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Category: Marketing (page 28 of 191)

September 16, 2020

Overnight News: “Yo, incipient hermits! Who craves a mile-high skyscraper?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Going up?”

Big Think: Is it possible to build a mile-high skyscraper?

Housing Wire: Bought right out of a job? When one OpenDoor closes… Opendoor announces merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. in bid to go public.

Forbes: Opendoor’s Cofounder Talks Covid, Growth, And The Quest For Profits As The Company Goes Public.

Housing Wire: The words that are going to matter, when this nonsense all blows up, are: “Agency with an interest.” EasyKnock launches solution that lets homeowners lease back their home after selling.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment soars to record high, but lumber prices raise a red flag.

Housing Wire: Mortgage lending volume in 2020 likely to break records.

Connect Media: An monument to a dying industry in a dying location? Los Angeles Approves Tribune’s 56-Story DTLA Tower.

Redfin: Coastal Migrants Boost Las Vegas Home Prices, Up 8% in August, Amid High Local Unemployment Rate.

Housing Wire: Virtual notary adoption surges as businesses rush to close transactions remotely.

Forbes: Stripe Is Offering $20,000 Bonus To Employees Who Relocate To Less Expensive Cities, But It Comes With A Pay Reduction.

Housing Wire: Title insurance premiums surging during COVID-19 pandemic.

RedState.com: 5G – and 10G. Symbiotic Wireless and Wired Internet – And Their Government-Free Miracles.

The Daily Signal: Wildfires Will Get Worse Under Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Veteran Forester Says.

AIER: So You Want to Overthrow the State: Ten Questions for Aspiring Revolutionaries.

Entertainment Weekly: South Park tackling COVID-19 with its first hour-long episode. The trailer:

September 12, 2020

Divorcing couples need togetherness on sale the sale of their house.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If I can tell that the sellers are divorcing, they are costing themselves money.

We plant the seed of love and it takes root and grows toward the sun, a straight, proud, sturdy tree.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Sometimes, alas, the sapling of love withers and dies. Pulling it up by the roots can occasion no end of problems, but the real-estate problem may be the one of greatest financial consequence.

Consider this: I walk into a home, escorting buyers. In the living room there are two pieces of furniture: a big-screen television and a lawn chair.

The bedrooms are empty, except for the master bedroom, where there is a bare mattress. In the kitchen, there are dirty dishes in the sink and half-empty takeout containers and beer in the fridge.

It’s a divorce, of course. Mom and the kids are gone. Dad got custody of the TV.

It would be funny if it weren’t so nakedly tragic.

I get paid to hear the stories that empty houses whisper. This house tells me not just about the divorce, but that the divorce isn’t a relatively smooth one. It hints that the house is in pre-foreclosure or is for sale by a judge’s orders.

It confides in the certitude of silence that my buyers can steal it for tens of thousands of dollars less than market value.

Together, the sellers own a valuable asset. But neither wants to see the other prosper from their past together. So, out of spite, they are deliberately sabotaging the sale of their home.

“I might lose out,” he growls at the big-screen TV, “but at least she won’t win!”

“He can go to hell with that TV!” she seethes from her new apartment.

This is a mistake.

Frankly, both of them should move out, leaving the home vacant. If one is to stay, then they should agree to leave the furniture behind – and clothes in the closets. I should not be able to tell that the sellers are divorcing.

It’s sad the marriage didn’t work out. But properly staging the home for sale can at least help to pay for a happier divorce.

September 12, 2020

Overnight News: Take that, doubters! All #iBuyers ever needed to succeed was a pandemic, rioting and a buyer feeding-frenzy! Totally sustainable!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Ya think it’s easy?”

Redfin: Everything about the iBuyers is funny, especially their Special Olympics approach to self-congratulation. Whose listings sell last and worst? But who is delighted to have had a national feeding frenzy to clear their overpriced inventories? iBuyer Activity Ground to a Halt in the Second Quarter, With Market Share Plummeting to 0.1%.

Forbes: Bubbles happen how? Mortgage Interest Rates Reach Another Record Low, Making Buyers Willing To Borrow More.

Redfin: We noted this yesterday: Who can spot the riots in recent closings? Who can anticipate the looming disaster of all the other listings, unreported here, that did not close? Home Prices Up 13%, Biggest Increase Since 2013.

CNBC: Commercial real estate community comes back from Summer vaycay to find its assets incinerated. Real estate CEO: NYC mayor must make streets safer, cleaner so people will want to return.

HousingWire: NAR: 31% of Realtors say they feel unsafe at open houses.

Reason: Who knew? There Is No Defense for Looting.

PJ Media: Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers Suggests the Civil War Has Already Begun.

And because the reincarnation of every sixties wraith is not quite 2020 enough:

BizPacReview: Killer mosquito clouds rise from swamp, descend on Louisiana livestock and drain their blood.

September 11, 2020

Ask the Broker: “Why do people hate Realtors?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The question is Cathleen’s, and it really plagues her:

“Why do people hate Realtors?”

Why do people hate Realtors? Because they think they’re supposed to…

It’s funny, truly, because almost nobody hates his own Realtor. Some people have real horror stories to tell, but most people don’t. To the contrary, most people have very happy, funny, charming stories to tell about the Realtor who helped them sell or find their home – or who perhaps undertook many transactions over the years.

Straight-commission sales people in general take a hit, not alone because we might seem to be more interested in the commission than in the work it takes to earn it.

And, of course, there have been no end of unflattering portrayals of real estate agents in art – especially TV and movies.

Here’s my best answer, though:

Why do people hate Realtors?

Because they think they’re supposed to…

September 10, 2020

Overnight News: If your houses aren’t evaporating, your taxpayers are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“What’s new, nu?”

Hoover Institution: California Businesses Leave The State By The Thousands.

Housing Wire: U.S. mortgage rates fall to all-time lows this week.

CNBC: The CDC banned evictions, but some renters are still vulnerable.

Forbes: What It Might Mean If We All Work From Home?

City Journal: What the Trump Eviction Ban Gets Wrong.

City Journal: New York City at the precipice: A Tale of Two Cities, Indeed.

CNBC: Manhattan rental market plunges, leaving 15,000 empty apartments in August.

And for hard-working grunts on the ground who have found a praxis that pays…

UPI: Virginia man buys 20 lottery tickets, wins 20 times.

September 7, 2020

What’s the secret real estate pricing trick that makes homes sell faster, for more money? Honesty.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Guile creates rancor and delay, ignoring the financial consequences, where an honest broker is a lifeboat in a sea of lies.”

Our story so far:

There are a zillion other things we do for sellers, but we are getting at the essence of what makes a listing move faster and for more money than its competition.

So: Every choice we make maximizes the seller’s interests, but for that reason every choice maximizes transparency and, for lack of better term, velocity of decision-making.

Translation: I make it as easy as possible for the buyer to commit to my listing.

How, specifically?

No guile.

Disclose everything, of course, but not in any way that’s tricky or cagey or coy. Every buyer’s fear in every transaction is getting taken. Obviously, I want to do everything I can to take that fear away, but even before that I want to make sure that I have done nothing to amplify that fear.

And what might you suppose is the fastest, easiest way to make a buyer wary of me and my new listing?

How about the listing price?

Oh, yes! The price is the most important, most powerful statement on your listing, and if it’s a lie, the whole listing is suspect and the house is one-down – at a minimum – before it even shows.

So what does a lying listing price look like?

Just like this: $299,900.

Is the house worth $300,000? Or $295,000? How to tell? Liar’s Poker: Offer $295,000 and see where they come back.

That back-and-forth takes time, even if you insist it does not cost the seller money. Worse, we start with mistrust and slap-box our way to bad will. That will make the repair negotiations fun.

I think that’s dumb. I despise guile, anyway, but its further fruits are even more rancid that the soul-sacrifice required by deception in the first place. You make an ugly first move and then Read more

September 6, 2020

My take on fintech? Who doesn’t love a better pen? But: No rainmakers, no rain.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Click to embiggen.

I got a recruitment pitch from OfferPad the other day: Be an in-house listing agent for our fallback upsell team. This is not an honor, an oddity or an error; I’m in a database, that’s all. And: Fun for me to see, but not a temptation.

They’re fools to make agents 1040 employees, rather than 1099 independent contractors. For a second reason, 1040 employees are going to be the death of all corporate entities. But the first reason is in the headline: No rainmakers, no rain.

You can see they understand this simple fact: The pay plan is commission plus a draw, the scheme all corporate sales teams use to attract and retain dedicated plodders.

But straight commission sales separates closers from losers just like that, with zero management intervention. That’s why real estate brokers like it so much.

And I think that illuminates the folly of taking fintech seriously. Who doesn’t love a better pen – but who believes a better pen will make you a better persuader? Technology solves paperwork problems very well, and I would be more impressed with technology vendors if they put more attention there. (Hint: Title and escrow: Rich, ripe, ready.) Technology addresses people problems poorly – a fact it is perpetually incapable of discovering.

Brian Brady pointed out to me that lenders live on Realtor marketing. That’s not wrong, it’s reasonable. Title, escrow, inspectors, tradesmen and home-warrantors all depend on Realtor referrals, which they can farm out only because they have already surfaced the buyer, seller or investor. You can’t buy your date a cocktail until you have a date.

So it’s the other end of the food chain that concerns me – not fintech but leadgen. Realty.bots whose sole business is to get in front of your client before you can – so they can sell access to you – are not your friends.

For what it’s worth: Of the big-name iBuyers, Zillow’s solution to abandoned shopping carts seems best. Instead of using salaried and lawsuit-curious employees to upsell more lawsuit opportunities, pitch the now-useless “leads” to starving Realtors. For 35%! Who has the Read more

September 5, 2020

The sweet spot: Pricing real estate the guerrilla marketing way, to maximize the seller’s net – as soon as possible.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The sweet spot is the place on the bat that makes baseballs change zip codes.


I am a passionate lister, and I have argued forever that everything matters in the listing praxis – but nothing matters more than the listing price. And: As you may have noticed, I could go on forever about pricing, but there is one idea that matters to me above all others:

The sweet spot.

Deny me sports and gambling metaphors and I could not write, but metaphors inform by their manifestation: If you know your business – if you have a true empathy for the machine of your praxis – you know where the sweet spot is.

In real estate pricing, the sweet spot is here:

I arrive at a number that, when I see it, I say, “But of course.”

And at at the listing presentation, the seller says, “But of course.”

And on listing day, all the experienced Realtors working that area look at their hotsheets and say, “But of course.”

And the buyers who see that house on the first few days of the listing all say, “But of course.”

The sweet spot is the number that everyone knows is right-on-the-money, as soon as they see it.

What’s the benefit? A bird – or six – in the hand. If you hit the market in the sweet spot, your seller should have one or more excellent offers to work with right away. When you get the price just right, everyone knows they have to jump or miss out.

And the benefit of that is to surface the optimal offer. I believe that a well-represented home should incite multiple offers overs its first weekend on market. I list on Thursday early morning, just after midnite, to maximize my debut on saved searches – thus to invoke reactions like “Must see Saturday!” As I’ve noted, I disclose the state of play for cash, conventional and FHA offers in the Private Remarks (Realtor-only) section of the listing.

My objective is to identify the highest, safest, soonest offer. The FHA offers will all be higher, even allowing for the closing-cost contributions, but FHA borrowers often Read more

September 4, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Timing Is Everything” – except so is everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Garrett Hedlund, who played Patroclus in Troy, doing one of the gut-wrenching songs from Country Strong – which is free just now on IMBD.

