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Category: Technology (page 22 of 60)

November 9, 2008

It’s my video.. you can have the audio!!

by

Commercial Real Estate Broker

Author website

Having spent the better part of a year on a project (which is done), I’ve been a faithful reader but apathetic contributor.. partly because I haven’t had anything catch my attention (other than $1.5T evaporating from the market – something for another post) long enough to spur those creative urges.. but honestly I’ve been fairly lazy.. 

With that.. UMG, Universal Music Group, is taking my “views” off of YouTube! They’re not asking, they’re telling (email below from yesterday)..

 

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself help center | e-mail options | report spam

Dear Sean, 

Your video “The Tree is Gone” has been identified by YouTube’s Content Identification program as containing copyrighted content which UMG claims is theirs.

Your video “The Tree is Gone” is still available because UMG does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.

Claim Details:

Copyright owner: UMG
Content claimed: Some or all of the audio content
Policy: Allow this content to remain on YouTube.       

  • Place advertisements on this video’s watch page.

Applies to these locations:
United States

UMG claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with UMG and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between content owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Content Identification Team

Some time ago, I put together some family videos with background music for the “rents” in Florida, and one in particular was about a 100-yr old oak tree that died in the backyard of the in-laws and had to be cut down.. So I filmed the “execution” with my background Read more

November 6, 2008

Offering more service to buyers for a bigger slice of the buyer’s agent’s commission, Redfin moves closer to traditional real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When I represent buyers, I see my biggest responsibility as taking the fear away. Yes, I need to find and show houses. Yes, I need to write contracts and supervise inspections. Yes, I need to husband everything through the lender and the title company. But the job of jobs is to serve as a security blanket for the buyers, to make them feel safe and comfortable throughout the process.

Whatever Redfin.com’s buyer pool might think they want from a buyer’s agent, in general they’re not that different from other buyers. They might like the idea of a very robust search tool for identifying homes. They might like the idea of a streamlined purchase process, Amazon-does-residential-real-estate. But when the dollars hit the dirt, they want to know that they are being marshalled through the home buying process by an experienced professional — someone who can do all the chores that need to be attended to, but also someone who can inspire the quiet confidence that permits buyers to sleep through the night in what might otherwise be a nightmarish experience.

Today Redfin.com moves that much closer to traditional real estate. Redfin buyers will be able to choose the agent they work with, and they will be able to look at an unlimited number of homes at no out-of-pocket cost. But the rebate to buyers will be 50% instead of 67%. The website has been retooled to reflect the higher degree of personal service.

Also today, Redfin will offer new search features on its web site, including tools to make it easier for buyers to investigate the history of distressed and foreclosure properties across multiple MLS listings.

By email, Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman offered this explanation:

A lot of this is the culmination of a long process of figuring out we’re a customer-service company, not just a web company or a real estate company, which means we’ve gotten a lot more practical about how we blend online and personal service; we’re trying to do more of both.

Redfin’s on-line search tool is so much more robust than anything else available to consumers, I think the company might be a Read more

November 5, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando — Schedule of events

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, so now you have to be careful to make no more than $249,900. 😉

If you’re not already there, come see us Friday in Orlando. Here’s the class schedule:

08:00 Opening
08:15 Greg Swann – The Unchained Epiphany
09:00 Brian Brady – Ninja Social Media Marketing
10:00 Sherry Chris – Keynote Address
10:45 Teri Lussier – Building a Community Through Blogging
11:30 Lunch Break
12:15 Point/Counter-Point On Social Media Marketing
01:00 Kelley Koehler – What To Do When Google Doesn’t Love You
02:15 Mitch Ribak – Internet Marketing Conversion
04:30 Dinner Break
05:15 John Rowles on IDX
05:45 Sean Purcell – The Bloodhound Way
06:30 Eric Blackwell – Leveraged Search Engine Marketing
08:00 Closing

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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November 3, 2008

Are you in Orlando on Friday? Make some time to learn how to make more money in 2009 at BloodhoundBlog Unchained

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re coming to the NAR Convention in Orlando this year, the vendors are quite literally dying to meet you. It’s been a bad year already for their useless crap, and attendance will be way down this year. They cannot wait to sink their fangs into you.

If you’re going to be in Orlando anyway, pry open your day on Friday for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Yes, we’re going to charge you ninety-nine bucks for the program, but we’ll give you back twelve hours of ideas on how lenders and Realtors can make more money in 2009. Brian and I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the course line-up over the weekend, so we know that even if you can’t make it for the whole day, you’ll get great value for whatever time you can make available.

And to top it off, we’ll do it all without vendors and without their useless crap. Not everything we’re talking about will be cost-free to implement, but everything we’re always talking about is about how to reap maximum bang from minimum bucks. It’s not about being cheap — anti-marketing is worse than no marketing — it’s about being effective.

Even if you’re not going to the NAR Convention, you might give us your Friday. Gas is cheap, but the road ahead is fraught with peril. Make some time for us and we’ll show you everything we’re doing to acquire and convert new business — on the web and in the real world.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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November 1, 2008

Defusing the Unabomber: Why individualism will triumph regardless of any temporary setbacks

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We spend so much time picking at our scabs that we but rarely notice how amazingly rich we are, and how much richer we are getting day-by-day. There are at least a thousand men and women as smart as Aristotle walking the earth right now. If you are a computer geek, you surely know the name of Donald Knuth, but what you may not have considered is that there are 10,000 Knuths alive right now. If you click on this link, you will read an account of an extraordinary scientific achievement, but the most extraordinary thing of all is how ordinary such accounts have become, how commonplace, how much to-be-expected. We are so rich that we cannot even begin to count our riches.

I wrote this essay just over thirteen years ago, when the internet was very young, but it is apposite, I think, today and every day.

–GSS

 
Defusing the Unabomber

I’ve been trying for a week to write something about the Unabomber and his pesky manifesto, and I can’t seem to get the job done. In this voice, the studious essayist voice, I can’t take him seriously. In the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie voice, the only other style I’m working in right now, I can’t make light of the murder of three innocents.

I can make fun of anything. I’ve been writing Willie stories for ten years, and, with few exceptions, all of those stories ridicule the ridiculous. I have 308 words of a Willie story about the Unabomber. In it, he is represented as a cowboy wino who has just sold a pint of blood and who terrorizes strangers by popping paper bags.

But I can’t work with him in even so grotesque and ludicrous a shape. I think of him and in my mind’s eye I see children making angels in the snow. And then I see those children blown to a bloody pulp for committing the horrid act of creating artifacts of technology.

I see William Shakespeare and I hear him denounced as a mere hobbyist. Was he brother to the Queen? A Lord of the court? A lowly actor with a potent muse? Read more

October 29, 2008

All these Widgets, Idjits, Digits and Midgets are making me fidget.

by

Free Market Cowgirl

Author website

Every web 2.0 Realtor® that is any web 2.0 Realtor® has at least one or more widgets up and running on their preferred social networking sites. Some Realtors® collect widgets like my son collects insects—strange little trapped creatures placed proudly on display—creatures that I don’t want coming anywhere near me! And, just like my eight-year-old and his obsessions with all things creepy-crawly—I’m not sure if Realtors® really want these things, or if it’s just the thrill of hunting them down, jumping online, sniffing them out, inserting those few lines of pre-written HTML code into their blog like bugs going into my boy’s empty-and-cut-open Mayfield Dairy milk jug. Then, slowly but ever so proudly lifting them up, so the whole world can see their widgets, more widgets, and look, a whole colony of social-networking, virtual-reality widgets.

Or, as I like to call them: Idjits, Digits and Midgets.

The Idjits – These things give me the creeps. Every time I see one, I think of the little girl from Poltergeist talking about somebody trapped inside her television. The only difference is that these are little faces trapped inside my computer—probably wanting to get out, but can’t. Prisoners in their own private sidebar hell wishing they had spent their time more productively than typing meaningless replies to words they never even read. Now, some agents swear by this widget and even use it as a makeshift stalker tracker. Obviously they don’t know what having a real-life stalker is like. If they did, they would know that the ones you can’t see are the ones you need to worry about. I’m not concerned about the agents staring at me on my computer, I already know what they are doing…or not doing.

The Digits – These contraptions tell people how good you are at selling real estate, how many posts you’ve written, how many points you’ve earned and how often you appear on the front page of such and such social media site. Funny thing is, not once have I ever been asked by a home buyer or seller how many posts I’ve written, how many comments I’ve Read more

October 26, 2008

Want to learn how to pull maximum search-engine results from minimal SEO efforts? Come see Eric Blackwell at Unchained Orlando

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Are you coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando? Bloodhound Eric Blackwell will repay your investment all by himself with a talk he has prepared on using easy-to-implement SEO tactics to drive traffic to your web site or weblog. This is guerrilla marketing at its best, and Eric will bring his own unique perspective on the topic: What works, what doesn’t, dumb stunts that will hurt you more than they help and traffic-building techniques you may never have thought of.

This is right up our street, maximum benefit, minimum spend. Click on the PayPal button below to join us in Orlando.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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October 24, 2008

Two weeks to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando: Learn how low-cost prospecting techniques can help you dominate in 2009

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I gather through the grapevine that the NAR Convention is shaping up to be a somber if not quite funereal event. Travel budgets are much constrained. That’s understandable. I can’t see a cost-benefit payoff of going to yet another vendorfest.

But BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando is another basket of oranges. We are about nothing but teachable tools, tips, tricks, tactics and techniques that you can use to start snagging new business right away. Even better, most of the things we talk about are highly-leveraged: Minimum expenditure, maximum results. If you’re a Realtor or lender running in survival mode, we’ll show you how to get more bang for fewer bucks — right now.

If you’re coming to Orlando anyway — or if you already live in the Southeastern United States — make time for us. We’ll show you how to make more money for yourself.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

See you in two weeks!

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October 21, 2008

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

I have been thinking alot lately about RE Web 2.0, particularly in light of the recent news regarding Redfin and Zillow’s current layoffs.  Greg also recently posted regarding the current state of the Realty.bots.

“Indeed. We have seen the future of real estate marketing — and it is us.*”

I am not entirely convinced it has to be all us.

I am a process guy.  Prior to delving into the real estate business, I developed sales and marketing strategies for technology firms – many of which targeted supply chain solutions.  When I approach a process, I try to focus on the inherent value a particular set of activities delivers.

Perhaps the double edged sword in the real estate industry is that we are all independent contractors – we approach our businesses in differing ways.  On one hand, we have the ability to run our businesses in a way that capitalizes on our strengths.  Some of us use a consistent process to bring a deal together, some of us don’t.  I suggest that many consumers approach the purchase and sale of real estate apprehensively.  Many simply don’t know what the correct process is for purchasing or selling a property and they look to a professional to provide the knowledge and expertise to consistently deliver a successful closing.  Unfortunately, not all agents are created equal, therefore mileage varies – alot.

I believe that the myth to the core of the business of buying and selling property lies within the MLS.  This process is not all about the data.  While the data is key, it certainly does not provide a consistent process for facilitating a transaction – there is a natural progression to a transaction.

Up to this point, if not the most successful, at the least the most recognized RE Web 2.0 search solutions have focused their solutions surrounding the myth of the real estate transaction – it is all about the data.  Again, the data is important, however, it is only part of the process.

My frustration with the current search solutions is that it does not address the natural progression of the real estate transaction.  While extremely powerful, Read more

October 20, 2008

No layoffs at Trulia: The San Francisco treat is still hiring

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

CNET:

Real-estate sites had some tough times last week. First, Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, announced that it was laying off 20 percent of its staff, then Zillow, a service that delivers home values and lists sales, announced that it was forced to lay off 25 percent of its workforce.

But Trulia, which lets buyers find homes for sale across the United States, says it has no layoff plans and that it has enjoyed so much growth, it’s actually looking to expand.

“We are not making any layoffs. All companies need to be smart in this environment and adjust to the market movements,” Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia, said in an interview. “As a company, we are in a strong position. We always believed that we had to be aggressive but fiscally responsible, and that is why we are in the position we are (in) today. In fact, we are still making a few select hires, where they are important to our revenue growth.”

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October 18, 2008

Tom Johnson to the Realty.bots: All that free stuff you gave us would have been a bargain at twice the price!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In a comment at the Future of Real Estate Marketing, our friend Tom Johnson delivers a fatherly lecture on the facts of life:

This is the free market and unintended consequences at work. There is a reason that the commission rates have been stuck for years where they are. The contingency nature of the listing relationship drives the business. The consumer is unwilling to pay for service that does not result in a sale.

Pouring VC cash into the real estate space has improved technology. The RE.net came on the scene with plans to disintermediate the real estate brokers by tapping into the commission honey pot. This put pressure on commissions forcing brokers to cut costs, so the RE.net responded by giving the services away for free. Free outbound doesn’t earn a return inbound. The cash burn continues, brokers continue to cut costs by not buying RE.net products causing more cash burn and layoffs.

As transactions slow, the commission honeypot shrinks. Brokers will cut cost and redouble efforts to get salable listings, by using the free tools that are provided by RE.net.

