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August 28, 2008

Understanding RE Web 2.0 – btw Where are my meds?

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

Lately I have an overwhelming feeling that I have schizophrenia – to those who know me well, they simply ask why it took me so long to figure it out.

What happened to the days when searching for a home doubled as a work out?  Lugging around 25 lbs MLS catalogues – flipping thru the black and white property snapshots – it was clean – it was simply – it was – well – leisurely.

You know – with the advent of new technology – evolving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the amount of choices and technological advancements in developing online communities and data analysis has my mind spinning – so many choices

  • how do I use these new solutions?
  • How will my clients benefit?
  • How will I benefit?
  • Which ones should I invest in?
  • Which functionality provides the best return?

As I discover new sites and options, I can’t seem to keep up with the “older” ones.

So – I decided to try and put it all together.  So here I am – at homethinking, on my computer, trying to assemble my thoughts – Trulia wondering what this all about – I mean, in general, I feel I am a realseekr of knowledge – where data’s concerned, I am good at Krunching the numbers.  But the mind map of the Web 2.0 space has really Motovoated me to look at how this fits together.

Personively, I want my clients with BiggerPockets to see the benefits while I become a SmarterAgent.  That way we all win.  Ok – so let’s Zolve this problem.

So – I’ve found some of the sites to be useful.  I actually have found some great clients using some of these sites.  But still – the list is Vast.  Bottomline – clients are still seeking help – they view me as their HomeGuru.  Let’s face it – for the client seeking a new home, they generally still need to walk thru the Frontdoor of a prospective property to know whether or not it’s a fit.

I will admit, I used to think Hoodeo these people think they are, having to walk UpMyStreet, up and down EveryBlock, insisting on Read more

August 28, 2008

Five for the road: iPhone apps for the real estate road warrior

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jott. Jott is preternaturally useful, since you can just phone yourself notes from the road and have them waiting for you when you get back to the office. Here’s an iPhone strategy: Install the iPhone app, but continue to use Jott by phone. That way, your Jotts will show up on your home email account, but they will also sync wirelessly with the iPhone client. You’ll have your notes with you wherever you happen to be working.

NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is by now the de facto category-killer feed reader. The desktop version syncs wirelessly with the iPhone client, so you never see the same news twice: If you read it on your iPhone, it won’t show up on your home client and vice versa.

Mail. A built-in app? You bet. I have my mail set up like this: From my iMac in the office, certain categories of email — initial client contacts plus mail from anyone in my Address Book — are redirected to a unique iPhone-only gmail account. That way, I get echoes of the mail that matters to me, with zero spam. The iPhone’s mail account won’t honor my gmail Reply To setting, which sucks, but, as above, the advantage is that I have my important email wherever I happen to be working.

Maps. Another built-in app — and it made me look look smart twice yesterday. I’m very kinesthetic. I rarely get lost, and I can remember any route I have ever traveled. Even so, directions in real estate listings can suck. Having on-demand GPS mapping is a life-saver for a working Realtor.

Where. If Where did nothing but find the nearest Starbucks, I would still love it to death. But Where finds and maps anything that can be found — with a fast, clean interface.

Cathy has four pages of iPhone apps so far. I am very conservative by contrast. But I have two voice dialers that I’m trying to find time to train. If one or the other does the job, I’ll be sure to talk about it, because hands-free dialing would make the iPhone that much more valuable — to a Read more

August 27, 2008

Racing the Clock on DPA Programs: Will The Dems Save the Day?

by

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

Author website

I had some fun, yesterday, with a report about the down payment assistance ban and the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit.  I poked fun at the hypocritical nature of the Down Payment Assistance Programs and speculated that the Tax Credit might be collateral for a “tax refund loan”, thereby, facilitating the need for down payment funds today.

The whole thing is silly when you think about it.  100% financing, through the FHA, is the answer.  Then, we can stop winking at the violation of the spirit of the law.  Some commenters, suggested that 100% financing, or attempts to provide down payment assistance, is dangerous and might bankrupt HUD.  The fact is that down payment assistance programs have a default rate that is twice the normal acceptable FHA default rate.  The universe of FHA loans have a default rate of 3-3.5% while DPA loans are 7-9%.

While it’s easy to say that over 9 out of 10 buyers, who use the DPA program to buy a home, succeed, the high default rate COULD bankrupt the FHA insurance fund.  I queried some senior bank credit officers about this.  What I discovered is that those defaults CAN be managed if we layer the risk.  For you non-mortgage types, that means that we tighten one C if we loosen the other.  I was astounded to hear that over half the DPA defaults could have been avoided if underwriters strictly adhered to a recommended debt-to-income ratio of 29/41 and a minimum credit score of 620.

Compliance to the underwriting guidelines then, could make DPA programs, or 100% financing work.

Last year, I wrote a letter to Senator Dodd, here on Bloodhound Blog.  That letter introduced me to a few contacts inside the Beltway; I called them today .  What I heard was classic political maneuvering.  The recently passed Housing Law was a compromise.  Republicans, siding with the HUD Commissioner, effectively banned the DPA programs and INCREASED the minimum down payment requirement, on FHA loans, to 3.5%.  Democrats, capitulated on the eventual DPA ban because they prohibited HUD from engaging in “risk-based” pricing, which is, higher rates for people who might not Read more

August 27, 2008

Going to ground, clearing cobwebs, finding balance: I’m back in the saddle again.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I know when my life is out of whack when I lose things. I’m a great organizer, but not on a day-to-day basis. Daily, things pile up: Paperwork, bags of unloved clothes for Goodwill, the experiments in microbiology that grow in my refrigerator. Day by day, things are no longer where they should be and I’m misplacing those pesky emergency medical forms for school, or a magazine article I wanted to blog about, or a receipt for a lamp that I want to return. Then, quite suddenly, or so it seems to me, I’m losing big things: My camera! A credit card! A potential client! Danger! Danger! Now it’s time to stop and regroup, and so I’ve gone to ground for a few weeks.

I love the term “gone to ground”. It’s usually in reference to the hunted burrowing into their holes to avoid being killed, and that seems appropriate to my situation. I wonder what rabbits do when they go to ground. Do they tidy up a bit? Take a nap? Make more rabbits? I was spinning my wheels, overwhelmed by unproductive minutiae and unable to accomplish meaningful (income producing) work, so I took some time to refocus my attention.  The bad news is that my staycation lasted much longer that I thought it would. The good news is that I accomplished much more that I thought I would.

All refrigerated biology experiments have been duly noted and concluded. We now have a remodeled bathroom, and our household files have been purged and tidied up. Both kid’s bedrooms have been cleaned and sanitized. One high schooler started the year uneventfully, and one has finally finished high school (we hope) with an indifference that is matched only by my frustration with his public school experience. Closure. Moving on.

Brad Coy felt stuck. I was spinning my wheels in unproductive navel gazing but didn’t realize it until things disappeared and I got buried. I needed to take the time to focus on a lot of little things which piled up to a really big thing which was standing in the way of me getting anything Read more

August 27, 2008

L.A. Times sells Real Estate now…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Jon Karlen continues to beat me to the punch! Yesterday he reported the Los Angeles Times’ new real estate auction venture. The original hat tip goes to Forbes.com this time.

When Bob Wilson mentioned in the comments of the last post about the LA Times that this was not the end of dead tree media, but the genesis of their online effort, he was correct IMO then. This certainly supports that.

Thoughts?

August 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: If your web site sucks — fix it

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As I’ve mentioned, I’m building a dedicated direct-response web site devoted to pre-selling listing clients. Our main Phoenix real estate weblog does a good job selling to buyers, sellers, investors and relocators, the four markets we target there, but it is my belief that I can build a sales engine that can pre-sell and pre-condition homeowners in such a way that, by the time they contact us, we will be completely Beyond Competition.

I talked about a number of these ideas at Unchained in Phoenix, and we’ll be doing quite a bit more on this topic in Orlando.

Consider this:

21:28:40 http://distinctivephoenix.com/
21:29:43 http://abetterlisting.com/
21:32:18 http://abetterlisting.com/Presentation/
21:46:29 http://distinctivephoenix.com/
21:50:33 http://abetterlisting.com/

That’s a set of visits from one unique IP address. I built minimal session tracking into the site, but I have Cameron working on a much more robust solution. But what you’re seeing is at least 22 minutes of someone’s life. Not counting search engine spiders, this site draws fewer than six unique visitors a day — but they’re all like this. Twenty-two minutes is a short visit. People have stayed for over an hour. Others have come back for three or four days in succession. The site is not converting as well as I want it to — yet — but I’m seeing exactly the kind of user behavior I want.

There are points I want to make, but I’ll have to be brief. This site and our others are converting well enough that I’m short on time all the time.

