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July 10, 2008

Localism.com’s Top Management Address Active Rain Member Concerns

by

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

Author website

Jonathan Washburn and Bob Stewart were my guests on a 45 minute interview about the new Localism.com:

1- Bob Stewart gave us an overview of the new Localism site and described its stated purpose.

2- Jon Washburn explained the history of the Localism portal and how polling the Active Rain community led to the decision to repurpose the portal as a hyper-local community interest site.

3- Opportunities for community evangelism were discussed along with practical ideas about how existing Active Rain members might benefit.

4- The sponsored community issue as well as “Top Neighbors” placement were explained.

5- Jon Washburn explained basic SEO strategy.

6- Bob Stewart discussed how the SEO strategy will be coupled with search engine marketing to draw consumers to the site.

7- Jon Washburn answered the BIG question; “Will he sell Localism or Active Rain ?”

The interview is about 45 minutes long and is perfect to download to your iPod, for your evening workout.

Download/Listen to the Localism.com interview here

July 10, 2008

The iPhone 3G goes live tomorrow — with over 500 dedicated apps already available at the iPhone store

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Apple. John Cook with a nice Jott for the iPhone video. Most popular apps so far. TechCrunch’s picks. LifeHacker’s picks. Continuous fanboy fanaticism at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Here is a sweet built-for-the-iPhone iPhone User’s Guide.

I know Cathy wants to buy tomorrow — the 16GB white monsters with Jawbones. We’re listing tonight, so who knows when we’ll get any sleep.

 
Addendum: Not so fast…

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July 10, 2008

Estately.com is now the San Francisco treat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Map-based web search start-up Estately.com has uncanny timing for launching new cities and services. No matter what dates they pick, it seems that either Zillow or Redfin will have news on those days.

Here’s the news, which I sat on to get Estately out of Zillow’s glare:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, July 10th, over 40,000 San Francisco homes and condos from four Bay Area MLSes will be added to Estately.com’s 115,000+ properties for sale. The Bay Area marks our fourth major market – Seattle, Portland, and San Diego are all live on Estately right now – and the third major market we have entered this summer.

As always, Estately will provide the richest kind of map-based search experience: All MLS listings plus neighborhood-based searches, local schools mapped with the homes, search by transit availability, etc.

Disclosure: Estately.com co-founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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July 9, 2008

Localism.com: It’s Not Just For Surfers

by

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

Author website

I remember when ActiveRain.com released its Localism.com portal.  SoCal surfin’ REALTOR dude, Rory Siems commented that he thought “Localism” was a term surfers used for defending their beach from “kooks“.  While Localism is not a surfing site, the principle of “protecting your turf” is alive and well for local real estate professionals.

Bloodhound colleague Michele DeRepegny vented her frustrations with the new site:

But this morning I’m feeling a little nauseous after the much anticipated revamp of Localism, The redesign is neutral and simple, with a few twists in navigation still needed.   I would have rather paid for an “outside blog” than purchased “communities“.  Maybe buying the way to the top as a community sponsor will actually reduce some of the crud posting just for points, but right now I’m having very mixed feelings about continuing to drink the Kool Aid.  Maybe I just need sleep.

I was privy to a pre-release tour so I know why they whitewashed the design.  The concept is that Localism isn’t just about real estate anymore.  It’s designed as a national host for thousands of hyper-local communities.  Membership is free and available to anybody in the community, including non-real estate related businesses.  The white washing was done to draw the readers to the user-generated content rather than an appealing design.  Community sponsorship is available to any business and quality content providers are rewarded with featured status on the pages.

Navigation is cumbersome but the site is in its infancy.  The designers are trying to create a sense of “stickiness” where the users are drawn to deep local content, be it pictures, video, or text.  They have some glitches but they should work it out.

The main feature of the site is that content will be edited for quality.  Active Rain hired editors to determine what user-generated content will be quality and what should be buried in the bowels of the server.  The intended result?  A sticky site about “your town”, for “your neighbors”, sponsored by “your Rotarians (local businesses).

Greg Swann feels it might be a SEO play:

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. Read more

July 9, 2008

As good as a link: How would you like to “co-brand” with Zillow?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to see something huge in the guise of something that might seem quite small at first?

Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. It’s supposed to go live at 9 pm PST, but it’s already working for me.

What’s different?

Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog.

Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com.

So what’s going on here?

As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches.

(We can take a moment to snicker behind our hands. Trulia.com is building its reputation on being niggardly and hostile toward ordinary working real estate agents, so what better way to throw the whole issue into the starkest possible contrast? I don’t think Zillow approaches things this way, but the irony can’t be lost on them.)

Why does this matter? Because it’s a very reasonable response to an objection. If someone says, “Providing or promoting content on Zillow.com improves their garden but not your own,” Zillow can offer up the perfect counter: If you shed attention to us, we will make you our partner for that entire visit, and we will entreat your guest to return to you with every page that person views.

This is brilliant every way you think about it, and, of the wannabe Web 2.0 players in the real estate industry, Zillow seems to me to be the only one who really gets the whole bundle of Web 2.0 concepts: You give to get, wealth is abundant, the expectation of good behavior yields good behavior, etc.

There’s more. Zillow.com is about to introduce a ton of new widgets and gadgets, each one of which will be co-branded to the end-user. You’ll be able to post real-time mortgage quotes, for instance, and anything built with the Zillow API will Read more

July 9, 2008

Content is king: The future of internet search is heuristic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I worked this out in email this afternoon. It’s stone obvious, once you think about it, so I think it might be on the horizon now — if it’s not already happening.

What the hell are you talking about, Greg?

I think the next level of search engine algorithms is going to be based in an heuristic observation of end-user behavior to correlate keyword relevance to actual relevance.

Do you see? Google and other search engines identify patterns of keywords in static HTML documents to try to identify keyword-relevant content. They do this because it’s cheap. Before that, they used gunk like meta tags because that was even cheaper — because that had too little hardware and software and too many documents to index.

The hardware and software problems are gone, plus Google has a huge and growing database of user behavior that is has harvested from the many bits of Google software people load on their systems. Moreover, Google has learned to draw sophisticated inferences from user behavior.

So consider two web pages. One is very strong on relevant keywords, but weak on useful content. The other is not as strong on keywords, but it delivers an ocean of very useful data. When users click into the first page, they tend to click out right away — high bounce rate, short time on site, few pageviews per visit. Users of the other site stay for hours and read everything twice — low bounce rate, long time on site, many pageviews per visit.

Assuming Google or another search engine can measure all of this end-user behavior, which site is actually more relevant to real people?

This is so obvious that it has to happen. If Google doesn’t do it, its successor as the number one search engine will.

What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. But more importantly: Now and forever, content is king. A highly-passionate, well-written, deeply-informative weblog is going to kick the ass of any site trying to get by on money and high-gloss lipstick.

If you deliver the goods, the search engines are going to find a way Read more

July 9, 2008

An introduction from the banking “Pup”

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

Hi,

First I want to thank all of you for making me feel so welcomed as one of the newest members of the Bloodhounds.   I’ve felt very welcomed and I appreciate that.   I’ve also learned a lot.

As Greg said when we kicked off Project Bloodhound, he’d let all of the pups take the opportunity to properly introduce themselves.  I’m going to attempt to do that.

First the basics: My name is Tom Vanderwell, I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart and best friend for 23 years (well it will be 23 years in 11 days).   We have 5 children.  The oldest (21) is living and working in Ohio as a call center rep.   My 18 year old will be attending Calvin College in the fall to pursue a nursing career.  She plans on going into third world nursing, specifically at this point in Haiti.  Our 16 year old will be a junior in high school.   Four years ago we adopted two more kids from Haiti (www.glahaiti.org).  They are currently 6 and 7 (the 7 year is the only boy besides for me in the whole family!)   Let’s just say life is never boring at our house!

One of the questions that I enjoy asking others in the real estate world is “How did you get into the real estate business?”   So here’s my story.  In 1988, I was running the showroom of a local furniture rental store (not a rent to own, but a temporary leasing store) and got let go because I refused to lie to the customers (go figure?).   One of my customers was a Realtor and she made a comment to me, “You should think about selling real estate.”   Well, after a couple of months looking for a job, I decided to pursue the idea.   I ended up selling real estate for 3 1/2 years.  I don’t know how many of you were around during the first Persian Gulf War, but I didn’t sell a house for 6 months during that.   Needless to say, it was time to look for something else.

In 1991, I made the switch to mortgage lending Read more

July 9, 2008

Gagging on the Kool Aid: Active Rains rolls out new Localism.com

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

I owe a lot to Active Rain, 

  • I learned about blogging in general.
  • I found Bloodhound Blog through following Terri and Greg during Project Blogger.  (and many other great blogs)
  • I’ve generated business from converted leads.
  • And made really good friends. 

 But this morning I’m feeling a little nauseous after the much anticipated revamp of Localism, The redesign is neutral and simple, with a few twist in navigation still needed.   I would have rather paid for an “outside blog” than purchased “communities“.  Maybe buying the way to the top as a community sponsor will actually reduce some of the crud posting just for points, but right now I’m having very mixed feelings about continuing to drink the Kool Aid.  Maybe I just need sleep.

July 8, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs shipping; watch your mailbox

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The DVDs for BloodhoundBlog Unchained will ship tomorrow, at long last. I guess that’s only six weeks, but it seems much longer. If you live in Phoenix, you should have a package by Friday. Further out, you could be looking at next Monday or Tuesday. If you haven’t received yours by then, let me know.

As it happens, I have a few spare packages made up. Brian Brady has plans to take care of real estate webloggers shortly, but, if you don’t have a real estate weblog, you might slip over to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com and snag a set for yourself. You’ll get more than ten hours of hard-headed, practical real estate content, much of it unavailable anywhere else at any price.

The more I think about this, the more stark the contrast becomes. Monday May 19th at Unchained, in particular, is like nothing you have ever seen at any real estate event. Monday is represented on Discs One and Two, and, while I don’t want to take anything away from Tuesday’s presentations, the work Brian and I did on Monday is a year’s worth of homework by itself.

We want a lot more than that in Orlando — and Brian hasn’t cut off the early-bird price so it’s still available as I write this — and last night we started trading emails to talk about how to offer an exponentially greater product next May in Phoenix. I don’t know if we can afford it, and I don’t know if we can pull it off, but we’d like to put together a fully-realized scenius scene next year, a concentrated boot camp for the first generation of fully-wired real estate professionals.

My ambitions are unchained, unbounded. I want for the people working with us to become so much better than their competition — so much more in demand — that they put themselves beyond competition. As a secondary consequence, I want for that level of excellent performance to supplant everything else in the marketplace. I want for all of us working together to be the catalyst that makes real estate a profession at last.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix was Read more

July 8, 2008

Let me introduce to you the one and only Dr. Beatrice Rowles, Real Estate Coach

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Huff and Puff Your Way to a Fortune in Real Estate

Part 1: Get Your Head in the Game
BY DR. BEATRICE ROWLES, PHD, BSR, FUBAR

Dr Beatrice RowlesFilling up a plastic bag with propellant and and then squeezing the bag to force it into your lungs is the new, cutting edge way to stay positive about the Real Estate Market. Are you up on the latest?

“Huffing” — as its known — is the coolest thing since Twitter. If you aren’t killing a few hundred thousand brain cells before each showing with someone under the age of 50, then you are missing a golden opportunity to reach the red-hot Gen X and Gen Y market.

What You Need

Just about any air tight bag will work. Personally, I prefer the plastic bag from Wonder Bread.

Look for household and office products that include freon or compressed hydrofluorocarbons. I’ve had great results stealing the canned-air computer keyboard spray from my office’s IT geeks, but don’t let them catch you. Fortunately, I keep an industrial sized drum of Aquanet in the hatch of my Lexus SUV. That’s right, S – U – V.  “Oil is $140 a barrel!”, “Our Oil Based Economy is Unsustainable!”, “Al Gore is right!”, “A Gallon of Gas is $4!” these are the headlines that the Chicken Little press is using to scare us out of our SUVs and into a hybrid.

Don’t let them fool you into buying a Prius. Imagine what would happen if you got rear-ended by a semi with an industrial sized drum of Aquanet in the hatch of that tin can. Besides, according to OPEC, President Bush and Osama Bin Laden, it could be a lot worse. AND the Chicken Little press is wrong as usual: Gas is more like $4.25 a gallon. But I digress…

Of course, there are certain risks associated with inhaling propellant. Look at this way:  If you were able to look first-time homebuyers in the eye and tell them that house values always go up and a NINA was a great way to get into a home that was way beyond their earning potential, then you shouldn’t have much Read more

July 8, 2008

Organic Gardens, Solar and Public Transportation- Oh My!

by

Realtor, Certified EcoBroker

Author website

As Professionals in the Real Estate Industry we try and do everything to stay on top of our game.  We attend classes to further our education and knowledge, we try out the latest and greatest Social Networking Platform to find out about new Techie stuff, but what about what the clients are looking for?

It is a job in itself to stay on top of what the Local Inventory is to know what may be suitable match for our clients.  Although Real Estate is local, it’s pretty safe to say that for several years, MOST large Metropolitan areas have been experiencing the Sprawl of the Suburbs, the desire for Material items, and the need to be bigger and have more.  However, just of the past 3 months I have experienced this Dynamic shift in the approach that people are taking in the features they want in homes.

In the title I mention Organic Gardens, Solar and Public Transportation.  These are the Top 3 items on my clients and potential clients wish list over the past 45 days.  Not a single buyer has mentioned the desire for Granite Countertops, Stainless Steel Appliances or even a McMansion.  It’s minimal footprint on both the land, environment and lifestyle.

What is it that Real Estate Professionals can do to keep up with this enormous shift in thinking from the Homebuying population?  If Solar Panels and Rain Water Capture Systems are getting to be the new Sexy, who can keep up?

Many of the people that are looking for Organic Gardens are tired of hearing about all of the Crud that is stuffed in our food.  Food Dye and Preservatives have been linked to Behavioral Disorders in children as well as Cancer, Depression and even Skin disorders in Adults.   Those that are looking for Solar and proximity to Public Transportation are looking to reduce Gas and Electric bills, or maybe even to give a subtle Finger to the Gas and Electric Companies.

Who would have thought that the Health Care and Energy Crises could have such an impact on the decisions that people make when they purchase a home and where Read more

July 7, 2008

IndyMac Bank To Close?

by

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

Author website

Depositors are fleeing because legislators are pressing.

But depositors may have been spooked by a letter late last week from Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, saying he was “concerned that IndyMac’s financial deterioration poses significant risks to both taxpayers and borrowers.”

IndyMac Bank is shrinking.  From their corporate blog:

As a result of the above, we have made the difficult decision, effective July 7, 2008, that we will no longer accept any new loan submissions or rate locks in our retail and wholesale forward mortgage lending channels, except for our servicing retention channel. We plan to honor all of our existing rate-locked loans and will continue to fund these loans in the coming weeks. While the managers and employees in these units have worked incredibly hard, these units are not currently profitable due to the continuing erosion of the housing and mortgage markets. At the same time, these operations take up significant balance sheet capacity and “feed” growth in the servicing asset, an asset we need to shrink given its size relative to our existing capital.

Damn !  Another good bunch of people jobless.

This isn’t the big one.  Expect a BIG bank to go belly up later this year.  I’m completely guessing but my money would be on WaMu or Wachovia.

July 7, 2008

Attention Realtor association wannabe geeks: All monopolies suck by definition, so you must open up our forms to multiple vendors

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote a couple of times yesterday about using the iPhone as the laptop killer for real estate transactions. If my guesses about cloud computing play out, the iPhone and subsequent hand-held computers have the potential to replace our desktop machines as well — or at least give us every bit of the power we expect from a desktop machine no matter where we happen to be. This is all for real, a brand new world unfolding before our eyes.

What is not new, alas, are the monopolies of morons imposed upon us by the National Association of Realtors and all of its many tentacular sub-cartels. Where everything in business is about to change radically — in response to the iPhone, to Web 3.0, to the unforeseeable efficiencies of the cloud — everything in our business will change at its usual glacial pace — driven not by the pursuit of profit, not by the thrill of innovation, not by the ever-more-vast oceans of information available to us — driven only by the need of the NAR and its cabal of sleazy vendors to hold Realtors hostage.

