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The only thing that might improve it would be the sound of the howling winds…

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Don Stewart posed an interesting question this morning about whether real estate is changing top-down from the broker or bottoms-up from the agent. In a post about how Redfin sees the real estate industry changing, Don suggested we had focused too much on the laws, the brokers, the MLS data sharing rules and the system by which sellers pay buyer’s agents:

I think that many agents are becoming more client focused, less afraid of discussing value for money, and are happy to be judged by their performance. They are not just trying to grab commissions, they want to build a professional practice. Real change happens from the ground up, not the top down and I see some very encouraging signs.

Don’s right. When I first got into this business, Redfin focused on structural ways we could make real estate better: by surveying customers and publishing responses, by paying agents at least in part based on survey results, by sharing as much data as possible with consumers.

But the most profound change has probably come from our agents. I’m not sure if we attracted the most progressive agents, or if those agents were in fact what made us progressive in the first place. But the longer I’m in this business, the more I’ve come to realize that what I think doesn’t matter as much as what our agents do every day.

What do you think? Is change coming via the agents or the brokers?

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Mortgage squirrels, searching for some nuts, during what I believe could be a long winter, might consider this idea:

There should be a lot of listings hitting the market when the shadow inventory eventually gets released.  Banks are not very attentive sellers inasmuch as they care less about condition and price than expediency.  Rather than pump money into property improvements or work with HOA’s to get the financial statements in order, they reduce the price until a cash buyer comes along.  Zillow showed us that REOs tend to sell for 3/4 of the market price.

Equity sellers might be having a tough time moving condominiums because (a)- the REOs are priced lower and/or (b) the HOA hasn’t taken the time to secure an FHA and VA approval for the complex.  Mortgage squirrels can focus on (b) and add value to the sellers by broadening the market.  While assisting the HOA secure complex approvals will help the REO sellers, those sellers often prefer cash offers.

Consider targeting condominium owners who have had the property listed for more than 60 days.  Send a letter to the owner and carbon copy the listing agent and HOA President.  Highlight these points in the letter:

• a complex approved for FHA or VA financing will open up the market and attract owner-occupants
• more buyers means higher property values
• gov’t loans are assumable which could translate to even higher values when rates are higher

It is possible that listing agents will be upset with you.  When you explain that you are not an agent and you are trying to help them and their customer to sell the property, they will be open to your proposal.  HOA Presidents may have no clue about this because property management companies (that manage HOAs) typically don’t want to address this with the HOA boards.  The sellers may be skeptical but will offer you a chance to present your proposal.

You have a chance to be a hero with (a) someone who intends to buy another home (b) a selling professional who could be a great referral source for future business. and (c) an influential owner within the complex who might suggest that other owners patronize you.

FHA and VA complex approvals are simple but tedious.  If you have some down time, and want to position yourself as a professional (as opposed to another mortgage squirrel) to influential people, you might consider this idea.

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The last half of the title came to me as I recalled one of Johnny Carson’s most memorable lines. He was talking about how economists are supposed to be the smartest kids in the room, but at the same time can’t agree with each other what day it is. He said, “If we laid all the economists end to end around the world…it would be a good idea.” (Insert rimshot here.)

There are two basic schools of economic theory — Those who believe economies can be centrally controlled, engineered if you will — And those who believe economies should be as free as prudently possible, with regulation in place to abort fraud etc., i.e. they avoid central control as much as possible.

The engineers think they know better what ‘needs’ to be done, while consciously eschewing human responsive behavior as part of their equation. They believe if you raise/lower taxes the result will be arithmetic in nature, and that you and I won’t modify our behavior in either circumstance. That’s surely an oversimplification, but accurate.

The free market crowd says if you raise taxes you slow economies down, and if taxes are lowered more jobs are created due to more capital venturing into the market because of the lowered cost (taxes).

Then there are the folks who think they’re smarter than both schools. They try to blend what they think are the best ideas from both theories. Good luck.

We’ve all seen the argument between the two camps rage since we learned to spell economics.

I bring this up only to illustrate the current example of how the smart kids in at least one of the schools just doesn’t get it. I’ll leave it to you to decide which school that might be.

The argument today is, Are we in a deflationary cycle or are we about to enter what could be a hyper-inflationary cycle?

I lean toward deflation. Every single time an economy, any economy in the last eight centuries, has gone through a massive deleveraging, it’s been deflationary in nature. There have been no exceptions found in the research, as in zip, zero, zilch, nada. The last time we, as Americans, experienced deleveraging at this intensity level it resulted in massive deflation. According to the research, the time leading up to, and the subsequent deflationary cycle were almost textbook examples of the consequences of massive deleveraging.

I realize there are folks, (I used to be one of ‘em.) who point to the massive money printing going on by the Fed, coupled with their buying of treasuries. They say that’s the working definition of inflation. Not true. For it to be inflationary, the liquidity it creates must overwhelm the economy’s ability to absorb it. The analogy might be water into a huge sponge. If the sponge is bone dry, and has a capacity of 10 gallons of water before it ‘leaks’ water (inflation), yet we only pour eight gallons into it (money printing), there’s no leakage. It was all absorbed. No inflation.

My crystal ball is as cracked as the next guy’s. But I think I’m right about being on the road to deflation. Whether on Wall Street, Main Street, or real estate in general, there’s simply far too much deleveraging to accomplish for inflation to win this battle. The sponge isn’t impressed so far.

We can’t say, “The Fed’s printin’ too much money, we’re gonna have double digit inflation” — While outa the other side of our mouths decry all the negative leverage on Wall Street and the monster default tsunami about to hit lenders. We gotta pick one. We can’t be morbidly obese and a marathon runner at the same time.

Of course, this is where the stagflation crowd enters, stage left. Go ahead, make your case. I’d love to hear how we get inflation amidst all this deleveraging — not to mention the incredibly growing federal/state deficits. The fact remains, for over 800 years there’s not been one exception to the result of massive deleveraging in a macro economy — it’s deflationary.

I’m not only willing, I’m praying to be found wrong as we look back several years from now. I just hope I’m wrong by degree, and not because we endured hyper-inflation.

What say you?

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So, if a broker owner really wanted to build a mega monster traffic magnet lead generation machine, couldn’t he or she just mandate that team members create a regularly occurring piece of content around some theme?

Maybe the agent entrance interview would so something like this?:

Broker Pimp: So, what’s your niche biche.

Agent: I don’t really have one.

Broker Pimp: That’s ok, we’ll help you come up with one. Then we’ll help you work it In a way that generates copious lead flow for you.

Agent: Sounds great, so what do I have to do?

Broker:Well every agent here at Cosmodemonic Realty is required to contribute some form of content to our company blog on a weekly basis. All you have to do is create the content and email it in to our in house technomarketer Nick Burnsy editor guy. And we’ll take care of the rest: Syndication to your social profiles, some paid click advertising, seo… All you do is create that juicy content on the regular then wait for the phone to start ringing. Our weekly E-Newsletter goes out every Saturday morning and most of our agents generatlly get some kind of healthy interaction based on the content they’ve recently contributed.

Agent:But I’m not really that great of a writer.

Broker PimpThat’s ok… Can you take a picture or a video from your fancy phone?

Agent:Sure.

Broker Pimp:Cool. We’ll set you up with a secret email address that you can use to send area photos to. What town do you live in? Could you see emailing in a “Yourtown” Business of the Week” on a regular basis? Maybe with a quick sentence or 2 about the business? Or perhaps you’ve got the stones to just stop a neighbor on the street and ask them what they like about where they live?

Agent: Sure I guess, but I don’t want to limit myself so narrowly to one area.

