BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2007 (page 7 of 7)

May 5, 2007

Renovation Project

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Never one to sit idly by, Greg has come up with another of his “Insanely Great Ideas”. A video tour essentially hosted by the seller, to me, is shear genius. The fact is, we are selling not a bunch of sticks and stucco but a lifestyle each time we market a property. What better way to make it personal than to bring the potential buyer into the home through video, not as someone panning and zooming their way through a bunch of lifeless rooms but as an invited guest to a conversation over coffee?

Now, Greg’s video deals with a renovation, so it is hard to achieve the warm-and-fuzzies where this particular home is concerned, but I think the possibilities are exciting. The problem for me becomes one of time and time management.

I would venture a guess that most of us here have a hard time with delegation. The fact that we are participating on blogs would suggest that we have some grasp of the power of the technological tools at our disposal, and anyone with a feedreader knows that forty-seven hundred (give or take) new spiffy ways to advertise our properties and ourselves are born every nanosecond. Unless I am a Realty.bot with an arsenal of tech geniuses at my disposal, I have to value engineer my way through the maze of exposure opportunities.

Take the process and importance of having killer property photos. I finally had to acquiesce and admit that photos taken by a true professional are superior to any I can take with my own, albeit very expensive, digital camera. All of our properties, from the one-bedroom condo to the multi-million dollar estate now enjoy professional photos. True, there is an added cost involved, and I still cling to the notion that given the right equipment and time commitment I could achieve somewhat comparable results, yet there is a cost savings… of time. My forty or so photos are now delivered to me within 24-hours in hi-res and web-sized format. No more resizing, no more hours on end of Adobe fun, which frees me to do other things. And Read more

May 4, 2007

Not-ready-for-HGTV: My alternative to the listing video

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am not hugely in love with the idea of video for listings. My problem is simple enough to state: I think 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 geek-appeal to geeks and age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if video overcame its crappy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.

However: I do want that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more than our competitors can on our listings. And: If I can soak up another twenty minutes of a potential buyer’s time, that’s twenty minutes that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with our listings, even if video competes poorly with digital photography.

So what I wanted was a video format that made sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.

Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. This film was made this week — and, yes, I know: I suck as a videographer. The particular home is an extensive restoration, so taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch — this is a way of turning video into a true added-value asset in the listing package.

The next time this seller refurbs a house, we’ll shoot video all along, memorializing the major changes. It might be slick to mount a web-cam from the ceiling to snap a picture every five minutes while work is going on: Time-lapse remodeling.

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

May 4, 2007

Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
Picture this: Digital photos can sell your home

Here’s the brutal truth about the real estate market in the Valley of the Sun: There are nine homes for sale for every motivated, qualified buyer.

So what should you do to make sure that your home is the one in nine that will sell this month? Everything you can.

For our listings, we’re pushing our way up the technology ladder as fast as we can. We’re doing custom yard signs for each listing, custom Web sites or Weblogs, interactive floor plans, virtual tours, even video tours featuring interviews with the sellers.

It goes without saying that the homes are priced right, in perfect repair and staged to encourage buyers to move themselves in mentally. Ideally, we want an inspection report, with the repairs documented, and an appraisal to demonstrate that the price is fair — and that an offer will make it through loan underwriting.

Not everyone can do all this work, but there is a simple technology available to everyone that can make a huge difference in marketing your home.

What is it? Digital photography.

An MLS listing can have up to six photos, but many have only one — or none. A flier can have even more pictures, and a simple Web page can feature photos of everything that matters in the home. Photography hasn’t been expensive since the days of George Eastman, but digital photography is virtually free.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Good real estate photos should be taken with the widest-angle lens you can lay hands on. And while multiple mega-pixels sell cameras, for a real estate photo to be useful it needs to be a small file size: 640 x 480 pixels is perfect. Fill the frame, showing what’s important, omitting what isn’t, and be sure to work with plenty of light.

Virtual tours draw eyes at Realtor.com. People will watch videos, if only for the thrill of watching “TV” on the computer. Poetic copy instills dreams. But nothing sells the buyer’s imagination on a home like a wealth Read more

May 4, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #5

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the fifth of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 3, 2007

FHA Streamlined Refinance Loans: Originators, Git You Some !

by

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

Author website

Loan originators, subprime mortgage blues got you down in the dumps? Let’s talk about a way to get your pipeline phat again. I’m going to give you a step-by-step plan to start, what Todd Duncan calls, the 90-day burn. If you follow these steps, and you don’t close 10 loans in the next 90 days, quit the business.

I’ve long been a believer in campaigning. A campaign is where you focus your promotional and sales efforts on a particular product type. The benefits of campaigning are astounding. You crank up the action volume (calls, door-knocking, mailers, e-mails, etc.) so SOMETHING happens. You learn a specialty because you must study the product to campaign. Consequently, you close a bunch of loans and half of them won’t be related to the campaign. Don’t worry about that.

Step One: Learn the FHA streamlined refinance guidelines. This loan program is designed for the greenest originator. I cut my teeth on this product when I started in the business. No credit scoring, no income documentation, and a current mortgage and you get an approval.

Step Two: Find a bunch of FHA loans . I’d call your favorite title company and get a list of HUD loans, closed within 10 miles of your office.

Step Three: Go on a mission. Go forth and communicate to these homeowners about the FHA streamlined refinance program with the zeal of a newly ordained priest. This is your career your fighting to save so pull out all the stops. Mail a postcard, call the customers (if they are not on the do not call list), even go so far as to knock on their door and hand them your card while explaining that you are an FHA streamlined refinance expert. If you are not an expert, dedicate three hours to this loan guidelines link and you’ll be one.

Step Four: Track your activity items. You should be able to talk to 20 people per day within the first 60 days. You will have Read more

May 3, 2007

If you were the cutest dog at the dog show, would you work for world peace, or would you just go for the contact info?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Give Shaun McLane of EKDAY.com credit for self-promotional skills, anyway. He has started a new site called Posh’d, which is — I kid you not — a beauty contest for real estate web site.

Say that again: He is finding the least ugly of — let’s face it — the ugliest stuff on the web, and featuring it on a one-page gallery site, which links back to the designated beauty queens. I can’t but think that this will win Shaun the Mister Congeniality award, but the idea is still kind of a stretch.

For example: BlueRoof.com is featured first and should be. It is a stunning site. But right next door is Realtor.com, looking as dowdy and dated as the Yellow Pages.

(For younger readers, the Yellow Pages is a big, useless book perfect for exhausting landfills. The Council of Residential Specialists publishes its own version, which is even stoopider.)

The rest of the dog show, including BloodhoundBlog, is not awful. But it’s not great, either. Better than average, maybe, but that’s hardly an accomplishment. I know there are some sightly sites among the Realty.bots. For example, Eppraisal.com has the coolest Web 2.0-like Weebils. My guess is that there is more and better to be found in The Undiscovered Country, the world beyond weblogs.

So: Here’s for everyone except BlueRoof getting kicked out of the dog show by ever-prettier dogs. Even better: Here’s to clinging by claws to our vaunted status by revising our sites into something useful and beautiful — with no movies, no MIDIs and an absolute maximum of 937 links on the home page. Who ever heard of anything like that in real estate?

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May 3, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #4

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the fourth of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 3, 2007

I’ll bring you a big basket of cash if you’ll let me sell your house for free

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Chris writes:

I’m looking to get into real estate after i graduate in a couple of weeks but i have a couple of questions that i’m looking to get answered, appreciate your help.

If all real estate brokers in an area generally charge the same fee for selling a house, how do real estate agents compete with one another if they cannot vary their fees? Also is the real estate profession overcrowded in your judgment?

Yes, the industry is horribly overcrowded, there are way too many agents chasing too few deals for all of the agents to make a decent living. This has been a true statement for at least the past four decades. 13 out of 14 agents fail and leave the business within two years. bugAll real estate brokers do not charge the same fee. Some brokers charge 6 – 7% to list and sell a house and others charge half that amount, some companies charging a flat fee of $300 – $500 to list a house. There is now a company affiliated with Buy Side Realty who will list the house at ZERO. Correct. A FREE MLS listing. And when you buy a house through Buy Side, they will give you back 75% of the commission. These companies are already “national” unlike the endlessly commented upon Redfin, who only has offices in a few cities.

A company was started some years back called HomeGain that was initially based on the premise of agents blindly (they wouldn’t know who the seller was – but the seller would know who they were) offering to list a home for less. The agent who offered the lowest commission won the prize of getting to list that home. This company was started by Bradley Inman and he sold HomeGain for enough money (tens and tens of millions of dollars) so he can now devote as much of his life as he wants to working on getting agent’s commissions down.

Then, how DO agents compete with one another? If you are in the business and working on getting business, you somehow contact someone and let them know you are Read more

May 2, 2007

Got back-up? Entire issue of Business 2.0 lost two weeks before press time

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From TechCrunch:

The June issue of Business 2.0 magazine was inadvertently deleted from the editorial server on April 23, according to a number of sources. And the backup server wasn’t working properly. The result? An entire issue down the drain just two weeks before press time.

[….]

A 2003 article in Business 2.0 likened backups to flossing – “everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.” I guess Business 2.0 forgot to floss.

Ouch!

One can only hope that the Chief Technology Officer’s resume was on another computer. It seems likely he’ll be needing it…

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May 2, 2007

Real Estate Investing For Retirement — The Human Factor

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

In the real estate investment side of the biz, everyone wants to talk endlessly about where to invest, how to invest, the best way to analyze the various investment factors, what needs analysis, and the rest. However, the most common factor left out of the process is the human factor.

How is the human factor described in the real estate investment process? Comfort zone.

There are any number of issues that can cause investor anxiety.

  • Not fully understanding the loan itself or the loan process
  • The size or lack thereof of the down payment — sometimes size matters
  • Acquiring property out of town, even out of state — “I can’t drive by!”
  • Tax deferred exchange worries — “What if something goes wrong?”
  • The timing of the acquisition — “Isn’t this a bad time?”
  • Just making investment decisions about when, where, why, and how

Most of the time comfort zone issues can be either minimized or eliminated by filling in areas of ignorance. I remember a client who was very afraid of investing out of state because if a tenant moved out she’d have to fly there. Obviously we hadn’t talked too much about out of state investing at this point. She was pretty anxious about it though, and was dead set against even considering such a thing. Once we explained the management team we had in the cities under discussion she relaxed a little. When we immediately called one of the management company owners (on speaker) and discussed the process her whole countenance changed. She now owns several properties in another state.

There’s nothing more soothing to a comfort zone violation than a knowledge injection.

hypodermic

Of course, the problem our San Diego clients face is there’s no real upside to investing locally. It’s not that in the next 5-10 years our local income properties won’t experience appreciation, because they will — it’s a given. But when was the last time you heard an investor talk about the great investment opportunities he uncovered in San Francisco residential income property? San Diego isn’t quite at that level yet, but they might as well be. When there are half a dozen areas within a couple Read more

May 2, 2007

A picture of The Third Career: If we’re not blogging for business, what are we blogging for?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

By way of ProBlogger, this image is from 901am. It nicely illustrates the idea I called The Third Career when the BloodhoundBloggers were interviewed by Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide:

Q: How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

A: [….] Greg Swann: Practically speaking, it doesn’t, but I don’t think that way. What we’re really up to is an idea I call The Third Career. Most of us came to real estate from something else, and, as we are wise, we know this is not our last stop in the world of work. My immediate goal for BloodhoundBlog is to make it the best-read, most-rewarding real estate weblog in the RE.net. Further out, I want for our contributors to be so well known that they can pursue other opportunities: Public speaking, freelance writing, books, seminars, television shows, etc. I don’t know that we will attain this, necessarily, but the goal itself is definitely attainable: Witness Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.

None of this is of immediate importance. Right now, we are dancing as fast as we can to do the jobs we get paid to do — even as we build this weblog, becoming better and more widely known with each passing day. Witness: BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will be speaking at Inman Connect. That’s two of us — so far. The chart illustrates the opportunities we can hope to exploit as we become better and more widely known.

Muestrame el dinero? It can wait. I’ve mentioned that I’m interested in repurposing the Weblogging 101 content as an ebook. I expect that, once I’ve done it, that will turn into speaking opportunities. Whether or not those are worth any money is less interesting to me than the opportunities themselves. If I can do a job often enough to get good at it, I can find a way to make it pay.

Here’s another, similar example: Steve Leung, whom I have praised in the past, has released a free 69-page “Silicon Valley Home Buyers Book”. The book is in PDF form, hot-linked throughout, so it’s actually more practical as a net.wired document, rather Read more

May 2, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #3

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the third of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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May 1, 2007

Estonia when you’re trying to be so good, Estonia just like they said they would

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Wit is easy, much easier than writing a real joke. But wit, even more than poetry, may be the bright-line dividing mere knowledge from true fluency in a language. To unpack the very dumb headline of this post, you have to know not just English, by far the richest human language, but the lyrics of Bob Dylan. And the richer your cultural context, the better your ability to apprehend slippery wit.

(He did it again, this time with Latin: Hendo literally means I hold in my hand, I grasp.)

(Incidentally, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 is about amphetamine, not marijuana, as all your stoner friends thought. Likewise Subterranean Homesick Blues (obvious, now, in the age of meth labs, yes?) and Visions of Johanna.)

But: All that is beside the point. Here’s something I think is marvelous: In response to yesterday’s post about the de facto confiscation of Steve Job’s house, BloodhoundBlog was linked by a weblog in Estonia:

Apple’i boss Steve Jobs tahab oma kinnistul asuvat 1929 Hispaania stiilis villat lammutada ja krundile midagi v&228;iksemat ehitada. Pilt siin.

Huvitav lugeda kuidas &252;ks kinnisvarablogija USA muinsuskaitseameti t&246;&246;sse suhtub. Swann BloodHoundBlogist arvab, et muinsuskaitseamet on &252;ks m&245;ttetu amet.

Of course, I have no idea what this says — although I love that double-o with the double-umlauts — but it doesn’t even matter. The post ends with, “Nojah aga pikas plaanis, mees,” and, whether that means “Damn straight!” or “What a buffoon!”, I think it’s beyond cool that this conversation is not only multi-national but multi-lingual.

In other blognews, The Real Estate Tomato brings us 10 ways to get all defensive and paint yourself into a corner. We are positively crawling with weblogging advice right now, not alone because of Project Bore-From-Within.

It’s completely plausible to me that much of this advice is utterly useless, but that doesn’t even matter. Learning to write a weblog is like learning to drive — a huge number of rules that seem best adapted to making you nervous and flustered, which in turn makes you make mistakes. Get over it. In due course you’re cruising at 23 over posted, fishing for french fries with one Read more

May 1, 2007

“Here’s a better idea: How about abolishing the state Board of Appraisal?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from the Tucson Daily Citizen:

Zillow.com offers online estimates of home values. There is now plenty of public data available for computers to crunch to make the estimates pretty good.

According to Zillow’s Web site, in the Phoenix metro area its estimates are within 6 percent of the actual selling price 50 percent of the time, and 72 percent of the time they are within 10 percent.

Although Zillow states on its Web site that its estimates aren’t appraisals, the state Board of Appraisal has ordered it to stop offering them in Arizona.

Here’s a better idea: How about abolishing the state Board of Appraisal? Any property is actually worth whatever a willing buyer is willing to pay to a willing seller.

Lenders might want appraisers in whom they have confidence to ensure that the property will cover their principal in the event of default. However, lenders are big boys. They can set up their own certification process to obtain the expertise they want. There’s no need for government to do it for them.

I find this logic unassailable. But it does make me yearn to live in a town with a newspaper…
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May 1, 2007

Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar: Podcast #2

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is the second of five podcasts from the Second Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminar. This event was held on April 17, 2007, and lasted for about three hours. That seminar, along with another held on March 13, 2007, are precursors to the forthcoming Russell Shaw Sales Success FAQ files. Russell will take questions from these podcasts, along with others you send to him by email, and answer them in a series of FAQ-like video and audio podcasts. His plan is to end up with a complete real estate sales training course in podcast form.

This podcast is available in audio and video format, each covering the same content.

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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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