(photo credit: mop squad)

Kevin Costner was hot 20 years ago in Field of Dreams. So was that comment “If you build it, they will come.” I received a fantastic comment from a home buyer today for my previous post How Listing Agents Unintentionally Sabotage Their Own Staged Listings:

1. Danica Says:
   May 12th, 2008 at 10:51 am That is so true. As a potential buyer, I have been frustrated many times by Craigslist ads that have no picture. There are a ton of houses out there, and I’m trying to weed out the ones I don’t want to look at - it’s really impossible without a picture.I’ve seen so many places, staged or unstaged, that sounded great on paper and then turned out to be hideous-to-unlivable in person.More importantly, even though online listings at a place like Craigslist are free and offer almost unlimited space, a lot of sellers just put up one or two sentences and no pictures - and to me that says “I don’t have it together enough to actually market this house.”

   And my experience has been that often, that means they don’t know how to deal with the paperwork, or with my questions, or even with basic social skills.I guess in a way it’s helpful to see a boring, picture-less, one-line house ad - because it tells me I don’t want to deal with that seller. But it’s still hilariously frustrating to see an ad online that says something like, “2 BR 1.5 BA NICE!!! MUST SEE CALL JAMES SMITH REALTOR 555-1414!”

This is a brilliant comment, it just goes to show that with that in this fast changing real estate market, our buyers’ behaviors have changed. The old attitude of “If you list it, they will come” no longer works. That worked in the movie Field of Dreams for Kevin Costner but guess what? Kevin Costner is OLD news now. That phrase was coined 20 years ago, so is that attitude. It’s freaking 20 years old. Shouldn’t we move on with the times?

A savvy marketer knows that today’s consumers are so de-sensitized by advertisements that they need more interactive and user-friendly contents [Note: "content," NOT "ads."] to make an educated decision before buying. You can see that through the fast rising numbers of business blogs and web 2.0 services. People want interaction, not sales agenda ramming down their throats.

Also, today’s agents no longer holds monopoly to MLS information. Internet has made today’s buyers more savvy, shrewed, efficient and much more likely to start their buying process without agents. Additionally, if the consumers cannot be satisfied by you, it’s very easy for them to go elsewhere. To be able to work in a competitive market, as a listing agent or FSBO (For Sale By Owners), you will need to get on with the time to provide a comprehensive and user-friendly marketing package.

To do so, here are a few tips as pointed out by Danika, our lovely buyer:

*Online presence is KEY. Staging the property will instantly make the home show-ready online. Once you have staged, having big & high quality photos is a must.

*Don’t just do 1 photo, if you are allowed to post 10, why not do 10?

*Place ONLY good quality photos that will entice buyers’ appetite. Photos like featuring the local eateries or parking lots are not really adding anything to your listing.

*Be creative, not boring and cookie cutter in your listing descriptions. “2Br for sale” is kind of a duh since anyone can read it from the sheet. Why not say something more descriptive that showcase the unique selling points of your listing?

*MOST IMPORTANT: Provide reasonable expectations for buyers. If your listing sounds like the “IT” property to buy and buyers walked into an ill-maintained home, they will turn around and leave immediately because you have wasted their time. If the house is staged, keep it staged while you sell. If you property was already on market then staged, showcase the staged photos online and on flyers and take out the old unstaged photos.

Happy selling!

Cheers,

Cindy

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There’s nothing like a quiet walk along the beach, being towed by an eager dog named Little Bit, to contemplate — even solve — the deep mysteries of life. I’ve been pondering the status of real estate advertising lately, and the answer to one particularly vexing question — Why, despite declining readership, despite more tangible online ROI, despite rising prices, do Realtors (r) still continue to advertising in traditional print media? — suddenly came to me. The inspiration was none other than Little Bit’s morning constitutional, dispatched with amazing regularity on piles of beach detritus standing in as a proxy for the more regularly favored target, the city fire hydrant.

You see, my friends, there are even more similarities between us humans and our canine allies than we had ever thought. It turns that the same 3 motivations behind Little Bit’s biological machinations also underpin the clockwork-like precision by which Realtors (r) spend $800 of their hard-earned money to advertise, seemingly increasingly futilely, in newspapers. Here goes:

1. Branding — By consistently spraying his scent, Little Bit reinforces his brand recognition. Ah yes, Little Bit — I remember him! If you’re ever looking for a good game of catch-the-tennis-ball, he’s the one! In the same way, Realtors spray their scent — more accurately, their picture — across pages of newsprint in hopes that, over time, some of it will stick. Ah yes, Realtor John — I remember him! If you’re ever looking for a good agent, he’s the one!
2. Marking territory — A close relative of the first, marking territory is all about establishing dominance. Little Bit’s thought process: So what if Fifi, Fluffy, Buffy, and Max have all passed by? The real king of this beach is Little Bit. That’s right, you sniffed it here! I’m not gonna let these interlopers pretend they own this area!Realtor John’s thought process: So what if Realtors Fran, Franklin, Betty, and Mike have already plastered their pictures over pages 1-5 of this week’s real estate section? My picture is better! bigger! less recent! They don’t own this area, I do!
3. Habit — Little Bit pees because, well, that’s what dogs do! Even he can’t remember whether his mother taught him, or his early playmates did, or if he just took to it naturally. Realtor John advertises in the newspaper because, well, that’s what Realtors do! It may have been one of his early mentors, or some buddies of his in that first brokerage he worked in 2 decades ago, but regardless, that’s just what comes naturally!

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For my upcoming “most Internet-advertised” listing, I — naturally — want a website for the property. There are lots of opinions out there about the efficacy of single-property websites (see, for instance, what Mary McKnight, Greg Swann, and Joel Burslem have said).

Here’s my take: they provide

1. Great property marketing — If done well, a website provides a convenient place to get out your marketing message. The property I reviewed yesterday, for instance, has its own web site — www.655-14thAvenue.com — which is very easy to remember.
   
2. Terrible SEO — No matter how well done, a single property web site is not going to have good SEO since it’ll be competing with sites like Movoto and Trulia for searches like, “Menlo Park Fair Oaks real estate” and “Homes in Fair Oaks neighborhood” and “655 14th Ave Menlo Park.” Remember: Real estate professionals and experienced home buyers and sellers may well know where the local MLS site is, but many people go to the same place they always do to get information: Google or Yahoo.

As an example, consider the property I reviewed yesterday. A search on Google for 655 14th Ave Menlo Park lists

1. Movoto.com
2. ListingProducer.com (the company hosting www.655-14thAvenue.com, but clicking on the link gives you all recently created ListingProducer sites, and the property in question quickly gets buried)
3. My write-up from yesterday

The actual web site itself is nowhere to be found!

So how do you combine the marketing cachet of a single-property web site with the SEO benefits of an established blog?

Matt Dunlap from Realivent recommended purchasing an appropriately-named domain, and then redirecting that domain to a subdomain under an existing well-established site, and that’s what I’ll be doing for this project.  PropertyAddress.com will be redirected to 3OceansRealestate.com/PropertyAddress.

I’m looking forward to building this site, using some of Matt’s expertise, widgets and plugins.

Stay tuned!

Update:  Matt gives more of his thoughts on his blog.

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Within 3 hours after my post noting that, quite rightly, 3Oceans doesn't rank for the search term, "San Francisco Potrero Hill Real Estate" … Google has picked it up, and we're now at number 14.

Yahoo and MSN often take a bit longer to index new content, so for now we don't yet rank with them.

The power of good SEO… 

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I've been waiting for the right opportunity to really push the envelope of online real estate marketing, and, well, it's here!

I'm working on a listing in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood that fits perfectly into this new online marketing world:  it's slick, chic, and contemporary, will likely attract a younger and web-savvy crowd of buyers, and the sellers simply love the idea of creating a buzz online.

We're passing on the normal full-color ads in traditional local media like the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and we'll be spending that money online instead.  To hedge our bets, we will be placing open house display ads in print media.

I'll be collaborating with several real estate online marketing companies to promote this property.  They'll be showing me — and, by extension, my readers — how to get the full benefit of their products.  I intend to chronicle our adventures here and invite you to follow along.  If you have some ideas, feel free to join in!

I'll announce the first collaborator tomorrow.

In the meantime, as part of our adventures, let's see how high this site currently ranks for the search, "San Francisco Potrero Hill Real Estate" — I suspect it won't be that good, since I've never written about Potrero Hill before!

Sure enough, on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, I'm nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100. 

Google: 

Yahoo: 

MSN:

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The Seattle guys are on a roll…a post in today’s Redfin blog alerted me to today’s San Francisco Chronicle, which has a feature article on Redfin and Glenn Kelman.

While much of it is stuff we’ve all heard before — Glenn didn’t set out to become an industry maverick, the Redfin model isn’t new, blah blah blah — two specific items stood out for me.

First, it appears Redfin agents are paid “$60,000 or more [emphasis mine] based on their performance, which is tied to customer service rather than the number of sales completed.” For Rosemary Vo and the other agents, I can only hope that the “or more” bit is “a lot more.” I’m assuming this means a base salary of $60,000 a year, plus performance-based bonuses. If these bonuses equal a full 100%, that would mean a total compensation package of $120,000 — not enough to live a comfortable middle class life in the Bay Area, but certainly more than most agents net after paying their broker cut and other expenses.

[3/20 update:  Just received an anonymous email tip that my estimates for Redfin agent pay are waaaaay off.  My source says the base is $50K and the bonus is $20K.  Not knowing who this person is, or their affiliation -- if any -- with Redfin, I can't vouch for the accuracy of these numbers.  Anybody else have an idea?]

Secondly:

At the same time, his company also must play by the industry’s rules or risk losing access to the vital database of home listings that is the heart of Redfin’s service.

“It’s our third rail,” Kelman said. “We have no backup. If we lose access to the feed, game over.”

Many of us agree that the protectionist rules of most MLS’s are antiquated, but breaking these rules is indeed playing with fire. I personally crossed the line once while conducting a several-month-long experiment with Google Base, but when I got caught, I got caught good. Ouch.

Redfin was displaying information on sold content well before our local MLS changed the rules and made that legal, and it’s still against the MLS rules to display the days on market of a property — which is exactly what Redfin does. Well, not exactly…technically what Redfin displays is something like “Days on Site” — ie the number of days which a property has been displayed on the Redfin site. And hey, if that number by complete coincidence happens to be the same as the days on market number 99.9% of the time, who’s complaining?
Stupid rules lead to creative interpretation.

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Sufficiently warned by Michael Price about the quality and content of entries submitted to this week’s Carnival of Real Estate, let me dispense with my gratuitous Latin phrase by boldly placing it in the title…and assuring you that my post has absolutely nothing to do with spinach in your dentures.  It’s just that I couldn’t find a Latin translation site that would reliably render the following headline: Creative Internet Advertising Your Broker Never Thought Of.

One of the first things you learn from many of the old-timers in the business is the importance of listings, for at least two reasons:

1. Your “sales force” — the other agents in your area, some of whom may have competed with you for the listing — does much of the legwork of showing the property to prospective buyers.
2. Having a listing gives you an “anchor” from which to further advertise yourself: an ad in the paper, a sign in the front yard, a brochure, a neighborhood mailing, an appearance in the MLS. This may well lead to further business for you…and as a side benefit may even help you sell the home.

The buyer’s agent, alas, has no such anchor. The fact that I represented the most recent buyer of 123 Main Street doesn’t offer a good opportunity to advertise myself. The new owner — my client — is unlikely to allow me to put a “Buyer Proudly Represented by” sign in his front lawn for too long, and if he did, he’d be inviting a host of unwanted guests, thinking the home is still for sale. I could send out a postcard to the neighborhood, trumpeting my success, but postcards are a pretty ineffective marketing mechanism unless you send them out regularly and for a long time. I could take out an ad in the local paper announcing my success, but that’s unlikely to generate any calls since the public has been trained to look in the paper for listings, not recent sales.

The excitement, the story, the marketing value of a transaction has always been quite firmly on the listing side. The buyer’s side is, well, yesterday’s news. While that makes sense, it’s not in sync with the fact that a home spends only a tiny fraction of its life as a listing. During the vast majority of the time in which the home is not on the market, shouldn’t there be some way of getting some marketing around my involvement in the purchase of that home?

The answer, of course, is “Yes.” The Internet does indeed present an opportunity for buyers’ agents to strut their success. At least two examples come to mind.

1. Sites like HomeThinking.com ask clients to rate their agents’ performance. The “anchor” for this rating and the (hopefully!) positive exposure is not only the listing side of the transaction, but also the buying side.
2. Zillow and its AVM brethren potentially present another such opportunity, though those sites don’t currently have such functionality. While most real estate sites concentrate on today’s news — the listings — Zillow’s inventory is all homes, not just homes that are currently for sale, and the history of those homes has some marketing value. If I wanted to highlight my buying agent experience in a particular neighborhood, I could — for a fee, of course, — perhaps add a virtual “Buyer of this home proudly represented by…” sign that would appear next to my past transactions.

Increasing the marketing value of the buying side of a transaction is unlikely to fundamentally shift the balance of power from the listing side, but it certainly does present an interesting new form of online advertising.

—————————————–

* Translation: You have a big piece of spinach in your front teeth.

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This just in from the “Google Adwords” crazy advertising department…

Do a search on Google for the phrase “Redfin Reality” and the only sponsored link you get is this one:

“The site Realtors don’t want you to see?”  Now that’s a way to spread the love…

Glenn Kelman has just got to stop the complaining about the attitude of traditional agents towards Redfin as long as they’re doing this sort of thing.  He can either

a) Position himself as being against the traditional industry
or
b) Expect the traditional industry to embrace him with open arms
…but not both.

Mind you, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the ad.  In fact, I think it’s pretty clever, actually, and a great way to hook in the type of client Redfin wants, namely those who don’t have much good to say about the traditional industry.  But it’s pretty disingenuous for Redfin to complain to complain about not being loved while simultaneously being somewhat, um, hostile itself.

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Ok, class, today’s quiz has two true/false questions. No copying!

1. Zillow is like Cyberhomes
2. Zillow is like NBC

Time’s up…here are the answers:

So, how’d you do?

Much of the criticism of Zillow centers on the fact that its estimates are not the last word in accuracy, and in many cases can be far off. If Zillow were, in fact, strictly a home valuation site a la Fidelity’s Cyberhomes, that would be a pretty damning indictment. Zillow’s only hope would be to consistently have the best, most accurate estimates in the business, and Cyberhomes would arguably have a better platform to achieve that, since its affiliation with Fidelity gives it access to more data, more accurate data, and more timely data.

These criticisms are valid, but they simultaneously miss both a relatively minor and a crucial point, both of which can be illustrated by another analogy, this one between Zillow and Google, arguably the best known online media company.

1. 100% accuracy simply isn’t possible: When you type in a search on Google for, say, “Radish recipes,” what you typically get is a “good enough” set of search results to help you find the content you want. It’s an amazing testament to the brilliance of Google’s search algorithm engineers how often within the first page of results you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, however, the answer isn’t on the first page…or the second or the third…or it simply isn’t found on Google. Somewhere out there on the Internet is the answer, but Google hasn’t found it or classified it or interpreted it correctly for your particular needs. A computer algorithm, however sophisticated, simply can’t always give the right or best answer. Similarly with Zillow, what you often get is a “good enough” estimate. The home’s true value might be $400,000, but Zillow might say $370,000 or $440,000. For many purposes, that’s a “good enough” answer for people to keep coming back, and when they need a more accurate answer — say, they’re planning on selling their home — they bring in an appraiser or a Realtor to give a more accurate estimate. As with Google’s search, sometimes the Zillow answer is way off. As frustrating as that is, it’s just the nature of the beast: A computer algorithm, however sophisticated, simply can’t always give the right or best answer…no matter how smart the engineers, no matter how many data points, no matter how powerful the computer.
2. Successful media companies are all about content and entertainment Google monetizes its search pages by selling relevant ads — just like NBC monetizes Saturday Night Live by selling ads. Google’s “content”, its “entertainment” is the search result and experience.Zillow’s content is all real-estate focussed. During its first season, there were two shows: “Home Value Estimates” and “Sales Prices and Details of Neighboring Homes.” We’ve just entered the second season with the release of a few more shows: “Make Me Move”, “Homes for Sale”, and “Real Estate Wiki.” Just like NBC, some of Zillow’s shows will be hits, and some will be flops. With any enough hits, Zillow will become successful.Don’t get hung up on the fact that Zillow’s “Home Value Estimates” show has inaccuracies in it. These estimates will improve, but they will never be 100% accurate, not only because they can’t be, but because what Zillow is providing is real estate entertainment, not the be-all and end-all of real estate valuation.

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If there’s one thing I learned from my tenure in consulting (apart from the names of the cabin crew on the mid-Sunday afternoon American Airlines flight from SFO to JFK…) it’s that the numbers always tell a story.

Remember this neat little chart from our little “Frolick with the data” yesterday, provided by those whiz-bang numbers folks at Altos Research?