It seems to me that the RE.net did indeed disintermediate, but it was not the RE brokers that were disintermediated, but the print media. So here we are, marketing listings for free on the web. Because of the fractured nature of the RE space, it takes unimaginable amounts of time to manage all that free stuff, so we are where we were. The consumer is still unwilling to pay cash for RE services on a non-contingency basis. So, we tweet and blog and facespace our listings, to get a transaction started, and then the real work begins-getting the contract to the closing table. That is the part of this industry that the RE.net sort of forgot about and the cash burn continues…

Indeed. We have seen the future of real estate marketing — and it is us.*

As might be obvious, I don’t have a lot of time for other RE.net sites right now, but it is worthwhile to note that tFoREM has four whole posts this week, a huge number by comparison to recent Read more

October 14, 2008

Videoplay: My idea of a halfway decent real estate video

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

October 13, 2008

Citing market downturn, Redfin.com cuts headcount by twenty heads

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via intrepid startup blogger John Cook from his new weblog Where are John and Todd?:

Redfin today said it is cutting 20 percent of its staff as the Seattle online real estate broker prepares for what Chief Executive Glenn Kelman described as a “big dip.”

About 20 employees were let go, bringing total staff at the company to about 75 people.

Kelman said it was a difficult decision, but the right move given how the economic slow down is impacting the residential real estate market.

“Redfin’s whole business will struggle and fight and may yet fail,” Kelman wrote in a message to employees. “But the only way it is possible for us to succeed – and, even today, I believe we will – is if we adapt.”

In an interview, Kelman said that the company had been performing well up until about three weeks ago. Last month, he said executives even felt strong enough about the business to raise revenue projections for next year.

But once the economic meltdown hit Wall Street, Kelman said “deals started to fall apart.” And while October and November may still prove to be solid months at Redfin, Kelman said beyond that the outlook is dismal.

“As the stock market wiped out prospective down-payments, tours and offers dropped 30 percent,” said Kelman in his message to employees. “Transactions that were done came undone.”

More from CEO Glenn Kelman at Redfin’s weblog:

Today Redfin laid off roughly 20% of our employees.

Unlike other startups, our industry’s recession started a year ago, when home prices first plunged.

Since then, we’ve fought like starving animals, and with some success: while industry-wide transaction volumes dropped 33%, we grew revenues by nearly 50%. Traffic grew more than 300%.

Even a month ago, we were raising 2009 revenue projections. All our markets, now including Chicago, contributed profits.

But the past few weeks have seen a major reversal. As the stock market wiped out prospective down-payments, tours and offers dropped 30%. Transactions that were done came undone. October will still be pretty good, then we’re headed for a big dip.

Hence the layoff. Layoffs are painful for any company, but especially for a startup and especially, I Read more

October 11, 2008

Boringly functional artwork in the service of marketing homes: If people can’t figure out what you’re selling, they won’t buy it

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote about the back side of that card last week. It’s the Open House invitation for 56 West Willetta Street in Downtown Phoenix, a home we listed for sale yesterday. This is a full-bore Bloodhound launch, but the card itself is kinda boring, wouldn’t you say?

That’s not an accident. I could wish I were more talented as a graphic designer, but I’m a firm believer that, if something is so cool looking that no one knows what it is, you’ve wasted your money. As radical as our real estate signs are, they still look like real estate signs. And the most profoundly valuable graphic element on our signs was suggested by marketing-provocateur Richard Riccelli: The snipe in the upper left hand corner that says “For sale.” In the uncivil war between obvious and obtuse, obtuse wins all the glamorous awards and obvious wins all the money.

Which brings us to our directionals. I’ve been writing about custom directional signs for more than a year. In that time, we’ve gone through many designs, and we’ve never done the same thing twice. For this house, I think I’ve finally hit on something I like and will use again:

Could not possibly be more obvious, yes?

That “Buy me” call to action is swiped from Redfin.com. Their signs do nothing for me otherwise, but those two words are the essence of good copywriting, in my opinion.

In our own small way, we launch a house in the same we someone else might launch a new car or a new kind of dishwasher or a new magazine. Those business-card-sized Open House cards will be distributed to 6,000 homes. We’ll get a 1% or at most 2% response on that effort — extremely direct mail — but the chances are excellent that the ultimate buyer will be among the parties who come to the first open house.

And: The signs, the directionals, the web site, everything else we do to market our listings — these techniques sell houses. This is not rocket science. Drawing more attention — and more-positive attention — to a house will make it sell faster and 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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