought and sold.  And if they do, they could end up owning (many of) us.  Already, Read more

December 18, 2009

One Turtle Dove

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

The Glass Ceiling

I remember the moment I decided to stop wearing a suit and tie in public—forever. It was a couple days before Christmas and I dropped by the K-Mart to pick up a punch bowl for the office party.  I was looming  in Housewares when an elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons.  Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing that insidious song through the sound system.

“I want to file a complaint.”  She said.

“I don’t work here.”  Me.

“You’re not the manager?”  She asked,  insistent.

“No. I’m not the manager.”  I replied, perhaps a little snippy.

She glared up at me like…well…like I was lying.  More than anything, I hate being implicated in an aspersion when I’m innocent. I’d rather receive three french hens every day for a year from someone I don’t truly love than be deemed a liar (unless of course, I actually am, in which case, I will simply deny until totally boxed in).

“This is an Italian suit,  lady. You need to find someone with a name tag,”  I continued, perhaps a little prideful.

“That lady over there said to ask  you. That you were a manager.” She pressed.

We turned our attention to a  squat woman in a burka, a rare sight in Richmond, Virginia in those days.

“That lady over there doesn’t speak English.”  Me, perhaps a little too loud.

“I speak better English than you,” the lady yelled back across the aisle.  “I speak five languages. How many you speak?”

Oh yeah.  One of  those days.  A blue light siren began twirling above my head and something inaudible was announced over the speakers, interrupting  the chipmunk falsetto drone. I froze as a wave of shoppers began scurrying  in our direction; something about cutlery.

“You don’t have this Foot Soaker in stock.”  The elderly lady shoved a coupon under my nose as the herd surrounded us.

“I know I don’t, ma’am…Because…. I. Don’t. Work.  Here.”  Me.

“She deserves a rain check,”  Burka lady. “It’s false advertising if you don’t. Bait and switch.”

“Yes. Bait and switch,”  Elderly lady.

“Bait and Switch!”  Somebody yelled from the mob. “Bait and Switch….”

About that time an employee approached me and ask Read more

December 3, 2009

2010 Big Broker Market Domination Action Plan

by

Retechulous...

Author website

Here below is my take on a possible action plan for any mid to large sized real estate brokerage that would like to increase local market share by drastically enhancing its brand visibility and recruiting more agents to its team.

At the core of this plan is the creation of a company standard “Agent Lead Generation Package.”

The thinking here is that as the brokerage works to serve (and mandate) the lead generation efforts of its agents, it’ll concurrently establish it’s standing as the most omnipresent, technically progressive, office in its market area.

Broker Market Domination Action Plan

  • Establish a wide multi-author, wordpress based blogsite designed to serve as the cornerstone of your overall lead generation system. This site will double as a regional web based “newspaper” of sorts and will likely have eventual value as such. Key components of this site should include a video gallery page, idx integration, an evolvoing google map and individual agent pages that stream agent created content and feature unique lead capture offers for each agent.
  • Establish Company Social Media Profiles – A Facebook page, Twitter account, and Youtube account. Set them each to automatically interact with the main site, with new content being syndicated and shared between all components. Any content posted to the main site will land on Facebook and Twitter, with links calling eyeballs there back to the main site. Any videos uploaded to Youtube will land on the video gallery page and if properly titled and tagged in Youtube they should provide a stream of traffic for years to come.
  • Establish a Content Creation Schedule for Each Member of the Team. Make it a company mandate that everyone must contribute to the site on a regular basis. This includes ownership, management, administrative staff, and all agent partners. Assign each team member a themed piece of content that they are responsible for on a weekly basis. Figure out a way to punish those who don’t comply, and to reward those who do. Example – You could charge each agent who doesn’t contribute content a $50 penalty that will be used to hire Read more
November 30, 2009