I love the granularity and particularity of the images, but you get to see the song being improved in the movie:

They’re arriving at the lyrics used in the the Garrett Hedlund recording, which are a substantial improvement on the original:

I could cite a number of examples, but the one that stands out is Gwyneth’s turn:

Original: “I remember that day when we first met.”

Country Stronger: “I remember that day when our eyes first met.”

That’s how good poetry gets better, and that kind of focus on mission-critical improvements is how everything gets better.

September 3, 2020

Guerrilla real estate marketing for immediate results: How to be young, hungry – and compensated.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.

Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”

I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.

I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.

So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.

I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.

The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!

We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive Read more

September 2, 2020

Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Got content?”

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of Read more

September 1, 2020

The trick to pricing real estate? It ain’t comping houses…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You: “Where should I price this house?” Me: “How much are the buyers willing to pay?” You: “How am I supposed to know about the buyers?” Me: “Precisely!”

For a year-and-a-day, I was an iBuyer pricing algorithm.

When Zillow announced they were going into the cash-incineration iBuying business, I looked for opportunities to find out more. Amazingly, I lucked into a job doing CMAs for Zillow’s pioneer broker on the ground. What’s amazing? Until then, I had never done a CMA in my two-decade career as a Realtor.

I could and can price to the dollar, but I never did anything beyond reading the comps like tea leaves. Zillow was a huge gift to me that way. I got to work with appraisers, and I learned why their comp selections always look so alien to me. I did my best to teach them my way of comping, but I only made a real dent in two of them.

Their tricks were great, and I had fun playing with them. I had never in my life adjusted for anything, for one thing, but I had never ever crossed an arterial street to get a comp before, either: It was – and still is – a great big deal to get me to leave the subject property’s subdivision.

My biggest influence on them was time. Until March of this year, the price trajectory in the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun had been steady as a clock since 2014 or so. They were going back three months for comps, adjusting for time. I rocked them to a year, and I did not hesitate to go back longer than that. Better to have closer comps, adjusted, than a false confidence in more-recent but less-comparable sales.

Zillow was a hoot. The appraisers would do things I think are crazy – like comping one- to two-story homes – but Zillow’s minions would not understand why wildly divergent product lines – Ikea kitchens versus Sub-Zero kitchens, for example – cannot be compared for pricing purposes. If you’re looking for defects in any AVM, it’s there, the inability to reconcile proximate Read more

August 31, 2020

The money-making secret to real estate? Socialize the risks to the seller. The #iBuyers are just now catching that clue – ineptly, as always.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Yes, I’m taking a cut on the sale of an asset I didn’t have to buy, first. But you are getting a real estate marketing expert you don’t even have to pay for until I’ve already delivered the goods.”

This has been a slow-rolling epiphany on the part of the iBuyers. I’ve snarked about it here and there, but that’s all, so far. I wrote a ton about iBuying last Summer, but by now it all seems quite a bit less urgent. There are a lot more of them now, for one thing, and they sell like a niche offering – Ug-buys-ugly-houses with swankier web sites. Much worse, dumbasses who already could not evaluate properties are all at sea trying to price into dizzyingly volatile, madly divergent markets. And I thought they were screwed before 2020 came along…

So what’s their solution?

Socialize the risks to the sellers, of course.

After only eight years of pissing away investor funds brokering real estate without a business model, OpenDoor has discovered real estate brokerage: I sell it but you own it, and all I get is a sales commission – and even then only if I get the property sold and the transaction closed. Sucks to be the broker? It can – if the broker sucks. But the upside is that the broker pays only his marketing costs, with the seller bearing all of the ongoing carrying costs.

I sell fast with almost no costs on my end, so this matters less to me that it might to, say, iBuyers, who have demonstrated repeatedly that they can cling to inventory long after buyer feeding frenzies have devoured everything else. Offloading months and months of carrying costs onto the seller might actually point OpenDoor to a path to profitability – someday.

In passing: OfferPad is already cross-selling traditional listings, and, of course, this has been Redfin’s iBuying pitch all along.

And that pitch is what?

“You can either sacrifice your equity for quick cash, or you can risk your time, money and equity on the MLS.”

They won’t say it that way, but that is the actual alternative being Read more

August 29, 2020

My 7 magic laws of done: How to finish the things you start – quickly, completely and with style.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Genius is fueled by midnight oil – by hours and hours of focused, solitary effort. 
 
Photo by: Raffaele Camardella

There is a book of mine that I am going to bug you to read – Nine empathies. Here’s something funny about that book:

I wrote it on a Saturday, six years ago today.

It’s not very long, only about a 90-minute read, and I only wrote about two-thirds of the revised length of the book on that Saturday. But I wrote the whole book, start to finish, with subsequent revisions all being interstitial – additions between the lines. I wrote a book that I could have shipped on Saturday, and in fact I did ship it to Amazon’s servers on Monday, long before I was all-the-way happy with it. I shipped successive revisions twice a day after that, until I called Thursday morning’s version the golden master. Then I said, “Hey look. I’m done!” – but in my mind I had been done since the day I started.

What is it that I’m telling you?

I don’t work like you. Most of the people who read me are going to be Cs or Ss in the DISC system. I’m much too wordy for my fellow Ds – and I’m only wordy because I see words as a currency, rather than as a distraction. Even so, I would much rather write a book than read one. I tend to work more outrageously even than other Ds, but my style of working is completely alien to Cs.

I wrote in ten hours what a high-C would have agonized over for ten months – or ten years. Worse, I took off with almost no plan – twelve lines of notes – knowing that I was at least two full epiphanies short of a revelation. “Welcome to Seat-Of-Our-Pants Airlines. If we can’t get you there on time – you’ll never live to tell about it.”

To say the truth, my kind of productivity annoys high-Cs, because it shouldn’t be possible to do this much this well this quickly. They are equally alien to me, in that I can’t fathom Read more

August 28, 2020

Why would Zillow abandon the all-time perfect real estate marketing tagline?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to hear my most perfect real estate marketing image? I’ve never seen this anywhere, except in my mind’s eye. It goes like this:

A little girl and her golden retriever are racing out the front door of their home. Why? Because “Daddy’s home!” – that’s why.

That’s it: Kid, dog, dad, with mom smiling proudly from the doorway. That’s The American Dream, circa 1955, but that is still the idyll we imagine when we think of home. It’s not simply a structure, not even merely a domicile. It’s Christmas and Independence Day, new babies and new puppies, tire swings and bedtime stories. Home is hope, the place where everything we love can thrive.

So tell me, if you can, what gives with Zillow?

Current tagline: “Home has never been more important.” That’s COVID FUD, I guess. The image is of a split-ranch home inhabited by vaguely visible people living widely-separated lives. I doubt anyone thinks that’s selling anything.

Recent tagline: “Reimagine home.” Say what? That dollop of word salad was intended to explain The Incumbent’s iBuyer business – by which Zillow reimagined profitability with a flame-thrower. The word “reimagine” itself has creepy Marxist connotations: As we have learned of late, “reimagine policing” turns out to mean “shut up or else!” Even leaving college-acquired SJW-ism aside, what needs to be “reimagined” about home?

So what did they have before that?

“Find your way home.”

And that would be simply perfect.

I Googled up old images with that tagline, and the photos are all pretty generic. But the tagline itself is beyond improvement: The aspirational quest is the literal function of the website. You simply cannot do better than that.

Why would they walk away from that? And why don’t they do a better job of selling that idea with images?

My takeaways? Billionaires are boobs. And marketing is for guerillas.

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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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