BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: August 2006 (page 4 of 8)

August 20, 2006

The Reporter’s Prayer . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On bended knee: “May almighty god spare us from a world in which facts can be checked.”

Catherine Reagor in today’s Arizona Republic:

Check out the listings on homes: The phrase “motivated investor” describing the seller is pretty common.

There are 46,680 active listings in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service right now. This is a lot, close to double what would have been considered normal three years ago.

How many of those listings say “motivated investor”?

One.

You read that number right. Out of 46,680 active listings, precisely one says “motivated investor”. None of the homes currently under contract uses that language.

I looked at everything, as well, just for the sake of completeness. Out of about 840,000 total listings — active, pending, sold, cancelled, expired — how many say “motivated investor”?

Eleven. Total. Going back more than four years.

Why wouldn’t a listing say “motivated investor” even if the home is owned by a motivated investor? Because using that language would hand the buyer an untoward advantage. Without the seller’s written instructions, this would be an agency violation. It would be a wonderful, wonderful thing if real estate reporting were done by people who know something about the real estate business.

But how did Catherine Reagor get the idea that, “The phrase ‘motivated investor’ describing the seller is pretty common,” is something that can be found by checking out “the listings on homes” when this is in fact almost impossible to find in the MLS system?

I think she just made it up. How about you…?

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

August 19, 2006

What is broken in real-life real estate?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In comments to a post at Rain City Guide, new agent Seattle Eric wrestles with Lady Ardell over what is and is not broken in real estate representation.

Ardell offers an amazingly detailed list, at which I can only marvel. I’ve had run-ins with less-than-perfect agents, but my common experience is the opposite — very thoughtful, experienced, conscientious people. I’ve heard a lot of stories about bad agents, but I almost always assume that stories improve with age, with retelling and with the transfer of retelling rights from the original raconteur to who knows how many raconteurs-by-proxy. We are not liars, as a species, just very good storytellers.

(Even so, bad agent stories are a good education. Love is hard but hate is easy. Most of your clients will love you if you do nothing they hate, and bad agent stories are how they tell you what they hate.)

My beef with other Realtors has to do with their being lazy and complacent, rather than their being corrupt or stupid. Much of what I write about here consists of marketing ideas we are pioneering. You could argue that we are arming our own competition, but I know we are not. As good as the ideas we deploy are, no one in my market is copying them. That’s all you have to do by the time we’re done — monkey-see, monkey-do — but the agents are too lazy, too cheap or too clueless to jump on an intellectual bandwagon they exerted not one thought to create in the first place. Dinosaur is always on the lunch menu.

In the same respect, I am appalled by how how inept, technically, many Realtors are. Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato had a wonderful riff on how stupid e-Pro is — and people at ActiveRain argued with him about it. We live at the far right edge of this Bell Curve, but my assumption, always, is that agents I’ll end up working with will be very far to the left side.

In general, I think agents do way too much of what Ardell argues they no longer do enough Read more

August 19, 2006

Realty reality: My friend Andy is a student, a landlord — and an American hero . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve known Andy since he was a teenager, and Cathy has known his mother, Sally, since before Andy was a gleam in anyone’s eye. I’ve always liked him, and it’s not always easy for me to like teenage boys. But Andy has been an earnest young man for as long as I’ve known him — a firm and fixed shape to his face and firm and fixed ideas in his mind. At fourteen he had a quiet intellectual confidence that would have been a credit to a man of thirty.

When he was a senior in high school, he read something I had written and convinced his English teacher to invite me in to speak to the class. I gave them ninety minutes on notational systems. That might sound dull, but in fact it is the naked essence of human social interaction. We started with learning to multiply in Ancient Rome, took a grand Mediterranean cruise of cognate terms, touched upon Shakespeare and Plautus, and brought it all back home to real life in modern America. I lecture on real estate all the time, but I think that day was the most fun I’ve ever had talking to a class.

“This is the life of the mind in action, as it is actually lived. It’s not some desiccated notion trapped in a dusty book, it is an eager pursuit of new knowledge by reference to what is already known. The more you know, the more you are able to discover.” I don’t claim to have made a lasting impact on those kids, but for ninety minutes, at least, they understood that there are reasons for learning apart from passing a test or getting a job or staying out of trouble with your parents.

When Andy graduated from high school, he elected to join the Army. Sally had money set aside for his college education, but Andy reasoned that if he served in the military, Uncle Sam could pay for college and he could then use the money Sally had saved as investment capital. It was peacetime when he enlisted, so the ratio of reward Read more

August 18, 2006

Working hard to get the listing on the Tower of Song . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m really not the off-topic type, but it’s Friday and I’m toast and I feel like sharing a little of the background here at Bloodhound HQ. For weeks now we’ve been listening to the soundtrack albumfrom the film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.

If the movie is still around in your town — it’s long gone from the world’s most sophisticated cow town — go see it. It has two redeeming features over most rockumentaries: First, the interview portions are viscerally honest, in contrast to the usual obviously phony PR treatment. And second, the interview portions are very brief, with the result that the music holds sway — vast stretches of uninterrupted music. Who’d’a thunk it? A music movie about music…

Leonard Cohen is one of my secret vices — along with Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt. However far they might fall from my own esthetic, I make room in my life for songwriters who ring true to me — no matter how gut-wrenchingly true. The obvious contrast is to Bob Dylan, who has whole suites of space in my mind, but who is always hiding behind one mask or another. If you listen to something like Marie, the experience is the perfect antithesis to one of Dylan’s set pieces. With the possible exception of Blind Willie McTell, which is excruciatingly excellent, Bob Dylan is nowhere to be found in a Bob Dylan song, whereas in a song by Townes Van Zandt or Leonard Cohen, the man is always right there. Tom Waits is a little more challenging, and I like to use a remarkably bad live bootleg I have of Falling Down as a litmus test for sophisticates. If you can hear through level upon level of rubbled ugliness to the sad and perfect beauty of the song, I might let you look at my record collection.

I’ve infected Cathy will all my musical affectations, and part of learning to live and work with me is learning to put up with, respect, like and eventually love what I admire in popular music — because if I feel a need to listen to Read more

August 18, 2006

Custom signs, week two . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, now we have the full treatment, a big sign at 24×36″ plus the two smaller signs. The two custom signs were made at one-sixth scale in QuarkXPress, then scaled up in Illustrator, then rasterized at 300 DPI in PhotoShop. I want to do it differently the next time, because I think I’m losing too much saturation in these steps. I think if I save the photos as PhotoShop CMYK EPS files, then scale and rasterize in the same pass when I come back to PhotoShop, I can retain all the color from the original photos. The finished raster for the big sign is 449 megabytes. These had to move on CD-ROM by sneakernet. It would have been too slow to FTP them — and I have a 3MBS broadband connection. Turnaround at the sign printer: 28 hours. Color is spot-on, so if I get it right on my end, I’ll have it right on theirs.

The ‘For Sale!’ snipe is Richard Riccelli, who argues that you can’t be too clear about your objectives. I think the headline and body copy are too small. (You’re seeing this at about 21.67% scale.) I can stretch the headline, but I’ll have to cut the word count on the body copy. You have to be able to read it when you’re sitting in your car near the sign, and I think I’m just a little too small for that right now.

But: It does what I want it to do: It stops traffic. I sat up the street and watched people. Most slow down to check it out, and many stop to read it and pull the flyer. This is good for our seller and good for us.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

August 18, 2006

Confronting the consequences of our privileged status . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website


NAR Board of Directors, 1909

Point:

As it stands right now, MLS systems and data exist purely for Realtors and members. The public is more of an afterthought. This will continue to be true, unless people start to stand up and say, “I WANT MY MLS!”

Counterpoint:

Some may say that [David Barry’s] goal is not ethics or reform, but destroying the NAR and the privately-owned MLS’s so companies that do not share these goals, or, in some cases, even actively participate in the buying and selling of real estate, can use the privately held data (listings) for their own benefit and profit.

Those two arguments shoot across each other’s bow, but much of this debate does. Truly, the whole mess was started in 1908. It seems unlikely that it will be resolved by 2008.

I have much more to say about this…

Technorati Tags: , , ,

August 18, 2006

Home inspection important, but don’t let it scare you off

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (the permanent link):

Home inspection important, but don’t let it scare you off

When you buy a home inspection, are you looking for reasons to buy the house or reasons to walk away?

Some inspectors seem to think it’s their job to scare buyers to death. They’ll call out things that are almost never found in resale homes — for example the absence of arc fault circuit interrupters — then describe the possible consequences in the direst of terms.

Please understand, I think you should have a home inspection. Even if you’re purchasing the home “as is,” with no seller-supplied repairs, you still should get an inspection. Done properly, this can be the cheapest $400 you’ll ever spend. It will either tell you to fully embrace the house you already love so much. Or it will tell you to run away in horror.

What matters is the house, not the inspector. Repairs in a newer home should run to $1,000 or less. For an older home, the costs might run to as much as 1 percent of the purchase price. If the work needed starts to climb toward 2 or 3 percent of the purchase price, that could be cause for concern.

If the seller is doing the repairs, will they be done in a “workmanlike manner,” using licensees where required, with everything documented with receipts? If you’re doing the work yourself to save on the purchase price, will you have the financial resources to finish the job?

Here is what you need to know from the inspector: What is serious and what is trivial? Was the home built — and remodeled — to code? Which repair issues are health and safety issues, and which are optional or cosmetic? What are the repairs likely to cost?

Ideally, your home inspector should have a strong background in the building trades. This will inform his determination of what is and is not significant. You want your inspector to be honest to a fault, without the fault of being an alarmist.

What you want is the truth, expressed calmly, rationally, realistically. A phlegmatic analysis of the Read more

August 17, 2006

Is that AOL there is?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato asked me to take a look at ActiveRain, seemingly a toe-in-the-water experience for technologically-timid Realtors. My initial take, reported back to Jim, was this: “ActiveRain is the AOL of real estate weblogging…”

That’s probably pre-mature. I hit ’em with Realtor 2.0 to see who might salute. In the mean time, the conversation put me in mind of this essay, which I wrote in November of 1995. Sadly enough, it actually holds up after all this time…

Is that AOL there is…?

Well, seeing is believing, and now I know: America Online is lame.

Like you, like everyone with a computer and a mailing address, I have been deluged by America Online start-up disks. Fortunately, most of those disks have been for Windows, and I run a Macintosh. It was bracing to learn that state-of-the-art target marketing can, with pinpoint accuracy, send the wrong pitch to an unmotivated buyer 79.91% of the time. But the truth is, I was unmotivated even by the Mac disks that sometimes came by accident.

But then the Mac mail order houses started chucking in an AOL Mac disk with every order. And Staples and OfficeMax put racks of them by every cash register. We haven’t gotten to the point of extremely clean-cut kids going door-to-door or hustling harried travelers at the airport, but America Online has taken to binding start-up disks in magazines, like those horrid scratch ‘n’ retch perfume samplers.

And then the woman I hope someday to make my ex-wife sent over a two-disk installer, the very latest release. My daughter Meredith has an AOL account, so the plan was that I would install it for her benefit. I didn’t, or, rather, I hadn’t, but I was fooling around with a cool little CD-ROM that came with the December Macworld–which, of course, had an AOL installer on it–and I decided to give it a gander.

