There’s always something to howl about.
If curious to know how Greg Swann builds property websites in the time it takes most of us to eat a bowl of cereal, tonight’s the night.
What: Engenu demo with Greg Swann
When: 8:30pm EST, 5:30pm PST
Where: At your computer
We’ll be recording this session too, so if you can’t make it and would like an email w/ the replay sent to you, go ahead and register anyhow.
We’re getting ready to start handing out homework assignments for the folks coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.
As has been noted, my piece of the program will entail doing hard-headed stuff at the server level.
To do that work, students will need a web browser, which everyone has, but they’ll also need an FTP client and a text editor — ideally a true programmer’s editor.
I live in the Macintosh world. I’ve been using Fetch for FTP and various editions of BBEdit for text editing since the mid-1980s.
But, obviously, most of the folks coming to Unchained will be running Windows — as will I, for that matter, since I don’t have a Mac laptop.
So: I need advice.
What’s a Windows FTP client worth having? I don’t need security, but the ability to open multiple sessions in multiple windows would be great. Right now I use FileZilla and mostly hate it.
And what’s a worthwhile programmer’s editor? I haven’t looked at eMacs in years, but I remember not loving it much back when DOS was still the boss.
Price range? I’d love free, but cheap is not the end of the world. Flexibility and ease of use matter, too.
So guide me. What should I be looking at?
I choose to live in a big American city because frankly, I stick out like a sore sport in most rural settings and my accountant says we can’t afford London. One of my earliest pre-school memories was a Trenton to New York City train ride with my mother on a blustery Saturday morning. How much of that early 1960s day trip I accurately recall and how much is anecdotal family filler (pulled, kneaded and peppered over the redolent decades around my parents’ kitchen table) I’m not quite sure. Still, certain sepia frames have been imprinted in my mind for life— gazing up at the sky scrapers whose dizzying heights give me vertigo to this day; creeping like a mouse through the bowels of The Museum of Natural History, terrified of the mummies and the smell of all that marble; seeing a man get his arm tore off by a taxi cab while standing at a busy Broadway corner…I’m pretty sure; sitting on a New York City phone book for a child’s eternity at Mamma Leone’s, waiting for the dessert course to arrive. Feeding the ducks in Central Park. Observing the landscape artists with easels and tams, their turpentined pigments slathered on thumb-holed palettes, probably all long dead by now but full of abstract perspective on that day. Not peeing my pants for the entire afternoon.
A similar ferment churned in my gut when I first strolled the arrondissements of Paris; same thing along the canals of Rome; and Gaudi’s Barcelona. And while I can easily inhale the woodsy fragrance of say, a Walden Pond (or even Dyer, Tennessee) without much complaint, I am clearly no Thoreau. Once you think you see a guy get his arm torn off in Times Square, you can never really go back to the suburbs. Not entirely.
As each year strikes like lightning, I find myself being both drawn to, and repelled from, the urban twist of what once was Sandburg’s Chicago with its animal sense of outcome and yellow inner eye… ‘ hog butcher for the world.’ Liebling’s Second City. On a calm evening the whispers can Read more
Can premium rental homes in suburban Phoenix throw off positive cash-flow at 75% of market rents?
An investor asked me that question the other day. It’s an academic problem, really, a matter of costing out typical homes to see how they perform under that scenario.
I can do that much standing on my head, but answering a question like that with a spreadsheet is not terribly satisfying. We live in a data-rich world, and I wanted for my investor to understand exactly what we were talking about. So not just the spreadsheet, but also MLS listings of typical homes. And not just the listings, but also detailed photos of those homes, with descriptions of what might be wrong with each one.
In fact, I could have answered the question any way I wanted, from tap-dancing on the telephone to an attempt to set a showing appointment. But I know from experience that the more questions I can answer in a completely credible fashion, the greater my chances of forging a long-term client relationship.
And that’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? How would I want to be treated if I were thinking of dropping some substantial fraction of a million dollars on investment real estate?
And this is where engenu comes in. I can shoot the spreadsheet across immediately, as an appetizer. But I’m not selling spreadsheets, I’m selling houses, so I put together a list of houses that I thought might be financially impressive. I toured each one, taking photos of everything, then came home and built an engenu web site from my findings.
I’ve been talking about engenu for nearly a year, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the point all the way across. We use engenu to build our single-property web sites and to provide supporting documentation when we blog about homes for sale. We use it as a way of previewing homes for out-of-town buyers and investors, and as a way of communicating staging advice to our sellers. The language of real estate is photography, and engenu enables us to build (and rebuild) large, photo-rich web sites with minimal effort.
So: I came Read more
Here is both the best and the worst of BloodhoundBlog Unchained so far.
It’s the best, or a piece of the best, because it covers a great deal of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology in rapid-fire fashion.
It’s the worst, or of a piece with the worst, because it’s me delivering a lecture, rather than us doing the work I’m talking about.
There won’t be any lecturing at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, but there will be a whole lot of the doing of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology.
This video represents just a slice of the content on the DVDs from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008. We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve learned a lot about how to share what we know, so what we really want is for you to come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix this year. But if you can’t do that, there’s a whole lot of great information covered on those DVDs. If you can’t be with us in April — or even if you can — the DVD set could be a great Christmas gift for your career.
We’re marketers, and because of that we know that sales increase when the barriers to commitment are low. So let’s commit, shall we?
If you’re ready to rock, all you have to do from here is click a PayPal button to reserve your place at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. The event runs from April 28th to May 1st, 2009. Many more details can be found at the BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix weblog.
Fair warning: This won’t be cheap. If you’re looking for the best possible deal, and if you qualify, joining the CyberProfessionals might be your best bet. And if you’ve entrusted us with your money before, either last May in Phoenix or in November in Orlando, we want to express our gratitude with a special Unchained Alumnus price. But whatever you end up paying, we’re going to make it worth your while and then some.
Here’s how the prices break out. Just click on the appropriate button Read more
Look at these custom yard signs from Mariana Wagner’s iTeam real estate brokerage in Colorado Springs, Colorado:
Mariana reflects: “Not exactly how yours is set up, as our wind and freezing temps make the hanging sign a disaster, but these rock. (We have installed a 1-800# on the bottom of each sign, as well.)”
I like the white space, especially, a vital design element I too often leave out. And I really like the way that Mariana and her team play with the Keller Williams color scheme without being imprisoned by it.
I’m dying to hear how they sell — the houses and the brokerage.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
I haven’t talked about video for a while because we haven’t been doing very much with it.
That’s not completely true. We use the Flip digital video camera to share notes with clients fairly frequently.
But as I have discussed at length in the past, I have no use whatever for the typical Lurch-takes-a-home-tour style of real estate video. I see it as being anti-marketing, worse than doing nothing at all.
For video to work, there has to be a story, and I can only think of two stories that make sense in the context of listing a home.
The first is simply an interview with the sellers, and we have done this on other homes. The second is the documentary, an illustrated narrative about some aspect of the home or the neighborhood. An example of this would be a slow drive-by of the structures in the neighborhood with a voice-over narrative telling the tale, whatever it is.
Arguably, you could impose a fictional or farcical story on the home, but this strikes me as being simultaneously too familiar and too stoopid by half.
The population of pundits who don’t actually sell real estate is rife with people who swear that video is the wave of the future. But, even with a plausible and endurable story, video has other drawbacks. It can be a real bear to edit, both labor- and computer-intensive. The down-sampling necessary to make it work on web sites robs images of their detail. Moreover, real estate photography wants very wide-angle lenses — which make people look fat and exaggerate foreground-to-background distances.
The solution I’ve arrived it, for now, is to superimpose still images over the video. Talking heads are boring, but we can use stills to illustrate what they are talking about, lending visual interest to the total package.
Here’s an example, as processed through YouTube:
You can see a better example of that video on the video page for 56 West Willetta Street.
The video scene was shot with the Flip camera. The native AVI file was converted to NTSC video, which is native food for Apple’s Final Cut. The photos were just dragged and dropped Read more
Over the past few days, Redfin got into it with a bunch of other real estate websites. What else is new?
In an argument about who has the most homes for sale, which began on TechCrunch and continued on Redfin’s blog, one participant argued that what consumers really care about is advanced filtering options, not inventory.
Which got us thinking. We spend a fair bit of time on advanced filtering options. And we’ve always thought we need to spend more: every week, we get requests for filters on parking, townhouses, waterfront location (Seattle), historic designation (DC), pool (LA).
So Redfin’s Jim Lamb just analyzed 70,000 Redfin searches from Thursday, August 21 to find out which of Redfin.com’s search filters people really use. It’s an analysis we’ve done before, to figure out whether a listing gets seen more if it’s priced to be included in web searches, like at $449,500 rather than $450,100.
What we learned last night was a little demoralizing. People filter on price, beds, baths, sometimes square feet, and new (or very old) listings, but not much else:
On looking at this, Matt Goyer said, “Who doesn’t filter on square footage?” I could only sadly shake my head. Consumers completely skip the fancy stuff:
So even as we argued that filtering options aren’t as important as inventory, we didn’t really believe it: our engineers have been hard at work on… you guessed it, more filtering options. Just now, it’s parking & townhouse filters. (Every week, I get a crazy screed from a consumer about how much people hate townhouses… which I read… from my townhouse.)
What do you think? Are we wasting our time? Confusing our consumers? As it is, we Read more
OK, boys and girls it’s Pop Quiz time!
Quick, without beautifying your answer, be honest and name one of the normal pickup lines a Realtor® would tell a FSBO in order to get their business? This one comes to mind:
“If you let a professional sell your home, you will walk away with more money.”
IF, that’s the case (third class condition, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t depending on the agent, property and market) then why are Realtors® so darn stubborn about following their own advice?
Is it that we have to do everything ourselves? That we can do it better? Faster? Cheaper? What drives this mentality? Since when did passing a multiple-choice examination on specific real estate matters make us omniscient about all things under the sun having to do with marketing and selling homes? I’m not being overly critical. I’m just asking. I believe it’s a very fair and valid question.
For Example:
Photography: Sure, I own a digital camera and have taken hundreds of pictures of my family. That doesn’t even begin to qualify me as a professional photographer. I’ve read a few things about lighting and the rule of thirds, but I’m still not an expert. I’m experienced enough to be dangerous. And that might not be a good thing for my client. You know what they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, I’m being paid thousands of dollars to make the photos speak to buyers. Maybe an expert could help more accurately express what needs to be said through them? Just a thought…
Video: Yes, I own a flip camera and Jason has a $5,000.00 Sony pro-consumer video camera that he loves to play around with. He has filmed videos of the kids opening birthday presents, Brutus jumping into the pool, and many other wonderful and exciting things (don’t even go there). But Peter Jackson making Lord of the Rings, he is not! We’ve always hired a professional for any project that wasn’t just for our enjoyment. A video of your client’s home Read more
That’s Kodak’s brand new Zi6 hand-held video camera. If it looks a lot like a Flip camera, there’s a reason for that. At first glance, it’s a virtual Flip cam clone, right down to the built-in USB connector and the YouTube video-sharing software.
And like the Flip camera, the optics are nothing special. This is not a camcorder, much less a pro-quality video recording device. This is a hand-held solid-state-memory camera meant to be used to capture memoranda, video podcasts or embarrassing moments at parties.
The Kodak version of the concept stands out from the Flip, though. For one thing, it’s pretty costly — $179.95 list. Much worse, while it can handle SDHC memory cards up to 64GB (which could equate to a day-and-a-half of continuous video), it actually ships with nothing but its own on-board memory. After overhead, there is 30MB left for video — not enough for a sustained belch from a practiced teenager.
By contrast the Flip Mino lists for $179.99 but ships with 2GB of memory — 60 minutes’ worth. The Flip Ultra lists for $149,99 and ships with the same 2GB. Both the Kodak and the Flip Mino use a rechargeable battery scheme. The Flip Ultra uses AA batteries, which is by far preferable to me.
Where the Kodak pulls away from the pack is in video quality. The camera can shoot 720p HD video at either 30 or 60 fps. A short lens and lots of camera motion, but better-than-TV-quality video. Go figure. More significantly, Kodak claims that H.264 is one of the native capture formats for the camera. That’s QuickTime, folks, the MOV format. That implies on-board hardware compression, which would make clips from this camera wicked easy to edit in Apple’s Final Cut video editing software.
YouTube is pretty strong on compression, so my thinking is that a YouTube video from the Kodak Zi6 (dumb name; it’s not a German roadster) is not going to look much better than a YouTube video from a Flip camera. But if you’re shooting hand-held video to be edited with high-end software, it’s plausible that the Zi6 could save you a boatload Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish
We do things that other brokers in the Phoenix area don’t do. We’re not the busiest listing brokerage — not by miles — but we’re among the most aggressively innovative in our marketing practices.
Our yard signs have always been very big, to try to grab as much attention as we can get for our listed homes, but for the past two years we have been building custom signs for our listings.
Working with Signs By Tomorrow in Peoria, we have been able to build huge, custom, four-color signs for our listed homes — featuring giant photographs of the interior and exterior of the house and custom descriptive copy about the property.
Our signs stop traffic. I know because I will often sit in my car a block or two away and watch passing cars as they slow down and stop to take in the sign, look over the house and grab a flyer.
We have a home listed in Peoria right now, and we took things one step further for this property. We know that a significant number of people in the surrounding area speak Spanish as their first language, so both the flyer and the custom sign are printed with one side in English and one side in Spanish.
Working from the English version of the Flyer, Enrique Lopez of YourPrintSource.com prepared the Spanish translation. This copy was typeset for both the flyer and the sign. If you approach the home — 7813 West Beryl Avenue — from the East, you’ll see the sign and flyer in English. From the West, you’ll see the sign and flyer in Spanish.
Just because there’s no reason not to, the photos on each side of the sign are unique. Instead of four pictures, we were able to use eight.
We also added a Spanish version of the flyer to the MLS listing so that Spanish-speaking buyers can read about the features of the home.
Regardless of our endlessly-debated border policies, as Read more
One of the factors that unites the vendors who annoy me is that they tend to do things that are fast, cheap and obvious, then market them like manna from the heavens. Still worse is doing something fast, cheap and obvious as a hosted solution, charging start-up fees, per use fees and monthly hosting fees — which can turn into a boatload of money real fast.
The back side of doing things that are fast, cheap and obvious is that the product category quickly becomes a commodity, with the corresponding free fall in prices. The dipshit thing may not be worth having, but at least it doesn’t cost much.
Today the economy of abundance comes to Ken-Burns-style virtual tours. Documentarian Ken Burns and others perfected a style of cinematography that lends motion to still photos by panning across and zooming in on the images. This turns out to be a fast, cheap and obvious way to build cheesy little faux-video virtual tours.
The good news: These kinds of tours have always been pretty cheap.
The bad news: They’re video, even if there is no actual live motion, so they occupy huge amounts of disk space and consume big bunches of bandwidth.
The worse news: They suck. As with true video, they only work as virtual tours as the secondary tour, the back-up or the teaser. All virtual tour solutions suck, but the faux-video photo-based virtual tour sucks big time.
The purpose of a virtual tour is to get the viewer to commit to the home, and the only way to do that is by way of the commitment of time. Any real estate promotion that excuses the buyer after a minute or two — as all video solutions do — is sub-optimal. The ideal virtual tour will offer the buyer more and more tools to play with, more and more ways to “try on” the home.
All virtual tours suck to one degree or another, but the best of the breed right now is Obeo.com. You get the panoramas and the pro-photographer photos, the neighborhood information, all that stuff. But what you get with Obeo and no one Read more
These signs don’t exist yet; they won’t be finished until Friday at the earliest.
This is the first time we’ve done this, custom signs with one side in English, one side in Spanish. The flyer is done in both languages, also, one on each side of the sheet. I may echo some of the copy on the web site in Spanish, also.
Just because we can, we’re using four unique photos on each side of the sign. The sign printer is digging this stuff beyond all measure. We came to them two years ago with these ideas, and, so far, no one else has even bothered to ask them what we’re doing. Meanwhile, we keep coming up with new things to try. I want for them to enter our work in sign-makers’ competitions.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography
I began reading this blog last year right after I first received my license. I took the class, the follow up class, graduated, found a brokerage, got the signature, then got my license. After all this I realized I knew nothing about Real Estate. I knew nothing at all. Where do I start? Google of course.
I found BHB. I began reading, reading, reading, and reading some more. I read Greg and what he does after he lists a property in Phoenix. I asked myself, “Would this work in Columbia SC?” I took it to heart and pondered it for several days. I finally came up with the answer. Some will, some will not. Thus is life. At this point, I began to slowly implement these ideas (though I didn’t grasp the ideas and honestly still don’t).
Tonight, I was writing a blog post on my personal blog about the most expensive houses in my market. Naturally, they do not resemble the prices that several of the Bloodhounds are used to. The average price in Columbia, SC is $145,000. I’ll take them all day long and sell every one I can. I like that price range personally.
I felt a little gluttonous this evening and decided to write the post. Of course, I pull up the MLS, do a basic all areas search for houses above $1 million in my markets. I was surprised to see a $5.75 million dollar property. I was more surprised to see the pictures. This is the headline image for the house (remember, this is the most expensive house on the market in Columbia, SC)
Lovely house I am sure. However, with this picture, I am going no where near it.
Now, ok, it’s not horrible…however, this is the 3rd most expensive house’s picture coming in at $3 million even.
Remember, the title of this post is ‘Not to beat a dead horse…’. I know this goes on all the time. Horrible pictures don’t sell houses, IDIOTS sell houses…apparently.
I do not claim to be a photographer by any means. I continuously cut my little sister out of photographs. If I stood to Read more
Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.
That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.
Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.
There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.
And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.
This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.
Start here: Read more
