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Month: April 2007 (page 7 of 8)

April 5, 2007

Loan Officers – Don’t Just Sit There!

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

Russell Shaw’s great post “I want a LOT of money — would you tell me how to get it?” got me thinking about loan officers who constantly ask me about how they can make “a lot of money,” especially in a tough mortgage market. They lament the current market situation, tell me that people are scared to refinance, that underwriting guidelines are more difficult, that property values are falling. They complain that these factors are squeezing their customer base and making it harder to win business. “What can I do? It’s soooo hard out there right now” is a common refrain I hear constantly. I keep looking for a way to disable the “repeat button.” After having this talk ad nauseum I’ve found that I can ask 6 questions to help loan officers refocus on capturing success. Those 6 questions tend to generate between 4 and 5 AHA!s per person. This realization is rather scary to me as many of these loan officers achieved high levels of success during the “boom” years. It makes me want to ask “How much more could you have made back then if you were actually trying?”

Today I’ll cover questions 1 & 2, and then get to the other three in my next post.

The first question is somewhat rhetorical; “How hard are you working; and, how smart is the work you’re doing?” That usually gives the inquiring loan officer pause. They look at me like a deer in the headlights, frozen by the realization that they’ve been working half-speed for as long as they can remember, stammer a bit, and then finally go quiet. Sometimes you see a little light bulb go on over their heads. That light bulb is the first step in an important process. Question one is my warning shot, to let them know that I have no time for their pity parties and that if they want advice they are going to get it — served cold.

I have found that the average loan officer spends too much time placing responsibility for their success on external factors instead of taking the responsibility to Read more

April 5, 2007

Why doesn’t Zillow.com act like Trulia.com? Because life is short but art is long . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy had lunch today with a friend and ex-colleague. Cathy was talking about Zillow.com as a Web 2.0 phenomenon, and her friend was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of Web 2.0.

I sent her mail when I heard about this, summarizing and quoting from the seminal Tim O’Reilly article:

In an elevator speech: Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.

This is O’Reilly’s summary:

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

  1. The Long Tail
    Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
  2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
    Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
  3. Users Add Value
    The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
  4. Network Effects by Default
    Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
  5. Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design Read more
April 5, 2007

Zynergy: They searched for a house, but they found you

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This ad:

Appeared this morning next to Cathy’s listing in the FQ Story Historic District of Phoenix.

As I said last night, I think all this kvetching and caviling is beside the point. You have a chance to put your marketing message in front of your share of four million visitors a month for free. If you do nothing more than create a profile page, your web site will gain an inbound link from a site with a Page Rank of seven, a fulsome offering to the Church of Googolatry. I had 37 page views on my profile yesterday, which is amazing considering that I have added almost nothing to the site.

My pet theme for the year is: Control your own marketing. It becomes ever more clear that various types of lead vendors want to soak up as much as half of your commissions — even before your broker stuffs his bear-like paw in your pocket. The more you can do to make your own rain as cheaply as possible, the better your chances of earning at least a starvation wage in our “overpaid” profession.

Take a chance and play with Zillow’s new toys. I don’t know that this will work. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing but your time. But if it does, you will gain control of a whole new marketing channel.

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April 5, 2007

Saved searches, available by RSS feed, at ShackPrices.com

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Dustin at RCG, new features at ShackPrices.com:

When you save a shack, you can keep track of price changes, status changes (if they’ve accepted an offer or the house has sold), and if the shack is removed from market or if it sells. The complete history of each saved shack, starting the day you saved it, is under the saved shacks tab. You can sign up for daily or weekly emails of changes OR you can subscribe to an RSS feed. We’ve even set it up so that you can subscribe directly to your Google Homepage, My Yahoo or to a few other online RSS readers (I use Google Homepage for my top 15 feeds, Google Reader for the other 50 or so). It’s easy to save a shack – just click the little star next to it.

These were announced yesterday, in the shadow of the big boot, and, of course, these are features people are bugging Zillow.com to provide. ShackPrices is vastly more innovative than anyone else doing map-based home search, so it will be interesting to see how they hold up in the fray.

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April 4, 2007

Zillow 5 is here, and, whether or not you seize upon its opportunities, it isn’t going away

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A day later, I think it’s all over but the shouting. There have been a small few objections, some earnest, some spurious, but, in the end, none of it matters. Zillow 5 is here, and it isn’t going away. Brian Brady and I have talked about how you might take advantage of the new functionality in Zillow. But take advantage or don’t, Zillow 5 is here.

Last night I explicitly addressed the conjecture that publicizing a home for sale is, colorably, advertising. I argue that it’s a material fact, not a solicitation to buy. But even if MLS systems or the NAR should rule otherwise, this would impact only Realtors. Anyone else could report these facts, picking them off of any one of dozens of Realtors’ IDX systems — to put exactly the right point on the candor behind the complaints. When little vendors see the sole of a big boot right overhead, we expect them to shriek. But their caviling will come to nothing. Zillow 5 is here.

In the same way, worrying about bad behavior that might but so far has not happened seems unlikely to move Zillow.com off its position. There may well be acts of malice, and Zillow will have to respond in a quick and measured way or risk losing all the decent people it is trying to attract. If it fails at this, it fails, but I doubt it’s going to quit the arena in response to so-far unfounded worries. Zillow 5 is here.

If there is a peril to feared from Zillow.com, it is here: This company has gone from a world-shaking AVM to a radical listings platform to a national residential real estate marketplace in fourteen months. This last round of revisions — adding many new pages and vast new capacity — took four months. If this advertising play does not pay off, could it turn itself into a national semi-automated real estate brokerage? You bet. In six months at the outside.

Will that happen? Hide and watch. Would it be a moral wrong if it did? We know exactly what we say to the crybaby union Read more

April 4, 2007

Going Fishing? Try to Land the Whales

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

If you are a Boiler Room movie fan, you’ll remember when Ben Affleck’s character said,

ACT…AS IF

“Act as if...” meant that you got on the telephone and asked people who were loaded to invest money. You didn’t worry about your youthful appearance, inexperience, or immaturity because they would never see you.
Can a new or underemployed Realtor who has sold 4 houses with a median price point of $200,000 effectively compete against a seasoned veteran of the real estate brokerage game in the tony zip code of 92657 ?

Use Zillow EZ Ads to “Act as if”

Your chances of landing the whale on Zillow are much better than farming for minnows.

April 4, 2007

Do You Zlog? Making the Zillow Real Estate Guide Work For You

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Do you Zlog? Let me define Zlogging on Zillow.com for you.

Zillow solicited listings this past fall from Realtors and announced the Zillow Real Estate Guide (formerly known as the wiki). I was a huge critic of the practice of posting listings because I felt their intentions were disingenuous. I did notice a cool “back door” to their changes that could promote the businesses of Realtors and loan originators. That back door was the Zillow real estate wiki and I saw it as an opportunity to use Zillow as a personal weblog. So, a Zlogging I did go.

The results were astounding. My personal weblog received 6-7 times the traffic within the first 2-3 days of my Zlog post and I received a call about a loan for a home in Mexico. I took it a step further and started posting “teasers” on Zillow in order to drive the traffic higher. It wasn’t completely altruistic nor within the spirit of the Wiki. I was caught red-handed by the Zillow cops and gently coaxed into more corrective behavior. My more toned down Zlogs were still driving traffic to my website while providing useful information to a consumer.

I walked in the back door, was thrown out by the Zillow bouncers, and invited back to the party through the front door. It was that defining moment that caused me to realize that Zillow has juice. If I can provide useful consumer content, they can deliver hits to my weblog. That seemed reasonable enough to me.

This latest announcement from Zillow, comprehensively analyzed by Bloodhound Blog, provides an amazing opportunity for the Realtor or loan originator to promote their practice on a national and local scale. Greg Swann explained how the practitioner can “mark their turf” in a zip code to gain expertise in the consumers’ eyes by farming via the Zillow Q&A feature. I will show you how to generate referral business by establishing expertise on a national level by Zlogging..

Understand that Zillow is extremely consumer centric and is striving to deliver Read more

April 4, 2007

Random observations on the new Zillow.com feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Your profile can include an embedded YouTube video.

Your profile photo is going to be reduced to 66 pixels in width, so if you scale it to that size before uploading, you’ll get marginally better quality. (Or is it 100 pixels tall?)

In general, photo scaling seems pretty fuzzy to me. For your own listings, it’s worth your while to scale to their width (267 pixels?) before you upload. (Or is it 200 pixels tall?)

The text editor for your profile is blog-like except that UTF-8 high order characters are being dumbed down to 7-bit ASCII, so you might as well dumb them down yourself — again to keep quality control.

The Wiki text editor will smart paste, like the ActiveRain editor, but it won’t retain your CSS. That means you’ll probably have to blow in an extra return between paragraphs. I don’t know if you can past in raw HTML, which would be my preference.

How’s business? Zillow.com’s David Gibbons:

Site traffic is definitely up though it’s not as much of a vicious spike as say when the WSJ story suddenly hit in February. It’ll be interesting to see what MSM pickup there is through the rest of the week. Early activity around Q&A and EZ Ads looks great with a fair amount of “testing” going on — I’m impressed by how quickly some questions were answered. EZ Ads in particular is looking surprisingly good. A few advertisers are testing ads in multiple (>10) zip codes. Too early to tell the impact on for sale postings but it looks like a bunch of homes have already been reported for sale.

A bunch from me. I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster. If the house is already listed, Zillow can ignore me.

Page loads do not seem to me to be inordinately slow.

 
Further notice: I said: “I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster.” In retrospect, this multi-step, manual entry is a passive barrier against the kinds of vandalism Jonathan Read more

April 4, 2007

Andy Sernovitz Has Signed On To Speak at SOBCon07!

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

This blogger conference was already going to be one of the killer opportunities of the year, but adding Andy Sernovitz seals the deal. His landmark book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, a nuts and bolts guide so effective, Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki wrote the foreword and afterward respectively.

Being able to listen to Liz Strauss AND Andy Sernovitz in the same conference? Get outa here!

SOBCon07 is the only blogging conference I plan to attend this year.

I can’t wait to hear Andy in person. And if you haven’t heard Liz Strauss before, you’re in for a very special treat. Everyone talks about how to raise blog readership while she quietly became one of the most read bloggers worldwide in a very short period of time. She is simply one of the best.

I’ll be in Chicago May 11-12.

If you wonder what you need to do to bring your blog to the next level, SOBCon07 is a no-brainer. It’s also one of the best deals you’ll see for awhile.

I’ll say it one more time – Liz Strauss AND Andy Sernovitz speaking at the same conference.

If I wanted to learn how to throw a great curve ball I’d go to Sandy Koufax. And if I wanted to learn about blogging and word of mouth marketing I’d be at SOBCon07.

SOBCon07 — Already nominated for a 2007 Bawldy.

April 3, 2007

Planet Zillow.com: Burgeoning Realty.bot grows, potentially, to become a self-sustaining residential real estate eco-system

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the news. We’ll circle back for details and implications.

Zillow.com, the national Realty.bot growing out of the popular automated home valuation service, is releasing a new version of its popular web-based real estate portal tonight. Dubbed Zillow 5, the new functionality comes in three broad categories:

  • Any user of the system — not just homeowners or their real estate agents — will be able to report that a particular home is for sale and at what price. Only owners and/or listing agents will be able to create more elaborate listings for homes for sale.
  • Any user of the site will be able to ask or answer a specific question about a home, whether or not it is listed for sale. The questions and answers will be stored with the record for that home, and each user’s questions, answers and Real Estate Guide (formerly known as the Zillow Wiki) contributions will be recorded on that user’s personal profile page on the system.
  • Agents or other users wishing to promote either themselves or their homes listed for sale will be able to do so through a new “EZ Ads” system. In appearance, the ads will look like a cross between a button ad and a Google AdWords text ad: a headline, two lines of text, an outbound link and an image — a logo or a photo. Unlike AdWords ads, the billing will be pay-per-impression, not pay-per-click. The ads will be sold by the zip-code at a cost of one-penny per impression. Ads targeted at a particular zip-code will rotate at random to exhaust the advertiser’s pre-paid spend over a pre-set span of time.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

“With this release, Zillow becomes a community,” said David Gibbons, the company’s Director of Community Relations. That’s true, but it’s somewhat Read more

April 3, 2007

A screen-shot tour of Zillow.com’s new feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Amending this: The site is live with Zillow.com founders Richard Barton and Lloyd Frink as the first Q&A links:

These are screen shots I captured during a teleconference with Zillow.com Directory of Community Relations, David Gibbons. Everything is scaled to fit the weblog column, so the live pages, when they become available will look different.


A Realtor-listed home with the Q&A panel. The listing agent’s contact information is shown at the right.


Detail of the full Q&A panel. The hot links will click through to user profile pages.


A user profile page with phone numbers plus email and web page links, along with links to all user-supplied content.


A home that is not listed for sale.


A home that has been listed for sale by a user other than the owner or listing agent. On the right is a link to that user’s profile page.


EZ Ads as they will appear on each page, three ads to a page, cycling at any page refresh.


The EZ Ads creation template. You have control over what you advertise, how much you spend and how quickly your ad buy is deployed. An ad will consist of a headline, an image, two lines of text and a clickable link to a page within or outside of Zillow.com.


The EZ Ads billing page. There is no automated billing/recurring for now.


The EZ Ads confirmation screen.


EZ Ads stats, very rudimentary for now. Zillow plans to improve upon this in the future.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

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April 3, 2007

Zillow.com’s press release detailing added functionality in new software release

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com™ Launches Home Q&A

“Ask Questions, Share Answers”at the heart of numerous new features harnessing knowledge of agents, homeowners and neighbors

Seattle — April 4, 2007 — Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow™ Home Q&A, among other new features aimed at further opening the site up to community contributions. Home Q&A is the ability for anyone to ask questions and share information and insight about more than 70 million U.S. homes.

“The release of Zillow Home Q&A enables anyone to ask any question about any house for the Zillow community to answer,” said Rich Barton, Zillow CEO. “This is the next step in our quest to help make everyone smarter about real estate. A quest that began with publishing Zestimate™ values last year as a starting point to answer the critical question, ‘How much is this home worth?’ Since then, we have enabled homeowners and agents to update home facts, post homes for sale, and set their Make Me Move™ prices. Over half a million people have made these contributions so far, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in helping people get answers to critical real estate questions.”

Visitors to Zillow.com can now “ask a question” or “answer a question” about millions of homes, right on that home’s Zillow Web page. Anyone can rate answers as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and each contribution links back to a user’s profile page — telling visitors, for example, if the question was answered by a local agent or other real estate professional, or if the contributor frequently answers questions within the Zillow community.

“Today, some of the most colorful and important information about homes and real estate is trapped inside the heads of local experts — agents, homeowners and neighbors,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “By allowing people to freely ask questions and share information online about homes, we hope to unlock, for the community as a whole, a powerful vault of data — such as an agent sharing insight into a neighborhood, or a potential buyer asking the shortest commute route downtown.”

In addition to Home Q&A, other new features announced Read more

April 3, 2007

Podcast with David Gibbons, Zillow.com’s Director of Community Relations: “We are throwing the gates wide open to the entire community”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Appended below is an audio podcast with David Gibbons, Director of Community Relations for Zillow.com. In this recording, David talks with me, reflecting upon the details and implications of tonight’s new software release.

RE.net readers know David as the voice of Zillow on real estate weblogs, effecting the small miracle detailed in The Cluetrain Manifesto: Engaging in the conversation of the marketplace in a way that shows that Zillow will do what it can to ameliorate difficulties. I happen to know that he’s good at that job, because I have a talent for cultivating difficulties.

Until tonight, David’s title was Director of Customer Service. In addition to tending to the concerns of the RE.net, he was charged with dealing with the email and phone calls a site as busy as Zillow.com incites. He talks a little about that on the podcast.

David is originally from South Africa, which accounts for his accent. Before working for Zillow.com, he worked for Amazon.com.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

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April 3, 2007

Ask the Broker asks the audience: How best to invest an unexpected windfall

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another question requiring expertise far beyond a broker’s license. Fortunately we have two great investment writers, three off-the-charts lenders and a readership of very prosperous people. Here’s the problem:

I have come into a situation, and was wondering if you could give me your opinion. I have recently come into an inheritance of about $200-$250,000 from a family member who has passed away. I decided that the best use of this money is to invest in real estate. I have narrowed down my choices to four options.

  1. A foreclosed house which needs repairing, however it can be bought for past due mortgage payments and past due real estate taxes, legal fees, etc. for $200,000. The fair market value is about $300,000.
  2. A housing project which has HUD financing of $1,750,000 and a fair market value of $2,000,000. Rental is locked in for $150,000 per annum, plus certain adjustments. Expenses are the mortgage with interest at 8% and operating expenses of $25,000.
  3. A shopping center with tenant rentals on an escalating year-by-year basis. The center is currently 80% rented and receives $200,000 cash flow and operating expenses are $50,000. The seller wants $2,000,000 and he is willing to take back a second mortgage of $250,000. I feel like I can get a $1,500,000 mortgage from the bank at the current rate on a 20 year basis. The second mortgage will probabably be a 2% higher interest rate.
  4. A shopping center with tenants who are all NYSE companies. All the leases are triple net with rental income of $500,000 last year. Sales price is about $6,000,000 and I feel I can get a favorable mortgage from an insurance company at a good rate. If I would proceed with this option I would probably cooperate with friends to get around $1,000,000 and get a $5,000,000 bank loan. I feel the property will appreciate at 8-10% per year.

Who has a good answer for this?

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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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