Forget transparency: Let's find a new clarion call in 2009

 

That's my mortgage broker, letting is all hang out.

My Realtor? When my wife and I sold, I knew exactly what she netted. I knew her split. I asked.

The closing costs on my recent refi were of course conveniently broken down for easy scrutiny. "Document preparation fee" sounds like bullshit, can we get rid of that? Done.

Many called for "transparency" in the real estate business over the past few years. It became an easy Web 2.0 buzzword. I put a lot of stock in it too: If we just make the information available and uncloak the sales games, the real estate experience will improve. Zillow raised $87 million dollars on this idea.

I was wrong. Very little changed. Buyers and sellers, though armed with comps, Zestimates, school reports and trend charts, still ended up paying an under qualified agent too much money far too often. Brokers got less profitable. Good agents suffered armies of fools. And the public's view of real estate is more jaundiced than ever.

In reality, consumers could always see the compromised links in the real estate value chain quite clearly. They certainly knew the score on commissions. The light of day can shine with the power of a thousand suns into the dark corners and clauses of the real estate transaction. The real problems, which are structural, remain. 

Yes, some people did get burned. But that wasn't for lack of transparency in most cases. It was a double helix of profit motive and magical thinking that is, in retrospect, nearly impossible to untangle.

So as I head off to Inman's Real Estate Connect conference today, I am looking for a new clarion call for all of us who want the real estate business to be better.

See, real estate matters. We're not selling ringtones here, folks. We're talking about shelter. Lives. Families.

We can do better. But can has seldom been enough. Perhaps now, in a time of must, it will happen.

Coming down

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.
And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

That's Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down. Real estate's coming down pretty hard too. And many are finding they've lost something along the way: Perspective. Business sense. Integrity.

I'm hoping we can get it back this year. But to do so we've got to move beyond believing that if we open things up a little it will all be okay.

With what, then, do we lead the charge to a better industry?

Honestly, I'm not sure. People smarter than me have suggested possibilities in the past few months, but it's not clear to me yet.

I am hoping I'll come back from Connect with some answers. 

But please: Let's drop transparency. It didn't do the trick.

Stay tuned.

-- Brian Boero

Brokers, it's time to get out of the cockpit

Brian wrote this piece just about a year ago. The title became the basis for a live presentation we have given throughout this past year on a variety of topics including branding, marketing and communication, sales and creative thinking. 

----

“Good morning, folks, my name is Brian Marsh and I’m your first officer on today’s flight out to Aruba [pauses amid chuckles].

How many people on this plane have never flown jetBlue before? Great, how about you stand up and tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Seriously, I’m grateful you’re on board with us this morning. We’ve got some tailwinds, so our flight time out to D.C. will be a quick four hours and thirty minutes. And all reports indicate a smooth ride.

Sit back and enjoy the jetBlue experience – and thanks again”

I was headed out to Washington from Oakland on a jetBlue flight last week.

The screen in front of me had already told me I “look good in leather” – the material covering my seat – and commended me for being a “good screen reader”. Now the first officer had come out of the cockpit to greet us, joke around a bit, and tell us what to expect.

The week before I had flown from Houston to Oakland on Continental. My seat smelled of body odor. The flight attendants were surly. My tray table restricted my breathing. I arrived home with a sore back and headed straight for the shower.

The guy flying the plane could have made me feel a little better about this, but he chose not too. He remained, as most pilots remain, a leaden voice coming through the squawk box, distant and unconcerned.

I hate Continental. I love JetBlue.

Brokers, it’s time for you to get out of the cockpit too. Times are tough. People are hurting. They’re angry, and unsure.

It’s been a long flight and the peanuts aren’t helping.

How often do you, your office mangers or your VPs, personally greet clients in your office? How often do you call buyers to congratulate them upon closing? Or send them a handwritten note?

Do you speak candidly and sympathetically to your customers about the challenges facing home buyers and sellers? Or do you remain ensconced in the soundproof cockpit of the executive suite and let your marketing department do the talking?

Have you lent humor to your interactions with sellers? Or are you still hoping to still the anxious minds in your market with postcards?

All this buzz about blogs? It’s not about technology: it’s about you, your voice, and a conversation you need to be having with your customers.

I know. There are reasons to stay put. You don’t want to edge in on agent relationships. You don’t want exposure to criticism. Let me tell you something: When you speak to your customers with a human voice you are forgiven for your mistakes. JetBlue botched hundreds of flights and stranded a hundred and fifty passengers on the tarmac at JFK for nine hours last winter in an operational meltdown. People gave them the flack they deserved and went on loving the company.

Get out there. Hold a town hall meeting. Spend 20k to hire a top shelf economist or personal finance expert to help your customers navigate a challenging economy. Give them the data they need, however ugly it may be.

Speak frankly. Be open. Push yourself to communicate in new ways. Take a look at this. I know -- it’s far from perfect. And the opening video is filled with cant. But he’s trying. He’s left the cockpit. He’s telling us what to expect and injecting his brand with a dose of humanity.

I know a lot of smart brokers. People who’ve been through rough times before and have a genuine passion for helping people. Trouble is, they don’t have – or don’t think they have – the moves in them to pull something like this off. I think they underestimate themselves. The tools are there. It’s what Web 2.0 is all about.

Get out of the cockpit and face the crowd. It’ll make everyone feel better.

-- Brian Boero

Tour of Duty

This was first published on April 17th, 2007. It was my second blog. Lots has changed since then. Brian Wilson, the subject of this story, returned from Iraq and built Zolve. Like many new ideas launched in '08, Zolve is hanging in there and trying to make it -- Marc

EAST BAGHDAD, Iraq: Forward Operating Base -- Night.

Mortar shells splash in the foreground throwing strobes of light that obliterate the darkness. Bullets ping like castanets off a sign post. Soldiers dart for cover as missiles drop through plumes of smoke.

Captain Brian Robert Wilson sits in the corner of his concrete barrack typing on his computer. His mind, elsewhere. Across the room an unannounced rocket penetrates the concrete roof. A beam of moonlight rides piggyback on the shrapnel pushed through a hole drilled into the cinder. Wilson screams out a soldier's name. Seconds pass. He yells again and she answers as she emerges covered in dust and debris. A few feet to the left and she would have been obliterated.

An Army of One

Farewell at the Wilsons' Fort Collins, Colo., home was a Kleenex moment. On Oct. 13, 2005, father, husband and real estate broker Brian Wilson received a Western Union telegram. As a West Point Graduate, class of '98, he's eligible for recall. The Army doesn't forget.

Wilson and his wife just learned they were pregnant. Their new house was about to close. He had opened his own real estate brokerage just four months earlier. A young man has been called to serve the country. Separated, he defined an Army of One.

Fort Bragg. Time passed, but it didn't stop. Three months later, Captain Wilson left this insane world to find himself thrust into another.

Realtor on a tour of duty

Forward Operating Base was once a center for higher learning. Saddam converted it into a military intelligence base -- i.e., a prison. There was an entire wing dedicated to children. Miniature chains and torture devices lie about rusted and silent. The imagined wails, however, were deafening.

Wilson's mission was civil affairs. Part of his task was to survey local businessmen and learn about the economy. During this time Wilson met two Baghdad real estate brokers. His interview revealed several cultural differences between there and here. MLSs don't exist in Iraq. Pocket listings rule. Brokers represent sellers only and are commissioned 3 percent. They facilitate the closing. All transactions are cash. A process that dates back to the time of Babylon.

Prices are staggering. When Saddam's regime fell, so did his housing restrictions. A boom ensued. 4-bedroom home with view could become 3-bedroom home with crater overnight and it'd still double or triple in value in a year. As Brian put it, "People will always need a place to live. Real estate will always have value, no matter the micro or macro circumstances."

