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Category: The Cheez-Whiz Prize (page 1 of 1)

March 15, 2012

Jay Thompson takes leadership role at Zillow.com.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Witness:

Thompson joins Zillow’s growing partner outreach team, which includes Sara Bonert (director of broker services), Brad Andersohn (industry outreach manager), and recent addition Bob Bemis (vice president of partner relations). Together, the team advances Zillow’s goal of helping real estate agents grow and market their business.

Grow and market whose business?

This is precisely the kind of leadership I have come to expect from Jay since 2008 or so: The goat takes a left when the cattle take a right. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll probably be taking the right turn.

I’m killing comments on this post, because I don’t want you to soil yourself in public just because I’m the only person in this benighted industry who will tell you the truth.

 
More:

Table talk from my email: A Judas Goat- yes? Got it.

Me: What’s the point of having friends if you can’t sell ’em out?

Andersohn = ActiveRainiers

Bemis = MLS systems

Thompson = TwitBook losers

Coming soon: Project FUD at REBarCamp: Can you afford to be WITHOUT Zillow?

The window on integrity in real estate seems to be closing…

 
Still more…

Our business is corrupt, so it’s no surprise that this is the only place on the net where you can find the other side of this story. This is me from a comment at Real Estate Industry Watch:

Whatever job they end up giving him, Jay Thompson has already delivered everything Zillow is paying for: His endorsement of their brand. Now they get to make the fallacious “Even-Jay-Thompson” appeal: Even Jay Thompson thinks you should piss away your money on Zillow’s advertising. Jay has yearned to be the Head Lemming of the RE.net since the passing of Joe Ferrara, but, as we saw in the Denise Lones fiasco, he lacked that sad little man’s taste for blood. Luckily, Zillow has provided him with an even better cliff off of which to drive his credulous “followers.” It’s sad to say, but they deserve each other.

We’ve seen this kind of self-dealing posturing from Jay Thompson before — and not just from him, alas. But eighteen months from now — when you finally wake up and say, “Wuh happened?!?” Read more

August 12, 2011

Say “Cheese!” It’s time to play Business Card Monte

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

We’ve all seen them. The usual suspects on a line-up across a counter in an empty kitchen. Gathering dust on a convenient window sill. Spread out like an abandoned poker game on a dining table. Ah yes, the real estate business cards left behind at showings. Black, white, red, blue, cheap, shiny, standard issue, each one with a Friendly Neighborhood Expert (FNE) smiling earnestly or stupidly grinning, depending (see tiny mug shot, above). My clients notice them too and they kind of scowl over the line up. When I toss mine onto the pile they say, “Hmm. Yours is different.” At which point I flash my own killerwatt smile and say, “Because I am.” They grin back, we move along.

Business cards are pretty awesome when you think about it. Palm-sized advertisements that you can carry about. A potentially effective way to get your message across, but it seems mostly wasted in the world of real estate.

Recently I saw a business card that was left behind with a printed thank you message: “Thank you for allowing us to show your property.” That’s nice. The message was printed next to the full length image of Mr and Mrs FNE. I wonder if it would be useful to have a showing-specific business card, with space to write a note on it? “Love the floor plan!” “Great job with the kitchen.” “Sorry we accidentally let the cat out.” “What the hell is that smell?” You get my point. Someone more experienced can fill me in on why that would be a disastrous idea for their client.

I’ve had property-specific business cards printed up, that’s an easy item to hand across a threshold if you are door knocking, and I have all purpose business cards I use, (see blurry photo, below) they feature The Brick Ranch logo from my website, and it does stand out in a sea of tiny FNEs splashed across the Formica, but business cards are so cheap, why not have a few on hand for a multitude of purposes?

I remember Russell Shaw commenting on one of the BHB business card posts that your Read more

September 11, 2008

Rate-a-Realtor is for Ding-a-Lings

by

Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

Author website

Techie agent types have probably googled their name (or the name of a competitor) only to find a agent review website that says something like:

Barbie Baker is a San Diego real estate agent. Barbie Baker has no reviews. Click here to review Barbie Baker.

If you’re uncommonly lucky, you’ll hit an agent with a review:

1 person has reviewed Barbi Baker. Phoenix Rand said the following about Barbie Baker: “Barbie was a fantastic agent to work with and helped us find the right house! Wow!”

Now, if you’re an agent, you’re saying to yourself “I wish they had a phone number at least,” but if you’re a consumer with half a brain, you’re saying to yourself “One rave review – I bet Barbie wrote it herself.” And, no offense to San Diego Realtors, but odds are she did. It’s easy and jeez – who’s going to catch you?

Everyone likes to compare real estate to other industries (travel anyone?), and the clear direct comparison here is business / restaurant review – sites like City Search / Urban Spoon / Yelp / Menuism. But the comparison is only valid in the most superficial sense.

How many customers will write a review?

Take one of my favorite lunch spots: Kau Kau in Seattle. Say they serve 10 people an hour from noon until 8. That’s 80 people a day or 29,200 people a year. Urban Spoon has four reviews of Kau Kau. Menuism has two reviews of Kau Kau. That’s one review for every 7,300 or so transactions on Urban Spoon and twice that many on Menuism.

That means that the average agent should not have a single review – even Russell Shaw does not do that many transactions per year. And agents who have more than one review are suspect. They’re either reviewing themselves or they’re sitting down with their favorite clients and “helping” them write a review.

Do you see value in these sites for consumers?

August 13, 2008

In Need of Migration Assistance – Please!

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

Hi All – I am in need of assistance with the migration of my blog – currently hosted on blogger to my own domain using WordPress.

I have referenced Tom Vanderwell’s post on July 2 asking for help/clarifications.  I’ve attempted to follow everyone’s previous advice and dagnabbit, it still don’t werk.

I currently have a domain setup and hosted on godaddy.  I have successfully installed WordPress on my new host.  I have tried the import function via WordPress to import my blog from Blogger.  When I grant access to Blogger, I get a blank webbrowser – it says done, but it ain’t.

Secondly, I’ve gone into Blogger and directed my blog to my custom domain www.itaintallbighairandcadillacs.com – again, ain’t nuthin’.

I know I’m missing something, but I can’t figure this out.

Any thoughts?  Thanks!

March 14, 2007

Do you want Cheez-Whiz with that weenie?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it holdeth not in every point, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we may thereby both see and remember almost all the passions before mentioned. But this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost; and in it: To endeavour, is appetite. To be remiss, is sensuality. To consider them behind, is glory. To consider them before, humility. To lose ground with looking back, vain glory. To be holden, hatred. To turn back, repentance. To be in breath, hope. To be weary, despair. To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation. To supplant or overthrow, envy. To resolve to break through a stop foreseen, courage. To break through a sudden stop, anger. To break through with ease, magnanimity. To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity. To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. To see another fall, disposition to laugh. To see one out-gone whom we would not, is pity. To see one out-go we would not, is indignation. To hold fast by another, is to love. To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. To hurt one’s-self for haste, is shame. Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die. — Thomas Hobbes

There is much to criticize in the RE.net. But one would hope that we would criticize criminality, venality and intentional transgressions, rather than honest, even if thoughtless, errors. From the former, we want not the correction of the bad behavior, but rather its elimination. For the latter, we can be big enough of spirit to help our brothermen learn to do better where they might have done badly. It is certainly within the bounds of reason to argue that Hobbes was more than unnecessarily dour.

Alas, we have a new candidate for The Cheez-Whiz Prize, a new weblog devoted to derision called “realweenie.” (I won’t link to this for the same reason I’ve stopped linking to Housing Panic.) It’s a Six Apart weblog, Read more

February 26, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Inman’s real estate weblogging coverage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

(I was going to award The Cheez-Whiz Prize to Google’s applications suite, but I decided not to bother. I do think it’s silly to go from centralized processing to distributed processing and then back to centralized processing, but I can understand why people might do just about anything to get away from Microsoft.)

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Matt Carter of Inman News for his four-part series on real estate weblogging.

Part I appears today, with the other three parts appearing later this week. The articles will go behind Inman’s pay wall, so if you want to see them for free, hop to it.

Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide writes about the series, also, along with details about a Blogger’s Connect later this year at Inman Connect.

Carter’s series explores real estate weblogging at amazing depth, and I would say so even if he hadn’t given BloodhoundBlog a big write-up. The articles explore work being done by many of the better-known names in the RE.net, including BloodhoundBlog contributors Kris Berg and Dan Green.

For my own part, my hat is off to everyone who got to be a part of this series, and to the RE.net as a whole. And most especially to Matt Carter, who has given us a lovely portrait of where we are now…

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February 17, 2007

Hugg a house or hug your Realtor? Discerning motivation in the pursuit of residential bliss . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have a searchBot running in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service to find our next home. We’re not actively searching, with a burning urge to move. But we know what we want, and, should it turn up, we may take the leap.

This is not terribly likely. We are professionals, after all. This means, first, that we have a very tightly refined set of criteria for the next home we will move into. And, second, it means that our next home will have to be a better-fit than our current home for our professional needs — a high hurdle to leap. Still, the bot manages to scare up a house or two a week, and we end up taking a closer look at maybe one out of twenty.

