There seems to be more egg available than faces to wear it.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Month: September 2006 (page 10 of 15)
Start from this page. What you should see is a self-running slide show of seven photos and their captions with manual controls. Now go to your browser’s preferences and turn off Javascript. Refresh the page. Now you should get the same seven photos and captions stacked up vertically. More than 98% of all web browsers have Javascript by now, but the super-lo-tech version also serves as the search-engine-spider-readable version of the text.
(If either of these things don’t happen, let me know. Also, don’t forget to turn Javascript back on.)
I didn’t build the slide show. I have one that I built years ago, but this is a lot richer. We’re integrating this with our content management tools so that every new page we build for a listing from now on will be built as this kind of either/or slide show. All of the pages will be site/appearance-independent, also, because I want to build all of my new sites as WordPress weblogs. The look and feel of these slide-show pages will come with the weblog template.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
I will be one of the guests on tomorrow’s broadcast of KJZZ’s Here and Now radio program. One of the big names of Phoenix real estate analysis will be there, as well, either R.L. Brown or Elliott Pollack. ASU’s Dr. Jay Butler cannot be there, more’s the pity. Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, will be a guest blogger, stirring the pot by keyboard.
The topic: The Phoenix-area real estate market.
The show will be broadcast on Wednesday from 11 am to 12 Noon on KJZZ 91.5 FM. A podcast will be available on Here and Now’s web page soon afterward.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
From Google Blogoscoped, Google has pulled the plug entirely on the Belgian newspaper that is suing it for theft of content. Whatever the merits of the case, acting out of caprice or spite while a judge’s gavel is poised over your head is dumb. This could be the tech’s Maginot Line, where Web 2.0 meets Government 0.99…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation
Rory Siems at Laguna Niguel Real Estate Blog has a post on using business cards for collateral promotion. I think this is a fantastic idea. In cost-benefit terms, the business card form factor may be the perfect print ad medium. It’s pretty lousy for conveying a lot of information, but it is an extremely portable, pocketable format for inciting interest and directing that interest to where the details can be delivered in detail.
We use business cards whenever we want to target-market homes or individuals. I can hold my own hand for the design — kludgey but proficient — so we can turn a new set of cards around in 48 hours or less. They’re inexpensive to buy, to ship and to distribute, so we can put 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 cards on the street in no time at all.
A primary application is ‘Open House’ announcements. We don’t do ‘Just Listed’ cards. We’d rather have potential buyers come and see the house for themselves. If we can clearly identify the neighborhoods where our buyer should be living, we’ll broadcast ‘Open House’ cards house-by-house. The cards above are typical ‘Open House’ cards. We always use the back of the card. The back copy you’re seeing here is very similar to the back copy we use on our personal business cards.
We do do ‘Just Sold’ cards, because we want for the nearby neighbors to apprehend the quality of effort we bring to our listings. Every card we do for a listing will promote that home’s custom web site, of course. The flyer boxes we use have a special pocket for business cards near the top. That way, if someone doesn’t want to take a flyer, they can take a card instead. Often, we will use the home’s card in the ‘Take One’ flyer stand inside the house, as well.
The image above to the right is the back of a ‘Just Sold’ card. I believe in the power of the written word. Almost always with a card like this, I’m going to use the front face to sell the specific idea and the back Read more
I’m up to my elbows in Ajax (“You’re soaking in it!”), but I don’t want this to get washed away in the suds: With respect to Redfin’s assertion of propriety, Kevin Boer at In The Trenches (blogrolled) provides a plausible explanation for how Redfin might be so adept at identifying impropriety.
An idea has been bugging me, and I don’t know what to do about it. Realtors are too much identified with The Real Estate King, the cheesy, sleazy used car salesmen. But there is another image of the Realtor, one among those we used to call The Better Men — maybe stodgy, maybe stuffy, but a man of firm and fixed principles. Real estate 2.0 (come and get me!) might bring us greater efficiencies, but if it brings us even worse behavior — how is that a benefit? Zillow.com whispers the truth and shouts the lie. The listings aggregators steal content like bums in Grand Central Station mining the coin returns on pay-phones. And Redfin.com seemingly devotes its every living moment to making street criminals look like men of character. This is not an improvement.
If you think about this at all, please think carefully. I am up to my elbows in Ajax — with which I intend to cleanse Phoenix of every last greasy remnant of The Real Estate King. But we gain absolutely nothing if we remake our industry as a cabal of cheaper and more-efficient moral midgets. The realty.bots might be famous and they might have a lot of money behind them. But if they are our future, we might as well have changed nothing…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Ubertor has been teasing a new mystery feature on their weblog for days. What is it? Text me and I might tell. No, wait. Text them. What they’re offering is live chat for their agent web sites with live bodies at Ubertor to pick up the chat-slack. I’m nobody’s shill (and we code all our own web stuff by hand), but Ubertor really does seem to go the extra mile.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Redfin asserts itself. You were saying…?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
The other day I highlighted some real estate weblogs that I read every day, and, while that article is true, it’s not the whole truth. The Republic gives me all of 350 words in which to map whatever universe I see behind my eyes, so I end up focusing on the larger landmarks. In fact, I read from dozens of weblogs every day, and there are five dozen or more at any given time that I track constantly in my feed reader (Vienna for the Macintosh). As a matter of fairness to all the fine weblogs omitted on Friday, here is a prettified rendering of my OPML file.
Note bene: If your weblog isn’t on my daily diet and you think it should be, say so.
Apple blossoms — all things Macintosh
Apple Hot News
FreeMacWare.com
MacOSXHints.com
The Apple Blog
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
TidBITS
Weblogging and search marketing
Blogging Pro
Copyblogger
John Battelle's Searchblog
Lorelle on WordPress
Google Blogoscoped
Marketing
Seth's Blog
WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs
Arizona real estate Weblogs
BlogArizona.com – An Arizona Real Estate Blog
Phoenix Real Estate [Blog]
The Phoenix Real Estate Guy
Real estate weblogs
360Digest
4 Realz
Agent CEO
Altos Research Real Estate Insights
ARDELL's Seattle Area Real Estate Blog
Behind The Curtain
blogsonrei.com
BlueRoof Blog
Boulder Colorado Real Estate Research Blog
Carnival of Real Estate
Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log
Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog
FollowSteph.com
Free The Drones
Hamptons Real Estate Blog
Housing Panic – The Bubble Blog with Attitude
Inman Blog
Matrix
Mike's Corner <br> Web 2.0 For Real Estate Pros
MOCO Real Estate News
Mortgage Blog – Industry insights from lenderama
Northern Virginia Real Estate Guide
PressReal.com
Real Central VA
real estate 2.0
Real Estate Investing For Real Blog – BiggerPockets.com
Real Estate Marketing Blog
realblogging
RealEstateUndressed
Realty Blogging
Realty Thoughts
RealtyObjectives
ReyEstate.com
Searchlight Crusade
Seattle Real Estate Professionals
Seattle's Rain City Real Estate Guide
SeekingAlpha US Market Stocks
Sellsius
SocketSite™
The Future of Real Estate Marketing
the Property Monger
The Real Estate Bloggers
The Real Estate Tomato
The San Diego Home Blog
TheREALTYgram Blogger
TRANSPARENT REAL ESTATE (www.TransparentRE.com)
True Gotham
Trulia Blog
Ubertor Real Estate Blog
Urban Trekker Blog
UrbanDigs: Tips on Profitting on New York City Real Estate
Zillow Blog
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at BlueRoof.com Blog. Our Lady Pompeia is in attendance, along with 30+ other articles on state-of-the-art real estate.
Mark your calendars: We are hosting the Carnival of Real Estate the week of October 9th. Whet your mind, sharpen your pencil and bring your A-game: I have a taste for the astounding, confounding or aboundingly profound, and I’m a tough grader. (The Leggy Blonde is a soft-touch, if you want to try apple-polishing.) But if you bring your best, we’ll do our best to bring it to the world.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, dual agency, real estate, real estate marketing
In an involuntary spasm of honesty, the Arizona Republic admits the truth:
The journalism school is considered the most crucial component of the new campus’ second phase, in part because it boasts an enrollment of nearly 1,800 students. Most of those are undergraduates who are more likely to live in downtown Phoenix.
That’s important because increasing the number of downtown residents is key to achieving Phoenix’s overall revitalization goals for the area.
Arizona State University has become the default financier of politically-favored real estate projects.
- The City of Scottsdale expropriated the Los Arcos Mall but was left holding the bag when hockey baron Steve Ellman made an even better sweetheart deal in Glendale. But here comes ASU’s Skysong to the rescue.
- ASU West owns a half-section of land in Northwest Phoenix, a gift parcel, that it cannot use productively and cannot sell. So it is building a Kierland-like shopping mall on the land — three miles away from the flagging MetroCenter Mall, which sits on taxable land. It would be beyond cynical to wonder if someone has plans for that land, once its value plummets.
- And here the Republic actually admits that the purpose of the inane Downtown Campus of ASU has nothing to do with the students. The purpose is to graft an artificial population of around-the-clock residents into Downtown Phoenix, in the hope that this, at last, will cause a true downtown to erupt there — as organically as mold in a petri dish. The cost to the taxpayers of massively increasing the value of the land Downtown, much of it owned by very powerful players, including (ahem) the parent company of the Arizona Republic: They admit to $800 million, so it’s probably a whole lot more.
But don’t get the idea that increasing the value of land owned by very rich people is the only reason for plopping a pretend university campus in Downtown Phoenix. Far from it! The students are also needed to make the insane Trolley line we’re building look busy — as they trundle back to the real ASU campus at least once a day for their real college classes.
You could say Read more
Who can best judge what a piece of real property will sell for?
We all know the answer to that: The best estimate of the value of real estate will come from an experienced real estate appraiser, preferably one with a lot of experience in the neighborhood where the subject property is found.
After that, a Broker’s Price Opinion — same stipulations — will come second. In certain very homogenous neighborhoods, a Broker’s Price Opinion may be just as accurate as a full appraisal — and a lot cheaper.
Third place belongs to an experienced agent’s Comparative/Competitive Market Analysis. This can be very accurate in homogenous neighborhoods, substantially less so in areas where the homes or lots differ significantly from property to property.
Last place goes to the results produced by an Automated Valuation Method such as Zillow.com or NetValueCentral.com in the Phoenix area. I have written a lot about the defects in Zillow’s methods and practices, as has Sellsius&176; Real Estate blog. The Cliff’s Notes: An AVM does not evaluate houses, but rather statistics and records about houses. It cannot, for an extreme example, tell you whether the house is still there at the time of the evaluation.
It is fairly common to hear people say that AVMs will get more accurate in time. In fact, there is a finite limit to how much they can be improved. A CMA is essentially an all-paper calculation, with no inspection of the property on the ground. But a CMA is produced by an agent who has a great deal of on-the-ground experience, most of which will never be encoded into an AVM’s software. And nothing that would be considered an unzillowable factor — landscaping, decor, orientation, views, etc. — can ever be automatically accounted for by an AVM.
But: The other end of this question is need versus costs. If you want to know what your supervisor’s house is worth — use Zillow.com. It costs nothing, and close enough is good enough. If you need to know what to offer on a house you want to buy, you need a CMA at least. The good news is, your Read more
A vigorous cross-examination of David G. from Zillow.com. The richer ore is in the comments, so be sure to keep scrolling.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
This is from email I had earlier this week:
Jim Cronin from The Real Estate Tomato and I were just talking about real estate blogging being what real estate websites will begin to morph into. He sent me to your blog and I was wondering if that has been productive for you as a lead generator.
For the first point, I’m with Jim wall-to-wall. In every second of my spare time, I am preparing to repurpose all of our content to weblogs or weblog-like pages. Last weekend my son Cameron reformulated our content engines to make them site-independent (and therefore appearance-independent), and I want him to take a second pass at everything to build content that will look like an Ubertor site to people but will search like friendly old HTML 3.0 to Google. There are other weblog-like things we’re doing at the transaction-management level. It would be reasonable to say that in due course weblogging will be the defining metaphor of our internet presence.
For the second point — has weblogging been a productive lead generator? — I don’t know. A fuller answer is more complicated than that, but the whole issue is trumped by an even larger point: I don’t care.
I want to approach business as a vendor in the same way I approach it as a customer. In other words, I don’t want people treating me as a lead, as a link in their food chain. As soon as I start to feel like a salesman’s prey, I get creeped out. I don’t have to feel that way for very long to get gone. On the other hand, if I feel that you are looking out for my interests, offering me the sage counsel I have sought — and perhaps the advice I hadn’t known to ask for — then we have a sound basis for going ahead with a transaction.
There’s a lot of mercenary weblogging advice out there right now, and much of it strikes me as being doubly-dysfunctional. Yes, weblogging has huge SEO advantages, but if you go out of your way to write SEO-attractive copy, you will have Read more
Here is a good example of why short-term real estate numbers are so useless.
In Arizona, the foreclosure rate leapt nearly 27 percent in August compared to July.
Wow! Twenty-seven percent! That’s huge… right? Wrong.
Foreclosures in August were down nearly 12 percent from the same month last year[.]
Last August, there were almost no foreclosures. We were in the midst of an unprecedented housing boom.
So what does “leapt nearly 27 percent” mean? It means about as much as a four-year-old leaping 27 percent higher than a three-year-old. Tell the Chicken Little Brigade to stand down — and belay that call to the Olympic Committee…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing