Disruptive RE Broker

Another fine post by FOREM. I am a big fan of the mind behind this blog. I tend to agree with Joel 90% of the time. Online ad spending will certainly decline in a rough market, but I am not sure Joel is completely correct on this one…

Looks pretty grim. If a prolonged housing slump means real estate related ad dollars disappear over the next two years, these companies are in for very lean times ahead. Time to batten the hatches and brace for bumpy seas ahead.

I feel advertisers will smarten up. Businesses will look long and hard at their ad spending and will most likely forgot about the advertising campaigns that are less accountable. This means offline campaigns will be the first campaigns out-the-window. It’s much easier to measure online campaigns, therefore, in a rough economy - online advertising will prevail.

So yes, ad spending amounts will change but the impact will be felt more so offline than online.

TIP:  Stay away from Isoldmyhouse.com

I really enjoy Do-It-Yourself sites.  I find that they are extremely useful.  There are just somethings I do not want to pay people to do so these DIY sites make a big difference.  If you are doing things around the house give Doityourself.com a look. I feel this site is much better than the one over at diynetworks.com

We will start to see a phone company put out a mobile phone that is not tied to a vendor.  Game over.  See the chatter.

Two years ago I saw what was happening to the market.  I knew the major downturn was going to wipe out homeowner equity in a big way.  It was clear to me that the housing market was going to get ugly.  Declining prices., foreclosures and the ugly credit crunch was becoming clear.  Lenders were not thinking long term as they closed up bad investments.  Anyone could get a loan.  It didn’t matter. Now it does.

Everything is expensive.  Go to the store and you will see your grocery bill.  Twenty items now cost $40 easy.  Five years ago, it would cost $25 for the same items.

I started a flat fee MLS listing service because the rush was over and I wanted to provide sellers with a choice. Sure I could have taken 5% from many sellers because I have a great reputation but I realized that sellers needed help.  Listing this way is not for everyone but it sure helps.  Regardless of what traditional agents or NAR says, it’s not how much the home sells for, it’s about how much the seller takes home at the end of the day.  This is why I started a flat fee MLS listing service.

I haven’t set it up yet, but I have to say that they spend a lot of money on packaging.  Really nice boxes. The invite tokens are metal.   Might be overkill.  Perhaps they should spend less money on packaging and lower the price on the system.

More details after I did set the system up which could be a few days - weeks.

Check this article out. It discusses what sellers should do if they want to get their homes sold.

I am a firm believer that if sellers go with a flat fee mls soluation they can be more flexible on pricing.

Last month Statewide MLS implmented SAFEMLS and I hate it because if I don’t have the password device I cannot get on Statewide MLS.  I would seriously prefer to have to download a exe file to my computer and have to work off it rather this online BS.

All it does is make MLS more money.  It is nothing more than a hassle for members.  I hope everyone complains so they have to take it down.

Check it out for yourself.

Do you agents get the point?

We run a flat fee MLS listing service in addition to our full service offerings because we know that we cannot provide service to everyone in all the states we do business in. It’s just too far to drive 2, 3, 4 hours to do a showing but we don’t want to give up opportunities to make money so this is how we do it.

I googled InstaMLS and what do i see….

Some dumb Massachusetts broker named David Wicker of Taconic Realty Group ripped off our listing agreement package completely. This guy didn’t even remove our domain name. Check out the Google cache page.

Pathetic jackass.

I sent a cease and desist letter and guess what? The doc is gone (but I saved a pdf copy for when I report him) and his site is also gone. Check it out: 299valuelist.com.

GONE.

As I previously stated, I won an Ooma system through a TC contest and I just got confirmation from DHL that it will be arriving next week. Fingers are crossed.

Nice!

I just bitched about Zillow’s search function cause it is the slowest I have ever seen. No doubt, Zillow needs to bang out some fresh code to move things along on the search front. But I gotta hand it to David G. This guy has radar ears. You write about Zillow and he is on your ass with a quick reply. ALWAYS. Look around at any blog that mentions Zillow and you will see a comment by David.

I am going to have to say he is the voice of Zillow. I just hope Zillow appreciates his hard core efforts.

I was just tooling around with zillow because I wanted to see if anything has changed within the last 7 months and I can confirm that Zillow’s search still sucks.

Not only does it take forever to search the listing for sale (I did about 5 searches and it took about 30 min because of all the bulshit loading going on) they don’t even give the results I requested.

Lets do a search example:

I entered:

Town: Brookline
State: MA

SEARCH BROOKLINE HOMES FOR SALE ONLY

See the serps? Not too many of these listings are from the location I requested. Don’t toss shit in my face that I don’t want to see. Why don’t they just say… No listings found or show only those from the location I ask for.

Try this one: Do a search for all homes For Sale “By Owner” in RI

SEARCH RI FOR SALE HOMES ONLY

What a joke.

Few suggestions… Get rid of the map. It takes too long to load and you have too much going on. Shouldn’t you guys have a list view only option? I want to do a search and do it fast.

SOMEBODY PLEASE CREATE A GREASE MONKEY SCRIPT FOR ZILLOW. REMOVE EVERYTHING BUT LISTINGS.

There is a great article on Josh Kopelman’s blog that I found on the Comeover Blog that talks about the two types of social networks:“Catch and Release” and “Catch and Keep.”

Alex of the ComeOver Blog feels that there is no “Catch and Keep” in real estate. This is true for now, but I disagree with this statement:

While it is unrealistic for a real estate website to expect a user to come once a day for years, they can strive to keep a real estate shopper coming back once a day for a several weeks while looking for their next home.

I am not going to go into detail right now about why a disagree with this statement because we are working on something that will make a so called “Catch and Keep” social network for real estate.

Few things to keep in mind.

- We are not focusing on immediate buyers/sellers.
- We are providing home valuation services.
- We are not doing anything with Neighborhood Analysis.
- We are not doing anything with listings.
- We are not doing anything with Video or Photos.
- We are not providing Open House info.

We are building a platform that will make you say, “why didn’t I think of that, sweet! I can use that. Wow!”

Finally we have finished up our new design for our flat fee portion of Hillman Real Estate Inc. Check it out and if you have any comments leave them. InstaMLS

It took forever and still might be buggy so beware.

MA flat fee MLS MA

RI flat fee MLS RI

I have been getting slammed with spam through using my company email address. I get a bunch of spam variations from greeting cards to the attached pdf spam. I can’t deal because once in a while I will delete an important email. This is bad. So what did I do?

I am now using Googles MX records via Google Apps and it works great. I cut down the spam to almost null and my uptime is outstanding. I highly recommend that every switch to Google Apps and give it a try. It takes mins to set up and makes a world of a difference.

Oh, the power of Google Mail.