The Social Media curve

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

if Arthur Laffer can have a curve for taxes that defies the static revenue generation models in use at the time and since, then I can have one for social media. (Hat tip to my friend Scott Hack at Selling Greater Louisville for starting me down this road…)

socialmediainbusiness

The true reach and impact of a given social media aite has a lifecycle. A site starts as an ineffective blob and the sites promoters must somehow inspire a LOT of people to waste a LOT of time building it up. **cough**Twitter**cough** As they do it gains traction, but unless it hits “critical mass”, a point at which it is a household word and EVERYONE is using it and will not stop using it, then it will decline. **cough**Myspace**cough**

For business purposes, since we are trying to maximize our ROI, my thought is that we only should spend time on those social media sites with enough RELEVANT traffic to warrant us spending our time on them. (Right now that is likely ONLY to be Facebook and then only where we can connect with our friends from the past effeciently and possibly get deals from them.

Twitter, for all of its rabid followers is now IN MY OPINION in decline.

**Eric ducks a tomato and few folks from NAR who are just now learning to spell the words “social media” (grin)**

How do I know? The aforementioned Scott Hack told me last week that he was noticing that more and more twitterers are doing less and less tweets. He is an avid twitterer. So I took it upon my self to do my own marketing research over Thanksgiving.

Of the many people in their 20s and 30s that I talked to, who were on Twitter, most (75%) planned on spending less time there in the coming year.Interesting to note that they STILL INTEND TO USE FACEBOOK.

So then I went to the younger crowd (read: Nephews and nieces) Are they getting on Twitter? No, No and no…why? Because they have become comfortable with the Facebook platform.

When I talk to the 35 to 45 year old crowd, they Read more

November 25, 2009

For the Cosmic Record

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

When presented with an ultimatum my first inclination has always been to go for the ‘or else’  end of the proposition— a defiant tendency that was pointed out  to me by more than a few black-hooded figures in charge of my early catechism. This probably explains  the abnormally high pain threshold I lug around to this very day. (Go ahead,  smack me across the knuckles with a ruler the next time we’re doing math together and see for yourself  how little I seem to care.)  I’m convinced this emotional dereliction has to something do with a mutated gene strand that skipped a few low risk taking generations in my inherent DNA.  Clearly, I was breech born under a bad moon.  I am a Virgo, they say,  but not by much.

In the late 1960s, when the Age of Aquarius was recruiting the deflowered masses of my wayward generation, I found myself stalled,  hesitant to beam up to the mothership.  Manned with my own back alley (hearsay, to be sure)  knowledge of that dirtiest of deeds,  I actually did the arithmetic and concluded that  my parents must have lost the rhythm on, or around,  Thanksgiving Dinner, 1955.  Born in the late afternoon on August 23rd  the following leap year (and exactly three complete trimesters to the dinner bell hour later), I concluded that  had my mother only pushed a little harder during labor,  I could  have been a Leo.  But then again, if everyone hadn’t started drinking Cold Duck in the morning exactly nine months earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been…. at all.

So hence, I mentally celebrate—in my sick,  sick head—two birthdays every year:  The day of my most  probable, mathematically correct Conception (Thanksgiving dinner, badda-bing),  and…. August 23rd, that so-called celestial cusp I barely missed by some late breaking water.  When someone asks me what astrological  ‘sign’ I am,  I simply spew out  my theory as posed above… and they usually go away.  It’s my own ultimatum of  sorts,  I suppose, to anyone who tries to get too close.  After all, I did come out feet first and tend to veer a Read more

November 4, 2009

Vook dead yet? Doesn’t matter. If you want to sell blades, first you have to find stubble that people are willing to pay to have shaved.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more

October 19, 2009

Unchained Melody: Fields of Gold

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Saturday I took a mini vacation and visited my daughter Rian, who was taking a longer vacation in the Hocking Hills. If you are from the Mid-West, you may know about the Hocking Hills. It’s beautiful land- old forests, rolling hills. It was a treat to take a day away from normal life and I love driving through Ohio with its farmland and small towns. I’m a Realtor. Under all is the land.