In late May I bitched about the vast hordes of bugs that infest Zipforms, but I knew going in that this was a Sysiphean effort. The people who impose these awful products on us are not the ones stuck using them. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are off-budget contributions — subsidies for Realtor association parties, for example — written into the contracts, which simply introduces bribery into what is already a capricious decision-making process. Caprice, it is worthwhile to stress, is the opposite of reason.

Tom Farley, the new CEO of the Arizona Association of Realtors actually called me in response to that post, but I could not manage to convey to him the importance of multiple, competing vendors to a free — or even quasi-free — market. What he told me is that, instead of Zipforms, in the future we will be inflicted with a different hopelessly buggy Windows-only piece of crap software. I know the man was in deep earnest, and I know Read more

July 7, 2008

Being a part of Social Media does not mean contributing to the 3,000 advertising messages the average person recieves everyday.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

Sure, the below slideshare will come across a bit heavy handed, but the facts are real.  Exercise choice by filling in the asterisks with either one of my favorites.  One (for the sci-fi fans out there) the over used intensifier from Battlestar Galactica.  Or two, remember that you are reading this on a blog and choose one of the late George Carlin’s 7 dirty words (NSFW version).  Our freedoms are precious and not shared world wide by any means.

Now, if you heard what was spoken at the Heard then it’s how passionately the message was delivered.  Ever since your chosen dalliance after logging on became more than checking email and playing mine-sweeper, everyone has been asking a lot of the same questions.  Only now instead of dropping some type and waiting … waiting … waiting  for a response, we have a variety of platforms to communicate on by chat, video, and even fantasy character.  But who’s listening in Real Estate?

If your clients are not asking to connect with you via a variety of social media, the day will come soon enough.  If you are interested with dealing with what we are calling the Millennials or Gen-Y at all then pay real close attention to slides 38 – 44.  “Tomorrows consumers are today’s digital natives”.  “96% of them have joined a social networks and they don’t care about your ad.  They care about what their friends think”.

So what are you doing to get on board?   For me it’s testing and exploring different platforms.  It’s asking those I meet what they are using to communicate.   Your mileage will vary given your market and demographics, but there is a certainty in that your presence, your reputation, and your voice could be working for you 24 hrs. a day.

“Content is the new democracy, and we the people are ensuring that our voices are heard”

July 6, 2008

Head in the cloud: This week’s new iPhone is the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As part of our breathtakingly romantic anniversary weekend, Cathy and I were talking today about all of the various types of digital storage devices we have actually used in our lives. I thought it would be a fun exercise at a conference, simply as a way of illustrating how rapidly technology changes while we’re not paying attention.

But stop for a moment and think: Right now, you’re probably using hard disks, CD- or DVR-ROMs and thumb drives for storage. You used to have Zip drives and streaming tape drives and flexi- and floppy-disks, but we are within a year or two of being rid of magnetic media altogether. Solid state hard disks will be hugely capacious, hugely fast, very secure and wicked cheap.

And then: What next?

It’s plausible to me that the next level of off-line digital storage will be the cloud itself — multiple, multiply-redundant, self-replicating, self-maintaining copies of your data, instantly accessible and virtually indestructible. I’m presuming the advent of Web 3.0, as well, but we are there already anyway.

I rank on Windows because it’s funny, but it doesn’t mean anything. In the cloud, Windows is a dead letter, and Apple only matters as a model of how to build elegant, functional software. The cloud is beyond operating systems, because, just as Web 2.0 is ideally browser-independent, Web 3.0 is operating system-independent. It will not matter how you address the cloud, since every way you have of doing that is simply a user interface — browser-, operating system- and device-independent.

This is why it is worthwhile for everyone — not just people in the real estate business — to think about the iPhone. It’s not a Mac OS computer, it’s the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing.

The ideal way to do forms on an iPhone (or any mobile device) is not by filling in the blanks on a PDF file, but, rather, filling in the blanks on a multi-page HTML form. The complete contract language could be there, in readable HTML, and the Realtor or lender could let the client type their own text fields and click their 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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