There’s always something to howl about.

Month: July 2010 (page 1 of 3)

You Still Here? Good. Now Get Out!

I was talking to a pretty large group of agents yesterday and during the break I asked my standard questions: “So, how’s business?”  “Are you keeping busy?”  Over and over I heard the same two answers.  One agent would say, “No, it’s been slow and it’s killin’ me.”  The next agent would say “Yeah, I’m real busy, but every transaction takes three times as much work and pays half what it did.  It’s killin’ me.”  Kind of reminded me of a classic Woody Allen joke about two old ladies sitting at a resort in the Catskills.  The first one complains, “The food here is terrible.” The second one replies, “Yes, and such small portions.”

I know, I know – this space is normally reserved for big-brain posts and how-to tutorials all written to help you find your bigger, better, more passionate place in this bowl of cold porridge we call real estate.  Heck, just for writing this I might get drummed out of the “challenge them till they drop” school of bootcamp real esate training that cost me $19.99 and four cereal box tops.  But listen, if you’re making it right now – despite the poor food and small portions – then you are a success and when the tides eventually rise, you’re going to reap ever increasing rewards. (Unless, of course, those tides drown you, in which case your reward is in the mail… please don’t contact me.)  So give yourself a pat on the back.  Better still, take yourself out to dinner this weekend and make damn sure to show this post to your wife or husband.  They should spend the better part of that dinner telling you how impressed they are that you’re still making it.  (Wouldn’t hurt if they commented on your tremendous bouyancy either.)  Oh, and make sure you order dessert too – something decadent and fattening.  Just tell the waiter that no matter how bad the dessert is, you want a large portion.  It’ll be okay, I promise.  Besides, you deserve it.

An Offer of Thanks and Some Encouragement – Fillin’ Barns

As is likely true for most readers, though hard work, a constant learning curve, and a little luck have combined well for me, it was mentors selflessly adding new possibilities to my menu who made so many positive outcomes even possible. They showed me where the pockets of light were in the dark times — and, more importantly, where the light switches were. How to leverage new skill sets and knowledge into useful and productive results for clients. But most of all, to become a mentor whenever possible. I’ve done this, if only to honor the frequent detours of their valuable time on my behalf.

All of them are gone now.

When thinking of them, which is often and fondly, a feeling of tremendous gratitude and a bit of frustration wash over me. Though I routinely thanked them for their priceless gifts, there’s always that nagging frustration — somehow I could’ve shown more gratitude. The lessons imparted weren’t limited to the nuts ‘n bolts of being a real estate investment broker. One thing they shared was the core belief that regardless of the times, those who kept plowin’ the fields, day in, day out, would always have their barn filled with enough, if not a surplus, come harvest time.

That one nugget of wisdom has kept me talkin’ to the mule, while plowin’ the field far past sundown more times than I can remember. I’ve not once been let down when it came time to bring in the harvest. That surely doesn’t mean there weren’t years when hamburger helper wasn’t a staple. It meant that I was still standing — ready to compete when the excrement stopped hittin’ the whirling blades. I learned as a young man that sometimes winning/success = survival. For many these days that’s surely the reality.

None of us are immune, most of us have been there, done that. But to those who’re experiencing their first go-round in this kinda rodeo, I offer heartfelt encouragement.

Grandma was right when she told you to keep your head down, and keep workin’ hard ‘n smart one day at a time. Read more

Get them [not] to sign on the line that is dotted…

Here are a few questions.

We all know that there are clients who will cost us – either in the short or long runs – more than they’re worth in terms of value to us. What steps do you take to account for potentially needy/troublesome clients? Do you factor that into a price you charge? Do you refuse to take them? Do you take them on a contingency basis, meaning that they must do XYZ before you will be hired by them?

I’ve recently turned away several clients who I knew could pay me, but who I suspected would be too much trouble in the long run. I think one of the benefits of running your own business is that you get to decide who you want to interact with.

I’m trying to develop a graceful way to reject clients, since I don’t want to damage my reputation. And the sometimes the kind of people I reject are the kind of people who, if they had a mind to do it, could damage my reputation.

An apology to Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman: “I bought my house on FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com!”

I owe Glenn Kelman an apology. When Redfin.com was young — which is to say four long years ago — I swore that Glenn’s assertion that people would buy homes like books on Amazon.com was simply absurd. I have moved people into rental properties sight unseen, and quite a few of my investors let me pick out rental home investments for them. But I could not foresee a day when people would commit huge sums of money to purchase a residence they had seen only on the internet.

Today I am obliged to eat my words — and I’m damn glad I don’t wear a hat!

I had email this afternoon from a vistor to our Phoenix MLS search site, FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com. Writing to me from Florida, he had found a property on our site that he wanted to purchase. To his credit, the home is very aggressively priced to its competition, as well as being listed for several thousand dollars less than the lowest recent comparable sale. In other words, very far from being wrong about this offer, he is right on the money. Plus which, he’s an investor, so he’s not going to have to explain to his spouse that he bought her a mail-order homestead.

But still…

But: Still: Thanks to DocuSign, we had everything done 53 minutes later. I had Phoenix handyman Mark Deermer meet me at the property so we could take a look at it — this after the contracts were already executed — but there was no key in the lockbox so we weren’t able to go inside. But we have ten days from acceptance to look for red flags, so there’s no risk in the work we’ve done so far.

But still…

Took me by surprise, but it’s been utterly painless till now. We may end up killing the deal yet, but, if not, we’ll close in 30 days or fewer.

So: Glenn Kelman: My hat — the one I don’t wear and won’t have to eat — is off to you. It’s a whole new world of real estate.

On a Scale of 1 to 10…

USC is cleaning house after the Reggie Bush debacle.  (For those of you with real lives, Reggies Bush is a running back for the Saints who, while attending USC, was lucky enough to receive – no strings attached – a big, beautiful new home for his family here in San Diego…  It reportedly had nothing to do with his prowess on the football field.)  According to a recent AP story reported in the San Diego Union Tribune, USC will be sending Mr. Bush’s Heisman Trophy back to the Heisman Committee as an expression of their shame.  Apparently, they are no longer proud to display it along side the trophies of Mike Garrett, Matt Leinart, Carson Palmer, Charles White, Marcus Allen and … OJ Simpson.
 
I’m guessing the closed-door strategy session ended with something like this: “Yes, yes, he nearly severed two people’s heads… I mean he alledgedly nearly severed two people’s heads!  But Reggie cost us scholarships and bowl games.  Gentleman, I believe our course of action is clear.”

Gettin’ Listings Sold – Playin’ Hide the Pea

I’ve never really cared much about the infinite number of sites ‘marketing’ listings for real estate agents. It’s always struck me as oversold at best, and a con at worst. I’ll let you gentle readers gimme your experience in the comments section. I have done a kinda sorta poll in the last 10 days or so. The question was — How many sold listings do you attribute to any of the various sites that do that sorta thing? Mostly I was greeted with a whole buncha silence, though some immediately admitted not knowing.

This question began to bug me about 18 months ago as I was headin’ towards the return of my firm to our local San Diego market. I’m gonna be a lister for the most part — can’t help it, it’s in my DNA. My dad always said it was one of the ways to keep my ManCard. 🙂 Actually, those who know me assume I won’t be showing houses, as my son will be representing buyers who can’t get started in investment property, but can own as cheaply as they can rent — another post altogether. I’m more than happy for him to be on the road. 🙂

As I was sayin’, in January of 2009 I was wondering how effective these sites really are when the Firestones kissed the pavement. The answers most agents finally gave me were exactly what I’d expected — they use them to get listings. Potential sellers are impressed like Little Leaguers at their first big league game when they see that Larry Lister from TopProducer Real Estate will be putting their home on 3,058 different sites — and by Saturday to boot. Boy, does that guy know how to market, or what?!

Um, I opt for ‘what’. This declaration of implied marketing savvy, also implies the agent is a techie of the first degree. Geez, does he leap tall buildings in a single bound too?

Wanting to find out for myself, I did a little experiment with the first local listing I’d taken in about six years. No sign — no fancy stand-alone websites Read more

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.3: Praising Cain: Change the world forever by learning to love your life the way you actually live it.

Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.

Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.

The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.

Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:

If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.

If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more

Where Would David Gibbons Go?

Home, of course.

Anybody who followed his World Cup trip to South Africa saw the glow on his face, in his Facebook pictures, and the longing in his heart, on his Facebook status updates.  Social media are interesting platforms.  They have the power to bring you much closer to people you’ve met or allow you to learn more about those you’ve yet to meet.   I “met” David on Active Rain, was drawn to the Zillow brand because of him (and Drew Meyers), and am grateful to him for supporting  the inaugural real estate social media marketing conference.

I’ve battled with, yelled at, drank beer with, collaborated with, and tried to support David Gibbons for a number of reasons but, in the end, it’s all about mentschkeit.  David G from Zillow is the type of guy you want on your team….and you want to play on his team, too.

I”m not going to cry about his departure because between  Skype and Facebook, Seattle is not much farther than Jo-Berg.  My goal today is to remind you of the single most important lesson we learned, from David G:  What Would David Gibbons Do?

The WWDGD lesson is to represent yourself  positively online and always sell your brand.  The trick is in the delivery.  David G. never skulked and pounced, like a sleazy corporate pitchman.  David G. was always part of the conversation, offering ideas, debating, and developing best practices.  If there was ever a spokesman for the ” RE.net“, Davig G would be that guy.  Why?  He lives in our world.

So I’ll just say “Hamba Kahle” to David G.  I’d say I’ll miss him but I doubt I’ll notice he’s moved.

GreenErections.Com

I’ve been having a lot of fun with WordPress 3.0. One of the cool things large brokers can probably be doing with the platform is offering their agents super simple to set up lead generating landing pages.

By taking advantage of the multi user capability and tweaking a themes template files to allow for very little customization, you can build, test, deliver, (and tweak for improvement) sites that do a nice job of converting visitors to incubatable leads.

Some early Retechulous stabs at this wp 3.0 mulitsite squeeze page concept include:

  • PropertyBuzzer.Com
  • 247Property.Info
  • FixerUpperLoan.Info
  • and… the site I’ve been wanting to build for years (I even bought the domain once, let it expire, then waited for it to come back available)…..

    GreenErections.Com!

    …An eco friendly squeeze page for real estate pros that sure to delight, offend, and most importantly differentiate!

    Anyway, full disclosure. I’m letting folks fire these sites up for free as a bit of a retechulous lead generation ploy… so if you’re interested in grabbing one for yourself, there’s a form that’ll let you start the process within the eco friendly real estate squeeze page (anchor text) blog post I just fired up on the subject.

    Very interested to hear whether Anyone else out there is having similar fun with WP 3.0?



Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.0.3: When you resolve never to let other people dominate you, you come to be indomitable.

That’s a lot to take in, so indulge me as we summarize what we’ve talked about so far:

  • You are a sovereign soul. Your purposive behavior is exclusively controlled by your self.
  • You cannot be governed. Other people cannot control your behavior, nor you theirs.
  • To the extent that other people — your religion, the government, your family or friends — might seem to control you, this is a consequence of your own freely-tendered consent, your own explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation.
  • Because other people’s seeming control over you originates in your own sovereignty, you can recover your freedom at any time you want, simply by withdrawing your consent.
  • If you have surrendered any of your sovereignty in the past, your life will be better — for you — once you have regained full control over yourself.

If you have made the mental effort to recover your sovereignty in full, your life will already be better. This is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, wouldn’t you say?

In other essays, I take up the mental, physical and moral benefits of a full commitment to self-adoration, but this is simple enough to see in summary: If you devote your life to doing everything you can think of to make your life better, more perfect — more perfectly, more abundantly rich in every kind splendor — your life will be immeasurably improved.

Now reflect that we’re talking about what might happen if the shit really does hit the fan. If the government of the United States does not collapse under its own vast weight, so much the better. But even if it does, your own unique life will still be better than it might have been had you not made this change, won’t it?

There is no downside to self-love. You’ve been poisoned on the idea, for your whole life, by people who know they cannot rule free minds. But just by daring to let your mind run free, by daring to be the uniquely beautiful specimen of humanity you have been all along, your life will be everything you’ve always known it could be.

Yes, the world outside your mind can be Read more

Some Observations From a Crappy Blogger Who Can Barely Spell SEO

Though most of this post won’t necessarily be tech related, it’s probably wise for me to credibly establish by TechTard credentials. I’ll do it quickly by tellin’ a story on myself back when I was a beginning blogger. My marketing guys said, “Hey, this blogging thing looks to be real. You should do it, cuz you know stuff. Can you write?” And a blog was born. My first post was published, quickly followed by my first ever comment. It wasn’t really a comment though, as some of the text made my cursor turn into a hand. What the hell?! It was a trackback (ping?) from none other than Greg Swann at Bloodhound Blog. I literally was in a panic cuz I thought I’d been hacked. How did they get into my blog?! Betcha my marketing guys from back then are still laughin’ their asses off.

I know a bit more techie stuff these days, but not much more. So there you have it — I’m a legit, card-carryin’ TechTard.

OK — Let’s start with SEO, if only so we can leave it first. 🙂

I use key words in my posts mostly cuz I need to in order to make the damn thing readable, not for juice. Check out my page rank, then tell me, cuz I don’t have a clue what it is, nor do I give a damn. Most decent bloggers readin’ this draw traffic orders of magnitude more than I do. They also, most of ’em, get more comments on their average post than I do in 10.

Please tell me how much money real estate bloggers earn per comment, I’m curious. How much more do they earn with 10,000 readers a month compared to the guy who doesn’t average 1,000? 10 X more? Go ahead, make my day, say yes. 🙂 What a buncha hooey. Does SEO work to generate more ‘traffic’? No doubt. When driving, don’t we avoid traffic? 🙂 Those extra cars don’t get us to where we’re going any faster, do they? No — they’re just traffic muddling up our commute. They don’t care where we’re Read more

Reasons to be (less than) cheerful, Part 3.0.2: What has it cost us to have been so wrong for so long about selflessness and self-adoration?

You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. If you’ve read this far, you must know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.

This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.

But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of splendor, within our own minds and in the world around us, is an artifact not just of selfishness but of the most profound and most profoundly-beautiful self-love. If there is any normal state for human beings — normal as a matter of ontology, not statistics — this is it: To be so much in love with the things you make with the time of your life and the effort of your mind and your body that you cannot bear for those things to be less than perfect.

Think of that: Whether you’re looking at a skyscraper or listening to a symphony or simply teaching a child to read, the source of the splendor you experience is self-adoration and nothing else — not just your own delight at being alive, or the child’s, but also the architect’s, the composer’s, the author’s and all of the people who worked on those creations. And then consider that it is self-love — the self-love Read more

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.0.1: You are ungovernable: Other people have power over you only because you have surrendered your own sovereign authority to them — and they can’t stop you from taking it back.

Let’s start with this idea: You are a sovereign soul. I have a lot more to say about the nature of the self, within this series of posts and throughout my writing, but, in a political context, this is the most important fact of your life: You cannot be governed.

All of human history, ultimately, is an attempt to contravene and negate and obviate this simple fact, and it is for this reason that every human civilization — so far — must be rated a failure. Some have been better than others, of course, and I sing the praises of the Greeks not just for what they did in the Hellas of old, but for what they are still doing all over the world. The Greek idea — each man has the right and power to own and control his own life and property — undergirds the best approaches we have seen — so far — to truly human civilizations.

And the United States — for a while — was the best-ever expression of that Greek ideal, the freest civilization ever yet seen on the earth. But like the polities of the Greeks before us, American society carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the horrors visited upon you every day in the news are those seeds bearing their full fruit at last.

Here is the problem, for the government of the United States and for any would-be governor of human behavior: There is nothing I can do to cause or prevent your purposive actions. I can threaten you or beat you or tax you or imprison you or kill you, but I cannot cause you to do anything I want you to do, nor can I prevent you from doing anything I want for you not to do. You are a moral free agent as a manifestation of your nature as a human being, and there is nothing I can do to contravene or negate or obviate your sovereign freedom.

But wait. Isn’t it true, as Rousseau had it, that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”? Indeed Read more