Ohio is still, and always has been, an agricultural state. Our biggest business is agriculture- that’s large expanses of productive real estate- income producing dirt. I am, even in my inner ring suburb, surrounded by cornfields and soybean fields and small roadside farm stands and pick-your-own strawberries. And when I was a kid I hated it! Hated it. I was once much more cosmopolitan than the hayseed you see before you. I was once a citified mohawk wearing rabble-rouser. I was once on the fast track out of the Mid-West and onto somethinganything more exciting. And then I grew up.

I spent time with people who came from the same gene pool. I was accepted by the most gentle and loving people I’d ever met. Their quiet wit, their infinite love, their simple lives woke me up and let me understand that I could take the girl out of the country, but I never really wanted to take the country out of the girl. My mohawk grew out, my attitude softened- just a bit- and I learned to love the sight of a pristine barn rising out of tidy rows of cornfields. I know with the tiniest whiff on the breeze, whether I’m smelling cow, pig, or horse shit, and my husband Jamie, who has farming in his blood and spent his youth as an assistant to a large animal veterinarian, says that the dumber the animal, the better the smell. Hint: Pigs stink almost as much as humans.

We have beautiful land in Ohio, and no time is it more beautiful than now, in the fall, when the trees become a spectacular raging colorfest, and the farm fields are golden, Read more

October 13, 2009

The (last) Amend

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

The Notion

In my dream I’m always gasping for air; as if the trillion or so cubic inches of ozone I’ve already blown through in my lifetime somehow counts for nothing.  I awake, step over the dog, and scramble downstairs in my boxers in search of a physical remedy to a metaphysical dilemma. Something is bothering me and I can’t quite place my finger on it. Life is short and, on this crisp autumn eve, I’m clearly too underdressed to even be considering my last breath.  Our fifteen-year old cat follows close behind, his own mousy demons no doubt,  in tow as well.

‘Dear God, please don’t let me die with money in my portion of the Charles Schwab account,’ I think as I root through the herbal medicine cabinet,  next to the dishes, above the microwave.  ‘That’s what the Prudential life insurance policy in the house safe is for,’ I obsess. It’s an odd recurring thought, I realize. Just being forthcoming.

We keep no real drugs in our house.

Ginkgo Biloba, Paranil, Senna, Licorice Root. Green Tea, White Tea, Black Tea…where the fck is the Alka Seltzer?

Over the years I’ve developed an internal ON/OFF switch of sorts; a requirement for any man whose livelihood  simultaneously hinges on rejection yet somehow also depends on the act of a total stranger purchasing something of considerable value; house, condo, etc…. every month. It’s an Acceptance thing, I’ve learned. This emotional circuit breaker has, for a long time,  assisted me in affairs of the heart,  finance,  most of  the Deadly Sins—Fear, Greed, Anger, etc… not to mention social and personal guilt.  And in case you haven’t  been following the box scores at home this season,  I’ve been in the OFF mode for a while now.

thankyouverymuchhaveanicedaybiteme….next

Over time I’ve learned to appreciate  the next ‘Next‘  in life—I just haven’t learned not to  eat Mexican food before retiring for the evening or found a way to avoid the night scares that have startled me ever since that stupid monster began squatting in my childhood closet at 39 Vineyard Road in Levittown.  And as my Life flickers before me this particular night, Read more

October 6, 2009

Want buyers to think you are better than sliced bread?

by

Realtor, Productivity Guru

Author website

Were ready for step two of the series on how to effectively use a tablet PC to run your day to day real estate tasks.  I’m including a screencast to actually give you some visualization on how I actually use my tablet PC for working with buyers in the field. Warning: Please turn down volume on screencast prior to starting.
Using a tablet PC when out in the field

The basic premise of what I do with buyers out in the field is extremely simple but very effective for organization, having a go-to information source, and being looked to at a whole new light in your clients eyes.

