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Month: October 2006 (page 5 of 7)

October 12, 2006

Goodbye, MLS. Hello, CraigsList.com . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We had three listings close this week, a new listing going into the MLS, we’re both showing quite a bit, and we had our usual meta-projects — plus The Carnival of Real Estate. It’s been a busy week…

On top of all that, we took one of Cathy’s listings “private”. The house had been MLS-listed, but it wasn’t getting good traction, so Cathy and seller agreed to take it to the kind of hybrid listing we’ve been talking about: Cathy will continue to market the home as an “exclusive” listing, except that the 3% that had been offered as a co-broke through the MLS is now offered directly to the buyer, to be used at the buyer’s discretion.

This is the text from the flyer and the web page:

THE BUYER RULES!

The seller has set aside 3% of the purchase price to be used at the Buyer’s discretion. Use it to pay for a Buyer’s Agent, to reduce your down payment or to defray your closing costs.

I have an idea that there is a certain kind of buyer who likes the idea of going into a transaction without representation as a sort of fetish, the counterpart to the hard-line recidivist FSBO seller. Our challenge now is to find those buyers. Goodbye, MLS. Hello, CraigsList.com…

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October 12, 2006

The luxurious look and feel of true CMYK saturation . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s the sign for the new listing. I’m able to continue working at one-sixth scale in QuarkXPress, which is a huge time-saver. But this time, when I resampled the photos, I rendered them in CMYK (as against RGB) and saved them as PhotoShop EPS files. This made all the difference with the saturation. I can save the page as an EPS from Quark with the full-bleed preserved, then bring it into PhotoShop at 600% scale, 300DPI, CMYK, then save that as a CMYK TIFF file, which is what the printer wants to eat.

It’s possible to wrestle with printers about what their equipment can do, but it’s usually not advisable. If you give them exactly what they want, they’ll return the favor with alacrity — and alacrity is a big part of what we sell.

And what is the benefit of learning to hold your own hand? I made this sign on Tuesday morning. I’ll hang the finished product later today. That silly saturation problem might have taken who knows how much chatter to resolve — and how much time and money. In general, we like to spin off everything we can. But for the items directly related to our stock in trade, we want complete control over the quality.

JPEG hates the spectrum: The live image is quite a bit better-saturated than what you’re seeing here.

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October 12, 2006

Out of the sandbox and into the ether . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The weblog for 214 South 122nd Av is live. Not as easy as it might have been, not as hard as it could have been. I’m not 100% thrilled with the weblog template, but my plan is to vary them to fit the house in any case. What I have now is maybe 70% of the up-front effort to do another one. Cameron has been iteratively rewriting our content engine to work in any environment, and winching it into place here was relatively painless.

No new search results for “214 South 122nd Av”, but when I search on the tagline for these pages, I find every one of them — when everything but index.php was created yesterday afternoon.

It will take two or three more before I can do these with dispatch, but this wasn’t bad…

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October 11, 2006

Real estate weblogs and the Google Sandbox of Doom . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a new domain going live tonight, the first custom web site we have done for a real estate listing built as a weblog instead of a static web site. When we talked about this before, Free the Drones wondered if custom web sites might get lost for a span of time in the postulated Google sandbox, a place where Google, at least hypothetically, exiles new domains to make sure they are not spam, scams, who knows what.

The weblog is far from being finished, but I have results to report. I registered the domain on Sunday, but, because of a MySQL problem, didn’t install WordPress until Monday. The first new post on the weblog showed up at blogsearch.google.com in less than hour. I blogrolled from the new weblog to BloodhoundBlog, but this was the only thing I did in the way of an outbound link — or anything else of a proactive SEO nature. That link showed up in Technorati within a few hours. I’ve been wrestling with content engines, so the weblog has bascially sat around doing nothing since Monday.

This morning it showed up on the main Google search engine, along with its own pet splog!

Three days from registration, two days from going live as a WordPress weblog, in a painfully retarded form. Free the Drones would argue that the Sandbox would keep this weblog from scoring high on searches, but the only searches people are likely to make will turn up this weblog, given that it’s there. And: I don’t know if a static web site would have become available as quickly.

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October 11, 2006

Candles, incense, bells and ashes: Redeeming The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been very gratified by all the comments we’ve had, both public and private, about raising the standards for The Carnival of Real Estate. We did what we did because we were behind the wheel. We had control of the Carnival for this one week, and it would have been difficult and unseemly to take it away from us. But we didn’t know, going in, if we were going to incite admiration or riots — or simply indifference. Cathleen and I have the advantage of being stridently devoted to doing what we think is right, damn the consequences, but we really do hope to make an enduring change in the way this competition is judged.

No, this is not rocket science, brain surgery, world peace or any other presumptively momentous endeavor deployed fallaciously to diminish every smaller endeavor. But anything worth doing is worth doing well, wisely, completely, coming as close as we can attain to the sublimely perfect. Excellence is ennobling, and to make a habit of excellence is to lead a noble life. And as far from the earth-shakingly momentous as a Carnival of Real Estate entry might be, is is nevertheless a piece of your life — whether you are the writer or the reader — an irreplaceable portion of all the forever you will ever have. Whyever would you waste it?

Even so, the test of all this, going forward, will be what ZillowBlog — owner of The Carnival of Real Estate — elects to do, and then how each hosting weblog interprets any rules ZillowBlog might lay down. Practically speaking, nothing may change, and I am ordinarily a proud advocate of changing nothing. But if nothing changes in the rules and standards of the Carnival, what will change is the quality of the entries. Bad work drives out the good. If people who are thoughtful, talented and assiduous know that they will be held as the nominal equals of competitors who actually bring nothing to the competition, they will stop entering. The Carnival will come to be seen not as the harbinger of excellence but of its opposite.

That Read more

October 10, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate: Creams and cheeses . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is our list of second-tier winners in the Carnival of Real Estate. Like those we exhibited yesterday, these are all well-developed ideas pertinent to the real estate industry. These are all very worthy posts, the kind I consider eminently link-worthy, because they advance the meta-discussion that is real estate weblogging.

Working from interviews with real estate webloggers, Drew Meyers from Zillow Blog asks Why Do You Blog?

Todd Tarson of MOCO Real Estate News uses a favorite movie quote to lead us on a grand tour of red hot real estate issues.

From True Gotham, Douglas Heddings shares his thoughts on the real estate market in the Hamptons.

Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato points a loaded question at real estate practitioners: “Why Have A Website At All?”

If we take a turn around Mike’s Corner, Michael Price will treat us to a review of Waiting On Your Cat To Bark.

Drop your keyboard and grab your game controller: Daniel Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra is a Blogger For Frogger.

Writing from his ActiveRain weblog, Jonathan Dalton chronicles Bigfoot, Open MLS and other myths.

David A. Porter of the Pacesetter Mortgage Blog advises us on the Top 4 Critical Questions when buying a Condominium.

Pat Kitano of TransparentRE.com, my kind of over-achiever, delivers a five-part tutorial on real estate weblogging.

From nubricks.com, A. Samuel asks Slough to get a new HeART time for Ricky Gervais to move office?

Renthuiast, a UK weblog, invites us to a Conversation with Nestoria.

Stephen Jagger of Ubertor.com brings an insightful list of Search Engine Keyword Tips.

Our outbound traffic to yesterday’s winners was huge, more than double our normal outbound/inbound ratio — on a very busy day. That’s great, and this is why I wanted to show these posts on a separate day — so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle. Let’s dig in and devour all these delicious creams and cheeses so that tomorrow we can self-flagellate in good conscience…

More: Carnival of Real Estate: Overture…, Carnival of Real Estate: The red meat…, Candles, incense, bells and ashes: Redeeming The Carnival of Real Estate…

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October 9, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate: The red meat . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The word carnival is devolved from Latin, carne vale, to bid farewell to meat. It refers of course to the French term Mardi gras, fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, when good Catholics were expected to either consume or dispose of any animal fats in their possession prior to the onset of Lent. Tomorrow we’ll devour the creams and cheeses. Today shall we feast on the red meat, the Carnival of Real Estate entries that best exemplify the standard of excellence to which every real estate weblog should aspire.

First, and by far best, is Bryan Tutas with The proof is in the puddin’ — Range Pricing part 1,275. Relevance and originality abound in this article, but the shear exuberance of the thing is what put it over the top.

Next comes Mike Simonsen from the Altos Research Real Estate Insights with Home Ownership and the Affordability Red Herring.

Dan Melson of Searchlight Crusade weighs in with Straw Buyer Fraud.

Jon Ernest, The Property Monger, is, as per usual, both factual and funny with Zillowblog sends some love to Boston Real Estate.

Greg Tracy from BlueRoof.com Blog brings us The Battle Between Appraisers and Everyone Else

Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, opines on The Ultimate Real Estate Portal.

And Dan Green from The Mortgage Reports Blog tells us that WaPo gets it all wrong about 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

The sequence from second to seventh implies nothing about quality. We felt Bryan Tutas was a cut above everything, but the next six are in a dead heat — but still much better than the next twelve, which in turn were much better than the remaining 24. But these seven are at the level of quality we all should be aiming for, in my opinion: topically relevant, important and fully developed, clear in meaning, purpose and direction, and possessed of that ineffable spark of stylistic genius that makes them not just readable but memorable.

So dig in to the red meat. Tomorrow the feast continues, and then Wednesday it’s sack cloth and ashes. Dominus vobiscum.

More: Carnival of Real Estate: Overture…, Carnival of Real Estate: Creams and cheeses…, Read more

October 8, 2006

Carnival of Real Estate — Overture . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re finished judging the entrants for the Carnival of Real Estate. I’m going to roll things out in four posts over four days. I have three reasons for doing this.

  1. I want to draw your particular attention to the posts that were particularly good, and I want for the entrants in the second tier — good but not quite great — to have their own day in the sun.
  2. I want to address in the first and last posts some issues that I think will make the Carnival of Real Estate better and more relevant going forward.
  3. I was accused today of having organized my own weblog posts in a logical sequence, an organizational feat I have never yet achieved.

My post tomorrow will highlight one entry of unsurpassed excellence and six more of surpassing quality. Tuesday morning, we will exhibit a dozen more entries that were very, very good. By Wednesday, I want to talk seriously about laying down some rules for this contest.

Here’s why: We had a total of 43 unique entries. Out of that number, 24 did not make the cut. We had multiple entries from the same weblog, in some cases from the same person. One entry consisted almost entirely of plagiarized text. Another offered advice on how to use constructive mortgage fraud to deceive new-home builders. Many, many, many entries were too short to warrant any sort of consideration. There is nothing at all wrong with writing a very short weblog post — I do it all the time. But a short riff on an undeveloped idea is not a contest entry, it’s a painful reminder to revisit the topic later — conclusively, in greater detail, in fuller mind.

I know the practice until lately has been to make note of every entry, but the number of entries is growing week-by-week, and I don’t think it is any favor to conflate serious attempts to push back the darkness with phoning-it-in cat-blog posts. It’s certainly a disservice to the people striving to do the most and best they can with their weblogs, and it strikes me as being unjust, also, to the Read more

October 8, 2006

A Sunday sermon: Let no sparrow fall from your blogroll or favorites menu…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a redemptive exercise for a Sunday morning: If you have a real estate weblog, update your blogroll. Otherwise, make some necessary changes to your favorites menu. Three key players have made some changes that require corresponding changes from you.

Kevin Boer, who was “In the Trenches” has migrated to a brand new, very blue WordPress weblog called Three Oceans Real Estate.

Daniel Rothamel, formerly of the “Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog,” is by now eradicating the notion of moral grayness as The Real Estate Zebra.

And Jay Thompson, “The Phoenix Real Estate Guy,” has become… The Phoenix Real Estate Guy. HUH…? Jay moved from a sub-domain on his real estate web site to a dedicated domain.

Now, of course, every devout weblogger is going to make these changes this morning. Non-weblogging readers are going to update their favorites menu. And everyone is going to put a dollar in the poorbox.

However: The lord helps those who help themselves.

Good luck in your new homes, gentlemen! You’re all looking great…

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October 7, 2006

The fetal flat fee: Contract language . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The first transaction we do with the flat fee as a matter of policy will probably come together tomorrow or Monday, but, as I had mentioned, Cathy has been playing with the idea. She has a contract in play right now, so I had to write language for the Buyer-Broker Agreement:

Buyer’s Broker is to be compensated as follows: Up to $6,000 from Seller or Seller’s Broker, with any additional compensation paid by Seller or Seller’s Broker to be disbursed to Buyer at Close of Escrow to defray Buyer’s non-recurring closing costs, to pay Buyer’s down payment, to buy down Buyer’s loan rate, to reduce Purchase Price, or for any purpose mutually-acceptable to Buyer and Buyer’s lender, if any.

Except in an all-cash sale, I don’t believe any of this money can be rebated directly to the buyer, so that’s why I’m specifying a number of possible destinations. Given that it’s “free money” from the Buyer’s point-of-view, an unexpected windfall, buying down the interest rate might be the best long-term benefit — particularly if we’re also taking closing costs from the seller’s side of the HUD-1.

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October 7, 2006

Why a flat fee for buyer representation? Because the money is in the meter drop . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Many years ago, I read the first couple of chapters from a book by an investment guru — “How Dilberts like you made me rich” or something like that. I must have seen it while I was staying with someone, because, as you might guess, I don’t have a huge store of respect for that kind of book.

But the first chapter, at least, was interesting. The author was talking about his youthful experience as a taxi driver, how he discovered that every other driver’s ideal — the long trip out to the suburbs — was in fact a money-losing proposition. His epiphany was that the real profit in driving a cab came from dropping the meter arm, and the more times he could do that — the more short trips he could make, in other words — the more money he would make.

When I started thinking about moving our compensation for buyer representation to a flat fee, I went through my own sales for last year. I had a great year, as did every agent with a pulse in Phoenix. I sold some very expensive houses — although Cathy landed my ultimate prize when she showed for me one day when I had a class. But I did many less expensive homes, along with some work that I did for no compensation at all. At the end of the year, I netted out to $7,638 a side. Not great, not awful.

But you can look at $7,638 as my gross value “per trip,” in taxicab terms. My belief is that, with the right marketing, engineering and support, I can do at least five times as many trips, and possibly more than that. I believe that one good agent, properly supported, should be able to sell 300 buyers a year, maybe many more. And, incidentally, throw off a lot of listings and referrals.

I did rentals when I was first licensed. I knew I needed experience, and I wanted it fast. New residential agents can starve for months, but I made money in my first week. It was lousy money, but the demand was Read more

October 7, 2006

The seller really pays for the buyer’s agent? Definitely not when the buyer pays out of pocket. But what if the buyer really did pay for the buyer’s agent from the buyer’s side of the HUD-1?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s a lot of discussion of Buyer Broker compensation going on around the RE.net, and I want to draw attention to it while I can. I have some further thoughts of my own, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to them today. It’s Saturday, after all. One of the reasons I’m re-thinking everything associated with buyer representation is the dreadful shortage of Saturdays in the week.

Pursue these links. This is interesting.

Kris Berg argues that it really is the seller who pays both agents. (For agents Back East: In Arizona, and I believe in California and Washington, we do not have sub-agency. The buyer’s agent represents only the buyer, but is paid out of the co-broke established by the listing agent.)

Jeff Brown suggests dropping the veil and having the buyer pay his own agent directly rather than through the escrow process. The key problem with that, of course, is that many buyers don’t have cash for earnest deposit, inspections, appraisal, down payment, closing costs and a buyer’s agent’s fee. Many buyers don’t have cash for any of those things.

ReyEstate has a summary of the latest episode of egg-tossing from Freakonomics. I’d be much more impressed by those boys if they actually worked in real estate.

Jim Duncan argues that the buyer can pay the buyer’s agent’s fee out of the buyer’s side of the HUD-1, rolling the fee into the mortgage, as it is done now from the seller’s side of the HUD-1.

All of this debate is good, I think. There is no doubt that sellers have a very high degree of control over what listing agents are paid. It seems completely reasonable to me for buyers to have that same level of control over what buyer’s agents are paid.

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October 6, 2006

Casual Friday: It’s a sports movie, it’s a Vegas movie, it’s a raucously funny comedy . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been a rich fully Friday in Bloodhoundville, so I have but one word for Casual Friday:

Dodgeball.

Vince Vaughn steals any scene he’s ever been in, but the casting is inspired throughout — as is the writing. Every little thing about this film repays attention.

There’s even an Easter Egg for Classicists. Anyone spot it?

October 6, 2006

Using weblogs for custom real estate listing web sites . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More than a month ago, I said that I was going to do the custom web pages for any new listings as WordPress weblogs. Lucky me, since then we’ve sold down our inventory of listings, but we haven’t added any new ones. That changes Thursday, and there are at least two more out there on the near horizon.

Couldn’t happen at a busier time, but I can’t be any busier than Danier Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra, and he’s already done two TypePad weblogs for his listings: 10 Tallwood Trail and 1179 Rustic Willow Lane. The sites are slick overall, but I think the links out to the vendors of upgraded features is an especially nice touch.

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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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