But let’s hit this much, at least:

  • Your web site or weblog is a perfectible selling tool. If it sucks now — and sucks only means something with respect to a commercial metric, not because of some emotional aversion — fix it. Good marketing is targeted at specific prospects, presents them with a unique selling proposition and rewards the desired behavior. It ain’t rocket science. It just takes effort and testing.
  • Your web site is potentially the most efficient sales tool you have in your sales toolbox. It might not convert at the same rate as other tools, but its cost per conversion is incredibly low, and it sells for you Read more
August 26, 2008

The First Rule of Fraud Club Is, Don’t Talk About Fraud Club

by

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

Author website

Well, it looks like the Down Payment Assistance Programs are dead.  Countrywide is usually the bellwether for any  “out on a limb” lending and they sent me an e-mail today, telling me to “get my deals in” by Friday.  Specifically, my down payment assistance transactions have to be locked by Friday and approved by a DE underwriter on Monday.  Files are taking 3-4 days in underwriting so for all practical purposes, I’m out of the down payment assistance business as of 5PM, today.

That’s okay.  I haven’t used these programs since 9-11 so I won’t miss out.  Lower end home prices might get walloped next month, as the pool of unsuspecting buyers disappears, but we might just have a few more tricks up our sleeve.

Did you understand how those programs worked?  You can read about how we got around the  law by calling sellers “owners of participating homes” here.  If it sounds a lot like the disclaimer that escorts use (escorts sell time; what happens between consenting adults is private), it’s because the same principle of “winking” at the law is employed.

The Rules of Fraud Club:

The first rule of Fraud Club is, don’t talk about Fraud Club.

The second rule is, you DO NOT talk about Fraud Club.

It would appear that this movie is about over.  But wait, there’s a sequel!  This one is called the First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit.  Essentially, it’s a $7,500 tax credit, that must be repaid, over 15 years to the Federal Government.  If you’re buying a $200,000 home, that $7,500 covers your downpayment for a FHA loan.  While “borrowing” downpayment monies are disallowed on loan programs, the first-time homebuyer tax credit is essentially an interest-free, government loan.  The problem with this “trick” is that the buyers can’t get that credit BEFORE they close on the new home.

Hmmm…now, how do we get that money into the buyers’ pockets before April 15, 2009?  I’ll bet that the downpayment assistance charities will find a way.  Look for Nehemiah and AmeriDream to morph into “tax refund lenders”, some time this fall.  Why?

Because, everyone knows the last two rules of Fraud Club

This Read more

August 26, 2008

Why Are We Wasting Our Time?

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

Over the past few days, Redfin got into it with a bunch of other real estate websites. What else is new?

In an argument about who has the most homes for sale, which began on TechCrunch and continued on Redfin’s blog, one participant argued that what consumers really care about is advanced filtering options, not inventory.

Which got us thinking. We spend a fair bit of time on advanced filtering options. And we’ve always thought we need to spend more: every week, we get requests for filters on parking, townhouses, waterfront location (Seattle), historic designation (DC), pool (LA).

So Redfin’s Jim Lamb just analyzed 70,000 Redfin searches from Thursday, August 21 to find out which of Redfin.com’s search filters people really use. It’s an analysis we’ve done before, to figure out whether a listing gets seen more if it’s priced to be included in web searches, like at $449,500 rather than $450,100.

What we learned last night was a little demoralizing. People filter on price, beds, baths, sometimes square feet, and new (or very old) listings, but not much else:

Redfin\'s Search Options

  • Price: Min 24.8%; Max 53.9%
  • Beds: Min 32.8%
  • Baths: Min 21.4%
  • Square Feet: Min 15.1%; Max 2.4%
  • Days on Redfin: 12.7% (this would include requests for new listings, listing on Redfin more than 45 days, or filters on on a specific number of days on Redfin; I suspect that almost all the volume comes from request for new listings)

On looking at this, Matt Goyer said, “Who doesn’t filter on square footage?” I could only sadly shake my head. Consumers completely skip the fancy stuff:

  • Lot Size: Min 5.5%; Max 0.55%
  • Year Built: Min 5.4%; Max 1.1%
  • Has view: 1.1%
  • New construction: 0.24%
  • Fixer-uppers: 0.36%
  • Open houses: 0.7%

So even as we argued that filtering options aren’t as important as inventory, we didn’t really believe it: our engineers have been hard at work on… you guessed it, more filtering options. Just now, it’s parking & townhouse filters. (Every week, I get a crazy screed from a consumer about how much people hate townhouses… which I read… from my townhouse.)

What do you think? Are we wasting our time? Confusing our consumers? As it is, we Read more

August 26, 2008

Clash of the Titans: Women shriek and children cower in blood-spattered suburban enclaves — when Realty.bots collide…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s news and then there’s news. Consider:

A real estate industry study released today shows that most popular consumer real estate search engines, including Trulia, Zillow, Google and Yahoo!, offer home seekers only a small fraction of the homes actually available on the market — and that many of the listings are inaccurate or out of date. Real estate searches on these popular sites in three sample markets — Miami, Dallas and San Diego — failed to provide users with as much as 92 percent of available listings in their home searches.

“Holy cow!” you might think. “The mainstream media is writing something actually factual about the defects of venture-capital-funded Realty.bots! No puff, no fluff, just the straight dope!”

Contain yourself. This is not news. Like most “news,” it’s a regurgitated press release. “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?”

The study, commissioned by Roost.com and conducted by the WAV Group, points out the stark contrasts between different online property search methods available today and concluded that the most accurate source of listing information is the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The WAV Group specifically researched how popular consumer real estate search sites including Trulia, Google and Yahoo!, among others — which aggregate listings from a variety of third-party sources — stack up to sites like Roost.com, which are enabled by the MLS. The MLS is the real estate industry standard database for sharing information on local homes for sale and is available only to licensed real estate agents and brokers; all the listings on the MLS are derived from local agents and brokers. To serve the needs of agents wishing to make MLS property search available to consumers, MLS boards nationwide have deployed a standard called Internet Data Exchange, or IDX.

This again is obvious, of course, so it’s perfectly understandable that mainstream media mavens seem not to know it. But it’s completely self-serving on Roost’s part. The actual news in this “news” would be:

Trulia/Zillow available everywhere (even on your phone), Roost unknown to founders’ mothers

But when would you ever expect to find news in the newspapers?

In fact, in the cities where it operates, Redfin.com has the most Read more

August 24, 2008

With a new iPhone application and support for other mobile devices, Trulia.com is pushing the Realty.bot race into the cloud, but its new free weblogging platform may put ActiveRain under a cloud

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Who’s winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? There is a constant flurry of new press releases from the two companies, but their boastful claims often sound like a pair of garrulous amputees agreeing with each other that the two-legged world is off its rocker: “Five million visitors! Ha-ha!” “A hundred thousand new listings! So there!”

Does any of this mean anything? There are wonderfully useful metrics for judging net.behavior. Unique visitors, for example. Pageviews per visit. Time on site. Even better: ROI per visit. But these measures are not independently verifiable, and the guides we do have available to us are inherently suspect.

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? Neither company has gone IPO. Neither company has gone belly-up. Beyond that, your guess is as good as anyone’s.

But: Tonight marks a decisive change in the game: Truila.com is releasing a fairly robust iPhone application as a part of a site-wide upgrade.

What’s new?

  1. Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of Lightpole-enabled smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.
  2. Trulia is adding a higher degree of user participation in the form of a new, free weblogging platform. Any registered user of the site will be able to start a blog.
  3. Finally, Trulia is offering greater personalization of the user experience in the form of a self-customizing home page. Your home page will reflect “new property listings, home prices changes, upcoming open houses, median sales price trends, recently sold properties,” all of these based on your past search history, along with “relevant blogs and Q&As from our Trulia Voices Community.”

In truth, personalization might Read more

August 24, 2008

BloodhoundBlog sports new iPhone theme: All the dog, half the drool

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I installed an iPhone-only theme this morning. If you land on BloodhoundBlog from any browser except Safari for the iPhone, you’ll see our normal theme. If you come in from the iPhone, you’ll get a theme optimized for the iPhone’s (or iTouch’s) screen size.

This is the way BHB looked on an iPhone until this morning:

This is how it looks now:

The theme rotates as you would expect it to, so you can get to a wider, shorter, easier-reading page if you want to.

The normal sidebar stuff is entirely omitted, so you’ll have to come in from a desktop browser to see that content.

Remember that you can easily add a BloodhoundBlog button to your iPhone home page.

I have to work out an algorithm, but, last night, in a fit of ecstatic romantic frenzy, Cathy and I worked out how to produce engenu-like pages on-the-spot. If I can figure out how to move iPhone photos to a file server, we could produce previewing web pages from within the house we are previewing.

Sufficient unto the day: If you have an iPhone, the new theme should make BloodhoundBlog easier to read on the run.

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August 23, 2008

Is it sink, swim, or just taking a deep breath to find buoyancy?

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

It’s Saturday, which means it’s my Sunday, which means it’s my one day off if I’m lucky.  This last month has been the busiest I have seen this year.  The choices of my clients, both on the buying and listing side have seemed more challenging now than I have ever seen.  Well, that’s not entirely true, many buyers have had no problem sitting on the fence.  On top of that, the opportunities that have been presented to me have be overly scrutinized this week.  I was out to dinner last night with some guests from out of town when it hit me.  The stress and lack of sleep has had me going around acting somewhat zombie like,  I literally responded to the Maitre d‘s question of “how are you this evening?” with a “nnnnyaeh”.  The obviousness of my failing condition was now as apparent as the gibberish expelled from my throat.

Now before this comes across an absolute whining session for me to vent off the frustrations of my life at the moment, let me tell you that I have the tools to navigate rough waters.  I’ve been here before, as we all have.  The bumps along the way keep it interesting if nothing else, right?   The unpredictable events the follow poor decision making are ones that can be reversed or taken into a more positive direction given the awareness of the direction of said bonehead moves.  I’ve never thought that it was helpful to beat one’s self up over what could be a mistake.  What I do feel is negligible is witnessing someone (or yourself) having the awareness of a mistake and keeping that action on the same path.  This, a good friend of mine would say is like sticking your head in the oven only to find that it’s too hot for a head, and then going  back again the next day to try it again and still find it’s still too warm…. though I could never figure out why somebody wanted stick their head the oven, the lesson was not lost on me.

Simplicity is always my best fix.  Making Read more

August 23, 2008

Buy low? Sell high? You can’t sell high for now, but prices are low enough that a buy-and-hold strategy could pay off handsomely

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Buy low? Sell high? You can’t sell high for now, but prices are low enough that a buy-and-hold strategy could pay off handsomely

Last week I met with a potential real estate investor. She’s an investor because she’s got the money, the credit and the will to dip her toe in the water. She’s a potential investor because she hasn’t yet been a landlord.

With new investors, I talk about premium suburban single-family rental homes. This is normally the safest, most economical way to start a real estate investment plan in Phoenix. That’s especially true right now, when the right rental home will be cash-flow positive from the outset.

But I also talk about other income opportunities in real estate, if only because land-lording is not for everyone. I would not advise a first-time investor to take the plunge in a large multi-family community or a strip mall, but there are plenty of other ways to take advantage of our current market conditions.

An example? Flipping. There never was heard a more discouraging word, but flipping has a horrible reputation because a horde of TV-educated tycoons bought at the top of the market and sold their refurbished masterpieces at auction. Now, when entry prices are low and trending lower, a slow flipping strategy promises nice rewards.

Here’s one slow strategy: Find a great flip candidate at a rock-bottom price. Buy it to own as a rental. Hold it in that state — with the monthly cash-flow covering your costs — until prices recover to your satisfaction. Then do the refurb and sell.

Here’s another one: Buy your cheap refurb candidate and move into it. Redo the home slowly, room by room, especially when the materials for doing a particular room are very cheap. Sell it after you’ve owned it for five years or more and take the capital gain tax free.

There is a common investment idea behind these strategies: Buy low. Sell high. You can’t predict when you’ll be able to sell high, but you know for sure you can buy low right now. If Read more

August 22, 2008

One for the dogs, one for my baby and one more for the road

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In the weeks before Unchained in Phoenix. I stopped reading my feed reader. I was wall-to-wall with Unchained work and wall-to-wall with money work and something had to give. I’ve read this and that since then, but I’m over 16,000 posts behind in my reading. Oh, well…

When I knew for sure that we would be getting iPhones this Summer, I switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire as my feed reader, this because the desktop and iPhone clients will sync to each other. Same subscriptions on both, but what I’ve read on the iPhone won’t show up on my Mac and vice versa.

So I added the feeds I really wanted to NetNewsWire, but I also kept the old set running on Vienna. Interestingly to me, since I made the switch BloodhoundBlog has added over 200 posts, an astounding accomplishment. Something in WordPress or a plug-in is wasting post numbers, but we are over 3,000 posts, total, on the blog in just a couple of years. Even more impressive is the depth of our posts. If your goal is to understand the world of hi-tech real estate, reading here will be more beneficial than reading everything else put together.

So let’s hear it for the dogs: The best, the brightest and by far the loudest voices in the RE.net. It’s an honor for me to write in such a company.

So far, 2008 has been very, very good to our tiny little real estate brokerage, but it certainly didn’t start that way. Q4 ’07 and Q1 ’08 were plenty scary for anyone in real estate, and I’m sure they contributed to putting a lot of people out of the real estate business. We normally go to Las Vegas at Independence Day for our wedding anniversary, but this year we did not. We were busy with money work, which was most welcome, but we were also gun-shy about spending money.

July rocked, August rocked, and we’re picking up buyers if not listings with alacrity. It’s time for Greg and Cathy to have some alone time. Even so, we’re still more than spooked about money, and we both have 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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