BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2007 (page 5 of 7)

May 13, 2007

SOBCon 07

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I’ll make this short and to the point.

I just returned from the most informative conference I’ve ever attended. The speakers were remarkable. The tech-geeks were beyond description, and included many of blogging’s true heavyweights. I’ll be writing about the technical news — it was exciting, and most things blog-tech generally don’t do anything but irritate me. 🙂

There are some truly bright people out there. When I am able to compile an intelligent post on the tech stuff, I’ll post it here.

I think even Greg might have been excited over some of this stuff. 🙂

May 13, 2007

60 Minutes’ Redfin.com story delivers 400 hits in 60 minutes flat . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Who says the old media is dead? In the hour just ended, Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing had over 400 hits from organic search. Just think what might happen if the NAR made reasoned arguments instead of trying to club reality into shape with legislation…

(This search is why we’re getting the traffic. As with Zillow.com, we are the highest-ranking discouraging words on the topic. It’s up to you to determine where the intellectual leadership of the real estate industry resides…)

More: real estate 2.x emerges from its Howard Hughes-like seclusion to comment.

Further notice: Well. That was pretty lame. You can see the video here. Wouldn’t it be cool if a reporter could ask an intelligent question? Wouldn’t it be cool if both sides of a story were actually presented? Even so, the bottom line is: Big deal.

Still more: I commented on the TechCrunch.com post, not that anyone other than insiders cares about accuracy on these issues.

My initial comment:

[Quoting Michael Arrington]> Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.

This is incorrect. Redfin’s cost “savings” consists of pushing the cost of buyer representation off to the listing agent and the buyer. It “saves” money by not doing the work the buyer’s agent’s commission is intended to compensate. The net consequence, if no other changes are made in the real estate industry, is that sellers and listing agents are likely to change the way they provide for the buyer’s agent’s compensation. Redfin.com has never turned a profit, and, if its business model actually gets traction, the money it “rebates” will no longer be available to it.

This was Arrington’s response:

Greg – the fact is that the real estate market is seriously screwed up and needs to be disrupted. Agents are overpaid and often do little more than underprice a house to ensure a quick sale. The model needs to change, and Redfin is changing it. Good for them.

That rejoinder is devoid of any actual response to what I had said, but people are rarely Read more

May 13, 2007

A Move Towards Mediocrity – And Beyond

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Many Agents Choose To Be Less Than They Can Be

In an industry overflowing with too many agents chasing too few opportunities, one might think that this level of competition would cause an overall increase in the professionalism and dedication of its principals.

I submit to you – that’s not the case.

While there are many several agents like Greg Swann who pride themselves on taking their efforts to the extreme… there are far more who try to see how little they can do to get a paycheck.

The list of offenses is lengthy, and quite frankly – I don’t know where to start.

One that really chaps my rear is the failure of an agent to return a call. As a listing agent, you have a responsibility to return the calls of other agents regarding your listings. It’s not an optional burden.

A recent case in point involves a few listings I showed a few days ago. Of three of them, we got in to see one. Calls to each of the listing agents was made the previous day to ensure availability and ascertain any special showing instructions.

One of the agents had a full voicemail box, so I was unable to leave her a message – but I did attempt to reach her several other times… including while we were at the home unable to get into the combination lockbox, as there was NO combination given in the listing.

You would think that a listing that had been on the market for more than a week would have this discrepancy fixed – but alas, we can not reach the listing agent to inform her of such. And since this listing is getting stale, I’m willing to bet that her voicemail box has been full for quite a while. Angry clients, I suspect.

Neither of the other agents was kind enough to return my call. When we arrived at one of those other two listings, we discovered that the lockbox and sign had been removed… even though the listing is shown as active in the MLS.

This experience is common to many other agents

I hear about this kind of behavior Read more

May 12, 2007

Can I ease out of my pay-option loan?

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

Heard this one before? I tell you what, if I had a nickel… skip it, you know what I’m saying. During the last few years home owners, especially in areas with exceptionally low levels of housing affordability, have flocked in droves to the “dreaded” pay option mortgage. Now with recasts looming, interest rates rising, and equity dripping away, more and more home owners are calling me asking how they can still afford their home AND stop losing equity.

A quick thought on the “dreaded” pay-option mortgage. Negative amortization gets a bad rap these days. The mainstream media loves these loans because they are the ideal poster-child of a mortgage market debacle. Think about these loans for a minute: they eat home equity, have high interest rates (usually), are confusing, and make the people who sell them A BOAT LOAD of money. That sounds like music to a reporter’s ears. And so they get a bad rap.

While I generally dislike pay option loans, it’s not the loans themselves; it’s how they are (mis)used. To be sure, neg-am pay-option loans have a place in the lending spectrum; but I believe that place to be with the short-term, savvy investor, playing the flipping game in a rising market, not with the family of four trying to buy a bigger house in San Francisco while working with restrictive cash flows. The problem is that the people calling me are not the savvy investors; it’s the family of four that took a neg-am loan, got addicted to the minimum payment option, and now is in a world of hurt.

These people chose the pay option for either the low payments, the low fees (with a commission north of 3 points on the back of these loans, anyone charging front points with a full margin is sadistic), or they liked the idea of choosing their payment option each month. Most people in the payment-option loans made two critical mistakes: 1. they took the loan for a property they planned on staying in for a long time and 2. they lacked the will power to make anything more Read more

May 12, 2007

Peeing on your own tree with Bloodhound-enriched Googlejuice

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy brought this up this morning, so I thought I would look into it. A version of this went out as email to BloodhoundBlog contributors earlier today.

Cathy’s question: What is the Google impact of being a BloodhoundBlog contributor?

We have a Page Rank of 5 on the main landing page — the “top” of the weblog. I expect us to be PR6 at the next recalculation.

Either way, the link to each contributor’s web site in the landing page should be hugely beneficial, since that page has such a high Page Rank.

A contributor’s spot in the list of Frequent Contributors also puts that person’s link on a huge number of other BloodhoundBlog pages: Each post, each category, each month, each author, each indexable page of posts, etc. The actual number of pages Google is “seeing” at BloodhoundBlog may be as good as infinite. Most of those pages will have a much lower Page Rank, of course, but every time Google spiders one of them, each web site it “sees” will be queued to be spidered.

Plus: We get spidered dozens of times a day, by Google but also by Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

We have a Technorati Authority of 463 as I write, putting us within the top 7,000 blogs overall — third place among Technorati-tracked real estate weblogs. We have 3,868 total links from other weblogs — second place — which argues that many weblogs are linking to us multiple times.

There’s more: After I started thinking about this, I realized I could go the whole thing one better. I’ve changed the way the meta-entry information is presented, post-by-post, to put the link to each contributor’s home web site there, as well.

We’re already delivering a lot of clicks back to contributor’s sites, but this change should yield even more. Plus, every post is now that much more Googlejuice-enriched — with the link being very high within the content, from Google’s point of view. Even better, every theme change is retroactive: All of our past posts, going back forever, will have this link, also.

I changed the date entry, too, so people can figure out Read more

May 12, 2007

How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

The natives are getting restless.

Much grumbling was heard this week about judging the Project Blogger competition. I don’t have too much to say about that. The contest rules and judging criteria were vague and rather useless from the beginning so no one should be shocked, shocked that things are vague and confusing now. I have my own goals for my little blog and I’m doing what I can to stay focused on those.

I do think however, that a good hard critical look at something is never a bad thing, so when Derek Burress stepped up to the plate and generously volunteered to give an honest critique, I thought it was a capitol idea. He graciously gave me his feedback and if you are an Active Rain member you can read his excellent critique here. When the week 4 judging was completed on Friday, I got more feedback. Looks like I got some splanin’ to do. Well that’s not entirely true. I rarely feel I have to explain anything I do, except to my loved ones and clients, but if it helps those playing along at home, I will.

The burning question is: What’s with theBrickRanch dog? The assumptive answer is that Coach uses a dog so Apprentice uses a dog. Not exactly. I don’t know the back-story of why Bloodhound is Bloodhound, but I can guess that part of the dog motif is this: What would you rather see, big soft puppy eyes gazing back at you or a cactus? What feels more like home to you: A warm, sweet puppy or a prickly desert plant? Which do you respond to on an emotional level: Bloodhound Realty or CactusPlant Realty? There might be more to the story of the bloodhound than that, but I understand the emotional trigger, the warm and fuzzy-ness of using a dog. It makes sense to me. I market to a very family oriented, dog friendly community and I have two big mutts myself so it fits my market, my blog, and me. Damn. We should get bonus points for that.

I took a local web marketing/ WordPress Read more

May 11, 2007

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

May 11, 2007

Heads Up All NASCAR Fans

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

An email I received today:

NOHASSLE uploadno hassle listing was not my experience. Your representative sent to install my sign refused to put the sign where the realtor and I agreed to. He was too busy talking on the phone to listen to
me. And when I asked for the 5th time to move the sign the crack head acted like he was going to attack me with a 5′ foot steel pike. I promptly told your sign installer to get the sign and his self off my property. Regardless of weather he was a contractor or not he is your representative. I expect anyone involved in the listing of my home to be drug free, not tweaking on speed and making threatening gesture. AND I QUESTION THE PROFESSIONALISM OF YOUR COMPANY even considering sending this company
back to install my signage. The experience was more than a hassle. It was a nightmare. I have wasted valuable time and effort dealing with Russell Shaw to list my home. Also the lack of
response to correct the matter was simply unacceptable.
I will be filing complaint’s with board of realtors, State of Arizona , better business bureau, and all of the local TV investigative reporters.
I also plan to use my 24′ enclosed racecar hauler and racecar to advertise to the valley my experience with no hassle listing. Look for me at the fall nascar event…
May 11, 2007

Trulia Voices: Can Bigoted Bastards Flourish?

by

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

Author website

We’re covering the launch of Trulia Voices with great interest on Bloodhound Blog. Greg took the lead this morning with his initial analysis and I lauded Trulia for appearing to be the more Realtor-friendly choice over Zillow.com.

I started tinkering in the Trulia Voices section. This is where people can ask questions about real estate issues on a national, regional, local, and hyper-local level. I am particularly interested in the Financing section and the cities of San Diego, Phoenix, and Long Beach, CA.

I’m no expert on the Fair Housing Act. However, like Justice Potter Stewart commented on pornography, “I don’t know how to define it but I know it when I see it.”. These questions seemed particularly disconcerting to me on Trulia Voices:

Any red flags I should know about?
There are a lot of listings in Maryvale on Trulia and the prices seem great. What are the downsides to living in this area?

What areas in Phoenix are best for raising kids?
You’ll notice that Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, does an excellent job at answering this question.

Where are the best places to buy in Phoenix for a young family?
Would love to learn about an affordable area with great parks and entertainment options for a 30-something couple with young kids. Nothing too suburban, but obviously safety
counts!

Is Orlando good for families with children?
Why or why not?

San Francisco? I think we have a problem. My interpretation of the Fair Housing Act leads me to believe that a professional could get themselves into VERY hot water by answering those questions. I think the Trulians would explain that the questions are REAL and indicative of how REAL people (read: consumers) talk. The questions seem to have been posted by employees of Trulia This leads me to wonder if the Trulians are bigoted bastards or just ignorant of how real estate brokerage really works.

Harsh Criticism? Perhaps…I think if you create a site which relies upon participation from real estate brokerages and you host potential traps for employees of those brokerages, you are culpable. The organizations that sue for damages for violations of the Fair Housing Act Read more

May 11, 2007

Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely

This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.

Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.

But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.

What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.

This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited Read more

May 11, 2007

Trulia.com versus Zillow.com revisited: Are your end-users temporary or permanent?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me last month, at the time of the Zillow.com’s most-recent software release:

In the world of Trulia.com — and other listings.bots focused on evanescent listings — users come and go. On the idealized Planet Zillow, users come and stay.

Home buying is at most an 18-month effort undertaken every seven to ten years, on average. Home ownership is continuous. Zillow attracts a lot of sellers, and it seems certain that it hopes to attract a countervailing cadre of buyers. But what Zillow is really doing, I think, is aiming at the 100 million-plus Americans who own their own homes. Some may come every day — to see new listings, to see new home photos, to ask or answer questions. Some may come only once in a while, when they have a particular need.

But its databases are permanent and accretive, constantly improving. I think Zillow’s goal is not to compete with Trulia or Google Base for home shoppers in the short run. I think its goal is to suck every bit of oxygen out of the residential real estate space as a vertical market. I’m not implying malice. But where others see this opportunity or that opportunity, I think Zillow.com sees the information marketplace for homeowners as a single unified whole, and I think the company’s goal is to dominate the whole thing in its entirety.

Today’s changes have the potential to make Trulia.com a stickier experience. But will it retain end-users after their homes have closed?

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May 11, 2007

Is Trulia.com the UnZillow? Realty.bot emerges from beta with a new Q&A feature and robust, system-wide automated alerts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Come with me to the newly-reconfigured Trulia.com, freshly emerged from beta status. Let’s search for an ideal house. The criteria we can use are limited — location, type of structure, price range, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage — but we can still scare up some results. Plus which, if you really know what you want — for instance, by winnowing the location down to a particular zip code — you won’t have a huge number of listings to sort through.

My search turned up four houses. Not a big number, but all of them are reasonably well-suited to my needs. But: None of them is a perfect fit. Here’s the cool part: I can instruct Trulia to send me email updates or an RSS feed of changed data in that particular search. When a new home matching my criteria is listed at Trulia.com, I’ll learn about it right away. Or, if I like a particular house, but I don’t like the asking price, I can subscribe to get an email notification of future changes made to that one listing.

I can set up any number of tightly focused searches, each with its own email alert or RSS feed. That much is not news to Realtors. We do this every day, with much more robust search tools. But we do it for clients. The clients themselves don’t have direct access to the MLS system. Some added-cost IDX systems permit saved searches with email updates, but then the search is not terribly more robust than Trulia’s.

But wait. There’s more. The new improved Trulia.com, will alert me when the house of my dreams becomes available. This is essentially the complementary counterpart to Zillow.com’s “Make Me Move” feature. Using a database of tax records, you can select a particular residence and ask Trulia to inform you by email or RSS feed when that home comes on the market.

Neither of these features is without problems. For example, where Trulia turns up four homes that match my criteria, either Realtor-listed or For Sale By Owner, the Arizona Regional MLS system unearths 146 active listings for the same search. And, at Read more

May 11, 2007

Podcast interview with Trulia.com’s Heather Fernandez: “Real estate professionals are going to be able connect directly with consumers”

by

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

Author website

Linked below is a podcast interview I conducted with Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez, Trulia.com’s Director of Marketing. Heather takes us through all of Trulia’s new functionality. At the end of the recording, I raise the idea that Heather might be getting a lot of email about the upgrade, so it seems appropriate to share her email address: heather@trulia.com. Let her know what you thnk of the new Trulia.com.

May 10, 2007

The NAR’s Operation Tip-Off: How to make yourself look guilty by protesting your innocence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Matthew Hardy of Real Estate Success Tools sends along a copy of the NAR’s press release on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes Redfin PR puff piece.

We are led by buffoons, avidly drawing attention to the stuff they want everyone to ignore. Two words is too many in reply to this crap: So what? Discount Realtors are nature’s perfect revenge on people who crave real estate discounts. The intelligent response is not to shout, like Redfin, “We’ll do nothing for even less!” but to offer a quality product at a fair price — and then actually deliver it.

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May 10, 2007

Cri de coeur meets The Long Tail: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet to be released, finally, on DVD

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

How long is The Long Tail? Long enough, even, for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, ten long years after its theatrical release. I despair for the state of staged drama, and not just in the chip-on-its-shoulder burgs, but this, in Horace’s phrasing, is “a monument more lasting than bronze.”

The news: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is to be released on DVD, at last.

We’ve been on the waiting list at Amazon.com for years, and I’d like to hope that this is a vindication of the waiting list idea, a social tug-of-war to stretch The Long Tail.

I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The Cameron you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet‘s theatrical release.

 
Hamlet past his bedtime

I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting — or buying.

My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.

Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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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