Category Archives: Investing

What I admire about real estate

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I was thinking about what my technology & business development plan is going to be for the next version of Zearch, and it reminded me what I really admire about real estate professionals.

You see, it’s occurred to me that people in this industry are self-employed entrepreneurs, free agents, and independent consultants. It doesn’t matter if they own a RE/MAX franchise, an independent brokerage, or is just an agent starting out. They don’t have a safety net of a 9-to-5 job. They also don’t have to deal with the inane responsibilities that life in a cube farm curses you with. But most importantly, they bare all the responsibilities and they reap the ultimate rewards of their eventual success or failure. For the most part, they only answer to themselves and their clients.

As somebody who shares the dream of becoming self-employed, I certainly admire the difficulties of obtaining that objective. Which brings me to asking the following questions of my entrepreneurial mentors?

  1. How did you get involved in real estate? Was it your first career choice or your second (or third, etc.)? Did you have any mentors or role models when you started?
  2. Why did you get involved? Was it the freedom that working for yourself brings? Was it the possibility of having a larger income (with a lot of effort, of course – there is no easy way)? Did you enter the industry because you enjoy helping people attain the American dream of home ownership?
  3. How long did it take you to “make it”? When did you know that you’ve “made it”? Did you try to work a day job when you got started or did you jump in with both feet with no safety net?
  4. If you haven’t made it yet or didn’t make it, what have you learned from experience?
  5. Knowing what you know now, what would’ve done differently when you started out?
  6. Any other insights you’ve gained on the road to being your own CEO? Has the journey been all that you hoped it would be?

Are you leaving too much on the table?

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I received a phone call from one of the agents I work with who is representing a seller requesting my opinion on another lender’s closing costs.    The seller had agreed [photopress:MPj04331500000_1_.jpg,thumb,alignright] to “pay up to $10,000 towards buyers closing costs.

Historic Photos of Your Seattle Home

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Did you know that if your home was built prior to 1930, there may be a photo of it in the State Achieves that you can obtain?

It takes a couple weeks to receive the photo and for a few cents extra, you can order the records that they [photopress:prince.JPG,thumb,alignright]have available from that time.    The black and white photo is from 1939 of the property which was built in 1927.   The color photo is a current picture of the home.

To order a photo of your home from the Puget Sound Achieves, click here to send an email.   You will need to provide:

  • Property address
  • Tax Parcel Number (I can help you find this if you don’t have this handy)
  • Legal Description (lot/block…they just want a brief one)
  • Your name and contact info

You can order anything from a 5×7 for $17.00 to a 16×20 for $55.00.   They will let you know what years are available.  It’s kind of fun to frame the older photos or to at least have them on hand.

Starting with Community Outreach

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Even before we were done building out the InsideBu website, I recommended that Madison start doing some research. And I started by advising him to fill up his sidepanel with links. My logic is that the process of building up a blogroll forces a new blogger to read other bloggers. The fact that it also also has the benefit of building up some good will with prominent local bloggers is just icing on the cake!

Here is the advice I gave him:

In the first week, there is no need for any blogging (although you should be writing a few posts just to get the blogging muscles exercised!). My recommendation is to spend a few hours this week researching the online competition for your area. At the end of Week 1, I would expect for your sidepanel to be filled with a bunch of links! (For background, see this blog post on Linkation!).

To give you an idea of where I’m going, I recently revived a bit of the neighborhood focus on RCG, which resulted in these Neighborhood Roundup posts. You simply will not find as many neighborhood blogs in Malibu (any?), but that doesn’t mean you should slack on the links… In terms of where to start, here is where my gut says should be the order of importance:

  • Local Bloggers
  • Celebrity Bloggers
  • Project Blogger Participants
  • Local News sites
  • Local Real Estate Professionals
  • Los Angeles bloggers

Some places to start looking for bloggers and other sidepanel links:

To see how Madison has implemented these recommendations of Project Blogger, check out the sidepanel of InsideBu!

Steps to Hosting Your Own WordPress Blog

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It has been so long since I initially set up a blog on a new server that I had to pretty much re-learn everything in order to build InsideBu. The process isn’t all that hard if you’re comfortable with terms like FTP and database. If not, there are many great blogging options for people who will host your blog for you (The Top Producer team I work with will happily host a WordPress blog under your URL as part of their real estate website product!) and both WordPress.com and Blogger offer good, free blogs (hosted under their URL).

BTW, I feel compelled to mention that this blog post is LONG LONG LONG overdue as I promised it way back on December 15, 2005, but never could put together all the steps into a blog post and never had the need to build a new blog from scratch.

Here are my running notes taken directly from a Google Doc I used to document the process (but cleaned up to add links and delete out usernames/passwords)…

We choose to use Yahoo Hosting because I’ve heard good things from other bloggers about the service. I was less concerned about the price (good hosting options for a blog differ by at most $5/month), and really focused on ease-of-use. I’d heard that Yahoo has a really easy install for WordPress (WP) blogs and that definitely appealed to me!

However, I was immediately disappointed that the blog they install was an old version of WP and not in the root directory. This would mean that I would need to do a manual upgrade before even blogging! OUCH! Anyway, I ended up bypassing Yahoo’s “easy install” option and instead, I installed the latest version of WP from scratch.

The manual install required three extra steps:

  1. I needed to create an ftp user using Yahoo’s admin panel (easy!)
  2. I needed to created an “empty” MySQL database (which also required me to install PHPMyAdmin) and note the name of this database (again, all of this was done through Yahoo’s admin panel)
  3. I needed to install use an FTP client (I used the free and open source FileZilla)

None of these were particularly hard and I noticed that Yahoo provided help files for all three of these tasks should you need that kind of thing.

With the back-end ready, I simply followed the instructions for the 5 minute install of WordPress…

This required me to create an admin profile for the blog (again, pretty straightforward).

At this point, InsideBu.com was live and functional, but with a generic theme and no plugins…

Here are some of the steps I took to spice up the blog and get it ready for launch!

  1. I installed and activated some basic plugins.
    • To install I simply used FileZilla to drag and drop the files from my hard-drive to Yahoo’s servers. Once configured for a server, FileZilla operates somewhat like the Explorer tool on Windows.
    • To activate, I simply clicked the “activate” button within the “Plugins” tab of InsideBu’s Admin panel.
  2. The plugins were:
  3. I tried to update and optimze the permalink structure, but this screwed up something on the new version of WordPress and I couldn’t find the .htaccess file to update (long story!), so I gave up on this one for the time being and used the generic linking structure (i.e. “?p=33”)
  4. Installed and activated the appropriate theme! In our case, Madison choose Orange Sunrise. This required me to
    1. download the theme
    2. unzipp it
    3. ftp the files to the “themes” folder on Yahoo’s servers
    4. activate it on the wp-admin panel
  5. Create a tagline
    • For SEO reasons, I included the words “Real Estate” and “Malibu” but my phrasing could easily be improved!
  6. Unselect “comment author must have previously approved comment!”
    • Want to do everything possible to encourage comments early and often! 🙂
  7. Organize sidebar items via the widget feature (very slick!)
    • I’ve put links at the very top for now closely followed by comments. As the site gets more comments, I’d flip this order in order to encourage community participation!

Those were my steps to creating a brand-new blog using the free and open-source tools available from WordPress. It is probably too complicated for most agents, but probably not too complicated for many of agents that are reading this blog.

Choosing a Name for Your Blog

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The perfect time to name your blog is after you’ve blogged for a while and really developed a personality around your site. Only after a few months of regular blogging will most agents be ready to give their website a name.

However, the time necessarily to develop a personality (before a name!) doesn’t coincide with the reality of Project Blogger or Google. While it is kind of like putting the cart before the horse, the reality is that the first thing we had to do was develop a name (that included an available URL!).

So, how did we end up at InsideBu.com?

Here are some of the ideas I planted with Madison to pounder:

  • First brainstorm on ideas, and then (after you’ve assembled a bunch of ideas!) check to see if the URL is available.
  • Make sure it has a community focus (i.e. we’re building a community destination website!)
  • Take yourself out of the URL… Make sure that you’re creating a site that others will want to take part (Don’t name it after yourself or your business!)
  • Think of the niche you want to create with your blog… who are you trying to reach?
  • Are there any local names you can capitalize on? (things like local high-school mascots, community nicknames, community centers, etc.)
  • Keep the URL short and sweat

A good name for a community blog will make a “local” think, this website “get’s it” and at the same time, won’t alienate people who are not local.

After many emails back and forth, we decided to capitalize on the name for Malibu (“the bu”) that is used by the locals (as in, “we’re heading back to the bu”).

However, TheBu.com was already taken (and doesn’t convey any “actionable words” that really tell you what the website is about), so we started thinking of other ways to connect the website name to the community. In Madison’s case, our plan is to have the blog focus on the unique aspects of Malibu. I happen to think that the beautiful beaches and the celebrity element of Malibu are going to be huge drivers of traffic and links into the future.

We tried a whole bunch of different words like “connect” and “community”, and combinations like “BuLife” and “LiveBu” but I happen to think that “inside” conveyed both the exclusive nature of the community along with the opportunity for insight that only a real estate agent can convey. Hence: We decided to go with InsideBu.com.

Maybe the blog will change focus into the future and the name will “feel” wrong, but thanks to the fact that we’re already seeing some LinkLove (in particular from celebrity bloggers), we’re going to have to live with the name and URL into the future!

Next up: Setting up a WordPress blog from scratch… (I’ve been taking thorough notes! 🙂 )

Owning the Malibu Community

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About a month ago, I got a call from a friend who highly recommended that I give a chance to a real estate agent who is working very hard to break into the Malibu market. The idea of “owning” a piece of Malibu is somewhat irresistible to me (even if it is only the digital dirt!), so I couldn’t refuse, despite the many wonderful options (or maybe because I had too many wonderful options!)

[photopress:madison.jpg,full,alignright]Anyway, to make a long story short, I met up with the agent for breakfast, had a wonderful conversation and decided to coach him as part of Project Blogger. So, without further ado, I’m happy to introduce Madison Hildebrand and his most wonderful blog, InsideBu.com.

Probably one of the most appealing aspects to working with Madison is that he already understand how to use self-promotion in the real estate context (he could teach me a thing or two!), so our conversations really get to focus on the ways in which he can use the technologies behind online social networks (we’ve got ideas for Flickr, YouTube, ActiveRain, the Move Blogs, etc. in addition to consistent and inspired blogging!) to build up a healthy online community around a local real estate market. Malibu is an incredibly challenging market where a few big names dominate the local scene. I am thrilled to have this chance to work with Madison to bring this unique market into the digital age! 🙂

Seatte Metropolitan Magazine's Best Places to Live

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This month’s issue of Seattle Metropolitan Magazine features their annual “Best Places to Live”.    What strikes me is their number one pick is[photopress:seattlemet.jpg,thumb,alignright] not any where near Seattle; nor is it “metropolitan”.   It’s Kent.  I’m not knocking Kent.   In fact, my main office is head quartered on the East Hill of Kent and I grew up in south east King County.   It just seems out of place to have 40% of Seattle Metropolitan Magazine’s Best Places to Live be outside of Seattle city limits.

Here is the Best Places to Live according to SMM with the median home price:

  1. Kent $278,500
  2. Lower Queen Anne $289,000
  3. High Point $315,990
  4. Belltown $324,450
  5. Victory Heights/Pinehurst $356,750
  6. Rainier Vista $390,000
  7. South Lake Union $394,000
  8. Issaquah Highlands $569,950
  9. Somerset $697,500
  10. Yarrow Point $1,500,000

Is SMM out of neighborhoods in Seattle they feel are worthy?  Are they searching for newly constructed fresh neighborhoods…Seattle is pretty darn old, afterall.  

Last year, Eileen covered SMMs 2006 Best Neighborhoods on RCG.   She asked why not Burien?  Which I agree–Burien continues to be completely overlooked and…in my opinion, so is Des Moines.   Both of these neighborhoods are technically “Seattle”.  

What Seattle neighborhoods would have made your top 10 that are not receiving recognition on this years list?

How Well Do You Know Your Mortgage?

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I was at my massage therapist yesterday (I was in an auto accident last July) and she was “talking mortgage” with me because she thought I find the conversation relaxing. 🙂  She recently was in the process of going through a refinance (with someone else, aahhhh…even more soothing) and discovered she has a prepayment penalty of $7,000 on her current mortgage.   She called off the refinance even though it could save her a couple hundred dollars a month (she may not keep her current residence for long, so this may not be a good move for her…I do not have all of her financial details, so I cannot provide a professional opinion).

Apparently her original lender never disclosed her prepayment penalty; at least she does not recall such a discussion.    She was very surprised with how little she knows about her largest debt.   She’s not alone.

I’m challenging RCG readers to make sure you understand your current mortgage.   I double dog dare you to dig up your Note (this should be with the inch thick stack of papers you received at your signing appointment) and confirm:

  1. What is your interest rate?  
  2. How is the mortgage amortized?
  3. Is there a prepayment penalty?   

Is your mortgage an Adjustable Rate Mortgage?   I have some additional questions…just for you:

  1. What is the date that your mortgage scheduled to have the first rate adjustment?
  2. How will your new rate be determined?  (What is the margin and index).
  3. How much can your mortgage adjust when the fixed payment period is over?
  4. How often can your mortgage adjust when your fixed period is over?
  5. Do you have deferred interest or negative amortization?

In light of all the press mortgages are getting these days, this is a good excuse to brush up on yours.   Just like my Massage Therapist, your Loan Originator may not have fully explained the details, or maybe you were so caught up in purchasing or financing your home, all those numbers slipped by.  It happens.

It’s up to you to make sure you are massaging your financial future to work in your best interest.   You can always contact your previous Loan Originator and have them explain your mortgage in fine detail or find another Mortgage Professional to help you.