Tag Archives: advice

Getting Stylish

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[photopress:Seattle_Real_Estate_Guide_3_20_2005_11_44_34_AM.jpg,thumb,alignright]Merv makes some great points about the importance of style in blogging. (He hits the nail on the head when he says Curbed “makes me dizzy…”).

Here are some tips I would add to the discussion:

  1. KISS: Keep it simple, …
  2. Graphics/photos are great, but don’t let them overpower the conversation.
  3. Don’t start from scratch. Evey blogging platform has themes you can download and install for free. Here’s a great theme browser for wordpress with hundreds of (free) downloadable themes. Start with one of these themes and edit it until it matches your personality.
  4. All blogging platforms separate “style” from “content”. In practice this means that all of the posts and comments are stored in a database, while the way the posts “look” is stored in a simple text file (In WordPress this file is called “style.css”). An amazing amount of personalization can be done by editing this one file. If you get to this level, you might be surprised how quickly you can “own” the look of your blog!

However, at the end of the day, don’t lose sight of the fact that substance is what keeps readers coming back for more! In other words, I continue to visit the Property Grunt on a daily basis despite the fact that he has never modified his theme. Content counts more than style!

Day Two – Realtor Mid-Year

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Yes, I am tardy with my report for Day 2. There was not much going on from an interesting meeting standpoint so I visited the tradeshow floor. For anyone that has not been to a Realtor tradeshow, it is certainly an experience. Flashing buttons, contests, people throwing free things at you. Having been to many of these, it always amazes me the types of companies that have booths. For example, there were several jewelry and makeup booths. While I am not a woman, it seems odd that they would come to a real estate tradeshow. It would be like having Titleist as a vendor. Lots of real estate guys like to play golf but they don’t really fit at a Realtor tradeshow. Then again, I am pretty dense about this stuff and they seemed to have a bunch of women buying stuff so I guess they are the smart ones.

I visited a bunch of booths but a couple stood out for different reasons:

Realtor.com – They intro’d a Zillow/HouseValues-like feature on their home page called “What’s Your Home Worth.” It is a lead generation system for agents that provides basic home value data and then let’s the consumer elect to get more refined info if they want from a “featured” agent. Agents can buy territories and they apparently will rotate as consumers access the feature. Once a consumer asks for more info, the “featured” agent will get an email and that consumer will see the particular “featured” agent for a period of time each time they return. With the large amount of traffic that R.com gets, it will be interesting to see how well the lead gen system works. I tried my zip code and there was already an agent signed up! I think this will be a winner for R.com and the agents that jump on it but I also think that agents will squak when their choice area is sold out.

HomePoint – This is a Trulia-like company (although the get data via the MLS directly) that is trying to become a portal of sorts. Agents sign up for territories and get “featured” when a consumer clicks on a listing. Again, this is a lead-gen system for agents that even extends to listing agents and FSBOs. The thing that I did not get was how they were going to generate traffic. No eyeballs, no leads.

More later….

Russ

There’s a Person Behind that Blog

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Robert Scoble (the excellent Microsoft blogger) has been writing about the pain of watching his mother die.

One of the things that shocked him was that even while he’s describing these events, people are still sending him PR pitches for new products. He follows up these comments by saying he doesn’t mind receiving product pitches, however, the people need to read his blog and be current on his situation if they expect a response.

He’s making some interesting points that are very relevant to real estate blogging… Always remember that there are people behind the blogs. Real estate is such a “people” business, and yet, when people get on the internet they sometimes act like they are only dealing with computers.

Before you pitch a product, website or service (either via comments or email) remember that it is not a computer reading your pitch but a human being. Write something that demonstrates you’re interested in the person’s writing.

Personally, I receive so many emails now that I couldn’t possibly respond to them all and still handle a full-time job. However, getting me (and just about every blogger I know) to respond is quite easy… Write something that shows your interested in their thoughts or opinions!

Day One – Realtor Mid-Year

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I just attended my first meeting at the NAR Mid-Year. It was the MLS Association Executives Committee Meeting. There were three presenters to the group and I will provide some highlights of their presentations.

Laurie Janik, NAR General Counsel

Laurie indicated that claims against MLS under the NAR EO Insurance Policy have for the first time surpassed the number of general association claims. Out of 32 claims made this year, 18 involve MLS issues. Of the 18, 8 involve the FTC, 7 the DOJ and one involves a state attorney general. Most of the claims revolve around whether an MLS can exclude Exclusive Agency listings from data feeds to third party websites (e.g. Realtor.com). Since Exclusive Agency listing allow the seller to sell the house themselves, MLSs argue that allowing these listings to be displayed on the Internet basically enables the seller to have free advertising to attract a buyer without paying the listing side of the commission.

Laurie also discussed the DOJ lawsuit. NAR filed a motion to dismiss which raised three arguments:

First, that the DOJ is seeking injunctive relief for the VOW policy that has been rescinded and never implemented and as a result, there is no relief that can be granted under this claim.

Second, that the VOW Opt Out provision is neutral on its face, there is a presumption of cooperation and that decisions to Opt-Out are based on independent action of each broker.

Third, that the DOJ’s claim against the current Internet Listings Display Policy does not allege any anti-competitive effect.

Laurie cautioned that Motions to Dismiss are rarely granted in the 7th Circuit (where the suit is pending). She also said that 14 MLSs have been involved in DOJ subpoenas and that the NAR insurance coverage for this claim is gone so the MLSs that are involved are now spending their own money to respond to the subpoenas.

Lastly, she indicated that there was a productive settlement conference. She believes a key issue in the case will revolve around the MLS definition of “Participant

Negotiating The Offer Part 1 – The “Homeless” Seller

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[photopress:250px_Tug_of_war.jpg,thumb,alignright]It is a popular perception that every seller wants top dollar as their primary objective.  In my experience that is not always true, and in fact is often not true at all, at the time the offer is being presented.  Let’s take a step back first to see where the perception comes from. 

When a seller is speaking with agents before the home goes on market, it is true that the discussion focuses on selling the property at the highest price, in the shortest amount of time and with as little inconvenience to those occupying the home, as possible.  Agents are trained to speak in these terms, and so that is how the discussion generally goes.

At the time the offer is presented however, if there is a lengthy discussion, that discussion is often not about the price at all.  Even when the discussion is about price, the underlying pressure on the price is often about something else entirely, like the cost of temporary housing for the seller.

For many sellers, the minute they accept an offer on their home, they are immediately, though temporarily, homeless.  I can’t tell you how many times a seller has looked up at me after signing the offer and said, “I guess I’m homeless now”.

Often when a seller is picking on every minutae detail of the offer, it is because they do not know where they are going.  This is a dangerous situation for a buyer, as the seller often wants them to “make it worth their while” to leave.  You might think it was obvious to them when they listed their home for sale, that they would have to leave.  Trust me, the reality in that moment when they pick up the pen to sign your offer, that the minute they sign it they will be “homeless”, hits them like a ton of bricks IF they do not know where they are going.

Any good negotiatior considers the factors on the other side of the table when preparing the offer, or during the give and take of the negotiation process as new information becomes available. While 30 day escrows have become the norm, does that really give a seller the time they need to find their next home?  Often the seller can’t make an offer on their next home until their home is sold, or at least in escrow. If you are willing to give them the time they need to know where they are going, and match up the closing dates so they don’t have to go to temporary housing, you often will win out on price.

If you are currently renting, adding an extra couple of weeks or more to the escrow time can actually save you money.  Go out to the date where you will not be paying rent and interest on your mortgage simultaneously.  Giving the seller time to negotiate the offer on his next home can be a winning strategy in multiple offer situations and even get you the house you want at a lesser price than other offers on the table.  Consider a longer close or a post occupancy agreement when writing your offer. (Some lenders will not permit a post occupancy to exceed 30 days on “owner occupied” financing, so check with your lender before agreeing to anything longer than 30 days past close of escrow, even if longer is only by a couple of days.)

Giving the seller the peace of mind that they can stay in their current home until they are moving into their new home is generally worth up to at least $5,000 in price and sometimes as much as $10,000.  If the seller has two offers on the table, one with an escalator up to $460,000 and one at $450,000 straight up with no escalator, they often will accept or counter the lower offer, if it provides them with the ability to find their next home before having to leave the house.  Sometimes something as simple as letting the seller keep some things in the garage for a week or two can make the difference.  Sometimes giving them the entire weekend to move can make the difference.  Sometimes splitting the weekend, giving them all day Saturday to move out and leaving you all day Sunday to move in is sufficient.  Often these little things prevent the seller from pulling extra had on the price to compensate for his uneasiness and inconvenience.

The perception that the highest price on the table always wins out, is erroneous.  A seller who faces being “homeless”, will often select the offer that affords him the option to stay until he closes and can move his belongings into his new home, even if that offer is not the highest price on the table.

Teaching Effective Blogging to Realtors?

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One of the great things about real estate blogging is that we’re all making this up as we go along… What is the “right” way to blog? I really have no idea but I like to think that the contributors on Rain City Guide are on the right track…

Recognizing that we might be onto something, Russ Cofano approached me a few months ago with the idea of creating a “Bloginar” where we would travel the country teaching real estate professionals how to blog (This is before I accepted a position at Move). With his experience giving seminars to real estate professionals and our combined experience with blogging, the timing seemed right and we quickly put together an outline for our idea. Russ ran this outline past some of his contacts in the industry and the results is that we quickly signed up a few organizations to host our seminars. Our first similar was today in Portland, and for those interested, here is a high-level outline of our presentation:

Understanding Blogs

  • History
  • Anatomy
  • Motivations

Basics of Blogging

  • Creating a Blog
  • Posting Content
  • Creating Links
  • Writing Comments

Increasing Your Business With Blogging

  • Current Internet Real Estate Tools Suck
  • High Search Engine Ranking
  • High Conversion Rates
  • Long-Term Benefits
  • Low Monetary Costs

Effective Blogging Techniques

  • Linkation
  • Content
  • Complementary Tools

It is a full three-hour presentation so you can imagine that we go into a lot of detail on each of these topics!

There are a couple of things that I know are missing from our presentation… I’d really like to spent more time on how to host a blog as well as how to incorporate photos/podcasts/videos into blogs. With that said, we only had three hours so we tried to hit the “sweat-spot” of giving enough information to new bloggers without overloading them on some of the more advanced stuff. My hope is that each and every person that walks out of our seminars feels equipped (and excited!) enough to start an effective real estate blog that evening.

If you’re interested in scheduling this seminar for your organization, please contact Russ (His blog is Realty Objectives [link removed] and his site includes some more information on our seminars [link removed]). You’ll definitely want to sign up soon because with my full-time job at Move, I can only commit to a handful of presentations each month (and we’re already booked-up through July!).

Also, if you are one of the people who attended the seminar, please consider leaving a comment below with your take on our presentation (along with a link to your new blog! 😉 )

How many emails does it take to buy a house?

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I belong to an agent oriented forum with 17,000 “participants”, many “lurkers”, from all over the Country and Canada.  I have been “speaking” there since 1998.  At least once a year a newer agent there asks the question: “What is the average number of emails per transaction?”.

Of course it is possible to go from start to finish with no emails at all, I guess.  Hasn’t been my experience, but I’m sure it is still humanly possible for that to happen.  Last year I had one that took close to 400 emails AFTER the transaction closed, to solve an after sale problem.  None of the emails were from the other agent in the transaction :-), though I did copy him on every email response to his client.  I was the seller’s agent.  I also had many, many phone calls and meetings, in addition to the 400 emails, and all turned out “well”. 

“Rule” is I can never contact someone else’s client in the transaction, but I must answer honestly, if that client calls me.  Usually I do tell them I will respond to their agent and their agent needs to be the one speaking with them.  But when they say their agent isn’t responding to them, I am left with no choice but to handle both sides until the matter is resolved.   I apply the same rule to email, usually.  I never email the other agent’s client in the transaction, nor do I copy the other agent’s client during the course of a transaction.  But if someone else’s client emails me directly, I respond directly, with a copy to their agent.  When you consider that those 400 emails were often directed to at least 6 people, that is 6 times 400 communications or 2,400 communications!

In my experience, the “average” transaction takes between 150 and 200 emails.  This is only my side of the transaction, so if the other agent in the transaction has the same experience, that would be 400 per transaction. Many of these copy multiple parties and only count as 1 email to 4 people.  Emailing escrow with copies to the other agent and my client, for example. This does include emails from the day I meet a potential client until the day they close on the property, and afterward if and as needed.  It does NOT include emailing property to them from the mls, as those emails do not show in my Outlook data.

Blogging is trimming down the number of emails needed to complete a transaction!  Since 1/1/2006, when I began blogging, I have noticed that many of my clients already know a lot more than they ever did in the past.  They already understand more about various transaction details, having read my blog before they contacted me.  I find they also read it during the transaction, and sometimes I direct a blog post to a specific issue at hand in a generic way.  This way I not only help my client to understand what is happening in the transaction, but the general public at large at the same time.

That being said, everyone, agents and consumers both, need to undersand that an email is “in writing”.  There are still times when I need to pick up the phone to say something that I am not willing to put in writing.  A good agent needs to know when to send a letter or a card by snail mail, when to email and when to pick up the phone.  Each of these communication mediums have their place in the transaction, and it is an art to know which to use when.

The YES, NO, MAYBE tour for relocating buyers

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I invented this back when I was doing a lot of relocation work for Coldwell Banker on the East Coast.  I thought Dustin and Anna might like to try it when looking at homes in California.  It comes in very handy when you are touring a lot of homes the first day in a new area.

It’s pretty simple.  You each have three little cards (kind of like Richard Simmons’ Deal a Meal – yes, it was that long ago when I came up with this.) One card says YES, one says NO and the other says MAYBE.  You can only use ONE card in each house.  Anna has a set and Dustin has his own set. 

At each house you are not allowed to say a word to one another until you make your selection from the three cards.  If you are touring homes with an agent, you hand her one of the cards as soon as you know your answer, not how you think your spouse will feel about the house.  Since there is a MAYBE card, this should be a fairly quick procedure for most people.  If the agent gets handed two NO cards as soon as they walk in the front door, you can all get back in the car.  Unless the owner is home, in which case you do a “pity” pass through.  Easier than saying we already know we hate this house.

If you have all NO cards played at the end of the day, what you don’t like is your price range, and you may have to go back to your new employer and say, “what you offered to pay me is not enough to live here”.  If you have three YES houses where you both said YES, you may as well toss out the MAYBE houses and go back at the end of the day to the three YES houses and spend more time in them.  I usually ask people to rank their YES choices as they go.  First YES, no ranking.  Second YES, you have to label one #1 and the other #2.  This way if you have 7 yes houses at the end, you can go back to #1, #2 and #3. 

Why did I feel the need to invent this system?  Can’t people know if they like a house without a little card? 

Here’s why. 

1) Sometimes the relocated spouse feels guilty about making the family move and says “Whatever my sweetie wants will be fine with me” until it is time to sign the contract and wants to offer 80% of asking price.  That’s called saying yes and meaning no.  It’s a passive/aggressive thing some people do 🙂

2) The wife walks in first and starts saying things like, “well, we could take this wall down over here and we could add a master bathroom…”, take it from experience, that’s a NO.  Before they start arguing over how they are going to afford the time and money to do all of that stuff…get a NO card and GET OUT!  Otherwise they will be crying and fighting before you get to house number 4.

3) When they both hand me a YES card and find out that the other party agrees, they can move through the house really evaluating whether or not they should actually buy it, instead of discussing whether or not the other likes it.  And you will be amazed at how happy they both are when you tell them they both said YES.  Sometimes one spouse is afraid to say they like the house because they don’t want the other spouse to buy it just because THEY like it.  It is a great moment when they both hand over a YES card.

Of course the client that keeps handing me all three cards at every house drives me nuts 🙂  Some people just don’t like to be pinned down.

Relevance is at the Long End of the Tail

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Listen to enough conversations on the internet and you’re bound to run into the concept of the long tail. It is a fascinating concept that helps define how people use the internet and helps clarify how real estate professionals can be successful on the internet.

The long tail is a concept that was first popularized by Chris Anderson as an article in Wired back in October of 2004 and grew into a popular blog devoted to the subject. The essence of the Long Tail is defined by the following chart:

long-tail-graph

In this chart, the red areas represent the most commonly sought after (and served) markets… I think of them as the “best sellers”. The yellow area represents the niche markets that only appeal to a small subset of people, and due to (the lack of) economies of scale, these markets tend to be under-served in most industries.

The concept of the long tail is that successful on-line business have (with very few exceptions) thrived by providing adequate services to the people under the yellow area of the curve. Sure you can go to Amazon to find the latest best sellers (red area), but you can also go to Amazon to find hundreds of thousands of titles that you won’t find at your local bookshop (yellow area). Same thing with eBay. The internet is best situated to serve otherwise “hard-to-serve” people.

But economies of scale don’t explain everything. The real beauty of the long tail is that it is often much easier to provide exceptional service to customers in the yellow area of the curve. If someone is searching for a generic topic on Amazon like [popular fiction], it is really hard to know if they would be happy with the results. But if they were to search [accident analysis training manual], you can be pretty sure that they will be happy with the results because there are only a few books dealing with this subject and Amazon will show them all!

The Long Tail and Real Estate

Recently, Chris over at RealtyBlogging asked “How are real estate and blogging alike?”, and this is my answer. Both real estate and blogging thrive when they effectively serve a local and/or niche market (i.e. the yellow area under the curve).

The idea behind this should really be second nature to successful real estate agents who know they couldn’t possibly serve all the niches within a major City. Rather, my experience has been that successful agents will say that they began by providing exceptional service to a small subset of people. Maybe their niche involves houseboats or condos, or a specific neighborhood… The specific niche doesn’t matter. The important aspect is that a real estate agent realized that they were never going to be able to serve everyone well, so instead they focused on a small subset of people and learned that market inside-and-out.

Similarly, blogs almost always come with a strong point of view and serve a niche market well.

In addition, the internet has allowed a few companies to do a very similar thing that real estate professionals have always been doing. Namely be extremely relevant to a small subset of the overall population. Not only has Amazon and eBay found success this way, but Google has created a billion dollar industry out of this concept. The idea behind Google Ads is that they provide relevant ads to users on obscure topics. I doubt many lawyers would consider putting up a banner ad on Yahoo to attract people looking for mesothelioma lawyers, but give these lawyers a chance to reach people who just searched for [mesothelioma lawyers] on Google, and they are willing to pay $54.33 for one click!!!

This extremely relevance is exactly how the real estate agents of the future will be successful on the internet. Not only that, but I happen to think that blogging is a great way for agents to get out from under the “red” of the curve (where most real estate websites live… and die) and out into the long tail where their niche knowledge will be appreciated and rewarded!