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Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:40:43 -0600

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OK, All You Stragglers That Just Haven't Gotten Around Yet To Registering for our next Social Media Series...

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:24:24 -0600

I've got some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is that you missed session 1 of our next Social Media Series.

The good news is that we're doing make-up sessions for all you stragglers...

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 from 8:45am to 10:00am Pacific time
Thursday, December 11, 2008 from 8:45am to 10:00am Pacific time

Want more information?

Head over here...

Or just click on this registration button...

Social Media Broadcasting Series -- The Next One Is Just Around the Corner!!!

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:01:07 -0600

The last few days have been pretty darn busy for Pat Kitano and myself ... OD'ing gorging on Turkey celebrating Thanksgiving and finalizing the curriculum for our next Social Media Webinar series, which starts on Friday, December 5, 2008, from 10:30am to 11:30am Pacific time, and runs for 12 weeks.

The first three have been sellouts, with over 50 attendees registered for each series, and we're expecting a full house again. We've been thrilled with the great reviews, which you can see for yourself here:

We're also excited because, working with ECRESystems.com, we're now able to showcase a pretty darn cool product: FeedFuze, which allows you to aggregate interesting social media content (via RSS) and display it nearly anywhere -- your Active Rain blog, your outside blog, your Wordpress blog, even your Aunt Thelma's old web site!

Translation: You know all that interesting content you've found and tagged on Delicious? And all those articles you've written on Active Rain about getting a home prepared for sale? And all those Tweets you've sent out about your market? FeedFuze enables you to take all that content, aggregate it, then display it in a "newsfeed" format. The future of social media marketing is all about you becoming the hub of real estate content for your local area, and FeedFuze makes it possible.

Check out these demos of FeedFuze:

Apart from showing off FeedFuze and what it can do for you, we'll also be discussing social media in general: How do you use these tools to generate contacts, listings, closed transactions, and ultimately $$ in your bank account?

Because of the support of the Active Rain community, we're happy to be able to offer a 50% discount off the regular $299 price. By clicking on the orange registration button, you'll be able to get the Active Rain special price of only $149 for the 12 sessions -- about $12 each.

For more information, please go to: http://domusconsultinggroup.com/ar

Social Media Marketing -- The Next One Is Starting!

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:21:15 -0600

While many Active Rainer's were off partying participating in NAR's 2008 Orlando convention, Pat Kitano and I were putting the finishing touches on our next Social Media Marketing webinar series, which started this morning (Monday, November 10, 2008).

For late registrants, and for those who missed the first session, we're offering make-up sessions later this week:

Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 10:30am Pacific time
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 10:30am Pacific time

Take a look at Brad Andersohn's article (and the comments) about our first series.

Also look here at the live "Twitter Stream" of questions, comments, and testimonials.

What's it about? Read on...

Everybody's talking about social media, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and a dozen other cool online tools to extend your marketing. How do you use these tools to generate contacts, listings, closed transactions, and ultimately $$$ in your bank account?

This 12-session webinar series answers that question, and much much more. What we're really exicted about is the "Social Media Broadcasting" system we're developing along with some of our partners, a system that expands your online presence significantly without necessarily blogging.

We've been thrilled with the response from the Active Rain community so far, with a sizeable big large huge number of attendees in the first two series, both of which sold out.

Because of the support of the Active Rain community, we're happy to be able to offer a 50% discount off the regular $299 price. By clicking on the orange registration button, you'll be able to get the Active Rain special price of only $149 for the 12 sessions -- about $12 each.

For more information, please go to http://domusconsultinggroup.com/ar

Session 3: Video is ready!

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:25:33 -0500

Hi Team,

The video for session 3 is ready! Just go to our site, log in, then go to Client Content - Social Media Series 1 - Session 3.

Let us know if you have any questions!

--Kevin

Session 2: Notes are ready!

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:25:57 -0500

Hi everyone, notes and video from session 2 are ready. Please go to domusconsultinggroup.com and log in, then click on "Client Content" then click on "Social Media Series" then click on "Session 2".

Please let us know any feedback you have.

Thanks.

Kevin

Getting the audio to work correctly

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:32:23 -0500

Some folks are having a hard time getting the audio to work correctly in our webinar.

Click here for a video we created to help you sort it out.

Reaping The Fruits Of Others’ Labor? Or Adding Value To It?