Connection to Sanity

The days are bearable, the nights insufferable. Grown men shouldn't cry themselves to sleep. But then most grown men don't lose friends with the same frequency that I lose keys. Captain Wilson learned to stay low, especially after a colleague his age in the same duty station with a wife and kids, who was also in real estate, met fate. The two shared the very same water-cooler conversations we do about the industry. Only difference is we don't dodge bullets and fail. 

There's a computer in the barrack with Internet access. With the day's events over and the fear of what nighttime horror lay ahead, Captain Wilson dials up and connects to the Web. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail he sent me:

"Over the past year I discovered blogs and podcasts - two things that changed how I thought about real estate. While in my absence, my company sold $98,000,000 in real estate doing it the traditional way, I learned the scope of changes the industry is now just beginning to realize."

It fascinated me to learn about the sites he surfs in his bunker: Inman News, ActiveRain, Transparent Real Estate, FBS Blog , and Rain City Real Estate Guide. These are some of his destinations. They served as his muse for developing the next new real estate idea.

When he returns from his tour of duty, a business plan will accompany him.

Beyond the boundaries of imagination.

During the last 15 months, Wilson's imagination went global. Iraq blue-pilled his perspective.

"Had I not been deployed, I would have never come up with my business plan for an online real estate venture. I would have stayed 'in the weeds' running a traditional brokerage on a daily basis. In the heat of the day, I didn't have or make time for bigger thinking."

Bigger thinking. Many employing it have come from outside real estate. Others, like Captain Wilson, are pure red, white and blue -- Realtor blue. What each have in common is the endless possibilities they see in our industry. Great minds are expanding real estate beyond the boundaries of imagination.

Wilson's message is powerful. If you're in the weeds, find your own private Iraq.

Salute

Stay low, Captain Wilson. Four more weeks. Come home and introduce yourself to your new babies. One day they'll thank you for doing your part to ensure that others never see what you've seen. You've been a great pen pal and I will miss our long-distance missives.

See you at Real Estate Connect in August.

Google's OpenSocial and the future of the MLS

Brian published this post back on November 6th, 2007. The observations he made then about the social implications and viability of the MLS resonate today -- Marc

I’ve been chewing on the idea of Google’s OpenSocial for the past few days. I’d like to draw some direct connections to real estate, but I’d be stretching. As big a deal as it is in the wider world, it seems but a tangent to the real estate sphere at the moment.

Social networks surely hold opportunity for real estate practitioners. ActiveRain has demonstrated that. But the consumer-facing prospects have yet to come into focus. While examples of blogging success abound, cases of leveraging mass-market social networks to grow a real estate practice are next to non-existent (if you’re aware of one, I’d love to hear about it). And while it is certain that some online real estate companies will develop applications using the OpenSocial APIs, I don’t see any game-changing moves on the horizon.

The real value of the OpenSocial announcement for real estate is thus instructive. An object lesson on what might be – for MLS organizations and the NAR in particular.

Here’s one way we might look at this:

Consider that the MLS is really a social network. Its value has always been much more than as a warehouse for listings. It’s the marketplace, the cooperative -- the network of people with similar interests doing business -- that gives it its juice. Hang a few features off the core interface, say, a facebook-like profile with professional preferences and other elements of the “social graph”, and the decidedly uncool MLS starts looking pretty hip – and much more valuable.

This would be a “socialized” MLS. But one that is still walled in, limited by its increasingly problematic geographic boundaries. But what if NAR ceased conjuring a fantastical “gateway” that will take years to build and created a series of APIs -- children of RETS, if you will – that enabled vendors and MLS organizations themselves to inject simple applications into Web-based MLS systems?

Rather than drawing yet another circle around the outside of the listings world, why not create new pathways into it and let a thousand flowers bloom, as they say?

