Bloodhound News: An entirely
different level of excitation...

We had thought to take a moment to make fun of the local newspaper's incessant incitements to an incandescent - all-but-incendiary - gloom. The market is slow, you see, and it's not at all like last year. To the latter observation we can only offer a hearty "Duh!" As to the former, we would talk about how slow business is if we weren't so ding-dong busy. And although the making fun part is always fun, there is a point at which tracing the the paths of self-fulfilling prophesies of self-serving acts of self-sabotage becomes less than ideally rewarding. Cats will spend hours chasing and capturing imaginary insects, but it's only because they have nothing better to do.

We are Bloodhounds, not cats.

We've written before about the idea of praxis when it comes to listing residential real estate for sale. We are celebrating right now because we have just pushed this idea to a whole new level. We may not yet be the best listers in the markets we compete in, but we are becoming a thing apart from our competitors, an entirely different level of excitation.

Unlike our friends at the newspaper, we submit ourselves directly to the test of the marketplace. If we are right, we prosper. If we are wrong, we dine on nothing but imaginary insects, assiduously captured by our cats.

So far, we haven't had to ask them to share...

Documenting a house
out of a fairy tale...

This is what we're talking about. If you visit this web site, you will see the quantity and quality of work we're doing. This is only one part of the marketing strategy for this house, but it is a big, big part. That web site is over 85 megabytes of data - and it's still growing. There are more than 125 internal web pages in the site, not counting external links. There are over 500 photographs of the house - before, during and after the restoration.

Cathleen's tax-deductible army of Guerrilla Prospectors have promoted the home to thousands of neighboring homes, and they'll be out again this weekend to invite the neighbors to the Open House this Sunday - Noon to 4pm, if you're in town.

The home will be heralded by our new signs, about which more below, and we hope to excite interest among the local media, first because this absolutely unique home is up for sale, and second because it will be featured on Generation Renovation on HGTV on Friday, March 24th.

But: We submit ourselves directly to the test of the marketplace, and that doesn't happen until a few minutes after midnight on Thursday morning. If we are right in what we're doing, we'll prove it, as we proved it with 1102 West Culver Street, and as we hope to prove it again with 922 West Culver Street.

And if we are wrong?

If we're wrong, we're still right, because this is the right way to do this business. The big innovation in real estate, right now, is to deliver even less service, even less expertise, even less added-value. We think this is twice foolish. As real estate transactions become more complex, fanatically-devoted professional expertise is more necessary than ever. Realtors who don't want to do the real job, no matter how cheaply they are willing to work, will find themselves in another line of business in very short order.

Now that is one big dog...

We just re-did our signs. We are deeply devoted to the idea of yard signs, so much so that we have written an entire philosophy on the subject. We had anticipated that the new signs would appear first at 1134 West Culver Street, the fairy tale cottage shown above, but in fact the first house to stop traffic with that enormous picture of Odysseus the Spokesmodel Bloodhound was 3835 North 12th Avenue, a starter home owned by our long-time friend Joy Cook.

So the question that barks and leaps in the quiet of the mind is this one: Why is the picture of the dog so big? And the answer is simple: To stop traffic. We hate absolutely everything about The Way Things Have Always Been Done in real estate, and we think about everything we do to make sure that we are actually accomplishing our objectives. It's not just a sign, it's a magazine ad, and it's devised to make you stop and read it, just like a magazine ad. We look forward to the day when we can have a huge flat-panel TV monitor - or a huge Wi-Fi-enabled touch-screen Macintosh computer! - as our yard sign...

The Butler didn't do it...

If we're poised to do a newsletter around this time of the month, we like to wait for Dr. Jay Butler at ASU to do his monthly regurgitation of median housing values. We don't think these numbers are all that valuable - we like our own much better - but other people do. And, of course, their release is another occasion for Dr. Butler to say something we can make fun of. But for some reason, the good doctor can't seem to deliver the goods in a timely fashion. We're done with our numbers on the third or fourth of the month. Our analysis actually only takes a few minutes, but we have to wait for all the end-of-the-month errors in the MLS to get ironed out. Dr. Butler is working with a lot more transactions than we are, bur presumably he has slaves--er, interns to do his scut work.

In any case, we're tired of waiting around, and we already know the news that matters: Values on Market Basket homes were down 1.14% in February. Interestingly, for the first fortnight in March, values are way up, hugely up, higher than ever. Many, many homes are selling in seven days or fewer. Presumably this will settle down toward the end of the month, but March could turn out to be an excellent month.

That won't make any difference to the Chicken Littles at the newspaper, for whom the sky cannot but fall, but it should make a difference to you. For example, if you have a LIBOR-based ARM, now might be a good time to refinance. Just don't throw away your proceeds on depreciating assets...

Phoenix and the wow factor...

The City of Phoenix recently celebrated the anniversary of its incorporation in 1881 (the town was founded by Col. Jack Swilling in 1867). The Republic had a timetable of key events. We thought we'd highlight two, for the wow factor:

• 1950: Phoenix covered an area of 17.1 square miles, had a population of 106,000 residents and was the 99th-largest American city.
• 2006: Phoenix spans across more than 514 square miles, has a population of more than 1.4 million residents and is the sixth-largest city in the country.

In a word: Wow...

Who killed Houndswick?

Greg did.

Logan Hall at SallieMae Home Loans actually had us approved for funding, an astounding amount of money...

But it was not to be.

Our long-time home inspector and friend Mike Elsberry uncovered a repair issue that could have permanently wrecked our finances.

So we elected to walk away, crestfallen but unbowed. We had actually intended to invest in rental houses this year, so perhaps it's all for the best.

And we remain convinced that Bloodhaven is going to come back on the market this summer...

Anyway, thanks to everyone who expressed interest in Houndswick. It would have been a great house...

Catch your kid doing
something right...

Everyone who's ever raised a teenager knows that there are moments when the laws against murder seem unduly stringent. We've actually been pretty lucky with our son, Cameron, all things considered. Cathy has a vast army of tax-deductible teenagers she uses for Guerrilla Prospecting purposes, but she won't let Cameron work on that crew. On the other hand, Greg has whipped the boy into shape as a pretty fine web-services programmer. By now, Cameron does all of our programming - and there's a lot of it, more and more all the time.

Take a look at our listings below, or go to our listings page. Those are our current, active listings. The text you're seeing is generated on the fly from this control file:

    http://www.922westculverst.com/
    http://www.1134westculverst.com/
    http://www.3835north12thav.com/
    http://www.12622westmerrellst.com/
    http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/522EastHamptonAv/
    http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/11445North57thDr/
    http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/5613North72ndAv/

Those are the web addresses for each of the web sites for each one of our listings. Cameron has written software that uses that control file to go to each of those URLs, to look for the file in each called index.php, to open that file and search for the first headline, the first photograph and the first paragraph of body text, then reformat all that and issue it dynamically, site-by-site, on demand. That way, if we make a change to the main web page for a listing, that change will be reflected instantly on our listings page. To add or remove a listing, we just edit the control file. The rest is done by Cameron's software.

And, to think, we raised him ourselves...

Less than zillow...

Just so you don't feel let down, we'll take a quick minute to take a quick poke at the newspaper. This is from the Arizona Republic:

Want a reality check? Go to zillow.com, a new Web site with a program that calculates a home's value for free. It values several Valley homes for tens of thousands less than the price listed on them.

If you want to know what your house is worth, do not go to a zillow.com, which delivers completely useless estimates of value for free. Even Net Value Central, a tool used by professionals, lags the market by a month or more. The only way to price a house is to work as rigorously as possible from current and recently-sold listings for extremely similar properties. If you price your house to sell from sources like zillow.com, you will give thousands of dollars away. If you rely on zillow.com to tell you how much to offer on a home, you will see it sold to someone else.

You can prove all this to your own satisfaction, if you like. Our intrepid newspaper reporter tells us that she ran zillow.com on live listings and found it came in much lower than the listed prices. How did it do against sold listings? She didn't check, but you can. Run zillow.com on homes sold in the last month. You'll see that, time after time, zillow.com comes in substantially under real-life market results. It's a useless toy, which the reporter might have discovered on her own had she bothered to test it properly.

There's more to this, though. Unlike zillow.com, and most unlike newspaper reporters, we incur liability when we speak. If you ask us for an estimate of value for your home, we're going to take extreme care to be accurate, simply because this is the kind of people we are. But even if we were stupid and lax, we would still incur liability for the accuracy of our statements. Newspapers don't even bother to correct the errors they make in vast abundance. All other things being equal, which would you expect to promote a better standard of care?

Unlike our friends at the newspaper, we submit ourselves directly to the test of the marketplace - and to the caprices of avaricious attorneys. We are Bloodhounds, and we strive for perfection, always. But we dare not err...

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