BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 30 of 191)

November 30, 2012

Virtually belly-to-belly: Don Reedy’s salesmaniacal YouTube video voicemails.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reacting to this post from yesterday on a better way to handle video testimonials, Don Reedy brought us this idea in the comments:

Greg, this is really easy, and does take planning, but not much time.

I’ve started trying to communicate with prospects, people I just meet coming and going, and folks in escrow by using my laptop, recording a 30-45 second message, posting as an “unlisted” video to YouTube, and then linking a picture of myself with a “play button” on my torso to that link.

I embed the picture with link in emails. They fly through, are almost always clicked on, and provide that belly to belly contact emails don’t always do. And yes, often that simply results in future actual phone calls, but the goal of creating value to and for the client is surely helped along by this methodology.

Here is the photo of Don he sent to me in an email:

And here is the video I see when I click on that image:

As constructive criticism, I think I want the photo to be bigger with a bigger YouTube-like Play button, plus also a reiterated call to action in text form: “I’ve made a ‘video voicemail’ just for you. Click ‘Play’ to see it.” For the video, I want Don’s head and shoulder bigger — closer to the webcam — and higher in the frame.

Those are quibbles, though. I love the idea, and the “Yeah!” special effect is fun. It might work to tack on a business card at the end, along with a link-back, in the video and in the description section, to any client-specific web pages.

This is cool, though: Using rough-and-ready tools to put a very personal touch on voicemail-like contacts. Using smartphone video with one-touch YouTube posting, Don’s technique would be useful for all kinds of client follow up.

As an example, here’s the ‘script’ for a movie you’ll have to screen in your imagination:

Hey, Jim and Shirley. Greg Swann here with a quick video voicemail about the houses I looked at for y’all today. I’ll have a web page for you later today with photos of the homes Read more

July 18, 2012

San Diego Real Estate – A Cacophony of Data

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

I love the scene from the “Princess Bride” where they undergo a battle of wits. Very funny scene, and way too reminiscent of popular conversations regarding the housing market in general and the San Diego housing market specifically.

So, How’s the Housing Market Doing in San Diego?

There’s no shortage of data or opinions, of course.  Here a just a couple of places and opinions I found interesting and potentially useful.  First, Here’s DataQuick’s (OMG lengthy) view of the San Diego data.  Quite a bit of stuff in here, all of which seem to indicate that the San Diego market might be recovering slightly.  But right on the heels of the DataQuick report is an article from MSNBC, a report that has  a rather dim view of San Diego’s recovery.

So, with my own opinions of the San Diego market in my head I reviewed a couple of local real estate experts to see what they thought. First a take on one of the neighborhoods in San Diego by Kris Berg.  Her numbers are easier for me to read than DataQuicks, and no one likes to be called a sick real estate market by anyone.  And here’s our good friend Jeff Brown with his take on analyzing real estate data.  Jeff is speaking to the choir in me when he talks about analyzing.  He is asking if the data and the way it is analyzed is as important at the analyst doing the organizing.

 My Take on San Diego Real Estate

My opinion comes after this concerto, aptly named “Cacophony”, but sweet music to my ears, and which I’ll explain below.  Listen to this now.

Pretty cool stuff, huh?  A cacophony of sounds, but your head and your heart allow you to analyze and put these sounds together so that they not only make sense, but are appealing and fun to spend time with.

Which Brings Me to My Opinion on the San Diego Real Estate

Market

  • When you want to know if there’s gas in the coal mine….you send down a bird.
  • If you see smoke, you know’s there’s fire….but how hot is that fire?
  • If it walks, quacks and…you know….it’s a Read more
July 5, 2012

“But we’ve got to have some regulation!” How else are insiders going to get their mitts onto sweetheart mortgage deals?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Regulation is rent-seeking, Rotarian Socialist graft, and that’s all it ever is. Who sold out the housing market? The regulators, of course.

AP: Countrywide won influence with discounts.

HousingWire: Investigation reveals Countrywide VIP program scope and influence.

Bloomberg: Countrywide Used Loans For Favor With Fannie Mae, Report Says.

I love this bit from the AP story:

Among those who received loan discounts from Countrywide, the report said, were:

—Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

—Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

—Mary Jane Collipriest, who was communications director for former Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, then a member of the Banking Committee. The report said Dodd referred Collipriest to Countrywide’s VIP unit. Dodd, when commenting on his own loans, said that he was unaware of receiving preferential treatment but knew his loans were handled by the VIP unit.

The Senate’s ethics committee investigated Dodd and Conrad but did not charge them with any ethical wrongdoing.

—Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

—Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., former chairman of the Oversight Committee. Towns issued the first subpoena to Bank of America for Countrywide documents, and current Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., subpoenaed more documents. The committee said that in responding to the Towns subpoena, Bank of America left out documents related to Towns’ loan.

—Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif.

—Top staff members of the House Financial Services Committee.

—A staff member of Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas, a member of the Financial Services Committee.

—Former Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif.

—Former Housing and Urban Development Secretaries Alphonso Jackson and Henry Cisneros; former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. The VIP unit processed Cisneros’s loan after he joined Fannie’s board of directors.

—Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, was an exception. He told the VIP unit not to give him a discount, and he did not receive one.

—Former heads of Fannie Mae James Johnson, Daniel Mudd and Franklin Raines. Countrywide took a loss on Mudd’s loan. Fannie employees were the most frequent recipients of VIP loans. Johnson received a discount after Mozilo waived problems with his credit rating.

The report said Mozilo “ordered the loan approved, and gave Johnson a break. He instructed the VIP unit: ‘Charge him ½ Read more

July 4, 2012

“It’s not the people, it’s the idea. The idea makes the people great, as great as they want to be.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website


Happy Independence Day. This is me, fiction from The Unfallen:

 
Bel Canto is about halfway between Central Square and Harvard Square. When they emerged into the cool of the night, they turned left, toward Harvard Square. They walked along in a contented silence, and she felt very close to him for no reason she could name. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his coat and his left elbow was sticking out there, like an invitation. Without asking permission she stuck her hand inside the crook of his elbow and kept it there. He looked down at her hand and smiled, so she knew it was all right. She knew they would look like an old married couple to the students pushing past them, one of those Yuppie couples who inhabit the high-rises on Mass Avenue. There’s a first, she thought, to be tickled at being mistaken for married.

Central Square is the shopping district for a number of blue collar neighborhoods. As you walk out of it toward Harvard Square, you see a little bit of everything — the Cambridge Post Office and city government buildings, free-standing houses, high-rise apartment towers, frat houses for both Harvard and M.I.T., cheesy little office buildings, restaurants, bars, fringe businesses — everything. But as you draw near to Harvard Square, Harvard asserts itself, and the eclecticism of the no-man’s-land between town and gown gives way to extremely absurd art galleries and extremely unappetizing restaurants and extremely fanatical radical bookstores and extremely incomprehensible retail stores devoted to every extremely incomprehensible pursuit or pastime known to the mind of man — or at least the Harvard man.

But even that can’t last. The real estate in Harvard Square proper is extremely valuable. If you cannot pay the rent, the landlord will direct you to a more suitable location closer to Central Square. In Harvard Square itself, absurdity is found only out of doors.

And it was out in full force tonight. At the Harvard Square station of the subway the plaza was rife with milling weirdness. Little teenage skateboarders with their strange haircuts and black street poets and homeless Read more

June 13, 2012

Internet savvy Phoenix real estate broker seeks a buyer, a partner, an investor or a job.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A note to the Bloodhounds: I want to come in from the cold. If you know of a biggish Phoenix brokerage that could use my skills and assets, I’d appreciate the referral. –GSS

I own a very small boutique real estate brokerage — good reputation, strong good will, clean books, and colossal internet power — but I am ready to move on to something else. Stripped to the essence, this is what I have to offer:

  • A very strong internet presence consisting of several hundred-thousand web pages on a number of domains. I have several custom-built automated IDX sites, and I can throw 300,000+ backlinks at any web page, raising any web site’s standings in the Search Engine Results Pages virtually overnight.
  • A FlexMLS-based IDX real estate search site that scores on the first page of Google for a number of very-high-value search terms.
  • Me: A sales professional with a deep background in print and internet marketing and strong systems, applications and API programming skills. I built all of the web sites discussed below, and I have a lot of experience building workable IDX/VOW RETS solutions from the FlexMLS database. I have high-level relationships with real estate industry technical professionals and vendors, and I can present comfortably to groups from 50 to 50,000 people.

In short, I have a freight train’s worth of internet power being pulled by a mule-powered real estate business. The interent presence I bring to the table would be of substantially greater benefit to a much larger brokerage. Here is a summary of my internet assets:

  • BloodhoundRealty.com — Main brokerage lead-generation site. It’s built as a WordPress weblog at the top level, but it subsumes thousands of pages, including separate web pages for every community and subdivision in Metropolitan Phoenix. The idea is to capture long-tail searches and upstream them into qualified leads. I have technology, so far not implemented, to effect the same kind of long-tail search-capture for every street address in Metropolitan Phoenix, taking those searches back from the national Realty.bot sites like Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Realtor.com.
  • FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com — The most robust MLS search in Metropolitan Phoenix, and one of the strongest Read more
June 11, 2012

An Effective way to gets lots of pages indexed to your real estate web site

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Search for Pateros areas properties near Lake Chelan

I’m cheap on spending money on real estate stuff from vendors promising all kinds of things, whether it is leads or exposure.  But, I went ahead and tried out a real estate search utility that is setup for WordPress.  There were three reasons I chose to do it:  1) They would program it to work with our itsy-bitsy MLS at Lake Chelan (no other vendors, IDXPro, etc. support such a tiny market). 2) Each listing in my MLS, and every saved search I did, became a page indexed to my web site.  3) They are less expensive per month than my current vendor with no setup fees.

Sure enough, I now have 4380 pages indexed to my site in little old Chelan.  I’ve moved up one spot in the top 5 Google results in a week.  I do have a nice real estate search for browsing properties with a photo type of interface.  The vendor is Spot-on Connect.

I have saved a bit of money in that they replaced part of what my former vendor did.  However, I haven’t been able to shut off my older IDX service because their searches allow more user choices to create more specific searches.  Yes, there have been a few bugs, but the Spot-on people have been pretty quick in fixing them.

I’m even getting search traffic, for searches like “9607 sr 17, coulee city, wa 98851” coming to my web sites that did not arrive before.

I wouldn’t plug a vendor normally, but I’m getting fond enough of this approach to hope Spot-on connect survives and prospers.

Like many things, the service hasn’t been everything I could wish for, but it is a pretty effective way to get your SEO juice up if you use WordPress.  If that and the ability to have beautiful custom neighborhood searches, like the one pictured above appeals to you, they are worth checking out.   This is one of the better things I’ve done for improving my web page ranking, ever.

May 10, 2012

Let’s Talk Listings – Better Yet? Let’s Talk Gettin’ ’em Sold

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Since the beginning of last year, how long has it taken to sell your listings? I’m not talkin’ about those priced at half the median value in your market. I’m talkin’ about a traditional seller who simply wants you to sell his real estate. Why do a few listings in every market sell faster than the rest? Let’s set aside the obvious go-to answer, price. Let’s also agree that unless you’re pricing your listings below the market, there are other significant factors involved in market time.

But what are they?

My firm is now on its third generation, and to gain respect at the dinner table, you must be a listing agent. Doesn’t mean you eschew buyers, not even close. It also doesn’t mean we don’t hold buyers’ agents in the highest esteem, cuz we do. In fact, we adore ’em. They’re the main reason we can leave town for extended periods, doin’ deals while applying the sunscreen. ‘Course, I gave up that luxury when I left my hometown market almost a decade ago.

