Tag Archives: blogging

If you build it, they will come…

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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!

I need friends!

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Despite my preference for blogs, (I really dislike the peer pressure games associated with almost all online social networks), I’ve been diving into a bunch of other platforms over the past two weeks (call it “work research”).

If you are on any of these, please consider sending an invite to me at dustin (at) raincityguide (dot) com.

If I’m missing a social network that you really like, please feel free to clue me in!

Also, one glaring hole in my social network is ActiveRain. The first reader to (1) send me an invite to ActiveRain AND (2) an invite to connect on at least two other social networks gets the credit for me joining up! 🙂 I’m now an ActiveRain Blogger! Thank you Cheryl of NELALive.

Move Along…

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[photopress:selling_peaches.jpg,full,alignright]Thanks to both Ardell and Joel, I’ve been tapped to list five things you may not know about me… Not sure where to start, I decided to focus today’s theme on some fun jobs (but I won’t go so far as to take you back to the days of selling fruit on the streets of LA! LOL):

1) At 16 years old, I spent the summer working as an ice cream scooper at a Haagen Dazs shop in Paris. At the time (early 90s), Haagen Dazs was all the rage in Europe, so it felt like I was in the center of the universe. Needless to say, I learned a lot working around a bunch of older (early 20s!) Parisian models for a summer, although my French never got very good because all the girls wanted to learn to speak “American” as oppose to their school-taught “English”. One of the highlights (that I can discuss in a real estate blog) was blasting Nirvana on the shops speakers (loud!) after-hours while closing the shop down. At the time, Nirvana’s Nevermind album had not yet been released in Europe (at least everyone around acted like it had not!), so having a copy turned out to be a HUGE hit.

2) The next career arc came during my UC Santa Cruz years when I was studying Environmental Studies… At 19, I drove to Alaska to work for consumer interesting group, AKPirg, in order campaign for “Campaign Finance Reform”. (I find it more than mildly amusing that 10 years later, their lead issue is still campaign finance reform.) While raising money and making a big fuss about all things political and environmental, I was getting paid to travel around the state and made many national park stops! Grizzlies in Denali, hiking under glaciers in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and that long, long, long Alaskan highway are all unforgettable experiences… I guess I wasn’t so bad at raising money for causes, because later in the summer I was asked to work for the USPirg office in Chapel Hill and was given the hilarious opportunity to canvass Jesse Helms in an effort to get him to join the Sierra Club! I guess I don’t have Bono’s magnetism, because despite a good 15 minute conversation, I couldn’t get him to join up for even the basic membership! 🙁

3) At 22, while studying Engineering at UC Berkeley, I decided to spend a summer working as a student-researcher for the Pavement Research Center. Believe it or not, this was a fascinating job that brought me up and down (and up and down) the state taking samples from test pavements in order to see the effects of some experimental pavement mixtures under different conditions. The pavement job was really good to me (financially), so I was able to stash some cash away for the school year and still take my girlfriend, Anna, on a cross-country trip via drive-away cars for the last few weeks before school started.

Our first assignment was to drive a car to Charlotte, NC (from Berkeley, CA) and we took I-40 almost all the way. Some of our stops including an evening in Las Vegas, a day on Lake Mead, hiking around the Grand Canyon, wondering in Santa Fe, eating huge steaks in Oklahoma City, dancing (and more dancing) at Elvis Week in Memphis, visiting the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, and shopping in Atlanta. For the return trip, we took the northern route (roughly I-80) with stops along the backroads of West Virginia (just in time to watch Bill Clinton give his famous mea culpa speech at our hotel room), a county fair in Kentucky, a Second City performance in Chicago, the Iowa State Fair, an evening in Boulder, CO, a hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and a hike on the Great Salt Lake. The kicker is that we did all of this in just a little over two weeks!

4) After graduating from Berkeley, I spent the first seven years of my professional career as a planner/engineer for a transportation consulting firm. This was interesting work in that I got to spend a lot of time working with local government officials to improve their transportation, and in particular their transit, systems. I worked all over the west coast for clients like BART, SF MUNI, SCAG, MAG, Portland’s Metro, and King County Metro, Sound Transit, WSDOT and the City of Seattle and became somewhat of an expert in travel demand modeling and GIS. Despite lots of good opportunities ahead (transportation in every American city will get worse before it gets better!), I knew it was time to look for new opportunities when Rain City Guide started to take off…

5) About eight months ago, I jumped off the engineering bridge and went to work for Move. One of the things I’ve learned is that while the technology (or secret sauce) behind large websites can be complex, it is the business development and marketing opportunities that most interest me. Hence, about a month ago, I switched out of our product development team and into our marketing team (although things are never that simple… :)). Probably the best news (at least for me) is that this switch means I’ll be able to come out of my dark cave and blog a bit more during the next year!

No perpetuation of memes from me! 🙂

Rain City Guide Year In Review

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The most popular articles on RCG from this past year as measured in total hits:

(I encourage all RCG contributors to do something similar):

  • 10 Great Conversations. This was the first of my “list” posts and was a lot of fun to put together…
  • The Best Online Real Estate Marketing Time Can Buy. Getting people to return to your site day in and day out is simple (but not easy)… Be interesting!
  • Improving Online Home Valuations? I like this article mainly because it jump-started a bunch of internal discussions at Move about real estate blogging.
  • Plus How to Link. I include this one because I’m often shocked at how many real estate agents think they can blog without linking…
  • Paying for the Privilege of Marginalization. I don’t think the real estate community at large has really come to grips with what it means to take part in some of these online classified sites and the tech-savvy agents seem to have given into their fatalistic instincts in terms of their industry as a whole. Fascinating stuff that borders on the “can’t tread there anymore” territory for me… 🙂

And finally, I found it particularly fun to read the slew of interviews I did at the beginning of last year. Lots of stuff has changed in a year in real estate blogging, but not as much as you might think!

The Future of Blogging According to Matt

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Matt’s up on stage with Liz Lawley of Microsoft Research talking about the future of blogging as the final session at the Blog Business Summit.

It has been a fun conversation with Liz and Matt taking different sides in terms of the importance of community vs. technology. Here are some of my favorite conversations (Some of these may only be paraphrasing).

Matt: “As technologies, we tell a Noble Lie.”

The idea is that the technologists are telling everyone the technology is going to rule the day, but in reality, the technology has been around for a while. What is new is that we have an audience to read the massive amount of content that has been created!

Matt: “When we look at the search engines like Google… and Yahoo and Microsoft… I feel bad like I have to do equal opportunity pimping when I’m on stage…”

Host: “What do you see as the future of the internet?”
Matt: “I don’t know… Don’t even want to guess at that. The reason I’m up here on stage is timing. WordPress is here because of timing.”

Host: “If you could buy any companies today, who would it be? Who is doing things right?

Blogging at Ed.Con 2006

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Yesterday, Russ Cofano and I gave another blogging seminar, this time in Seattle as part of Ed.con 2006 put on by the Washington Realtor Association.

[photopress:elvis_and_liberace.jpg,full,alignright]I thought the day went over really well and considering it was the first seminar we’d given to the “home town

The "Goldilocks" Principle

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[photopress:images_1.jpg,full,alignright] I know that applying the “Goldilocks Principle” puts me in the category of “hopeless utopian”, but hey, for one solid year, until December 31, 2006, I am going to stay in this thought mode.

I’ve tried various commissions with various people, and for the most part disregarded anything I’ve ever known, and everything that anyone has to say on the subject. I say “for the most part” because you really can’t erase your brain. But you can test and try varied options, just like Goldilocks rested herself on the three beds before deciding which one was “just right”.

I find that all of the rhetoric available on the topic is pretty much bunk. Reality is, it depends on the sale price/purchase price. I plan to do a “year in review” on 1/1/07, my blogging anniversary, to post my experiences and conclusions. But since this topic keeps coming up in the comments of various articles with everyone spouting out percentages, or flat fees, or hourly fees, etc., I thought I’d at least post that the results of my experiments are absolutely hinged to price of property.

The other reality is that my “awakening” with regard to commission issues started three months BEFORE I started blogging, and being in the Blogosphere really isn’t what turned my head with regard to commission issues. What turned my head was when I, myself, purchased a house for $850,000 with $59,500 of commission issues plus $22,000 of other credit issues thrown into the mix. Trust me. There is no question in my mind that I, the buyer, am the one paying for that whole $81,500 in my mortgage payment. I’m not complaining. I structured everything that way for a reason. But overnight I realized that the buyer pays the commission…no question.

I also realized that it didn’t bother me on the 10-12 properties I purchased before this one. So price of house does matter. The experience revolutionized my whole thought process with regard to real estate commissions. Nothing causes you to “get real” more than putting yourself into the equation, and experiencing it personally, from the inside out. So for now, I’m trusting my own judgment and using “The Goldilocks Principle” when determining the fairness of commissions. A full year of experiments, and then I’ll come out the other side and see where I’ve been and which feel “just right”, which were too high and which were just not enough.

For now…price matters is the key, and almost none of the discussions anywhere, focus on different fees for different home prices. So basically, they are ALL wrong.

Time for some sleep!

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At around 8pm, I woke up from a late afternoon nap to see that Ardell still had over 30 posts to write and I got a worried… So I took a Newcastle out of the fridge and started writing. I figured that should it become necessary, I could pass along a few extra posts to Ardell… (Greg’s not the only one with a competitive streak!) But she obviously didn’t need my help as she has just made it to 100 on her own! Awesome stuff!!!

Congrats to both Greg and Ardell… You’re both amazing.

However, because I hate to see things go to waste, I’ll go ahead publish the mini-blog posts I was going to pass along to Ardell. My intention was only to write a few “filler” posts, but…

1) I believe Greg when he says he could hit 135 in one day… The man in an animal!

2) Speaking of jobs! Give this man the full-time job as the Open House blogger… With articles like this fun one on an whimsical (artist) house and timely articles like this one on the number of NWMLS price reductions. Steve has come a long way in a few weeks since he asked me how to get some traction to his blog.

3) I steal a lot of “Rain City” traffic, so here’s my chance to give back:

  1. Rain City Video (local video chain)
  2. Rain City Rocks (rocks and minerals)
  3. Rain City Grill (yum)
  4. Rain City Dogs (dog walking)
  5. Rain City Hearse Club (car)
  6. Rain City Choppers (bikes)
  7. Rain City Shwillers (125% punk by volume)
  8. Rain City Yoga (hot!)
  9. Rain City Story (a personal blog)
  10. Rain City Studies (website design)

4) Greg points out this post on the Trulia Blog… Considering all the work that Sami and Pete have done to bridge the gap with the broker community, I’m surprised they let that post slip through…

5) In search of a snippet…

6) Kris turns a strange day into a great 12-step program for blogging… However, note that most 12-step programs try to ween you of addictions while Kris is trying to give you one. You’ve been warned.

7) Review of the Bloodhound Blog… Nobody, and I mean nobody, feels more comfortable calling real estate B.S. when and where he sees it. With a fluent style, a quick wit, and a massive quantity of writing under his belt, the man has become addicting.

8) How to discuss Marlow’s recent post about Trulia’s expansion without sounding self-serving??? I put together a Excel spreadsheet that examines not only how many listings each service has, but also how many “accurate” listings each service has for one zip-code (98117) in Seattle. The results highlight a bunch of interesting things like (1) Redfin’s zip-code search is broken (i.e. a search on 98117 returns results for other zip codes like 98203 and does not return all the homes that Redfin has with a zip-code of 98117), (2) Realtor.com is missing more than a few Windermere listings (I was surprised when Marlow mentioned this, but the results pan out), and (3) Trulia has a long way to go before they are comprehensive. If someone wanted to take this data and add one more zip code in some other part of the country, I’d love to post the results. Maybe a Bay Area agent can take this on since all the sites in question have operations there!

9) One of the things I most admire about Ardell is that she focuses on the service (and then delivers a rebate). While it Bill’s approach makes for great blog posts, focusing on the “discount” doesn’t work for me.

10) I still haven’t made sense out of what it means to be part of a “Christian Real Estate Network”, but the guy does some great real estate blog posts… I like his latest on ways to learn about your competitor’s website is another doozy… although he does miss out on the most obvious trick, which is to use technorati to see who else is linking to them!

11) Interesting to see the competitiveness of the rental market…

12) I’m not sure who, but someone once said… “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” That’s the theme for these blog posts!

13) However, I must give credit to Jim for his excellent post on “why blog?”

14) Jay makes a bunch of valid points when he says it is time to “raising the bar” on becoming a real estate agent… Since stricter requirements would serve to keep out additional competition, I’m assuming that most successful agents would agree.

15) Tom echos this point, andapplauds the Governator’s move to require more education for California agents…

16) Merv continues to deliver with his price trend analysis… If you’re looking for good ways to display real estate data start with Merv!

17) Then go check out Mike’s Altos Research blog because he makes price trend analysis easy…

18) While just about anything is possible, tracking my net worth based on my home’s zestimate and MyYahoo stock tracking performance is going to far for me… and then making a button for the whole wide world to see? No thanks!

[photopress:realty_blogging_book.jpg,full,alignright]19) The real estate blog marketing book is available for pre-purchase on amazon… I spoke to these guys while they were writing the book and will be curious to read it!

20) Thinking of amazon wish lists… This four bedroom home in Malibu is currently on the market…

21) They are easy enough to find, but Hanan alerted me to this ironic clip of Bush…

22) “Seller will pay 6 months of mortgage payments“… (I’m all for good incentives, but is this loan fraud?)

23) The Inman Blog follows up on Trulia’s post where they asked a few real estate professionals to predict the August numbers… It seems no one really knows what’s going on, and if they do, they sure aren’t letting you know in a blog post! 😉

24) As usual, if you want the real scoop on the numbers, turn to Jonathan.

25) The group at Inman also wonder if the people over at Freddie Mac have their pulse on the Latino culture… I’m not holding my breath.

26) Jonathan is also wondering where are all the foreclosures… interesting stuff. I think there are a lot of bubble bloggers that are ampted up and ready to pounce should these trends ever change. I wonder how long they can keep up their intensity before their bubbles deflate… 🙂

27) Speaking of numbers… Peter over at the Business Week blog does an excellent job explaining one example where housing numbers have been so obviously manipulated…

28) I always like reading a blog posts from Sandy, but I just wish that she kept her posts short-and-sweet as oppose to long-and-infrequent.

29) Joel points out an unorthodox use of Zillow’s data… I haven’t looked through their API documentation, but do they insist that you add their name/logo when you use their data? How about refelcting them in a good light? Interesting stuff.

30) Now that they clog up our inboxes, real estate leads are a legitimate business [link removed]… On any given day, I literally get 100s of spam and my guess is that over 3/4 or them are real estate related. Thank you google for putting together such a good spam filter. I wouldn’t be able to handle the email I get to my blog email account with the filters on Outlook… I think I would just give up on email!

31) Elizabeth Razzi says that we should get to know the neighborhood before we buy a place. Not exactly brilliance, but it serves as a good reminder that there really are some intangibles that require more than an aerial view of a property!

32) Cherokee is looking for information on the Snoqualmie area… Pak gave one answer, but I’m sure there are others who could help! 🙂

33) The Seattlest gives hogwash a rave review as a fun for the whole family.

Hogwash – An Improvised Tall Tale For Small Children
Runs Saturdays at 2 p.m. until October 28, 2006
Historic University Theater, 5510 University Way NE (University District)
$10, Reservations – 206-297-1767

34) I like Rory’s approach: “I assert that a Real Estate Agent’s expertise and professionalism should be visible in their service and knowledge of the housing market and inventory. Their expertise should never be based on a carrot and stick ploy to drip feed clients MLS information.

35) Do you get comfort knowing that the home of the NAR president is lingering on the market? 🙂

36) If you’re curious, I’m going by the code name “tyr” in the Inkling Market set up by Keven Boer. At this point, I’m down… It seems more and more people are voting for Greg… Will a last minute spurt of posts from me help out???

37) The title may be a mouthful, Creative agreement may enable advantageous use of otherwise unavailable homesite, but Marlow points out a great example of the benefits of getting creative!

38) Welcome to the neighborhood…

39) When Shaquille O’Neal makes a $1B real estate investment, that’s a great story!

40) Claudia lets us know about the renevotations that hurt!

41) David organizes another fascinating (and colorful) post on the connection between home life and healthy aging…

What do they put in his coffee?

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Waking up this morning, I was pretty impressed to find that Ardell is already at 22 posts in the 101 Challenge… At that rate, she’ll make about 60 posts today if she doesn’t slow down!

And then I noticed Greg is at 50. Wow! Someone needs to spike his coffee with some sleeping pills! 🙂

Ardell: If I may… it is time to pump up the quantity and not worry about quality! You’re at the perfect stage to write about 50 filler posts: simple, short, one link-type posts. And then end the day, finish up with some high quality Ardell classics! 🙂

The 2006 101 Blog Post Challenge Match

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[photopress:boxer.jpg,full,alignright]Gentlemen, Place Your Bets!

Responding to the Sellsius Challenge, at 12:01 a.m Tuesday 9/26/2006, Greg Swann and I will commence the Cool Hand Luke Style test of completeing 101 Blog Posts in a 24 hour period. Kevin over at In the Trenches is monitoring the betting odds via bets placed via Inkling.

The Challenge Match emanated from Sellsius’ attempt to post 100 Blog Posts in one day, with two writers. Their efforts produced 50 great Blog Posts, and the resultant challenge taken up by Greg and I, will be followed closely by Sellsius and The Property Monger who added fuel to the fire by dubbing the match A Battle of the SEXES

Greg seems undaunted by the task at hand, claiming There is NO WAY he won’t finish. I, on the other hand am wondering if I’ve bit off more than I can chew.

CJ over at NELA and a host of other specators are awaiting the stroke of midnight, for the Blogathon to begin. So grab your popcorn or place your bets or tune in tomorrow morning to see which of us fell asleep! 101 in one day…what the heck were we thinking!?