Month: July 2007 (page 1 of 7)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, here’s a Black Pearl made from sandy irritants we picked up at the StarPower Conference.

First, one of the Stars is making custom signs featuring photographs of the listed home. I’ve been writing about custom yard signs for more than a year now, but, so far, I haven’t heard from anyone who is doing them — other than us, that is. What the Star is doing is not our way of making the signs. He’s putting up his regular brokerage sign, then supplementing it with a separate sign that features photos of the home.

Second, another different Star is using directional signs to direct buyer traffic from main thoroughfares into the subdivisions where her listed homes are to be found. These are the size of an Open House directional, but they’re mounted in the yards of cooperating (or compensated) neighbors.

This idea I liked a lot for two reasons. First, it would tend to bring more buyers to the listed home. And second, using these directionals would tend to make it look like you had half-a-dozen listings nearby, rather than just one or two. You could be half the signs in the neighborhood with one listing. If you list in that subdivision frequently, the directionals need never come down, and they could serve more than one home.

Where’s the Black Pearl? Put the two ideas together in custom-made directionals:

These would be coroplast signs mounted on wire H-frames. Any sign printer can do them. Any Kinko’s can do them. They’re cheap to print in bulk, so you can hold out some replacements for stolen or damaged signs. Meanwhile, the photos do some of the jobs we expect from the custom yard sign: They stop traffic and preview the house. At the same time, they radically differentiate you as a lister.

This is pretty simple compared to some of the ideas we’re playing with, but it seems like a sweet little supplement to the idea of custom yard signs.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, StarPower

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my final evaluation of the StarPower Conference in four short words: I didn’t hate it. The intellectual content of the thing was oversold by a hefty percentage, and virtually everything in the curriculum was an upsell for something else. We were entreated all week to gather “pearls” from the presentations, but the best I was able to come home with are grains of sand from which we will craft pearls of our own. The event was stage-managed with precision and flair, although a little cheerleading goes a long way with me.

This post is largely a critique. In the coming weeks, I want to detail some of the pearls Cathy and I will be assembling around the gritty sand we brought home. Here I want to enumerate what I considered to be important defects in the StarPower Conference. I don’t know that this will do anyone any good. Most of the companies I take on seem not to spring into action to address my concerns. But I find myself taking an anti-vendor position again and again, and my four days at StarPower served only to reinforce that redoubt.

However: I think it’s important to note that the StarPower organization is not unique in exhibiting the defects I will catalog, nor does it come even close to being the worst specimen of the milk-the-Realtor industry. I could have wished for a lot more — and more-rigorous — information in exchange for my time and money, but I did not come away empty-handed, and I may yet succumb to one of this week’s incessant upsells.

First, with a couple of exceptions, StarPower is stuck at about 1999. Web sites, lots of web sites, all of them static, almost all of them templated, most of them mindlessly mimicking the me-me-me meme. There is weblogging, sort of, substantially worse than what I’ve been bitching about and yet utterly invisible to Technorati and the Googlesphere. In the StarPower universe, there is no Web 2.0, nor any derivative implications of Web 2.0. I heard the words “long tail” out of my own mouth only. This thing that we do Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
By-owner home seller is no match for a skilled listing agent

We’re about to list a home for sale in a fairly pricey neighborhood, so we are very aware of our competition.

We knew a similar home was ready to go on the market, but we were convinced it would be marketed as “for sale by owner,” so we didn’t feel threatened.

Why not? Because a by-owner seller is no match for a skilled listing agent.

I’m willing to concede that there are some unskilled listing agents, but that doesn’t matter to us. We compete against professionals, not amateurs.

In fact, the seller instead went with a limited-service listing, which is slightly — but only slightly — more likely to succeed.

By now, go-it-alone sellers are thin on the ground. You can get a true MLS listing at a range of discount prices, from $3,000 down to $99.

So why is a limited-service listing unlikely to succeed? In this market, a home must be marketed perfectly from Day 1 or it will sell slowly and at a deep discount, if at all.

Except for the MLS listing itself, the home will be offered by owner in every respect: priced wrong, prepared wrong and inaccessible to buyers and agents.

This is not a necessary consequence, but it is very common.

In the case of our newly listed competition, the home is offered at $200,000 over its market value. It will not be a threat to our listing.

But it wouldn’t be a threat even if priced right. A professional home marketer will bring too many weapons into battle for an amateur, no matter how dedicated, to compete.

Even worse, a limited-service listing shouts out a warning to buyers’ agents to stay away.

Why? Because it is being marketed by an amateur. The seller will have no one to turn to for advice, exposing the buyer’s agent to double the legal liability in the transaction.

There’s nothing wrong with negotiating the best price you can get for a full-service listing. But in our opinion, limited-service listings are a false economy in this market.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Howard Brinton’s closing remarks tonight at the StarPower Conference, here are Gregg Neuman‘s Top Ten Reasons for Optimism:

• 10. 3,600 fewer agents in my market
•   9. Downward pressure on commissions is gone
•   8. Developers/builders welcoming us again
•   7. Discount brokerages vanishing
•   6. FSBOs are extinct or nearly so
•   5. Foreclosure/short sale market thriving
•   4. Great market for buyer’s agents (you can negotiate)
•   3. Declining prices opens market to more first-time buyers
•   2. Sellers willing to listen to reality
•   1. Sellers need us now and THEY know it

Realtor optimism, yes. For sellers, not so much. But it is a real improvement over crying in your beer that times are tough.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing