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November 9, 2010

Attention Brad Inman: I don’t want your dipshit “most influential” citation again this year, either, but it is beyond obvious that I am by far the most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s start with some music, just to set the mood:

So: If you run in the wrong circles, these are the kind of “arguments” you can expect to hear about me:

  • Greg Swann is mean.
  • Greg Swann is rude.
  • Greg Swann is vulgar.
  • Greg Swann is angry.
  • Greg Swann is cynical.

Here is an argument you won’t hear anywhere, except possibly at BloodhoundBlog:

  • Greg Swann is wrong, and here’s why…

You won’t hear the latter argument for two reasons: I don’t take positions I can’t defend with an impervious impenetrable invulnerability. And: If I should happen to discover that I have been wrong, generally I will be the first person to figure that out and I will announce my error to the world immediately.

What explains all the ad hominem arguments cited among the first set? You figure it out.

These are the kinds of games that some folks are running while making these persuasively useless claims about my character:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

In each of these cases, I think they’re doing me favors — which assertion will probably just piss them off more. People who run in mobs don’t like me, and I don’t like them. Anything dominating personalities can do to recruit those folks to their own side of the table can only save me time in the long run.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this song summarizes my position on this kind of behavior — along with every other kind of behavior:

Recent events have made it more than obvious that I am by far the most influential person in the wired world of real estate. People are wasting irreplaceable hours and days of their lives obsessing over me, topping each other with tales of how ardently they don’t pay any attention to me.

Why would this be so? Again, you have to figure this out on your own, but my take is that they know I’m right and yet they don’t want to be right.

Witness:

November 8, 2010

Mama Grizzly Knows Sumptin’: It’s Sunset For Low Mortgage Rates

by

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

Author website

One of the things I love about the internet is that links last.  For your soap-operatic pleasure, Sarah Palin asks a national author if he read his own newspaper, when he criticized her remarks about inflation:

So, imagine my dismay when I read an article by Sudeep Reddy in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the fact that I mentioned inflation in my comments about QE2 in a speech this morning before a trade-association. Here’s what I said: “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”

Mr. Reddy takes aim at this. He writes: “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact.” Really? That’s odd, because just last Thursday, November 4, I read an article in Mr. Reddy’s own Wall Street Journal titled “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies.”

It’s common knowledge that Sarah Palin is a vacuous bimbo, who gathers her economic news from the Wasilla Women’s Club Newsletter, right ?

Call me suspicious but I watched an amiable dunce win the Cold War, without firing a shot.  Let’s just say I’m less inclined to question the intelligence of country bumpkin politicians, after living through Reagan, and am more inclined to second guess the propagandists at the major dailies.

Whodathunk Mama Grizzly would face the Wall Street Journal, though?

Mama Grizzly and Mama Brady know something about inflation; they do the weekly grocery shopping.  When Mama Brady told me that our grocery budget had to be adjusted upwards, while I was remarking that our budgeted monthly fuel expenses had to be adjusted  as well, I started thinking that inflation might just be around the corner- that’s not good for mortgage rates.

November 8, 2010

Tête-à-tête in Tombstone

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

When the shadow blocked the doorway of Johnny Ringo’s, everyone in the bar looked up. The door was propped open and traffic was brisk. The glare of the late afternoon sun fought the gloom of the little taproom to a draw. But then gloom captured the turf enduringly, and we all looked up to see why.

The stranger leaning against the doorjamb was long and lean and very relaxed. He wore black wool trousers pegged at the ankles over ornately-tooled snakeskin boots. His dove-grey top coat fit him like a glove. Beneath it he wore a rich brocade waistcoat and a white linen shirt open at the collar. He had eyes the color of coal and flowing brown hair that spilled halfway down his back. His handlebar moustache was trimmed and combed and waxed to perfection. A red silk cravat finished the ensemble, that and two nickel-plated Colt 45s with carved ivory grips. The sidearms were mounted high, at his ribs, and a double-barreled shotgun, breech open, was slung across his left arm.

And even though Johnny Ringo’s is the tourist trap for the sophisticated tourist, still everyone gawked. Everyone except one man in the corner at the end of the bar, a man nearly perfectly concealed by the gloom. He looked up at the stranger in the doorway and there was genuine fear in his eyes.

The stranger was looking right at him. Looking right through him. He didn’t stare, he glared, and the room fell deathly silent — not a nervous cough, not a stolen breath. The fearful man tried to the hold the stranger’s gaze but couldn’t. He looked down at the drink before him on the table then looked up again quickly, something furtive in his eyes. The stranger nodded slowly and said, “I’m your huckleberry.”

Some moron guffawed in recognition but this didn’t relieve the tension, it added to it.

The stranger stood up straight and snapped the breech of the shotgun closed. He hefted it high in the air and the bartender snagged it with two hands. He mounted it on two pegs over the back-bar. Read more

November 7, 2010

What is Splendor? For me it’s exuberance and indomitability.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Start here: I’m not trying to piss you off. If you don’t want to read what I have to say, don’t. There are thousands of essays on this site, many recent and eye-opening, others older but canonical. You can find what you want here — or you can seek elsewhere. You have no reason to endure something you don’t want to read. You don’t have to, and I don’t want you to.

Now then:

This is funny: I live in a state of fairly continuous delight. It’s not always the case, but I would paint my state of mind most of the time — and especially when I’m working at something I love — as exuberance. It can be hugely external, and I know I sometimes wear my wife out when I’m playing with ideas out loud. But it can also be almost searingly apollonian — as here, as it happens — and I can sustain a kind of frenzied concentration for hours on end.

Why is it funny — to me, at least? Because it’s just excellent comedy, the radical juxtaposition of two opposites — the expectation that I simply must be angry or dour or cynical and the actual experience of being, for me and for people who spend time with me. I am having fun — deeply satisfying fun — almost all of the time. So much so that I don’t even think about it, except when I consciously direct myself to think about it. And that, thinking about the way my mind functions, is a delight for me just by itself.

Delight, exuberance, searing concentration — these are mothertongue ideas, and this is the job that art does for us: Poets and painters and playwrights and novelists use abstractions in ways that induce us to see not mere words or images but the essence of being itself. We know we are complicit in an illusion — not real life, just a simulation — but we surrender ourselves to it and live it from the inside, at least in imagination.

I have written hundreds of thousands of words in my life, but I Read more

November 7, 2010

In which I find more focus and dump the hocus pocus

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Disclaimer: If your business is humming along, I doubt you will get much useful information from this post, however, please do feel free to share any productivity hints in the comment section. Thanks!

I made a public commitment, and so I thought I share where I was and where I’m going. To Jeff Brown: I have yet to do one single 6 hour prospecting day. Haven’t done one. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do 3 hours most days of the work week, but even that isn’t consistent, so that’s still a goal, and I’m still committed to hitting that goal, and I will, but it’s a tough one for me. Which brings me to my first point: Real estate is not an instant gratification business. And the church says, “Duh!” Right. Old-timers are laughing their arses off right about now and I am too. I really like instant gratification, but unfortunately, I can’t use it to pay bills, so if you are seduced by that, as I often am, be careful. Don’t lie to yourself about what is “working”.

Working requires thoughtful planning and focus. If you want to brainstorm an idea, give me a call, drop me an email. I am very very good at brainstorming. Making a goal, making a commitment to that goal, doing the basics, this focus comes less naturally to me, but that’s where the money is so that’s what I’m learning to do.  Know thyself: Hands down, best thing I’ve done to help me focus was to secure a private office. I had been “working” out of a desk in our family room. Oh, I know, my broker supplies a desk at the office, I could use that but my stuff is at home. Unfortunately, so are our dogs, our cats, our kids, the laundry, food, you get the point. Here’s my solution: My broker owns our office building and this being the Rust Belt circa 2010, we have a few Read more

November 6, 2010

It’s 4:15 pm. Do you know where your Realtor is? A consumer’s guide to using social media to supervise your goof-off employee.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Your mortgage lender just called. The appraiser is standing outside the home you’re hoping to buy, but there is no key in the lockbox. The lender called you so that you could call your Realtor. Your Realtor in turn can call the listing agent, and then someone can get over to the house — pronto! — to let the appraiser in.

There’s just one problem: You can’t seem to get your Realtor on the phone.

Stuff happens. Your Realtor could be tied up with another client or stuck in traffic in a cell-phone dead zone. Heaven forbid, he might have been in a car accident.

But… There is another possibility…

Do you remember when you first made contact with your Realtor? Do you recall him telling you all about how hi-tech his business is, detailing his presence on all the biggest social media sites?

So: If you’re not getting your calls to your Realtor returned, where might be a good place to look for him?

How about Twitter, for a start? How about Facebook? Foursquare? Tumblr? Posterous? You might have to look in a few places, but there are only two kinds of hi-tech Realtors: The kind who work a lot and the kind who play a lot.

How can you tell if your Realtor is the kind who plays a lot? It’s easy. He’ll be leaving tracks all over the place, Retweeting jokes and commenting on Facebook photos and writing detailed reviews of burger joints and doing — and documenting — just about any activity on the face of the earth — except attending to your real estate transaction.

Here’s the sad part: Even if you’re seeing dozens of Tweets and Facebook comments from your Realtor, you’re probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg. You’re not seeing the direct Twitter posts or the private conversations being carried out on Facebook or in email.

But: If your Realtor seems to be wasting his entire day on social media sites, there’s a reason for that:

It’s because he’s wasting his entire day on social media sites.

I’ve tried pointing out to Realtors that schmoozing on Twitter or Facebook is bad marketing, so Read more

November 6, 2010

Let’s Be Clear About Social Media

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I keep thinking I’m going to stop posting here.  I keep thinking that I’m going to get sucked into the vortex of rancor that BHB can be.   And then we get these gems of conversation from Brian, Jeff, Al & Greg.  And I’m drawn right back in.   Nothing’s perfect, everybody’s crazy, right?  Life goes on, and the closest I will get to a rebuttal of Greg’s impractical rancor is that it’s wallet-foolish to criticize someone that competes for some of the same business you do. Saving my rancor for when it matters has doubled my income. Your milage may vary.

I digress. Circling back to my take on Facebook.   I post there often, it’s in my opening tabs as I start my computer.  I look around and peruse.  I make some money from it, mostly in the form of the zombies.

Zombies?  These are the strangers that add me randomly on Facebook.  I consider that an “opt in”, so I add them back and put them on a “social media” list in Heap.

And then I send my new pseudo-friends a torrent of spam and calls.  They cry uncle with an Amex.   They are mostly realtors.

I process my queue about once a month and I wind up with 75-80 “leads”.  This generates about $3500 in new business.  $50 bucks a friend, y’all can add me all day long.

This is what most Realtors that are hustling do on Facebook. At least there’s effort here, which is more than I can say for those that strive to monetize whatever should flit across their subconscious.

 

Anyhow, enjoy.

November 5, 2010

Swallow Hard — Make It Happen — Or Get Out

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

For the most part, it’s human nature to have a love/hate relationship with the results that have our name attached to them. I’ve failed far more often than I’ve succeeded. It’s not even close. Name a category in which I’ve endured the ignominy of defeat, and my hand is more likely than not be in the air.

Baseball is useful here, as it’s a game based on failure. Hall of Famers are players who failed somewhat less than their peers. Major leaguer hitters as a group, fail at a rate of roughly 75%. Those who fail a ‘mere’ 65-70% of the time often end up earning $1 Mil a month or so. Think that’s a thin margin separating average from excellent? Try this — The difference between a .250 and a .300 hitter? One measly hit a week. Really.

Ponder this.

In San Diego’s market, one extra skinned cat monthly at the median price, about $375,000 or so, would create additional GCI of — wait for it — $135,000. Median price in your market is $150,000? That’s an additional $54,000 or so. One more deal a month. Would that make the difference for your family? Would those results keep you in the business? Would you then stop making pathetic excuses for your failure to do what produces spendable results?

If you can honestly say that’s within your reach by quietly tweakin’ your effort a bit, super. Do it now. I’ll expect a Christmas card next year.

However, if you’re already killin’ yourself 25 hours a day, eight days a week, you may wanna consider doin’ something different so as to generate better results. How’s that for an original thought? Explaining an anemic bank account to those counting on you at home is not a Kodak moment, a truth to which I can effectively testify.

It was one of those moments when the phrase, ‘Winners don’t make excuses, they make it happen’ became real to me.

Adapting is really code tellin’ us to stop doin’ what ain’t workin’ and start doin’ things that do. Again — there are those who tell us Read more

November 5, 2010

I don’t play Farmville and I don’t disagree with Brian Brady!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

But I do question whether prospecting using facebook is the most efficient way to prospect.  I’m sure everything Brian Brady said is correct, he’s just that kind of a guy!  I’m also a one person office and time spent trolling facebook for leads isn’t as quick as calling up expired listings in my area, or working the internet where buyers are looking for homes!

For me, there are just quicker ways of getting calls from interested buyers than slogging through my facebook friends’ friends, tracking down phone numbers and calling them.  If there was some clever tool to just get those folks names and numbers (Greg has probably written one), with some sort of a relationship graphic so I have something to chat with them about, count me in on the calling.  I don’t mind cold calling.  Expired listings are quick to get and easy for me to call.  They can be pretty productive too.

I spent some time playing on Ebay’s classifieds today.  I’ll tell you how that works out when I know, but being where buyers are looking usually works pretty well for me.

So, I’m not disagreeing with Brian, I’m just wondering, like apparently the Zillow CEO is, if facebook is worth the time.  I haven’t found it to be the most productive way to do business prospecting.

“We’ve taken a number of swings at social (networking) that have not paid off. We might have invested less,” said Spencer Rascoff, chief executive of Zillow.com.

His site has some social networking features and some integration with Facebook and Twitter – mostly as a result of following the conventional wisdom that any vertical could benefit from a social emphasis.

What Rascoff discovered, however, was that real estate is one area that truly doesn’t lend itself to social.

“In our category, we have not found it to be a social experience,” he said. “When you’re looking to buy a home, your network is small – it’s you, your spouse, and your real estate agent. You don’t tell your 300 friends, ‘I’m looking at this house.’ And especially in this market, Read more

November 5, 2010

Facebook Works If You Work It. If You Won’t Work It, Just Play Farmville

by

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

Author website

Let me restate my case about Facebook; if you’re not using Facebook as a prospecting tool, you are most likely wasting your time and engaging in the ultimate procrastination scheme.  I don’t begrudge folks fun and Facebook can provide much joy.  You can reconnect with old friends and make interesting new friends there but if you plan to use it for business, you’ll most likely end up wasting hours that could have been better spent standing in front of a supermarket, handing out your business card.

Like this, from Agent Genius:

You don’t need a business page.  In fact, a business page is just one more time suck.  People rarely go to a business page to learn about real estate on Facebook; look at the metrics offered to prove that.   The author’s offered advice is just plain wrong:

You shouldn’t be using your personal profile page to promote business. It is against the guidelines on Facebook and just rude, regardless. I will share with you how you CAN use your profile effectively, but blasting out your market reports and new listings is a big NO-NO on your personal profile.

Huh?  I have no idea where the author found the “rule” about doing business on personal pages but can tell you, from a few years experience on Facebook, that telling your audience about your business is not only desirable but effective.   Posting listings isn’t rude, it’s your stock-in-trade.  If you’re only posting listings on your Facebook page, you’re likely to be branded as boring but listings are real estate porn, designed to slow down the gawkers and encourage a reaction from them.  Your “friends” will most likely be gawking at your listings if you’re interesting enough to be in their Facebook stream.

I have what I think is a low key way of occasionally including real estate into my status without it being obvious. I share parts of my day that include real estate in a personal light. For example: last winter I was showing REO property and put as my status update: “Showing Read more

November 4, 2010

If you can’t sell, teach. And if you can’t teach? Teach e-Pro!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t pay close attention to this crap, because — well — it’s crap. But you may have heard that the NAR’s most-idiotic designation, e-Pro, has been taken over by a confederacy of dunces super-nice people from Agent Shortbus (where they “pour” over everything, especially maple syrup over waffles) called SMMI.

You have to read between the lines in this press release, but my take is that the swamis from SMMI are going to teach you how to waste your days on TwitBook just like the cool kids. You might think that this is a suicidal strategy for working Realtors to pursue, but as has been discussed here lately, apparently the notion of working is one the cool kids are trying to get away from altogether.

Like this: I am told that the e-Pro trainer-training event held by the smarmies at NARdigras drew a thick slice of the most-prominent twitwits. I don’t know if they’re going to stop officially selling real estate — how would one know the difference? — in order to become full-time carriers of the TwitBook virus. The one thing we can hope is that the long-standing stench of e-Pro will arouse working agents from their TwitBook-induced stupor before they go completely broke.

And if they don’t? Crush them like bugs. This business isn’t for everyone. TwitBook is just the new bullpen, the new water-cooler around which losers can gather as they gripe themselves out of the real estate business.

Looked at that way, the e-Pro trainers in training could be doing all of us a favor: Isolating the people who won’t make it and teaching them How To Succeed At Failure.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

First, if you are deeply offended at seeing pompous, blustering, sputtering, know-nothing jackasses being skewered in public, please just go away. I don’t care, and I cannot imagine how anyone over the mental age of nine even could care.

Second, if you don’t want to go down the toilet in a very amusing public display of TwitBooked indolence, get your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel and stop pretending that schmoozing with losers and Read more

November 2, 2010

Yelp-ing Real Estate Agents: The Online Bus Bench Advertisement?

by

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

Author website

Todd Carpenter introduced me to Foursquare, last year in San Diego, and I immediately saw how geolocation could change the game for the neighborhood real estate agent. I envisioned agents promoting their listings and open houses on Foursquare.  I’m a natural “spammer” so I started using it to “check-in” to my place of business.  I figured it was a natural way to promote myself in front of a crowd.  The problem with Foursquare is that the crowd was measured in the dozens and most of them were bar-hoppers as opposed to “citizens”.

Geolocation was quickly adapted by Yelp, then Facebook.  My rule of social media marketing is to go where the people are.  What I like about Facebook (it’s a BIG platform) didn’t quite work for geolocation marketing.  Check-ins get lost in a sea of status updates and it’s tough to “piggy-back” on the social proof offered by Yelp.

Yelp is a really good platform if you’re trying to find the “bus bench advertising” approach to neighborhood brand building.   It’s pretty simple idea (you write reviews on local businesses) and the geolocation service allows you to ‘check-in” when you’re at a business.  There is a little point game associated with check-ins but the hidden gem is, if you have the most check-ins at a business, your picture, and link to your Yelp profile, is prominently displayed (at least on the mobile version).  This is the modern day bench bus advertisement (and it costs nothing).   Combine your check-ins with reviews and you’re building an online brand as a neighborhood expert.

What Is A “Neighborhood Expert”?

We would like to think that the big hair and Cadillac agent model is dead.  It’s not ! How often do you meet recent buyers, who tell you that they used the agent, who advertises in the Pleasantville Courier-Post ?    They often describe that agent as “a big shot” or “successful”.  They may not comment about that agent’s ethics or service but people like to think they are dealing with the “biggest”  (which they sometimes confuse with well-known).  This is why so many agents spend money on “brand building”.  I prefer Read more

November 1, 2010

Developing The Perfect Content Map For Your Real Estate Blog

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

Regardless of the recent debates about whether or not a real estate blog should be considered a solid foundation for a single agent to develop a realistic business model on, there are still many benefits of publishing content on a site you own… provided everything is organized properly.

I follow the CopyBlogger school of thought for designing strategic landing pages to ensure my target audience gets the exact information they’re looking for when they hit my sites for the first time.

While I do feature categories and tags in non-prominent areas of the footer or custom sidebars, I try to keep my main informational points of interest flowing from the top down in order to respect the time my readers have to spend online.

Homeowners and new buyers can easily get overwhelmed with the hundreds of details they may need to be aware of when it comes to the mortgage or real estate process.

One simple answer can easily lead them to five other questions that they didn’t know they needed to be asking.

Designed with the big picture in mind, your blog can effectively lead someone through their fact-finding mission in a painless and strategic manner.

Obviously, articulating this complex home buying thing in a manner that non-industry people can understand is great way to build trust with your potential clients.

Agents are obsessively consumed with “Personal Branding” to the point where buyers have to invest valuable seconds of their life on a site sifting through awards, testimonials, twitter feeds and media interviews before they can find a page that actually addresses their real needs and concerns.

However, I feel industry blogs have come a long way in the past five years.

But, we need to get better at focusing on homeownership education if we’re truly going to impact a positive change in our local real estate markets.

Here’s an example of my Mortgage 101 section, which has significantly increased in stickiness since I took out the sidebars and customized the page layout to serve as more of a site index with a purpose.

My ultimate goal is to be able to send borrowers and agents to my mortgage blog without 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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