BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: July 2007 (page 5 of 7)

July 10, 2007

Zillow.com’s latest release me-too’s Trulia.com’s recent me-too release: Can either make the leap from ghost-town to community?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

With its Z6 software release, which goes live tonight, Zillow.com adds a neighborhood level of user conversations, similar to Trulia.com’s Trulia Voices feature released in May of this year.

From Zillow’s press release:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today added a number of new community features, opening up the site even further to user contributions. Chief among these additions are individual neighborhood pages in more than 130 U.S. cities (more than 6,500 neighborhoods in all). The pages are seeded with rich local demographic and real estate information, but are built for communities and neighbors to make their own. Anyone within a community has the ability to add photos, events, local news, engage in discussions and ask or answer questions about neighborhood real estate.

“Adding the ability for neighbors to meet, share information and learn about their local neighborhood is a natural next step for Zillow. We started with individual Web pages and Home Q&A for more than 70 million homes, and today we’re bringing the conversation out to the neighborhood level,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we’re adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online — and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process.”

Neighborhoods are accessed from any of the 70 million Home Details pages within Zillow, or via the “local real estate” link at the bottom of every Zillow page.

There’s more, but we’ll come back to it.

First: Is this a surprise to anyone? The new features were accidentally pre-announced last week in an inadvertently transmitted email. I understood the portent of that email, as I’m sure did everyone else in the RE.net who got it: Responding to Trulia was Zillow’s obvious next move, and they’re fairly steady at doing major upgrades once a quarter. The only real surprise was that the hermetically-sealed start-up actually leaked something.

But could it be that Zillow and Trulia are stuck in a tennis volley of answering each other’s features? Truila Voices was the loud claim from the Read more

July 10, 2007

A Real Estate Recovery in Early 2008, Don’t Be So Sure…

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Chicken Little made the famous quote, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Would he have been more believable if he had said the sky is falling, but I expect it to ease down slowly and rebound early in 2008? This is exactly what many real estate professionals have been doing for the past six months.

Here are just a couple examples:

Bob Toll of Toll Brothers, one of the nation’s largest home builders reports to CNN,

I don’t see the market getting better until, at the earliest, April of 2008. But I do think that when a recovery occurs, it will be much quicker than it has in the past because of pent-up demand. You’ve got decent job growth, low unemployment, low interest rates, great corporate earnings reports and tons of money being created and sloshing around the world.

Why April? Why 2008? Since Bob Toll, like myself is a Cornell graduate, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will assume he has concrete data for this projection, but I really have to wonder if he is looking at the big picture. Access to capital has reversed course significantly and has now become a major stumbling block for many would be home buyers. Additionally, Congress is considering adding more rules and regulation to the banking arena, which will inevitably make lending tougher. On the other side of the equation, supply is hitting an all time high. Not only have many of the home builders over built, but adding foreclosures, and longer than average time on the market for regular stock really makes the picture look grim for sellers. It will be very hard for this equation to right itself in less than a year.

Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp. in Cleveland, writes at Bloomberg.com,

We’ll hit bottom in 2007 in terms of sales, but we’ll continue to see price declines into 2008. Prices tend to weaken for about six months after inventory normalizes, and we probably won’t see that begin to happen until the end of this year.

While Richard shows a bit more pessimism than Toll, he too Read more

July 10, 2007

Ignore the so-called experts: Blogrolls are good, m’kay?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

No one is better suited for a discussion of the value of blogrolls in viral weblogging than South Park’s Mr. Mackey. (“Drugs are bad, m’kay?”)

Some supposed experts have done extensive research by reading other weblogs and they have come up with (and reiterated) this startling conclusion: “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?”

I would link to the source, but that might turn out to hurt their SEO prospects. I have, out of thoughtful consideration, removed them from BloodhoundBlog’s blogroll. Not, mind you, because, “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?” but because I don’t want to promote pernicious nonsense.

Why are blogrolls thought to be bad? Because they might look like a link exchange, and they might get brand new weblogs temporarily sandboxed by Google.

What are we talking about? SEO results, yes?

What should be your objective in producing a real estate weblog? Viral marketing, yes?

If we stipulate Mr. Mackey’s case without contest, would blogrolling being bad for SEO imply that blogrolling is bad for viral marketing?

Take it apart. The masque of Mackey is bullshit: Brand new blogrolls don’t have extensive blogrolls, and, even if they did, there is no reason to suppose that Google is penalizing them. More likely the contrary. Google likes links.

But even arguing to the contrary, would a hypothetical Google-that-doesn’t-like-links make any difference in your viral marketing strategy?

First, lightning can strike with an over-the-transom lead from Google, but it’s not very likely.

Second, the objective of your viral marketing strategy should be to nurture a substantial community of people who are predisposed to use you when they have a real estate need. This has almost nothing to do with SEO results.

Ergo, everything you do with your real estate weblog — and with other viral marketing tools — should be focused on nurturing relationships with people who can and will do business with you, not with attracting random hits from all over the world. In other words, if your primary concern is SEO, you’re spinning your wheels.

So what does this imply about blogrolls? In a community-focused real estate weblog, a blogroll of other weblogs and web sites focused on that community is an immensely powerful viral marketing Read more

July 7, 2007

More construction photos from Las Vegas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We did more in Las Vegas than tour construction sites, but you’d never know it from the snapshots. Here are some more projects in the works — nothing like all there are to be explored.


This is a view across the Bellagio to the CityCenter site. In the middle foreground is the old Jockey Club, being remodeled in the course of being assimilated, Borg-like, into the new Cosmopolitan hotel-condo-casino-resort.


The CityCenter site from behind.


The new Encore tower at Wynn Las Vegas.


The new Palazzo tower at The Venetian.


Ground-level construction on the Palazzo tower.


On the left is the first of two Trump Towers. On the right is the Encore tower. In between is a lot of future construction on the North Strip.


From the Encore tower to the Palazzo tower.


With the Palazzo tower in the background, a chunk of the Harrah’s section of the Monopoly board.


Caesar’s empire. Behind the Augustus tower, on the right, will be another high hi-rise hotel tower. The steel shed in the bottom right will be replaced by new convention facilities. At the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard, now occupied by an open-air plaza, Caesar’s will build 37,000sf of new casino space.


And not to forget dowdy old Downtown, the Landry restaurant chain, new owners of the Golden Nugget, are planning to build a new hotel tower behind the old Pioneer Club.

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July 6, 2007

HARD MONEY: Buy at Eight. Sell at Twelve. Repeat.

by

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

Author website

Imagine a business with a 50% markup. No employees, no warehouses, some liability, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. I’m not trying to introduce you to the hottest multi-level marketing craze nor am I trying to convince you to open a franchise.

I want to talk to you about becoming a buyer and seller of money. Mortgage money. I’m talking about the private mortgage marketplace.
Let me start off by showing you how to get the money you need. If you own a home with a bunch of equity (and many of you do), you have a lousy investment. Robert Ashby, President of Solid Rock Mortgage in Florida, tells us that home equity earns you nothing and may actually shrink over the next 6 months to 6 years (depending when your local market turns around). If your boss left a bunch of inventory in the warehouse and it was in danger of losing value, he’d be looking for another job in a few years. Turn that “dead” inventory into money producing inventory by borrowing against your home equity. You can do that for about 8% in today’s marketplace.

Disclaimer: The private mortgage as an investment, aka “trust deed” or asset-based lending (READ: hard money) is a very specialized market. I talked about this marketplace in Life As A Legal Loan Shark. I try to refer would be trust deed investors to the basics of trust deed investing and ultimately send them to the California Department of Real Estate explanation.

Now that we have the appropriate disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about how you make money. Let’s secure you a HELOC for $225,000. We’re going to leave $25,000 in what Jeff Brown refers to as the Sominex account. Subprime borrowers are not always the best at paying the loans back in a timely manner so we want to have access to 10-12 months worth of payments in reserves. That way you can weather a storm.

Now, we’re going to have you Read more

July 6, 2007

Clip show: The Fabulous Baker Boys

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote about The Fabulous Baker Boys at New Years. This is another film where the conflicts are painfully real and where everyone is a better person at the end.

In the clip linked below, Michelle Pfeiffer sings More Than You Know as a way of summarizing the argument of the film. As with Pleasantville, this is a film I can watch over and over again.

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July 6, 2007

Looking for funky residential real estate on the Strip in Las Vegas? You’re surrounded by it…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ll share one more idea from Las Vegas, then I’m going back home to where the men are men and the women are symmetrical.

Start with this: Condotels. This is the utterly brilliant scheme by which I reap the financial benefits of owning a hotel suite while foisting off on you all the risks of owning that suite. When business is slow, neither one of us makes money, but you incur all the costs. Very gracious of you to underwrite my business in this way.

This of course is the time-honored business strategy that I call Socializing the Risk. I may give up some portion of the profits I might have made, but I absolve myself of all the risks associated with ownership while retaining some, most or even all of the predictable rewards. You in your turn acquire all right, title and interest in and to the unpredictable rewards — e.g., future appreciation — along with all of the costs and downside risks of ownership.

Which of us is getting the better deal?

Who pre-printed the paperwork?

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In many of the newer, larger casino hotel resorts, you will see fake structures like this. This is at Paris, but you can see the same kind of faux-cade at The Venetian or Caesar’s Palace or Planet Hollywood. What we have is a ground-floor retail establishment with apartments overhead, just like back in Europe or Olde Boston Towne.

Here’s my question: Why are those apartments fake?

Why aren’t they condos or condotels or even just hotel rooms? Why not condotel whole structures, with the resort deciding who gets to lease the retail space? Living inside a casino would be too loud and too smoky for many people, but there are others who would love it, if not as a full-time residence then as a getaway home.

This retro mode of residential-space-over-retail-space is already happening at Kierland Commons-style outdoor malls. You can find it in Las Vegas at Green Valley Ranch, and no doubt elsewhere. It’s too late to do it in extant resorts, but it might be a fun idea to try in newly-built facilities.

Too much Disney for my tastes, but Read more

July 5, 2007

Marketing Brilliance Courtesy of Homer Simpson

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

When it comes down to it I’m more of a marketing guy than a mortgage guy. Sure I own a mortgage company but I wasn’t brought in to do the selling or the secondary marketing or the finances or office admin – I was brought in to be “the marketing guy,” to bring in the leads and market our company. It’s my background and my passion. So even though I spend a lot of time dealing with all of the items listed above it is the marketing that really gets me excited.

With that introduction you’ll understand why I’ve so hastily penned this post about out-of-the-box marketing after reading this article about 7-11 and The Simpsons teaming up to transform 11 7-11’s across the country in to Kwik-E-Marts to promote the upcoming movie.

To promote the movie not only did they completely redo the exterior of the store, but consider the other details:

  • Green aprons for staff (a la Apu)
  • Squishee cups instead of slurpee cups
  • Buzz soda 6-packs for sale
  • Pink frosting-covered donuts with sprinkles
  • Radioactive Man comic books
  • All new signage “Thank you for loitering.”
  • Tons of Simpson-esque memorabilia products

People drove from miles around and waited in a huge line just to get inside. Once they were inside it felt like being in the cartoon. You can see more photos from the Burbank store here.

Can you imagine the creative meeting that led to this? Can you imagine the scared conformists who thought the idea was too risky to be pitched to the client? Those that thought this could never be pulled off, that no one would go for it, that people wouldn’t care? Can you imagine the courage of those who conceived of the idea had to push it through the doubters and those that said “we should just do a viral internet video?”

Can you imagine what it would take to come up with something as remarkable as this to market your business? Every time I see something like this I shake my head and give a silent round of applause to the marketers that made this happen. I immediately think how can Read more

July 5, 2007

Zillow.com is free to issue free Zestimates in Arizona

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Arizona Republic reporter Peter Corbett phoned to say that Arizona Governor Janet Napilitano has signed Senate Bill 1291, which includes language that will permit Zillow.com and other no-fee Automated Valuation Models to operate without interference in the state. Corbett also notes that the Arizona Board of Appraisal has backed away from the cease and desist orders it had issued to the Seattle-based real estate portal.

More at Zillow Blog and The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

July 5, 2007

A luxury condo conundrum in Las Vegas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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The greenish structures on the right are the Panorama Towers. They sit just on the west side of the I-15 freeway. Condos facing east will have a very dramatic view of CityCenter and much of the south Strip. Condos facing west will look upon flat land bearded by houses, and they will be blasted every day by the late afternoon sun.

What do you suppose is the price difference between the two sides of these towers?

July 5, 2007

Clip show: Grand Canyon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s what I like in movies: I want an accurate portrayal of normal human life in which basically decent people are confronted with a challenge, and, in wrestling with it, emerge as even better people.

I despise the idea of villainy — not because there are no villains in the world, but because they are almost never the problem in a normal human life. Film villains are stupid, insanely over the top. If you want to deal with villains in real life, take on angry drunks or passive-aggressive wraiths or the kind of everyday trolls who try to bring out the worst in otherwise good-hearted people.

Even then I’m not interested. In real life, most people are trying to do their best from the best of intentions, and the conflicts that arise between them are interesting because we each see the world from our own unique vantage point. We are beset, mostly, by errors of knowledge, not by malice. The true story of humanity is learning to do better, and from this idea comes the best art. Those kind of stories fascinate me.

Grand Canyon is a good example. The High Concept behind the film — people are becoming more divided by their chasm-like differences, and yet the real Grand Canyon is bigger and more significant than tiny human lives — is lame, symptomatic of the pontificating Sunday editorial page Deep Think piece. But co-writer/director Lawrence Kasden manages to overcome the banality of his theme with a series of overlapping, converging story arcs. Each character is motivated like a real person, which means that none of their motivations are evil or wrong, but they are sometimes in conflict and have to be worked out.

In the clip linked here, Mary McDonnell’s Claire endures an agonizing dream exploring the changes, welcome and unwelcome, she is going through in her marriage and family.

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July 5, 2007

REMBEX Blog Fiesta promises facts, food, fun

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter of lenderama and REMBEX fame is hosting the REMBEX Blog Fiesta on July 18th in Denver:

Blog Fiesta will be held at Garcia’s Mexican Resturant, on July 18th, from 11-3. Garcia’s is in the Denver Tech Center (South Metro Denver), near I-25 and Belleveiw. We have a room reserved to seat 60, and can spill into another room to support as many 100 attendee’s.

Appetizers, soft drinks, lunch & expert blogging will be provided!

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July 4, 2007

Clip show: American Beauty

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t quite hate American Beauty. Cathy thinks that Lester Burnham is redeemed in the end, first by correcting the defects in his life and second by not succumbing to the crime of ephebophila. My take is that he’s a snarky pomo asshole from start to finish. I think the philosophical argument of the film is made by the clip of the plastic bag being buffeted at random by the winds: Nothing is everything. Ick.

But: Even ickier: American Beauty brings us the all-time most hideous portrayal of the real estate business. A piece of that is shown in the clip linked below, Carolyn Burnham defiling herself at open house. It were well to be free from pestilential, confiscatory government, which is what we celebrate today with beer and fireworks. But there is something to be said for breaking free from phony, prostrate selling stunts, too.

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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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