What I do when working with buyers using my tablet PC:

  • Fire up my MLS and find the homes that I will be showing to my buyer
  • Go to File Print and select the Print labeled “One Note 2007”
  • Once the spec sheet is in One Note I move it into a pre-created notebook for my specific client for organizational reasons
  • You can also print specific tax bills or anything relevant to that specific house you can think of that maybe handy and impressive to show in-front buyers.  The most relevant thing that I have added into my showings is the listing history/price change sheet.  (We all know they ask they questions almost every time no more fumbling, time to be the expert we really are!)
  • Next I go show the house and take notes on each property that we see so I can give relevant feedback to the listing agent.  Taking notes on every house is also a great way to remind buyers about the prior homes.

As you can see what I’m presenting here is really simple and should not intimidate anyone that is afraid of technology.  It’s as simple as Print/Move to a Notebook this is a good start of what we will be building in on future posts.
The real reason I’ve decided to take on this Tablet PC for Real Estate blog journey is to communicate with other people who share similiar interest’s and can share new ways of working with a tablet PC to become more efficient Read more

October 2, 2009

Is it time for a second Vook at Brad Inman’s latest brain fart?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Believe it or don’t, just yesterday I was telling Cathleen that I felt remiss in not having made fun of the Vook lately. The Vook, as you will recall, is Brad Inman’s latest attempt to prove that he stumbled onto half a billion bucks by accident. The trouble is, as he is discovering, pissing away that kind of dough isn’t easy, no matter how clueless you are — and Inman takes a back-seat to no one at cluelessness.

Even so, I need to issue a mea culpa of my own: The Vook has actually made it to the marketplace, a feat I would have bet against. Simon and Schuster — which has always made all of its profits from crossword puzzle books — turns out to be possessed of its own Inmaniacal cluelessness: The New York publisher is issuing Vook content, apparently because its printed books are not already selling badly enough.

But: Don’t despair. Even though there are very few people who are stupid enough to buy this stupid gadget, the Vook will still serve a purpose in the history of marketing: It will make the Zune look popular by contrast.

July 18, 2009

With MLS listings available everywhere on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

Here’s an intriguing question: Given that it’s so easy to search for homes on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

Face it, if you use the MLS search tool on my web site, you’re seeing exactly the same listings I see. And you know better than I ever could what you like and what you don’t like.

By now, the home search process is at best a partnership between the agent and the buyer. In some cases the buyer and I will work together to perfect our search criteria. But many buyers simply search the available inventory on their own, emailing me the MLS numbers of the homes they want to see.

So why do those buyers need a buyer’s agent?

Realtors hoarded the MLS data for so long that even they came to believe it was the source of their value to buyers. But this is very far from the truth.

You don’t need me to search for listings, although I’m happy to do that. And you don’t need me to open lock-boxes. You need a buyer’s agent to guide you through what is in fact an arcane and perilous process — potentially a financial disaster. You might not need me to find your next home, but you need me to make sure that you get it — or that you pass on it, if that is what is truly in your best interests.

A skilled buyer’s agent will write the kind of purchase contract that will prove surprising to you at every turn, with every term and condition tailored to achieve your best advantage. Your agent will supervise the inspection process and negotiate the optimal solution to the repair issues. Your agent will be prepared for every pitfall in the escrow process.

If you bought and sold houses every day, you could do all these things yourself. It’s because you don’t — and because the seller and the listing agent are looking to take advantage of your naivete at every turn — that you need a skilled buyer’s agent as your steadfast champion in Read more

July 17, 2009

A Sailor Jerry Moment

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

tattoo

The base anticipation that precedes any journey to a new destination is always more vivid for me than the denouement that accompanies the physical descent to earth.  With rare exception (perhaps Paris and maybe Vegas), the image I conjure up in my two dimensional mind beforehand always seems to fall somewhat short of the real 3-D deal.  On our first trip to Maui, for example,  my notion of grass huts  and Woody Wagons clamped with surfboards was quickly dashed the moment I spotted a Costco and a  Wal-Mart just steps from the arrival terminal. It was raining  ukuleles that day and the lone, Port Authority hula dancer was, how shall I say… Samoan? I was expecting something a bit more, I don’t know….svelte?; like the subject of one of  those Sailor Jerry tattoos I threaten to get stenciled across my chest every 120  lunar cycles or so—-pure 1950’s  South Pacific paradise-of-the-mind stuff. I think we  bought our own leis for 8 bucks each at the gift shop, rented a Taurus from Avis, and called it a day.

And it’s not just Hawaii. The same holds true for Jamaica—or as I like to call it, The Bangladesh of the Caribbean, with its human squalor, smelly ceviche,  and over-abundance of  muddy water. Even the Antiquarium in Boscoreale, Italy, beneath the shadows of a nearby looming housing project,  is sequestered by a string of barbed wire and discarded heroin needles. Not that I don’t enjoy myself abroad, mind you. I’m an enthusiastic traveler, to be sure. The foreign landscapes that ultimately unfold just never fully mesh with the spatial images dancing around in my head before touch down.

Alaska was pretty spot-on but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting  too much from that particular latitude. And while I did not get a tattoo while docked in the port of  Juneau,  I was presented with a  shiny new Rolex Datejust in our cruise ship cabin later that evening.  Since I’m clearly never retiring from anywhere,  my wife decided to give me my ceremonial timepiece a few decades early— for my 50th birthday.  Just so you know, Read more

July 12, 2009

Some questions about using DocuSign for electronic signatures

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve avoided DocuSign because ZipForms was so terrible in the Mac world. While the new implementation is not great, it’s better. And as kludgey and expensive as DocuSign seems, I really, really want electronic signatures.

But I have questions:

1. Can I use DocuSign to do my “broker oversight” signatures? That’s not a legal question. I’m just asking, is it possible?

2. If I receive a document — say a counter-offer — from another DocuSign-using Realtor, can I use DocuSign to get my client’s signature on that document?

3. Same question, but just an ordinary PDF? How about an ordinary fax?

4. What about added documents? We do a lot in the way of extended additional clauses, especially on listings, with each version of those clauses being unique. Is it possible to add our own forms in a DocuSign envelope?

5. What do you love about DocuSign?

6. What do you hate about it?

I’m grateful for any insights you can offer.

July 6, 2009

Why Web 2.0 Still Hasn’t Mastered the Real Estate Mantra: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

So Goggle thinks it’s going to win the real estate search game.  As far as I’m concerned, there is no more meaningless a result in an online property search than a red pin designating the location of a property on a map.  Take the map above in the example – a snapshot of the the greater New York City area with little red dots designating search results.  New York’s a big city with alot of little neighborhoods.  Help me understand how this solution is any better than any of the others? How has Google upped the ante in providing a better solution?

They haven’t.

What I find interesting about the online search game is how many players fail to understand what makes a particular property unique – desirable – a one of a kind.  How does a little red dot convey the weighty significance of LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION?  I just read Joe Burslem’s post over at FOREM, regarding how Google is now getting serious about real estate.

Should Zillow and Trulia be worried?  Not if they view search as a value added activity.  SEO juice isn’t necessarily the fuel that runs an effective or valuable search.  The content around the search is key.  What makes a location important?  When consumers seek a home – not a house – what evokes the emotional response?  A view?  The possibility of walking to a farmer’s market on Sunday, while passing a Starbucks?

A street view is a “window” into a location, but it doesn’t define it’s personality.  Location has an identity.  Zillow has already done the homework to identify the boundaries to neighborhoods.  Perhaps a valuable next step may be to better identify a neighborhood’s identity – its personality – or maybe link the characteristics of a location to the attributes of a property.

If a search result can personify a property’s location, consistent with how a consumer lives, the red pin comes alive.  Search is meaningful.

Google – you’ve got your work cut out for you.

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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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