Though I harbor genuine and deep respect for those of you who’re able to help us TechTards, there are so few of them who actually DO help. It’s funny to watch, over time, as the vast majority of their ‘can’t miss’ predictions die ugly, without even an audible whimper from TechTards.

I bring this up in order to send you to a post I just read which has the most interestingly informing comment thread I’ve recently had the pleasure to read. I’d love to hear what the Bloodhound TechnoGeek posse has to say about the post, but am far more interested in hearing what they have to say about the comments.

For me, the comments were at times a revelation. I urge you to read every last comment — as I was riveted as various ’sub-threads’ emerged. But then I’m just a TechTard, right?

Here’s the link — I and my fellow TechTards will be waiting to hear from you guys.

Much thanks in advance for your TechTake.

• That from 1975 to 1999 was “normal” enough to indicate a statistical trend.   I think the case could be made that it was.
• That we’re going to eventually get back to that trend line.    I think a case could be made that we will.
• If both of those assumptions are indeed correct, then we’re heading into a scenario where we have quite an adjustment to go through in terms of a drop in peak housing values until we are back into range with that statistical trend.

What do you think?   Tell me why you think he’s wrong……

Tom Vanderwell

Values Have Dropped Only 25% of the Fall Needed to Reach Trend «

PRICE TRENDS / WAR OF THE WORLDS (Part 4): Property owners nationwide have lost only one dollar for every four dollars they can ultimately expect to lose on their home.

The good news according to the leading data series issued by the United States government is that prices have only fallen 6 percent. If you are a homeowner, you are wealthier than you knew. The bad news is you still have three dollars to lose for every one dollar which has already been lost.

The total projected fall from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) “All Transactions Index”, which begins in 1975, shows a peak-to-trend fall of 27%. Since prices are 6% lower by this measure, prices must still fall an additional 23% from today for prices to revert to trend.

The assumption built into these estimates is that prices in the years 1975 to 1999 advanced at a typical rate. A trend line was generated to the present based upon that 25-year period. The chart depicts the divergence of the trend established from 1975 to 1999 and the actual prices recorded from 2000 to 2009.

The FHFA prediction of a total fall of 27% is far less than the total fall of between 49% to 60% predicted by Case-Shiller. Based upon the four data sets reviewed in the last few weeks (see summary below), we can estimate a total fall of between 27% to 60% from the bubble top to the long-term trend. The average of the four indexes projects a total fall of 41% from the bubble high to the trend bottom.

Looking ahead from today, the average of the four indexes predicts that property values will fall 26% from our current price levels.

I did the transaction at BestBuy because you get the rebate immediately, instead of having to cut off the label from the box and send it in to Verizon if you were to buy the phone at the Verizon store. 

The phone itself is quite nice.  If I hadn’t been spoiled on the iPhone, it would be the best phone I’ve played with or had.  I’ve had a couple of Blackberries, used by wife’s Motorola Q.  I haven’t used a recent Palm, so can’t compare it to that.

Verizon has a superior network.  The call quality is night and day.  The calls are crisp, the 3G network is fast, and phone calls have not been dropped in the past three two plus days.  That’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which would’ve dropped at least 2 or 3 of those calls.

As for the phone: On the upside, the physical keyboard (in addition to a virtual keyboard), while not very good, is nice to have. The keyboard is too flat, so it makes finding the right keys hard. There are many free apps, and they’re pretty good quality.  If you use Google and Gmail for your email, contacts, and calendar, the integration is seamless.  Even Facebook contacts are properly synched.  Google Voice works great, and because I’m now on a fast network, the call quality between Google Voice and the regular phone isn’t different.

I got the 16 gig version, but thankfully I can swap out the 16 gig SD card in the future for a 32 gig card if I ever want to expand the memory on the phone.  If I bought an iPhone, I’d have to buy a whole new phone to increase the capacity. 32 gig SD cards now run at about $90 to $100, so they’re not cheap, but the price will come down and I’ll do that next year. 

Unfortunately applications have to be stored in the phone’s native 500 meg memory.  That’s not a huge limitation for me, since at no time in owning the iPhone with it’s 100,000 apps did I use more than 200 meg of memory.  So I’m assuming that I won’t really run up against that limitation here.

Here’s one of the best features, which I haven’t fully explored yet.  Google includes turn-by-turn GPS navigation.  I used it last night and it was great - better than my wife’s Garmin.  It even displays the street view at the end of your trip so you can see where you should’ve arrived.  It did have trouble finding the Verizon store last night, however, but the store is brand new and may not be in Google Maps yet.

Applications run fast, and run in the background.  This is an improvement over my iPhone 3G which could take a while to launch an application, and which could not run applications in background.

The removable battery is nice, so I don’t need to send the phone into the manufacturer to replace the battery, and so that I can buy an additional battery and swap it out if the battery life doesn’t suit my needs.

On the downside, the software lacks polish.  The same button may not work the same way across applications, the applications vary in quality and so don’t all run as they should, there are only three home screens of possible apps (instead of iPhone’s 11), the phone is not seamlessly compatible with my Mac (iTunes) although there are workarounds. In addition, processes can build up in the background, requiring you to kill them.

Some people will like that last point - you can theoretically have finer grained control over the phone.  But for most people, that’s just going to be a nuisance.  Think of the iPhone as being… well a Mac, and Android being slightly closer to a Unix box in the way you have control, but also the way you need to know how to control the phone.

Here are some related links if you’d like to learn more about Brian Brady’s Linked In techniques or Google Reader:

Brian Brady Training on Linked In (awesome webinar we recorded in March)

Google Reader vs. Twitter Lists (why I disagree with a recent article Scoble wrote vs. Google Reader)

Introduction to Google Reader (great article by Mark Madsen, fellow BHB contributor)

RPR is not the generals fighting the last war, but the war before that. Apparently, the NAR still believes that the added value of real estate representation comes from hoarding data. RPR is their attempt to put a new fence around the data, having let the last set of barriers fall to Realtor.com and to IDX.

It’s twice funny to me, because not only is that war already well won — by the consumer — so is the true last war, the Battle of the Realty.bots. After all of this chatter, none of this shit has turned out to mean anything in real life.

I mean nothing. I’m convinced by now that no one who does not actually represent buyers and sellers has any clue about what is going on in the real estate market. We don’t search for listings — our clients do — and our position is stronger than ever. We post our listings wherever we can — and our position is stronger than ever.

I’m no friend to any restraint or restriction on trade, but buying or selling a home is a lot more complicated than it was four years ago. Our clients don’t need flashy web sites, they need agents who know how to navigate the shoals of the transaction.

RPR, MLS, VOW, IDX — all of this goes away when we do away with the co-broke. In the mean time, it’s deck chairs on the Titanic, at best, one more dipshit time-wasting “tool” to mask sales-call reluctance.

Notes for the grunts on the ground:

1. Motivated buyers and sellers will not go through a middleman in the early phases of their search. This is 1974-style thinking from the NAR.

2. Motivated buyers and sellers don’t care how they found you. They care about what they found: Do you know your shit? Can you deliver the product? Is your word any good?

3. Whether or not the information you have is better than the information they have is meaningless — to them — until they have resolved to rely on your judgment.

Ergo: There ain’t no substitute for salesmanship.

I’ll play with this toy when it comes around, but that’s because I’ll play with anything. My IDX software is the same as my MLS software (FlexMLS from FBS), and so my clients are searching from the exact same database I use. This is a huge marketing benefit, one that will not be easily replaced.

Even so, the notion of a national MLS is absurd, so it’s most likely purpose is not to re-enslave the data (impossible), but, rather, to attempt to re-enslave the agents. Even that objective would seem to be doomed to failure, but it’s another problem easily corrected by getting rid of the co-broke.

Meanwhile: I don’t care.

• MBS and Market update
• Inflationary concerns
• Fed participation in secondary market
• Legislative updates
• Latest on RESPA and GFE…specifically addressing broker channel issues
• Update on FHA broker approval (mini-eagle) process…what is expected
• Credit risk…why underwriting is tightening and when is will contract

I hope you enjoy!

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

I learned about purpose by analogy. Purpose is a map — any destination on the map, if we choose to go there, is a goal. The reason goals aren’t achieved, the root cause, is because the goal’s ‘destination’ isn’t on any of the ‘maps’ of the person’s purposes. If your goal is to go to Canada, but none of your maps include that country, it’s highly unlikely you’ll find your way there.

Experts have devised several methods to help folks discover their purposes. Frankly, I’ve always shied away from the concept of ‘discovering’ a purpose, as I’ve always inferred that to mean it was always there, so not necessarily my choice. We can decide at any time to change our main purpose for existence. One of the extreme examples of this truth was the Biblical story of Paul. In the story he not only radically altered his purpose, but reversed it — becoming the world’s strongest advocate for what he’d previously did his utmost to destroy.

So understand, the excuse for not having a guiding purpose cuz ya can’t ‘discover’ it is lame beyond description. We all decide what our purpose in life is, whether it’s a proactive decision or not. Furthermore, having that purpose will not only cause goals to be far more easily achievable, but will generate the goals resonating with the purpose itself. Who’d a thunk?

I don’t advocate any particular method to decide your purpose. Some write down purposes ’till one hits home. Some go to a quiet place and meditate, some even consult experts from different disciplines. It doesn’t matter as long as it produces a purpose with which you’re both at peace and big time excited.

There’s very little in the world more powerful than a purpose driven goal — unless it’s a purpose driven human being.

Your purpose is your map — are you trying to get places not on your current map? Are you living a purpose not of your own choosing? Are you constantly in flux cuz you simply don’t realize your goals are totally incongruent, if not in conflict with your purpose — stated or not?

When setting goals for your business, what’s your track record? It’s one thing to fail cuz your plan/strategy/execution was iffy. Failing due to setting goals in direct opposition to your purpose is self sabotage at it’s most elegant. A goal in misalignment with your stated purpose is maybe one of the most effective Trojan Horses ever. The irony is it was inserted inside your ‘city walls’ by you — guaranteed to fail from Day 1.

I review what I call my ‘umbrella’ purpose annually. It hasn’t changed since I set it in stone back in the ’70’s. The purposes safely underneath have though. This year I’ve deleted all of them in favor of one that seemed to be speaking to me every time I thought of the concept of purpose. I relaxed whenever it came to mind. It’s now, in fact, almost a tag line to my umbrella purpose. Sorry, but unlike some others, I tend to keep my purposes to myself. It’s not that I think it’s wrong to share one’s life purpose. It’s just that it’s not me.

I will share one thing — knowing my overriding umbrella purpose — the one whose approval I need to do anything in life — is part of my DNA, makes all the difference in the world. Take time out to name yours and see what a difference it makes.

One of the key differences in the purpose driven life, is how many decisions simply don’t hafta be made. They make themselves. When it becomes part of who you are, it becomes almost painful to establish a goal (much less work towards it) when it’s not aligned with your purpose for getting up every day.

Though downright hard times hit all of us, those with a crystal clear purpose in life experience far less stress, at least in my personal experience and observation of others. It may be your turn to take the E-Ticket ride in Murphy’s Barrel, but as a consequence of living a purposeful life, you won’t lose your way. Knowing in your heart of hearts the ultimate destination — driven by your purpose — seems to be a natural salve for the road rash caused by ‘Life Happens’.

Learn for yourself — Purposeful Living isn’t just a catchy phrase. It’s living for real.

I attended the NAR convention in San Diego over the weekend and this banner caught my eye. It just seemed oddly Orwellian to me, as if NAR were subliminally planting the idea. As it turns out, that was not far from the truth.

The IDX rules have been updated to explicitly allow indexing by search engines, defeating the Indianapolis BoR’s attempt to use the old rules to prevent brokers and agents from using IDX data in SEO.

This time around, apparently, there was no parliamentary chicanery to delay the obvious. On the other hand, they did add an explicit opt-out for sellers who don’t want AVMs or third-party comments, or links to that content, associated with their listings.

It would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating: Obviously, they are aware that there is this technology called a “search engine” that makes it easy to find stuff, because they just endorsed a rule that acknowledges what the rest of the world figured out in 1995 — that search engines are useful.

Then they pivot and give sellers the right to censor information about their listings, but only on sites that use IDX data, meaning that those AVMs and third party comments are just a quick search away on sites like Zillow and Trulia. All this does is give people a reason to leave the broker or agent’s site to go and find the information they want on a site that is not bound by these idiotic rules.

Not that it will matter for much longer. With RPR, NAR itself is getting into the AVM game and, if you believe the nightmares of some local MLS directors, taking a concrete step towards a national MLS. If the reality matches the spin, they may be able to improve AVMs by adding information contributed by the membership, an idea they call the “Realtor Valuation Model”.

What’s missing is MLS data, at least for now. Done right, blending current and historical MLS data in with all the public data and combining that with an ability for brokers and agents to add their 2 cents would produce a much more accurate, and consistent, picture of real estate value, which means that MLSs have a choice to make: Play ball or don’t.

I’m fully aware of Greg’s opinion of NAR and its origins as a “criminal conspiracy against consumers” and he has a point, but if NAR has decided to hobble the ability of local MLSs to use their rule-making authority to fend off technology that they fear, then that is a good thing . As it stands, the end result of the current MLS system is the balkanization of real estate data and all these internecine squabbles like the MIBOR thing that do nothing to help brokers, agents, sellers or buyers.

Maybe, just maybe, the NAR has come to the conclusion that the MLSs, like the Sunnis in Anbar, need to make a choice — either you are with us or you are a terrorist. If you are with us, there will be benefits, if you are against us, not so much.

As Brian Boero points out, there are so many layers to this that, if it were an onion, it would be the size of Rush Limbaugh’s head, but one thing was obvious this weekend in San Diego and it was the extra padding that some of the MLS people had in their pants from the diaper they had to wear to prevent their loosened bowels from embarrassing them at the Reba concert.

If California doesn’t want to be Texas, it must find a way to be a better California. The easy thing about being Texas is that the government has a great deal of control over the part of its package deal that attracts consumer-voters—it must merely keep taxes low. California, on the other hand, must deliver on the high benefits promised in its sales pitch. It won’t be enough for its state and local governments to spend a lot of money; they have to spend it efficiently and effectively.

The optimistic assessment is that things are going to get worse in California before they get better. The pessimistic assessment is that they’re going to get worse before they get much worse. As is often the case, hanging around with the pessimists is less fun but more instructive. The current recession has driven California’s state government into what amounts to a five-month budget cycle, according to Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee. He estimates that the budget deal tortuously wrought in July should start falling apart in October, because it was predicated on pie-in-the-sky revenue estimates and because so many of its spending cuts are being challenged, often successfully, in the courts.

The recession will eventually end and California’s finances will improve, say the optimists. Given the state’s pervasive political bias against efficient and effective public services, however, the question is whether its finances will ever get truly well. States that have grown accustomed to thinking of the engine that drives their economies as an inexhaustible resource—whether it’s Michigan and the auto industry, New York and Wall Street, or California and the vision of the sunlit good life that used to attract new residents—find it tough to compete again for what they thought would be theirs forever, and to plan budgets for lean years that turn into lean decades. Instead, they invest their hopes in a deus ex machina that will rescue them from the hard choices they dread.

For California’s governmental-industrial complex, a new liberal administration and Congress in Washington offer plausible hope for a happy Hollywood ending. Federal aid will replace the dollars that California’s taxpayers, fed up with the state’s lousy benefits and high taxes, refuse to provide. Americans will continue to vote with their feet, either by leaving California or disdaining relocation there, but their votes won’t matter, at least in the short term. Under the coming bailout, the new 49ers—Americans in the other 49 states, that is—will be extended the privilege of paying California’s taxes. At least they won’t have to put up with its public services.

I live in the far suburbs (bordering on rural) of Raleigh, and have had the iPhone 3G (not the latest 3GS) since April.  I mostly love it. It integrates well with gmail, where I maintain my contacts.  It has a few really nice apps that make life easier.  And the design is very nice and intuitive. In fact, I’m in discussions with some folks from Bangalore about building an app for the iPhone that relates to part of my law practice. 

But AT&T’s network is terrible.  Lately I’ve been dropping two or three calls a day.  Back before I started my practice, it was mostly just annoying.  Now it’s getting to the point where it’s interfering with business.  On Friday, when I was in the midst of a major issue with a client, I dropped at least six calls. 

AT&T hooked me up with a new SIM card this weekend, and I went to the Apple store where they exchanged the iPhone with a new one.  But I dropped another two calls today.

So I’m thinking about switching to Verizon.  The Motorola Droid is out, and I played around with it today at the Verizon store.  I’ve gotten so used to the high quality of Apple software, that I was somewhat disappointed by the way the Droid moved from application to application and the fact that the same button did not have the same effect in each application. 

So I’m going to stick it out for a week with the iPhone.  If I continue to have phone troubles this week, I’m going to switch.

It’s unfortunate, because the iPhone has been great for me. But dropped calls are not acceptable.  If you’ve got some thoughts on a Verizon phone - Blackberry, Motorola Droid or Palm - that you love, let me know.  The Droid is appealing because of the open framework and the fact that apps are going to be developed for it in great quantities.

And if you know how to write an iPhone App, and are interested in having me pay you to write a simple one for my business, let me know!

UPDATE:

Walt Mossberg of the WSJ has a mostly positive review of the Motorola Droid. As does David Pogue of the NYT.

Gizmodo says “If you don’t buy an iPhone, buy a Droid.”

It was actually a brilliant idea - for Keller.  KW agents immediately began flooding the market with (expensive) calendars, post cards, and chotchkies - building the Keller Williams brand in the process.  While Century 21 squandered ad dollars sponsoring the MLB All Star Game and RE/Max floated its balloon on expensive and largely ineffective national TV ad buys, Keller Williams gained market share without spending a corporate dime.

Back in 2004, when the book was published, I felt strongly that 33 annual touches was too high a frequency for real estate professionals.  But that was before I started exploring social media.  Today, it’s very conceivable for a real estate agent to reach their database with 33 quality touches per year.  Below, I’ve mapped out a sample 33-touch program.

Postal Mail:  5 touches

Direct mail is relatively expensive when compared to some of the vehicles we’ll discuss below - but I still believe it should be a core component in any CRM campaign.  Of critical importance - your direct mail efforts need to look and feel as if they are “one-to-one” correspondences.  I have never preferred post cards and “newsletters” because they are clearly mass-mailing efforts.  We want your contacts to believe that you specifically thought of them when we reach them via direct mail.  Direct mail ideas:

• Birthday cards for the client and co-client
• Thanksgiving card (rather than the stale holiday card approach)
• Market updates (make these a mail-merged professional letter, not a bulk-mail blast)
• Announcements (invites to charity events, new hires, testimonials/case studies, etc)

E-mail:  12 touches

I’ve written a few articles about the trials and tribulations of email marketing on the Top of Mind Blog - all of which boil down to common sense.  Email is cheap and easy.  This low barrier to entry creates more and more emails being dumped into our inbox every day.  Clutter is a marketer’s worst enemy.  Your email correspondences must meet an extremely high bar in order to maintain readership and response over the long haul.  Here’s our email approach at Top of Mind - please note that our program is built for mortgage professionals, but I still think these principles could apply for real estate professionals:

• Quarterly Neighborhood Home Sales Reports (every 90 days we advise each contact on what homes sold within a 1/4 mile radius from their home)
• Quarterly Mortgage Checkups (advises each client how their mortgage is performing vs. market conditions)
• Beyond the Media (aims to debunk the doom and gloom consumers are bombarded with in the mainstream media, written quarterly)

Phone Calls:  4 touches

Most of us fail, myself included, to actually talk to our past clients frequently enough.  After all, it can be awkward calling a past client who is likely not in the market for our services.  But the beautiful thing about an effective CRM program is it gives us natural, compelling reasons to contact our database by phone.  For example, when you send a community real estate market update, you could simply select 30 clients to follow up with each time with a phone call.  Questions you might ask:

• Did you receive the letter/email?  (Heck, it’s important for us to ensure that our content is reaching the recipient and is being read!)
• Did you have any questions or concerns I might be able to address?
• Might you know anyone who I can help?  (Say, for example if you’ve written about the home-buyer tax credit.)

Web 2.0 - Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Blogging:  12+ touches

Up to this point, we’re “only” at 21 touches/year… still a long way from Keller’s magic number.  Enter social media and blogging.  It’s virtually impossible to measure how often, say, a Facebook status update is read by a contact in your database… or a blog article.  And I certainly don’t mean to beat a dead horse here… but these vehicles absolutely “work”.  I laughed out loud this morning when I saw Geno’s Facebook entry about his Persian night out.  I know intimately how Brian Brady lives and dies with each Chase Utley at bat.  Above all, social media provides the ideal complement to traditional CRM vehicles because they allow us to connect on a personal level with our database - rather than just on a professional level.  I never liked this expression… but after all we are “buying brain cells” here.

The Glue That Holds Everything Together Is:

Content.  Always has been and always will be.  It’s not enough to “stay in front of” your database anymore.  The ultimate goal is to deepen relationships with your contacts.  Before you hit the send button on a campaign, ask yourself a few questions:

• Would I see value in this correspondence as a consumer or would I immediately hit the delete button?
• Is the correspondence about me or is it about the contact I’m sending it to?  What’s in it for the reader?
• Is this correspondence a “one-to-one” touch point?  Will the recipient believe that I thought of them specifically?

Today, the concept of “33 touches to your database” doesn’t seem so intimidating anymore.  Rather, the challenge becomes providing deeper, more compelling content than your competition.

Twitter’s popularity and usefulness are a mystery to me. Pressed by personal, professional and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting “followers” know I hate raisins or that I loved the finale of “Mad Men.”

Now, not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it, some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics — recklessly using “2″ and “4″ and “U” as words.

To this point, I’ve found Twitter so aggressively worthless that I was forced to research exactly what I was missing. In the process, I stumbled across a useful New York Times tech column penned by David Pogue that clarified all. The headline read, “Twitter? It’s What You Make It.”

In summation, like your beloved pet rock, Twitter is useful only in your imagination.

Despite this, I can’t begin to add up how many times, as a member of the media, I’ve been instructed that I need to Twitter by people who have absolutely no clue what Twittering means. How Twitter helps journalism is yet to be determined.

But the deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can’t write their own lines.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood — and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

In these past few weeks alone, a clueless Colorado State Sen. Dave Schultheis tweeted, “Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.” NFL running back Larry Johnson took time out from his busy day of sucking at his job to ridicule his coach and question the heterosexuality (crudely) of a critical Tweeter. He lost his job.

So you see, though only a reported 11 percent of Twitter’s users are actually teenagers, nearly everyone who participates may end up sounding like one. (Young people have the good sense to head to MySpace, where they can freely post sexually provocative pictures — with music!) I certainly have no cleavage to ratchet up my “follower” numbers.

As a blogging, Facebooking, texting American who values the explosion of democratic user-generated Internet content and its contribution to intellectual debate, political activism, government transparency, entertainment, access to data and community, I can safely say I still see no reason to tweet.

Naturally, this phenomenon is growing by approximately 1 million percent yearly. Maybe this is just where I get left behind by technology. Still, I’m sticking with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter the “poor man’s e-mail system” — and considering e-mail is completely free and allows you to form complete sentences, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The inherent spirit of humankind is individualistic, creative and inclined toward action.  The heart of man is inexorably drawn toward freedom: freedom to live, freedom to express and freedom to choose.  No matter what short-term damage is effected by an oppressor or institutionalized by a government, men and women will devise ways to rebuild and overcome.  Even in countries where the idea of freedom has been systematically driven out by force, we witness people taking action toward freedom.  It is a natural state that can be delayed, but not denied.  We are DOERs.  This country, the United States of America, is the poster child for taking action toward freedom.  We are a nation made up of DOERs.

So what does this have to do with the tax credit?  It empowers us with a “win-win” opportunity.  The immoral bribes to home buyers, the unconstitutional mandate for health insurance, the socialistic bail-outs, even the very destruction wrought by stimulus packages:  embrace them all!  These are all opportunities to make that “win-win” choice.  Embrace the home buyer’s credit and ACT on it!  Be a DOER.  It’s the DOERs who create the success of our society.  A nation of DOERs - of independent, entrepreneurial, action-based DOERs - will always bring about the necessary changes to save this republic.  If you desire your own success, then you desire to become a DOER.

More specifically: every action you take to help another person receive the tax credit strengthens you as a DOER while at the same time weakening the architects - the very architecture - that imposes itself upon a free people with that tax credit.  Eventually, the system cannot bear its own weight; the center cannot hold.  In taking action to embrace the tax credit you not only strengthen your potential for long-term success  by being a DOER, but you effect the implosion of the progressive state.  In other words, you hasten the collapse of an economic enemy by using its own tools of destruction and in the action of using those tools, in being a DOER, you reinforce and strengthen the very reason such a system cannot stand in the first place.  It’s a “Win-Win” proposition.

One last thought: there are those who fear taking action because they don’t know what will happen after the crash.  That’s actually a  surprisingly insignificant concern.  We don’t control outcomes and so we cannot know them.  Rather, we take action based on our knowledge of who we are, what we believe and what we desire.  We are a nation of DOERs.  If you believe that, than you have no reason to fear your desires or the brave new world after the collapse.  A more legitimate fear might instead be: “what happens to me after the collapse if I am not a DOER in a society being restored by DOERs?”

Embrace the government hand-outs and credits and stimulus spending.  Encourage an immediacy so apocalyptic that no one has time to read the laws they enact.  Take action and be a DOER… Join the revolution.

Knowledge is power and knowing that we are our own biggest obstacle is very powerful. Yes, you have to have goals.  Yes, you need a marketing plan to achieve them.  But I guarantee you that plan will be much more successful if its very first step, is to fall back in love… with yourself.  Sound a little corny?  Maybe easier said than done?  Fear not: I’m going to leave you with a small, powerful two-word phrase for that all-important first step.  Not long ago I was talking to my 7 year old son and I was congratulating him on figuring something out for himself.  He immediately threw his arms into the air and said “Yeah Me!”  No pretense.  No guilt.  Only genuine admiration.  Imagine that: “Yeah Me!”

Go ahead, try it yourself.  Stop reading for a moment, put your arms in the air and say “Yeah Me!”  Come on… say it with feeling - really mean it.  “Yeah Me!”  Does it feel a little funny?  Make you feel a bit awkward; a little self-conscious?  That’s not unexpected; remember, we’re the same people who decided we weren’t good enough while on a date with ourselves!  Try this: for the rest of the day say “Yeah Me!” every chance you get.  Say it at least 100 times and mean it every time you say it.    Hold a vision of yourself, goals firmly in hand, during that brief moment it takes to say “Yeah Me.”  Most importantly, don’t stop doing it all day long.  You see, the moment it stops feeling funny is the moment you discover how successful you can really become.

“Yeah Me!”

Last week, in addition to extending the $8,000 first-time home-buyers tax credit for another six months, Congress added a new $6,500 tax-credit for move-up buyers.

The credit can be applied for homes selling for as much as $800,000, and the income limits exclude almost nobody.

You have to have lived in your home for more than five years out of the last eight, but that’s hardly an onerous restriction. And homeowners who have put down roots have equity.

Remember that capital gains on your primary residence are excluded from taxation if you have lived in your home for the past five years. But the way the government is spending money, that exclusion cannot last.

But, but, but… Your home isn’t worth what it was in December of 2005. That’s true, but it doesn’t change anything. The home that you can buy now was also selling for more four years ago.

Here’s the way things really shake out: If you have equity in your home, you can take that equity as a tax-free profit — for now. At the same time, you can snag the $6,500 tax credit. And you can do all of this at historic low interest rates.

If your house is worth $400,000 and you only paid $300,000 for it, you could reap a gain of $100,000 — which would save you thousands of dollars in taxes. If you wait for prices to go higher, you may wait a long time for a much smaller return. And the house you buy then will have appreciated, also.

I think we’re looking at a perfect storm for homeowners with equity: You can move now, take a tax-free gain, get a lot more house than you could have bought a few years ago, all financed with a low-interest mortgage. And then, next April, Uncle Sam will write you a big fat check for your trouble.

On second thought, this is less cash-for-clunkers than the taxpayer’s revenge…

 
Sell this idea! Feel free to share this idea with your clients and prospects — in your blog, by email, on the phone. This is big, and the more we talk about it, the bigger it will get. Yes, it’s insane, but for once the hardworking American people will be on the sunny side of insanity.

The cool San Francisco fog was a pleasant change from the sticky Mekong Delta heat that he had endured less than 28 hours earlier.

While pleasant and welcoming, the faint background sounds of traffic and sea gulls confused his heightened sense of awareness.

Trying to gain a perspective of his new surreal, yet familiar surroundings, this 23 year-old kid paused at the bottom of the long steps that led up to his front door….

Can I look my own mother in the eyes without letting her see right through to the pain and fear that is hidden just beyond this external shell of a man?

It had only been weeks, or days, or maybe even minutes since he raced to stop the bleeding and save another brother’s life.

As a Field Medic, he had been trained to maintain composure while holding a dying man’s hand, yet the Army never prepared him for when he returned to the real world.

His mind drifted back to the day his father dropped him off at the bus station when he was heading off to boot camp.

A solid man, who fought back tears as he explained to his son that he joined the fight in World War II so his children wouldn’t have to.

Will his return open up wounds that his father spent years healing? Does he even have to share his story with his Veteran dad, or will he already know the ending?

He took the first three steps…. only 8 more to go before he has to face his future.

A soft bed, secure behind locked doors was motivating him to gently move up a few more steps, only stopping for a brief moment as he cringed with the thought of his prior sleeping conditions.

Nights were either spent in a foxhole infested with fire ants, or on moonlit missions into the jungle rooting out ambushes. Either way, the thought of a full 12 hours of sleep in his own bed overcame his prior anxieties as he neared the top of the front porch.

What would he remember, or how would he be remembered?

As he took his trembling hands away from his weathered face, he realized that he had been kneeling on the first step the entire time.

Looking up, he saw his parents standing in the open doorway with welcoming arms waiting for him to complete his long journey home.

_____________

The happy ending to this story is that my father finally made it up those steps and went on to raise a great family.

While he continues to struggle with the questions and answers about those 21 months of his life, he has made this world a better place by sharing his compassion and love with everyone that he meets.

On this Veterans Day, I’d like to thank my father, grandfathers, uncles and their wives and children whom have sacrificed their lives so that I may have the freedom to sit here and blog about it.

More tomorrow…

Can’t locate my muse but I’m working on it…

G

Look at the NAR monthly numbers: every year, December and January are only 8% off from August and September in the housing industry.  2008 is an outlier. Probably still time to do one of 2 things: crank 2 transactions out of this year or have an amazing January, or both.  But “shutting it down,” and waiting, and coming into the office in the role of listless mope in adult failure spiral.  If you are going to fail, stay home and don’t infect the office.

But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point comes from a tawlk with Bawld Guy I had last night.  He pointed out that a blog was well intentioned but had vague unactionable advice.  I see it too.  Because being told to “work harder, and be careful” is the sole substance of most of the Social Media, or Investing advice you see these days.   “Connect more, be authentic and transparent, and use common frolicking sense.”  And then wait and you’ll get to join the Twitterati.  Buncha crap.

That’s the rub, nobody gets really specific about what “works” and what doesn’t work.   A lot of this you have to learn on your own.  What works for Brian Brady may not work for Greg Swann.  You have to create your own system.  Try things  and go to what you are good at. The key part of the equation.  From Always Be Testing (my new Scriptures):

1. It’s OK To Not Know.
2. It’s Not OK to Assume
3. What Works For Them Doesn’t (necessarily) work for me.
4. There’s always room to improve
5. There are no sacred cows.

This Stuff Works For Me

OK, so we’ve got a little direction.  Try a bunch of stuff.  Real good.  Well, let’s get more specific:  have you tried one new, scary and risky idea this week? Write that down.  Make it a commandment.  I call people, and have connected all the way up to some unfathomable talents.   I’ve got about 3 things that work, and I try to find something better each week to bring in business to replace one of the 3 things that works for me.  Most of what I try fails.  I’m 100% oK with that. because of the above.

That said, let’s get to basic blocking and tackling and get kind of specific.  A site/social media presence oughta have:

1. High quality “Free” giveaway with no strings.  Like, say the consumer’s guide to Divorced Real Estate Commissions. Even blog posts or a “series” can qualify.
2. A High Quality quid pro quo giveaway, something in exchange for registration or an email address.
3. A demonstration of virtuosity: the point of blogging is to give a customer a preview of what will happen when they work with you.   If your blog is half assed, so will the experience that the customers have.
4. A plan to follow up with the people that endorse you via commenting!

Beyond that, let’s get into social media a little bit.  The goal of mine is to make a real connection.  Not to have a following with “10,000 people mostly ignoring you on twitter”. Twitter is permissive and promiscuous enough that each day I have between 10-25 people that add me.  I don’t often add others–I’m not against it, I just don’t currently need to.  About 1/3 of them are spambots, and another third make it hard for me to reach them.  That leaves between 3-8 people that I can find, call and offer to help.   That process can easily be repeated everywhere.  My rule is that if someone follows ME, then that’s permission to market to them.  I didn’t ask for them to come to me, they chose to, and thus…they get marketed to, befriended and helped in any way that I can.

I process my Twitter people once a day.  Takes 30-45 minutes.  I call everyone I can find and see what’s next.  Local people, I try and have coffee with.   I try to get in front of 10-12 people a week, and I often fail.  I’ve taken to deliberately having zero agenda on the call or meet.   That allows me to get to know people.  I follow up using sequences in Heap.   The other, tacit quid pro quo is simple: my contacts for yours.  If you strike me as a quality human, I’ll give you my contacts for yours all day long, provided that you honor them.

I wanted to be “famous” on social media for a time, but now I wanna be effective.  The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but they have different MOS.  The “effective” goal allows you to ignore FB friend counts, followers, and everything else, provided that it doesn’t directly influence a sale.

I’ve got one more post in me for 2009, these last 50 days or so matter a lot, and it’s time to get after it.

Just to refresh our memory:

• Goldman received $10 Billion in Tarp Money
• Goldman received $12.9 Billion of government money through AIG
• Goldman received $20.9 Billion in FDIC debt guarantees
• Goldman, restructured as a “bank holding company” borrows at the Fed Window (at basically no cost)

Oh, and one more thing: Goldman will be paying $21.9 Billion in bonuses for 2009.  I don’t begrudge them bonuses, after all: they’ve had a helluva year.  Although some of that might be due to their oligarchical position within the federal government.  It would be nice - every once in a while - if Goldman would send a little thank you nod our way; maybe a quick wave or even a wink.  I guess I’m saying that when you’re screwing me this bad, a little dinner wouldn’t hurt.

John Lennon stirred up quite a spot of bother when he said: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.”  Have to admit though, that seems like such a trifle compared to the CEO of Goldman Sachs.  I mean, who cares if you’re more popular than Jesus?  Mr. Blankfein is angling to BE Jesus.

Google Voice is a free, invitation-only service.  They recently gave me two invitations that I can give to the first two people who contact me at bhb@chetson.com.  I believe you need to use GMail as your webmail provider in order to take full advantage of Google Voice.  The two services work together.

Easy Reference Youtube Embed Codes and Tweaks For Your Website

Using Youtube’s standard embeds you end up with something like this:

Notice the White “Brainstorming Domain Names” in the header? Ugly, right?

Well strip them out by adding “&showinfo=0″ to the url. And you’ll end up with something like this:

Or maybe you want to make the vid bigger? Just change the dimensions in the embed code and you’ll end up with something like this:

Or, maybe you’d like to start the video at a certain point? Use “&start=(insert seconds here)”.

Or, maybe you want to “loop” the video so it keeps replaying? Just use “&loop=1″ in the embed code. Trust me, this, coupled with “&autoplay=1″ can come in very handy, especially if you’re trying to have some fun with a friend. I’ll spare you the demo on this one, because the Bloodhoundblog home page would end up streaming my “toilet humor” over and over again until this post gets buried in the archives by newer posts.

Or…maybe not? Which leads me to my favorite trick. Coupling all of the above with a minimized 1 x 1 pixel vid featuring some unsavory audio. (If you pull out a magnifiying glass maybe you can see the video below this line?

[Note- Little pixelated fart was just removed. I felt bad because people were starting to blame the dog. Sorry Odysseus... rh, a few days later]

Excuse Me!

Practical applications for real estate? Well, stripping the white title line could make your site look a lot cleaner and more professional? Or maybe you want to take a real long video of a home tour, then link directly to different rooms by using the “&start” thing. Or maybe you’re confident a little “silent but deadly” offer could help your conversion ratio. Example: You could embed a tiny 1×1 and say something like “pssst… give me a call, I have an opening this Saturday morning at 10.”

Freak em out a little, they’ll either love you or hate you for it… but at least your site’ll be memorable?

It’s about that time of year again. The kids have just gotten through their annual Halloween candy coma, Thanksgiving plans are either being made, debated, or negotiated, and signs of Christmas are beginning to show up in the cultural background. If you’re in real estate or a related field, it’s also about the time you see the office population begin to thin out a bit. While we sit somewhere, unawares, that little voice with whom we have a love/hate relationship begins whispering less than subtle hints about sitting down to review the year’s production vs the goals you so enthusiastically and meticulously set.

You sigh. Not just cuz you know this year’s production will probably make you look like a slug who came to work late and left early every day, but also due to all those other goals you simply gave up on, hoping they wouldn’t come back to taunt you at the end of the year. I especially like the physical goals like ‘lose 30 pounds’, knowing that even if you go on a juice-only diet ’till New Year’s Eve you’ll still weigh more than when you wrote the damn goal down.

Why do millions of us set so many goals and fail so miserably so often? Is there a common denominator? I think there is, and have been making use of the principle since the 1980’s.

I’d just become a father for the first time, and was visiting Grandma and Grandpa who lived just an hour or so up highway 15. Grandma had spent her alloted time with her new grandson (Um, alloted time is code for as long as she dang well felt like.) and found me sitting alone in her old school country sized kitchen. I’d grabbed the still warm raisin bran muffins she always made when she knew I was comin’.

I just asked her straight out, “Grandma, how come I fail so miserably at most of my goals?” Her answer became a pivot point in my life.

“Daddy told me the success of any goal I set for myself would first hinge upon its congruency with who I was, and what my purposes in life were. If the goal was aligned with one of those purposes, it would almost be impossible to fail.”

Really? It’s that simple? No way. But Grandma had never steered me wrong.

In retrospect, it sure explained a lot.

It filled in some blanks for me about why my real estate production goals never quite got traction — until I moved from selling houses to the investment side. Then I took off like a rocket. But why? Specifically why?

Again — simple as pie. I hated selling homes, as I couldn’t stand the irrational subjectivity of it all. I mean seriously, the color in the rooms is all wrong? Someone get me a gun. Yet dealing with sellers for me was a blast, even in homes. They were much more rationally results oriented, and tended to recognize reality when it bit ‘em in the ass.

So when I (lucky for me) began a farm by door knocking, my goals became reality, and much sooner than the deadline I’d set.

Then there were the physical goals I’d been making for years, though Lord only knows why. They wilted on the vine by Valentine’s day. How lame is that?

Yet my goals in bodybuilding as a teenager were regularly met and surpassed. What the hell? I asked Grandma about it. She said as a teenager I had an almost unquenchable purpose in life to excel in something. Bodybuilding was not just losing weight, or eating better, cuz I was thin then, and ate pretty well too. It was my purpose to become excellent at something, and know in my heart I’d in fact become excellent.

What happened? Within three years I was approved to compete in the Mr. Teenage SoCal (California?) contest. Didn’t get within sniffin’ distance of winning, but seventh was plenty fine for me.

Do you recognize this truth in your past? Maybe your present?

Some points to ponder.

1. Though we’ve all accomplished goals incongruent with our life’s purpose, they often are hollow and disappointing. The ‘Is that it?’ feeling comes when it was a goal you really hadn’t bought into at your core.

2. Is your goal something you want? If not, they’re much more likely to fail. Stop setting goals pressed on you by others, regardless of their good intentions.

3. The only worse thing than setting a goal inflicted upon you by others, is assuming a purpose for the goal that is unrelated to any of your life purposes. An imposed purpose is almost infinitely more failure prone than an imposed goal.

4. When you set a goal in perfect harmony with one of your purposes in life, the process of attaining that goal energizes and excites you. You approach the necessary goal achieving tasks with relish instead of dread.

Goal setting begs the question then, doesn’t it? What is/are your purpose(s) in life?

That is, until you know exactly what your purpose(s) in life is, setting goals is a waste of time and energy, at least in my experience. Even if I’ve accomplished a goal that didn’t align with a known purpose — a purpose I created — it was a hollow ‘victory’ and almost always a daily death march in the process.

Next up — What Grandma had to say about figuring out my own purposes.

Now I feel dirty.

The elections this past Tuesday were not a referendum on President Barrack Obama or his plans and policies. How do we know that? Because everyone associated with the Obama administration loudly insists that this cannot be so. They ought to know, right?

Senators and Representatives from states and districts that supported John McCain in the last election might have second thoughts, though, and this is very far from being a bad thing.

Americans insist to each other that they want a government that gets things done — except when they happen to be suffering under a government that is getting things done. If this election was not a referendum on Obama, it was a loud, angry shout about what the government has been doing lately.

The last time voters repudiated an over-ambitious president — the last six years of the Clinton administration — the nation experienced a period of tremendous growth and prosperity. The American people recoiled in horror from socialized medicine, and the resulting government — liberal president, conservative congress — was amazingly beneficial for the American people.

How? By getting nothing done, that’s how.

For free markets to work at their best, entrepreneurs need to be able to plan for the future. If they can surmise that prices and credit terms will not swing wildly over the next few years, they can plan their investments with a sense of security.

And if not? Not.

The Obama administration’s herky-jerky dance of currency inflation, stimulus programs, emergency bailouts and tax credits not only cannot stabilize the economy, they do exactly the opposite: They convince entrepreneurs that now is not a safe time to make plans for the future.

This goes for the real estate market, too. Buyers sit on the sidelines waiting for new tax credits. Sellers live in dread of future interest rate hikes. The Cap and Trade bill promises to complicate life for every homeowner.

So how might these elections have helped us all? It’s simple. If Senators and Representatives are afraid to act, nothing will change. And when nothing changes in Washington, everything changes, usually for the better, for everyone else.

Steal this book: I’ve written over 200 of these real estate columns. They are consistently one of the most popular features on our blogs. Many of them are dated and/or entirely Phoenixocentric. But many others are timeless and generic. If you want to use any of my columns on your weblog or web site, feel free. Three rules: Don’t change my text, credit me as the author and give me a link back to http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/ with appropriate anchor text. Something like this, perhaps:

<a href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/" target="_blank">
Phoenix Realtor Greg Swann</a> suggested I share this with you:

Am I link-baiting? You bet. The quid pro quo is free content for your site that pulls eyeballs and excites interest.