Selling houses is a flashback to dating on Match.com

[photopress:heart.jpg,thumb,alignright]Yes, that’s right, I too have used Match.com in the past and it’s actually how my partner, Michael, and I met. This weekend I was reminded of the dating experience online as I perused houses in the Greenlake area with some clients. First, we looked at houses in a price range of over $1 Million. The house they’ve written an offer on is gorgeous but the photos of it were horrible. It was exactly like how Michael and I met because he had a horrible photo – so I almost didn’t meet him – and it ended up that when we really did meet it was love at first sight. It was the same way with this couple, I almost didn’t show them the house because I was afraid it was going to be lacking in the aesthetics department based on the lame exterior photos – there were none of the interior. Thank goodness I took a chance and used it as a comparative for another expensive home and they ended up falling in love.

[photopress:IMG_1075.JPG,thumb,alignleft][photopress:master_bedroom.jpg,thumb,alignright]As I’ve been in the real estate biz only a few years I imagined that all agents who work with higher priced properties might actually take the time to provide exceptional skills when it comes to marketing a home. Well, apparently this isn’t the case. Do sellers just not think to ask to see what their house will look like online? The post that came in a few days ago about putting in good photos on real estate listings really strikes a chord with me. Which photo would you rather have for your home? The one that limits the scope of the room to be seen and is kind of dark and depressing? Or go for the warm, inviting photo that gives some sense of the actual space?

I’d post the photos of this house here but since we’re under negotiation right now, I can’t. Let’s just say my client’s digital photo did a lot better than the one the agent took. I have to say that, like Michael, I’m glad someone put in a bad photo this time because otherwise a love match (for me and then my clients) wouldn’t have been made.

Interview with Glenn Kelman of Redfin

[photopress:glenn_kelman.jpg,full,alignright]Since joining on Redfin almost exactly a year ago, Glenn has earned a reputation of a colorful, intelligent, and unconventional CEO. In my quest to interview the real estate bloggers who have influenced me, I am very glad that Glenn took the time to talk about his foray into corporate blogging as well as the team he has built up at Redfin, many of whom are expert bloggers in their own right.

However, before I begin the interview, I have a request… Will someone please record tomorrow’s panel discussion between Glenn and Allan Dalton at Real Estate Connect when they both answer the question: Is the Realtor becoming irrelevant in the internet age? Now back to our regularly scheduled interview…

What inspired you to start blogging?

[photopress:Noam.jpg,thumb,alignright] The person who showed me how to blog is my friend, Noam Lovinsky, a 26 year-old Israeli-American with unnaturally large, expressive hands.

He introduced me to his subscription set the way a 13 year-old shows you his comic books. He is the kind of person who, if you ask him to play checkers, gives you a list of other people to play first, and says “Beat them, then we’ll play.”

The reason I enjoy blogging is simply because I enjoy writing; I once wanted to be a novelist. I take a child-like joy in finding colorful pictures on Flickr to post alongside the writing. And I appreciate the hurly-burly of comments, which helps us figure out what to do at Redfin.

On the other hand, I worry that blogging can be self-indulgent and even a bit solipsistic, all of us bloggers talking to one another.

But mostly I like it.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

The Roman playwright Terence once wrote “I am a human; nothing human is alien to me.” The best topics for a post are always people. More than the topics, what I enjoy about blogging is the tone, which itself seems more human to me than most corporate writing: you can admit mistakes, make personal observations, sometimes explain how you feel. Ventures into other topics have been precarious: every time I mud-wrestle traditional real estate agents, I lose; my posts about Redfin sound like press releases.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Mostly, just let folks write in their own style, unedited. Our blog has improved since Matt Goyer began posting; I feel the same way about posts from Eric Heller, Rob McGarty, Cynthia Pang and Bahn Lee. Each has his or her own voice.

Do you have any favorite posts?

It was fun to testify before Congress. Any post that quotes Emily Dickinson or P. Diddy is good. I like posts about odd Redfin employees because, well, they are so odd. But for some reason this post has stayed with me the most, because I like the picture so much (a Redfin employee trying to work while flying down the freeway).
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What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

Very partial list (excluding RCG of course):
John Cook’s blog: scrupulously fair, blazingly fast.
TechCrunch: a carnival of start-ups, oddly idealistic and cynical.
SocketSite: which tries to be rigorously analytical but often is just compulsive.
Guy Kawasaki’s blog: probably the best writer on start-up culture in the blogosphere.
Matt Goyer’s blog: which taught me to be myself.
I also like what Joel, Kevin and Greg are doing. OK, sometimes Greg drives me nuts, but in a good way.
And I love the Redfin bloggers who provide eyewitness property reviews for different Seattle neighborhoods.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

NetVibes is a good way to read blogs. We use Six Apart’s Moveable Type to publish our blog, and Google Analytics to monitor traffic. Flickr is a good place to find colorful photos. I’m glad we’ve finally made it easy to post to del.icio.us and Digg.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

First off, a blog isn’t just a marketing vehicle. It’s a way to have a conversation with the market, narrowing product cycles, gathering ideas, correcting blunders.

Second, I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us. A blog at its best can facilitate that kind of nakedness.

Most important, the blog expresses our personality. Most corporate websites are a sensual deprivation chamber. Sometimes it seems like everyone in business is trying to act all grown up and professional and fake, but what people are really starved for in our denuded commercial landscape is a little personality.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

We plan to introduce neighborhood blogs to each of the markets we enter, with eyewitness property reviews. This may end up being too much work, or too expensive, but so far our efforts in Seattle have been promising.

We’re also excited about using our blog for virtual focus groups, so that we can gather feedback on new designs before coding. Matt Goyer has already started to develop a community of folks interested in the design of real estate web sites. Now we just have to decide how much we have the guts to share.

The flip side of all this is that we need to make our site, Redfin.com, open to blogs, so that as you browse neighborhoods on the map or click on listings, you can see property reviews, neighborhood alerts, local real estate advice. In six months, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ardell is popping up all over Redfin.com with noisy opinions about this neighborhood or that house.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

The ability for users to subscribe to neighborhoods, like Bainbridge Island, South Seattle, Bellevue, Green Lake.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

Ardell will run six separate blogs. Greg Swann will be predicting Zillow’s conquest of other planets.

Enjoy this interview? There’s lots more where that come from:

Interview with Rudy and Joe of the Sellsius Blog

In terms of real estate bloggers, Joe and Rudy are at the top of their game… Follow their blog for a little while and it becomes obvious that these are two guys who are committed to understanding, tracking and promoting the real estate blogosphere. I can’t be the only one to wonder if I’ll ever get a sneak peak at the money-making side of their operation (which was first announced on RCG in August 2005), but that is besides the point because this interview is about blogging and there is no doubt these guys have played a pivotal role in shaping the connections between real estate bloggers as it exists today!

What inspired you to start blogging?
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We started blogging very early. As Silver Sponsors of the Inman Connect NYC in January 2006, we attended several conferences on blogging and caught the bug. We were readers of RCG, Matrix, Inman & Property Grunt. Property grunt & Inman gave us positive press and encouragement and you gave us life as vaporware 🙂 We never forgot it. This really inspired us. In the beginning it was easier, since we had no readership to answer to. We felt, heck, no one is reading us so let’s do what we want. So, in a sense we inspired each other. We decided early on we’d break some rules, go our own way and see what happens. We’re still learning.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?
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We enjoy marketing , branding, advertising, technology and personal stories. Our business is promoting our members, helping them attract more clients and improving their bottom line. We are always looking for anything new and innovative that can help them.

What have you done to personalize your blog?
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Hopefully, our personality comes across in how we write, comment and choose our images. We try to interject humor and put the Sellsius° spin on a topic. We look for the exception to the rule and go against the grain when we feel it’s right. We stand up for the consumer’s right to informed choice, we advocate for professionals and want to improve the industry we love.

Do you have any favorite posts?
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We love all our Zillow posts, especially Unzillowable, To Coin a Phrase and Mining The Elusive Unzillowable, where JF debates David G. We are also proud of the Bell Labs posts where we collaborated with Ryan Block of Engadget to save a piece of technology history. We felt like journalists covering a story. We liked Realtor’s Allan Dalton Calls Zillow Carnival Act because we got to create our best Selltoon°. We also like our promo pieces (Mary Kay Gallagher and Willie Williams). We did a Year’s Best Posts so you get an idea of what we liked. We like a lot of what we do because we’re having so much fun.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?
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We try to keep up with everyone in the real estate blogos. We would not choose a favorite because at different times we follow different blogs. It depends on the topic discussed. Zillow posts always get JF’s attention. Copyblogger is a must read. We also like Lifehacker, Micro Persuasion, TechCrunch, PronetAdvertising. There are so many more. We still visit grow-a-brain and Joe likes some Russian sites. We find a lot of great writing & commenting on Active Rain.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?
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Bloglines, tabbed browsing, the Wire Services, YouTube, Wikipedia (often better than Google), Firefox extensions like AIOS & Stumbleupon, Google’s Images, Alerts, & News. Fast Stone Capture for screenshots & resizing images is a MUST. Tiny URL, CoComment & Commentful are useful commenting tools.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?
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The blog helps build the Sellsius° brand and we will use it to promote our membership. We are big believers in branding. We want the Sellsius° brand to represent trust, honesty, caring, knowledge and PASSION.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?
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We can’t be too specific other than saying we are going to better promote others, including other bloggers. We will also partner with other bloggers for new ideas we have for the genre. We have already collaborated on a consumer facing blog called MyHouseKey.org.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?
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We invented the Blog Surfer to help retrieve archived posts in a new way and increase page views. The blog surfer is a random remote control, a blog post stumbleupon. We would like it to be tag or category specific so you could surf only marketing posts, for example. Our page views skyrocketed with the surfer.
A tool I’d like to see is an automatic Table of Contents Creator where each post title would be sent to a categorized Table of Contents, with a corresponding link to the post. Blogs are like books and a Table of Contents is necessary. But keeping a Table of Contents up to date is cumbersome. If you visit our Table of Contents, it needs updating.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?
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Blogs will be attached to every real estate website. Every blog will have advertising of some kind. That won’t even take 3 years, maybe only 1. More contributing writers. More hired writers. Payment gateways to transact business on the blog. Blogs will be more varied. Skype on every blog. Blogoholics galore.

Thank you both Joe and Rudy for indulging me in this great interview!

Want more? Here are some more interviews with other influential people within the real estate blogosphere:

If you build it, they will come…

I started responding to Brian’s comment and it turned into a blog post…

[photopress:200px_Field_of_Dreams.jpg,full,alignright]I can tell from the enthusiasm I’m seeing around real estate circles and all the action I’m seeing in the beginning of this new year that this will be a breakout year on the blogging front. There are a bunch of different reasons, definitions and ways of viewing the overriding theme, but I’d characterize it by saying we’re definitely seeing a massive swing where agents are now using pull methods of marketing instead of push methods.

Many agents are creating their own blogs, refocusing their content based on lessons learned, focusing on improving the quality of their listings, or taking part in social networks… No longer are agents going to push their message at consumers when they don’t want it (like mass-mailers, supermarket ads, bus benches, etc.), but rather I can sense that more and more agents are looking for ways to reach potential clients when and where they WANT to be reached…

To steal a theme from a classic movie… If you build it (provide good, helpful, interesting real estate information), they will come!

How to Market Yourself on LinkedIn

This is a follow up to my recent endevor to immerse myself in some of the more popular social networks on the web. Now that I think we’ve exhausted the MyBlogLog discussion, I thought I’d turn to LinkedIn and some of the ways that agents can use this platform to market themselves and potential earn new clients.

How LinkedIn works

LinkedIn is a relatively “closed” social network in that you don’t really get much power out of the system unless you are actively involved. While it is possible to see a someone’s online resumes without being logged in (here’s mine), the service only becomes really useful when you can see their connections and references.

How LinkedIn Really works
For LinkedIn purists, you need to only like to people you know and trust. That way, when other contacts are looking to use the services or hire someone from your contact list, they know they can have a higher level of trust in that person. This sounds good in theory, but LinkedIn doesn’t work that way anymore. Too many people have muddied the true “trust” waters, so the “rules” have changed.

For many people using LinkedIn today, the “game” is to link up with as many people as possible. For someone trying to reach an audience of potential people to hire and/or give them work (i.e. real estate agents, mortgage brokers, lawyers, etc.), you want as many connections as you can get because each connection gets you that much closer to someone who may be looking for your services in the future.

Why should you be on LinkedIn?

Here are four good reasons:

  • Real estate professionals are still pretty novel on the site, so there is plenty of room to stick out.
  • It is really easy to stand out… Simply upload your address book and ask previous clients for recommendations.
  • The site is primarily made up of well-to-do, tech savvy people. In my office at Move, I would estimate something like 75 to 80% of the people have an active LinkedIn profile, including almost our entire executive staff.
  • It meets the “what’s the worst that could happen test?

Seven steps to make LinkedIn work for you
Step 1: Sign up for an account
Step 2: Fill in your profile
Step 3: Upload your address book and connect with everyone who is already a member of linked in (If I’m not in your address book, add my email: dustin@raincityguide.com).
note: They make it extremely easy to upload your online address book (like one through Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and/or Hotmail) by simply giving your username and password, although my advice is to always use extreme caution with giving up your password!
Step 4: Selectively invite people from your address book… My experience has been that unless I send a personal invitation to someone with a really good reason why they should join, I get a REALLY low response rate. Nonetheless, if you have some previous clients who are particularly tech-savvy (and would give you a good recommendation) then they would make a good invite candidate.
Step 5: Start recommending anyone and everyone you can. If you give a good enough review of someone, they are quite likely to return the favor! That’s a lot easier than begging for recommendations and definitely makes a good place to start
Step 6: Start begging for recommendations from all your previous clients who are on the network (and presumably have a good opinion of you!)
The cool part about these last couple of steps is that once you get even one recommendation, you’ll start showing up in their list of recommended service professionals.

Step 7: After a few weeks, I recommend returning to the site and re-uploading your address book. It’s easy and you might be surprised how many of your new contacts are already on the site!

Obviously, the more recommendations and the more connections the better.

To give you an idea of how this might work for you, my wife and I were recently interested in finding a financial adviser in our area. The first thing I did was clicked on the financial adviser link and then sorted by people who were only one degree of separation from me. One guy out of that list looked real promising and will probably get a call from us soon. Next, we went one more degree of separation and found a few more (some with a ton of recommendations). We’ll definitely give at least one or two of those people a call when were ready to start the process of actively finding a financial adviser. The parallels for reaching someone who is searching for a tech savvy real estate agent should be obvious!

There is lots more information about how to use LinkedIn all over the web, but I figured this primer was probably pretty good for the typical real estate agent… Nonetheless, if you want more, check out Guy Kawasaki’s 10 12 Ways to Use LinkedIn.

A Personal Take on the Ethics of a Title Professional…

[photopress:ed.jpg,full,alignright]Writing about his experience of going to prison because of his actions as a Title representative could not have been easy for Ed…

I became federal inmate number 34661-037 and like every inmate in this country was regarded as a slave of the state forfeiting my liberty and all personal rights. While passing the threshold of that terrible place, I surrendered not only my person, but my legitimacy and the sum of my hopes, and my dreams, for the future.

Interview with Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato

[photopress:jim_cronin.jpg,full,alignright]This past summer Jim has came out of seemingly nowhere to quickly become a leading voice in teaching agents how they can use blogging technologies to better market their business online.

With a flair for fun (he has a tomato theme after all!), Jim is always entertaining and has become a daily read for many of us in the real estate blogosphere

What inspired you to start blogging?

I have been in the online real estate marketing industry since 2000 and have always made an effort to keep an ear to the ground as to what actually works. I started my first real estate marketing blog in mid 2005 as a platform for a potential book. Two posts in, I lost my drive. Then I started to realize that I was getting the majority of my own news from blogs; baseball, politics, entertainment… it was all being read on independent blogs. Suddenly I felt that without my own blog, I was falling behind when it came to utilizing the internet as a marketing tool. In late June of this year (2006) I jumped in with both feet, determined to be heard. Never looked back. In fact it has so consumed me that I started a business to consult others how to leverage the business blog as the ultimate online marketing tool.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

I found my topic niche just as I started to gain a consistent audience, or was it the other way around? It has always been my style to educate, and once I had a grip on why I was gaining readership and search engine success, I was compelled to share it. In turn this changed the landscape of the Tomato’s content, and I chose the path of “real estate blogging consultant”. This choice has helped me separate myself from other great real estate bloggers whom I admire so much: Sellsius, FutureOfRealEstateMarketing, RainCityGuide, Bloodhound to name a few. I still enjoy uncovering a new web 2.0 tool, breaking some news, or picking on the bigger media types (read: RISMedia, NAR etc), but I most enjoy delivering an article that examines the real estate blogger’s concern or challenge and (hopefully) provides some solution.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Every stitch you see on the Tomato was placed there by me. I have considered redesigning it many times, and in fact have done so in Photoshop, but like the emotional letter you write and never send, the effort itself has been satisfaction enough.

[photopress:realestatetomatobannersm_1.jpg,full,alignright]Do you have any favorite posts?

I am proud of all the educational pieces I have done in the ‘blogging advice‘ category, but there are two posts that, for me, stand out more than any others. The first post I ever wrote, on that first failing blog appears in its original form on the Tomato – It’s called Understanding Your Audience. I feel that this is a subject that anyone marketing their business needs to master. This particular article won’t apply forever, but its concept will.

The other post I can’t ignore is titled ePro Is A Tinfoil Badge. This piece my first attempt at “stirring the pot”. The results we fantastic. Half my audience loved it the other half wanted me hanged. I really feel that it represented the catalyst for my success; I was able to engage the audience that agreed with me and those that weren’t so sure.

What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

I mention real estate blogs I like all the time, and most of them are probably covered in your interviews… so here are a few personal favorites (non real estate) that I consider the cream of the crop.

Soxaholix. Above and beyond the best sports blog, evah! It is a peak into the Red Sox fan psyche through the dialogue of clipart characters. Hart Brachen (pseudonym, Heart Breaking, get it?) masterfully weaves Boston Red Sox culture and news with pop culture and literary reference into a fabric so entertaining that I actually miss his strip on weekends. In fact it is so good that Yankee fans are actually jealous.

MichelleMalkin. Simple design. Powerful. Attentive. Reactionary. Every political blog should learn from her command. You don’t have to be a republican to recognize her wizardry.

Gizmodo. Gadget Pr0n. ’nuff said.

What tools/websites do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

iStockPhoto, Wikipedia, Technorati, BlogJet, docs.Google.com, Photoshop, Toshiba, Firefox, Jim Beam and Sonos.

How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

It is everything. 100% of my business has come from my blogging. In fact, blogging has eclipsed what I did for a living from 2000-2006.

What plans do you have to improve your blog over this next year?

Where do I begin?… Let’s just say that the education we deliver will be bigger, better and more comprehensive than ever. In addition, we look forward to showcasing more guest authors that recognize the Tomato as their personal soapbox for expressing their knowledge of embracing technology as an effective marketing tool.

What is the one tool or feature that you wish your site had?

Number one item: Comments email notification. It is ridiculous that TypePad blogging platforms do not offer the “notify me of new comments” functionality with their software. This is nearly a deal breaker. I have been able to ‘work around’ many other TypePad deficiencies (trackback weakness for example) but this one just drives me crazy. Maintaining the conversation that develops in the comments is crucial, and to not offer it as a standard blogging feature is just ridiculous if not stupid.

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

The unfathomable amount of content that is generated because of this (gold)rush to blog will persist longer than you and I, no doubt… but in 3 years the blog will no longer be the tool that “gets it done”. TheVlog (video blog) will be the most effective marketing platform for real estate. As the internet, television, Xbox, music, etc. merge into one console, and we sit 15 feet from the flat screen with remote in hand, browsing through channels/websites/whatever do you really see us reading? Video will be the most effective form of marketing (it already is, duh), and learning how to embrace it on an independent basis (like the blog) will be crucial to real estate agents in 2010.

Thank you Jim for this interesting insight! 🙂

Want more? Here are the other interviews I’ve done to date:

Survivor! – The Active Rain Edition

[photopress:survivor.jpg,thumb,alignright]I have spent the last seven days in the Alter-Blogosphere known as the Active Rain Network. Dustin had a few days off and “knocked on my door” and said “Mr. Harris, Can ARDELL come out and play?” and off we went, hand in hand to Active Rain.

Now I am not a big fan of the Survivor TV show, and so I need some help here from those who are. Basically the “Active Rain Island” permits participants to knock out their “competitors”, and I am stumped at what to do about it. I can’t seem to get any good advices from within, because the sabotaging of my efforts is not transparent enough for me to deal with on my own, and the kind people who are trying to help me have never seen this kind of behavior enacted toward them. So I’m at a Crossroads.

When Dustin and I started out over there, we studied the “rules”. OK you post five articles a day. You get 200 points for each article, 25 points for up to 10 comments on other people’s blogs per day, so forth and so on.

OH, and before I forget, I got 600 starter points for putting a message in my own blog’s sidebar saying “I am a PROUD MEMBER of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network.” Time to pop that baby out of my sidebar, unless someone can explain to me what is going on in better definitive terms.

For seven days I jumped through all the hoops, as far as I could ascertain what and where the hoops were, like a video game. I climbed from #11863 in the Network to #227 in just 7 days. From #644 in the State of Washington to #19 and in King County from #264 to #9. In an other than straight points format, I was up to NUMBER 4 in the State! I was a proud member, I was happy, I was working my butt off in true Survivor Style!

And then the other participants, or a few of them, can’t tell who or how many (though the administrators of the site can apparently see who is doing it and what they are doing) started whacking down my points! Holy Crap, Batman. What is THAT! Now I wish I had watched the Survivor show…I’m more like a Trump’s Apprentice type where you give it your best and the chips fall where they may. You try different images, different article styles, spent the week experimenting when all of a sudden I noticed something.

Twice I read “You get 200 points per article and that score rarely goes down, but it does grow upward based on poplularity and comments”. I’m looking at the hard work I put into my five articles a day and watching the points on most of them drop from 200 to 179 to 142 to 128…what the $*^%$)(*% is that! It’s Survivor tactics. Apparently “the system” permits some mean spirited people or some overly competitive people the opportunity to steal away my points. Not quite sure how, and I was assured they were being warned not to do that, and was further assured it would be corrected the next day…but, I wouldn’t be writing this if that were the case.

Not really sure what all this point stuff is about. But I am sure that I am NOT a PROUD member today. Question is, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” I hate to give them the satisfaction that they got the better of me. But by the same token it is almost as much work as the freakin’ Sellsius 101, and in many ways even harder, especially with people pushing me down while I am climbing up. Do I want to be involved with a group that permits such petty and nasty activity?

Not sure what to do. Maybe a show of hands will help me here. Thanks.