We are not unique as move-up buyers. We work with quite a few people who are pursuing this same strategy indirectly, through us. Sooner or later they will move-up to homes selling from $500,000 to $1,000,000 — when the right home comes on the market.

That’s traditional real estate in the age of the computerized MLS system.

Now let’s do the same thing without professional representation. We can go to Trulia.com and PropSmart.com and Zillow.com and ZipRealty.com and look at what may be four different inventories of homes or may be essentially the same homes — with the degree of overlap unknown. Still worse, some of those home will have been off the market for months, since, with some exceptions, there is no penalty for lax housekeeping in the databases. The contact information is what it is, and, obviously, there is no built-in provision for arranging showings.

The idea that the secret power of Realtors is control of the MLS is funny, but funnier still — for now at least — are these goofy alleged alternatives to the Realtor’s way of identifying candidate homes for buyers.

Enter the folks from Incredible Agent with a solution. What if, every time you ran across some dubious candidate home at some dubious Realty.bot, you were to race over to HomeHugg.com to leave that home a Hugg, which is analogous to a Read more

February 10, 2007

Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman: “What if the parasites had to eat the parasites?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been a Redfin week for us. Kris Berg recorded her podcast with Glenn Kelman last week and I spent much of my spare time this week dealing with it. Allen Butler dealt with the audio quality, and then Cathleen and I went through the recording, pulling out apposite quotes for my own post.

I think we did the BloodhoundBlog idea credit, though: Kris demonstrated that an informed insider can ask much more pertinent questions, digging much deeper, than can mainstream journalists.

I’d like to cite another Redfin post as the first-ever recipient of the Odysseus Medal. Marlow Harris of 360 Digest gave us “Thank you, Mr. Kelman” yesterday, and I think it is a particularly good example of the real estate weblogger’s art.

Marlow has been on top of Redfin from the very beginning. Some of my first links from BloodhoundBlog were to Marlow’s Redfin posts. But all that notwithstanding, yesterday’s post was excellent irrespective of content: Rich in detail, peppered with links, written in an engaging, can’t put it down style. This is a level of quality unsurpassed on the RE.net.

And the winner of this week’s Cheez-Whiz Prize is… Redfin.com. I have never bought Kelman’s charm offensive, and events since Kris Berg’s interview seem to bear me out. (As a side note, Cynthia Pang, Redfin’s PR maven, was nothing but sweet and painstakingly efficient throughout this process.)

First, to claim to have reformed is easy, it’s the actual reforming that’s hard. We are what we do, not what we say we do. A common dodge of recidivist miscreants is the insistence that their behavior is not bad, it is your own misunderstanding of the good intentions motivating that behavior that is at fault. If you listen to the podcast, you will hear Kelman resort to that defense again and again.

Can you hear Eric Burden singing? “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” The song is about a wife-beater. It’s worth your while to remember that style of rationalization for egregious behavior.

Abandoning whatever hope he might have had to extend an olive branch to the Read more

February 2, 2007

The First Honorary Cheez-Whiz Prize: my-currency.com, where play money is play wisdom

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When I was a child, I used to love to play Monopoly with my kid sister, Pammy. She was sweet and passive and just wanted to play, where I’m the most competitive. I would routinely put her six figures in debt, then just keep lending her more and more money, so that I could put hotels on absolutely everything.

I think this proves that I am an incomparably talented real estate investor. Kirk Kerkorian owns three of the four corners of the intersection of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevards. But the only difference between us, as real estate investors, is that Kirk is playing with real money, where I was playing with play money.

That can’t be much of a difference. Can it?

If you’re thinking, “Who would bother to answer such a dumb question?” — there is an answer: my-currency.com, a brand new Zillow.com wannabe that is even stoopider than an AVM for pricing homes.

The site explains itself in a particularly soft-skulled newage style:

CrowdValue is where we process everyone’s idea of value for specific problems – such as “What is the value of a house for sale” or “what will be the value of a square foot in 6 months in my neighborhood”? So in that regard, CrowdValue is exactly like the stock exchange – it brings people together to coordinate all the different views of value and settle on an equilibrium price, at a point in time. CrowdValue is a trading engine and marketplace.

No, CrowdValue is a silly, masturbatory game. Stock prices are not equilibria, they are a consensus among buyers and sellers about real values. A play money stock market is as dumb as… a play money real estate market.

An AVM is at least rational enough to make guesses about what real traders might do. There is no value whatever in making guesses about what pretend traders will do with pretend money. Most especially since real buyers and real sellers are the only people who can establish the market value of real property, by negotiating to a meeting of the minds.

I’ll award the first Odysseus Medal next week, but this week Read more

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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