In this scenario, MarketLinx, Paragon and Rappattoni and the like are the real estate equivalents of LinkedIn, Orkut and Friendster – the parties who adopt the API protocols. Like OpenSocial, these APIs would respect the business and community rules of participating partners. Data integrity and ownership would be protected and worlds of new value would be unlocked for MLS organizations and their members.

Michael Wurzer over at FBS Blog has examined these issues with far greater insight than I have here. And there are MLS organizations cooking up progressive initiatives. But from my position on the periphery, it looks like far more need to embrace and advocate for the ethos represented by OpenSocial if they are to remain competitive.

-- Brian Boero

Daydreaming deep

As young man, in my early 20's, my bedroom (in the attic of an old Victorian) had an alcove with a window that looked out over the entrance to a wooded area. The alcove was deep enough to house one chair. I would read here. Do homework. Or work out the music for the great lyrics my then band mate would pen. Those songs eventually won my group a record contract. Often, I would put my books down, lean my guitar against the wall and just stare out that window. And I would let my imagination go wherever it took me. The thing is, most of what I envisioned, one day became a reality. Befitting for the last days of 08, this piece hopefully serves to stir your imagination as you prepare for what will be a year that might very well depend on it. -Marc

Life has a way of bringing you just what you need when you need it.

The $20 dollar bill you find in a pants pocket you hadn't worn in ages when your wallet's empty.
The prayer that's just been answered.
The great new idea you just hatched.

You can bet that right now, somewhere inside a makeshift office, a few undernourished and overtired   innovators are using up various colors of erasable ink scribbling on a whiteboard. Their great new idea still in stealth mode, code name and all under lock and key.

Maybe it's a web application. Maybe it's a new commission model. Maybe it's a zany new design idea for a real estate office that includes a waterfall, tropical fauna, a few exotic birds and video of homes and neighborhoods broadcast onto a 60-inch plasma screen 24/7. All the furniture is oversized and comfortable, sitting on plush shag rugs and accented with art deco lamps, an oxygen bar and self-serve gelato.   

You can bet that right now, one your most ardent competitors are conjuring ways to steal your market share. To out advertise you. To recruit your best agents. To undercut your commission. To ramp up their site traffic

You can trust right now, all over America, the majority of real estate practices are blissfully unaware that anything I have just described is taking place. I say, let them. I'm sure dinosaurs where just as blissfully unaware of the great meteor and, if by chance, one caught wind of it, they probably wouldn't have known what it was or what to do about it.

And truthfully, life is much better without big dinosaurs running around.

What a day for a daydream

When I left college after my junior year to sign a recording contract with Polydor, I spent the ensuing months during recording, staring out the window of my apartment daydreaming. Hours would go by and then, after a time, lyrics began to make their way to the page. Then the music. It was astounding to me how minutes earlier that creation didn't exist. Its manifestation the result of a wandering mind. A few weeks later, the songs were performed on stage. In front of thousands. Two made their way to national radio.

I still daydream. Over the last few years, I have come up with a bunch of ideas for real estate. Some I've built, others never left a Power Point slide.

Some were over-the-top insane. But that's okay. Somewhere in between insanity and nothing is a place where the next, new, great ideas simmer. The Ideas that make their way to whiteboards. Then to the launch pad. The kind that go live and make you crazy wondering why you didn't think of them yourself. The kind that make you think you've been lazy. Or just arrogant enough to think that what isn't broke need not be fixed.

If it isn't broke... break it. 

Try it. Look around your office. Look at your revenue model. Your recruiting plan. Your advertising. Your presentations. Your website. Your hairstyle. The Feng Shui of your office. Your blog  design. Or the lack of having a blog. Or the time you spend blogging when you could be daydreaming. Your hesitation to go to the next conference. Your paper based operation and the time you spend standing in front of a copy machine.

If you think you have it all nailed down, rethink it. Break that mindset. Become an idea zealot. Get a whiteboard. Put it up on your wall. Let it be empty. The Mona Lisa was once a blank canvas. Find a window and stare out into the yonder. Find that one thing, one idea, one change to your current process that you can call your own. Put it on the white board. And then stare it a while.

Make this your contribution to you. The future you. The one that wants more money. More clients. More agents. More customers. More business. More time off. More recognition for being brilliant rather than just one of the crowd.      

Life has a way of bringing you just what you need when you need it.

It could be Andrew Jackson.
It could be the answered prayer.
And if you allow it, it could be your next great idea.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Brushing the sands off a brand

This was one of my last posts of 07. It's one of the many posts I wrote last year about branding, a subject I have a particular expertise in having worked for 20+ years in show business building personal celebrity brands. I often find myself struggling to understand how real estate people set out to build their brands just posting away, blogging away, Twittering away with no set plan in mind. They may achieve a certain degree of name recognition but they are not building a brand. I think this had a few novel ideas in here brokers might benefit from as they seek to build their brand in 09 ...Marc

I've always wanted to be an archaeologist. Ever since I was a kid. My first discoveries were found beneath the cushions of my grandparent's sofa. Candy wrappers, hardened tissues, playing cards. The occasional utensil was a treat. For a 6 year-old these things were a real find. 

At an early age I learned that a superficial examination of anything reveals little of real value.

Nothing is at it seems. A landscape might hold natural beauty, but it's underneath, sometimes mere inches below the surface, where the real treasure is found.

Today, I like to excavate great companies. I'm fascinated by extremes. I want to know why some companies leave their customers feeling pained, sickened, stressed or empty (AT&T comes to mind) while other companies elicit a feeling something like euphoria (say Katz's Deli in NYC).

Today, I'm standing at the site of Starbucks. My latest dig. I'm trying to figure out why I and millions of others remain loyal despite the abundance of competing cafe's. The coffee is not the best. Their retail shops are starting to look like department stores. Yet something draws us back each day, sometimes more than once. 

This morning my pickax hit paydirt. I leaned in and brushed away the sand. Here's what I discovered: The Starbucks Job Application.  

Allow me to draw your attention to some of the questions on this application:

Have you ever visited a Starbucks Coffee Location? Describe your experience.
What do you like about coffee? 
Why would you like to work for the Starbucks Company?
Describe a specific situation where you have provided excellent customer service in your current position. 

Brokers: When you recruit an agent, do you ever ask these questions? Do you ever ask a recruit if they have used your company, and, if they have, to describe that experience? Do you ever ask what they truly love about real estate? Do you ever require them to scroll back into their past to reveal something special they did that could help you determine if they are suited to extend your brand experience?

Or are you just recruiting for the sake of growing? Are you just recruiting for the sake of saturating a marketplace? Are you just recruiting for the chance to get one deal from anyone with a pulse? Or are you trying to landscape the marketplace with an experience that is bankable?

Agents: Have you ever really sat down and wrote out why you're attracted to the broker or the brand you're looking to call home? Or are you joining a firm just for the split? Or because you get a corner office? Or so you can have the freedom to do whatever you please? Or is there a deeper desire based on something intangible but ripe with meaning?

As my archeologist fingers sift through the chalky soil of wayward brands, I have found that their cultures are built on chaos. They have been bled of meaning in an entropic mercenary swirl.

Starbucks employees start out at less than $10.00 an hour. The work is hard. The hours are hard. Yet they are drawn there and picked based on certain virtues. This is what built their brand -- passion. Passion to serve. Passion to push the Starbucks experience. It's a passion that begins at the top and extends to the newest recruit. Everyone in Starbucks knows why they are there. Interview them as I have. Dig deep and gain an understanding that the foundation of any great company is a solid culture, experience and brand.

Those in real estate who have neglected to create such a foundation should take notice. Stick to what you're doing now, allow yourself to be run by fear and complacency, and in years to come, I and others like me might uncover your artifacts and find little by which to identify you. You will have been lost. Unknown.

Don't let that happen.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Blazing a trail of ethics, morality and social interaction

If you read us regularly you know I am a huge fan of Zappos. My dedication to this company is born from their dedication to me - their customer - which I have now been for several years. I have purchased dozens upon dozens of shoes and other goods, outfitting my wife, myself and our 4 kids.

My relationship with them began a year before I actually purchased. I used the site to search for products and read the content but was not, like many consumers, always ready to start shopping immediately. While real estate still grapples with how to deal the passive web shopper, trying like heck to corral them with lead generation and capture mechanisms from the first visit, Zappos, hung back. Chillin'. It waited for me and, in the meantime, gave me access to everything. One day, I became a customer.

And then things got great. 

I am also blown away by their CEO, Tony Hsieh - the man - and the clarity with which he guides his company. I don't know him personally. And I don't have too to understand his dedication to the process. I do know this for sure: Every decision he makes must bow at the alter of the Zappos brand promise and answer to the question: How does this increase the level of super service we offer our customers?

I read his blog. I follow him on Twitter and continue to marvel at how he exudes positive thoughts during these challenging times.

Today, Tony published this Blog post correlating the skills he's amassed as a businessman to the game of poker. It's pointless to pull a few quotes. It's best to read this in its entirety but clearly, in his world, being humble, friendly, appreciative and always open to the possibly someone knows more than you are the key takeaways for me.

Zappos is more than a vendor of apparel. In fact, they are more than a company that provides great customer service. Zappos is fast becoming a model of ethics and morality for those looking to blaze a trail forward in the world of online social interaction.

I get it.
I'm grateful for it.  
And I grow as a result.

- Davison 
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Let's call it Zulia

Brian wrote this toward the very end of December 2007. I remember both of us flying down to Los Angeles (each from different destinations), meeting at the airport and grabbing a cab to meet with a client. We were throwing ideas around and before long we realized the cabbie was completely lost. In the few minutes I spent trying to get the cabbie back on track with the directions we had, Brian hatched this idea and presented it to me. It was one of those moments when I wished we still had our tech company so we could build an app that enabled our customers to do this. I loved this idea then, and I still love it today. ...Marc

On Friday, Davison and I gave a presentation to a group of top producers at a large real estate company here in the Bay Area. At these things, I usually play Ed McMahon to Marc's Johnny (minus the pre-show hi-balls). I keep things moving and laugh at all the jokes.

But this time I wanted to take a few minutes to share an idea I had with the crowd. I offer it for your evaluation below.

I've been thinking that if I were to sell real estate in my neighborhood, one of the things I would do would be to create a comprehensive database of images, sales histories and notes on every single home in the neighborhood (in my case, about 1,200 homes).

In other words, I'd create my own private Zillow or Trulia -- or, really, something even more valuable to my clients and prospects. Maybe I'd call it Zulia.

The data would be impeccably accurate, the images would be clear street level views, and it would be frequently and meaningfully updated. Each home would have its own page. Heck, I could even run this on Wordpress. Every home would be a post.

But -- and the real value would lie herein -- all of the data, all of the images, would be complemented by my own assessment of the home. This might include observations taken on a broker tour at some point in the past ("next door neighbor raises German Shepards"; "living room gets very little light in winter"), or notes on sales prices that would make such data much more meaningful than a list of out-of-context comps. I might, for example, note that an unusually low sales price could be attributed an out of area listing agent, not a marker of a market shift.

This database could be used in a couple different ways. I could either use it as a tool for myself and my clients and keep it password protected. It would be helpful in discovering buyer preferences or helping shape sellers' perception of their home's value. Or I could leave it wide open.

Either way, I'd be using the Web to leverage my valuable experience and knowledge in a new way that would help clients and differentiate me from every other agent in my neighborhood with a stack full of comps from the MLS.

