ALL PHOENIX REAL ESTATE

What happens when you take the Phoenix real estate market’s hottest month, mix it with some spring training and add a couple of real estate technology conferences? You end up with one exhausted beagle owner.

Aside from spending time with the several of you who are making their way down to the Valley over the coming weeks, I’ve been scratching my itch as a free-lance sportswriter and working for the Associated Press covering both the Texas Rangers and the Milwaukee Brewers. If you’re looking for a temperature update, you can check out my updates on Twitter … yes, PapaGrande is me. We can thank Tom Evans for that moniker, wherever he may be.

After a week off next week while the staffers take over, I’ve got another 8 to 10 games on the schedule before spring training comes to a close and the regular season begins.

For those in the business, the Arizona Regional MLS is hosting Technopalooza on April 22 at the Mesa Convention Center. (Of course it’s in Mesa. Everything’s in the East Valley … except for the Cardinals, the Coyotes, the last Super Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl and eight of the 13 teams in the Cactus League … but I digress.)

At the event there will be an agent forum featuring Jay Thompson (author of the Phoenix Real Estate Guy), Nick Bastian (RailLife), Dru Bloomfield (At Home in Scottsdale) and me talking about … what else? … blogging and how to connect with buyers and sellers online.

It should be an interesting mix … Nick has a hyper-local blog, I’ve gone hyper-local with a handful of websites sans blogs, Dru’s got the blog and also uses referral companies and Jay is the 800-pound gorilla on page 1 of Google that many of us spend time trying to catch. Almost guaranteed … some discussion on requiring registration for homes searches; I made the change to the dark side last year with excellent results; others have decided to go without registration.

(Attn: Mr. Jablowe and Mrs. None Of Your Damn Business … feel free to follow a link above, you won’t hurt my feelings.)

The day after ARMLS’ event is REBarCamp Phoenix, which actually will be held inside of Scottsdale Stadium. (Of course, Scottsdale. Everything’s in the East Valley except … oh, never mind already.) Since there’s no set agenda, I can’t tell you what the plan is for this one. I know I’ll probably be holding rum by the end of the night, though.

Attend either event and you’re likely to learn something from those here in the Epicenter of Real Estate Blogging who are generating real estate business from their efforts, whether it be through general blogging, niche blogs or neighborhood blog-sites.

Now if only someone would realize there’s a big wide world west of Central Avenue …

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“You know,” my client told me Friday on our first meeting, “everywhere I look online around here, I see you. Why is that?”

The why’s pretty easy to figure out - I do happen to be running a business here, after all. The how, which was the hidden part of the question, is slightly more complicated and probably wouldn’t interest you in the slightest. Suffice to say if I take a shine to a neighborhood and believe others may like that area too, I can find a way to - in the words of Nuke Laloosh - announce my presence with authority.

Though few among my real estate brethren would believe it, I’m not necessarily a tech person. Okay, so I tried to write programs for my Texas Instruments computer back in the mid-80s. (Casette drive, voice modulator, 16K of memory … oh yeah, baby. Big time stuff right thee.) Okay, so I know a little bit of HTML.

Still, technology’s not always my friend. And it’s for this reason that I’ve avoided the siren song of smart phones and stuck with my Samsung - no e-mail capability, bad photos and all. My phone had become a running joke at any real estate blogger meetup. People are sending messages to Twitter and checking the weather in Auckland and I’m just happy to get an incoming phone call.

That changed Friday, about an hour after my client’s statement, and all for one very low-tech reason - my phone fell out of my pocket.

Goodbye M-300 (or whatever the hell it was) and hello Samsung Instinct.

In saying goodbye to the old phone I also am saying goodbye to several dozen phone numbers, some of which I have saved elsewhere, some I don’t. (If you don’t hear from me, now you know why. Yes, Mom. This means you.)

But I’m also saying hello to the ability to check e-mail wherever whenever, which is a bit of a double-edge sword. The trick isn’t checking but learning not to check. Should be easy but considering I’m writing a blog post at 8:40 p.m. rather than watching a movie with the family, you get the hint.

Here’s where the big plus really comes in, at least the way I see it - the home searches on this and my other half-dozen websites. When you sign up I receive an e-mail letting me know that you’ve done so. If there’s a legit number, you’ll probably hear from me within a short time frame just to make sure the search pulled up what you really wanted. As good as the IDX is, I still have better available through the MLS that I can set up for you.

Reactions to these immediate phone calls since I turned on registration in August has been almost all positive. One person ended up buying a home through me. A few others still are looking. One prospective buyer said, “I’m so glad you called. Let me tell you what I really want to find …” all before I really got out my initial hello.

The main delay in contacting folks came from not having e-mail on the road, but that’s now a thing of the past. That has to be a good thing, especially these days when I’ve got a closing coming every 14 days (my average since mid-March) and when I’m spending more time driving either with clients or to check on REOs and other listings than I am in front of my computer screen.

Now the biggest obstacle comes from the 9-year-old Princess, who complains that my new phone “is too fancy.” I think that’s another way of saying “Daddy won’t let me play with it.”

I’m still slightly wary of the feeling of being shackled permanently to my inbox, but I guess that’s part of the learning curve with these smartphones. I just have to learn to be smart enough to turn it off at 7 p.m. when my official business hours end.

Well, unless I need to check some fantasy football scores of something.

It’s a process.

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Last night I received an e-mail from a client who is looking for homes down in Estrella (formerly known as Estrella Mountain Ranch, a master planned community) in Goodyear. As we went up and back I asked the million-dollar question … do you use RSS feeds at all?

Yes, came the answer. And this morning came a unique solution to help him in his search for homes for sale in Estrella: an RSS feed of 3 bedroom, 2 bath homes that are new to the market in Estrella.

Rather than having to search daily, the new listings now will appear in his feed reader whenever a home comes to the market. I’ve got something similar set up for Westbrook Village just listed homes given the number of clients I have looking for the same type of property there.

Interested to see how it works? Click on either of the above links and when the results page appears, click on the orange RSS button. That will allow you to add the RSS feed to your reader.

Selling your Phoenix real estate may be an inconvenient process, but buying homes here in Phoenix shouldn’t be.

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Last week a home search site, RealSeekr.com, came onto the scene. The main difference between this and a number of similar sites is RealSeekr was designed by real estate agents so presumably they’ve kept what we as a group tend to like and tossed what we don’t like in creating this platform.

Will anyone find this site while searching for homes? Maybe. Maybe not. But I put together a profile and I’ve started to add my listings, just in case, because you never know for certain.

Syndicating Phoenix Real Estate Listings

One of the challenges RealSeekr faces, in my opinion, is that listings have to be added to the system manually. There’s no IDX feed coming from Phoenix into the system and, since the site’s fairly new, there are no syndication agreements in place.

It’s not a question of laziness; I’m happy to invest the time if it means one of my listings is going to sell. It’s a matter of age and stress - I can’t seem to remember all of the different places where a home can be listed, at least not in a day and age when there are new sites debuting monthly.

Syndication helps.

All of my listings have been entered on RealBird.com, which then powers the map on the “My Listings” page here on AllPhoenixRealEstate.com. I could use a map from Diverse Solutions, but I’ve had RealBird’s map on longer and so it stays.

RealBird syndicates listings entered. So let’s take my new short sale listing at 7873 W. Redfield in Peoria. I entered the information on RealBird. And within a couple of hours the same data already has been entered on Zillow, Oodle, Trulia, Edgeio and CLRSearch.

Will buyers look at all of those sites? Probably not. Do I want my home there in the off chance that a buyer does find it on a small listing portal? Absolutely.

Return on Investment

It’s a question of the return on investment. All is takes for me to enter a listing into the Point-2-Agent National Listing Service (which also syndicates) or RealBird or Zillow or Trulia or anywhere else is a few minutes of my time. And given the uncertain return through most of those sites, the ROI - a possible sale in exchange for some of my time - is with the investment.

Not so with print. There is a very, very uncertain return with print advertising (aside from the certainty that it will be low to nonexistent.) But print costs real dollars. And as a businessman I’m not going to burn real dollars unless I know there’s an absolute return coming at the end of the day. Wishful thinking doesn’t cut it.

The same goes for the glossy real estate magazines about which I’ve written previously. Is it in the realm of possibility that someone will pick up a real estate magazine, fall in love with a photograph and buy the house I have listed? Sure, it’s possible. But the remote possibility doesn’t justify the exorbitant expense.

Throwing money at the marketing of a listing isn’t going to help the sale if the dollars are being spent foolishly. Glossy magazines are all about the agent - not your house.

Who’s Marketing What?

All real estate agents leverage listings to their own benefit to some degree. That’s why we have name riders with our phone numbers, why we plaster our own mugs on print flyers (for those unenlightened souls burning through our rain forests in the name of a remote chance of selling a home) and why we have open houses (not me, but others.)

Print ads aren’t about you - they’re about the agent trying to show their seller all of the hard work they’re doing in trying to sell the house, while they’re taking the calls on the side and trying to turn those folks into buyers - for your home or, more likely, another.

One local agent boasts about custom signs “that stop traffic” - even if that traffic is on a seldom-driven street in the middle of a subdivision where only the residents travel on a daily basis. Prominently displayed at the top of the sign is the brokerage’s motto.

Who does that benefit? You or the broker trying to secure additional listings? Will that custom sign cause more people to drive down that road? Or does the number of people that happen to drive past and take the time to stop still pale compared to the number of people who are seeing the same listing every day on line?

Where are marketing dollar better allocated - trying to attract the attention of the few whose sole qualification is driving past the house or picking up a real estate magazine or glancing at the newspaper classifieds as they wrap that fish - or trying to attract the eyes of the thousands of folks looking online at any given moment?

Seems pretty simple from here.  So simple, even a silly beagle can understand it.

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Speaking of technological stupidity, I posted the beginnings of a post meant to be a draft and now find myself writing the post as quickly as possible for those who are wondering why there are only scattered notes on a page.

Still with me?

One of the cool things about the boys at sellsius is their penchant for thinking outside the box. I happened upon this comment on a post from Shaun McLane’s “Every Kid Deserves a Yard” blog in Orlando. Shaun was terminated by his broker for failing to remove a blog post to which she objected.

The comments generally were supportive of Shaun’s right to post what he chooses but a sub-theme became prevalent … does the video in question and his blog in general meet state real estate advertising standards. That brought the following from Rudy at sellsius:

is blogging really advertising? how about a forum? what about a wiki? what about an email?

isn’t it really a platform for communicating? teaching? educating? learning? venting? etc…..

when a journalist writes an article for the newspaper is that advertising?

If you are the author of a real estate blog, I can’t see how you can avoid conforming to local real estate advertising statutes. If you’re writing as a member of the public about your dogs then that’s a different story. But if you’re a licensed real estate professional and you’re discussing real estate on a website you own, that has to be advertising … even if the blog is primarily informational in nature.

Every real-estate related post is an advertisement of your knowledge about a given subject. There’s no way around that. Throw in the ubiquitous home searches, real estate market stats and everything else and it seems clear cut.

Journalists writing for a newspaper create an apples-to-oranges comparison. They write because they are paid by an employer to do so.

Fortunately for Shaun we’re in a business where we choose our employers to a far greater degree than we are hired by them. There ALWAYS are other brokerages from which to choose. And failing that there’s also the option of setting out on your own with your own broker’s license, which Shaun has.

Incidentally, Shaun’s isn’t the only blog where the broker’s information is not provided in a prominent location. It’s a 30-second fix should the state real estate department ever take a look, but it’s a tangential non-issue for the most past.

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