I’ll admit it… I’m pissed off at USAirways right now. I recently purchased a airline ticket for an associate of mine on U.S. Airways and unfortunately my associate was unable to take advantage of the flight. The flight was $425 and I was unable to cancel the ticket in time to ultimately get some credit for the flight. This is a complete contrast to Southwest Airlines which is my preferred airline anyway where if I don’t show up for the flight I get 100% credit for the flight on a future flight. There is no need to call and cancel the flight. Southwest has already taken into account that a % of the people who book flights won’t make the flight and they simply allow you to use the flight credit on a future flight.
This is a huge difference. As one person who takes care of travel arrangements for a number of people in the company that I run there are times when I am unable to cancel a flight in time and as such Southwest will now be my airline of choice.
Even after calling USAirways and asking for credit (which in my opinion should have been the value of the flight less $150) they indicated that the ticket had no value at all. You would think that USAirways would have provided some credit. Anyway they didn’t so consider this my first of many vents on the experience.
Now to find some other blogs where others have had a similar experience and add my comments to those blogs.
All I can say is I’m glad there is Southwest Airlines. They might not have assigned seating however they do have have the most flexible travel program available of any airline that I know of. As a result I predict that in five years we will all be flying Southwest.
July 29th, 2008
Okay it’s not just another SEO Company, it’s an SEO Company that I’ve started called Working The Magic, LLC. As many of you know I have been working on growing BuyerTours Realty LLC into a multi-state and multi-city real estate company over the last few years which has continued to grow even in the face of a declining and slowing real estate market. We have been able to dominate the search engine in numerous markets however running a real estate company is sometimes an exercise in herding cats.
During the last few years while I or one of the marketing staff was doing work relating to positioning our websites we would often say we were “Working The Magic” of Search Engine positioning. Some of the lead agents were obviously very protective of what we were doing with regard to web positioning since we have been busy working with clients and closing deals while most agents have suffered significant declines in the number of transactions that they have been able to do whether on the listing or buyer representation side.
Anyway this year I decided it was time to share what we know with other agents in markets that we are either not in or don’t have an interest in being in and it has been interesting now that we are in the SEO business getting the word out about our abilities takes a bit more work then I had expected. I do now remember when starting my real estate practice in 2002 how I had to keep raising the bar in all areas of the business until we got the traction that has ultimately launched us to where we are now… Anyway one can’t rest on their laurels when starting a new enterprise. One must bring game to the table… If that’s the case then Game is coming to the table…
Check out the website as well as the blog attached to it for my SEO commentary…
All the Best,
Glenn
June 14th, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days with Hobb Herder in a course called MegaManagement. I have since signed up for their coaching for owners and managers of real estate offices however one of the things that I came home with was the idea that most real estate offices are essentially dinosaurs. They are effectively frogs in a pot of water that has become fatally hot and yet they have no idea that it is happening. What they do know is that its hard to recruit talent. It’s hard to keep talent. The techniques that most of the offices are coaching are from the 70′s and 80′s and really doesn’t reflect the new internet economy in the least. Hobbs Herder which is an advertising firm for real estate agents really spends a significant amount of time in the off line collatoral business and the building of agents personal brands. First this makes a lot of sense, as most agents don’t have a good idea of how to differentiate themselves from all the other agents in the marketplace. The main reason is that in the personal services industry like being a real estate professional it really comes down to number of impressions over time to become top of mind when your contact or client decides to buy or sell. What is discounted however is the use of social media and how social media has displaced at least for the younger generation print media.