It’s taken about six years, but San Diego’s real estate investors, especially the regular folk, are finally realizing there’s real estate life outside of Paradise. 🙂 If I’m correct in this supposition though, how will I sell their properties quickly and for market value?

BawldJapan strikes again!

I have no false pride when it comes to doing what puts cat skins on the wall. Since I come up with precious few original ideas myself, to survive, I’ve learned to steal like a cat burglar. 🙂 Sometimes I leave well enough alone, sometimes I tweak a little here and there. I’ve learned through experience that my clients are influenced more by one factor than all the others combined: Obtaining the results for which they hired me.

Funny how that works. It’s why most marketing folks keep their distance from guys like me. I’m constantly measuring their efforts with the ‘R’ word — RESULTS.

Serious minded sellers are obsessed with results when they choose an agent to list their property for sale. They universally like the marketing plan we employ. 98% of Read more

April 9, 2012

Why do we link in the Web 2.0 world? Not because a link is a footnote, and not because a link leads to more information. Not to give link love and not to build the community. The purpose of a link is transparency: This is the truth and here is proof.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

person holding brown eyeglasses with green trees background

Trustworthy people do not expect you to take them at their word.

This is a short post about a big idea: Transparency.

The word transparency has a useful cachet in business, a condition where nothing of material importance in the transaction is concealed from the consumer. When I was a kid, I worked with a print broker who led his clients to believe that he owned his own composition house, his own pre-press facility and his own printing plant. In fact, he worked out of his car and, for all I know, he rented his shoes. Why would his clients really want to know that he was a broker, not an owner? Because it affected his ability to deliver on his promises — certainly a material concern.

In real estate, we hear about that kind of transparency, and we’re one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock. We absolutely hate it, for example, when the other agent in a cross sale fails to disclose a material fact — no doubt hoping against hope that the problem will go away if no one mentions it. But we rebel against the idea of what we might see as an intrusive transparency. As an example, where one agent might disclose to the penny how a listing commission is to be spent, another might feel that this is none of the seller’s damn business. The discussion then would turn on whether such a disclosure is a material fact.

The issue is clouded because the word transparency means something very different in the Web 2.0 world — and in the world of persuasive communication in general. The fear in any advertising or marketing presentation — your own fear, too — is that you are being tricked, sold a bill of goods. That by dishonest or technically-honest-but-non-obvious means, you think you are buying a rabbit when all you’re really getting is an empty hat. The purpose of transparency in this context is to take away that fear.

So in reply to my post last night about video testimonials, John Kalinowski notes that they could be Read more

March 2, 2012

DocuSign graduates: The ultimate signature bot is about to become a full-blown point-of-purchase.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s the real difference between a broker and a salesperson? Whatever his or her license status, the broker is one who knows the deal ain’t done until you’ve got the money. Starting in April, DocuSign is going to make a broker’s life a lot easier:

DocuSign’s upcoming April release ushers in a new era for the global standard for eSignature with the introduction of Payment Processing. Once available, you will be able to close the deal and collect the cash with DocuSign in one step to further accelerate transaction times, increase speed to revenue, reduce costs and enhance your customers’ experience.

It’s PayPal, and the charges are plausibly reversible, so it’s not perfect money. But this is document-as-storefront, a whole new way for paper-pusher to sell.

Note to the vendorslut mafia: I gain nothing by chastising you for your unbounded mediocrity, which is why I’ve stopped paying attention entirely to your artifacts of ineptitude. But take careful note: DocuSign knows how to deliver the goods. They are in a constant added-value mode, with the result that no less-motivated competitor can even come close to them. It’s not just the features, it’s how they are implemented — software-as-a-service in both directions, with a REST API coming in the new release.

March 1, 2012

Online Success For Real Estate Brokers/Agents – Still More Myth Than Reality?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Count this post as the first in this year’s semi-annual observations of social media/online marketing for real estate agents. Those who know my views on the topic, also know I’m always open to changes in the landscape. My years online have shown me widgets and SM pretty much add sales every now and again. Agents don’t need shiny toys and Facebook to do that.

I have no dog in this discussion — it’s about results.

In fact, I’m rooting for something, anything, put out by either the TechnoGeeks or whatever the online marketing folks are callin’ themselves these days, to work. I know many of ’em, and they have good hearts, work their butts off, and want to bring results to the table. They’re big-time smart. But as I’m fond of lamenting, the next shiny toy and/or SM ‘technique’ that skins as many cats as they imply, will be the first.

The test I apply: Will this new technique beat the increased production that adding another 1-3 hours a week to what the agent’s already doin’?

That’s a fairly low bar. Yet every year I beg for agents to brag about the new SM/shiny object that added more than a sale or so a quarter. Being more alert at Happy Hour every Friday could make that happen.

Let’s get IDX outa the way first.

We all know of or about agents who’ve figured out lead generation via an IDX on a website/blog. Some do better than others, but a level of success can be had — sometimes, impressive success. I’ll leave it to the IDX lead generation experts, but it seems getting thousands of leads a year is a stellar lure. The other shoe inevitably drops though, as it’s been tough for me to find any who’ve worked out a way to successfully skin more than 1% of those cats. I assume somebody is. But that creates its own problem. If, for instance, someone works hard enough to sift through 5,000 IDX leads in order to close 50 transactions — what’s left in the work week for, you know, belly to belly production? How Read more

February 21, 2012

Ask the Broker: Has going FSBO lost its fizz?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in over the transom. I’m not answering the whole question. To say the truth, I feel as if I’m being shopped with every conceivable infraction in the HUD handbook. So, you, too, please do also exercise restraint on the subject of commissions. For all of me, the FSBO question is more interesting, anyway.

From my interlocutor:

We are selling our home in a very upscale part of Atlanta. We want to do it “by owner” using one of several services advertised on line. Who pays the buyer’s agent and what percentage? We’ve been told its negotiable but too little and no one will show it. The home will sell in the $400,000 range if that makes a difference.

I start here: I want to know more about “one of several services advertised on line.”

I don’t know the real estate market in Atlanta, but this strikes me as being a very poor time to sell without the MLS. If the “services advertised” are limited service MLS listings — which is as far as anyone should go, in my opinion, down the “by owner” road — then those listing agents can address the commission questions.

The seller will definitely be paying the buyer’s agent, of course: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product — an idea that never seems to occur to home buyers.

But I think it would be a huge marketing disadvantage to forego the MLS. In the age of the internet, an MLS listing is more valuable than ever before. (I think this has come up lately in the Dipshit Broker News, but I stopped following that crap years ago.)

But even more than that, I think the right full-service listing agent can more than repay his marginal cost. The house is unlikely to attract a lot of attention if it is not listed in the MLS system, but, even then, if it is not marketed to its fullest advantage, it will sell more slowly and for less money than it could have.

My take is that most listing agents aren’t worth a damn, but the right agent will bring home Read more

February 8, 2012

Wow… And you thought the gonophs at ReMax were mercenary…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Spam today from RealtyExecutives, which really used to matter in Phoenix:

I love the monthly fee with the huge, larcenous split. RealtyExecs actually invented the 100% commission plan. It was that idea that Dave Liniger spirited away to Denver, where he founded ReMax. He discovered right away that a 100% brokerage is a giant cash sink — for the broker — but, luckily, his minions in Canada figured out how to combine the 100% claim with a hidden 5% split. Liniger flies in a private jet today because his 100% commission brokerages are all actually split shops.

Still, $95 a month plus a 15% split is a little steep. HomeSmart will do you a monthly deal for twenty-five bucks plus E&O. But before its ignominious bankruptcy, RealtyExecutives was charging on the order of $750 a month — nine grand a year! — whether you closed anything or not. In the interim, a whole lot of Big Names have moved from RealtyExecs to HomeSmart.

I love the rest of the ad, though: 78% of RealtyExecutives’ agents made less than six figures in 2011. And if the average agent closed 12 deals, that suggests that a whole bunch of those agents sold five houses or fewer last year.

And to think: You could be an “executive” too!

« 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