BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 29 of 191)

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

August 24, 2020

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“You’re going to listen to your own music at work, that’s understood. But make your own music at work. And master your craft so well that you can craft a music they can’t play…”

We often 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 on Pandora. Like all streaming-radio 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.

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 hard-working 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 Read more

October 6, 2017

Want to increase business? Answer your phone

by

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

Author website

Do you want to sell your listing faster and for more money?  Answer your phone

Do you want to work with more buyers?  Answer your phone

Lenders, do you want more loan business from agents?  Answer your phone

I know this sounds simplistic but more sales are made on the phone then are made via text or email.  This year, I made a conscious effort to ANSWER every phone call which come in.  I even bought a contraption which charges my phone and puts the calls on the car speakers.  The connection sucks but it allows me to acknowlege whomever called and to “triage” why they are calling.  If it’s a “money” call, I tell them that I will pull off the freeway and call them in a matter of minutes.  If it’s something to do with something other than work, I ask them to send me a text so I can call them later.

It doesn’t always work.  Sometimes, I’m a in a meeting and can’t answer the phone but by changing my mindset to believing that every single phone call represents a five-figure check, I am conditioned to sell.

Most importantly, our high tech culture has made incoming phone calls a “nuisance’ to many people.  if you are on the dialing end of the phone call, a voicemail or text, instead of an answer, tells you that you just might be bothering someone.  If you call me, I try to make you the most important person in the world.

You ARE the most important person in the world because you are the one paying my bills.  So call me at 858-777-9751

October 2, 2017

Real Estate Auctions: Not Just For Foreclosures Anymore

by

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

Author website

Two years ago, I started paying MLS, NAR, CA, and SDAR dues.  Since my wife Debra was taking on more of the lending responsibilities, I spent the bulk of my time working with the real estate agents.  Having MLS access allowed me to hold broker opens for my agents, hold open houses for their listings, and act as a de facto “buyer’s agent” for them when they were out of town.

I had a few “orphan” clients and, in the past 30 months,  I represented about a dozen buyers and listed and sold two properties as a real estate agent.  It’s not something I love but understanding the brokerage side of the business enhanced our knowledge as lenders.  We understand contracts, deadlines, contingencies, and conversations with our agent clients better.  Throwing mom and dad in the station wagon, showing homes, writing offers, meeting property inspectors, negotiating repairs, and closing deals has made us better lenders so I’m grateful for the experience.

Eight years ago, a local hedge fund type started an online real estate auction site.  I wrote about it here and was tangentially involved but it never really took off.  I think it was more because of the online component and less of the auction component.  Generally speaking, when tech types and hedge fund guys try to disinternediate the local brokerage, they lose.  Greg wrote about the next flop yesterday.

I have always been intrigued with auctions so it shouldn’t surprise you that I have followed Harcourts, the New Zealand real estate brokerage’s entry into the Southern California market.  Harcourts has been holding non-distressed auctions for two years now with tepid results.  I had a few thoughts about why its results are mediocre so I started to form a new firm; California House Auctions.

We are a vendor.  We have an exclusive agreement with one of the top auctioneers in California.  He’s held over 600 auctions in the past thirty years and is well known in the community.  We’ll be helping ANY real estate brokerage to sell their (non-distressed) listing through a live auction.  We’ll charge a fee for each successful auction (paid at Read more

August 17, 2016

Four Tips To Supercharge Your Real Estate Brokerage Business

by

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

Author website

Most real estate agents want two things:  more money and more time off.  The challenge is that they are doing things that (a) are not dollar productive and (b) are time consuming.  Add in more regulatory burdens, market shifts, and industry participants which are staffed by people who are incompetent, lazy, and/or stupid and it makes an agent’s goals harder and harder to reach.

Don’t let this gloomy scenario bring you down.  Here are four action-oriented things, agents can do right away, which have built empires, created wealth, and sparked business revolutions.

1-  Own everything about your business.  You are responsible for EVERYTHING even if it’s “not your job”.  We live in a world where any question can be answered by a smart phone and still I hear agents get confused about where to find answers.  Your broker isn’t calling you back with an answer to that question?  Ask Siri the question and read a few of the thousands of answers offered, by other brokers, on Trulia, Google, and Zillow.  The lender seems stuck?  Call a well-rated lender and get another opinion.

Stop bitching about problems you can’t control and fix them anyway.

You are the captain of your ship.  If the crew screws up and the ship runs aground, the captain is fired.  Your client doesn’t care about the lender, your broker, your transaction coordinator or the seller/buyer.  They want action and they hired you to get it for them.  Own everything.

2- Surround yourself with congruent rather than competent people.  It’s not enough to have a great lender, proficient escrow officer, and proactive transaction coordinator.  You must have people working with you who are on board with your goals.  If your goals is to make more money and save more time, you need to focus on dollar productive activities so you want affiliates who have suggested solutions to problems when they call with problems.  A lender should call you and say “we ran into a problem but this is how I will fix it”.   The escrow officer should be thinking about chasing down your client for signatures rather than emailing you.  The TC Read more

August 25, 2014

Getting a San Diego Condo VA-Approved Adds Value To Service Members

by

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

Author website

Debra Brady and I are experts at VA-financing.  One of the things we do very well is secure a VA condo complex approval for condominiums which aren’t agency approved.  Some comments from a recent YELP review:

I started the home buying process while still on deployment, and Brian graciously worked with me across 13 time zones to begin explaining the ins and outs of home buying.

This is actually kind of fun for me.  With technology, deployed service members can communicate with me well in advance of buying.  Many times, when deployed,  they have free time with little to do.  They use Gchat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and email to communicate with me.  Sometimes it makes for some weird hours but I enjoy finally meeting them when they return to the States.

I googled VA home approval, and his was the first name to pop up.  Brian is an absolute master at working with the VA.

That’s what I love to hear–that we come up first on Google Search for this topic.

Brian took my wife and I out for cocktails to explain in person the different loan rates and explain the decision making process for each of them, and Debra worked like a fiend to make sure thinks were done WELL ahead of time.

This is how Debra and I work.  I spend most of my time “selling” real estate agents and educating clients and Debra gets the loan done.  When we’re clicking properly, I am “Mr. Outside” and she is “Mrs. Inside”.  Clients know that she is in the office, every day from 8AM until 230PM each day and available on the telephone.  This frees me up to: (a) find more business for us and (b) properly educate home buyers about the process.  We pride ourselves on “no surprises” during the loan process.

To any Servicemembers who are interested in using their VA loan option, look no further than Brian, he is THE expert who will get you into the place you want.

That’s what I hope to hear on every VA loan we close.  It doesn’t ALWAYS happen but, I’m proud to say, it does happen more Read more

July 4, 2013

Celebrating the father of our freedoms: The freedom to own real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

Celebrating the father of our freedoms: The freedom to own real estate

By the time you read this, Independence Day will have passed, but I thought I’d give you one more reason to celebrate our freedoms: Real estate.

We call our culture Judeo-Christian, but we owe our laws and political institutions to the Greeks and the Romans. The Greek Hoplites, in particular, are the model upon which Western Civilization is based: Individual family farmers, freeholders in the land they farmed, who owned their own weapons of warfare and who banded together as a virtually unconquerable infantry when their lands were attacked.

What accounts for the independence of the Greeks? Was it their unprecedented military tactics? Was it their superior weaponry? Or was it the savage dedication of free men fighting for their own land?

The Hoplites fought against ragtag slave armies, engaging in combat only out of fear of the lash, never losing sight of the chance to dessert. But the Greeks fought to retain the rights they had wrested from despots, rights ordinary people, until then, had never known.

We derive many more treasures from the Romans, among them the story of Cincinnatus, the retired general called back to battle and given dictatorial power because the situation was so dire. Instead of abusing that power, Cincinnatus won the war, set down his arms and picked his plow where he had left it.

We honor the citizen-soldier in the conduct of George Washington, who could have declared himself king of America, but who instead, like Cincinnatus, surrendered his power and went back to his farm.

Politicians will tell us that we owe our freedoms to representative government. This is twice false. The interest we share in government is the land we each own individually, like the Hoplites. Moreover, representative government without free ownership of the land is tyranny in camouflage.

Americans are free because we have the uncontested right to buy, use, enjoy, rent, let and sell the land we live on. If you have any fire-crackers left over, you Read more

June 13, 2013

Practical ontology in real estate? Who ever heard of such a thing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

NewHomeBuildingInPhoenix

From KJZZ Radio in Phoenix, The Way of the Bloodhound:

‘“From now on whenever you’re driving on the freeway look for a truss,” Swann said, referring to a roof truss on the back of a truck. “And when you start to see a truss every day, then things have turned around. If you see three trusses a day, then things have really turned around. But if you can go five days without seeing a truss on the freeway, then no one is building anything.”’

The linked story is from Peter O’Dowd, a journalist for whom I have huge respect — not alone because he listens when I talk about bug’s-eye-view real estate.

May 7, 2013

Reason Magazine: “How established homeowners use regulations to stop new low-cost homes.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s not mentioned in the Reason article, but the real curse of zoning is the prohibition of innovation. By forbidding all projects, land-use tyrants exclude not just the dreck but also the sheer genius. Some builder coud have come up with the modern equivalent of Wright’s Five-Thousand Dollar Home, but that guy works in software instead, where innovation is celebrated and rewarded.

Meanwhile, the hard consequences of coercive land-use regulations:

When a news crew showed up to film a public meeting in tony Darien, Connecticut, in 2005, some of the residents were less than thrilled. “Why don’t you fucking shoot something else?” one demanded. Hundreds crammed into the hearing, sneering and jeering during the presentation.

The fresh hell residents showed up to protest? A proposal to replace a nondescript single-family home on a one-acre lot with 20 condos for senior citizens.

In Snob Zones, journalist Lisa Prevost describes the heights of entitlement to which property owners ascend when faced with the prospect of new development, especially multi-family dwellings in neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. Prevost tours New England and finds an aging, declining populace bent on excluding outsiders. In town after town, affluent and working-class alike, residents line up to shout down new development no matter how modest.

In Darien, the need for the proposed project was clear; the town’s senior housing center had a long wait list, as did the last condo development built in the area (in 1994). Still, many townsfolk, expecting the project to open the floodgates to more high-density projects in the resolutely low-density burgh, were incensed.

Incumbent homeowners have a powerful weapon for vetoing change: zoning. In Darien and other exclusive zip codes, mandated minimum lot sizes kneecap developers who want to build something other than super-sized homes. In the process, they put entire towns out of reach for all but the wealthy. In hardscrabble Ossippee, New Hampshire, where it’s not uncommon for the working poor to live in tents during the summer months to save on rent, the zoning code flatly prohibits new apartment buildings.

Though Prevost, who covers the real estate beat for The New York Times, has no problem with Read more

April 9, 2013

Kotkin: “Why the next great American cities aren’t what you think.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin at The Daily Beast:

Once considered backwaters, these Sunbelt cities are quietly achieving a critical mass of well-educated residents. They are also becoming major magnets for immigrants. Over the past decade, the largest percentage growth in foreign-born population has occurred in sunbelt cities, led by Nashville, which has doubled its number of immigrants, as have Charlotte and Raleigh. During the first decade of the 21st century, Houston attracted the second-most new, foreign-born residents, some 400,000, of any American city—behind only much larger New York and slightly ahead of Dallas-Ft. Worth, but more than three times as many as Los Angeles. According to one recent Rice University study, Census data now shows that Houston has now surpassed New York as the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse metropolis.

Why are these people flocking to the aspirational cities, that lack the hip amenities, tourist draws, and cultural landmarks of the biggest American cities? People are still far more likely to buy a million dollar pied à terre in Manhattan than to do so in Oklahoma City. Like early-20th-century Polish peasants who came to work in Chicago’s factories or Russian immigrants, like my grandparents, who came to New York to labor in the rag trade, the appeal of today’s smaller cities is largely economic. The foreign born, along with generally younger educated workers, are canaries in the coal mine—singing loudest and most frequently in places that offer both employment and opportunities for upward mobility and a better life.

Over the decade, for example, Austin’s job base grew 28 percent, Raleigh’s by 21 percent, Houston by 20 percent, while Nashville, Atlanta, San Antonio, and Dallas-Ft. Worth saw job growth in the 14 percent range or better. In contrast, among all the legacy cities, only Seattle and Washington D.C.—the great economic parasite—have created jobs faster than the national average of roughly 5 percent. Most did far worse, with New York and Boston 20 percent below the norm; big urban regions including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and, despite the current tech bubble, San Francisco have created essentially zero new jobs over the decade.

[….]

The reality is that most urban growth in Read more

April 3, 2013

Apparently, insanity is buying the same house over and over again, even though you never qualify.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You just can’t make this shit up: Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit. Why not? It worked out so well the last time.

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.

Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.

“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

March 25, 2013

We are all ‘greater fools’ now: How can you sell your house to a big family when big families don’t exist any longer?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Markets go up. Markets go down. But the whole house of cards is built on the idea that population will grow. What happens when it doesn’t?

matt-king-most-depressing-slide

From Business Insider:

It’s what I like to call “the most depressing slide I’ve ever created.” In almost every country you look at, the peak in real estate prices has coincided – give or take literally a couple of years – with the peak in the inverse dependency ratio (the proportion of population of working age relative to old and young).

In the past, we all levered up, bought a big house, enjoyed capital gains tax-free, lived in the thing, and then, when the kids grew up and left home, we sold it to someone in our children’s generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well when there start to be more pensioners than workers.

The entire welfare state is built on the idea that young people can be milked of their wealth because they’re too busy being young to notice.

Alas, the welfare state also awards adults either for not reproducing or for reproducing in only the most wealth-destructive ways. The consequence (entirely foreseeable) is that the number of dependents-by-choice goes up while the number of de facto slaves declines — by people either opting out of producing wealth or opting in to the welfare state’s “free” benefits or, as here, by not being born in the first place.

This will not end happily…

January 11, 2013

There is no real estate inventory problem in Oceanside, CA

by

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

Author website

How often had you heard real estate agents complain about “the inventory problem” this past year?  I used to think their complaints were farcical until these past 3-4 months.  I have about a dozen pre-approved buyers out looking for homes.  Interest rates are low and the foreclosures are getting snapped up as soon as they hit the market.  Not one of those dozen has been able to get an accepted offer since Labor Day, 2012.

Clearly, there must be an inventory problem. 

It’s time to change gears real estate agents.  A few years back, I suggested that buyers would be controlling the market and the listings side of the business should be de-emphasized.  All the properties being offered were short sales or foreclosures.  Paperwork-intensive transactions didn’t sound so appealing to me and I recommended that agents focus all their efforts on finding buyers and getting them into contracts.  Those who followed such advice didn’t get rich but earned a darned good living these past few years.

I had breakfast this morning with Mr. Oceanside, Don Reedy.  We discussed the local market and “the inventory problem” when it hit me; there is no shortage of homes.  In Oceanside alone, there are thousands of home owners, with equity, who can sell their properties to ready and willing home buyers.  This offers the ambitious real estate agent a great opportunity.  Too often, real estate agents (and loan originators) forget that we are paid to add value to transactions.  If we’re simply acting as gatekeepers, we are no different from everyone else.  We need to “create personal inventory”–find sellers for the buyers who want their homes.

Here is my ten- step plan for real estate agents, for a great 2013…with PLENTY of “personal” inventory:

  1. Attend your local caravan meeting each week.  Pay close attention to the agents who speak during the “buyers’ needs” segment.
    Call a dozen local agents weekly who work with buyers.  Find out where the inventory problem is.  At this point, you will see a glaring opportunity in your town/market area.  If you know that those agents have 2-3 buyers, for a certain price range, in a certain Read more
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

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts