BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 31 of 60)

April 30, 2008

Who’s the greatest real estate agent in the world? That’s a title I’m willing to compete for. But the winner of the “Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World” SEO contest is BloodhoundBlog’s Eric Blackwell

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

And BloodhoundBlog’s Eric Bramlett breaks the news:

Drumroll please……

Team Eric!

Eric Blackwell and his merry band of SEO’s/bloggers truly proved the spirit of SEO – it’s all about the relationships.  Jennifer Karlan, Greg Swann, Ken Smith, Wayne Long, Judy Orr, Cal Carter, Mike Damman, Charles & Jacqueline Richey, and Matt Scoggins all need to take a collective bow.  Through the use of teamwork and some very strategic use of assets they individually & collectively own, they were able to control #1 from the second month of the contest to the finish line.

There was a LOT of stiff competition here.  Ardell DellaLoggia ran it tight all the way to the finish line.  Greg Boser was in it, and then disappeared off the map w/ a few weeks to go — everyone was anxiously waiting for the SEO Dark Lord to pop his head back in at 11:59 on April 30th.  The guys at newhomessection.com finished #5, w/ Mike Damman’s site PropertyHogs.com, Ryan Ward, Justin from hismove (ranking well, though he dropped out early,) and then Jay Thompson rounding out the top 10.  Wouldn’t you know it?  My post ended up at the top of page 2 – the story of my life.

I’d like to thank everyone for participating, and especially thank Morgan Carey of Real Estate Webmasters for sponsoring the event.  Team Eric has decided to auction off the prize & donate the money to the Eco Preservation Society of Costa Rica (a favorite of Mike Damman’s.)

Eric Blackwell told you he was going to win. I told you Eric was going to win. But the truth is, Eric won because he assembled a great team of very smart people who were shooting Google juice his way until the very last minute.

Take a moment, if you would, to leave a comment to Eric’s winning post. This is a remarkable achievement, and we all got to be a part of it.

Bravo, Eric! And remember: Nice guys link back! 😉

Technorati Tags: , , ,

April 27, 2008

The challenge for Realtors and lenders in the future: How do you sell to consumers who don’t want to be sold?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). The lender in the story? Brian Brady, America’s #1 Mortgage Broker.

 
The challenge for Realtors and lenders in the future: How do you sell to consumers who don’t want to be sold?

We represented a cute couple in the purchase of their first home late last year. That much is not news: First time home-buyers are the bread and butter of the real estate business. What was interesting to me was how internet-focused they were.

The husband, Michael, is an internet adept, but his wife, Danielle, is a true wizard. Her primary interface to the commercial world is the world wide web.

They found me on the internet, of course, and I referred them to a lender that I know through the nets.

Consider this: There are 30,000 Realtors in Phoenix, and at least that many lenders. All of them are advertising at a furious pace — newspapers, real estate magazines, supermarket shopping carts, bus benches, billboards, radio, TV — plus balloons, free pens and scratch pads and coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, flower seeds, recipe cards and Halloween pumpkins.

Real estate professionals spent millions of dollars trying to get Michael and Danielle’s attention, and all of that money was wasted. They are not paying attention to advertising.

To the contrary, if Danielle cannot completely research a product or service on-line, she won’t have anything to do with it. They never once went into the home they were buying without a digital camera. I watched Danielle crane around in impossible contortions so she could read and write down the model and serial numbers from the washer and dryer so she could research them on-line.

Looking forward, nothing changes as fast as we expect it to. But looking backward, the world seems always to be changing like dreams. Danielle is immune to advertising. She recycles her junk mail unread. She doesn’t want to be pitched, she doesn’t want to be sold, she doesn’t want to be wheedled or needled or cajoled. She doesn’t want to be closed on.

All those old school gimmicks still work — on some Read more

April 27, 2008

Update On New Data Standards for Listing Displays

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

On April 12th, I posted some “news” from NAR regarding the unanimous approval by RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization) of the draft data standards for listing display.

On Friday, April 11th, NAR announced that the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) had unanimously approved a “draft standardized data format for distributing real estate listing information.”  

A few of you wanted more information, so I contacted NAR’s Technology Center and got the full scoop.

First, the draft is NOT available on-line, at least in a format that non-techies can read.  Here is a link to some really technical stuff for those of you who know what an “enum” is all about (I do not have a clue).

Second, I found out that these standards are a subset of the RETS data.  The RETS Syndication Standards (the official name) includes less than 2 dozen fields (I’ve heard 14) from RETS.  That sounds like a lot of field at first, but once you count up the obvious ones (e.g., agent name, contact, beds, baths, etc.) that is not very many.  Not that I’m second guessing the wizards who came up with this stuff.

Finally, the near riff I reported in the original post was reasonably accurate.  The big aggregators were tired of the slowness and bureaucracy of the process, but after they threatened to create their own standards, the process moved very quickly.  Essentially, they are beta testing now and will make the final decision in August.

So, what does this mean to REALTORS®?  Here’s what Chris McKeever from NAR said in an e-mail:

With the RESO and NAR backing of this Syndication Specification, this could very easily be adopted into MLS systems to allow them to be the clearinghouse for data transfer between all points.  In other words, your single point of listing data entry into the MLS could then also dynamically be sent to every site that you choose, very similiar to how REALTOR.com is fed now.  This, coupled with the growing number of consumer facing MLS search portals(link) could throw a complete paradigm shift into how listings are marketed on the web.

April 27, 2008

The smarter agent emerging: standards out of experimentation

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

Choice is becoming more critical as options increasingly expand. I have read about this potential problem for years and now we seem to be well along the road to increasing abundance of options. As real esate agents, we’re inundated with options regarding web sites, social networking avenues, blogs to read, models to consider, marketing techniques to employ and advertising venues to use. It’s the flip side of the blessing, the curse of too many options and the problem of choice.

One of the benefits of sites like Bloodhound is that people are giving consideration to these problems and openly writing about what has been found to be the best practices. Awhile back I talked about an article written years ago predicting how the internet would intially be chaos, then experimentation and selection and winnowing, then a standardization period. I want to give credit to the writer, but I can’t find the source. Perhaps someone will remember.

It seems we are still in the experimentation stage, but as we quickly change and learn, choices will hopefully become easier. There is still a dearth of statistics showing the effectiveness of blogging, social networking and online marketing through website providers, RE sites and social sites but anectdotal evidence and personal experience based on analysis are beginning to give us an indication that these new forms of doing business have much potential for those who are adopting the right methods and utilizing them in a committed way.

I do have evidence in my own company that online business has increased by at least 20-30% each year for the last three years, I just haven’t pinpointed which methods produce what part of that business — perhaps it’s a holistic effect of it all.

Making choices is based on knowledge gained through experimentation, our results and the results of others, developing certain guidelines I can use to measure new offerings. In other words, I’m getting to a point where I don’t have to experiment with every new online offering, wasting money on useless gimmicks — it’s easier to tell now which ones have merit and which ones are just a snazzy remake of something I’ve tried that didn’t work.

I suspect many real Read more

April 26, 2008

An NAR Challenge

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I recently found myself in the unenviable position of taking a good long look in the mirror.  Not your typical mirror on the wall (although I often find that to be no picnic either), but the metaphysical mirror; the “pot calling the kettle black” kind of mirror.  I often comment on posts (lately they have been Barry’s) decrying what I perceive to be criticism without construction.  But as soon as the topic turns to our beloved NAR (a favorite around the BloodhoundBlog), I join the nattering nabobs of negativism.  Barry’s post on the NAR’s recent attempt at a technological video is the latest example.  At last count there were 66 comments and I am in there at least twice with some snide sizzle and no meat.  (Hello pot, you’re black!)  But there are also some comments from Ian Smith, one of the people vested with producing the video.  He came into what can only be described as hostile territory and acquitted himself quite well.

So here is what I propose.  The contributors, commenters and readers of BloodhoundBlog may very well constitute the premiere brain trust in RE2.0.  We complain, sometimes with great vitriol, that we would like to see more from the NAR and here is our chance.  I challenge as many of you as possible to step up in the comments to this post and offer your services to Ian for the production of these videos (I’ll start if off below).  I imagine we have many experts here abouts: video, editing, graphics, music, writing, production, agent advice, technological advice and so on.  Ian, your challenge is to get whatever bureacratic sign-offs you need in order to open the project up to some expert volunteer help.  The progress will be reported from time to time right here on BloodhoundBlog and we can all take a hand in improving that which we so often pillory.

