BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Fun With Vendorsluts (page 1 of 1)

August 25, 2020

Horror stories wanted: How has real estate’s Vendorslut Mafia preyed upon you?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Results? Any day now, for sure. Meanwhile, this month’s payment is due.” Photo by Ian on Unsplash

I don’t pay for leads. Never have, never will. I pay referral fees to other agents from time to time, this as a matter of expected courtesy, but I don’t collect fees for referrals – not alone to escape the burden of policing them.

Not such big news, regardless: I don’t make a lot of money. We haven’t marketed for new business in ten years, and I make my meager living on repeats and referrals from my existing clients. I’ve never craved money – it shows, I swear – and I am not as much in love with collecting pelts as I once was. When BloodhoundBlog was young, I said we were a boutique brokerage. I am by now my sole licensee, and I think of myself as a lab-rat broker.

I am mainly interested in listing for sale as though I were practicing free-throws on the basketball court. My goal is to perfect my listing praxis and then to hew to it with perfect performance. My numbers bear me out – but I don’t spend much on advertising, either.

My curiosity runs the other way just now: How have you been hurt as an agent or lender by your engagements with the sleazy folks we have always referred to as The Vendorslut Mafia?

Are there no happy stories? Surely there are. Deeper pockets going in may see happier outcomes going forward. But when you’re tap-dancing with your kid’s orthodontist so you can fork over cash you don’t have for “leads” that won’t pan out…

Kinda sucks, don’t it…?

I would love to hear about your experience. Who you paid. How much you paid. How things paid off.

I’m not shaming salesmaniacs, and I know it’s easy to click “Submit” before you know what you’re submitting to. And you can tell yourself that 65% of something is better than 100% of nothing – with luck missing out on the news that you’re paying some gonoph for coming between you and your client – typically with your own listings. Read more

September 30, 2017

Who’s afraid of the big, bad bot? Real estate “AI” is a cargo cult – of trivia.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll talk more about this as we go forward: I am listing almost never, but I am listing as close to perfectly as I can. I have made myself into a killer real estate listing agent by way of behavior modeling: Double-thinking appraisers and experienced agents to get to the unassailable price, then selling to absolutely everyone in the process. That includes writing rebuttal language in private MLS fields for agents to deploy on their buyers – selling by attenuation.

That doesn’t end. Under Contract is a dance of magnets, a war of attrition among mutual repulsions. This is where closing skills really matter – and that’s why I am selling my client’s interests all the time, to everyone, all the way to the close.

My point? Come and get me, robot. I don’t give a rat’s ass where the nearest Starbucks is, but I know how to get to the closing table. You don’t.

April 3, 2013

What’s big, dumb, sclerotic and panics on command? A California Association of Realtors member, apparently.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So this big dumb robot shows up on the front porch this morning:

Believe it or not, it’s from the California Association of Realtors. The robot exists to support this video:

Get it? There’s a meet-cute featuring pre-tween pretend robots, and this clunky piece of junk communicates… what…?

My reaction? “Urf. Now I’m going to have to waste time mocking this nonsense…”

Okayfine. You will note that the robot seems to be suggesting that California Real Estate is something of a slot machine.

But at least your CAR member agent has his squarish mechanical head screwed on right.

And in a batteries-not-included world, your mechano-Realtor comes complete with two enormous D-cells, which must have added considerably to the postage.

The box didn’t provide a lot of insight into why one should choose a CAR-certified RealtorBot, but it was fun imagery:

Ultimately, though, it’s the test of the marketplace that matters. And a CAR-approved RealtorBot can panic mindlessly like no other.

Hey, CAR members: No tar, no feathers in California? This is your money I’m having such a good time with…

March 15, 2013

My client went shopping for houses on Trulia.com, and only 75% of those she found were bogus listings…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My note to her: “Trulia and Zillow both present inactive listings as though they were active to fool the public into thinking that they have more inventory than the agents they exploit for advertising money, even though their listings come straight from the MLS systems. Mere real estate brokers would be fined out of business for pulling these stunts.”

Despair you nothing, though, hard-working dogs. Every time Trulia or Zillow are caught pulling these bait-and-switch stunts, one more active real estate shopper is turned off of their sites forever. Nice going, suits…

December 7, 2012

Are Zillow and Trulia thrashing savagely in a blood-red ocean? Here’s a clue: Both of them are jumping the shark.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you feel like dinner?Is the business model of all the Realty.bots daft?

It is Citron’s primary thesis that Zillow is a Web 1.0 business presenting itself as a Web 2.0 investment. The entire premise of Web 2.0 is that smart managing and publication of information interactively to users can scale tremendously, while costs remain fixed. But unlike Netflix, LinkedIn, and even Facebook, Zillow isn’t voyaging forth into an ever-expanding horizon of unlimited sized markets opening up on the internet. It generates virtually all of its revenue from U.S. real estate agents. And it does so the old- fashioned way—by cold-calling them on the telephone. It’s been operating since 2006 more or less as it does today, and was consistently unprofitable, until the last two quarters.

[….] It is a “heavyweight” sales company masquerading as a “web 2.0” leveraged technology play. The only way it has to grow revenues right now is with the increasing intensity of the sales effort. It’s not light and leverageable like LinkedIn, or OpenTable (Sales and mktg 21.4% of revenues) Zillow is more similar to Groupon than a Web 2.0 company such as LinkedIn or Open Table.

[….]

Expressed another way, it is apparent to Citron that Zillow is buying revenues with an intense telesales effort. Put in its simplest terms, they spent an additional $3.8 million on sales expense last quarter, and only generated $4.8 million in new revenues!

By comparison, Open Table spends 21% of revenues on sales, and even LinkedIn spends 33%. This comparison shows how much Zillow is dependent on old school phone room sales—not Web 2.0 online leverage.

While management might spin a fun story about their company growing revenues at a rapid pace, the proof is in the numbers. The cost of sales demonstrates that customers do not buy Zillow ads; they are sold Zillow ads, which should be disturbing because they address a target niche market unlike OPEN or LNKD—and cost of sales should be lower.

[….]

Citron notes that MOVE.com, formerly Homestore.com, referenced above, could not make money during the real estate boom of the mid 2000’s. At the time, they were the only online destination for brokers to buy Read more

March 15, 2012

Jay Thompson takes leadership role at Zillow.com.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Witness:

Thompson joins Zillow’s growing partner outreach team, which includes Sara Bonert (director of broker services), Brad Andersohn (industry outreach manager), and recent addition Bob Bemis (vice president of partner relations). Together, the team advances Zillow’s goal of helping real estate agents grow and market their business.

Grow and market whose business?

This is precisely the kind of leadership I have come to expect from Jay since 2008 or so: The goat takes a left when the cattle take a right. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll probably be taking the right turn.

I’m killing comments on this post, because I don’t want you to soil yourself in public just because I’m the only person in this benighted industry who will tell you the truth.

 
More:

Table talk from my email: A Judas Goat- yes? Got it.

Me: What’s the point of having friends if you can’t sell ’em out?

Andersohn = ActiveRainiers

Bemis = MLS systems

Thompson = TwitBook losers

Coming soon: Project FUD at REBarCamp: Can you afford to be WITHOUT Zillow?

The window on integrity in real estate seems to be closing…

 
Still more…

Our business is corrupt, so it’s no surprise that this is the only place on the net where you can find the other side of this story. This is me from a comment at Real Estate Industry Watch:

Whatever job they end up giving him, Jay Thompson has already delivered everything Zillow is paying for: His endorsement of their brand. Now they get to make the fallacious “Even-Jay-Thompson” appeal: Even Jay Thompson thinks you should piss away your money on Zillow’s advertising. Jay has yearned to be the Head Lemming of the RE.net since the passing of Joe Ferrara, but, as we saw in the Denise Lones fiasco, he lacked that sad little man’s taste for blood. Luckily, Zillow has provided him with an even better cliff off of which to drive his credulous “followers.” It’s sad to say, but they deserve each other.

We’ve seen this kind of self-dealing posturing from Jay Thompson before — and not just from him, alas. But eighteen months from now — when you finally wake up and say, “Wuh happened?!?” Read more

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