Tag Archives: real-estate

Danger, Will Robinson… theft types for all to be aware of

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Prescription Drug Thefts
NWMLS has once again received reports of prescription drug thefts at Broker Open Houses in the Seattle area. NWMLS advises you to request a business card or require registration at all open houses from everyone in order to keep track of those in attendance. In addition, please report similar thefts to NWMLS, as well as a list of attendees so that we may look for patterns in behavior and conduct. Please also remind your clients to remove or secure their possessions, particularly their prescriptions, before their home is shown or held open.
Staging Thefts Reported
Area 500: Keyboxes were missing on two new construction properties. One house was missing all staging items, including high-end appliances. The second property was missing the keybox (no staging was taken). Police have been notified.
Area 770: All staging material was taken — including a ceiling fan removed from the ceiling. The keybox was not broken into. Marysville police have been notified.
These notices were just put out by the NWMLS to highlight recent thefts – this after the notice about copper being stolen out of new construction and vacant homes. Thieves targeting houses seem to be getting more common or we’re just hearing about it more.
What can you do to help thwart these kinds of problems? Make sure also to leave outside lights on if you aren’t living on the premises so people in the neighborhood can see what’s going on in your yard. Perhaps have a friendly neighbor keep an eye on your place and to be willing to call if there is any suspicious activity. I’ve often knocked on neighbor’s doors to tell them if the house will be vacant and to ask for help in watching out for predatory types. Especially if we’ve already moved some things out for staging I’ll be sure to tell the neighbor, “if you see another moving truck here and there is no SOLD sign on the yardarm or we haven’t told you the place is sold, call the police.”
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The NWMLS tells agents to secure keyboxes to properties yet I still find them on front porches of homes without any kind of attachment such as a bicycle lock or otherwise. Why are these sellers and their agents not securing the keys to the home? There really is no good reason not to given the number of resources available to do so. I’ve also spoken with other staging companies that have had their products stolen out of vacant homes including the home’s appliances. This is pretty serious stuff and if it doesn’t get better soon it could make people very nervous about selling their homes.
For goodness sake, if you’re going to sell your home be sure your agent is going to secure the keybox at the property – in fact, help them secure it. Good ways to do this include not having the keybox out in the open where it’s obvious, using a strong bicycle lock, or putting the keybox in an area that requires someone know where it is (notes can be put in agent remarks of NWMLS listings).

On mentoring and blogging…

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Another frequent contributor here on RCG asked me to write a little ditty about this subject matter as she was interested in how I saw the differences between the two.

My view of mentoring is that it’s done a very personal level and typically occurs between individuals with one person in the relationship acting as the “teacher” and the subordinate being the “student” in most cases. Also, these relationships are chosen between the parties. I’ve never seen a mentor/mentee situation where the two parties hadn’t agreed to it – most folks that have good information to share are usually quite disciplined and discerning about who they want to share that knowledge with and the people I’ve known that want to be mentored are usually pretty targeted in their choices of who that person or persons will be – it usually starts with the mentee taking note of respected colleagues in higher positions whether at the same company or elsewhere within an industry.

Blogging, on the other hand, is very public and generic in nature. When I put my thoughts down in this techno environment I’m releasing all of my thoughts into the universe to be picked up by anyone and everyone that might be interested and open to my ideas. There is no real selection process.

Another question has been put to me like this: “I am curious to know how struggling agents are managed in your office. Is there a framework set up to help new agents or any agent write a business plan? Maybe this is a sign of a wider industry problem, maybe not.”

First, I’ll say that I believe agents not knowing how to write a business plan is an industry wide problem and it’s a BIG problem in the real estate world. When I joined the broker’s office where I’m located I was brand new to the industry (but had bought 3 homes and sold 1) but I walked in the door with a business plan, a marketing plan, and a funded budget in hand. My brokers, who have been around 30+ years, told me later that I was the first agent they’d ever had do such a thing. From what I’ve sorted out in speaking with agents of all levels of experience is the majority of people got into this industry with no inkling of how they should get themselves prepared for doing anything other than selling houses. As independent contractors (the majority of us) we are all small business owners and that means you must have experience or willingness to learn how to run a business. I’ve noticed such a lack of business planning and understanding in this arena that I’m launching a side business this year to teach agents these skills via online classes.

There is much more to being a real estate agent than just knowing how to read and fill out a contract, stage a home, or answer buyer’s questions about financing and closing documents. The main reason upwards of 90% of first year agents fail in the first year of business is usually due to lack of planning and a lack of proper funding. Even in the 2nd year of business between 60-80% of those agents fall out of the business – again, usually from a lack of planning and funding. The majority of agents I’ve spoken to never knew how expensive it was to be an agent with respect to broker fees. And then there is the “herd mentality” of ordering the same marketing stuff that everyone else does because rarely does a new agent know to ask the right questions about a product before deciding to buy large quantities of it. Example – I received more calendars this year from vendors than I could possibly need in my home and office yet I know large numbers of agents that use this as part of their “touch” programs. Differentiation is key. How can you stand out when you are doing what everyone else is doing? Companies like HouseValues (who I write about in a post below and in previous posts) also can be expensive lead referrals services cutting a lot of the potential revenue stream for an agent. Plus, you have to understand the difference between advertising, branding and marketing and what those programs mean to your bottom line.

Anyhow, the question about struggling agents is not too common in our office because our brokers tend to only take on those that have demonstrated ability. But, for those new agents (we’re now bringing them in) and some that are beginning to struggle there are methods in place to help such as training programs that are offered via a proprietary satellite network, we have onsite managers that will provide coaching opportunities, and there are some mentoring programs as well.

HouseValues lays off 60 employees locally

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Hmmmm, the Seattle Times article in today’s business section talks about HouseValues reducing staff because they’re moving out of selling leads to mortgage brokers and they had also overestimated where they’d be financially at this time on top of the fact that sites like Zillow.com have taken over part of their target site user. HV will now go back to the original focus of selling directly to real estate agents and I have a feeling they’ll have some difficult days ahead of them.

Not only was there a layoff but yet again there are upper management shifts. In the short time this firm has been in business they’ve had a lot of staff changes in the upper tier management and C-levels of the company.

Interview with Marlow Harris of the 360 Digest

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I feel very lucky that for my final interview of the season, one of my favorite bloggers in the world has agreed to answer my questions. One of my Seattle real estate blogging failures has been that I’ve never managed to convince her to start blogging on Rain City Guide and instead she’s gone off and done wonderful things on many other blog platforms. 🙂

What inspired you to start blogging?

I have several websites, including SeattleDreamHomes and SeattleNeighborhoodGuide, but I was unable to have a conversation there so I began the blog 360Digest which has since morphed into a personal and real estate-oriented blog. I’ve also created another site, Unusual Life, where I’m having fun sharing information about unusual homes and architecture and selling books that interest me via Amazon.

I also contribute to several other blogs, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Real Estate Professionals and Inman News and a few others like Realty Blogging and My House Key.

I have actually started and discontinued at least a half-dozen other sites over the years, adding and taking away those that didn’t work or that were ineffective. Expect a culling of these sites too, over 2007. This is still a relatively young field, so some editing and natural selection is inevitable.

I think we’re all watching to see where this new medium will take us.

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

Well, I like to be around and work with creative people. Therefore, I enjoy writing about creative people, their homes and creative approaches to real estate, art and popular culture. You can’t really write about your listings, that’s boring. And there aren’t that many “stars” in real estate. You’re left with dry prognostications or dull mathematical calculations. Or you can try to make connections between real estate and other endeavors. For me, that’s art and popular culture. My favorite magazine is Juxtapoz and the word “juxtapose” sums up what I like about making connections between the relationships of art, real estate and popular culture. It’s the intersections, random connections and juxtapositions that I find the most fascinating. One’s home is often a reflection of self, ones values and desires, and I love to see the choices people make.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

I write like you and I were sitting in the same room having a chat. I write about things that interest me. And I hope it will interest others.

Do you have any favorite posts?

Well, I think it’s funny to try to see how often I can mention Elvis in conjunction with real estate. It’s just so stupid, a bad joke that’s got out of hand. It’s absurd and it makes me laugh.

And one post that’s on my mind this week was the time I was asked by a movie location scout to find a place to film the true story of the local guy who, uhmmm… uh… loved horses. The film just debuted at Sundance this week and the reviewers fell all over themselves praising the aesthetic v.s. salacious approach to the film. I love the local angle of the story, it’s bizarre, strange and perverse….. all the things I love.

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

Oh, you mean besides Rain City Guide (smile) and all of these? I like Grow-a-Brain, Boing Boing, Fark and Unique Daily.

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

There are very few people who have anything remotely interesting to say, let alone write. Perhaps everyone will be blogging and instead of a couple of dozen really good blogs, there will be tens of thousands of mediocre blogs out there that no one reads. (Actually, I think that’s already happened.)

I think for many writers, the blog is just a big energy suck and a huge waste of time.

It’s fine that blogging is getting all this attention, but I’m concerned about the predictions of the end of traditional journalism and newspapers. Not many bloggers are going to attend school board meetings, city council meetings, and other important (and, perhaps boring) community meetings and events. Without paid reporters, there could be a huge hole that unpaid bloggers will never begin to fill. We need paid reporters — who’s going to follow those political candidates around, attend labor meetings, and report on local and national news if newspapers cease to exist and paid journalists disappear? Volunteer bloggers cannot possibly fill the void left by newspaper and professional journalists and they both serve different purposes. Professional journalists at least strive to be impartial, even if they are not always successful.

Blogging is an interesting endeavor, but I think it’s important for bloggers to keep what they’re doing in perspective. It’s usually marketing or ego gratification. It’s rarely journalism.

Thanks again Marlow for the wonderful insights!

Lots more to pick up via osmosis from these real estate bloggers:

As this is my last interview of the season, I figure it is only fair that I let others know that my interview from last year where Andy Kaufman subjected me to the same questions is still live on his blog.

Talking Up Shackprices

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[photopress:galen_ward.jpg,full,alignright]Nathan of nPost just did a great interview with Galen on Shackprices… Lots of gold including some indication of Galen’s vision for the future for Shackprices!

What is your long-term plan for ShackPrices?

I would really like ShackPrices to be a national real-estate search website. Our goal is to make it for anyone in America to search for a home. The plan is national coverage, more features, and a better site for people to search for a home with.

Don’t stop with this quote… Go read the whole thing! 🙂

Copper thefts on the rise – a new threat to vacant homes for sale or rent

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The local NWMLS has posted a notice to its members that I’ve pasted in below:

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Snohomish County Copper Pipe Thefts
January 19, 2007. NWMLS has received reports that copper piping has been cut away and stolen from the crawl spaces under several vacant homes in the Everett vicinity. Many of these crawl spaces were not secure, allowing easy access. A police report has been filed with Everett city police (Case #DD071461). Please notify local law enforcement if you see any suspicious activity.

For those that don’t know the price of copper has skyrocketed and there are many people stealing copper (and other metals) from locations like vacant houses. Recyclers typically don’t verify the source of where these scrap metals come from so it’s up to homeowners to be careful and make sure their properties are kept safe.

This isn’t just a local issue to Everett, it’s a problem throughout Puget Sound and nationwide. My parents own rental properties in Kansas and they were the victim of just such a theft from one of their vacant rental units this past fall. It cost them a lot of money to replace all the copper piping in the house, and unforeseen expense that can wreak havoc on annual profits from rental ownership.

A bit of staging magic goes a long way

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This past weekend I attended a three hour class on staging. I was motivated to take the class because, as a real estate photographer, it helps to understand something about staging a property as agents frequently defer to me over last minute details of the home staging when I am on site doing the shoot. It’s not part of my job description but many agents have come to expect it and I do enjoy surveying a room and making simple, and quick, recommendations. I am fascinated by the psychology of staging and the dramatic changes staging can have on our perception and impression of a property.

Prospective buyers largely lack the imagination to see what one can do with a space so the seller, listing agent and/or stager need to provide it for them and hopefully do it well. In some cases it may be adding, subtracting or both. Immediately after my class I had a shoot that the listing agent had requested a few new photos as they had redone the staging since the original shoot. I think this is a great example of how a few changes really add considerably to the appeal of this condo. I especially appreciate the accent wall which was easy and inexpensive but really makes this condo, or at least the photo, look so much more inviting.

And to just pass along a tip to realtors from the class I took, get rid of dead vegetation in the landscaping. Especially in the front of the house. I walked by a home for sale in my neighborhood and I saw some dead plantings and I could see how detracting it was from the impression, or curb appeal, of the property.

I’d also recommend checking out Barb Schwarz’s existing book on staging and/or pre-ordering her new one that will be available in May.

Learn as much as you can about staging, regardless of who does it.

Your seller, (and photographer) will love you for it.

Before:
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After:
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Rolling with Grow-a-Brain

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I’ve been a little slow to recover from a wonderful weekend!

We had a little gathering for my son’s 1st birthday and I got the treat of meeting one of my favorite bloggers in the world.

Hanan (the magical man behind Grow-a-brain) showed up with his lovely girlfriend. I really had a blast catching up with Hanan and he helped make it a memorable party!

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Going way back… I can remember the first time he linked to RCG and it made me feel like I was on top of the world! He really is a great guy!

Interview with Mary McKnight of RSS Pieces

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[photopress:mary_mcknight.jpg,full,alignright]As the online face of RSS Pieces, Mary has quickly become an influential member of the real estate blogging community by freely giving her expertise on many technical areas of real estate blogging. She’s fun, interesting, opinionated and intelligent… What more could we ask for?

What inspired you to start blogging?

I actually started blogging years ago on a number of fitness sites because it was a passion of mine and blogging was a way of connecting with other aficionados and sharing my experience and knowledge. That’s where I developed my unique voice and my strategy for driving traffic and penning posts that keep readers coming back. believe me, I crashed and burned many times when I first started blogging. Back then, there wasn’t a manual for how to do it- it was all trial and error. But over time, I came up with a formula that worked. So, when we entered the real estate market with a blogging product, I applied the same successful
formula I used for my fitness articles.

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

I love anything about emerging technologies so topics covering web 3.0, the semantic web, FAOF and SIOC are what I’m interested in covering now. But my roots are definitely tutorial posts. I like writing them and I love knowing that in some way I have helped Realtors to build their knowledge base so they have the tools to grow their business. I’m a big believer in giving people the tools to build their business regardless of which blogging product they use.

[photopress:rss_pieces.jpg,full,alignright]What have you done to personalize your blog?

I always try to use a conversational tone and talk to my readers rather than type at them. I hate to be lectured or read dry technical manuals (which I read a lot of), so I like to keep my posts fun and often campy. I also like to share little bits of my life in posts so readers can connect with me directly. I find that when people feel that they know you and can connect with you they are more likely to contact you or share themselves with you. I receive the most comments and emails from posts where I share bits of my life. Here is an article I wrote about humanizing your blog for intimacy.

Do you have any favorite posts?

By far my favorite post was the meme- I loved watching that virus spread throughout the industry and beyond.

I also have a special place for each post that I penned as a guest host on other blogs because I can’t believe anyone would trust me with their blog!

My favorite tutorial posts are:

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

Good question. A blog has to be stellar to make my feed reader and here
are the top 5 feeds in my reader from Real Estate and Other.

Real Estate:

Other:

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

The RSS Pieces system was built by the ground up by our own staff so all the tools we need for SEO and add-on functionality are already inside the system but here are some of my favorite development and free SEO tools:

Macromedia Homesite, Widexl, NUAH, iWebTool, Zen Studio, W3C, RSS Pieces SEO tools. We also are always looking at what the power bloggers are doing and what the industry thinks is on the horizon.

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

Blogging is an essential component of our marketing strategy since we are a blogging company. I think as a blogging company you have to prove that your system works by making it work for your own company. I hope that our little blog does show clients and prospective bloggers that you can build success with blogging in a fairly short period of time through strategic content, a little bit of home grown marketing, quality SEO and a lot of attitude.

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

  • Implementation of the semantic web in our blogging platform so each of our blogs will web 3.0 enabled
  • Drag and drop template configuration so users can rearrange the way their sites look without having to call the developers to recode them.
  • Better online image editing and gallery management in our editor
  • Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs

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

Better support for people using cell pones and PDAs.

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

I think the line between blogs and websites will be blurred so much that people won’t be able to tell the difference. Blogs will take on more traditional website features like listing searches and mortgage calculators. They will begin to replace their website counterparts. This is the direction in which RSS Pieces has been moving. Traditional blogs are pretty featureless by nature, more and more companies will begin to add features to their blogs so they can become their central on-line presence. Also, once FAOF and SIOC are in place, blogs, forums, aggregators and other social media sites will become more interconnected giving blogs a firmer foothold on the Internet as information resources.

I also think that natural selection will occur and as the blog population grows, weaker blogs will die off and the overall quality of the remaining blogs will increase.

Thanks, Mary, for taking the time to answer these questions!

Everyone else, feel free to leave a comment or peruse these other interviews with other influential real estate bloggers…

Interview with Kristal Kraft of the Denver Real Estate Blog

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As some of you may already know Ardell and I have been playing on ActiveRain lately. My personal goal in taking part was to learn about the group dynamics and see how and why people are active on the site. [photopress:kristal_kraft.jpg,full,alignright]Interestingly, one of the things I decided to do was ask the group who was the most influential person on ActiveRain so that I could interview them on RCG.

The results were loud and clear in that Kristal Kraft is not only the point leader on ActiveRain, but the most influential person for many members of the site. I spent some time following Kristal’s posts and I found her to be consistently informative and interesting. Armed with that knowledge, I decided to ask Kristal a little bit about her blogging influences and experiences.

What inspired you to start blogging?

Blogging has been a natural progression for me; ten years ago I published my first real estate website. Then in the year 2000 I took a year off from work to travel around the world on a bike. That year I was biking and blogging (without a blog platform). At the time I thought of if as a travel/photo journal of my experience, the site Bike Tracks was written often times in a tent with a flashlight attached to my head. I would publish as soon as I could find a land line. OK, so it wasn’t really a blog, but I had a huge audience. In fact at one point in Africa I didn’t publish for a couple weeks. Everyone was in a panic worried I had been eaten by a lion or something awful! After that, they got used to my irregular postings. Funny how things work, I took my position seriously when I found out people were reading my site. Riding a bike 80 to 105 miles a day can get boring! There were times when the journey got very difficult, but my “responsibility to my audience