Broker Pimp: That’s great! You’ll never be asked to only work within your designated niche focus, you’ll be free to contribute as much extra stuff as you want. In fact, most of the agents here will tell you that they’ve become quite addicted to content creation… that’s it proven to be a much better exercise then sitting around crying about how bad the markets been these last few years. Folks seem to not only enjoy the creative buzz, but they’re also sorta competing with eachother to see who’s stuff can generate the most comments and passing along on Twitter and Facebook.

Agent: Ok, I guess I’m starting to understand. But what’s all this web stuff going to cost me?

Broker Pimp Oh, nothing. We got this. All we need from you is that weekly piece of solid niche focused beat real estate reporting. Should only take you a few minutes, maybe a half hour or an hour tops. In return you’ll get a share of all the business we’re generating as a result of having become the most widely read online news source in town.

Agent Ok, so if this is all included in my commission arrangement… Hmm… What if I don’t want to participate? Could I maybe still the Glengary leads but receive a lower split in return?

Broker Pimp Biche, You Must Be Trippin! Sorry, this ones a non-negotiable deal breaker. You’re either willing to help yourself by helping the team in the manner we’ve been discussing, or we simply don’t want you. So what’ll it be? What’s your niche biche?

Photo from SomeECards.Com - Click To Visit The Best Greeting Card Site On The Web...

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Your thoughts? (Hat tip to Tom Royce for the heads up on this.)

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Sign this contract with us, and we will deliver fresh leads right to your in-box! The cost? Well, the cost is more than covered by just one deal! Can you afford not to take advantage of this? Should we bill you on the 1st or the 15th of the month?

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The shadow inventory has been a topic of interest with almost every agent I talk to lately.  Most believe it is large and few understand why it isn’t in the marketplace rather than held by the banks.  Russell Shaw recently wrote about the shadow inventory being gibberish.   It is an interesting article and one I recommend reading.

I rarely disagree with Mr. Shaw, and rather than do so now I’ll simply suggest that we are talking past one another.  As I read it, he is suggesting that this inventory doesn’t exist because it is, for the most part, out there already; just not listed as REO.  He makes it quite clear, however, that he is not talking about foreclosures still to come. (Apologies to Russell for over-simplifying.)  This is where we begin to part ways.  I submit that the shadow inventory must necessarily include not only actual REOs (or REOs not listed as REOs), but the entire picture.

More to the point, if we look at all the homes that have been foreclosed on, are in foreclosure and should be in foreclosure, we are left scratching our heads and find ourselves back to the same question: why aren’t the banks taking these homes in, putting them on the market, and selling them?   (I’m talking here especially about those homes where people have stopped making their payments and continue to live for 6, 12, even more months.)

MORTGAGES IN DEFAULT
Here’s a graph courtesy of the New York Times:

Sources: Federal Reserve Board and Mortgage Bankers Association, via Haver Analytics

That is an awful lot of mortgages in foreclosure; but add to that that lower line – of mortgages in default and not yet in foreclosure – and the numbers are staggering (again, think of people staying on a year after they’ve stopped making payments).  So no matter what we call it, the question remains: What are the banks doing? Why aren’t these mortgages foreclosed?  Why isn’t this inventory on the market?

I know all real estate is local and there are plenty of areas around this country where the last thing agents want to see is more inventory.  But here in San Diego this question of  Shadow Inventory is burning a hole in people’s brains.  We are down to less than two months inventory and the effective inventory (discounting homes that are not financeable due to cracked slabs, missing kitchens, etc.) is closer to one month.  The average buyer is writing over fifteen offers before buying a home or simply walking away in frustration.  We are clamoring for this inventory; why isn’t it out there?

A THEORY
Here’s a theory I’ve been sharing over the past two months with the agents I talk to: the banks have a financial incentive NOT to sell these homes for the same reason they have a financial incentive NOT to lend money.  Let me ask you: if you could borrow money right now from the Fed at roughly 0%, and through carry trades create a very low risk return of 3%, would you do it?  Of course you would; that would certainly be more prudent than putting the money out there in relatively risky mortgages?  More important to our discussion of Shadow Inventory:  you can borrow that money at 0% so long as your balance sheet and reserves are in order. When you have a non-performing asset (like a mortgage not being paid) you can carry that for quite a while.  But, if you sell that home in foreclosure you book the loss.  I don’t know about you, but if I were a bank I would happily carry a non-performing asset and continue to borrow money at 0%.

CONCLUSION
When the Fed begins to raise rates -expected to be late 2nd quarter or early 3rd – the banks will thank them for the ride and begin clearing their books of these non-performing assets in a hurry.  If we follow this theory to its inevitable conclusion, we are looking at a scenario wherein inventory is going up (and home prices are dropping) while at the same time rates are rising.  Falling home prices and rising interest rates. Not the summer I want… and I hope to hell I am as wrong as I have ever been.

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President Obama told a New Hampshire town hall meeting:

“When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices and it’s time your government did the same.”

Amazing, I wonder how Obama talks about Vegas when he’s not on TV?

Maybe this is why HUD Dissed Las Vegas In The Housing Stimulus Lottery, or Florida got their high speed Disney World Train and Las Vegas didn’t.

Either way, at least we know exactly what Las Vegas can expect when the President speaks about “Jobs” being his top priority in 2010.

And the Mayor’s reaction:

Speaking of blowing a bunch of money on trips….

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Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an iPad app. Not just text and video, but taking full advantage of the hardware — audio, video, text, touch, motion, all integrated with everything else on the web. How about semantically integrated, with the app and the iPad working together at every launch of the app to maintain the best and most useful outbound links. This will all start to happen now. Slowly and clumsily at first, but we are on the verge of iPad authoring tools that are to the iPad what HyperCard always wanted to be to the original Macintosh. This is so cool I could freeze solid right now!

Meanwhile, Brad Inman (along with every vendor of crap products) thinks you’re an idiot. He doesn’t think he needs to get as close as he can come to doing a perfect job. He doesn’t think he even needs to do a proficient job. He studied under the world’s great carney barkers, from P.T. Barnum to Andy Warhol, and he is convinced to the core that pigs — that would be you, the consumer — will eat anything. Worse, that pigs will beg and plead for the opportunity to waste their hard-earned money on reeking, festering, nauseating garbage.

Yes. I agree. I am making a mountain out of a molehill. But it happens that we all of us have until lately been stranded on a vast, barren mountain composed utterly and entirely of uninterrupted molehills. The Vook is near to hand — and dear to my mind in its almost-perfect upfucktitude — so I think it does us well to examine the underlying epistemology and psychology of the business model. But that underlying epistemologically-psychotic psychology is everywhere. Or was until lately, and, we may hope that its waning waxes on forever. There will always be con-men and the sly lazy liars who are their natural prey. But the outrageous failure of the Vook is something we all can take pride in. At least we are not complete suckers!

Even so, the things I have written about the Vook, while not nearly harsh enough, seem to me to be ripe with pith — rich in truth and portentous in their marketing insights. I found — if I might be indulged in my outsized, awesome humility — that revisiting them repaid my effort. I’m not the Vookish type, but I’m thinking that if you read, think about and quarrel with the marketing arguments I am making, at the very least you will come away with a better understanding of what I think marketing is and should be — even if you disagree with everything I’m saying.

But: Even then: When Brad Inman takes to the pages of the New York Times to insult my intelligence and yours and everyone’s with a bucket full of unconcealed, uncongealed carney crap straight out of Machiavelli (the Vook, not a real book) — kissing his boo-boos and kissing his ass are the very last things on my mind. And while swatting at mosquitos is not itself a wealth-producing action, it is the preferable stop-loss. It’s disgusting to squash a cockroach — or a scorpion — but much more disgusting to make yourself its slave, its minion, its underling, its toady — its stooge. And it must be true that Brad Inman has no friends if I am the only person on this earth who told him that his swan-song brain-fart is useless and idiotic and cravenly cynical — irrelevantly redundant and fundamentally corrupt.

But even then: My take is that to have read me on the Vook and the iPad is really to have read something — this being the most-perfectly Roman sentence I have devised in my brief career as a Latinist. To write is to think, to read is to rethink, and to engage a thoughtful mind — in silence and solitude — when that mind has the time, the inclination and the courage to think the unthought — the unthinkable! — this is but the shadow of what human communication can be and will be as we grow into our fundamental, unavoidable, inescapable, gorgeous and glorious solitary self-responsibility. The lazy liar needs the con-man and the sucker needs the carney barker. But we stand on the threshold of the world of man — of true humanity — and we each of us need nothing but the human mind — each one invisible to all the others — and the vast riches we can unearth by using the mind.

So: Indulge my indulgence, if you choose. Or don’t. But my final thought is this one: This essay is proof of its argument: I may be very far from being wise, but I am wiser for having thought this through — by having written about it. Your mind is your own business, but my mind, at least, is improved.

Try doing that with a Vook.

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I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.

So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.

Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.

Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-”a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?

The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on the Macintosh, but no one in authority at Microsoft ever thought it wise or prudent or beneficial to fix an obvious, bone-headed error in one crappy version of Windows after the next.

Here’s the real truth of the matter: They thought you didn’t know any better. They thought it didn’t matter much to you if you did. And they thought you had nowhere else to go in any case. That one little bug, one among thousands in the Windows world, was just a tiny little expression of contempt for you — for your time and your money, and for the satisfaction you had hoped to obtain by investing your time and your money in Microsoft’s flagship product. Close enough was good enough — and if you don’t like it you can go have safer sex with yourself.

Why was the Vook doomed to failure from the outset? Why is the iPad going to do the very things the Vook could have and should have done? Why is the Vook stuck with a lame-ass video-with-text design paradigm when the exact same hardware could have done so much more?

Brad Inman told you, on his LinkedIn page. I drew attention to his confession of mediocrity at the time:

Premium content does not sell because it is not premium content. Something new and different will sell.

That might sound pretty tame, but to decipher it you need to think like a dinosaur. Witness: “We used to hustle the rubes by standing athwart the chokepoint and charging a toll. But now everything we used to sell is available for free. To succeed at hustling the rubes now, we’re going to have too cook up a new gimmick.”

Brad Inman said, right out in public, for all the world to see, that he thinks you are an idiot and that he can can take two things you can already get for free and, by slapping them together in a shiny new gizmo, he can hustle you out of your money.

And that’s the kind of shit that always used to work, isn’t it? How many times in your life have you parted with your money only to discover that what you bought is nothing like what you thought you were buying. We’ve all heard of and studied the Zig Ziglars and the Tom Hopkins of the sales training world, but the driving force behind sales and marketing in the United States, since World War II, at least, has been the carney barker. The whole point and purpose of marketing in corporate America has been to hustle you out of as much money as possible while delivering as little value as possible. Microsoft and Brad Inman are convenient targets because they’re near to our lives, but the whole economy has been driven by gonophs just like them for a long, long time.

Guess what? It’s all over. The demise of these dinosaurs will take a while — but not nearly as long as they will want to believe. But among all the many other things it is going to do, the iPad is going to kill them off.

Not the iPad itself, perhaps, but the marketing paradigm it is ushering in with it. The sine qua non of the close-enough-is-good-enough product or service is shine-it-on marketing, baffle-’em-with-bullshit-marketing, schmooze-’em-as-you-fleece-’em marketing. And it will not work any longer.

The heavy lifting is really being done by the internet as such. The iPad is just the lever that will tip the balance. When I say that privacy is an artifact of inefficiency, I am not exhaustively describing the consequences of inefficiency. Hustle-and-jive marketing is also something that can only persist where the cost of overcoming information asymmetries is relatively high. If I say, “100% Organic Chicken!” and you don’t have a fast, cheap way of discovering that there is no such thing as inorganic chicken, then I have put one over on you.

No longer. You can still hustle fools out of their money, but you cannot hustle any consumer who is determined not to be foolish with money. And the iPad is the computer for the rest of us. Apple’s new tablet computer is going to open up the world of the web to the tens of millions of people who have so far missed out on this revolution of pure, plain-spoken truth.

Here is a sad fact: Virtually everyone in the United States is uneducated. Late in the nineteenth century, education as an institution was taken over by ideologues hell-bent on enslaving Americans in the name of “progress.” If you were blessed to know anyone educated in America prior to World War I, I expect you were amazed at how much that person knew, compared to you — this assuming you had had enough schooling to comprehend just how badly you yourself had been schooled. (And if you’re having trouble unpacking that sentence, you are proving its validity.)

Americans have been easy to snow, until lately, because they have never truly learned how to think. I hope you don’t regard yourself as having been insulted. I am speaking for myself, as well. I can see just enough of the world to know that I am peeking through a keyhole, and I know that I will never, ever compare in intellectual power to an ordinary high school graduate, circa 1880 or so. But the internet gives me and you and everyone the power to amend at least the most critical of our deficits of knowledge. We may never understand the world as Socrates did, but we can use Google and Wikipedia and resources more exacting to discover the truth when we suspect we are being lied to.

And the implications of that simple fact — the internet balances all information asymmetries — are truly revolutionary. If they want to be, consumers can always be on an equal footing with vendors. Even better, when a vocal consumer (someone like me, for instance) catches a half-assed vendor (Brad Inman leaps to mind) trying to bullshit the public, that consumer has the power to make the true facts available for anyone else who might wish to avoid being sold a box full of crap.

This is an amazing thing. After ten millennia or more of being herded and hassled and hustled and robbed by the powerful, any single one of us has the power to fell any Goliath in the marketplace.

And in just a year or two, our numbers will double, thanks to the iPad.

What are the implications of these remarkable events?

Stop lying, for one thing. Your customers will tell you when they think you’re full of shit — unless they’ve seen all the way through you already. Once they do, they’ll be working with honest vendors forevermore. And, for god’s sake, up your standards. If you would find your product or service unsatisfying, don’t expect me to buy it. Close enough is not good enough. You either did the job or you’re trying to hustle ignorant people into trading their hard-won money for your lost-cause crap. Those days are over, or they are soon to be over, and none of the stunts that always worked for you in the past will continue to work in the future.

If you’re already with me on all of this, so much the better. The world is ours to win. The Inmans and the Microsofts of the world hate the human mind, because it is the human mind that discovers — and reports, at full voice — that their products are crap. The iPad will massively magnify our voices, even as it provides millions of consumers with a first-hand experience of a product built by people who love the human mind.

Thanks to the iPad, as the precipitating agent, at least, mediocrity is dead. Contempt for the consumer is dead. Hoke, smoke, hustle and jive are all dead. And pure, plain-spoken integrity — the integrity of Socrates — is ascendant in the marketplace at long last.

My toast to this new epoch is simple: To the truth — undiluted, unaugmented, unalloyed, unshaded and unafraid. To the pure, plain-spoken truth!

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Thankfully the Obama administration is doing everything possible to stamp out this dreaded disease………

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Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman is in Scottsdale today and tomorrow for the MLSCOVE Conference, a gathering of MLS executives from all over the country.

Glenn made time for Cathleen and me this morning, buying us breakfast and regaling us with stories of the not-always-smooth path Redfin is traveling.

In real life, the man has a sweet and gentle — even beatific — nature. We saw this when he spoke at the first BloodhoundBlog Unchained event, winning a hostile audience over with a quiet, unaffected honesty.

That shone through again this morning, and, allowing time for Glenn’s son and our pets, we spent most of our time talking about real estate marketing issues: REOs versus short sales, new builds versus resale, the prospects for recovery, etc.

It’s funny, actually, to talk this way, because Glenn Kelman is a star in the real estate firmament, but in person he is fun and personable and very empathetic. Whatever our past differences, I respect and admire what he has been able to achieve with Redfin in such a short time. It was an honor to be able to spend some time with him.

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