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:27:30 -0500

For those who care about such things, the big recent news is, of course, the Move.com vs. Active Rain dustup. While much of the commentary amongst Active Rainers has been supportive of their fearless leaders, there is also an underlying angst about the notion that while the content of Active Rain is provided by its 50,000-odd members, the windfall from the prospective sale would have accrued not to those members, but to the owners of Active Rain. Were Messrs. Mardini, Heaton, and Washburn indeed going to enrich themselves with the fruits of others’ labor?

For the rest of this article on the ongoing Move.com vs. Active Rain controversy, please visit my blog.

Announcing the shady agent tricks competition -- win a Starbucks card

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:47:40 -0600

I thought some of my fellow Active Rain bloggers would find this entertaining...I'm sponsoring a"shady agent tricks" competition. Here's how it works: You submit an anecdote about something shady that a real estate agent or mortgage broker has done (without, of course, revealing the name of the agent in question). The writer of the best entry will get a $10 Starbucks card.

For more details, click here...

Submit your entries in the comments section to this post, or in the comments section of my blog.

Cheers!

Active Rain on Google Base services

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:38:09 -0600

Some of you may be familiar with Google Base -- essentially a searchable database into which you can upload information about nearly anything -- homes, resumes, recipes, doctors, cars, proteins, reports -- and make it findable by Google's hundreds of millions of users.

One of the categories Google Base has is "Services", which I was playing with today. Imagine my surprise when I typed in "Palo Alto, CA"...and my own mug shot was staring out at me! When I clicked on the link, it forwarded to my Active Rain profile.

I imagine the good folks at Active Rain have simply built a little XML feed that automatically posts our profiles to Google Base as another way of promoting our services. Great job, and very creative!

Redfin and the end of real estate as we know it?

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:26:10 -0600

In September, the New York times published (yet another) puff piece on Redfin, the innovative Seattle-based online brokerage. Following is my commentary on that article, which I posted originally on my home blog and I've re-posted here for the benefit of my fellow Active Rain'ers...

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Today's New York Times has a provocative article featuring Redfin, the Seattle-based broker with an innovative web site and business model. The thrust of the article is captured well by its headline: "The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters?"

Does Redfin's entry into the market indeed spell the end of the traditional compensation model, in which the seller pays a commission -- fully negotiable and often around 6 percent -- which then gets split -- often 50/50 -- between the seller's agent and the agent who brings the ultimate buyer? Redfin's approach is quite different: in exchange for doing a lot of the work involved in a real estate transaction yourself, you pay significantly less.

Judging by the paranoid, almost apoplectic, reaction of the traditional real estate industry to Redfin and other "discount brokerages," you would think armageddon is just around the corner. I beg to differ. While Redfin et. al will certainly help change the commission structure, I don't think they will end it. Rather, I think we'll see a split in the market, with some firms, like Redfin, concentrating on budget-minded, do-it-mostly-yourself clients, and other firms continuing to work with those who want the traditional "full-service" treatment.

One size does not fit all, and kudos to Redfin for recognizing that as a business opportunity. Perhaps there's an analogy between real estate and hair salons. Some people want the $45 "full service" haircut, which is an hour-long ritual that includes a shampoo, a soothing scalp massage, a high-quality haircut, a comfortable chair, stylish surroundings, and maybe even a glass of wine.

Others, however, prefer the $7 "discount" experience: it takes only 10 minutes, the chair's not that comfortable, the ambiance isn't much to brag about, and you'd better have done part of the work --shampooing your hair -- ahead of time. They're both haircuts, but they're distinctly different experiences, designed for distinctly different consumers. Likewise, Redfin's product and the traditional broker's product are both "real estate services," but they're distinctly different experiences, designed for distinctly different consumers. I'll have lots more to say about alternative real estate business models in other posts, but for now I'll close with a few other comments on the article...

It's a shame, though perhaps understandable, that technology-driven innovation in real estate is largely coming from outside the real estate industry: not only Redfin, but also Zillow, Trulia, Google (e.g. Google Base), and Yahoo (now allied with Prudential and Zillow), and smaller players like Altos Research (which provides market analysis).
The reluctance of listing agents to show properties to buyers being represented by Redfin is not necessarily "blacklisting." Part of the duties of a traditional buyer's agent -- for which he/she is compensated 3% -- is to show properties, often literally dozens of properties, to clients. Though it's understandable that Redfin, at $2000 per transaction, simply can't do that for its buyers, it's also understandable that the seller's agent would be reluctant to essentially do somebody else's job, for no additional compensation.
While Redfin's search technology is incredibly Web 2.0-cool, I have to wonder if it's defensible. Movoto created quite the buzz when they launched their also-cool Web site, but now that Redfin is also operating in the Bay Area, Movoto now has only the second-coolest site in town. If another startup with $1 million in funding comes along -- or, for that matter, a tech-savvy realtor figures out a neat Google Earth mashup -- maybe Redfin will also drop to second place. Ultimately, it has to be their business model, not their technology, that will determine Redfin's fate.
Finally, an admittedly nit-picky point on the article's use of the phrase "selling agent." In the industry, the person representing the seller is most commonly referred to as the "listing agent." The buyer's representative is, oddly and confusingly enough, most commonly referred to as the "selling agent." In a few instances, the article incorrectly referred to the seller's representative as the "selling agent."

Fun with Zillow #4 -- Exploring Zillow's new features

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:15:08 -0600

Shortly after Zillow added their latest new functionality to their web site, I posted the following on my home blog. Thought it might be of interest to my fellow Active Rain'ers...

-------------------------------------

Hats off to the Zillow team for adding some ridiculously “z-addictive” features to their offering! The real estate blogosphere is abuzz with comments, some relatively positive and some negative.In this post, I’ll describe what I found, and in the next one, I’ll provide some commentary on what impact I think these features will have on the agent community and the general public.

While you can continue to use Zillow as before without registering, you do need to get a Zillow account before you can use some of these new features. Once you’ve done so, you search for a property…

…and click on “See home details” which gives you, uh, the home details…

…and three options.
“Save Favorite to My Zillow” is pretty tame. The other two options, however, have a lot of folks hot and bothered. Let’s see what the fuss is about…

“Owner Tools” gives you three further options:

Confirming ownership sounds a bit dubious at first, and indeed the first time you do it you only have to confirm the owner’s name:

Thankfully, to claim a second or subsequent property as your own, you have to enter your credit card information (which Zillow dutifully promises not to use for spurious purposes), enabling them to match their ownership records with the name associated with your credit card.On to the next feature…editing your home facts. They’ve made this ridulously easy to do. In my case, the basic features of the home were correct, but Zillow was missing information about the type of heating and cooling system, the roof type, and a few other items.

The third feature, “Create an Estimate and Make it Public” was also pretty straighforward. You start by editing basic home facts, if necessary……followed by adding home improvements……and other features… …and finally by specifying which comps make the most sense for your home:

When you’re all done, you get an updated personalized estimate, which is different from the public Zestimate.

Go ahead, give it a spin yourself! Warning — it is addictive.

Why the Internet will never disintermediate Realtors — Part 1: It’s the relationship, stupid

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:55:57 -0600

Note: If this blog entry looks familiar, it's because this is the second time I'm posting it. The first time, some gremlins came and by the time they were done, this entry had disappeared. :( Here it is again...

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Realtor-haters and Internet-fearing-Realtors may not love each other, and they may not have much in common, but they do agree on one key thing: the Internet is the death knell of our profession, about to consign all of us to the same sad scrap heap of history on which travel agents were once summarily, and somewhat brutally, tossed.

It is therefore perhaps ironic that on this one issue, the only issue on which these two diametrically, almost pathologically, opposed groups agree, they are both wrong. Sorry, folks, the Internet ain’t gonna put us out of business, no matter how badly the first group wishes it would, and the second group hopes it won’t.

To both groups I say, in my best James Carville-inspired Clinton-esque campaign trail voice, “It’s the relationship, stupid!”

Before I explain, let me clarify what I don’t mean, in the interest of avoiding a winged-monkeys flame war.

First, I don’t mean that the Internet hasn’t had, isn’t having, and won’t have a large impact on the way real estate business is done. Quite the contrary, the Internet has changed and continues to change the industry in many ways, most of them good for the consumer.
Secondly, I don’t mean that an average Realtor, or a top-producing one for that matter, wouldn’t benefit from becoming more Internet-savvy. Quite the opposite — the rich efficiency-and-effectiveness-enhancing fruits of the Internet are there for all to feast.

So, what then do I mean by, “It’s the relationship, stupid!”

What I mean is this: the real estate business is not really about homes, and transactions, and escrows, and mortgages. It’s not about negotiation, and home inspections, and contracts, and deadlines. It is, instead, primarily a business of relationships, and of the dreams that such relationships can achieve.

When clients engage a Realtor to help them buy or sell a home, they are entrusting that person to guide them through what for most of them is the biggest financial transaction of their lives, a roller coaster of elation and disappointment, of happiness and sadness, of agreements and arguments, of satisfaction and stress. It is, in short, a relationship, and the success of the whole process depends to a large extent on how well that Realtor cultivates and manages that relationship.

Similar relationships are also found in other “intermediary” professions in which an agent acts on behalf of a principal. The extent and strength of that relationship is, I posit, directly correlated to the difficulty in disintermediating it.

Why has the Internet been so successful in driving the travel agent industry to near extinction? A big reason — not the only one, to be sure — is that most people never thought of their travel agent in the same way they did of their attorney, their Realtor, their accountant, or their private money manager. A travel agent was simply the person on the other end of the line who helped you buy a ticket from Peoria to Pretoria. The next time you called the 800 number, or dropped by the travel office, you would often deal with a completely different person. Consumers never really developed a deep relationship with travel agents, because the travel agent industry was not one in which relationships were key to being a successful intermediary, so when a cheaper, more efficient way came about to get tickets, consumers did so.

Back to the original question — will the Internet disintermediate Realtors? It might, for that relatively small percentage of folks for whom this relationship simply isn’t that important — the die-hard do-it-yourselfers, the inveterate Realtor-haters, or more benignly, investors who buy and sell frequently and simply don’t need the hand-holding.

For the rest of the population, those who appreciate the need for guidance, for counsel, for support — for the relationship — Realtors will always be around and needed.

Winged monkeys, go home, and please leave us alone.

Internet-fearing Realtors, take a deep breath. The Internet will not cut you out of the business, unless you deserve it, unless your client relationship skills are so bad that your clients prefer no relationship to one with you. If that’s the case, then you, my friend, have a much bigger problem than the Internet.

Electronic signatures, a missed Virgin Atlantic flight, and two mystery guests

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 14:04:02 -0600

I’m always looking for ways to streamline my business, and one of my favorite tricks is electronic signatures, which save me and my clients an unbelievable amount of time, effort, paper, and ink. Plus, they’re really, really cool!

Many of my clients travel frequently, and e-signatures mean they can sign anywhere they have Internet access — at the office, at a conference, in an airport, or at a Starbucks/T-mobile hotspot. A few weeks ago, we were expecting a counter-offer to come in while my client was going to be en-route from San Francisco to London on a Virgin Atlantic flight. No worries…that Virgin flight had wifi access! Unfortunately, my client missed the flight, so I’m not yet able to say that clients have signed while flying.

The two mystery guests? You’ll find them in my presentation on this topic, best viewed in full Powerpoint presentation mode.

The platform I use is Docusign, a Seattle-based company. Before getting into the specifics, a quick disclaimer, then a digression into what electronic signatures are and are not.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and there are a lot of legal issues around electronic signatures of which you should be careful. Don’t take my word for either their efficacy or their legality in real estate transactions in California — do your own research. If you live outside California, I have no idea what laws might apply to you.

Digression: A “signature” is simply an action a person performs to show consent to something. Examples of signatures include:

Writing your name on paper in a stylized and consistent manner. Because this is currently the most widely-used signature method, it has become known as — you guessed it! — a “signature.”
Pressing your fingerprint
Marking an “X”

An “electronic signature”, then, is simply an electronic action a person performs to show consent to something. Examples of electronic signatures include:

Clicking “place your order” on Amazon.com.
Clicking “pay” on your online bank’s web site.
Clicking “sign” on a Docusign document

Using Docusign e-signatures in California real estate transactions

Docusign uses a familiar motif — yellow “sticky” sign here labels — to make the process easy and understandable. You start with any document in electronic form, such as an online real estate purchase contract from your forms provider. If the original is in paper format, then you need to either scan it or e-fax it to yourself.

Once you have the document in electronic form, you simply “print” it to Docusign to get it ready. You specify the email addresses of the signers…

… then drag yellow “stickies” to where your clients need to sign…

…and then email it to them. When they open the email, they’ll be directed to sign in to Docusign, they’ll see the document, and then sign by simply clicking where it says “Sign here.”

When they’re done clicking in all the places that need a signature or initial, they email it back to you, and then you can open it, print it, forward it etc. The signature is a stylized cursive version of their name along with a unique identification number:

That’s all there is to it!

Trust me, after getting over the initial learning curve, you and your clients will simply not believe how you survived without electronic signatures.

“Thar’s gold in them thar data” — the real genius of Zillow

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:05:43 -0600

Another company rocking the real estate boat these days is Zillow, the Seattle-based company offering (nearly) instantaneous property valuation estimates.The objections to Zillow are legion but boil down to two in particular:

An automated computer-based estimation of a property’s worth can’t, by definition, be as accurate as that of a real estate professional, largely because the computer has no way (at least yet) of adjusting for non-numeric characteristics such as views, condition, type of carpeting, visual appeal, amenities, and so forth. That Zillow’s data is drawn from notoriously inaccurate county records doesn’t help their cause any.
The public has been duped into believing that Zillow’s “Zestimates” are gospel truth. (What part of “Zestimate” says “gospel truth”?), making it harder for professionals to convince clients of true value. An extreme, perhaps apocryphal, example, reported here, was when a seller apparently pulled his home off the market when a potential buyer showed him a Zestimate $500,000 lower than his asking price.

The ever-erudite, passionate, and insightful Greg Swann has some hard-hitting commentary on both these points.

While both concerns are entirely valid, there’s a completely separate, equally important, issue: how come it’s outsiders like Zillow, and not real estate industry players, who are coming up with creative ways of monetizing the value of the mountain of data we’re sitting on? Borrowing from the old gold-rush days, “Thar’s gold in them thar data” — and the prospectors are largely outsiders!

The Expedia travel-agent-industry-destroying pedigree of Zillow’s founders naturally leads to fears of a similar revolution in real estate, so it’s no wonder we’re all worked up about it. For reasons best left to a post of its own, that ain’t gonna happen: disintermediating a low-dollar-value, relatively-frequently-purchased, non-emotional product like airline tickets is a whole lot easier than doing the same with a high-dollar-value, infrequently-purchased, highly-emotional product like real estate. Don’t worry guys, they’ll always need us!

Expedia’s success in the air ticket industry had a lot to do with it understanding — long before the airlines themselves — that while the airline industry’s primary product was getting people from point A to point B more or less intact, it was sitting on a largely untapped ancillary asset: the data about getting people from point A to point B. Expedia took that data, made it accessible to the unwashed masses, and left the airlines dutifully losing money while it took $X profit per transaction. Pretty neat.

Fast forward a decade…Zillow sees a similar opportunity in real estate. We all get that the primary product in this industry is enabling buyers and sellers to achieve their housing dreams. What we’re missing is the immense value in our untapped ancillary asset — MLS data. Realtor.com and/or local MLS boards could have and should have come up with Zillow a long time ago! We have the data, it’s higher quality than Zillow’s county records source, and we’re more familiar with it.

The real genius of Zillow is not its perceived threat of contributing to the downfall of this industry, but rather in doing an end-run around all of us and making money out of the gold mine of data that we’ve been sitting on.

Voting, erudition, Bloggers Anonymous, and other random election-day stuff

Kevin Boer (Domus Consulting Group, LLC) — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:20:31 -0600

Having lived in some decidedly non-democratic (lower-case “d”) places, and having lived in other places where I was not a citizen, I’m always happy — and proud — to do my civic duty by voting. Nonetheless … Thank Goodness It’s Over.

Not only are we — finally! — done with all those negative campaign ads, but I’ve also just freed up 3 hours of my evening, time which I spent last night studying the 17 (!) state and local ballot initiatives and the positions of the candidates for ~20 elected offices. It was an arduous task made more difficult by the fact that Cameron Swann lives in Arizona, not California, so I could not rely on his voting guide. (As a side note, erudition and Libertarianism both seem to run in the Swann family genes!)

Following my civic duty, I drove up to San Francisco to join Pat Kitano and Mike Simonsen for the inaugural West Coast meeting of Real Estate Bloggers Anonymous. Our addictions have proven lucrative, however, since our blogs apparently have a combined market value of $53,066.76. I wonder if that will be enough to cover the rehab?

3oceansrealestate.com

is worth $11,855.34.

Transparentre.com

is worth $14,678.04.

Altos Research

is worth $26,533.38.

If that’s not enough money, maybe we can hit up Greg Swann for a loan — his blog clocks in at over $110,000! (And it probably just went up by $20 because of this post.)