BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Jeff Kempe (page 1 of 2)

Realtor, Associate Broker

April 11, 2008

Nordstrom, Dave Liniger, RE/MAX and Web 2.0

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I’m just not a rah-rah guy. The most trouble I was ever in at Nordstrom – it almost got me fired – was my refusal, as a men’s shoe buyer in a suburban Portland mall store, to participate in an Anniversary Sale employee pep-rally-fashion-show, in which the men modeled the women’s apparel and the women modeled the men’s. When the store manager asked me why I wouldn’t want to be a team player, I told him shoe dogs – at 8.75% commission – tend to get much more excited by having enough of the right product to sell than my walking around in a dress; that would be my focus. I was saved by the increase.

So when I heard several weeks ago that Dave Liniger – Chairman and cofounder of RE/MAX International –would be in town for a three hour seminar, with the jingoistic “Be Great in 2008” title, my first thought was “Uh oh.” But I’d read the fabulous Everybody Wins, and think Dave Liniger’s brilliant; one has to be to go from nothing to building one of the most recognized brands in the world. So I and about a thousand others went.

He had me with the opening: “Don’t believe any crap NAR tells you.” That was followed by three hours of substantive (and riveting) advice on how to deal successfully in a real-world down market. I found myself every so often closing my eyes and thinking: he sounds exactly like Russell Shaw.

The number of mentions of Web 2.0 in that three hours: 0.

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When I left Nordstrom in 1979, starting a 24 year career as a manufacturer’s rep, I drove four NW states, and called on two or three independent shoe stores in every small town. Nordstrom had a shoe buyer in every store; what sold in one didn’t necessarily sell in another only a few miles away. The focus was entirely on the right product, the one customers actually wanted to buy, and I made a good living planting seeds in a few stores, then expanding based on success. We had a four day trade show every six months Read more

February 23, 2008

Will the last one leaving BHB please turn out the lights?

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Wait…you’re still here?

Why?

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I’m still a blogging outlier. I don’t pay enough attention to my own blog, let alone BHB; I read blogs and love to write, but it’s never been obsessive. I write when I’m inspired, not when I’m on deadline; when I’m short on time I scan enough to get the gist and mostly ignore links. In doing so I occasionally miss the gist entirely. One of the reasons I’m really looking forward to Unchained is to learn from those I like and respect to channel the process productively.

So not until yesterday morning, when I got the feed to Cathleen’s post, did I have any clue as to what was going on in RE.net. Not until this morning did I have a chance to read the more than four hundred comments here, here, and here. I’ve had to go back to the last week’s posts here to put them in proper context. (Russell: My apologies.)

Whew. As I said in my comment to Teri, people love to be offended; sometimes they wallow in it. (Note: I’m a people, too.) It brings the warm glow of righteousness, especially if it can be shared with fellow travelers. Objections to the contrary, ‘mob’ is a perfectly apt descriptor; “they’re a mob, but I’m thinking on my own” just doesn’t wash. Hiding behind the vitriolic din brings the false feeling of no consequence.

Since this is all new to me, some observations:

  1. I spent more time on Sellsius this morning reading comments than I’ve spent in the entire last year. Ferrara is a terrific writer, and argued his case well, though I’m not sure it’s the case he meant to argue: The genesis is his snit at being locked out of BHB. Whether or not Greg’s post was in fact offensive, that was only a vehicle to unload.
  2. Everyone else – including Dustin – followed. And Dustin – whose sites I like and read and who I’ll continue to like and read – used an approach that was particularly small. Petulance is never a winning tactic.
  3. I learned Mike Farmer is a terrific writer as well.
  4. One of the things Read more
February 8, 2008

Clients are people, too.

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Indulge a father to make a point:

My youngest daughter is spending the next six weeks at a tiny hospital in northern Malawi, not far from the Zambian border. She’s there in one of her last rotations as a fourth year med student: The University of Washington recognizes that one of the biggest pitfalls for students is coming into a program with a passion for people and graduating with somewhat less passion for the cardiovascular system. The entire curriculum is centered on remembering the humanity of the patients, and encouraging students to get out of their comfort zones is of a piece to help drive that home. It’s a fabulous program, and she’s going to come back a changed person.

We – the real estate industry – have the same problem. We don’t have friends and family, we have a sphere. Clients are to be harvested from our farms. People aren’t people, they’re leads.  Buyers, of course, are liars.

I just got back from a listing appointment; wonderful couple, I’d sold them their home a year and a half ago. For a number of reasons they’re now in foreclosure. The tension, the anxiety, the fear, the anger were all palpable: She was in tears, he was stoic and blaming her. I was part real estate agent, part marriage counselor. I tried to mitigate some of their grief by absorbing some of the blame myself, and pointing to one of the worst loan originators I’ve ever dealt with, but they wouldn’t hear it. They’d made the decisions, they’d signed the papers, they’d failed to meet obligations, they were the ones to blame. And it hurt. Deeply.

I can quote John Galt verbatim, but that doesn’t obviate empathy.

Before I left for our meeting I watched an on-demand training video on short sales, hoping for a little more insight on how I might help. The star was an overly made up realtor stereotype that each year manages to make it to the bottom of the Harris Interactive poll of respected professions, animated and delightfully giddy in the good news she had to deliver:

I can tell you very frankly that, Read more

December 17, 2007

Excellence Unchained

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I joined the Lake Grove Presbyterian Church choir about nine years ago.  (Geno, chill.  This is a story about excellence, not Bible Boy!)  There was an interim director who led about twenty singers. The assumption of the director, and most of the elder hierarchy in a still dying denomination, was (is) that choirs and classical music are essentially passé, that contemporary music, a rock and roll praise band and ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ anthems are necessary to put people in the pews. Armed with that assumption, the director aspired to mediocrity and almost succeeded; why put effort into something that’s dying?

I was on the search committee to find a permanent director.  I had concerns about the person we picked – Wendy Bamonte, a wisp of a thirty-something with a terrific cv in instrumental music, but less so in choral.  She was hired, but I took my concerns to the pastor anyway, who took them to Wendy, who called me and said: ‘Let’s talk.’  We did.  It turned out she’s every bit as direct as I am, and out of that, um, lively discussion, developed a friendship that I’ve had with her and her husband since.

Wendy isn’t one who accepts conventional wisdom simply because it’s conventional.  She had (has) a vision:  provided excellence both in the choice of music and its preparation, choirs and classical music aren’t only not dead, but on the cutting edge of the future. No one believed it, of course, but it was nice to have someone passionate about something, as quaint as it seemed.

But she’s been driven from the first year eight years ago.  Interested less in genre than in the excellence of the music, we’ve done everything from baroque to gospel.  She’ll spend two weeks picking exactly the right music for a twelve week sermon series. She has the personality, drive and tact to get the most in the least amount of time out of unauditioned amateurs.  Unlike those who protect themselves from anyone better, she brings in world-class directors for choral workshops.  She’s very, very good at what she does, but still takes the time Read more

December 5, 2007

Dave Barry, Loser

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Dave Barry, the inveterate suer of all things MLS, has lost. Again.

After having failed to get his Open MLS initiative on the 2007 Maine ballot, he said this in February of this year:

Early returns from an initial 2 month effort to collect signatures for the Maine Open MLS Initiative show it heading toward being the most popular initiative in Maine history, with over 80% voter support. To date 14,000 of 55,087 required signatures have been collected.

Upon collecting 55,087 signatures, the Open MLS Initiative will appear on the Maine ballot for the November 2008 election.

Right. 

Inman reports he’s walking away from the effort.  Apparently Maine voters are a bit skeptical of putting someone’s career ambitions up to a popular vote.

There will be a tendency of MAR to take credit due to their $200 special assessment.  No.  It failed because it was a seriously dumb idea badly written, and people are much more discerning than we sometimes give them credit.

Incidentally, Barry is for the time being retiring from the suing and initiative grind to concentrate on a providing agents and consumers a new lead generation system.

Can. Not. Wait.
 

 

December 4, 2007

Unchained: It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls…

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I’ve mentioned before a friend of mine who’s a broker in Phoenix; we talk perhaps once a month. Several weeks ago he told me about a conversation he’d had with someone in my office that stunned me, and I’m not easily stunned. I asked “are you sure?” three times, then asked him to please put it in an email, which he did. He’s now said he’s willing to be deposed. Here’s the email he sent:

Hi Jeff,

I wanted to let you know that I had a conversation with a fellow agent of yours, [redacted], two weeks ago. She had called me because my client’s are moving to Oregon and happened to look at one of her listings. She was asking if I thought their house was priced right and how long it would take to sell it. I told her I was from Tigard and knew you.

She said you were very pushy, arrogant and a jerk. I told her that she must be talking about someone else and I described you. She said no it definitely was you and that she would never do her business the way you do and that you are a little unethical in your business practices.

I felt you might want to know what she was saying about you.

‘Arrogant’ in the postmodern twenty-first century refers to anyone who actually believes what he says and says it. Guilty. If by ‘pushy’ this person meant someone who insists people to follow through on promises, guilty again. ‘Jerk’ is so manifestly subjective that it’s meaningless.

But ‘unethical’? That’s slander.

Now: This person is a mega-producer, in business for twenty five years. I’ve been in the business a little over three. I did a few open houses for her up until a year ago – I learned email to her was a decidedly foreign concept – but we’ve never been on opposite sides of a transaction. By both reputation and public record this is her SOP: the climb to the top has been with cleats on the backs of others; I suspect everyone reading Read more

November 13, 2007

Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

The Bossy Visionary guide to power:

1. Sell a crisis.  It can be real, it can be almost real, it can be imaginary, but sell it apocalyptically.  Over-population/global famine has been an especially popular one, Paul Erlich having predicted it every five years since 1968 (but this time he’s serious!), following in the footsteps of Thomas Malthus, who first predicted the population would outstrip the food supply in 1798. [Now, of course, we have global warming, global cooling having proved a disappointment.]

2. Set yourself up as the one person/group/coalition/association that can solve the crisis, if only people will give you enough money and behave exactly as you instruct. 

3. Demand sacrifice, open a bank account, and wait for the marketplace to work.

4. When it doesn’t, legislate. 

The Bossy Visionary confidently knows what’s better for people than people.

Portland, Oregon is fertile breeding ground for Bossy Visionaries.

Portland doesn’t wear the progressive label; it wallows in it.  The County Commission and the City Council cattily compete with each other for the ‘most like San Francisco’ award, often to the exclusion of proposing anything actually, well, sane.  Thus the county a few years ago began unilaterally issuing gay marriage licenses, notwithstanding the fact that it wasn’t legal, wasn’t popular, and there’s nothing worse than giving someone something only to have it taken away, which the Supreme Court predictably did.  Thus the City Council is in the process of changing the name of a major thoroughfare in North Portland from ‘Interstate Ave.’ to ‘Caesar Chavez’ Ave., notwithstanding the fact the neighborhoods through which Interstate runs are an olio of Polish, Indian, African American, old, young, hip and not, but less than 8% Latino; and notwithstanding the fact that those neighborhoods, especially the businesses, are overwhelmingly opposed to the change.  [To the petulant mayor – he did the perfect ‘terrible twos’ impression and stomped out of a Council meeting when it looked like one of the key votes had changed – all that matters is the du jour grievance group, the fawning press that will be generated in the process, and one more notch in the totem erected to the politically gooey.]

So this didn’t Read more

November 1, 2007

PMAR, OAR, NAR, David Barry and the Essential Elements of non-Reform

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

The confluence of events:

Last week I received a lead from our lead generation system.  I had only a name and email address:  she wanted info on three listings, then two more, then the next day seven more, each emailed separately.  There was no contact number, only her email address, and it turned out she wasn’t really in the market to buy, just curious.  And: all she wanted were the addresses, was more than a little annoyed – so was I – she had to jump through hoops to get them.  Damned REALTORS®!

Monday I was in a meeting to introduce our new company web site, including a new property search engine.  The mock up included maps, street view and… addresses!  Transparency; terrific!  But, no, sorry, that’s not a real fixture.  Apparently that’s against the bylaws of one of the five MLSs we deal with; “Besides, we want to give a reason for the phone to ring!”  See above.

Then last night – after fifty plus sugared up munchkins – I opened my annual Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors bill, which includes dues for PMAR, OAR, and NAR. Last year it was $343, and this year: $459. For those who dabble in percentages, that’s a 34% increase. 

The stated reason:  A $100 ‘special assessment’ to OAR:

The Public Awareness Campaign is an integrated program designed to address multiple issues facing the real estate industry in Oregon as a result of extreme changes in the real estate market including the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the threat of an initiative petition to give unfair advantage to a new MLS provider and the ongoing threat of a real estate transfer tax. 

The Public Awareness Campaign special assessment will accomplish two goals – it will fund the specific campaign to raise the profile and enhance the image of our Members [sic] in the eyes of the public, and it will make available the necessary funds to educate the public regarding initiative petition issues that impact the real estate industry and consumers in Oregon.

So that’s a $2 million confiscation, not to study and/or implement ways to make agents more efficient, to make us Read more

October 24, 2007

Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

[I was just finishing this up when I read Greg’s terrific post.  Timing in life and all that…]

My first jaunt into online polemics was in the early nineties, the topic animal rights.  The Animal Liberation Front was active in the Northwest – burning fur farms and research labs to prove the efficacy of their argument – and my (then) wife was involved with the breeding and showing of dogs, the kind of thing that worked a True Believer into lather.

Then, of course, it wasn’t blogs, but  newsgroups – talk.politics.animals, as I recall – and it should come as no surprise that conversations tended to get a little, well, testy.  I actually took a moderator position for a short time, part of my job to write, every third post or so, a plea of the “Can’t we all just get along?” variety, which would settle things down, but never for much longer than twenty minutes.

[One can tolerate only so much. A reader had logged in to pour out his heart: He was a teacher in a middle school that, for a fundraiser, had staged a pig kissing contest.  The kids loved it, but the teacher was traumatized by the humiliation caused the pigs; he’d gone home and cried himself to sleep.  What could he do to make others understand?  I was asked to step down due to the insensitivity of my reply.]

Turning someone already steeped in the dogma is impossible, but there are tools available to convince the fence sitters:  The first thing I did was read the literature, then I downloaded and printed out – I still have the somewhat yellowed copy within arm’s length of where I type – a list of forty three logical fallacies.

Dialogue requires order.

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Unfortunately, the web and blogs have managed to define discourse down even further.   And – who’d have thought? – it’s even beginning to infect RE blogs.  I think that’s why Rain City Guide’s Dustin Luther issued his preemptive admonition,  brilliant in its brevity:  Attack ideas, not people; no personal promotion. All’s well, and RCG continues to be one of the best in quality dialogue.

Then Read more

September 14, 2007

Attorneys, Condescension, Immaculate Perception and the NAR

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

It’s always dangerous – and not a little misleading – to extrapolate a whole from a part.  One of the problems facing the real estate industry is a phantom stereotype – generally negative – applied to all agents, when anyone in the business knows that the range spans the genius to the inept, the scrupulously honest to the corrupt.  I’d argue high professionalism for most, but in three short years in the business I’ve run into the gamut.

So I understand the pitfalls of where I’m going with this, but I’m going anyway:

Do law schools really have a required Applied Condescension class; and why is it so many attorneys have a self regard inversely proportional to their actual worth?

I admit some of this is anecdotal and personal: the only attorney I’ve ever had to hire I also had to fire; what she’d failed to accomplish in six months I managed on my own in six days. Recommended by a friend, she overpromised, under delivered and grossly overcharged. When I told her on her last billing I wouldn’t pay until she provided an itemization – which she never provided – she tried the intimidation game.  Didn’t work.  Oh, my, it didn’t work.

But much more recently and pertinent: First, there was this – Buying without an agent – written by an attorney at Rain City Guide.  Entirely self serving, badly argued with serious errors of omission, it generated some pleasant acrimony in the comment section – numbering over 150 – as well as a follow up rebuttal.  I’m not going to parse the whole thing, but you get the tone from the last sentence:

Regardless, for hundreds of dollars, you can save 3% on the purchase price, while getting legal services from an attorney, not an agent.

This is just another verse in an emerging chapter:  Save money and get better representation by using an attorney instead of a real estate agent!  Why?  Hey, who cares about home values, sewer scopes, oil tank decommissioning or elevation certs when you have this argument: “I’m an attorney, you’re not!”

The straw came a couple days ago.  I was at a Read more

August 18, 2007

Redfin: Lessons in How NOT to Succeed

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

No apologies for the topic. As many problems as exist in the real estate industry — many more than the practiced elites would like to acknowledge, many fewer than the bubbleheads need to satisfy their tantrums — Redfin has made itself a prominent example of how not to improve things.

A few days ago in a comment section I wrote that Glenn Kelman’s a phony. It was the heat of the moment and I only wrote it because, well, he is a phony. He has to be.

On the one hand he has to corral capital and customers by feeding the realtor stereotype of the venal do-nothing narcissist, exemplified here in the Sixty Minutes shtick. But on the other he desperately needs the cooperation of the very people he’s trashed if his model has any chance of succeeding, thus the apparent charm exuded at Inman Connect. He creates a crisis of disdain for the full service agent, sets himself up as the champion of the little guy to quell the crisis, then calls on the full service agents to help him do it. Quite a dance, that.

But.

I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time on the Redfin website. It’s not in my market, and I’ve read and seen enough to know it’s a model that’s not likely to succeed. I’ve left the particulars to others and the market to its natural flow.

But I never thought the champion of the little guy would be dumb enough to try to con: the little guy. The following comes from a BHB reader, Leonard Wallace, who…I’ll let him tell it:

I’m a broker in Maryland where Redfin arrived last month. I’ve read many of your [BHB] posts about Redfin, but I haven’t seen anyone comment on their blatantly false advertising. Here’s a screen shot of a listing in the Washington area:

Leonard goes on to point out:

Redfin’s minimum commission on any buyer transaction is $3000. That never came out in the Sixty Minutes piece or anything else I’ve seen: note here, the first page of the ‘how to buy’ section. That’s why, I suppose, a $500,000 selling price Read more

August 13, 2007

Hating Selling through the Art of Sales

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

The friend of the son of a very good friend — an exceedingly polite young man just out of high school — came by late Friday afternoon to sell me some cutlery. I explained when he called to set the appointment that I was already doing some business with the company he was representing in the form of monogrammed house-warming gifts, but he said he’d like to come by anyway. To practice.

He arrived, carefully unsheathed his samples, and pulled out a three ring binder. He opened his presentation with a hand drawn graph of his progress toward his summer goal; if reached, he said, he would win a scholarship. Then he launched into a rote monologue, cribbed nearly verbatim from his notes. Per the script he handed me each utensil as he talked about it, wasn’t sure what to do with his hands after I refused the third one, and was flustered when I asked about something out of turn. All the sales-guy 101 feints were in play: “If you could choose between one of the two sets today, which would you pick?”; “Just for sitting down with me today, I’m authorized to offer you, for no extra cost, these kitchen shears. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

At which point I stopped him. I’ve sat through thousands of presentations and delivered thousands more. I didn’t need another to confirm what I’ve known forever: I hate sales. And salespeople.

So I waxed parental:

“Why, David, didn’t you ask what I was already using, what about it I liked and didn’t? Turn your head: five feet away is a full set of Wusthof; you should have known that before you came to the door. Why didn’t you ask about the sets I was already buying? Clearly there has been a need.

“Selling isn’t about glib one liners, happy hour entertaining or pat answers to pre-conceived objections. It’s considerably less about form than substance. It’s about having the knowledge and developing the trust in order to fill the real needs of your customers, better than anyone else.” LOVE parental mode.

Since this has a lot to Read more

August 6, 2007

In Search of Excellence

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Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

That, of course, was the name of a best-selling management book that came out in the early eighties. It not so much defined my market philosophy as confirmed what I’d already learned from Nordstrom: Concentrate on excellence and rewards will follow. Concentrate on rewards, and you’re pretty much assured of being consigned to mediocrity.

What’s been interesting to watch in the twenty five or so intervening years isn’t so much that nearly every business gives lip service to the tenet, but what’s happened to the definition of ‘excellence’. The education establishment meets failing test scores by dumbing down the tests. Grades are allocated not on merit, but on the perceived sensitivities of the students, just as soccer games are played without keeping score so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. You can get an undergrad English Lit degree at the University of Washington without ever having studied Shakespeare. In the frenetic twenty-first “I want it now!” century reading has become a chore, replaced by vapid visual stimulation and fifteen minute podcasts. Writing skills have devolved to YouTube. Joseph Conrad need not apply.

So what? Here’s so what: Words matter. Reading builds vocabulary, writing exercises its use. But not only is someone who draws on 150,000 words able to communicate concepts better than one who’s limited to the normal 50,000, but he or she is infinitely better able to conceive them in the first place. I’ve said — often — that good writers invariably make good thinkers, largely because they do.

All of which was going through my mind as I read this weekend’s BHB posts.

Whew. Excellent.

Before I started my own RE blog I searched the internet to see how others were doing it. Lots of people giving advice, most of it in the genre of Kris’ exquisite satire: Keep it short, be witty, illustrate cleverly. Most blogs seemed to keep diligently to that formula, but two things were apparent: that A) Most were blogging just to be blogging, and not to be actually saying anything; and B) the “Keep it short” formula was necessary to mask an inability to string words Read more

July 19, 2007

In Defense of Buyers’ Agents

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

This came into the comments section of this post yesterday, from Joshua Ferris:

What type of services do you expect a buyer’s agent to offer in order to create a “real value”?

Thank you, Joshua, for the set up! Timing couldn’t be better; there seems to be a confluence of events. Redfin has apparently duped a new round of investors (“Honest! It’s the last time I’ll ever need funding!” is the fourth great lie); Redfin is capitalizing on what seems to be an emerging anti-realtor trend; and I had more conversations with local realtors yesterday who are getting “I’ll only deal with the listing agent!” sign calls.

I wondered if there was anything that was helping drive it, so I just Googled “How to buy a house” and found this site:

“Real Estate Agent” Is Just Another Name For “Salesperson”
Don’t ever lose sight of that fact. Their only mission is to sell, sell, sell to YOU. Don’t ever let on that you are in a desperate situation, or that you need to sell a house fast to pay for emergency bills, or that you are in a desperate crunch to buy this house now, because you are being transferred into town this week. It’s simply none of their business and as far as they are concerned, you are not in a rush to buy a house.

Excellent. What good could possibly come from telling your agent how quickly you need to buy or sell?

HouseBuyingTips.com Buyers Warning
One of the biggest mistakes many home buyers make is assuming that their “buyers agent” is working for them. They could not be more wrong. Also, never let a real estate agent choose your attorney. You must choose your own attorney, not one with a cushy relationship to the salesperson who is trying to sell you a home.

Punctuation is oversold, and non sequiturs simply don’t deserve that negative reputation…

If you are buying a house instead of selling a house, you really don’t need a real estate agent.

When the Carnival of Praetorian Cranks Posing as Something They’re Not is launched, this guy — Jeff Ostroff — will win every week. He’s apparently Read more

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