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Month: August 2007 (page 2 of 9)

August 27, 2007

Staging Oregon: Being the best house when only the best will sell

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Week after week in the Republic, I hammer away on the idea that the only homes that will sell in this market are the ones that are priced right, prepared right and presented right. It goes for us, too, obviously, so we made a visual record of the process of preparing a home for the real estate market for a home we listed last week.

This is fun for me, because one of the things I tell sellers is, “You know what’s wrong with this house. You know exactly what you would frown over — or your mother-in-law would frown over — if you were seeing this home for the first time. Those are the issues we need to address before we can try to sell this house.” This gives us one extra way to show-don’t-tell the ideas we are trying to communicate.

Staging is all the rage right now, but staging is a wasted effort if the home is dirty or in palpable disrepair. This slide show illustrates a more robust idea of home staging.

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August 27, 2007

Flashed cards — The Art of the Card: The Riccellivised version of The Realty Butler business card

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli sent me this yesterday, his unique take on a business card for Allen Butler, The Realty Butler:

The art of the card

Allen, 

Your euphonious butler idea can work … just be more evocative to move it up market.  More like this on the front…with apologies to Mr. Vettriano and the Portland Gallery.

Formula for success:  Fine art on the front** + Simple contact details on the back = Hard to discard. 

__
**Don’t even THINK of appropriating this work without Mr. Vettriano’s permi$$ion!  Of course you knew that.

That formula, fine art on the front, details on the back, could rock.

There is no guarantee that a top-drawer marketing guru will while away his Sunday redesigning your business card — but what have you got to lose? Show us your card and let’s talk about it…

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August 27, 2007

The scarcity shortage: Seth Godin on the Age of Abundance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written before about the practical consequences of the Age of Abundance. Here’s Seth Godin on the same subject:

So how do you deal with the shortage of scarcity?

Well, the worst strategy is whining–about copyright laws and fair trade and how hard you’ve worked to get to where you are. Whining is rarely a successful response to anything. Instead, start by acknowledging that most of the profit from your business is going to disappear soon. Unless you have a significant cost advantage (like Amazon’s or Wal-Mart’s), someone with nothing to lose is going to be able to offer a similar product for less money.

So what’s scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust. None of these things guarantee loyalty in the face of cut-rate competition, though. So to that list I’ll add this: an insanely low-cost structure based on outsourcing everything except your company’s insight into what your customers really want to buy. If the work is boring, let someone else do it, faster and cheaper than you ever could. If your products are boring, kill them before your competition does.

Ultimately, what’s scarce is that kind of courage–which is exactly what you can bring to the market.

Read the whole thing. And this was written four years ago… If you’re not moving up in incredibly irreplaceable value, you’re moving down in infinitely fungible price.

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August 26, 2007

Voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another not-very-short list of posts. We set out to attract the best, and we’re seeing it and then some.

Vote here.

These are this week’s nominees:

Voting will end Monday at noon, and I’ll announce the winners soon thereafter.

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August 26, 2007

Flashed cards: “Think of it as evolution in action”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Allen Butler is a volunteer to this discussion, so please be gentle:

Frankly, it needs an overhaul. I’m not real enamored of it any more. I used to think it was better than good…

Don’t blame Allen for this. Blame Adobe’s John Warnock, who, more than anyone else, invented desktop publishing.

I have one word: Simplify. Amend me constructively, if you please.

And: In the nicest possible way: Why not show us you can take it as well as dish it out?

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August 26, 2007

“Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves—all this on a daily basis—they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Damn straight. And it is pure agony to get a horse shod, too.

The headline is quoted from a luddite’s lament in The Age — in Melbourne, Australia. Technology threatens the jobs of the farriers of our age, newspaper reporters, and there is nothing for it but to weep incessantly from — literally — halfway around the globe.

Suck it in, suck it up and move it on down the road. Such horses as there are needing shoes are shod, and — to the exact extent that anyone at all is interested — school board meetings are being overseen and documented. How much education do you have to have in order to fail persistently to understand that broadcasting was a low-tech economic compromise? In the world of narrowcasting, everyone gets exactly what he wants, nothing that he doesn’t, and no one is obliged to pay for school board notes in order to see the horse-racing results.

Reporters have always been demagogues in debate, masters at deploying the logical fallacies they never learned in school. Even now, when they want to scare their vanishing audiences with the bogeymen of the internet, they pick the weakest of straw men to pick on. In the case of the article I’m citing, the designated victim is Wikipedia, which, because it lacks editors, could at any moment deceive you into believing that Wednesday is a vegetable.

Do you want to see the future of professional journalism? My pet example is John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His “Venture Blog” is a beat blog: He covers venture-capital-funded start-ups as his beat and as the exclusive focus of his weblog. His work is also printed in the newspaper, but that’s anticlimactic — hours or even days late. Cook is a blogger who happens to work for a newspaper.

It seem unlikely to me that anyone is going to pay for weblogged coverage of school board meetings, but weblogging is the future of school board reporting. Content producers who want to get paid for their efforts will have to expend those efforts on content people are willing to pay for. Just about a century Read more

August 25, 2007

What price friendship? “He says he spends more than $100,000 a year on cabanas, food and alcohol for him and his guests”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In a dreadfully serious soft-core porn piece on the mission-blending of swimming pools and ultra-lounges at Las Vegas casino-resort-hotels, the New York Times coughs up this Gilded Age morality play:

Rainmaking aside, how expensive can it get for high-end customers seeking a raucous Sunday afternoon? Randy Lund, a C.P.A. who works as a branch manager for mortgage broker Meridias Capital, has been going to Rehab since Day 1. He says he spends more than $100,000 a year on cabanas, food and alcohol for him and his guests. Yet as much as Rehab is about recreation for Mr. Lund, it is also about business.

“I bring Realtors and clients and they love it at Rehab,” says Mr. Lund, trim, shirtless and wearing board shorts. “I met a guy here who was a friend of a friend, I invited him to hang out with us in my cabana, and I bought him a few drinks. He turned out to be a multimillionaire who owns shopping centers and a jet. Now he’s a mentor to me, and we’re in the process of developing our own shopping center here in Vegas.”

When you’re writing your mortgage check next week, do pause to reflect that your money is going to worthy purposes.

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August 25, 2007

The New York Times goes on a Countrywide manhunt

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The New York Times on the Countrywide mess and how the company got there:

ON its way to becoming the nation’s largest mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial Corporation encouraged its sales force to court customers over the telephone with a seductive pitch that seldom varied. “I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible,” the sales representatives would say.

But providing “the best loan possible” to customers wasn’t always the bank’s main goal, say some former employees. Instead, potential borrowers were often led to high-cost and sometimes unfavorable loans that resulted in richer commissions for Countrywide’s smooth-talking sales force, outsize fees to company affiliates providing services on the loans, and a roaring stock price that made Countrywide executives among the highest paid in America.

Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews with former employees and brokers who worked in different units of the company and internal documents they provided. One document, for instance, shows that until last September the computer system in the company’s subprime unit excluded borrowers’ cash reserves, which had the effect of steering them away from lower-cost loans to those that were more expensive to homeowners and more profitable to Countrywide.

More:

In a mid-March interview on CNBC, Mr. Mozilo said Countrywide was poised to benefit from the spreading crisis in the mortgage lending industry. “This will be great for Countrywide,” he said, “because at the end of the day, all of the irrational competitors will be gone.”

But Countrywide documents show that it, too, was a lax lender. For example, it wasn’t until March 16 that Countrywide eliminated so-called piggyback loans from its product list, loans that permitted borrowers to buy a house without putting down any of their own money. And Countrywide waited until Feb. 23 to stop peddling another risky product, loans that were worth more than 95 percent of a home’s appraised value and required no documentation of a borrower’s income.

As recently as July 27, Countrywide’s product list Read more

August 25, 2007

Flashed cards: If you want any more salesmanship than this, you’ll have to make an appointment

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer brings us this:

I just had my business cards changed a few weeks ago to highlight the FBS Blog on the back/front. This is a tame rip-off of Hugh MacLeod’s blog cards.

Publicizing the weblog is sweet, but what Michael is showing us is the businessman’s business card — just the facts ma’am. If there is a marketing appeal, it’s in the subtle factors: “Our good taste and organizational ability provide you with tacit assurance that we won’t screw up your work on deadline.” That’s a job every business card has to do before it can do any other.

The question for the house: Can a business card do any other job? We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make our cards sell for us, passively. Are we just spinning our wheels? Is Michael’s card carrying all the load a little collateral piece can bear?

Say it in pictures, if you would: Show us your business card.

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August 24, 2007

World’s Largest Property Search Engine to Re-Launch

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

Properazzi Home Search on Bloodhound BlogProperazzi has announced that it has grown to become the world’s largest property search engine and works with your specific computer history rather than a log-in.  With over 4 million listings in 49 countries, Properazzi will re-launch with a new interface with numerous uber-specific filters (balconies, parking, etc) so you can search for your next home in your undies… if you’re not in America.  Ah, I had you- no worries National MLS, sleep tight RedfinTruliaYahoo dudes; Properazzi hasn’t landed in the U.S.

But, what if it did?  With already so many properties and a snazzy name and website under their belt, could they branch out to become the ever feared/loved National MLS in America?

—–
Comments are encouraged!

 

August 24, 2007

Flashed cards: “Hello, my name is Ken Brand”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ken Brand:

I’m a big fan of Scott Ginsberg the “Name Tag Guy”, I thought the name tag idea would make my card seem casual and approachable…wanted a short little resume so I put it on the back of the card. No sense wasting the space.

I’m looking forward to seeing what others are up too…thanks.

It’s time for you to show us what you’ve got.

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August 24, 2007

A buyer’s market? You bet, but even more than that, it’s a listing agent’s market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
A buyer’s market? You bet, but even more than that, it’s a listing agent’s market

As I write this, there are 55,706 homes listed for sale in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. Some are anomalous listings, but those would account for far fewer than one percent of the total. Allowing for every possible quibble, there are a lot of homes for sale — double what there should be.

In July, 4,730 ARMLS-listed homes were sold. Funds changed hands, escrow closed, sellers moved out, buyers moved in — sold.

That’s not a very healthy number of buyers. Five years ago, in July of 2002, 6,113 homes were sold. This is before the market went crazy, so it’s a reasonable number for comparison.

So we have about 75% as many buyers as we should have pursuing 200% of the normal quantity of inventory. That’s an 11.78 month supply of homes. Another way of saying the same thing: Every buyer in the market right now could have twelve or more candidate homes to choose from.

Not all locations are the same. Some buyers might have two or fewer homes to work with. For example, historic or architect-built homes are always in short supply. If you want to live in a high-demand area, you may have no homes to choose from. On the other hand, in very low-demand subdivisions, buyers may have 30 or more appropriate houses available to them.

Is this a buyer’s market? Oh, you bet! But even more than that, I see it as a listing agent’s market.

Why? Because for every home listed in the next 30 days, only a very few are going to sell within 30 days of being listed. For every home that comes off the market, at least one will replace it in the MLS. The ones that don’t sell immediately could be out there for a long while.

Which homes will sell? Those that are perfectly marketed in every possible respect: Priced right, prepared right, presented right. During the boom, anyone could sell a house. Now — and for the foreseeable future — only the Read more

August 24, 2007

Oh, good grief, not another one! “Stealth” real estate start-up is long on promises, short on details

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If Groucho Marx were to come back to us as a hen, aghast but still sardonic, what would he (she?) do? Peck around in the dirt, no doubt.

Comes next a “stealth” start-up called roost.com, which promises “to fundamentally change how customers find & move into their next home.”

When words mean almost anything they mean almost nothing, but “fundamentally” ought to mean a lot. For this promise to come true, I’m thinking people will need to find their homes by divination and move into them by teleportation. Realty may yet disappoint.

But: Mortgage woes be damned, the world does seem to be crawling with doofuses with dough. If you’re facing foreclosure, come up with a scam by which millions of insomniacs will search for homes they can’t afford in towns they don’t live in while exposing themselves — no, not to children — nor even to aghast, sardonic hens — but to thousands of pay-per-impression ads. Where before you were a deadbeat, 90+ days late, now you can be a Web 2.0 real estate entrepreneur, a stylish flash in an already over-crowded pan.

Goofy logo? Check. Jaw-dropping offices? Check. Radical chic media cachet? Check. The only thing missing from the “real estate space” is practical experience selling houses…

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August 23, 2007

Microsft doesn’t miss EVERY boat…

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

Many of you are Mac geeks while some of us are Microsoft fans.  Look, the iPhone trumped any of Microsoft’s phone efforts, but their creativity surpasses any Mac product on the books with their Photosynth project.  In case you didn’t have enough videos to watch today, I thought I’d give you one more.  So, grab a cup of coffee, take 10 and watch the future brought to you by Microsoft.

When you’re done, tell us how you think this could change the face of Real Estate?  Comments are highly encouraged!

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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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