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Category: Real Estate (page 38 of 266)

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 16, 2012

The world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the map to that world is written in the lines of your face.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A couple weeks ago we got together with an old friend whom we had not seen in some while. She made a huge point of remarking that my appearance had not changed at all, which I dismissed as a kindly untruth, sweet but surely very far from being accurate.

It turns out she was closer to the truth than I had guessed. I am speaking about Man Alive! at The 21 Convention in August, and I had to come up with a head shot for the event.

This is me on April 15, 2001, the photo I’ve used at BloodhoundBlog since its inception:

This is me on July 9, 2012, a week ago today:

A little more weight on me, and a little jowlier, but not much difference. The set of my features is a constant, a reflection of the world I see outside my mind.

This is me from Man Alive!:

Your mama told you, when you glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial expressions we wear most often – habituated Mothertongue emotional reactions – inscribe themselves into our skin.

We listed an actual equity sale on Friday, and we’re getting ready to do another one Friday next. I’m waiting right now to get the signed contract on a buyer side, also an equity sale. That much is good, since we have fared very poorly in ForeclosureWorld. But I just lost a buyer side that we need very badly, and I have not had any confidence that we can hold onto our own home for the past four years. Desdemona died, Shyly died, and Odysseus is making his last orbit around the sun. I’ve had family shit, and Cathy lost her father and is slowly losing her mother.

In short, I could wish for more triumphs and fewer tragedies. But the world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the reality of my own life is that I have to make a conscious effort to remember pain as soon as it’s over. I love my life best when I’m too 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 1, 2012

Google Updates Penalize Cheap SEO

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

Three years into my private law practice, the web continues to be the primary way I market my law firm. Having represented more than 500 people over the past three years, I’m starting to see both repeat business and referrals. But not everyone needs a criminal lawyer, the way they’ll eventually need a realtor, so it takes time to build out a referral base.

In order to not put all my eggs in one basket, I’ve launched a bankruptcy practice as well with separate websites and separate identities to help channel potential clients to the right information, and so that if my web presence suffers on one dimension, it won’t suffer on all dimensions.

We’ve also tried other marketing efforts, including direct mail, radio advertising, and networking. The networking can be effective, but that’s really not my strength, so I’ve not invested the kind of time and effort that I should on reaching out to other lawyers in order to develop referral channels.

All of this is to say: I spend an inordinate amount of time focused on Google (and to a lesser extent Bing and Yahoo) in watching updates.

For the past nearly 30 months, my website has been number 1 in my city for my primary keywords. But the ride has been bumpy, especially in the last year and a half. Google has made more than a half dozen important changes to its algorithms and search behavior since January, including one that is rolling out as we speak. This after a number of years in which Google implemented fewer updates than that for entire 12 month periods.

Some of the updates have been improvements. For instance, in April, Google released a penalty for over-optimization – basically spammy and keyword laden websites. Fortunately, I had moved away from keywords about a year prior, so I was not penalized, but I did see some competitors take a huge hit.

What does this mean? It means that, first of all, there is never one SEO strategy. Building a quality website takes time, and Google is trying to reward quality Read more

May 16, 2012

I might be a Bloodhound if Eric likes my intro video….

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

My respect for Eric Blackwell is, well, simply beyond my ability to wordsmith.  This guy is not only smart, but he’s fun (in a funny way),  creative, and shaped in the mold of Jeff Brown’s cat skinners.

So when Eric penned a post recently on how one might be a Bloodhound if……and then showed us a superb video by a cool guy right up the road from me, I decided it would be appropriate to thrown down a glove in the challenge and see whether I win the prize (get the princess) or am sent to the guillotine.

You be the judge.  Joe Post and I have worked together for a long time, and our goal is to create a video site where we are THE go to guys for finding info other than square footage and HOA fees.  Enjoy…..cause I might be a Bloodhound  if this makes you feel like you’d like to get to know us better.

 

 

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

May 8, 2012

The Economist asks “Why is it so expensive to buy or sell a house in America?”

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

This is in an article titled “The great realtor rip-off”.

The comparison to estate agents in the UK is especially interesting. They make half the commission and close 3 to 4x transactions.