If you read any publication like Inc, or Fast Company you’ve probably seen Facebook mentioned on the cover at least a couple of times this last year and if you took some time to read the article you would see how Facebook started as a place for college students to network. Since that time Facebook has expanded to allow anyone with a social network to build their own relationship trees and to share information with friends and associates. However what may be missed is that Facebook is a highly efficient system for disseminating information about what you are up to to these people. I can’t tell you how many times during the last year I get phone calls from people just wanting to know what I’m up to and we chat and of course I inquire at the same time as to what they are up to. We might chat for 20 minutes while multitasking on the computer or whatever and even though I was in the conversation I forget the commentary. However with Facebook I am able to log into my page. Update information on myself which automatically updates everyone who I’m a friend with on my update so they can see what I’m up to on their Facebook page. What’s even more interesting is how many people are online Facebook of people who I am keeping up to date on Facebook. It seems that Facebook through its highly addicting interface and its efficiency of tranfer of information allows me to see what other people are up to quickly and they are able to do the same with my information. This ultimately makes me more efficient.
Now how does this play into building a personal brand as a real estate or any other personal services professional. Well ultimately you want all your clients to be on Facebook or something like Facebook. Why, for the same reasons I talked about earlier. Clients are looking for highly efficient models of keeping track of everyone else they know including their agents. It keeps us top of mind with our clients and because their friends who will be part of their network will likely look through the photos and “how we met” portions of the friends photos it gives you a way to get referred without even trying.
So what is the message here…. Be on Facebook and make sure that you have invited all of your “good” clients to be on Facebook as well. If you do this then it is highly likely that your client will remember you without having to mail out monthly recipe cards and its likely that your clients friends may end up wanting to be your friend too and ultimately doing business with you.
November 12th, 2007
I am in the fortunate position of living in one of the most beautiful parts of the country in Bellingham Washington and it seems that the rest of the country and the continent for that matter knows it. The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released today has the Seattle real estate index as outpreformed the rest of the market with a year over year gain of 9.1% with Portland ranked 3rd in price appreciation at a 5.7% gain. While most of the country suffered declines in values the Pacific Northwest all the way into Vancouver British Columbia have continued marching higher.
Major drivers for Portland and Seattle are tech jobs, not to mention access to outdoor activities not available anywhere else in the country. Bellingham continues to be one of the most popular cities of its size for retirement / recreation and investment. With the valuations of Vancouver BC continuing to climb especially in advance of the 2010 Olympics, as prices skyrocket values values across the border represent to significant a bargin to pass up for real estate starved Canadians, as well as second home purchasers and investors who can no longer afford the price or the perceived risk on property prices in Canada.
Be sure to visit our Bellingham Real Estate site for up to date opportunities in the Pacific Northwest, or drop me an email at Glenn@BuyerTours.com if you care to comment and/or ask me a question about this part of the country.
August 1st, 2007
Well we just launched a new site on 1031 Exchange called Free1031Exchange.info. This site will have information an links on like kind exchanges, reverse and forward exchanges and more. Right now we have put in some basic content from Wikipedia and IRS publications however over time we will continue to fill this site out with content.
June 21st, 2007
Page 32 of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) put out today the U.S. House Appreciation Report and even though the overall U.S. market was only slightly up, 1.3% Bellingham Washington Real Estate was up 8.21% year over year. Washington State had 5 of the top twenty most appreciating markets in the country with Wenatchee year over year increasing in value the fastest at a whopping 25% due in a large part to the data centers being built for companies like Microsoft, Google and other large data center users looking for lower cost areas for IT infrastructure. Other areas in the top 20 in Washington State included Spokane, Longview, Seattle-Bellevue and Everett as well as Tacoma Washington.
Bellingham was also recently recognized as the #2 place in the country to retire according to Cities Ranked and Rated. No wonder in the OFHEO study Bellingham had a five year appreciation rate of over 85%.
June 1st, 2007
Previewing homes is what I consider one of the joys of being in real estate. Looking at homes through the eyes of a buyer is incredibly educational for me as a real estate professional. I had a chance to visit two homes today toward Deception Pass in Skagit County. Both looked out over Deception Pass. A couple of the view photos are below:
Considering the two homes that I looked at, one on Yokeko Drive and the other on Central Ave in Anacortes I was amazed at the price differences. The first photo taken from Yokeko Drive was of a home priced over $150,000 more then the one on Central. The home was built in 1900 and needs tons of remodeling.
It seems that there is still some challenges with pricing since the 2004 – 2005 price runs where you could literally put any price on anything and as long as you didn’t raise your price eventually the market would rise to ultimately take the property off your hands. Now overpriced properties can sit on the market for months on end. We are seeing some properties with 400+ days on market.
May 22nd, 2007
Zillow for me went from being an asset for quick and dirty home valuations to a liability.Â
Okay if you are a real estate agent who is even slightly tech you’ve no doubt ran across Zillow and probably even tried to see if it would short cut the CMA process on homes. For those who aren’t real estate agents, CMA stands for “Comparative Market Analysis” and it’s a process of using the MLS and knowledge of homes in the area to come up with a valuation of a home for a prospective seller to ultimately determine the highest sales price of the home in a reasonable period of time (say three months).
As a prior HouseValues subscriber who subscribed to the valuation requests, Zillow looked like the Holy Grail to a process that normally would take anywhere from an hour to three hours to generate a range of value that home might sell for and for all intents and purposes had the potential of reducing the period to 10 – 15 minutes, simply the time to transpose the data from Zillow into the HouseValues system.
It became obvious fairly quickly after running a few CMA’s that way that the valuations just didn’t feel very accurate. Sure I knew the neighborhoods and in many cases had already viewed some of the homes which Zillow had called out as comparables and in reality the range of value that I entered wasn’t inaccurate, however it also didn’t feel accurate either. It really came down to the fact that I didn’t have faith in the estimate of value coming out of Zillow.
What drove me to write this particular blog however is one of my past clients who purchased a home about three years back is now thinking of selling. I would from time to time type in the address into Zillow, again with the idea that it would kick out a value that I could simply have on the top of my head should I talk to my client. That number by the way was about $365,000 according to Zillow. Recently she asked if I would be interested in listing it and I obviously I said I would. The subject of price came up and without skipping a beat I suggested the home would probably list between $340,000 – $365,000. (I didn’t want to err on the high side so I used the Zillow zestimate as the top end.) If my CMA came back above $365,000 then we would obviously look at listing at the higher valuation. I asked one of the agent on our team to work up a CMA to send to my client and much to my chagrin her CMA came in at $309,000. Oh no!!! What the heck is going on here. Zillow is showing me $365,000 for a quick and dirty estimate of value and the agent on our team came back with $309,000.
What’s wrong with this picture. Well what is obvious is that someone or something is wrong… Guess what, I wanted to see the comparables. I need to save face with my client (by the way I haven’t talked to my client yet… This is a bit of my vent in advance of that), however the comparables look pretty darn accurate. In fact based on recent solds and recent listings $309,000 looks dead on, anything more then $5000 – $10,000 above that is going to reduce the number of showings considerably and the likelihood of an offer beyond that.
I’ll probably get a little slack from my client (who has become a friend since she bought the house) when I tell her where my initial estimate of value came from, but it makes me sound a bit uneducated on the market by simply throwing out a figure without actually pulling the comparables before making the call.
I even decided to visit the Zillow site and see what it said about is valuation model and its quite telling if you actually read the fine print. In Washington State the mean percentage from actual selling price is 5.7%. That doesn’t sound too bad, however mean is different then average. If you take all of the valuations that Zillow does and you compute the deviation from the selling price 5.7% sound good, however if the valuations that were more then 5.7% were a lot more then 5.7% then the average could in fact be a lot larger. Another stat for Washington State was that 72% of the time the selling price was within 10% of the zestimate. That means that in reality that’s a 20% potential spread 72% of the time. On a $309,000 home that means that if they were accurate with their zestimate then for their estimate to be even in the ballpark it would have had to be a high of $339,900 and a low of $278,100. This zestimate obviously fell into that 28% of the time that they are off more then 10% on valuation. Assuming that we ultimately do sell the home for $309,000 that is a difference of in excess of 18% from the Zillow valuation.
My bottom line on Zillow is it’s a novelty. If you want to for grins and giggles see what a computer comes up with on the valuation of your home then go for it, however I do not recommend that serious home buyers or sellers use Zillow without a second opinion from a knowledgeable agent.
Zillow is like the trusted friend who pulls a fast one….
Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me! Zillow will not fool me twice.
March 4th, 2007
Well sometimes hard work and perseverance really pays off. 2006 was one of those years. My fourth full year as a real estate agent and second full year with a team made us the #1 team / Agent in Washington State and #49 team nationwide against a backdrop of over 70,000 agents with Keller Williams Realty International.
What’s even more impressive is that we did it almost entirely on the buyer side of the business with clients we worked with from the Internet. In Bellingham alone our team wrote over $30,000,000 worth of closed business and developed a strong referral network of agents around the U.S. bumping our effective closed business up to over $50,000,000.Â
Last year we generated approximately 1200 leads online and turned 115 of those into successful sales. The real estate industry normally has a close ratio of 1.9 – 2.9% of internet leads turning into closed business. Because of total focus on the internet consumer and developing a strong franchisable service model our clients enjoyed a lot of services that most agents are unable or unwilling to provide.
This next year will be interesting. We are going to transition our team into a boutique real estate office. We’ve already picked up the name, BuyerTours Realty LLC. Valerie Griffith will be our acting broker for a few months while I study to get my brokers license and I think it will be a lot of fun. For sure it will be a lot of hard work, however definitely worthwhile.
January 31st, 2007
The SeattlePI reported today that HouseValues lost $1.5 million last quarter and in addition is laying off 60 employees as well as key executives leaving for other ventures.
For those who haven’t followed HouseValues. HouseValues sells leads back to agents by harvesting them through the search engines and Television and Radio advertising. That being said their margins have erroded significantly over the last two years and agents have not been renewing their contracts for leads.Â
In my opinion (It’s a blog so its all my opinion) Housevalues has not had a defensible business model from day one. Other then a few domain names which provide some branding the consumer experience is horrible and inconsistent which ultimately kills the ability for the company to create the necessary viral buzz to expand without continually doing Pay-per-click, Television, and other offline media to try and drive consumers to their website.
Because the company is simply a lead generation company without the ability to enforce a service paradigm the company is without the big stick necessary to develop a Wow experience by the consumer. Also because consumers are even more wary of allowing others to know what their true real estate investment intentions are, the data that the agent gets is discouraging.
I also believe that consumers when they find out that their information has been essentially sold to a third party that they had no former relationship with and without choice as to who ultimately follows up with them the consumer ultimately pulls out of the equation and will also tell other consumers of the challenges of working with such a flawed business design.
Housevalues is parasitic by design. It’s an unnecessary middle man taking a significant piece of the real estate commission in the form of leads being sold to agents.
Without knowing exactly what percentage of leads that convert into closed transactions, using the industry average of about 2%, that means that the average agent will need to contact 50 HouseValues leads in order to close one transaction. Assuming $50/lead the cost per closed transaction would be $2500. If the average transaction side is say $300,000 or $9000 Gross commission at 3% (less at 2.5%) the agent is paying in excess of a 25% referral in advance. The economics just don’t make sense.
The economics of lead generation is break even at best. Given PPC (Pay-per-click) and the fact that HouseValues is competing head to head against actual agents on the ground in the same venue (sponsored advertising) on probably similar economic terms, the fact is that HouseValues is going to get squeezed. The only markets where they won’t get totally squeezed is in smaller specialty markets which are as far as the web is concerned lead generation is less efficient (meaning that many agents create a more efficient market then only a few agents).
I like many agents have learned the hard way the difficulty of converting HouseValues leads. It’s much easier to work with a client who has visited our website and requests information or sets up a search there then it is when the client comes via a third party. As much as the third party might think the leads are good, they really aren’t, at least not compared to leads we generate on our own websites.
January 25th, 2007
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