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Category: Technology (page 36 of 60)

February 25, 2008

The language of real estate is photography; here’s how we talk in pictures with buyers, with sellers and with our vendor partners

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’m kicking this back to the top. I posted this a week ago Saturday, but I think it might have gotten lost in the shuffle. If you saw it then, carry on with my apologies. But Mike Farmer’s comment to my Arizona Republic column about single-property weblogs made me think we might want to revisit these ideas. –GSS]

 
We talk in pictures, Cathleen and I do, as Realtors.

We’ve shown you this before, a lot of different times, but I don’t know if the point has sunk in.

We always have our digital cameras with us, and we’re always prepared to use photographs to illustrate what we are saying — whether we’re talking to sellers, to buyers, to relocators, to investors or to our vendor partners.

That much is as it should be — we all should be talking in pictures as much as possible.

It’s at the next step where I think we have a real advantage.

We’ve shown you our slide-show-based web sites before. We do these for single-property web sites/weblogs, but we also use them to preview homes for buyers, to document construction on new builds, to give sellers staging advice or to make a record of our staging efforts. We begin with the idea that we are going to talk in pictures, and then we do that comprehensively, in the most efficient way we can.

And how would that be?

We do it with software, of course.

I’ve written quite a bit about the application we call Slide Show Marge, but when I started doing things this way, I built my pages by hand, using search-and-replace tools and typing a lot.

We’ve been through Slide Show Bob, Slide Show Mel and several versions of Slide Show Marge, producing thousands of web pages, hundreds of discrete web sites. We knew we would be best able to communicate ideas about real estate in pictures, and we did that with alacrity.

Okay. With that as introduction, take a look at this website I made for a Usonian home in North Phoenix. I took these photos in July of 2005, and I hand-crafted a very similar website then. We were previewing this Read more

February 25, 2008

A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web

I have an unshakable faith in the three P’s of home marketing — Price, Preparation and Presentation.

If the home is priced above its value to the buyer it will not sell in this market — it probably won’t even show.

If it is not well-prepared — repaired, staged, cleaned — to the condition implied by the price, it will not sell even if it does show.

Presentation is your Realtor’s job — or yours if you’re trying to sell without representation. I don’t have space to go into a full-blown marketing plan, but here’s an idea that can make a big difference for very little cost:

Give your home a blog.

Every home for sale should have its own web site. What makes a weblog useful and practical is that weblogging software is so easy to use. And the price to get started? Nothing.

Sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.com will let you set up a blog on a subdomain — an address like 123MulberrySt.WordPress.com — for free. Or you can buy your own domain — 123MulberrySt.com — for less than ten bucks a year. You can host your own domain for a few dollars a month, but using your weblog provider’s hosted option will work just as well.

What do you want for content? Photos — and lots of them. Good pictures of clean, well-lit rooms sell houses. Your text should be just-the-facts, nothing overtly promotional. Not only can people see through hype, it turns them off.

With a weblog, you can document your house room by room — or by the benefits to be realized from the home’s features and amenities.

Best of all, you’ll have a 24-hour salesperson working for you on the internet. Put your blog’s address on your flyers, in any advertising you do, in your Craigslist open house notices, on Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The more you can promote your blog, the more traffic it will draw.

You still have to be priced right. You still have to be prepared Read more

February 23, 2008

Practical Marketing With Twitter

by

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

Author website

We learned that we are not alone, yesterday. It might do us all some good to look outside our little world to see how other small businesses are using technology and new media. You’ll recall that I started tweeting rates about a month ago.

It is in this spirit that I offer you a series of articles, written by Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide:

If you’re just joining the series, make sure to go back and read part one where I gave step by step directions on getting your Twitter account up and running, part two where I explain how to send messages and take advantage of the Twitter follow/followers system and part three where I explained how Twitter can help you meet new people. In part four, I looked at the traffic potential of Twitter and explained the value of retweets in making a link go viral.

Greg, I’d like to include her series in the Odysseus Competition.

February 22, 2008

PhotoDropper WordPress plug-in puts zillions of creative-commons-licensed Flickr photos just a click away

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tipped by ProBlogger Darren Rowse, I’m adding the PhotoDropper WordPress plug-in to four of our weblogs this morning.

What is it?

With the Photo Dropper plugin, you can now search millions of Flickr photos and add them to your WordPress posts with just 1 click, all without leaving your WordPress dashboard. Attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. It’s the easiest way to add photos to your blog. Period. And best of all – it’s Free!

I’m not a member of the images-incite-interest delegation. I believe mere prose is sufficient to attract attention if it is the right prose, and I’m only interested in a picture if it does that work that could be done by a thousand words.

But: I am a prototype without a production model, and many people writing here take exactly the opposite position, that pictures can make the post. That’s what makes horse races. And to be completely frank, sometimes the images our authors come up with knock me out.

These are the weblogs I’ve upgraded:

If it seems to work for people, I’ll add it everywhere.

A word of caution: A Creative Commons license does not put an image in the public domain. Russell Shaw, for example, loves to make image mash-ups in photo-editing software. People similarly inclined should make sure the photographer permits you to mess with his or her images, rather than simply displaying them.

How do you use it?

1. Once you have the plugin activated, you will see a “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” panel right under your Write Post (or Write Page) editor. Enter keyword(s) for a photo you would like for your post (Example: “sunset”, “black cat”, or “HDR bridge”) and click the Search button.

2. The search will return photos matching your keywords.

3. Once you find a photo you would like to add to your post, click on any of the sizes (”S”mall, “M”edium, “L”arge) to add that photo and attribution link to your post.

Here’s a Heard Museum photo I snagged in a split second:

Read more

February 21, 2008

Zillow’s Virtual Sold Signs go live: Are yours up yet?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re a working Realtor, Zillow.com’s Virtual Sold Sign technology is another weapon you can deploy in your guerrilla marketing strategy.

I raved about this when it was announced, but now the feature has finally gone live.

What’s a Virtual Sold Sign? If you were the the listing agent the last time a particular home sold, Zillow will associate that home’s record with your Zillow profile, noting that the homes was “last sold by” — you.

Because Zillow has a database of almost all of the homes in the country, we have the unique opportunity to provide this feature.  Traditional listings sites just take a listing down once the transaction is complete, but we have over 4 million visitors coming to Zillow and viewing millions of recently sold homes each month.  In fact, over 35 million homes have been viewed on Zillow since we launched.  In some cities (Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, among others), over 90% of ALL homes in those cities have been viewed on Zillow.  Your sold homes are already getting viewed a lot on Zillow, with (until now) nothing to distinguish them as your sold homes.

The VSS program allows agents and brokers to continue marketing themselves on their sold properties for free, long after the home has actually sold.  Past transactions can even be submitted, to get attribution for listings that [sold] long before the Zillow Listings Feed program was even started.  It’s like leaving the “sold” sign up in the yard of each and every home you’ve ever sold.

Aside from the obvious benefit to agents and brokerages, the VSS program is beneficial to prospective sellers, and even buyers to find out who the top agents and brokerages are in their neighborhood, or the neighborhood where they want to move.

This is another piece of the marketing strategy that Brian Brady, myself and others have been working on, but which Tom Johnson has given the sizzling sobriquet “ZestiFarming.” Not to get too unhinged on the Unchained promises, but I’ll be teaching two hours of ZestiFarming techniques to enable you to completely dominate a geographic listing farm.

And this is also another demonstration of Read more

February 21, 2008

I Hope Unchained Considers My Topic Wish List

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

This is the year I’ve thrown down the gauntlet to myself. By the end of the year I’m gonna have my feet firmly planted, technologically speaking, in the 21st century. This may require leapfrogging most of the decade of the 1990’s, but I’m approaching this venture fearlessly. (Or at least without noticeably trembling.)

Numero Uno on the A-List is my database. It sucks so much Dyson wants to know my secret. Seriously, we’re organized, but we’re only slightly ahead of Willie Loman.

I’d love someone to tell me how I can get things done seamlessly, without either writing a check with a comma not appearing ’till after the second digit, or buying something at Databases R Us that promises me the moon but delivering something akin to Willie’s Roladex with a prompter.

Here’s what I need. I’m hoping against hope these needs will resonate with others out there, ‘cuz being the Lone Ranger would mean my checkbook is the only plausible remedy. So please, pretty please with a real estate recovery on top, chime in with anything you can add, or recommend. I’m officially lobbying for a database expert to get some face time at Unchained. (I hope that’s subtle enough for Greg and Brian.)

If it helps, here’s what we’re up against. We not only work with folks in San Diego, but in many states. We must deal with staffs or teams in each state, along with our clients and their property portfolios — all of which must be at our grubby little fingertips. (In my case of the Flintstone variety.) We’ll also have moderately large sub-databases in each region we really like. These are composed of investment property owners to which we’d like to market some day, or already have. Each one of these sports around 20-80,000 names/properties. These need to offer the capability to be kept separate or meshed together — at our whim, over and over again.

My new database would be perfect IF

  • I could break it up into various segments without giving up the ability to blend everything together if it suits my purpose.
  • I could email from it Read more
    • February 19, 2008

    Vertigo by map mash-up: How to spin your way around the globe

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    There’s Grant’s Tomb, looking a little scruffy in Riverside Park in Manhattan:

    And here’s your chance to take a truly dizzying tour of the Guggenheim Museum:

    These images, and many more, are brought to you by 360cities.net, a Google Maps mash-up of 360 degree panorama shots from all over the world. Probably more useful for fun than for real estate — but it’s definitely fun.

    Tipped: Google Blogoscoped.

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    February 18, 2008

    Three important real estate questions for an early Monday morning

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Another killer day yesterday, almost 1,600 unique visitors on a Sunday. We’d have been lucky to have half this on a Sunday two months ago — and we were doing great then!

    Just everyday content — lender stuff, Realtor stuff and the long tail. But here are three interesting questions to ask yourself this morning:

    1. In the greatest real estate agent in the world contest, how did Greg Boser get to be number one — for now?

    2. Why is Eric Blackwell going to win the contest in the end?

    3. If you have a geographical listing farm, how can you dominate every possible search term referring to that farm with multiple page one entries?

    Eric already figured out the answer to question number one, and he may or may not share his results with you.

    I think he’s pledged to tell you the answer to question number two, once he wins the contest.

    For the answer to question number three, you’ll have to come to Unchained. As before, I’m not terribly interested in being your buddy, and I for damned sure don’t want to be your wet nurse. But we have some brand new ideas about driving traffic — just the kind of seeing around corners ideas you expect from BloodhoundBlog. If you’re in business to make money, we’re going to show you a better way to be found by your clients — and a better way of working with them once they find you.

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    February 15, 2008

    Unchained Pioneers: Podcast with Brad Coy and Andy Kaufman on how they hope to benefit by coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained

    by

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

    Author website

    I had a great talk with Social Media Marketing pioneers Andy Kaufman and Brad Coy this afternoon. They were among the first folks to register for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. If you click on the podcast linked below, they’ll tell you in their own words the benefits they hope to bring home from their trip to Phoenix.

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    February 9, 2008

    Who is vulnerable to Zillow.com? How about TopProducer.com?

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I’m thinking the lending product, whatever it turns out to be, is going to involve some kind of Customer Relationship Management/Transaction Management component anyway. And what does everyone say made it worthwhile to drink the HouseValues.com KoolAde? Yep — CRM/TM.

    Here’s my big-picture take: If you’re in any sort of business where the added-cost per additional increment approaches zero — all of TP’s costs are accounted for by customer #1, transaction #1; after that, they’re storing and swapping electrons — watch out. Anyone who is willing to eat your front-loaded costs can eat your lunch.

    What’s the counter-measure? Price your product at zero. The plausible alternative to free is not-only-free-but-WAY-better. Otherwise, your installed-base should stay put, with all the new converts up for grabs. That’s a first-mover advantage, provided the first-mover stays nimble. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world…

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    February 8, 2008

    What will the NAR do with this?

    by

    Realtor, Real Estate Ethicist

    Author website

    It would be too easy to pile on the NAR, what with their recent tempests in respective teapots.  But here is a hypothetical –

    What’s the NAR going to do in this scenario as described at SearchEngineWatch?

    Adding more confusion to the case law surrounding trademark issues and search advertising, a Sixth Circuit federal court in Kentucky found that keyword advertising is a “trademark use in commerce” under the Lanham Act.
    …
    If buying an ad triggered by a trademarked keyword is eventually found to be a trademark use in commerce, that would essentially prevent advertisers from doing so legally. Goldman has written quite extensively about online trademark law, and he agrees with the Second Circuit courts.

    The Lanham Act defines “use in commerce” as using a trademark on physical packaging or displays, or “in the sale and advertising of services,” an ambiguous definition when it comes to the Internet and search engine marketing, says Goldman. He expects the matter to remain unresolved until Congress passes a new law or the Supreme Court makes a ruling.

    Google’s current trademark policy allows advertisers in the U.S. and Canada to trigger an ad from another party’s trademarked keyword, but not to use the trademarked term in the ad text. In all other countries, advertisers are not allowed to do either.

    If a Realtor advertises with Google for “Charlottesville Realtor,” or “Phoenix Realtor” would they be met with a Cease and Desist from NAR? While “Realtor” is trademarked, wouldn’t Realtors benefit more by having the word officially enter the vernacular akin to Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic?

    February 5, 2008

    Q: How many razors does one guy need? A: How many free blades come in the package? Or: Why we now have two color laser printers

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    We have a Konica Minolta 2450 color laser printer. Rock-solid performer, a good citizen on the network, true PostScript, excellent color reproduction.

    And, as of today, we also have a Konica Minolta 2550 color laser printer — which is essentially the same model.

    Why on earth do we have two color laser printers?

    Because we needed a new drum cartridge, and we were running low on al four colors of toner. Big deal, right? It’s just consumables.

    Here’s the thing: Four high-capacity toner cartridges plus a new drum cartridge would have run $471 at the best on-line price I could find.

    The brand new 2550 printer, which uses the same consumables as the 2450 — and comes with them pre-installed — was $435, shipped.

    I saved $36 and got a free printer in the deal. I would have bought two, except the next time I do this the spread between consumables and the full package will be even greater.

    In the mean time, I have to decide if I want to try to sell the new printer new-in-box without the consumables or sell the old printer as a parts solution to someone who already has one or more of the discontinued 2450 model.

    Is this insane? The idea was that you would give the razor away and make your money on the blades. But if the razor plus the blades is cheaper than the blades by themselves, we’d be fools not to buy more razors.

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    February 4, 2008

    Back among the living…

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I’m even caught up on my email, if only because I was dealing with mission-critical stuff in Squirrel Mail, a Eunuchs server-side mail client written in 1474. Motto: It’s Pre-Colombian!

    Now: 327 unread posts in my feed-reader.

    The Odysseus Medal will issue forth with dispatch, honest.

    How much to repair the Mac: $0.

    Priceless…

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    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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