The article mentions NAR by name and only refers to MLS in passing as ex-cartels:

The business used to operate like a series of local cartels. In a typical area, a handful of brokers controlled a shared database of available homes, and limited their cheaper rivals’ access to those listings. In 2008 in the United States and 2010 in Canada, regulators struck deals with realtors to open up these databases. Yet since then the average commission has actually risen, from 5.0% in 2005 to 5.4% in 2011, according to REAL Trends, a research firm.

“Used to”, huh?

Its a great read as it sums up the state of the industry succinctly and in no uncertain terms, but it could have done a better job of laying the blame at the feet of the MLS concept itself. If there were no MLS/NAR creating $8bn of “economic waste”, it seems to me Bloodhounds would be the brokers and agents left standing, as is apparently the case in UK.
May 2, 2012

Really, What If He’s Not Wrong?

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

A follow-up to an article on syndication I wrote just a short time ago.  Keep in mind that I’ve never even met Jim Abbott, and am not promoting his company.  But I’m listening harder now to him, and as he speaks his words continue to etch a path that I really believe warrants all of our attention.

At the end he does make a request.  In San Diego you can actually withhold syndication on a property by property basis.  On the MLS form simply check “No Syndication.”  Try it.  I discussed it yesterday with a client, and I’m listing her home without giving away all the info to you know who.  Oh, and I truly believe if buyers come to my site to learn about this property, even if they don’t want this particular home, it will greatly increase the likelihood of my working with them in the future.

Want to skin some cats, anyone?

April 24, 2012

You might be a Bloodhound if…you do an intro video like this.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

In the world of Google upheaval that I have lived through in the past couple of months, I have consumed my share of Diet Mt. Dew and aspirin. So to cure my headache and to continue to contribute to all that is good in the real estate conversation, I offer you the first of hopefully many Jeff Foxworthy style best practices that I am seeing in the real estate industry.

I have entitled these posts, “You might be a Bloodhound if…” I think it is appropriate.

The first entry is from a friend in Manhattan Beach Ca who has what I think is one of the classiest videos to introduce himself ever. Try competing with the sincerity and the authenticity of this REALTOR:

Get to know ya video for Greg Geilman

Seriously. Go to the page…click the video and please share your thoughts.

I personally think that this type of video connects in all the right ways with a consumer. It would if I was the consumer.

Would love your feedback. (And NO I did not do the video. 😉 He sent it to me for my thoughts. grin

You might be a Bloodhound if…you create a video to connect with people like this. #justsayin for those of you twitterers..grin

April 12, 2012

Todd Carpenter joins the Knights Who Say SMIE!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter, the National Association of Realtors’ official In-House Social Media Judas Goat, has announced that he is leaving that charnel house of corruption for the slightly-less-corrupt Trulia.com. Carpenter, who almost immediately proved himself to be much too goaty for the refined nostrils of Michigan Avenue, managed to last three years with the NAR.

His new position at Trulia is entitled — I kid you not — Senior Manager of Industry Engagement (SMIE). In an earlier, more circumspect age, a job title like this would have implied carefully-honed skills in affable-cocktail-drinking, check-grabbing and barely-losing-at-golf. In the Realty.bot era of the dot.com epoch, Todd’s function will be to be well-known to thoughtless TwitBook time-wasters in the real estate business, thus to provide “social proof” that advertising on Trulia is an unbeatable waste of money.

Carpenter’s announcement is the fourth in a recent series of similar “news” stories. Todd will be following Bob Bemis, Jay Thompson and Duane Fouts into exciting, challenging leadership roles in the burgeoning Realty.bot Judas Goat industry. In light of Carpenter’s utterly implausible new job title, I have denominated all of these sellouts great guys “The Knights Who Say SMIE!” They may not actually say “SMIE!,” mind you, but you can bet they’ll say what they’re told to say. To do less would be cheating the shareholders, when the job description clearly calls for gulling the yokels.

As always, if you don’t know who is the yokel — it’s you. If you don’t believe me, check for blood in your underpants.

I have warned you about all this for many years. You didn’t listen then, and you won’t listen now. But if all the mad monkeys of the TwitBook mob “decide” to tee me up for a Two Minutes’ Hate, could y’all please go the extra mile and hate my new book and web site, too? Chapters 10 and 11 explore the mob mentality thoroughly, so there’s plenty to rant about.

But: Still: My heart goes out to Todd Carpenter, easily the most easy–going of The Knights Who Say SMIE! I always thought he was redeemable, and I still do. And look at the 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

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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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