What could it hurt? It only takes up slightly more disk space than the complete works of Shakespeare, and the worst that could happen is that my vital financial information would be shared with the FBI or less officious Read more

August 17, 2006

If Zillow.com succeeds, who will have failed?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Daniel Rothamel at the Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog hauls out that heirloom Virginia horsewhip. But is it Zillow.com he’s flaying?

If a customer were to call me and ask for a property valuation, or Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), and I responded by saying, “Sure, I can do that. I think you should know, however, that there is a 38% chance that I am going to be off by at least 10%,” I would expect that person to hang up on me and find another Realtor. If I continued to do this with every customer with whom I came in contact, I would very quickly find myself looking for another profession.

The founders of Zillow.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were also the founders of travel site, Expedia.com. Do you think Expedia.com would still exist if it told customers that sure, they can book a travel package on the site, but 38% of the time, we will tell you the wrong price of your trip by at least 10%?

More:

Zillow will never be right. It isn’t capable of being right. It can’t see properties, and even self-reported data on a subject property won’t help, because it doesn’t have equivalent data on comparable properties. This will ALWAYS be a shortcoming of Zillow. And it is just the most glaring on a very long list.

And the peroration — cover your backside:

If enough of these people buy into the Zillow lie, then I suppose Zillow could become authoritative. The people who would be held responsible for such a tragedy would be the hard-working real estate professionals who know better. It is our responsibility to educate the public about property valuations, and the danger that lurks behind Zillow. The only reason that Zillow will EVER become an legitimate authority is if real estate professionals sit idly by and let that occur.

For all of me, I can’t figure out why the appraisers aren’t leading this charge. In any case, there is much more in Daniel’s post. Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

August 16, 2006

There is a case to be made for experience . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This bit from RedFin (tipped by FoREM) reads to me like a dual agency lawsuit waiting to happen.

Why?

Because RedFin is paying an extra incentive for its buyer clients to purchase a home from its seller client before the seller’s home is MLS-listed. RedFin would surely argue that no agency has been created, but in fact what they have is a pocket listing — an exclusive — and they are representing the seller as soon as they seller decides they are. I’m not crazy about the idea of implied agency, but that’s almost certainly the way the gavel will drop if this comes before a judge.

What would be the seller’s beef? By inducing him to sell without putting his home to the full test of the marketplace, by means of an MLS listing, RedFin may be cheating him of proceeds his home might have earned for him. An exclusive listing sold in-house stinks to high heaven — and if it smells bad to a jury, it doesn’t matter how it smells to anyone else.

Say what you will about Help-U-Sell, Assist-2-Sell and all the other limited-service brokerages, at least they have experience in the real estate business…

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

August 15, 2006

Zillow.com versus the truth: Why it matters . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was in a comment, but I’m pulling it out because I think it’s important:

A Zestimate cannot be “off” or “on”. It cannot be accurate or inaccurate. What is being evaluated is not a house but statistics and documents about that house. As I have demonstrated, the Zestimated house may not even be there. The results can have a greater or lesser correspondence to reality — which attribute is equally true of astrology — but a Zestimate is not a statement about reality. This issue is not whether or not the Zestimate is more or less correspondent to reality. The issue is whether it is wise to substitute calculations based upon statistics and documents about a house for an actual, objective, on-site evaluation of that house. This is a determination an informed party — such as a mortgage lender — can make at his own peril. To induce ordinary haphazardly-informed consumers to do so strikes me as being fraudulent.

Why does it matter? From another comment:

Here are some good ol’ boys in Texas who are using Zillow.com to milk the rubes. They’re responsible for their own behavior, of course, but who made it possible?

The fact is, this scheme is only possible because Zillow.com has represented itself as an authoritative source when the principals of the company know that is untrue. The people running this game can gull the public because the public comes to them having been pre-gulled by Zillow.com.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

August 15, 2006

Conjurers confounded: Reality is what it is . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Burslem:

If enough people believe their Zestimate to be true (consumers, journalists, realtors, whomever) – then reality really can be altered. It just shows how malleable the wisdom of the crowds really is.

Oh, good grief… Consciousness does not cause reality.

The meta-topic is interesting, however, first because it highlights one of the more pernicious aspects of Web 2.0, the idea of collective wisdom, and second because it brings out one of the better features of Web 2.0, the ferocious pursuit of canonical truth.

In the first case, the social web is largely harmless, even if its epistemology is absurd. The nonsense Joel Burslem is citing would be dangerous — and assuming that he is not actually joking — if it actually came to pass, but this seems hugely unlikely. One of the subterranean tenets of Post-Modernism is the subtly communicated dictum that nothing matters until it does. David Letterman does not chuckle when you back into his car. The owners of Zillow.com will not buy or sell real property on the basis of their own dubious Zestimates. In any real-life real estate transaction, if one party loves the Zestimate, then the other necessarily hates it. If people labor in error, in Wikipedia or elsewhere, it is because they believe the marginal cost of improving their knowledge of reality exceeds the marginal benefit of having done so — which calculation may itself be in error.

So what falls out? It is possible that people directly involved in real estate transactions may decide that the cost of pursuing a better alternative to Zillow exceeds the benefit. This seems doubtful to me, but we can stipulate the point for the sake of the argument. Even so, their doing so will not have “altered” reality. Zillow will still and always be unable to report the most important fact about the structure — is it still there? — at the time of the Zestimation. To agree to decide something by a means that is known to be fundamentally defective but which is nevertheless mutually-acceptable to the parties is not metaphysically dispositive, despite the fabulist hyperbole we hear everywhere. The Read more

August 15, 2006

Walking the rails: What to do when you miss the Cluetrain . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I would say that the Zillow.com’s response to recent events has been pretty lame — a vast silence punctuated by a gavotte with The Bubblette. But as clueless as they have been, I think the comment we got from one Brad Thompson takes the prize. Brad apparently works for realPING, although we can only conjecture about this because he doesn’t link back to anything.

His point is to take exception to my detailing of the reverse-engineered version I made of the realPING product. Have at it, Brad:

Even with the “Update” and “Further Notice” comments added, I believe you have grossly mis-represented both our product and the ability to reverse engineer the technology.

I do believe I misrepresented your product in my original post, which I amended when I realized my mistake. As to “the ability to reverse engineer the technology”, I think you should hold your tongue. It took me two hours to duplicate the best 90% of what you’re selling. The other ten percent doesn’t matter to me, but my son and I could get it all in a weekend, a totally clean-room reverse-engineered clone. Your “technology” is impressive only to people who don’t know any better.

RealPing is a Voice Over IP (VOIP) telephany system, not a simple e-mail-to-cell phone SMS capability as you represented. Immediately connecting a prospect (web visitor, email recipient, virtual tour viewer, etc.) with an agent (person to person live conversation)…

Check. You’re safe from me, because I think this is stoopid. I don’t take calls when I’m with clients. My entire attention is focused on their needs. This is why an SMS message, echoed to all team members, made better sense to me.

…is 100 times more powerful and valuable businesswise than an email that may or may not be answered.

Did you Zillow that stat, Brad? I can’t believe you did. Zillow would have had “100.47 times more powerful and valuable businesswise.” That shows that it’s science and not hyperbole. In any case, I don’t think it’s that big a difference, but your mileage may vary. We push our form responses out by SMS, too, so that we can Read more

August 14, 2006

And this is the Zillow-killer . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Right there in the Realtor’s remarks section of the listing is the conversation-stopper, the quill-puller, the objection-obliterator:

The stately home you’ve always dreamed of with a completely unzillowable view…

That’s a mean meme, mama. If it spreads, the deal is utterly undone. The concept focuses the mind, and the word calls forth the concept. The coin Sellsius&176; has struck enriches us all…

Technorati Tags: , , ,

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts