BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: August 2006 (page 8 of 8)

August 2, 2006

Signs of competitive advantage . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about our signs before. Counting the custom rider and the rental for the post, a configuration like that shown to the right costs about $275. The post rental is per house, of course, as is the cost of the rider. The top and middle signs are re-usable, but the weather is not kind to them. We don’t want our signs to look beat-up, so we rotate them out as soon as they start to look worn.

We’ve been playing with four-color ink-jet sign printers on the riders, and I’ve known all along that someday we would be able to do custom signs for each of our listings. That day may be today. We’re meeting with a sign vendor who has a massive six-color digital ink-jet sign printer. If I can get the kind of UV and scuff-and-scratch protection I’m looking for, we may make our move now.

This is Seth Godin from November of last year:

If you’re in any business where the cost to enter as a competitor is very low, you’ve got this problem. The minute there are big profits being made, competitors will flood in and steal them. This is why there are five times as many real estate brokers in San Francisco as in Steubenville, Ohio. Because the houses cost five times as much, the commissions are five times as great, so brokers show up in enough volume that everyone goes back to making exactly the same amount of money.

The only way to win is to break the rules. To play by your own rules, creating a market in which the cost of entry is very high, or even impossible. If you’re the only one, then you win, by default.

Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner, in addition to everything else we’ve talked about, I will produce huge, stunning, traffic-stopping, custom yard signs for your home in less than 24 hours. Is there any other Realtor you’re talking to who will make you this offer?

Further notice: Doable. Two days turnaround, which is fine. The funny part is, our current sign philosophy (which is version 2.0 for us) is losing the CRS Read more

August 2, 2006

The Long Tail in real estate photography . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Chris Anderson at the Long Tail weblog on how switching from film to digital media changes movie acting and directing:

“I think shooting in digital changes acting as much as film changed stage acting, or as sound changed film,” said Bill.

Why? Because film costs a lot and must be used sparingly, while digital tape is practically free. The difference between the scarcity economics of film and the abundance economics of digital is, as Bill put it, “the difference between pointing a loaded gun at someone and a toy gun. You point a loaded gun at them and they’re going to act different. A film camera is a loaded gun. Digital is not.”

The principle is the same for real estate photography: If you’re not paying for a photographer’s time, nor even for film and processing, you have no reason not to take a lot of photos and simply toss the ones that don’t work out.

Man! That Long Tail is everywhere!

Technorati Tags: , ,

August 2, 2006

High phinance on the editorial page . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I lived in Phoenix when the Arizona Republic was still a great American newspaper, a daily example of how good a mainstream media outlet could be if it worked from fact, not bias. The Copy Desk — the folks who write headlines and captions — was rich with poets and punsters in those days, which meant a lot to me, too.

Long gone. The paper was bought by Gannett and over the last decade has been infested if not infiltrated with ideologues. Even the smallest item is suspect, but major issues are always reported from the slant of one long-range agenda or another. For example, the repeated mentions of allegedly homeless schoolteachers and firefighters is part of a propaganda campaign to pass ‘affordable housing’ legislation. Soviet-style, the paper will run half-a-dozen glowing puff-pieces on a pet topic on one day.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, they’re really bad at it. Anyone schooled in rhetoric can see right through it. Here’s an example from today’s Editorial page:

News flash: The law of gravity wasn’t suspended in the Valley. In last year’s sizzling real estate market, home prices and sales kept going up.

And up. And up.

At least one of four sales was to a speculator. Prices skyrocketed 55 percent in 2005. Sellers raked in profits as bidding wars drove up prices.

And now, an astonishing number of people are startled to find that the law of gravity still applies to the Phoenix area.

Ignore the real estate argument, which is really no more or less stupid than the ones that erupt, Tourettes-like, from those afflicted with enbubbulation. What matters is that finance is not physics. Equating the two is specious. So much the better, the idiot editorialist doesn’t even understand the law of gravity.

So what’s the purpose? To gull the gullible — among whom the author might nevertheless be numbered — into believing that economics describes unavoidable events and relationships in the same way that physics does. Proximate masses must accelerate toward each other, the lesser toward the greater? Yup, and if a market booms it must bust, if Moneybags got richer then Penniless must Read more

August 2, 2006

Trulia maptivating . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jeff at Trulia.com ate my feed and set up what I needed to make my own map. You can customize many details. Note that while Trulia gives you a color palette to work from, you can plug in your own hexadecimal values for web-safe colors. Very, very slick…

BloodhoundRealty’s Historic Properties


Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

August 2, 2006

Real estate photography snapshot: Choosing a camera . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I keep meaning to write about real estate photography, and I keep not getting it done. Let’s consider this a first cut, to which I may return more than once.

Mark Reibman of Rain City Guide has written two great posts on digital photography for real estate, and we can only pray that he does more. I lack his talent, but the wonderful thing about photography is that quality can be an emergent property of quantity: Any one photo I take might stink, but if I take 500 shots, one of them might accidentally kiss the forehead of greatness. Film and prints were cheap, but digital photos are next door to being free. We can take lots and lots of photos and cull down to those that present the property in the best possible light.

Camera selection is always a problem. The two most-advertised features of digital cameras, mega-pixels and zoom lenses, are the two you need least.

Except for print reproduction, the best size for a real estate photo is 640 x 480 pixels — which is 0.3 megapixels. Ideally, your everyday camera should be able to produce that size image without post-processing. The photos on your web pages can be bigger than this, but not by much. If you try to load 20 images on a page, with each image weighing in at one megabyte or more, you’ll overtax most web browsers — well after you’ve overtaxed the patience of your audience.

What you want from a lens is not a long zoom but the widest possible angle. Most digital cameras have their widest angle setting at 45 – 55mm, if the lens were on a 35mm film-camera equivalent. A few cameras get down to 38mm. This is inadequate. What you want is 28mm or less — with reservations. The Fuji FinePix E500 shown in the sidebar is an excellent everyday real estate camera. It gets down to 28mm, which is very good for most rooms. The flash recycles fairly quickly. It will do 4 megapixels at the high end, which is good enough for lower-quality print work. But it will also work Read more

August 1, 2006

Losing the homestead to a sucker’s bet . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Real Estate Bloggers have a nice post on one of my pet peeves in real estate, the lease option/lease purchase scam:

If you are serious about buying a home, spend the time that you would have rented a lease purchase and save hard, clean up your credit report, and focus on the opportunity. By buying into the opportunity for a lease purchase you are limiting your opportunities to one home and putting yourself into a relationship that could end up setting you further behind in your attempts to become a homeowner.

Songwriter James McMurtry (son of novelist Larry McMurtry) nails the issue in Choctaw Bingo:

Uncle Slayton’s got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He’s cut that corner pasture into acre lots
He sells ’em owner financed
Strictly to them that’s got no kind of credit
‘Cause he knows they’re slackers
When they miss that payment
Then he takes it back

If interest rates rise substantially, we may see a return to the days when financially solvent people purchased homes with carry-backs, wraps or land contracts. But, for now, these tricks are just one more sucker’s bet for folks who got themselves into trouble in the first place by being suckers for just about anything.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

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