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Category: Real Estate (page 33 of 266)

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 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

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

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 2, 2020

Vacation Rental Investing: Perdido Key, FL– Purple Parrot

by

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

Author website

How about a vacation property, on Perdido Key, Pensacola, Florida, which cash-flows with just 25% down payment?

This Realtor-listed property sold for $238,000 in November of 2019 and this FSBO sold for $242,500, two weeks ago.  Both properties are 2 BR 2.5 bath bungalows and are in the Purple Parrot Village Resort, a community of about 150 bungalows on the east end of Perdido Key, walking distance to Johnson State Beach, a half-dozen restaurants, and less than 10-minute drive to two golf courses, a dozen restaurants, Big Lagoon State Park, and the world-famous Flora-Bama Bar and Marina on the Alabama state line.

While there are no similar properties listed now, a few of the 2BR, 2.5 BA bungalows turn over each year and its; likely that one of these can be purchased for less than $245,000.  Let me walk you through how I analyze  or “screen” properties like this one for investing purposes:

I star by using the public-facing rental calculator on the Vacasa website to get a rough annual income estimate.  When adjusted for the amenities, it shows $45,000.  That is above the average for the area so I adjust downwards (to the average) to arrive at $39,000.  Vacasa (and most other vacation property management companies) charge a 30% management fee so our adjusted annual income will be $27,300

We plug in the following annual expenses:

$1500  for Repairs/Maintenance
$2800  for taxes
$8400  for HOA fees
$  300  for insurance
$10,788 to cover the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, for $183,750, at 4.125% (4.38% APR)

As a Vacasa-Certified Real Estate Broker, I have access to some pretty nice analytical tools so here are the numbers in a nice report.

The down-payment plus closing costs will cost you approximately $66,000 and, while it’s not uncommon to purchase these properties furnished, you may want to spend $5,000-10,000 changing/updating the furnishings.  Your investment then, should be around $75,000.

I can’t predict the future but I do think these properties will double in value over the next 20 years.  Let’s assume it only appreciates at less than 3% annually and, in 20 years, sells for $375,000.  If we assume selling costs of approximately 8%, that should net 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 30, 2020

Three reasons why New York and San Francisco aren’t dead

by

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

Author website

“The reports of our deaths are greatly exaggerated”– New York City and San Francisco

The Bloodhounds have been talking about San Francisco and Manhattan’s death over on Facebook.  The general consensus is that they have been ruined by Marxist mayors (they have) and become much too expensive for people to live, work and play (they have).  The pandemic exacerbated these flaws and now that everyone is working from home, these cities are destined to crumble into ruin.

Greg Swann fired a shot the other day, right here in Bloodhound Blog.  I don’t dispute that both cities are in trouble.

This graphic shows the growth in year-over-year housing inventory.  While most of the country is experiencing actual declines in housing inventory (less homes for sale than the year before), NYC and San Francisco have more homes for sale than the year before.

Some reasons for the decline in housing supply are:

(1) homeowners are hunkering down because of the pandemic,
(2) some homeowners are in trouble and taking advantage of the mortgage forbearance program.— they are delaying the inevitable sale,
(3) new housing construction has slowed or halter in most major cities.

Greg Swann went so far as to suggest that cities might be dead forever, thanks to the internet and remote work opportunities.  While his criticism of poorly run cities is valid, the notion that the future of work is a “laptop in the basement” is not.

I am the one of the most tech-friendly Luddites you’ll ever meet.  If an app or platform is relatively easy to use, I embrace it.  Back in the early days, I was teaching real estate agents and lenders how to build IRL networks from social media.  I have been doing that since 2003.  The key component to success in online networking is to connect online but to meet, and develop a relationship in person.  Human beings are mammals and we like to cuddle.  The cuddlers will be more productive than the email-ers every time.  Keep this in mind when you think that humans will scatter to the mountains and do business on Zoom forever.

Here are three reasons why neither San Francisco nor New 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.

August 27, 2020

Influence is when people actually listen to you. Realtors and lenders can help save the world right now just by evangelizing the middle class.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am as Cassandra, and it pains me. I know what is wrong with Western Civilization, at the root, and how to fix it so it will never need fixing again. So much good does this do me – or anyone else, for that matter.

Instead we are here, agog as the world we thought we knew crumbles around us, aghast that no one rises to its defense.

Whose job IS that, anyway?

I’m looking at you, thumbsucker…

It is beyond all doubt unconscionably rude to hector your clients about politics. And yet: We are at a place where the free real estate market itself it at peril. Absurd? Who saw the country in flames a year ago? And the private and widely-distributed ownership of the land we live, work and play on is the freedom that undergirds all our other freedoms. The enemies of human splendor will destroy it – if they can.

Me, eleven Independence Days’ ago:

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we all seem to own our homes only by sufferance, none of us will have anything left to defend.

So what can you do about all this?

I think you have to talk to your clients, those who trust you enough to listen to you – and this doubled-periled epoch is one of those rare moments in the lives of adults when minds are open to Read more

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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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