The agents in attendance liked the idea. But in reality, most were selling super high-end homes and don't get their fingernails dirty in the nitty gritty of technology. With a more time and effort, this could even be done at a brokerage level.

Your thoughts?

-- Brian Boero

Online real estate marketing made simple

Brian first published this blog on October 1, 2007. Every word of it rings true today some 14 months later. 

A while back I gave a speech at a real estate franchise convention on the topic of online marketing. 200 weary brokers filled the room. They expected to hear about new technologies and cutting edge tactics.

I let them down. I decided, instead, to tell them this:

The first thing to do when thinking about online marketing is to forget about technology completely. A carnival of blinking tools and barking vendors has clouded your thinking. I want you to go back 15 years to a time when your marketing was guided by an understanding of business fundamentals.

Now -- in 1992 -- where do you start in thinking about how to market your business?

Right here: Understand your customer.

Then what? Meet their wants and needs.

It is then reasonable to say that your marketing effort should be about telling and showing prospective customers you have what they want.

Let's fast forward back to today and apply this formula to your business and the Internet.

What are your customers' wants and needs? There are some things unique to your market, but a decade of research from NAR, CAR and others has pretty well established what consumers want and need most when they go online for real estate:

#1 Listings
#2 Home value information
#3 Community information

Now, let's meet their wants and needs.

First off, put a full IDX feed directly on your home page, front and center. No "featured homes", just quick access to a full feed of listings for your market and prominent promotion of the "homes by email" feature that comes with your IDX system.

Next, dedicate a full section of the site to detailed, up-to-the-minute information on home values in your market: Recent sales, list to sales price ratios, days on market and your own analysis of what it all means. Put this on a blog, email it in a newsletter and make it easily printable. Get it out there!

Lastly, leverage the local knowledge within your company by placing detailed neighborhood information on the site. Focus on the small stuff no one else covers. This may be done via a blog or blogs, or, if you don't have skilled writers in your company, at least hire a local freelancer to craft some core neighborhood guides.

You can forget about everything else about until you master these things.

How, then, do you tell and show prospective customers you have what they want?

First, eliminate almost everything that does not make a connection between what you know your prospective customers want and what you now have to offer them. Employ the electronic marketing platform you've been using to send e-cards and cookie recipes to distribute all that neighborhood and market knowledge you know have on your site. Switch out all those newspaper and bus bench ads touting your brand to simple calls to action along the lines of "Search every home for sale in _________ at www.___________.com" or "Sign up for weekly home sales prices in your neighborhood at www.__________.com".

If you look at online marketing through this lens, things will become much clearer. You'll also have a framework for judging what online applications are important for your business and which are not. You'll find a new focus that will move you beyond the clamor of the carnival.

--- Brian Boero

I believe in Father Christmas - Holiday cheer U2 style

I couldn't resist posting this.

Whether you love U2 or not, this rendition is simply gorgeous. And frankly, there is no musical sound more beautiful to me than The Edge playing his 12-string Rickenbacker, piped through a Korg SDD3000 digital delay (or a TC 2290) and out through a vintage 1960's Vox amp.

This track was recorded for the launch of (Red)Wire, the newest addition to the Product (RED). (Red)Wire is a digital music magazine promoting new music. Fees from memberships (see home page for free trail membership) are appropriated towards purchasing life saving medications and helping fight against disease in the world's poorest countries.

As a long-time member of the One Organization, and a long-time musician, this is something particularly near and dear to my heart.

I know many people prefer not mixing music with politics, but even from my early days listening to Phil Ochs as a kid in the 60's, the Clash in the 70's and U2 since 1981, this is how I tend to mix my musical drinks.

And honestly, I think these four Irish guys truly do the work of angels.

I thought it wise to take a minute and bring something sweet to the otherwise hard boiled tone of real estate that often takes place here.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc