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Category: Technology (page 37 of 60)

February 1, 2008

M-soft bids for Yahoo! What does it mean for search?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

According to Yahoo News linked here Microsoft has tendered an unsolicited bid for Yahoo that would make it (in theory) a realistic competitor to Google in the search engine world. They are not even in the same league at the moment.

I had posted a couple of weeks ago about Yahoo laying off hundreds and the power of focus. Seems that Bill G. thinks he can bring some focus to them…it will be interesting to see. What will be even more interesting to see is (IF this bid is accepted and I would think it would since it is a large percentage over current stock values…) how they attempt to take on big G.

I will be posting some more in depth thought on how this MAY impact search marketing and search engine optimization efforts in the real estate space as the story develops. I think they will have a difficult time in getting their search results more relevant than Google’s are right now.

There could be some interesting implications to many REALTORS who currently derive much exposure from the search engines.

Stay tuned.

January 31, 2008

Who benefits from occupational licensing laws? The licensees, to be sure — to the detriment of the consumer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Coyote Blog and Radley Balko, the Philadelphia Inquirer brings us a nice illustration of why occupational licensing laws really exist: Not to protect the consumer, but to protect the licensees from free-market competition:

Mary Jo Pletz was really, really good at eBay. But now the former stay-at-home mother and gonzo Internet retailer fears a maximum $10 million fine for selling 10,000 toys, antiques, videos, sports memorabilia, books, tools and infant clothes on eBay without an auctioneer’s license.

An official from the Department of State knocked on Pletz’s white-brick ranch here north of Allentown in late December 2006 and said her Internet business, D&J Virtual Consignment, was being investigated for violating state laws.

“I was dumbfounded,” said Pletz, who led the dark-suited investigator to a side patio area, where he grilled her. “I told him I would just shut down,” she said.

Mary Jo’s violation? Auctioneering without a license. Sound familiar? It should. It parallels the dumb stunt the Sate of Arizona tried to pull on Zillow.com, which was accused of doing real estate appraisals without a license.

But there are consumers who need protecting, right? Oh, you bet:

D&J Virtual Consignment had 11,000 feedback comments on eBay and 14 were negative, Pletz said, giving her a 99.9 percent satisfaction rating.

Ebay is not just perfect Capitalism, it is Capitalism Perfected — everything that has always been implicit in free-market commercial transactions made utterly transparent by means of database management. If you are looking for the complete and irrefutable refutation of Das Kapital, you’ll find it not on but in the form of Ebay.com.

So where’s the beef?

Amoros, the state spokeswoman, said investigations were a “complaint-driven” process but those complaints are confidential.

Uh huh.

It is only possible to for you to defend occupational licensing laws by ignoring the palpable harm they do to actual consumers — higher prices for lower quality goods and services. But even then, don’t get downwind of yourself. This stuff stinks.

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January 30, 2008

Big News: Ignore all that fine print, tear through all that red tape — Redfin.com supports Safari at last!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, wait, that’s not the big news from Redfin.com. In fact, I reported the really big news last night:

Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

So here’s what’s changed, as of 12:01 am EST: Redfin agents are going to squire buyers around for free four times as much as they have in the past. No news on who’s buying lunch.

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today rolled out a 75-day trial of a new home-tours policy that allows visitors to its site to arrange four Redfin-hosted home tours without paying any money up-front or making any commitment to Redfin. The first two tours would be free, and the third and fourth tours would cost $250 at closing, with any subsequent tours costing $250 in advance.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? My experience is that home-buyers are not the most assiduous readers of fine print.

There’s more:

The new tours last two hours, and require the buyer to provide a mortgage pre-approval letter documenting her ability to buy the homes she is scheduled to visit. Redfin deducts the $250 charges for the third and fourth tours from the commission refund, which has averaged roughly $10,000 at closing. Customers who do not complete a purchase with Redfin do not pay for their third and fourth tours. Previously, Redfin only provided one free three-hour home tour, charging $250 in advance for each additional tour.

I’m thinking there can be too much red tape even for the INTx gnomes who find Redfin appealing. What is clear is that pay-as-you-go has a less-than-ideal gnome appeal.

I can do four houses an hour with normal buyers. I normally do 12 houses in three hours, then make the buyers stop. After 12 houses, their eyes glaze over. If we limited ourselves to two hours, that would be eight houses. Four two-hour tours would be 32 houses. This is nothing at all like the original Redfin game plan — shoving the expense of showing homes onto Read more

January 30, 2008

Obeo, Baby, where have you been all my life? Why should buyers stop at virtually moving in their furniture when they can virtually redecorate — inside and outside — as well?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We are too much misled, surely. Too much miscounseled, misdirected, misinformed. Too many of the people we turn to for advice on selling homes don’t actually sell homes themselves — never have — and, in consequence, too often, they are too much mistaken.

Consider that 2006 was to have been the Year of the Real Estate Video — except it wasn’t. Nor was 2007. And nor, neither, will be 2008. Video is useful for telling stories and for communicating personality. In expert hands it can be an incomparable tool for conveying arcane or abstract ideas. As a real estate marketing tool, it is at best a role-player — and most often — owing to crappy production values and even crappier pre-planning — it serves more as a detriment than a benefit to the marketing of a home.

Good photography, by contrast, is the real estate marketing tool of the millennium. Houses sit still, and what buyers want, more than anything, are scads of detail-rich images that also sit still — so they can examine, repeatedly, every last one of those details.

We will sometimes do video in a role-playing way for our listings, but the second most popular feature on our web sites, after the photographs, is the interactive floorplan. Buyers love to see exactly how their furniture is going to fit into the home — and the more they commit their minds to the home, the more committed they are to buying it. The scientific name for this intricate process is: Salesmanship.

For years now, we have dreamed of an even more fun, more engaging, more interactive tool to put on our sites: Virtual redecorating. Change the paint. Change the flooring. Change the cabinets and countertops. “You almost love this home, folks, and you haven’t even liked anything else. What can you do to make this place your own?” The name for this again? Oh, yes. Salesmanship.

And guess what? It’s here. Obeo, about whom I knew nothing until this morning, has solved the virtual tour problem in a way I not only don’t hate, but actually like. And they have given me virtual redecorating, Read more

January 29, 2008

Want to learn how to sniff out bias in the mainstream media? Follow your nose — all the way to Yosemite

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

John Cook fingered this mash note to Redfin.com in Forbes Magazine. More of the same four-legs-good, two-legs-bad crap we expect from the mainstream media, but it’s short enough that the bias is almost too obvious.

Consider the attributions for quotes:

  • “says Kelman, 37”
  • “Kelman says.”
  • “one Redfin representative wrote recently”
  • “read another posting”
  • “says Steven Del Bianco”

These are all people of whom the writer approves.

But you can’t write a morality play without a villain, so take note of this item, quoted in full:

“In our area the consumer is savvy enough to know that they want value and a high-quality agent,” sniffs Gary Bulanti, a Realtor with Alain Pinel Realtors in Menlo Park, Calif.

Did you sniff out that “sniffs”? Kelman says, then says again. Redfin’s minions write and post. Even investors in past failed discount brokerages get to have their “say,” as it were. But if you are anti-Redfin in even the smallest way, you sniff — you bloated, soul-sucking, counter-revolutionary pig!

It’s all one, really. Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

But just stop for a moment to take account of this:

In a national forest near Yosemite National Park someone affixed fake Redfin bumper stickers to signs, trees and rocks to make the company look like a shameless promoter and defiler of the environment. After Redfin staffers removed the stickers, which they have never used to pitch the Seattle company, the trickster started tossing the signs, attached to weights, into branches of sequoias.

First we have some some kind of demented, Edward Abbee-like monkey-wrenching counter-revolutionary pig of a Realtor, who traipses off from densely-populated Seattle to a national frolicking forest to smear Redfin. And then we have a yellow school-bus full of happy, happy Redfinions — red caps, blue kerchiefs, khaki tunics and cargo shorts — racing off to that same forest to repair this horrendous damage to the natural world, praying all the while to Gaia to heal the deeper wound. On the way home they sing Read more

January 25, 2008

Now If We Could Get General Motors To Build One…

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Doubling Our Collective Fuel Mileage Could Help Drive Oil Prices Down

Our country has been enduring high oil prices for the last few years – but that transfer of funds out of the country has had a detrimental effect on the economy. And any bad effect on the economy will be felt in the housing sector.

One of the problems is that Americans like their big cars. Less than 10% of our gasoline is consumed by vehicles that get more than 30 miles per gallon. We just don’t find smaller, more efficient cars all that exciting.

Well in another year or so, we’ll witness a new breed of car on the road

And that car will be the Carver… the Cornering Genius.

I haven’t looked forward to the introduction of a vehicle with this much pregnant anticipation in years. A cool vehicle like this could save an enormous amount of our precious fossil fuels – while reducing emissions. And since 90% of all commuters drive to work – alone – a vehicle like this makes good sense.

Now if we could just get General Motors to build one…

January 23, 2008

Speaking in tongues: A universal contact form for real estate weblogs…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Nota bene: Slightly amended. Reread carefully.

I landed on Jeff Kempe’s weblog yesterday. In the way of the web, I don’t remember how I got there or why I came. But I spent a little while looking around, without quite realizing what I was looking for.

And then it hit me: There’s no contact information. No phone number. No “email me!” link. No contact form. You can find Jeff’s phone number on the About page, but that’s about it.

Maybe he wants it that way. Maybe it’s none of my business. And maybe I’m not so religious about this stuff that I can go out look for motes — or even beams. But Brian Brady is dead-on when he talks about asking for the business, so I decided to do something for Jeff, whether he likes it or not.

And: You can play, too.

What I came up with is a sort of universal contact form for real estate webloggers.

You can see how it looks on DistinctivePhoenix.com in the image to the right. It’s built to adopt the look-and-feel imposed by your weblog’s theme’s CSS file, so it should look just right when you deploy it. I deliberately made it narrow because sidebars can be pretty tight places.

The code itself is pretty simple, so if you feel comfortable editing PHP, you can go in and modify it to your heart’s content.

But if the thought of editing software makes your brain ache, you can deploy this form by editing only five lines of code, all very simple.

First, you have to email me to get me to send you the form. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get a PHP file to download from our server without executing. I can email you a zip file, but our anonymous FTP is so anonymous I can’t figure out its true name.

Anyway, when you get the PHP file, you’re going to do this — in a text editor, not in Microsoft Word: Edit the second through the fifth lines. They’ll start out looking like this:

$myName = "Firstname Lastname";
$myCompany = "The Almagamated ClusterFunk Team";
$myEmailAddress = "MyEmailAddress@MyFileServer.com";
$myWeblogAddress = Read more
January 23, 2008

Is Roost.com roosting on the brass ring? Start-up Realty.bot comes to market with two firsts: MLS listings and a business plan

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What if somebody built a Realty.bot that seemed to make sense from Day 1? What kind of goof-ball strategy is that in the wacky world of Web 2.0?

I don’t know if Roost.com really has a business to bank on. The search.bot horizons are starting to look a little crowded. But unlike past entrants, the company is entering the field with two unprecedented features: They’re working from real MLS listings, via member-brokers’ IDX feeds, and they actually have a strategy for monetizing their efforts.

Yawn! YAMBS again? That’s Yet-Another-Map-Based-Search, a transition in the course of two years from the cool to the commonplace. I haven’t been able to play with Roost.com yet, but my guess would be that they’re behind the curve on cool-factors. The search tools seem to be more than adequate, but Roost is all about search, with none of the social-theater-of-the-mind games the older Realty.bots have been rolling out.

This is nothing but residential real estate search, with 13 major markets being served at today’s roll-out. Since the listings come from IDX feeds, Roost.com needs at least one broker relationship for every MLS system it wants to service.

There’s more. Roost.com plans to make money by delivering prospects back to member brokers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. In one scenario, as in the screen-shot above, the broker can have his own private-label Roost.com IDX system hosted on a third-level-domain — e.g., tarbell.roost.com. Every click originating on that site would go back to Tarbell.

Alternatively, brokers can participate directly on the Roost.com system, with the end-user click-throughs being distributed in a manner similar to Google’s Adwords program: Participating brokers would be selected at random based on their desired spending goals.

I’m eager to play with the system, because what I’ve seen of it so far seems cool. As an example, the image below shows a windolet of photos. You can have more than one of these open at one time, so you can compare photos from multiple properties.

Roost.com is essentially a free IDX system for brokers that they would only have to pay for when they are receiving benefits from it — this in the form Read more

January 21, 2008

Activerain.com and HouseValues.com- The Ultimate Irony

by

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

Author website

Activerain.com received a capital infusion to the tune of $2.75 million from Housevalues.com. It was announced on Inman News, posted here, on BHB, and explained on Activerain.

Housevalues has suffered an erosion of market value since its post-IPO “pop” in early 2005. It added 50% from its IPO price and held steady through out 2005. As the real estate market declined, so did the value of Housevalues.com; it’s stock price plummeted below $10, in May, 2006 and has steadily declined to its current sub $3/share.

While many members of Activerain.com are showing a stiff upper lip, they are exhibiting cautious optimism. Most REALTORs have had less than stellar results with the Housevalues.com advertising/lead generation platform and are wary of the portal’s high-pressured telemarketing operation.

What does Housevalues.com get for its $3 million? Activerain.com has 66,000 members, probably 10-15% of them active. While the press release from Jon Washburn states that the member’s content is not released to Housvalues.com, one would think that the investor has a first right of purchase for the remaining stock. If the rumor of the equity ownership is correct (35%), Housevalues could purchase the Company for about $9-10 million, members’ information and all.

What Move.com said was worth $33 million, Housevalues.com is buying at a substantial discount. Activerain has a “great franchise”, just like Countrywide does. What Bank of America saw in Countrywide, House Values sees in Active Rain.

I just think the irony of the lead generation company paying for leads is worthy of a chuckle. Hat tip to Jon and Matt for making the sharks pay for the meal.

Our story so far: Trying to keep up with developments in the ActiveRain saga? These are all the BloodhoundBlog posts to date:

January 20, 2008

Ahem: Your goal is not weblog traffic, your goal is converted sales

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It might seem like I’m shouting up the drain pipe, but I’m not talking to Dustin — I’m talking to you.

If you were selling a viral product like Skype, where for every 10,000 people with a casual interest in your product, one will turn into a paying customer — with the cost per conversion approaching zero dollars — what Dustin is saying would make sense.

But selling real estate is a direct marketing problem. If 10,000 people exhibit a casual interest in your product, you will have earned nothing, whereas if one person actually buys, you will have earned a huge pay-check.

There’s more: If you are spending some significant fraction of your time servicing inquiries from people who will not be buying your product, you will have less time — possibly no time — to work with the small number of people who will buy your product — from someone else if not from you.

Your goal is not weblog traffic. Your goal is converted sales. This is not news. This is me, from last March:

“Traffic is not about traffic. Traffic is about conversions.”

If you get 3,000 unique hits every day and convert one a month, you are an emaciated wretch with huge bragging rights. If you get three unique hits a day and convert one a week, you are constantly trying and failing to make time between appointments to get your Lexus detailed. Your goal is not traffic. Your goal is not even community, although this is a vitally-important secondary objective. Your goal is not forms filled out or leads captured or phone calls returned or listings emailed or showings scheduled. Your goal is conversions, as represented by a fat check from a title company. It does not matter how many shots you take at the basket. What matters is how many times — and how often and how regularly — you get the ball through the cylinder.

I pointed out that the False Dichotomy of schmoozing with the homies versus counting flowers on the wall is a logical fallacy. Your objective is not to be tripped-upon by accident by any one of Read more

January 19, 2008

Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents

“Eighty percent of buyers start their home search on the internet.”

You don’t have to dig too deeply in the real estate world to unearth that statistic. There are two problems that I can see with the claim.

First, it’s based on an outrageously unreliable mail survey of recent home-buyers. Fewer than five percent of recipients returned the survey. How did the other 95% manage their home search? We don’t know.

Moreover, while the long-term trend, surely, is that more people are using the internet to shop for homes, what matters is not how they started their search, but, rather, how did they finish?

There’s more to think about, though, because it seems reasonable to me that people who are starting their home search without professional representation — without a Realtor — are continuing their search unrepresented as well.

What’s the implication? Like it or not, the listing Realtor’s responsibilities are increasing.

Realtors like to say — to each other — “If you list, you last.” What that means is that a listing, at least in a normal market, is a pretty secure paycheck, where working with buyers can be a lot riskier. This is the reason that the buyer’s Realtor often gets 60% or even 75% of the gross commission. The listing Realtor presumes that the buyer’s Realtor is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting.

But this is not as much the case in the age of the internet. If an unrepresented buyer clicks through to the listing Realtor from an on-line Realty.bot — or if that buyer simply makes a sign call — the listing Realtor is obliged to show the home, even if the original intent was to have buyer’s Realtors doing all the work. Moreover, the open house, long derided by Realtors, is suddenly much more important.

All of this creates new opportunities for dual agency, whereby the listing Realtor gets paid more — and incurs huge risks — while giving the buyer almost nothing in the way of representation. It’s hard to Read more

January 17, 2008

Yesterday Twitter was a village; today it’s an exclusive gated community

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

“Hyper-local micro-blogging”. Ya heard it here first.

Let’s gather the pieces:

–Twitter might be a village, but real estate is local.
-To create an insanely great hyper-local weblog, “Be the community”.
-In order for Twitter to be useful, you have to tweet something useful.

Let’s put it all together:

-What if you created your own Twitter village?
-What if you created your own unique hyper-local community content?
-What if all the tweets were for the benefit of your readers, and they all pointed back to your blog, your website, or if you were a broker they could point to the brokerage website and your agent’s blogs?

What if?

January 17, 2008

Active Rain can’t catch a break…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

T.S. Eliot:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald]
    brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.

Trulia.com is going into the Realtors-talking-to-each-other business…

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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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