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June 28, 2008

In the battle of the baseball cards, the biggest shoe-box wins — but Realtors who master the art of marketing homes will be fine

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This post appeared on BloodhoundBlog on June 30, 2006, our second day. I’m reprising it now as a part of our birthday celebration. It’s fun for me to see how much of what I talk about here was with us on our very first days. –GSS]

 
Cathleen and I live pretty much continuously in a fairly intense business conference. We’re both paying very close attention to everything, and we are in nearly-constant contact. On the ground, we’re aware of what we like in the work product of our competitors, what we don’t like, what we think might be worth improving upon and what we know from rigorous testing is a complete waste of time and money. We pay even closer attention to the net.world, because that’s where our own bread is buttered, and because the internet will someday be the entire bakery. We’re about to skip away to Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we’re taking three books on marketing — not real estate marketing, just marketing — with us.

That brings me to this, an argument that representation of sellers trumps home marketing. I don’t absolutely hate the premise. I have made a similar argument myself. What’s interesting to me — fascinating to me, a full-time obsession for me — is the idea that real estate marketing is somehow imperiled by internet-based disintermediation.

First, what is being done on the internet, so far at least, is not marketing. It’s listing, at best, the compilation of baseball-card-like stats, and if Realtors conflate the two, it’s because they have never understood marketing to begin with. “The houses sell themselves,” we say to ourselves, and there is a truth to this. If you take buyers where they want to be, they’ll pay to stay there. In crucial respects, buyer representation is the easiest sale in the history of sales. In other respects, it’s impossibly hard, of course, which is why the failure rate among Realtors is so high. But, unlike virtually every other type of sales, you do not have to convince the client to want your product before you can attempt to sell Read more

June 28, 2008

You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

So your house is finally under contract. Congratulations. It took longer than you thought it would to sell, and you had to go through three price reductions before you got regular showings. But now you’re under contract and in escrow. You’ve made it through the inspections and you’ve taken care of all of the repairs. Nothing but smooth sailing from here, right?

Not quite.

Here comes some bad news you hadn’t anticipated: Your house didn’t appraise.

A lender will only lend on the appraised value or the purchase price — whichever is lower. If the appraisal comes in lower than the purchase price, something has to give.

If there’s an appraisal contingency in the contract — and there almost always is — the buyers can cancel the contract unilaterally.

More likely, they’re going to want you to lower your price instead.

If you don’t, you’re almost certainly killing that contract. The lender will not underwrite the loan, so the buyers will be forced to cancel using the financing contingency.

You could end up waiting quite a while longer for another buyer. And that buyer could offer you quite a bit less for your home. And even then, your house will still have to appraise for the purchase price. If home values continue to decline, you could live through this same nightmare a second time.

So does that mean you should cave on the appraisal no matter what? Not necessarily — depending on your objectives. If you need to move now, take your punishment and move on. But if you can afford to wait long enough for the market to recover, that might be the better option.

Appraisers and loan underwriters are skittish right now. Lenders are taking back homes and selling them for fifty cents on the dollar. Appraisers are being fastidious to make sure they are not overestimating values.

And all of this is just another reason to price your home to the market. You Read more

June 28, 2008

Farewell

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

Greg, I would have written an email but I wanted to publicly address all of Bloodhound and it’s followers. I appreciate the opportunity given to me to be a part of such a powerful and dynamic group, but I must move along and pay more attention to my work and my own blog. I haven’t got the stamina to keep up with the number of blogs I post on, so I don’t want to just hang on the side pictures and not contribute.

This has been a great experience and you have some great contributors coming on board. I thank you and will always be a loyal fan.

 

Sincerely,

 

Mike

 

June 28, 2008

Understanding the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org plus a little bit about custom domain names

by

Real Estate Broker, Investor

Author website

Here’s a point of confusion I often notice when people begin their search for a blogging platform:

There are two different flavors of WordPress.

WordPress.com is a hosted platform. You go there and sign up for account, pick a pre-designed theme, and start blogging.   It’s free, it’s very easy.  Software updates and security are handled for you.  However, You don’t have an option of custom designing your own theme, your choice of plugins andwidgets is limited. You cannot FTP into your blog.

 It’s not a bad idea to go ahead and set up a blog on WordPress.com, even if you don’t intend it as your primary business blog.  Make it a “cat blog”. It will give you a chance to test drive the post editor interface, practice adding images or videos with the “Add Media” tool, and get a feel for the concept of changing themes. 

WordPress.org is a web site from which you can download the WordPress software. You then install the WordPress software on your own host. Same concept as installing a new program on your own computer, except that you are installing a new program on a remote “host” computer.   You can install any plugins or themes you like, and customize them to your heart’s content.  You can run affiliate advertising, and edit the database. You can write your own PHP code and use it in the blog’s design. 

Although the WordPress.org software is free, you will need a hosting account somewhere. That’s not free.  Average hosting fees run about $10 per month.   My WordPress blogs are hosted on GoDaddy. BHB with much higher bandwidth requirements, is not.  Where is BHB hosted now, Greg? 

I have heard good comments about BlueHost.  Maybe some other contributors will jump in with info on their choice of hosts.

You can register your own custom domain name and use it with either flavor of WordPress, so don’t let anyone mistakenly tell you that you can’t map a domain name to a WordPress.com site.  You can. 

Here is a how-to  I wrote several months ago on mapping a custom domain name to a WordPress.com blog.

And as a FYI, you can register and use a custom domain name with TypePad and Blogger, Read more

June 27, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Inman’s non-ad ad might be extortion, but at least you’re invited to help them betray their own advertisers — for a fee, of course

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is what you will see if you click on a link to an Inman News article:

First: What ad? There isn’t any ad there, just a ransom note.

Who’s the hostage? That would be you. Inman is deliberately interposing itself between you and what you want, demanding payment to get out of your way. That much is extortion, and it’s extortion of the Chokepoint Charlie variety, since the chokepoint is entirely an artifice manufactured by Inman in order either to extort your funds or to punish you by delay for refusing to be extorted.

Nice behavior, huh?

There’s more. The non-ad ad actually attempts to insinuate that it is a matter of prestige to have been extorted in this fashion. “Club members,” the concierge in the pro shop will inform you, “have first claim on available tee times.” If you cough up the dough demanded by this chokepoint, you’re not a schmoo who got rolled in exchange for faster access to regurgitated press releases. To the contrary. You’re a member, one of the privileged elite. In essence, it’s like a line pass in Las Vegas: You’re not some ordinary sucker. No, sir! You’re a very special sucker!

We’re not done. Consider the advertisers, even though I can’t ever remember seeing an ad in this non-ad ad’s place. The “social contract” between Inman and the advertiser runs like this: “We know that our readers don’t want to be delayed. We know they just want access to whatever it is they clicked through to find. So, in exchange for your money, were going to frustrate and betray them — with your ad being the instrument of that betrayal.”

I cannot imagine an advertiser stupid enough to want to try to engage the people it just pissed off, but this is literally the expectation governing that particular advertising space.

But now we’re back to the non-ad ad. What does it really say? It says that Inman will take money from advertisers to frustrate and betray its own readers. Unless those readers are willing to pay the extortion money, in which case Inman will frustrate and betray its own advertisers, from Read more

June 27, 2008

Mortgage Market Week in Review – the Fed Translated….

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

Hi all,

I want to thank Greg and Teri and Brian and….everyone for the honor of being invited to hang out with such an esteemed bunch.  I’m really excited about it and looking forward to working, talking and “raising the bar.”

I’ll do up a post next week telling a little more about “my story,” but for now I wanted to put up the post that I write every week for my blog.  I call it “Mortgage Market Week in Review” and it’s my overview of what’s been happening in the market and how it impacts the real estate world.  I hope you enjoy it.

For this week’s “Mortgage Market Week in Review,” I’m going to translate the Fed’s announcement that came out on Wednesday at 2:15 PM. It will, I believe, help give us a better view of what’s happening in the financial markets. The actual statement by the Fed will be in italics, my comments will be in bold.
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to keep its target for the federal funds rate at 2 percent.

That, in and off itself, says that the Fed sees things as having changed since the last time they met. The last time they met, they felt that the economic weakness issue was more important than the risk of inflation. Now they are saying that it’s pretty much a tie as to which risk is bigger.

Recent information indicates that overall economic activity continues to expand, Remember, they are looking at the big picture and are looking at things nationally. partly reflecting some firming in household spending Household spending has firmed some, but a closer look at the charts (which I won’t bore you with here) shows that consumer spending is either 1) Spent on essentials like food and gas or 2) drifting slowly downward. So, I don’t see the household spending holding up, especially as people have to cut back in spending in other areas because of the cost of food and gas for their cars.

However, labor markets have softened further As the labor markets soften (a nice way for Read more

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to make Google your weblog’s best friend

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is one of the all-time most popular posts on BloodhoundBlog. I’m reprising it for Project Bloodhound, first because it’s a nice leveraged SEO solution, and second because it’s a painless introduction to customizing the PHP in WordPress. –GSS]

 
Who can probe all the mysteries of Google? Not me, and I don’t even do referrals on the subject. But I can give you a 93% solution to the problem, and you can worry about the other 7% when you’re not too busy handling incoming traffic.

What’s the secret? Like this: Relevance equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. If those three elements are in close correspondence, to Google the article is what it says it is. If that sounds like a Zestimate of a burned down house, it’s because it is. Software cannot evaluate objectively, it can only draw inferences from trusted indicators. If you leave a trail of indicators that Google associates with highly-relevant content, then it is highly-relevant content.

I’ve talked about writing headlines and body copy that are long-tail keyword rich. If you have a WordPress weblog, here’s a way to get your post’s title to correspond to its headline:

<title>
<?php wp_title(" "); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(" ", false)) { echo " | "; } ?>
YourBlogName | 
Your blog's tagline...
</title>

Here is what that code says:

If there is a headline, show it as the title of the page. On your main page, there is no title. On archive or category pages, the archive or the category will be the title.

If we did show a title, lay down a vertical bar as punctuation.

Then show the weblog’s name and tag line, separated by a vertical bar.

Altogether, the code means that when your post is shown as a standalone weblog entry, the title of that page will be the headline of the post. This is the way Google will see it for indexing purposes. And what that means is that Google will regard your post as being highly relevant.

You can snag a copy of the code you see above by clicking here. The file you need to edit is named “header.php”. You’ll find it in the folder for Read more

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to write headlines for your real estate weblog posts that deliver the goods — and deliver Google results

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A headline on a weblog post is a differentiator — this entry is different from all the others — but that’s not a very useful lens for understanding headlines. A serial number — A37592x — is a differentiator, too.

A headline can serve the same purpose as a headline in the newspaper, as a brief summary of the succeeding content — “Man kills wife, kids, self.”

That’s a useful function, but it’s not really doing the job we want a headline on a blog post to do.

Here’s a better way of understanding the communicative purpose of a weblog entry’s headline:

A headline is a testament from the writer to the reader than the content described in the headline is accurately reflected by that headline and that reading that content will repay the effort it entails.

But that’s still not enough. A headline on a weblog post, and on any persuasive copy, has to ensnare and entice the reader. The headline has to promise a substantive benefit that the reader will realize by pursuing the copy. Writing an effective headline is very much a Direct Marketing problem.

And we’re not done even yet. In addition to all the jobs it must undertake in the reader’s behalf, a well-written weblog headline should also engage horizontal search engines in meaningful ways.

So a properly-crafted weblog headline will:

  • Summarize the content in an interesting way
  • Promise the reader a practical benefit for reading that content
  • Search well on the most-significant keywords in that content

That’s a big load to carry, but a good headline can make a post, where a bad one can break it.

I don’t want to represent myself as a good example, because I will frequently opt for clever rather than good, but the headline of this post is a nice example of a good headline: It tells you what I’m going to talk about, it tells you how you will gain by reading this post, and it is strong on keywords that are likely to be searched by people who may have an interest in BloodhoundBlog’s ongoing content.

The latter point is important. It’s easy to score well on long-tail search terms, but Read more

June 27, 2008

How to Use Twitter to Dominate Local Real Estate

by

Real Estate Agent

Author website

What is the best way to use Twitter to put you on the path to dominate your hyper local area? I am convinced I live in one of the least techie places in the Western Hemisphere. The suburbs I wish, pray, and hope to one day dominate only have 38 people on Twitter. I am not complaining, I want to learn how to market to those 38 people as if I was marketing to 10,000.

A comment on this post yesterday got me thinking. I use Twitter. Do I use it to its fullest?

I have seen several of the contributors on here as well as a good number of the people I know who read this blog use it, and use it well. Often, when Brian Brady says to “Lock all loans” via a tweet, I call the mortgage brokers working on my deals and scream “LOCK!”. That right there proves that Twitter works. Across the United States the words of Brian are making a young real estate agent make his clients lock their loans. Why? Because he is trusted. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Bloodhound Blog Unchained in Phoenix, where I understand Twitter was discussed a great deal, but I will see all of you in Orlando.

Currently, it seems as if I am marketing to solely other Real Estate Agents. I have gotten a referral that ended in a closed sell, yes. However, I want to be able to dominate my local market, once they get on Twitter. Of course, I have followed each and every person that comes to Twitter from my target areas, even if they are outside their target demographics. I do not only write about my blog posts, real estate, etc…I share funny pictures of my cats, dogs, and just general updates on life.

So, yall…what did you old Tweeters do on Twitter before your town, city, neighborhood etc came to be fellow Tweets?

Should I just follow the masses as they come here, search out for new faces for referrals in other markets, Read more

June 27, 2008

Cloaking is Against Google’s TOS, Trulia. (And other SE’s as well)

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

What is CLOAKING?

Here is Wikipedia’s Definition.

Simply put, it is the practice of showing one thing to a user and another thing to the search engine spiders. It violates the BASIC trust that MUST exist IMO between the search engines and webmasters in order for there to be umm…order. They need to know that you are not doing a sleight of hand.

In Search Engine Optimization, there are few things that almost all of the search engines treat alike. Even things like no follow links are handled differently (at this point in time) depending on which search engine is involved. But they all cry “foul” when it comes to purposely sending their spiders one thing and users another.

Why do I bring this up? Because Eric Bramlett just dropped a video bombshell on Trulia. (Fair warning, the video takes a while to load and may not explain easily to the typical viewer what is happening, so I will do some play by play…).

UPDATE: Bramlett has now added a post with STILL photos as well to explain.

Scene 1: Trulia has “partners” at the Seattle Weekly and Parade Magazine. Bramlett visits them as a normal viewer online would. The link takes him to a subdomain shared between the “partners” (just using the Seattle Weekly example here).

Scene 2: Bramlett then switches over to a tool we SEO types use to look at the same link AS IF WE WERE A GOOGLE SPIDER. When he does this and clicks the same link…

Scene 3: He goes to a completely DIFFERENT page, one that gives links DIRECTLY to Trulia and NOT to their “partners”. Yes, folks that IS the page that they are promoting to the TOP of Google for the keyword Seattle Real Estate! (My guess is that they are doing this to THESE partners the same way they do it to their REALTOR partners? That is the only explanation that I can come up with….)

Eric Bramlett’s video evidence has what they are doing. They are caught red-handed. Plain and simple in my opinion.

A word of advice to Trulia:

1) As you rise to try and compete with REALTORS nationwide Read more

June 26, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: The marketing power of a custom yard sign is not the color, not the photography, not even that it is custom-made — it’s the text on the sign that stops traffic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve been making custom yard signs for two years now, but that represents the third generation of our sign philosophy. The second generation featured a huge picture of Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound, and that was a real traffic stopper when it was new. The first generation sported a huge rendition of our corporate logo, which we moved, in smaller form, to the riser on top of the post for the second and third generation signs.

What BloodhoundRealty.com signs have always had in common, going back to 2003, is that paragraph of small text in the middle of the sign. With our custom signs, we can rhapsodize each house, but we knew from the very beginning that that paragraph of text would stop traffic, and that this would win attention for our homes that we could not achieve with an ordinary real estate sign.

We knew back then that we wanted custom signs, we just couldn’t do it then. (Richard Riccelli suggested that we mount a metal frame on our signs so that we could swap in other text.) We knew then, as we we know now, that good marketing sells houses — but that exceptional marketing would set us apart from the Realtors we compete against with our sellers and with their neighbors.

Here’s how to understand the Bloodhound marketing strategy: Everything we do goes into selling the house — into inducing the behaviors necessary for the home to be sold. And selling houses the way we do accomplishes the objective of selling everything we do to those homeowners who are paying attention. In that respect, all of our marketing is integrated — all one thing.

This is adapted from a comment I posted earlier today.

What matters most about custom yard signs is not the color, not the photography, not even that they are custom-made for the house. What makes them sell is that paragraph of text in the middle of the sign. As you could easily predict, there is a philosophy behind everything we do, including our custom signs:

Forever and always, Realtors have treated their yard signs like billboards. After all, the traffic Read more

June 26, 2008

Project Bloodhound: The question I should have asked a year ago

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

As a new blogger, with little experience, how do you choose a weblog platform?  My current blog runs on Quick Blogcast from Go Daddy and it’s beginning to feel limited.  The number one reason I chose it, when I started blogging a little over a year ago, was that it looked easy to implement and was affordable.  Frankly I’m very frugal, especially while I’m proving to myself whether or not something work for me.  The good news was I was up and running  in no time and my blog has brought me business.

Ironically, two of us new puppies are currently using Quick Blogcast.  I’ve found some tricks and gotten some great lessons  in CSS and rigging things to make them work the way I want from the tech support, who are patient and helpful, BUT they have to put me on hold and scratch their heads to make it happen almost every time.

I really want a more functional platform that allows me more creativity and control, but I’m intimidated by wordpress.org setups and every time there is an update, it seems that I see a few really frustrated real estate pros over on Twitter.  Now the time has come for me to shut up or put up and this seems like the perfect opportunity to make a platform move, but I’m still not sure I have the technical skills to take on a more complex platform.  

Now that I have a functional blog that makes me money, with a growing Page Rank, should I risk the change? 

  • Will I spend days frustrated to no end, during my really busy season?  Is it worth it to have a pretty blog?
  •  Should I just pay someone who does have the technical skills and pay them forever?

    •  I know there are great bloggers out there who have made these hard choices and I really need to know what you think about choosing platforms, which one you recommend, and anything else you can suggest to help.  If you were going to start a new blog today, what would you do?  Thanks for taking the time to share the pros and cons and I’m really looking 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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