BloodhoundBlog evangelism: How, by working together, we are going to reinvent real estate representation, convert the best real estate professionals to the wired life and put the bums out of the business

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

First, this is important: The easiest way to get someone to BloodhoundBlog is to type “BloodhoundBlog” into any web browser. The “.com” will be assumed by default, and BloodhoundBlog.com redirects to the full address of the weblog. If there is someone you work with whom you would like to see get involved in our world, all that person has to remember is that one word: BloodhoundBlog.

Why is that important? Because you are the most important factor in BloodhoundBlog’s growth. We don’t even have Google working for us right now, but it doesn’t matter. We have always grown on the strength of the content and on the strength of very bright people like you reading, commenting on, subscribing to, linking to and recommending that content.

Last night I looked in on Cheryl Johnson talking about the coffee-table books we build for high-end listings. One of the comments was an eye-opener for me:

Thanks for the BLOODHOUND link, I had not run across them yet and man what a good read, blew my 30 min quick.

Of the weblogs written by actual working real estate professionals — Realtors, lenders, investors, technologists, vendors — BloodhoundBlog has the deepest penetration: Most pages, most Technorati links, etc. It’s easy for me to forget that new people are coming on line every day — and that they have no automatic way of knowing about BloodhoundBlog.

So far, we have depended on viral effects to be found by those folks. But I want for people like Cheryl’s commenter to find us. You want it, too: It’s the people who care about doing their very best who will matter most to the world of real estate, going forward. We are each of us here for our own reasons, but, at the same time, we are all of us here out of a shared commitment to excellence. When you run across someone like the person who posted that comment, you need to send him or her here like a BloodhoundBlog evangelist. Not for our sakes, but for your own.

There’s more. After weeks of phone tag, it seems all but certain that we will not be able to hold BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando at the Orange County Convention Center, the facility the NAR will be using. The NAR has a non-compete clause in its contract, and it’s hard to imagine them waiving it for the likes of us. The rooms we would have liked to have used will not be available to us in any case.

This is not the end of the world, it simply means that we will have to use another facility. But that does create another evangelical problem. We need to enlist you as Orlando evangelists to begin with. There will be 20,000 Realtors at the NAR convention, and we would love to preach The Unchained Epiphany to 2,000 of them, if we can.

Why so many? Because there are three million real estate professionals in the United States, and we want to talk to the best of them, to baptize them in these oceans of electrons and birth them anew into the wired life. We know where residential real estate is headed, but, given where we are on the learning curve, we have the opportunity to set the standards that will obtain in our industry in the years ahead. Not only can we lead the best real estate professionals to our way of being, we can flush the bums out of the business forever. Not with laws, not with licenses, not with more and more brain-dead CE classes, but simply with barriers of the mind set too high for the lazy to leap.

So even with the best of conference facilities in Orlando, we would have needed your evangelical fervor — and, coming soon, Brian Brady has a divine plan to help you do well by doing good. But if we end up meeting anywhere but where the NAR is meeting, we will need that much more evangelism to expose as many people as we can to our world.

But there’s more still. Ken Kelly wrote a wonderful post last week on the idea of scenius — a kind of communal genius. I’m normally a hard sell on collective claims, but I’ve seen how the scenius effect can work in real life. It’s the sine qua non of Bebop, but you can see it happening right here — not all the time, but on our best days.

Kelly isolates these factors for a thriving scenius:

• Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

We have an incredible opportunity before us, because, like the Jazz musicians hanging out at Minton’s night club in New York in late 1942, we are not on anyone’s radar. After two years in the skunk works, we are finally able to draw a map to where we need to be. If you were at Unchained in Phoenix, you saw a lot of this. If you weren’t — and if you actually want to learn what we are learning — buy the DVDs or hie thee to Orlando in November.

I had a vision of what I wanted for this place eighteen months ago, and that image comes clearer to me every day. This is what we are doing:

1. We — we here at BloodhoundBlog — are inventing Real Estate 2.0 — the confluence of Social Media Marketing, Direct Marketing and belly-to-belly selling. Other people at other places are involved, but we push the game so much farther, so much faster that, without us, there is no game — just more and more sleazoid vendors milking you with Inmanospheric pressure.
2. We here at BloodhoundBlog are going to bring the Good News to the mostly unwired majority of real estate professionals.
3. We here at BloodhoundBlog are going to set the standards for quality of care so high that the bums and the crooks will run away from real estate screaming, seeking relief from the awful burden of excellence.

That’s a mission statement, far better than the one we’ve had so far. It imposes an obligation on me, too. Until now, I have chosen contributors to BloodhoundBlog for their writing ability. That’s still necessary, but it is not sufficient. What we need even more than great writing are great ideas. We need to push this game even farther, even faster, and if the world outside this place cannot keep up — so much the better. We’ll bring ’em along in due course.

But if you have thought that you might want to write here, my mind is always open to radical new ideas. Bring more scene to the scenius and you’re in.

And again and always, we need evangelists. When I look at Brian Brady, I always see Saint Francis Xavier, but my wife says the two of us are more like the Fabulous Baker Boys. Whatever. I really like the idea of a Jesuitical war of redemption for residential real estate, and this is a war we are uniquely equipped to fight.

Saint Francis fought with a bible in one hand and a sword in the other, but you can arm yourself for holy war with only one word:

BloodhoundBlog.

Type that one word into any web browser and you’re here — in the intellectual nexus of the future of residential real estate.

Tell your friends.

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