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Category: Technology (page 33 of 60)

March 28, 2008

Don’t blog your listings? How about this? Don’t try to pass sales call reluctance off as social media marketing expertise

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I know, I know — I owe, I owe.

I owe Jeff Brown a discussion of every little last thing we do to launch a new listing with maximum impact.

And I owe The Lovely Wife a discussion of the role of self-promotion in real estate weblogging.

But…

We listed two homes today — Mutt and Jeff, $400,000 and $60,000 — go figure. And, while the prep work leading up to a listing can be time-consuming, the actual day of listing is often an 18-hour blur of activity.

Part of my effort was to write weblog entries about both of these homes. My primary reason for doing this was simple: I want them sold! But I also wanted to demonstrate that weblogging about listings is not only an appropriate use of a real estate weblog, if it is done right it can be a very effective sales tool.

So: In both cases, I am explicitly telling the readers that I am selling them on the home I am talking about — and I close, in both posts, with a bald-faced call to action. Take that, wannabe social media marketing experts rationalizing your sales call reluctance!

Witness:

I say a lot of memorable things — so many not even I can remember them all. 😉 But there are two precepts that came out of this extended discussion of whether or not to blog listings that I think are worth remembering:

  • The purpose of real estate marketing is to sell real estate.
  • Nothing sells houses like houses.

I love new things because I have a young and eager mind, but I don’t confuse new with better. Nor old with better, for that matter. What I’m interested in — all I am interested in — is better, pure and simple and clean and cool and quiet and breathtakingly elegant. I know that good promotional copy sells homes. Imagine how effective it Read more

March 28, 2008

Surreal Times: Election 2008

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Real Estate Broker

Author website

Every day around the world there are brilliant people going to work performing complex tasks that make all our lives better. There are companies developing and implementing service oriented architecture (SOA), information technology solutions more sophisticated than the world has ever known. Few people outside the inner workings of these companies know what is happening, because it isn’t reported. The leaders in industry building incredibly complex systems that respond with such a high degree of flexibility that reaction time to market changes is almost immediate are mostly unknown — they aren’t sexy and they aren’t political.

There are brilliant people making discoveries around the world: scientists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, programmers, biologists — they are mostly unknown. There are entrepreneurs with vision reshaping the way we do business in a 2.0 world. These people take chances and gamble on innovative ideas — they step forward, yet most people don’t notice them.

Every day there are improvements to the cars we drive, the medicine we take, the homes we live in — online search makes information easy and useful to access, buying and selling goods and services is offered up improved and less expensive, medical procedures extend our lives and add to the quality of our lives, entertainment is offered in diverse packages that make our lives more enjoyable, private charities are getting help to needy individuals in more creative and efficient ways. It’s all due to the myriad individuals who use their minds daily and development better and better management and delivery. The real leaders of the world, for the most part, go unnoticed.

Not only do they go unnoticed, they are disparaged directly and indirectly by politicians building power bases. It’s especially noticable this election year. You would think the world revolves around and depends on the choice between three people. Government has positioned itself in the hearts and minds of many people and in the press as the true leadership that will reshape the world and improve mankind. If this idea wasn’t so dangerous, it would be hilarious. All one has to do is sit back objectively and consider the brilliant people at work each day building, innovatiing, managing and delivering Read more

March 27, 2008

Urbanologist Joel Kotkin: Why growth-oriented cities like Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta reflect the future of global commerce

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin is the only American urbanologist who can tolerate actual living human beings. In consequence, he can write about the organic growth of cities as they really are, rather than as he might remake them with enough tax money and firepower. This is a long extract from a much longer article about Houston’s emergence as a world-class city, this despite the scorn that might be heaped upon it — at tax-payer expense — by urban monument-builders like Richard Florida. In this section of the article, Kotkin discusses what makes young, growth-oriented cities so dynamic by comparison to older, more-typically-urban urban environments.

Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.

Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.

Chicago, the great growth city of the late Read more

March 27, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: Using the synergy of the internet and low-cost printed promotions to sell your product, build your brand and give you an affordable — testable — marketing strategy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the first of a series of Black Pearl Marketing Minute podcasts that Brian Brady and I will be putting together. We want to take marketing ideas that we have discussed on BloodhoundBlog and flesh them out to real-life strategies while connecting them to other synergistic tactics.

In this inaugural episode, we start by talking about my post on using the business card form factor for doing low-cost broadcast door-to-door promotion. We talk about some ways that we deploy custom-made business card-sized promotional pieces, how we make and print them, and our distribution plan.

Brian then connects that idea to a marketing plan that emerged from our comments threads, partnering with local merchants as an online/offline farming technique.

Earlier today, someone known only as Jacksonville Real Estate posted a comment on my post about using low-tech promotional schemes to bring traffic to a single-property web site:

It’s an old idea and it’s not mine … but if you are targeting just a certain areas then getting your flyer on the local pizza delivery box can work wonders.

Brilliant! Never thought of it, but that’s why I love this place: We bring bright minds together and set off a blinding brilliance. My reply:

Oh, very cool. I tend to think in terms of things we can do on our own, but this is actually an interesting cross-promotion:

“Visit our custom web site for 123 Mulberry Lane and your next pizza is on us!”

Build a PDF coupon in the site and redeem them with the pizza joint once a week. Meanwhile, your contact info is on the fridge for weeks or months.

That’s a Brian Brady-style idea. I must be channeling…

It’s a Guerrilla Marketing kind of idea, actually, a Duct Tape Marketing kind of idea — maximum bang for minimum bucks. It’s most completely a BloodhoundBlog kind of idea, in the sense that it combines (and recombines) physical with online marketing.

But nothing’s perfect in the first draft. My correspondent thought springing for the whole pizza might be too expensive as a “pay per click.”

Okayfine. How about this?

Buy the soda instead, then. It’s an upsell for the pizzeria — bigger Read more

March 26, 2008

Jerry Rubin Died A Stockbroker

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Real Estate Broker

Author website

The point of my title might not be obvious, and it’s not meant to discount youthful exuberance — God knows we need youthful exuberance. However, Peter Pan and Michael Jackson aside, we all grow up. What does that mean — grow up? I take its meaning as maturation, becoming wiser, thinking long term, becoming responsible to self and others.

Organizations, even countries, like individuals, seem to go through the growing up process — from infancy, to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to the twilight years. If companies and countries can continuously reinvent themselves between young adulthood and middle age that’s a good thing. The analogy with individuals breaks down here, for the most part, because individuals can only “remodel” so much before the realities of age take over completely. However, individuals can stay fresh in mind and spirit for quite a long time through constant learning, reflection and openness. This freshness of mind and spirit coupled with maturity and wisdom is an attractive combination in individuals — these are the people I gravitate towards.

RE internet companies seem to be in their mid twenties. There is an emphasis, a feel, a persona, if you will, of “youth” with companies like Redfin, Zillow, Trulia and the rest. What is their phiolosphy? It’s like most 20 somethings; it’s a mixture of style, doing good, distrust of tradition, worship of change, but very little mature, rational long term vision. Unlike Realtor.com, they play their music loud, dress in t shirts and jeans, talk funny and love to give stuff away to their buds.

They are the RE version of Google starting out, just doing stuff with no business model, having fun, being different with an attitude and declaring like grandiose young mini-gods they will “Do No Evil“. Oh, I’m sure there are grown ups developing plans and thinking about making money, but this is the sense, the feel, I get from these companies.

Do they have to “grow up”? Can they survive in the business world by hanging out with their friends, creating stuff and giving it away? They will make more and more friends, that’s for sure, but Read more

March 25, 2008

Redfin.com beats the field again, this time in both Seattle and San Francisco: Buyers pay less and reap commission rebates, too

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin.com has news this midnight, but it’s the sort of thing I would normally ignore: It’s basically the kind of rah-rah-for-us stuff I leave for the vendor cheerleaders and the mainstream media. But: I gave Redfin a lot of grief last year when they made a similar announcement, so today I’ll give them a bit of their own back:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today published an analysis of the last 12 months’ public real estate records in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area that shows its buyers and their Redfin agents negotiated a better price than buyers who used other brokerages. Redfin’s average negotiating advantage was $5,048. The company also reported a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate for users of its home-buying service, and an average commission refund of $10,520.

This is the actual news, which you will not find in any news source: Redfin beat the field for the second year in a row. Is it plausible that particular agents beat Redfin? Not just plausible, highly probable. I don’t know of any teams of buyer’s agents like the kind of team Russell Shaw runs for listing agents, but a team like that would be much more useful for comparison purposes than the entire field of Realtors in three MLS systems. But give Redfin its due: The company deploys the kind of task specialization common to every sort of business except residential real estate brokerage. It’s very hard to resist the idea that specialist negotiators, more often than not, could out-dicker ordinary jack-of-all-trades Realtors.

And all of that is caviling, and wasted caviling at that. Stand in awe as Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman illustrates the high art of PR triangulation:

“Why do Redfin customers consistently tend to negotiate a better price, in different markets and different market conditions?” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Last year, we concluded it was because of our agents, whom we pay bonuses based on customer satisfaction rather than commissions. Others argued that it was because of our deal-savvy customers, who benefit from Redfin’s transparency to take a more active role in the deal. Today, we think it’s Read more

March 24, 2008

While The National Real Estate Market Is Soft – Google Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising Still Going Strong

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Is Your Online Marketing Costing You Too Much?

As one of those with an online presence, I am always interested in how others attract “eyeballs”. Back in the early days of Google, I proudly staked my claim on some choice keywords in their pay-per-click program – which brought me a great deal of traffic at a relatively low cost.

But that was then – and this is now.

The pay-per-click rates for the major cities are now – in some cases – astronomical.

Currently, the rate for Atlanta Real Estate is between $0.80 – $3.17… which is what is was a few years back when I quit advertising there. Three bucks a click is too rich for my blood. Average daily clicks on that search term is between 38 and 48… not that much, really.

For Houston Real Estate, the rates are between $0.86 – $3.76… with between 89 and 113 daily clicks for that term. A little more expensive – but there is more activity.

For New York Real Estate, the rates are between $0.65 and $2.18… with between 32 and 41 daily clicks. I thought that was odd, so when I researched New York City Real Estate, I see that rates are $0.69 – $2.44… and only 7 to 11 clicks daily on that search term. Unbelievable.

Manhattan Real Estate, on the other hand, has rates of $0.67 – $2.32… with daily clicks of between 10 and 13. You would think that in the Manhattan market, there would be more online competition for that Google space… but the truth is in the numbers – the searches just aren’t there.

For Los Angeles Real Estate, we find rates of $0.96 – $4.85… with daily clicks between 105 and 133.

For San Francisco Real Estate, the rates are $0.93 – $.43… with daily clicks between 43 and 55.

For Chicago Real Estate, the rates are $1.03 – $5.97… with daily clicks betwteen 122 and 154.

For Las Vegas Real Estate, the rates are $1.07 – $9.92… with daily clicks between 76 and 97. Getting kinda pricey, eh?

For Phoenix Real Estate, the rates are $0.77 – $3.01… with daily clicks between 29 to Read more

March 21, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Virtual remodeling

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote about Obeo’s virtual remodeling feature when first I discovered it (they call it Style Designer). As far as I’m concerned, this one feature is a total category killer among virtual tours. Panoramas? Check. Ken Burns zooming tricks? Check. Cheesy music loops ripped-off from CHiPs and Charlie’s Angels? Check. But to give the buyer the ability to re-envision the home — that’s worth talking about.

I’ll talk about the full tour when we’re done with it, but here’s a before-and-after example of virtual remodeling:

Before:

Cathy and Mark Deermer, our factotum-like handyman, worked hard to make this kitchen pop. My contribution: The white walls. They had been a custard yellow, and I thought they were making the room too warm and dark. Now this kitchen looks like candy — the elaborate girly kind of candy.

After:

I agree with Cathy and Mark that kitchens should be girly, but, even so, I really like masculine kitchens. This is how I redesigned that kitchen in Obeo’s Style Designer.

How long did it take? Less than two minutes, although I could see people spending hours remodeling our homes. I want for people to spend hours remodeling our homes.

Note the reflections along the left-most face of the cabinets. Compare the surfaces underneath the microwave oven. I feel like we should be paying royalties to Pixar for results like this.

I invest a lot of invective beefing about vendors, but I am delighted to be able to rejoice when a vendor gives us a feature we have wanted for years — in a slick, fool-proof interface at a reasonable price. I promise to be astounded if Obeo does everything this well, but they are doing this perfectly.

This is the kind of technology that sell houses. And to that I can add but one carefully-considered sentiment: Hot damn!

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March 21, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Photography

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I read somewhere the other day, I forget where, about a web site for a listing that had 47 pictures. The author of the post clearly thought that was a lot of photos.

Cathy organized her first batch of photos for the web site I will be building today. We will be adding other photos later, but this is by far the biggest batch.

How many? Not a huge number for Cathleen — only 221, about 28 megabyte’s worth. The finished web site probably won’t have many more than 300 photos — not counting the virtual tour and the video we have planned.

Is that overkill? We don’t think so. Everybody knows how to turn off the TV, but if you want to know everything about the home, we want to show you everything about the home.

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March 20, 2008

Hubcaps on breadcrumbs? How BloodhoundRealty.com builds single-property web sites — and why they sell homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vance Shutes left a comment to my post about how we use web sites and web pages about particular houses as “breadcrumbs” to lead potential clients back to BloodhoundRealty.com. My response to him is long enough that I’m turning it into a post of its own.

Vance:

I’m intrigued by this concept. Will you be expanding on it during Unchained?

At BloodhoundBlog Unchained I will show you two different ways to leave a breadcrumb at every home you might ever want to sell. Each of those ways will result in a different kind of market penetration, but each should make you very easy to find and very hard to miss in your target markets.

Put into practice, these two ideas are worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in gross commission income just by themselves. I don’t normally keep secrets, but I wanted a big blow-out for Unchained. We have been quietly testing one of the two ideas and the results are coming in quite a bit better than I had predicted.

Are you setting up a separate page for each listing at BloodhoundRealty.com, or are you setting up a separate domain for each address?

For homes we are previewing for clients or photographing for other reasons, we host the pages on on Phoenix real estate web site, on our main file server. I don’t even know how many we have out there. Hundreds, certainly, possibly over a thousand. Someday I want to create a database of links so we can find them without having to hunt too hard.

For listings, we do a single-property web site on a separate domain. These are pretty elaborate, usually running to 60-100 megabytes of content before we’re done: Dozens of photos, an interactive floorplan of the house, a live Google map of the neighborhood, PDFs of the listing and the flyer, along with any historic photos or documents we have of the house, etc. If there is any question we can answer about the house on the web site, we do it.

Then we promote the home’s URL with everything else that we do: The custom yard sign, the business-card-sized open Read more

March 20, 2008

What’s the future of residential real estate signage? I think it’s like the recent history of digital printing — only much, much bigger

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“The Barrys” on Real Estate Radio USA have a burning yearning to know just what it is that listing Realtors do to earn their commissions.

It’s a question that plagues me, too. As much as I talk here about on-line marketing, we draw a lot more attention from sellers with our real-world marketing efforts. We’re all about selling the house, and, oddly enough, this makes an impression on other people who want their houses sold.

But we’re deliberately not listing very much right now. We’ve turned down a bunch of houses we would have liked to have handled, but we will not list a house for sale if we don’t feel certain we can sell it. There was a span of eleven days when we turned down over $3 million in new listings — but every one of those homes is still unsold, despite repeated price reductions.

We’re gearing up to list 1322 East Vermont Avenue in North Central Phoenix. The house doesn’t go live until March 28th, but, because of an Easter-egg hunt in the neighborhood, we’re holding it open this weekend in advance of the MLS listing.

We’re going to be documenting everything we do to list this home for sale, both as an enduring record of the kinds of efforts we undertake for our sellers and as a step-by-step guide for Realtors who follow BloodhoundBlog.

The house has been repaired, touch-up painted and and staged. Some of the photography has been done, but I have not yet built the home’s single-property web site as I write this.

But because we want to have our yard signs up by the weekend, I built the signs today:

I’ve built an engenu page with bigger versions of the signs along with a link to an engenu site discussing our sign philosophy in detail.

Our yard signs are just one part of our listing strategy, but they form at least a piece of the answer “The Barrys” are looking for. We believe in marketing our listings, and we do everything we can think of to get them sold quickly and for top dollar. As we build out the engenu site Read more

March 20, 2008

Destination: Vertical. Zillow houses “hot or not” for homes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dig this. Dumb but fun. A sticky way to see a lot of ads — but fun anyway.

Serious reflection #1: Another way for Zillow to be a sticky, top-of-mind vertical search portal. Get ’em there. Keep ’em there. Satisfy all of their real estate needs.

Serious reflection #2: The design sense in this new feature is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from Zillow so far. I’m talking about a much higher standard of graphic elegance. Not jaw-dropping, but much better.

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March 19, 2008

Looking for long tail search results from your on-line real estate marketing efforts? Don’t clean up your breadcrumbs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:

Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.

This is the web page I had built for 1415 East Flower Street in the Cheery Lynn Historic District of Central Phoenix.

That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.

We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.

What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?

Nothing.

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.

We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine 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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