Category Archive

Marketing

Things You Need To Know Part 2

Posted on October 31, 2023 by Russell Shaw

If you take the Sales Price of any house and divide it by its number of square feet, you would get the price per square foot for that house. Contrary to popular opinion, that formula does not generally work in reverse. If you do enough research you’ll find out it occasionally works. So sites like Zillow or Realtor .com are occasionally correct – with about the same frequency of how a stopped watch is correct twice a day. If price per square foot was a valid formula, Zillow would be correct almost all the time. Unless someone is certified as

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How Zillow Cheated Me – Part 1

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Russell Shaw

When I finally discovered in late January what Zillow had done to me and all of their paying customers outraged me so thoroughly that I called and made several demands.  Working my way through their channels it became obvious that they had no intention of doing any of them.  From their point of view they had done precisely nothing wrong.  They had sent a notice.  It was all legal. In other words, they could get away with it. The 2nd person I spoke with is named, Martin.  Martin’s job was to handle people who wanted to cancel their account with

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Bank of America, RE/Max and Wells Fargo. From Very Bad to Great.

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Russell Shaw

For his ground breaking book, "Good To Great", Jim Collins and his research team looked into just about every public company in the United States to find those companies that made the transition from good to great.  Good is the enemy of great – which is why most companies and most people never make that leap.  They are good. They are not great.  To get on Jim Collins "great list" a company had to significantly outperform the other companies in that industry for  a minimum of fifteen years.  Making the great list wasn’t going to be a fluke.  Collins first

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A Late Christmas Gift For You

Posted on December 26, 2009 by Russell Shaw

I haven’t been blogging much lately (for some months) and needed an easy one to get myself started again.  The gift to me is being able to post this here now.  The gift to you is a really (really really) cool book from Seth Godin you can download for free, here. I think you will really like it.  I know I have. Merry Christmas to everyone!

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I Hate Most Every Sales Pitch And Most Salespeople But Make My Living Selling

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Russell Shaw

It’s true.  I really don’t like salespeople, I don’t like to listen to a sales pitch and anytime someone says, "I just need twenty minutes in person to explain it to you", I already know in advance that whatever it is I don’t want it.  And, for sure,  I don’t want to listen to them explain it to me. It is also true that I have made my living on straight commission since I was 17.  I have not had a "job" or worked for wages, I’ve lived on commissions all these years.  Several times over the years people who

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1. The Discount Realtor Rain Dance

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Russell Shaw

  I believe that the success of a rain dance has more to do with timing than the quality of the dancing.  A few short years ago the discount real estate companies were being heralded as the wave of the future.  "Traditional brokerage" was all but finished.  Game over.  Now the internet based, lower fee, more modern, forward-thinking companies would dominate the industry. Virtually all of the real estate companies that proclaimed this the loudest are either already completely out of business or have dwindled down to the point that few think of them as much of a threat to

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Let’s Talk About How Much We Charge

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Russell Shaw

Let’s talk about commissions.  Realtor to Realtor.  We do it everyday with potential customers.  Reporters can ask us how much we charge and then print our answers for other agents to read.  You can call any real estate office and simply ask them or just look on their website (if they are willing to put their fees there as most discount companies are – and I am, as well).  Would it be okay if you read how much another agent or company charges but not okay if you heard them physically say it?  A few years ago when I was

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Home Is Where Someone Thinks It is

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Russell Shaw

  There is an unalterable reason that discount real estate companies are having a much tougher road to hoe these days than the traditional companies they were going to replace: the fact that they are discount companies.  That’s correct, they can’t escape the fact that they positioned themselves as discount companies.  Their problem isn’t that some other discount real estate company charges even less – their problem is they are stuck being a discount company in a buyer’s market.  That is a recipe for failure. If getting a lower fee was what the public currently actually wanted right now it

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Fantastic New Yard Sign

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Russell Shaw

When I saw what my friends, John Kalinowski and  Derek & Mariana Wagner had done with this idea, like everyone else I thought, "Pretty nice.  In fact, really nice".  But I also saw that they were only using photos of the house the sign was in front of (a very 80’s and 90’s approach).  I wanted to take it further, much further. As you can see above, my new design doesn’t even bother with pictures of the subject property – I simply use nice pictures that people will want to look at: high-end homes, Camelback Mountain, a pretty girl. Do

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