Month: October 2006 (page 4 of 7)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Culled from my email this morning:

AD TEXT:

Relocating to Phoenix AZ?
Hit the ground running. Tour homes
by net with smart, hi-tech Realtors
www.BloodhoundRealty.com

Ad Status: Suspended – Pending Revision
Ad Issue(s): Trademark in Ad Content

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad: “hi”.

Adwords has been very good to us, for years now. There was a time when the ROI on our Google spend was incredible. But it’s a diminishing return. Other Realtors have discovered it, bidding up our keywords and thus bidding down our positions. And regular users have trained themselves to prefer organic over paid results.

So it’s doubly-smart for Adwords to tell me that “hi” is a trademark just when I’m turning the boat, as it were.

“Do no evil” but go right ahead and shoot yourself in the foot. It’s the American way of doing business…

Technorati Tags: real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli made me re-write the ad for flat fee buyer representation last night. He convinced me that trying to sell the whole idea in a space ad would not be as effective as driving traffic to a web page, where we are free to discuss the idea at any length necessary.

This is the draft of the new ad:

If you click on the image, a PDF version will open up, for easier reading.

The modern name for this style of advertising is “advertorial,” but this idea was invented a century ago by Claude Hopkins. This is direct response advertising. The theory is that the buyer wants to be informed and will pursue dense text to gather information.

Properly deployed, an ad like this would be run in different versions — different headlines, different body copy, different offers — to see which version pulls the optimum response — not necessarily biggest response, but highest-profit response. For an ad like this, I can use a different web page for every version to measure response. Moreover, I can build different versions of the web page for a particular ad and test those against each other as well.

Hopkins believed that if you couldn’t (or didn’t) measure your response to find out what was and was not working, you were wasting your advertising dollars. Most advertising is not done this way, precisely because most advertising dollars are wasted.

Richard has already hit me with detailed instructions about what to do with the design of this ad. I have one or more revision cycles on the copy, plus I need to re-write the web page. Even so, we’re just that close to being ready to roll, and I’m showing with a flat fee client later today…

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, compensation for buyer representation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I love Metropolitan Phoenix. I understand that some people don’t, but for me it is the perfect paradise on Earth. So do please understand that the withering critique I am about to offer is directed only at the gullibility of some of the people who live here and not at the place itself.

Okayfine. Look at this picture:

This is the confluence of two freeways, de facto some of the most valuable real estate that can be created by fiat of state. Just east of the SR-101 Freeway, the City of Tempe is building a huge shopping mall, which is what you expect to find where two freeways come together. Just east of that, they have built the Tempe Town Lake in the dry riverbed of the Salt River, creating even more very valuable real estate on the banks of the fake lake.

However, an unintended side effect of the giant inflated pontoons that contain the Tempe Town Lake is that any water that happens to flow down the riverbed of the Salt is trapped upstream, creating what I have named the Mesa Town Swamp. To my knowledge, no one but me has ever written about the Mesa Town Swamp, but, as it happens, some of the pilings of the SR-202 Freeway are embedded in the swampy riverbed. I will bet a large dollar that the engineers who planned those pilings did not plan for them to be planted into perpetually saturated soil. (This not to mention the West Nile Virus mosquito-breeding environment of standing water. Nor the more immediate threat that enraged bearded Birkenstockers will declare the Mesa Town Swamp a wetland wildlife refuge, to be preserved unmolested to the very edge of doom.)

But wait. There’s more. In the lower middle of that map, there is a golf course, to which we will return. To the right is a huge city park with it own little fake lake, but just above the golf course are some silver buildings, expressing what the City of Mesa thought was the most important thing to be built at the confluence of two freeways: A water treatment plant. Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I gripe about the meager little 350 words I get in my column in the West Valley sections of the Arizona Republic. What I want is 1,500 words on page one of the Sunday Buiness section! But today’s column (permanent link) is an example of how 350 words can effect a radical change:

 
For-sale-by-owner sellers can help move real estate market into new buyers’ world

For now, if you want to negotiate a lower buyer’s agent commission, you have to assert yourself by saying those five little words: “How much do you charge?”

Even though buyers traditionally have not done this, asking that question will be doubly profitable. You could save thousands of dollars and you will learn right away whom you are dealing with. Does the agent think you exist for his or her benefit, like a cow to be milked for commissions? Or does your Realtor know that you are the boss and you have every right to exercise a boss’ authority over your employee’s compensation?

There is an even better way to do this, but it’s one that will require a change in the Way Things Have Always Been Done.

Instead of offering a hefty “co-broke” commission, sellers could offer a nominal commission in the MLS, then concede 3 percent of the sales price directly to the buyer — to be used at the buyer’s discretion to pay for representation, closing costs, etc.

With that one simple reform, we would go from buyers having to initiate fee negotiations with reluctant agents to agents very eagerly bringing the topic up themselves. In essence, buyers would be on the same playing field as sellers, bargaining with agents who know they are applying for a job.

Will this reform be put into effect? Not easily, and probably not soon. The “co-broke” commission predates buyer’s representation, and sellers — and many listing agents — still treat it as a bribe to get the buyer’s agent to betray the buyer’s interests.

But there is one type of seller who has no stake in the Way Things Have Always Been Done: for-sale-by-owner sellers. Homeowners selling through limited-service brokerages also can afford to Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had lunch today with Ed Robson of Robson Communities. This was something Tom Horton set up, and he’s been campaigning for it for months. I think maybe both Robson and I wondered what might be the benefit of such a meeting, and I certainly didn’t want to embarrass Tom by being underwhelming. I’m a Realtor, very proudly. Ed Robson is a demi-billionaire. There’s a difference.

All my dread was wasted. We talked about flat fee buyer’s brokerage, and Robson was so completely sold on the idea that he had me present it to his finance VP. Ed Robson is a life-long hard-charging salesman, and he simply loved the idea of screwing down hard on the big-savings-in-exchange-for-the-commitment. This is true closing, a rare phenomenon in real estate sales.

I walked them through how our wives might decide that we were moving, which is how things often work out for men (roof, fridge, garage, TV — what more do you need?). When I got home from the rest of my day, I posted a comment at Mike’s Corner touching on some of the same issues:

To be honest, I don’t even like locally-available consumer-level MLS access — not even our own. Some IDX systems provide more detail than others, but there is nothing like the kind of control that comes from having full access to hundreds of unique data fields. If you can’t search to a very short list of high-probability candidates, one of which is the home you will end up buying, what you have is not home search but a wish book — a wheel-spinning toy useful for no purpose except wasting your time.

If you’re doing a transcontinental relocation, you need more search power than you currently have available. At a minimum, you need a Realtor to feed you more rigorous results than you can get on your own. Moreover, you probably wouldn’t know how to do the search you want done, anyway. The idea that Realtors have lost control of the MLS is absurd. If you want to make that data dance the way I do, you have to do it as Read more