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Category: Technology (page 32 of 60)

April 13, 2008

Zillow.com’s Mortgage Marketplace brings anonymous apples-to-apples mortgage rate quotes to consumers, free consumer leads to lenders

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Zillow.com’s Mortgage Marketplace brings anonymous apples-to-apples mortgage rate quotes to consumers, free consumer leads to lenders

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a broad array of mortgage quotes without having to make dozens of phone calls? And what if you could make a true apples-to-apples comparison among quotes? Better still, what if you could remain anonymous, making yourself known to the lender only when you are ready to do business?

Seattle-based real estate start-up Zillow.com last week released its long-anticipated mortgage lending product, called the Mortgage Marketplace, and it offers all those features and more.

Unlike Zillow’s “Zestimates,” the loan quotes are generated by real people, working lenders. Zillow will basically be acting as a hands-off intermediary between borrowers and loan originators.

Consumers using Zillow’s new Mortgage Marketplace will be able to anonymously solicit bids for loans from participating lenders. The consumer will fill out a detailed form disclosing all pertinent financial details.

The form will be submitted anonymously to participating lenders, who will, in their turn, produce estimated loan quotes, submitting them, through Zillow, to the consumer. The consumer will then have the choice to make direct contact with particular lenders to decide whom to do business with.

To a very large degree, the information asymmetry between lender and borrower will be done away with, since the loan quote will detail every fee associated with the loan. Moreover, Zillow will be implementing a reputation-management system whereby borrowers will be able to rate lenders on their performance.

In return, the lenders will receive Zillow’s mortgage leads at no cost.

What’s in it for Zillow.com? When you fill out a form requesting a loan quote, Zillow will be writing “cookies” to your local browser. They won’t be storing your financial details on their own servers, but they will be able to access those cookies in the future to target specific ads at you according to your demographic characteristics. Zillow will also be selling access to these cookies to other ad-supported sites.

So, just as with free-TV, in exchange for looking at advertising, you will get free anonymous Read more

April 12, 2008

The Anatomy of Generating a Lead Using an E-Book

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

svhbb.pngIn what must be dog years ago by now, Greg and I had a virtual conversation which sparked an idea that was successful for me, so I wanted to share some of the real-life insights I gained, with him and the rest of the Bloodhound readers.

The idea itself wasn’t completely new but there were some details in the execution that helped the campaign along since its inception May 2007. These techniques have proven useful many times over throughout the years and they’re what I’m hoping to communicate here.

The first step was to build credibility — and to test if the download was actually useful to my readers. See, the idea was to create a downloadable home buyers’ e-book from the existing content on my real estate blog.

I thought readers would like the convenience of a book with “chapters” on how to buy a home, arranged in step-by-step order. In turn, I would get a viral marketing piece that readers could forward to their friends, which not only had my contact information but linked back to my site within the content on every page.

Originally, I didn’t ask for any information in return for the e-book. The reason for this was because it was important for the credibility of the project to start with a large number of downloads. That and frankly if “no one” downloaded it, I would chalk one up for experience and move on.

The first month produced exactly 1,001 downloads. I advertised this number and began requesting a name and an email address (where an automated system would send a download link), effectively raising the price from free to legitimate contact information.

Since the price had gone up, it wasn’t a huge surprise that downloads dropped to 47 the next month. That averages out to a little over one lead per day. All but 3 registered using their real names (at least ones that closely matched their email addresses and the first step in building a relationship), two used their first name and last initial, and the third was fake. The Read more

April 10, 2008

Consider “24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot” and then tell us in detail how the world is going to work 15 years from now

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I get a huge kick out of this because I remember what tech.life was like in 1994. Everyone rebelling against Barry Cunningham’s pronouncements has very detailed ideas about future portents — and each one of those ideas is almost certainly hugely wrong.

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

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April 9, 2008

Working with engenu; a painless geek tool even an ‘I’ can love!

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I am not a geek!

I like geeks. I get along with geeks, but I ain’t one. Let’s just get that out of the way up front and now you know where I coming from.

I’m a lucky girl; I’ve been playing with engenu. I’ve been on board with the idea of engenu since I first heard about it. It’s very exciting for a lot of reasons, some have been discussed here, but I’m sure there are other uses for engenu that we will discover the more we use it.

You really need to understand that I’m not a geek. On the DISC profile, I’m an ‘I’ with a healthy dose of ‘D’. ‘C’ barely registers. I cannot explain how engenu works so if that is something that is important to you then I shall direct you here. One other thing I want to make clear- Greg didn’t ask me to write about this. I’m writing this because I’m assuming that there is someone else sitting out there reading Bloodhound because you are hungry for something different, something that can differentiate you and the way you do business, and something that gives you control over your marketing. You might be looking at engenu saying to yourself, “easy for you to say Mr. Swann, but what about me?” Me too. All that php and html and whatever else is something I should learn, and should know, and some day I probably will- through osmosis if nothing else- but today I simply want to know what’s in it for me and my clients, and I want it to be easy to use or I’m going to bail.

Well, I’m happy to report that I have been using engenu to help some first time buyers relocating from Florida. They are not looking for suburban starters, they want to get their hands dirty and rehab a historic home. Not too much rehabbing, but they are looking for the charm, the character of older homes and they want to share that love with their neighbors. We talked about the pros and cons of several areas, and they’ve settled on South Park. No, not Read more

April 9, 2008

“Our role will remain strong, firm, indispensable. All we must do is adapt.” Wanna bet? The dinosaurs of the pre-web world of business will be supplanted, not disintermediated

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli fingered this article on intimations of irrelevance in the advertising industry. Richard and I lived through the demise of professional typography, so I have a different take than some others here 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. Attention must be paid and horses must be shod. That much is utterly beside the point.

Here’s my take on the matter: Don’t think in terms of disintermediation. Use the word “supplantation” instead. The dilbert in the advertising article is insisting that he is not a dinosaur — because he knows he is. He is being supplanted by much smarter ways of doing his job, and he will never, ever catch up — first because he doesn’t want to change, and second because the first-mover advantage is too great.

In the same way, there is no need to start a revolution to get rid of the pestilential NAR. They have no intention of changing, nor any ability to change — but it doesn’t matter. We don’t need to storm the Bastille, we just need to get on with what we’re doing. The NAR will persist in a state of increasing irrelevance, a rotting husk like the neglected Sunday newspaper out on the front porch, but it won’t matter at all in due course.

The same goes for everything. If we are not all the way onboard with the way business will be done, we will be left behind at the station. 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. But they will have been well and truly supplanted.

When will that happen? Ask a blacksmith — if you can find one.

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April 8, 2008

Does This Describe You?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

We’re so often imprisoned by technology which is designed to do just the opposite. I’ve turned down lunch meetings with other pros who make the meeting meaningless because of their irrational need to stay in touch. There’s been a term going around for quite awhile, describing some of the worst of this ‘syndrome’. Crackberry.

Are You Addicted To Your Blackberry? lends credence to what many of us have wondered about — often about ourselves. Are we addicted to technology? Does it adversely affect our relationships with family and friends? No?

Are we in denial?

After reading the post, I double checked my normal business day. Returning an email promptly is cool, but my life isn’t altered if it takes longer than a few minutes, even a few hours. I’ve refused to own a Blackberry, though my future may include an iPhone.

Living our lives under our control — not dictatorial hi-tech tools — should be jealously guarded. Though my refusal to meet professionally with clearly addicted peers has raised a few eyebrows, I literally couldn’t care less.

Nobody’s that damn important. And that includes all of us. Nobody.

HT/The Dirt Lawyer

April 8, 2008

Redfin.com wakes up, smells coffee, staples galoshes to forehead: Now Redfin buyers will be able to see homes in an almost-normal way

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The uncontested brilliance of the free market is that it is self-correcting. People like me have been bitching all along that Redfin.com’s approach to buyer representation was misguided if not outright evil. Conceding some huge chunk of the buyer’s agent’s commission to the buyer was certainly consumer-friendly, but pushing the cost of buyer representation off onto the listing agent was vile. “Stick it to the man” rhetoric might play well with Leslie Stahl, but we have no way of knowing how often the listing agent is working for one percentage point of the sales price — or even for nothing.

But: So what. So long as listers were too cowardly to contest Redfin’s claims to having earned the buyer’s agent’s commission even when it had violated the everyday understanding of procuring cause, every erg of outsized bitching was just so much wasted energy. If the Redfin experience was satisfying to its buyers, not much else seemed to matter.

Except…

Of course, the Redfin experience wasn’t satisfying to buyers. As much as they might like the idea of shopping for homes from an on-line catalog, when it came time to actually squeeze the fruit, a surprising number of them wanted to actually squeeze the fruit.

So: Redfin had to provide home tours when its cost structure was built around not providing home tours. Then it had to start charging cash fees for home tours. Then it built an elaborate mechanism whereby buyers could schedule two home tours for free, then pay $250 a pop for additional tours. And today, without fanfare, Redfin.com announces its Redfin Select program, whereby buyers can schedule unlimited home tours in exchange for a reduced commission rebate.

First: All hail The Market, which speaks lucidly even to deaf ears.

But second: Ugh.

Listen to this:

With Select, we take you on tour twice a week, every week, until you find a home.

That “twice a week” sounds a little school-marmish, doesn’t it? “You will walk in single file, boy-girl, boy-girl, in a neat and orderly fashion.” God help the poor relos in town from Thursday to Sunday. Twice a week means twice a week, pal.

Okayfine. Progress is Read more

April 6, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have 14 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 96 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. This week’s Short List is all Zillow Mortgage Marketplace posts, all of them written by lenders. If you’re not interested, you’re just not interested, but I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be.

Four of the Short List contestants wrote two posts each, so I’m going to count a vote for either as a vot for that person. If one of them wins, I’ll split the People’s Choice Award between both posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Zillow Mortgage Bourse Zillow Mortgage Bourse: How To Acquire Long-Term Clients”,
“Brian Brady — Zillow Mortgage Marketplace Zillow Mortgage Marketplace: One Way Transparency Like A Bad Online Dating Site“,
“Dan Melson — Zillow\’s New Mortgage Quote Forum Zillow’s New Mortgage Quote Forum“,
“Gina Gardner — Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends Dog Eat Dog: Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends in Selling“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community Zillows Mortgage Community. The Consumer is Ready, But is The Mortgage Professional?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp of an Anonymous Transparent Credit and Personal Information eXchange Between Mortgage Professionals and Consumer, to Create a Highly Trusted Mortgage Transaction Community“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Mortgage Launches Zillow Mortgage Launches – How do you rate?“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Quotes Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Rate Quotes“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillows On Line Mortgage Leads Zillow’s On Line Mortgage Leads: Is It For You?“,
“Todd Carpenter — I have a war to fight I don’t have Read more

April 6, 2008

Can’t wait? “Coming soon: superfast internet”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Times of London::

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

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April 4, 2008

Because of who I am, because I will not keep my mouth shut, I might understand better than most of us what it means to be an American

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Witness:

“Hu spread malicious rumors and committed libel in an attempt to subvert the state’s political power and socialist system,” the court verdict stated[.]

Every time you take notice that there is no gun barrel pressed to the base of your skull, you might say a prayer for the soul of George Mason.

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April 3, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Want to learn how Zillow.com bakes a sweeter, tastier browser cookie? Scratch the FUD from your recipe

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wanted to expand on my post from last night on Zillow.com’s use of web browser cookies with its new Mortgage Marketplace free loan quotes software.

So you know going in, I have a huge contempt for people who try to sow FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt — about new technology. In the podcast linked below, I’ll give you the grand tour of the browser cookie bakery:

  • What cookies really are
  • Their implications for privacy and secrecy
  • How Zillow is implementing browser cookies
  • And, most importantly, how you can deploy browser cookies in your own marketing

If you insist upon living in a demon-haunted world, you’re probably not going to get much out of this. But if you understand that, as a side-effect, Zillow is teaching you a great deal about hi-tech marketing, then put on your thinking cap and think.

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March 30, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute Hour: Your first six months as a real estate licensee — use your time now to make money then

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

For years I lectured at the pre-licensing classes of the the college professor who taught my own real estate pre-licensing classes. I hadn’t done this for the last couple of years, but I did a class on January 24th, 2008. We made a video tape of my talk, but I hadn’t done anything with it until Sean Purcell’s post, What’s Your Six Month Plan?, got me off the dime. Sean’s program is more thoroughgoing. I’m just leaning on a bunch of kids to get busy now, rather than waiting for money to come raining from the skies six months from now.

I’m linking an audio podcast from BloodhoundBlog.com and the video in iPhone podcast form from BloodhoundBlog.TV. The video is basically just Fred Flintstone shuffling around and waving his arms around a lot, so you might do just as well with the audio-only version.

I know there are a lot of brand-new and soon-to-be-brand-new Realtors reading BloodhoundBlog, so I hope y’all take this to heart. We talk a lot about passive marketing here, but selling is always active — belly-to-belly. If you can’t push yourself to get belly-to-belly now, with people who already know and like you, you will not somehow achieve miracle results later by direct marketing, social media marketing or any other form of passive marketing.

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March 30, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Everything we do to list historic, architecturally-distinctive and luxury homes for sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a detailing of the things we do to list a home for sale. We don’t do every one of these things on every home. For example, we know that if we list in a newer tract-home subdivision, much of the noise we try to make will fall on deaf ears. If I am listing a tenant-occupied investor-owned home, we won’t do much beyond the normal MLS, lockbox and sign kind of listing. But this is what we do when we pull out all the stops for those homes that are likely to excite the most attention among buyers.

  1. Setting the stage for staging. Cathleen Collins will go though the house with a fine-tooth comb, often taking many photos. She will make lists of repairs, touch-ups and redecorating she wants to do, and she will plan her staging strategy.
  2. Home-warranty pre-inspection. We put a home warranty on our listings covering the listing period and the buyer’s first year in the home. We use ServiceOne, and they do a fairly rigorous pre-inspection so that any pre-existing conditions can be addressed.
  3. Repairs, painting and cleaning. This can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week. Everything’s a trade-off, and we can’t always do everything we might wish for, but we want for our homes to be as clean, as homey, as livable and as turn-key as we can possibly make them.
  4. Staging. This is Cathleen, and she is a master at it. We own about three houses worth of furniture, and she is always trawling Craigslist to find more — period, modern, eclectic. She has tons of art and decorator items as well, and her modus vivendi is to take everything she thinks she might need to the house, then move back what she doesn’t use.
  5. Professional photography. We have just switched to Obeo for our virtual tours. They send in a local professional photographer to do hi-resolution and panoramic photos. In addition to forming the basis of the virtual tour, the hi-rez photos are also used for Obeo’s Style Designer, virtual remodeling of selected spaces.
  6. Floorplan measurement. We put an interactive floorplan on the Read more
March 29, 2008

Facebook Made Easy: A Tutorial For Marketers

by

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

Author website

Travis Greenlee, on www.facebookmadeeasy.com, produced a Facebook tutorial that outlines how to get up and running. He gives it to you in five 3-4 minutes videos. Grab a pen and legal pad and take some notes instead of watching the Brady Bunch rerun. In thirty minutes, you’ll have a clear understanding about how to use a social utility to meet referral partners and/or customers.

Travis has a weblog and specializes in teaching “solo-professionals” (sound like any of us?) how to benefit from online marketing. His podcasts are short and informative.

If you’re coming to Unchained, the Facebook Made Easy tutorial is required viewing for The Way of the Hunter session, with me. For extra credit, subscribe to Travis’ podcast. For independent study, Listen to his free “Expert Training Series” or watch his free Virtual Practice Builder webinar.

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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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