April 26, 2008

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer at FBS Blog fingered an astounding exposition by Clay Shirky on the impact participatory media will have on us all:

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the Read more

April 24, 2008

Actions speak louder than words, so let your actions say this: “I intend to do more to earn your business.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Rohrig got to hang a sold sign on the first custom yard sign he built for a listing. The sign probably didn’t sell the house, but it did sell another homeowner on listing with Mike.

He relates this in email:

I had reports from my seller of at least one person just short of slamming on their brakes to look at the sign. How do you think the sellers felt when they saw that?

From Tallahassee, Barry Bevis offers this:

Here are my first two custom yard signs.

Learned a little — as you always go the first time out. Next time they will be larger, I’ll balance the fonts out, No rivet through my logo and maybe shorten the text — but the paragraph is stopping walkers.

As I posted on your blog, the web address just sends you to the listing page on my website.

Here are Barry’s signs:

I think this rocks. From our point of view, a listing sells to three parties: The seller, the buyer and the neighbors. The idea of using yard signs to snare random buyers — in the hope of selling them something — anything! — seems sub-optimal to me. We would rather knock the socks off the neighbors, thus to cultivate a steady stream of listings.

As both Mike and Barry note, a custom yard sign is excellent for drawing buyer attention. And your actions will speak to your sellers much louder than any words could that you want to earn their business. And that yard sign will communicate silently to neighbors who are thinking of selling that they need to give you a call. I rate that a win all around.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

April 23, 2008

Estately.com gets $450K angel round funding, and it is barreling right down California’s throat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Looking for the ultimate status symbol in Scottsdale? Drive a Porsche. In Manhattan? Maybe a co-op on Central Park West — and a Porsche. But in Seattle, if you want to make heads turn, get yourself some venture capital funding.

Estately.com co-founders Galen Ward and Douglas Cole join that rarefied company today, snagging $450,000 in angel round funding. What that means is that “a small group of online entrepreneurs” believes the company is worth at least $4 million on resale. The funding — to be used to expand into other states — is no doubt welcome, but it comes with an added pressure to work miracles.

From the company’s press release:

Estately.com is the leader in location and lifestyle real estate search, allowing users to search from over 45,000 Western Washington homes and condos using unique search features; users can search for properties a quarter mile from specific Metro bus and Sound Transit light rail lines, users can search inside or nearby neighborhoods, zip codes or cities, and users can use text search to narrow their MLS-based home search down to “Tudors,” “fixers,” “short sales,” or “pre foreclosures” without registering on the site. Estately.com also brings searchers information on the closest local schools (including school scores), parks, transit stops, and restaurants for every property in its database. Anyone interested in real estate can track property price changes on individual properties or on area-wide searches and can store (and search for) private notes on any property.

When a real estate seller or shopper is ready to work with a professional, they can anonymously get competing offers from pre-screened and hand selected professionals in their area – no name or phone number required. Estately rigorously screens the agents allowed to participate in the program – Estately combines a powerful in house Realtor ranking system, using the same MLS data displayed on the site, with interviews and reference checks on every agent in the program. All participating Realtors have over 5 years experience unless they come highly recommended by a verified client, have considerable experience in the locale, and have received positive reviews from previous clients. In the Read more

April 22, 2008

engenu public beta test goes live: If you want to explore the software BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build our web pages and web sites, this is your opportunity to deploy engenu on your own web server

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been talking about engenu for a couple of months now. This is the software that BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build single property web sites for our listings and other web pages and web sites that we use to communicate with clients and vendors. Our belief is that the language of real estate is photography, and that, in many cases, the most effective way of communicating real estate concepts is by means of web pages and web sites.

I have been building pages and sites like this for as long as I have been in real estate, first manually, then with a steadily improving series of software programs. engenu is a further development on those ideas, designed and written from scratch this year. We have been using it for our own jobs for the past two months — to make sure that we had what we wanted, and to makes sure everything was working properly.

Here are some engenu sites we have built, both as live work and as examples of what the software can do:

What is it, exactly? engenu is slide-show-oriented software for the semi-automated creation of web pages and web sites. It is communications software, not a presentation package. As an expression of this, even though we make very elaborate single-property web sites for our listings, we continue to use a third-party vendor for our virtual tours.

Who should use engenu? Realtors — and I mean all of them — but also handymen, roofers, landscapers, inspectors — anyone who needs to communicate frequently with digital photographs.

What will you need to run engenu? Root level access to an Apache web server, a robust FTP client that you know how to use, and a strong need to create a lot of professional-looking web pages quickly and cheaply. engenu is multi-user software, so, as soon as you have it installed, you can split the workload for large Read more

April 22, 2008

Cleaned by Capitalism: Our professed love of nature is an artifact of our enormous prosperity

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The other week Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek posted a wonderful article discussing the advent of the rule of law as a precursor to poetic rhapsodizing about the love of the natural world. The post featured a quote from Macaulay’s History of England:

Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develop in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. . . .

It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of robbers . . . that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain tops.

Today is Earth Day, and Boudreaux is back with another trenchant post, this one discussing the revolting squalor that typifies pre-capitalist communities.

Don Boudreaux is the Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University — a hot zone of free-market economic research. In today’s post, he cites an article he had originally written for The Freeman, the magazine of The Foundation for Economic Education.

Boudreaux has given BloodhoundBlog permission to print his article in its entirely. The Greek root of the word economics literally means household management, and it’s not a coincidence that Read more

April 20, 2008

Don’t Listen To The Arrogant Attention Whores — Just Skin Your Cat

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

As happens with blogging sometimes, certain topics inspire many to register their take. That’s what we do. Whether it’s real estate, loan, or tech oriented, it’s amazing how quickly certain subjects can morph into almost a spiritual debate.

Watching all the back and forth the last month or so has been, uh, enlightening — not.

I’m here to tell you, Bloodhound is all about making agents better at what they do. I adhere to that as my Bloodhound mission statement with whatever I write here, just as I do in my own house. Writing here is such an honor. The first thing readers realize is that most of us understand it’s not about us, but about you. This is a critical distinction when passing on expertise.

For example, as a youth baseball coach, (five all-star teams 🙂 ) I never told a kid he was stupid ‘cuz he hit a line drive other than how I’d taught him. On the contrary, I praised him for gettin’ the job done. There are so many ways to hit a baseball hard. But if you freeze frame the hitter at the point where ball meets bat? They pretty much look identical.

The same goes for real estate agents. Their success depends on one thing: How many prospects were they able to get themselves in front of on a consistent basis? In baseball parlance, how many at-bats do they get every week, month, year?

Wow, you made seven figures?! Yep. How’d you do it? The answer isn’t relevant. The target of the question did it — that’s what’s relevant. He skinned the cat. Now that you’ve discovered that fact, you can sit down with them and find out how. The next agent who impresses you with their income will have done it an entirely different way. Go figure.

We human types are funny. We figure out what works for us, then become evangelical about it. Billy Graham was never more passionate than those on either side of the discussions on SEO methods, what to call a lead (Are you serious?), cold calling/door knocking vs the internet, Read more

April 20, 2008

Will Realtors be disintermediated by on-line tools? Probably not, but tech-savvy Realtors will supplant those who do not adapt

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Will Realtors be disintermediated by on-line tools? Probably not, but tech-savvy Realtors will supplant those who do not adapt

The big news in real estate is the market, of course. My view is that the American economy is much stronger and more resilient than you might guess from day-to-day reports.

But the other big story in real estate is the idea of “disintermediation” — replacing Realtors with some combination of do-it-yourself effort and hi-tech tools. The stock retort to this notion — and I have made it myself — is that people will never buy homes like they buy books on Amazon.

Perhaps so. But I lived through the desktop revolution in printing, so I have a different take about the dreaded word disintermediation.

If the triumphant yelp is that some travel agents and some stockbrokers still have jobs, I will point out that some blacksmiths still have jobs, too. Horses still need shoes. That much is beside the point.

Here’s my take on the matter: Don’t think in terms of disintermediation. Use the word “supplantation” instead. In industry after industry, old techniques are being supplanted by new ideas. More importantly, the old technicians are being supplanted by new ones.

This is not a necessary consequence, but it often works out that the “old hands” don’t want to make the change to the new ways of doing business. Even if they do, the “first-mover advantage” can be too great to overcome.

The same goes for everything — most especially real estate. Realtors who are not all the way onboard with the way business will be done in the future will be left behind at the station.

A real estate transaction is so complex that most people will continue to want professional advice — even as they handle many of the simpler functions Realtors might have done in the past. The work we do will be superficially similar to the work others have done in the past — but those others won’t be doing it any longer.

Will they have been disintermediated? Not if you insist that they haven’t. Read more

April 17, 2008

Is managing your URL structure enough to achieve Truliamazing long tail search results in your target market?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of BloodhoundBlog life: Trulia.com can be a redheaded stepchild around here. We’re always happy to pounce on Redfin.com or to pontificate about Zillow.com, but Trulia most often gets short shrift. It mainly comes across like Realtor.com’s younger, smarter, cheaper brother — and no one with a stock-option plan needs to write to me to tell me this is an unfair characterization. Trulia is certainly less adept at — or perhaps less interested in — grabbing headlines. The flip side is that the start-up is recovering its own costs, an unheard-of feat in the Web 2.0 world.

But here is another factor that sets Trulia apart, one that cuts much closer to this Realtor’s bones:

Trulia.com absolutely kills at long tail search optimization.

Mary McKnight advised us yesterday to ignore the long tail, but that advice doesn’t make sense in our business. If I were competing for prospects in Cedar Rapids, then focusing a lot of attention on Cedar Rapids keywords might make sense. But Phoenix is home to five million souls. The Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market comprises an area larger than Belgium. Moreover, our own real estate practice is focused on a tightly-defined niche. We live and die on long tail keywords.

And this is why I am hyper-aware of Trulia’s long tail efforts. I keep a constant eye on street names where we are strong or want to be strong. People cruise the neighborhoods we work at 15 MPH, looking at every house for sale. If they write down an address and Google it later, I want for them to find us. If it’s our listing, so much the better, but I want for them to find the breadcrumbs we leave behind us no matter what.

Watch this: 921 West Culver Street is for sale, but nobody told Google. In consequence, one of our old single-property web sites comes up first for that search (YMMV), giving us first crack at any buyers who Google for more information about that home.

By contrast: 714 West Culver Street is also for sale, but there’s only one dog peeing on that tree right now. Read more

April 16, 2008

Who can reinvent real estate marketing? At MikeCanDoIt.com Mike Rohrig howls like a Portland Bloodhound…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Look at this. Isn’t that…?

Yes — that’s a custom yard sign, mounted right there in the yard. Here it is up close:

The sign was made by Mike Rohrig, a Portland Realtor and Broker who is pushing the boundaries on his marketing.

Here’s a note Mike wrote to me:

The accidental brainwashing in the real estate industry is almost staggering.  The saying ,”think outside the box”, is almost cliche anymore but once I saw your custom sign on the Blog, it left me perplexed that neither I, nor anyone else in my market has created a custom sign.

It is a simple and effective tool.  It truly will get the home noticed as well as allow me to separate myself from others.  It cost me less than an typical ad in the Oregonian newspaper.  We have certain regulations that don’t allow me to make signs the same size as yours but I think I did okay for my first try.

For single property websites I have been using WordPress and learning some tricks to make it easier.  I had an idea that you might find helpful. I added a FAQ page.  After talking to my client about some buyer feedback I realized that this would be a perfect way to answer questions, objections or concerns ahead of time.

One question was about a school boundary line that moved so I put the email response from the school in the FAQ.

I am not the wordsmith that you are so I use a lot of pictures. I take pictures of nearby parks and anything else I think will help someone make a decision.

I also make pertinent links on the side in case someone is not familiar with the area.I think I will work on business cards soon as I implement these ideas into my business practice.

Here are two of my sites that are getting compliments.
http://1140swhuntingtonave.com
http://2904seberkeleypl.com

Mike’s main weblog is the aptly named MikeCanDoIt.com.

There’s a lot that we do, at BloodhoundRealty.com, that no one we compete against does. But everything we do, in one way or another, is built upon work that came before us. We watch, listen and learn, and Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts