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Month: September 2006 (page 4 of 15)

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #69: The language of differentiation . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Kevin Price writes on “The language of differentiation”:

Only if we are correctly positioned can a difference have the desired effect. That is, a customer must perceive our position as being relevant to his or her needs, and different from that of our competitors. The desired effect of advertising is to bring our brand and a customer together and unite them; make a connection. This requires the twofold action of separating your customer from your competitor and separating you from your competitor. Says the good book: “one must separate things in order to unite them.”

Differentiation occurs in the attributes of a product or brand, not in the benefits. A difference is a character trait of the brand that is not applicable to a competitor’s brand. It occurs because you choose to do something different from your competitors, or to do the same things competitors do but do them differently. But there are a few catches.

The difference must to be able to be translated into a benefit that is desired by prospects. There’s not a lot of point in being different if no one wants what you’re offering and the difference is meaningless. The difference has to be able to be perceived so that it can be labelled. Correct positioning depends on this combination of perception and labelling. The difference has to have life, or at the very least the potential of life. The simple fact is you cannot have drama without life, and because customers expect your advertising to tell a story that is meaningful over a period of time. The difference has to be relative to competition, even if that competition is your own brand.

Good advertising comes from understanding exactly what forces drive your prospects; what the force of your differentiation is and exactly what the right positioning is. Positioning derives from the benefit that arises out of the differentiation. Differentiation is the effect of what it is you’re doing that is different. It is the effect because it results in an attribute that can be claimed or labelled. Positioning on the other Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #68: Many factors affect home’s value . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is from my Arizona Republic column:

Buyers will try to compare homes on a price-per-square-foot basis, but this is useful only for highly comparable homes – similar square footage on similar lots in similar neighborhoods.

Same subdivision is good. Same builder is better. Same exact floor plan is best.

The more differences there are between the homes, the less comparable they are and the less useful it is to compare their price per square foot.

There are a lot of reasons for this, the three most important being location, location and location.

The desirability of the underlying dirt is the overriding consideration. Even within the same subdivision, it matters where the lots are located, how big they are and what value-added features (or value-subtracting detractions) they are near.

We go on to consider some other factors that can influence the value of a home: single versus multi-story and the amount of variety in the shape of the exterior perimeter.

But wait. There’s more.

Ultimately, though, price per square foot can be misleading because it tends to treat all space equally.

The costliest space in a home is the kitchen. After that come the bathrooms and any space with running water. Mere bedrooms, dining rooms, family rooms, game rooms, dens, etc., are very cheap by comparison.

The exterior walls of the home are expensive because they have all the framing, the heavy insulation and the wiring. Interior walls are wood framing wrapped in sheetrock.

True value-added features matter a lot: Extra bathrooms, soft-water loops, security or home-theater pre-wiring, central vacuum systems, fireplaces, etc. Relatively unimproved extra space matters a lot less in pricing a home.

This is why 1,200-square-foot homes can sell for a lot more per square foot than 2,400-square-foot homes.

And, to think! — all that comes into play before we even get to the unzillowables…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #67: Weblog Review: Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a great affection for Daniel Rothamel of the Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog. He’s my kind of serious Realtor, devoted to doing the right thing no matter what the price.

Plus which, he writes a lot, which scores very highly with me. Local real estate, national real estate, basketball, linguam latinam, real estate reality-TV — nothing escapes his purview.

The site is Typepad with its goofy trackbacks, but you can’t have everything. The pages are clean and readable.

Here’s Daniel in action:

When I’m not practicing real estate, one of the things that I do is officiate basketball (I mentioned this once before). The letters from my officiating supervisors have been coming in, the rules clinics are coming up, and the season is on the horizon. All this got me thinking about the similarities between being a REALTOR and being a referee. Officiating has helped me tremendously when it comes to business, and vice versa. Here are some things I find similar about being a referee and being a REALTOR:

1) Referees adhere to a code of ethics, too.

2) For REALTORS, a well-managed transaction brings satisfaction. For the referee, it is the well-managed game.

3) REALTORS must build trust with their clients, referees must do the same with coaches and players.

4) Referees and REALTORS must possess and constantly improve upon their skills of interpersonal relations.

5) The technology of the Internet is changing the way REALTORS conduct business, Internet and video technology is changing the officiating landscape.

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #66: Ask the Broker: Homeownership and the poor . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From my sister-in-law:

Why isn’t there more opportunity for poor people to own their homes?

If you were to substitute the word “horses” for “homes”, the question would answer itself, wouldn’t it? Poor people rent rather than own because their income is too low, their credit scores are too low, or their debt-to-income ratios are too high. That much is not rocket science, and it would apply to any other expensive financed possession we might name.

People very enamored of coercive charity can imagine circumstances in which financially unqualified people are given homes — or are given heavy subsidies toward buying homes. But this can only happen by taking wealth away from other people — people who have earned that wealth and deserve every penny of it. Poor people might get more home than they have earned, but only because other people are getting less home than they deserve. This kind of redistribution of purported injustice is made possible only by force — and, by my reckoning, that force is the most vicious injustice of all.

But, even so, there are two persistent problems. First, people tend not to respect what they did not have to earn and deserve. This is nicely illustrated by the awful condition of free or subsidized housing all over the Earth.

Moreover, unless the problem is to repeat itself, the poor recipients of subsidized housing would have to be forbidden from selling it at its true appreciated value — lest it become unobtainable by other poor people in the future.

The poor do not buy homes because for whatever reason they don’t develop the attributes of mind, character and behavior that lead to homeownership. And, even if they were to be given free or heavily-subsidized homes, the restrictions that would have to be placed on the sale of those homes would prevent those poor people from profitably developing those same attributes of mind, character and behavior even after they have become homeowners — in name only…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #65: A good hot fire sheds light, too . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From SEOmoz blog, a definitive resource, how to use controversy to attract readers to your real estate weblog:

Ingredients: A passionate audience or community with strong (and hopefully misguided) feelings about a subject, person, company, etc.

Process: Create content through a blog, article, report or statistics that challenges commonly-held beliefs or assumptions or specifically challenges the views of a very popular person or organization. Be prepared to defend your positions, write about them in comments on blogs, in forums, chatrooms, online groups and wherever appropriate. Sometimes, you can even leverage the editorial section of a newspaper and re-print online.

Results: Heavy traffic levels come through multiple channels, but your biggest source is often the direct response of the disagreeing party. Be sure you’re handling the dispute in a professional and even-handed manner and you can earn a respectable following. It’s all dependent on industry and size, but a between a few hundred and a few thousand RSS subscriptions are usually on the table.

Note however, that you don’t have to do this as an SEO tactic. It could be that you just like taking a stand. I’ve heard about people like that…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #64: How to be a great public speaker . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, blargy treats us to “How to Be a Great Public Speaker, by a Former Nervous Wreck”:

Did you know that when surveyed about their greatest fear, people more often say public speaking than death? That’s right, apparently people would rather die than have to address a group of people.

Hm, must be bad.

I used to be one of those people. For me the mere thought of standing in front of a crowd made me feel like tossing my lunch. But the thing is I really wanted to be a good speaker. There’s power in it and it gives you the chance to really spread your word quickly. And let’s face it, it’s also downright cool to be able to command a whole audience.

So, how’s it done?

I’ve heard a lot of “solutions” in my time, mostly from the pop-psychology corner. Everything from “drink some alcohol right before you go on” to “curl your toes over and over as you speak.” And of course, we’ve all heard that it helps to picture the audience naked.

These are techniques for distraction, for putting your mind elsewhere.

And that’s exactly why they don’t work. They distract you at the very moment when you should be at your very best.

I think this is a great article — worth pursuing, worth printing out. If you work in sales and you can’t speak extemporaneously in front of any crowd, you need to change one or the other right away…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #63: Divorcing couples need togetherness on sale of house . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a special favorite from my Arizona Republic column:

Consider this: I walk into a home, escorting buyers. In the living room there are two pieces of furniture: a big-screen television and a lawn chair.

The bedrooms are empty, except for the master bedroom, where there is a bare mattress. In the kitchen, there are dirty dishes in the sink and half-empty takeout containers and beer in the fridge.

It’s a divorce, of course. Mom and the kids are gone. Dad got custody of the TV.

It would be funny if it weren’t so nakedly tragic.

I get paid to hear the stories that empty houses whisper. This house tells me not just about the divorce, but that the divorce isn’t a relatively smooth one. It hints that the house is in pre-foreclosure or is for sale by a judge’s orders.

It confides in the certitude of silence that my buyers can steal it for tens of thousands of dollars less than market value.

Ack! Mom and Dad own a very valuable asset. What should they do to protect their money?

Frankly, both of them should move out, leaving the home vacant. If one is to stay, then they should agree to leave the furniture behind — and clothes in the closets. I should not be able to tell that the sellers are divorcing.

Here’s the takeaway point: “It’s sad the marriage didn’t work out. But properly staging the home for sale can at least help to pay for a happier divorce.”

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #62: Weblog Review: Hamptons Real Estate Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you smell the salt in the air? Doesn’t it make you crave linguine in clam sauce? Welcome to the Hamptons Real Estate Blog, a place of salt, surf and sand — and huge, rambling, very expensive houses.

There’s little enough we have to go by, in reading a weblog. Style is a hard thing to develop. You write and write, and for the longest time, you write every which way. If you didn’t attach your name to your prose, no one would know it was yours.

This is not true of weblogger Michael Daly, who has a voice all his own. I’ll read just about anything he writes, simply to have read him.

Witness:

Confidence – Many of today’s agents come from other successful careers in finance, advertising, law, hospitality, and retail. But real estate is a product unto its own. I’ve seen successful bankers crumble at the rejection and lack of loyalty that a real estate agent sometimes has to swallow. I’ve seen grown women brought to tears because their best friends from childhood bought a house from someone else after they dragged them around for the past six months, looking at everything they said they wanted to see. If you don’t have the confidence to take the ups and downs, and if you can’t accept that fact that real estate agents are often held in the same regard as car salespeople (which encourages clients and customers to be less than completely truthful due to the intrinsic lack of respect for the industry in general), then you’re going to struggle. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about who you are (or who you were) – it’s about how you conduct yourself in the moment.

Commitment – Working as an independent contractor in the real estate business is different than working a 9-to-5 job on Lexington Avenue. If you don’t show up, you don’t have a chance to make a commission. Getting to know the market, attending brokers’ open houses (not just the ones with lunch), learning how to read tax maps, negotiating the web-based tools of the trade, and standing in line and begging Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #61: Ask the Broker: How can I escape without taking a scrape . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a truly ugly problem:

I’m being transferred and need to sell my house in a new subdivision. Unfortunately, the builder is still selling new houses. To make matters worse, I bought during the summer of 2005, and the builder has actually reduced its price from what it sold it to me for. Do I have any hope at all of not losing a boatload of money?

Probably not.

In fact, better days are coming by and by — we just don’t know when by and by is.

If you can afford to, you can lease the property until the builder is gone and homes have appreciated enough to get you out from under. This may mean that the home will be cash-flow negative — the income will be less than the outflow — which means you will have to make up the short-fall out of your income. This may become a losing proposition overall.

A second possibility is to sell it as a lease-purchase at a future value that will get you out from under. You may still be cash-flow negative, but your buyer will probably be a more conscientious tenant. If he elects not to buy, you will keep any down payment, which can help with your expenses. You could end up doing this more than once

A third alternative is to sell the property for less than you owe on it, bringing your own money to the closing table to pay off the lender. As bad as this might seem, it’s better than putting a foreclosure on your credit…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #60: RSS for people who can’t think like Oprah . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From mezzoblue.com: “What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?”:

RSS/XML/Atom are technologies, but syndication is a process. RSS and Atom are two flavours of what is more or less the same thing: a ‘feed’ which is a wrapper for pieces of regularly and sequentially-updated content, be they news articles, weblog posts, a series of photographs, and more. For the purposes of this article, consider the terms interchangable. XML is the base technology both are built on, but that’s almost totally irrelevant; the orange buttons are mislabelled, and should read ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’ instead. Strange, but true.

Syndication is the process of using RSS/Atom for automated updates, another way of getting the information you want. You no doubt have a list of web sites you browse daily for updates, whether they’re stored in your bookmarks or your head. If you find yourself loading 20 or 30 sites a day, and you notice if a few stop updating as frequently, you’ll inevitably stop checking them.

What if there were instead some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn’t waste time checking those that haven’t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many.

Syndication provides the tools to do this. A news reader, or aggregator as they’re also known, is a program or a web site that automatically checks your list of bookmarks (which you only have to set up once) and lets you know what’s new on each site in your list.

It goes beyond simple updates though — the news reader works by pulling in the feeds of your various bookmarks. As we covered above, a feed is a wrapper for content items, so on top of notification, a feed delivers the content that has been updated itself. You may choose to read the new content in the news reader, or you may choose Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #59: How to explain RSS the Oprah way . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Back in Skinny Jeans teaches us “How to explain RSS the Oprah way”:

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

I don’t know if this is actually useful for anyone, but it’s a whale of a lot of fun.

The funniest part, really, is that a good RSS-feed reader takes away almost every need you might have for a web browser. Imagine how well that flies with people who have barely gotten a grip on their web browser in the first place. Now tell ’em about the semantic web…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #58: Don’t tell buyer’s agent your reason for selling . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is another favorite from my Arizona Republic column:

“My goodness! This house is gorgeous. I don’t know how you can bear to leave it.”

That’s me talking to a seller – while I’m in the home representing buyers.

It sounds like an innocuous remark, effusive small-talk, but what I’m doing is probing for motivation.

The most important fact is this: The seller should not be in the house while I’m there. It’s a kindness to the buyers to get out of their way so they can confer in comfort. But if you hang around the house, I’m going to talk to you and I’m going to extract every bit of information I can from you.

So the seller says, “Yes, we love it, but the payments are killing us.”

Excellent! We have financial pressure, leverage for my buyers in negotiation.

Or the seller says, “We’d love to stay, but my company’s transferring me.”

Almost as good: time pressure.

Or the seller says, “We’re building a home we love even more in Surprise.”

Financial pressure and time pressure. I’ll follow up to find out the deadline. If it’s relatively soon, we’re in the catbird seat.

This all seems so obvious to me. You should not be in the house at all. The fact is, I can read the house to get a fairly clear idea of your motivation, but why give me a chance to confirm my suspicions.

But suppose you just can’t get away. How should you answer my questions?

The best answer would be something like this: “It’s just time to move on.”

No emphasis, maybe even a hint of indifference in your voice. If you are truly in a hurry, if you’re under the gun from financial pressure or time pressure, it should say so in the listing.

But if you have the time to wait to get the best possible price for your home, don’t tell a buyer’s agent why you’re moving.

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #57: Weblog Review: Altos Research Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have nothing to say about the Altos Research Blog except, “Bring these folks to Arizona!”

They are utterly the apogee of analytical real estate weblogging. Without a perfectly telling chart, they’re completely tongue-tied. That’s not really true, but if you feel an urge to challenge their conclusions, sharpen your pencil first.

They’re running a Serendipity weblog, and their links are internally-shielded by software: You find what you clicked on without knowing what you had sought. That’s poetical, don’t you think? The trackbacks look like one of the three ways WordPress can do them, which makes me think they might be able to get rid of them altogether.

Clean, thoughtful, very detailed — with unnecessarily complicated weblogging software. Web geeks and complexity. Who’d put those two together…?

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #56: Ask the Broker: What should I look for when I’m evaluating a neighborhood to buy in . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is hard, so I’m going to make it easy:

What should I look for when I’m evaluating a neighborhood to buy in?

Because of the Fair Housing Laws, this is actually a difficult question to answer. I can give you some useful hints, though.

Visit your prospective neighborhood at 9:30 at night. Sit in your car and watch what happens. By 9:30, people in the neighborhood will be doing what they do at night.

Are they doing what you like to do? If so, you’ll like that neighborhood.

Are they doing things you don’t like to do — or worse, don’t want done around you? That neighborhood is not for you.

Obviously you’ll factor in location, structure, amenities and price. But if you don’t fit into your prospective neighborhood at 9:30 at night, you won’t fit in at any other time, either…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #55: Real estate weblogging? Get real . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here are four that I’ve had enough of:

Use lists.

Include polls, meters and other eye candy.

Do email interviews with the well-known.

Be anonymous.

Anonymity can be cool if there’s a reason for it. If you really are Deep Throat, I’ll cut you a break. If you’re hiding behind a mask to get away with being rude or vulgar — get real.

I have had it up to here with lists. It’s magazine writer crap, and they have already milked it to death. If you really have a reason to delineate something by list, I’ll go with you. If you’re trying to hook me with the top 15 ways to hook unsuspecting weblog readers — get real.

I’m not hugely crazy about graphics in weblog posts unless you’re illustrating something mere words cannot depict. If you’re throwing in a picture either because you can’t write or you think I can’t read — get real.

As for email interviews, that’s an oxymoron. If there is any reason for an interview — as against an essay or just plain email — it’s to hear the respondent under the pressure of time and circumstance. Bill Clinton’s melt-down on Fox News Sunday this week is a perfect example of why an interview must be done live. In other words — get real…

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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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