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Category: Technology (page 5 of 60)

January 1, 2012

Me in 2012: Writing Splendor’s sound-track, among other things.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been living for years now with my daily calendar system of staying focused on my goals. Some months I do better, some I do worse, but having a regular agenda has proved fruitful for me.

These are my daily goals:

  • Work-out with free weights
  • Walk with Cathleen and the dogs
  • Write or update software
  • Blog or write essays or Willie stories
  • Practice the guitar

Software and writing came and went, strong and weak, in 2011, but the guitar got the benefit of end-of-day exhaustion almost every day: Mindless sitcoms on the TV, internet radio playing in my office, eye-candy on the iPad and “a Telecaster through a Vibralux turned up to ten.”

I love it, to say the truth, especially the sound of a solid-body electric amped up very loud but played very quietly. This is what made those Chicago blues gods such great underpants gnomes, and it’s the trick the British blues-rock gods missed when they doubled the tempo on all those old riffs and called it rock ‘n’ roll. I feel sorry for poor Cathleen, who by now has heard the I,IV,V blues played crudely in at least half of its infinite variations. But it works for me so well that sometimes I take pity on her and play through a headphone amp. This also promotes dancing — by me, that is, since I’m self-contained and free to move where I will.

But I’m wary of it, too, because the guitar gives me two benefits I must always find in my work: A creative outlet and something to do with my hands. I don’t want to give it up. To the contrary, I think I might take up the piano, as well, this year, as a looping and recording platform. My solution is to learn to write songs. I know I can do this, but by now it is possible to carry the song-writing process all the way through to a marketable demo — or even a release-ready recording. I have no desire to perform, but I would love to find an ambitious act to feed tunes to.

My other big blue-sky project for the year is to Read more

December 28, 2011

Slugging Away. One E-mail Address At A Time

by

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

Author website

I’m on a quest to find 75 San Diego real estate agents.  I need 75 agents, to give me permission, to e-mail them weekly.  I told you about my plan to secure those permissions and I thought I’d update you as I get results.

Bill Lyons agreed to do a joint marketing deal with me but I haven’t taken him up on that yet.  I’ve been scrambling around with year-end stuff, and I took a holiday trip to Arizona, but I’ll do something with Bill next year. For now, I’m focused on the SDAR Officers’ Installation and Dinner as a magnet.

I held a drawing at the Downtown San Diego caravan.  Thirty agents gave me their cards and Debbie Neuman won the tickets.  This works pretty well because while she is a quality agent, with established lending relationships, she’ll sit at my table that night.  This will be a good chance to get to know her and pitch ourselves as her “number two lender” (I’m not proud).    The challenge with the thirty “new” contacts has been securing permission to e-mail them..  I have spoken with ten agents thus far and only five agreed to receive my newsletter.  I do have a drawing scheduled at the La Jolla REBA, next week. and those folks know me better.  I guess if I have 25-30 permissions, by next Friday, I can celebrate the fact that I have achieved one-third of my goal.

That means I’m going to have to grit it out for the final fifty permissions.  I’m going to start the “open house plan” after the first of the year.  The plan is to visit open houses and drop off a “care basket”, filled with snacks.  Agents get hungry at open houses so this is what I’ll give them:

A couple of bottles of water, three bags of snacks, and a couple of oranges (or apples, or bananas).

I’ll assemble them in my newly delivered TANSTAAFL lunch bags.  I ordered these from 4imprint.com and 100 of them cost me less than $300.

I had my name, website, and phone number imprinted on them, along with the word TANSTAAFL.  The Read more

December 16, 2011

Reading myself right into welfare via a Kindle Fire. Forgetting whats important.

by

Realtor, Guerilla Technologist

Author website

In almost two years of participating at Bloodhound this will be my first tech and family combined post. Recently, I decided it was time to buy some bling aka the Kindle Fire. What really attracted me to the Kindle Fire was all that it can do coupled with it’s tiny size. Although it’s not an I-Pad 2, the Kindle Fire is still really practical for reading and Android apps which is the two sole purposes I bought it in the first place.

Have you ever thought that you might have been reading yourself right into welfare? I wake up in the morning to read for 30 minutes prior to getting out of bed. I read on the toilet! (smile) But using the bathroom now takes longer because I can’t put a book down on the middle of page. I read before and after diner. My social life has decreased and my newly found love aka the Kindle Fire has me consumed.

Brian (The Genius and mortgage mega broker) really wrote a great post about how he needs more agents to close more mortgages. And that article had me thinking about my time management skills which have clearly gone right out the window. Like the title says, I’m reading myself right into welfare. Of course we need time to unwind and so forth, but what I’ve been doing has been habit which I repeat daily. I am a wife whom is a homemaker and two small girls. I often find myself working longer hours just so we have enough padding in the bank. Just went it seems like we have a good pad, something breaks!

I guess this post is more of a spiritual battle with myself. I want to be the best husband, always there for my family even at night instead of showing homes. But dad’s need to work harder than ever right now just to survive and care for their family. I do have a confession. I’ve been reading 10 Read more

December 10, 2011

Who else wants some cheap and easy ways, to generate more purchase business from REALTORS?

by

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

Author website

I cleaned up my e-mail database this week and was pretty surprised.  The lion’s share of our business comes from real estate agents.  Many times, I don’t speak with nor hear from an agent for 5-6 months…then…WHAM—I get a loan call.  That call always seems to come within two weeks of one of my email newsletters.  I understand my numbers pretty well:

  • for every California agent, in my database, it results in .6 purchase loans/year
  • over 75% of that business comes from agents, in the database, who open at least 50% of my emails (that comprises just 20% of the total number)

Last year, I cleaned up the data base.  I whittled the number down to 70 agents.  15 of those agents accounted for 32 purchase loans and 55 agents accounted for 11 purchase loans.  If I want to close 72 purchase loans in 2012, I probably need 30 agents, who open at least 50% of my emails.  To add those extra 15 agents, I need to meet and add some 75 NEW agents to the database…pretty quickly.

I broke down the content offered, too:

  • the highest click-through ratio (55%) came from marketing ideas
  • mortgage tips (like how to get a VA offer accepted) generated a 35% click-through
  • mortgage rates reports were largely unread (10% click-through)

Agents want to hear how to get more business and then, how to do business properly.  Agents just don’t care about mortgage rates.  I’ll stop writing those onerous mortgage rates reports (nobody’s reading them and, because their time sensitive, they are more of a short-head).  I will start adding marketing ideas to my blog, then use those blog posts for my email newsletter content.

Here’s what I did last night:

  • I created a new list, of the serial readers, and named it the “top-gun file”.  I’ll add new agents there, check it every 90 days, and move the agents, who are not opening 50% of my emails, to the “general agents” list.
  • I pre-loaded weekly emails, for the “top-gun file”, out to April 15, 2012.  I want to insure consistency
  • The “general agents” file will get a bi-weekly marketing idea.  I pre-loaded that content, out to April Read more
December 5, 2011

My address changes when I move. My phone number changes when I swap phones. My email address changes when I get buried in spam. But my name never changes — so it’s the perfect contact address.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. From PC World:

Forget phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The era of the Internet handle is emerging.

Instead of having to remember a phone number or an e-mail address, in a few short years we might simply find somebody remotely over the Internet via his or her handle, another word for an Internet nickname.

It would be similar to the way handles are used in instant messaging or Skype, except that the handle would apply to all modes of getting in touch, including a phone number or e-mail address (or several of each). In my case, my Skype handle, “MattaboyBoston,” could become the way you would reach me.

“People will no longer seek each other’s phone numbers or email address[es] when establishing personal or working relationships,” wrote Gartner analyst Adib Ghubril in a report on mobile predictions for 2012 and beyond. “Instead, they will ask each other, ‘What’s your handle?’ ”

Ghubril said that handles will have a huge advantage. They could remain unchanged for a long time, if not for life.

The idea is simply indirect addressing: If I depend on your physical address (or your phone number or email address), when you make a change, I am lost. But if I use an indirect addressing scheme — I address you by name, or by “handle” as this article avers — then the indirect address can always accurately reflect your current contact information, even if you change it twelve times a day.

The responsibility for maintaining accurate contact information moves from dozens or thousands of distracted and loosely motivated people to the one person most strongly motivated to make sure your messages get through — you.

As with all predictions, the ideas discussed in the PC World article are kludgy and stoopid. This all will actually happen as a beneficial side-effect of cloud-based data storage. We talked about this over the summer in discussions of a hypothetical CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as Read more

October 6, 2011

Brian Brady makes it happen: BloodhoundBlog Unchained is on for Anaheim, Friday, November 11, 2011.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brian Brady got us a room, may the gods whisper his name in awe. We’re working on sponsorship, and I’ll have speaker announcements in the coming days. Here’s the big picture:

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Anaheim
Friday, November 11, 2011
12 Noon to 10 pm
Cortona Inn & Suites Anaheim Resort
2029 South Harbor Boulevard
Anaheim, CA 92802
714-971-5000

We’re going split the day between formal presentations and Scenius scenes. No one can predict where lightning will strike, but we have delivered transformative experiences before. If you go to the NAR sessions that day, you can look forward to being upsold on crap. Come see us and we could change your life forever.

That’s sounds like a value proposition to me.

I’ll have more to say soon, but right now I want to give people who are paying attention a chance to jump. We have a very limited number of seats, so if being there matters to you, get your credit card out now.

Make the Scene: $99


















October 4, 2011

I want someone to give me a conference room in rounds so I can launch a Scenius in Sacramento Anaheim.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want someone to send me to NAR in Sacramento Anaheim next month. I don’t want to do anything even remotely NARish, I just want to commune with the grunts on the ground. I have lots of interesting ideas about innovation in real estate, and I am lucky enough to know a lot of very clever people. Put us all in a room together, and we can make magic. We’ve done it before.

This would be cool: A double- or triple-sized break-out room in rounds of eight, each table its own little Scenius. Some formal presentations from the front of the room, with web and slide support, all that stuff. But also a lot of time for real work at the table level. I plan on throwing off a lot of product ideas, and I would love to have a leavening of people from the development side of the on-line real estate table. I want to sell some very serious ideas, but I want people to go home with new product plans, new marketing plans, too.

Here’s a true fact: This is the most propitious time for revolutionary change in the residential real estate business. Why? Because things could not possibly be any more screwed up than they are now. There is no sane argument to be made against any attempt to right this flailing beached whale we scheme to call a profession. I have ideas. You do, too. I want to talk about how we can be the drivers of real change in our business.

Am I too vain to think that someone would put together a show for me? I know how to do all this myself, after all. But: I don’t have the time or the money to put anything together. I loved doing the BloodhoundBlog Unchained events with Brian Brady, and with all the hard-working dogs who graced us with their presence. But all that is way more than I can do now. It comes down to this: I’ll do this if someone will take on the logistics and costs, and not if not.

But what I’m promising is a Scenius, Read more

September 14, 2011

The Next Big (Tech) Step in Real Estate?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I watched the following video earlier this week and was blown away.  The basics of what’s described (kind of a mobile computer/projector/app device) are not that complicated; as a matter of fact, the mock up is made from off the shelf components.  Imagine when these are combined into one sleek pendant hanging on a stylish chain…

The video shows some of the more fun uses (draw a temporary watch on your wrist with your fingertip, take a picture by holding up your hands to frame an image, “see” social media key words associated with anyone you meet… in real time, the list is amazing), but I was struck by how powerful this can be for real estate agents.  I listed a few ideas below – watch the video first though.

Imagine walking your clients through a home with this device.  Want to look at the neighborhood comps again? Why crowd around my Pad when we can just sit down in the dining room and see everything laid out on the table itself.  Curious how a room would look if it weren’t painted Jimi Hendrix purple? Go ahead and stand back while I bathe the room in light close to the color you prefer. (Foam green?  Really?)  Don’t know if your entertainment center will fit on that wall?  No problem, I’ll project a 3D image and we’ll check it out while we’re here.  Prefer a guided tour of everything that’s right with this home (and maybe some of what’s wrong)?  Great, the owners themselves are here virtually and will discuss each room as we walk into it.  Want to write an offer?  Great, let’s just step over to the living room wall here and sign your name using your finger.

Those are just a few ideas from a non-tech guy.  What would you do with this device?

September 12, 2011

Introducing Ascende.me, an eye-candy-view of some of the most breathtaking homes for sale in Metropolitan Phoenix.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am introducing Ascende.me today at BloodhoundRealty.com. I’ve been working on this, in my spare time, since Steve Jobs announced tabbed browsing in the iPad version of Safari, and it’s time to draw further inspiration from Mr. Jobs: “Real artists ship.”

There is added functionality still to come in this software — and for something that looks like a web site, there is a ton of software under the hood.

Even so, the essential algorithm comes down to software-encoded art. That is a hint to Realtors in Phoenix: Your dipshit vendors can’t copy this. They’ll tell you they can, but they can’t.

If you are a Realtor in any other town, we can talk about licensing the underlying technology.

Meanwhile, here is my release announcement:

 
Here’s a screen shot from Ascende.me, a new web site we are launching today:

Ascende is a wish book, not a full-blown search tool. We already run the best real estate search site in Greater Phoenix. Instead of bombarding you with everything, Ascende gives you a small subset of available homes, an artistically-chosen selection of the best homes, the most stunning homes, the most impressively-marketed homes.

The purpose? To dream, to plan, to hope — and to capture. The homes featured in Ascende may not be for you, but they sure will give you ideas…

Got an iPad? Ascende will work on any normal browser, but it’s orientation-sensitive on the iPad. There will be more iPad integration to come.

Play with it and let me know what you think. I like looking at big pictures of gorgeous homes. I think you will, too.

August 25, 2011

Thank different…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Good Jobs reading:

August 3, 2011

A demonstration of the value of VirtualOmniscience.com: “I don’t remember offhand what I was doing last Tuesday, but this does not automatically lead me to assume I was gang-raped.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.

Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:

Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.

If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.

Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?

Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?

None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — Read more

August 2, 2011

iPad observation #8: The death of mediocrity and, along with it, the death of contempt for the consumer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS

 
I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.

So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.

Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.

Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-“a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?

The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on 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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