BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: December 2008 (page 4 of 6)

December 15, 2008

In Detroit, Idle is a Four Letter Word

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

In a prior life, before becoming a licensed real estate professional, I was responsible for implementing supply chain technology in the discrete manufacturing arena – more specifically – the auto industry.

Over a 7 month period, between 1998 and 1999, I made a temporary home in Sterling Heights, Michigan – 16 mile and Mound Road to be exact – home to Ford Motor Company’s largest real axle and transmission manufacturing and assembly facility – one million square feet of real estate, generating roughly $1.7B of product.  The plant was as vertical an operation as I have seen, short of a foundry.  From raw forged metal, UAW workers machined gears and assembled rear wheel drive transmissions for Ford’s cars and trucks – the Mustang, Lincoln Town Car, Explorer and the Ranger pickup – at the time, some of Ford’s hottest products – the Explorer was selling like crazy.

Before setting foot in Sterling Heights, I was tasked with creating a new sales methodology, tools and implementation plan that calculated the ROI of our supply chain technology solution once implemented.  The sales methodology walked a senior executive through the hard dollar, tangible savings and return to bottom-line profit contribution our technology solution would deliver.

Process created – tools developed – mission accomplished.

Or so I thought.  Now go prove that it actually works.

My first – and my team’s feat was to sell our solution to the VP of Operations.  We walked through the process and learned from our discussions that the VP of Operations was given the directive to reduce Work In Process inventory – WIP had grown disproportionately to end-unit assembled transmissions.  This particular problem was a no-brainer – our sweet spot.  Our solution optimized the flow of WIP and synchronized the flow of raw material to end-unit assembled transmissions via planning and scheduling algorithms.  Cake.

Unique to our solution was our commitment to reduce WIP over a 12 month period.  Our proposition – Ford would pay our travel expenses and small overhead expenses for our 12 month assignment – nothing more UNLESS we delivered results over and above the $20M goal.  Any additional savings above and Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and Read more

December 13, 2008

For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure

Looking for some good news in the Phoenix residential real estate market? So is everyone else.

New foreclosures are down, as are new foreclosure filings. Lenders are working with homeowners to help them stay in their homes, just in time for Christmas. That’s good news right?

Maybe. It turns out that, of the folks who negotiated loan workouts in the first quarter of 2008, 60% are back in default on their loans.

It gets worse. The typical newer stucco and tile West Valley tract home lost 7.41% of its value. In November. Year-over-year, that house is down 35.46%. Compared to its high in December of 2005, that property is down 48%.

Now there is a silver lining. If you bought your home in 2003 or before, and if you have resisted the impulse to refinance it, you’re probably still ahead of the game, at least by a little bit. And with interest rates at historic lows, this might be the time, finally, to refinance to lower payment.

And investors and first-time homebuyers could not have things better: The selection of available homes is still very broad, prices are below replacement costs, and interest rates are deliciously low.

Better news — for people who don’t own homes: Prices could go a lot lower, and interest rates could drop even more.

But what, then, is the implication for loan workouts? Until home prices stabilize and start to rise again, a loan workout against substantial negative equity might not make the best financial sense.

As we talked about last week, the hit on your credit rating from a foreclosure is a terrible thing. But it’s plausible to me that you could recover from that faster than your home will once again be worth what you’re paying for it.

And that’s the worst news of all: We have mismanaged our economy so dreadfully that, for many people, the most financially-astute course of action they can take is to pretend to be deadbeats, to fake their way to Read more

December 12, 2008

If the question is, “What should a Bloodhound do if awarded the Pulitzer Prize?” — the answer is, “Drool…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Fanmail from some flounder:

BloodhoundBlog: Will Pulitzer Come Calling?

The BloodhoundBlog is a phenomenon; read it and you’ll become addicted to the prose, the passion, and the gem-like jewels of news. It now has a cult following and it has achieved pinnacles of success in online media. But will Pulitzer’s new criteria open the door to the likes of the “dawg??”

More here on the Pulitzers.

It is obvious by now that the best writing in the world is being written for electronic media only. Excepting Geno, we wouldn’t qualify for any awards anyway, but it remains that the Pulitzer committee is not quite ready to tiptoe the whole way into the twenty-first century. It is stretching itself only so far as to consider prose that is being committed to pretend paper. If you can hang in cyberspace without clinging in craven desperation to atoms — even purely imaginary atoms — your talents will not be considered. The Pulitzer Prize will remain a celebration of obsolescent relics by irrelevant antiques. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

December 12, 2008

Is Web Technology Squashing the Little Guy in Real Estate?

by

CEO, Redfin.com

Author website

About once a week, someone asks Redfin who built our real estate search site (sometimes they don’t ask, they just take). Since we built our site on our own, we can’t recommend a development partner, but we can offer advice to other brokers building MLS-powered sites.

And our first suggestion would be to bring your wallet. If you include all the employee salaries, benefits, hardware, online services, data costs and hosting costs, Redfin will probably spend $4+ million on research and development in 2009.

Is Technology Tilting the Playing Field Toward Large Brokers?

Is Technology Tilting the Playing Field Toward Large Brokers?

That may sound like an imposing number but we have costs you can avoid. We spend at least $1 million on commerce tools for tracking offers and listings, so we can give customers the same 24-hour web support you expect from a bank, limiting the administrative burdens on our agents. A traditional brokerage doesn’t have to invest in this area.

We probably spend another $1 million making mistakes you could easily duck by following us at a safe distance of, say, six months. We try to avoid mistakes, but a mistake is often just a good decision outpaced by circumstances.

For example, when we had no money — scratch that, (thanks David Selinger) when no mapping technology existed that supported user-controlled panning and satellite imagery — it made sense to build our own map. Later, Virtual Earth was the best choice because Google was slow to draw hundreds of property outlines on its map. Now the best choice for us is Google Maps because we figured out how to outline all the properties at once. We just switched to GMaps today, and now it’s on the front page of TechMeme.

I think we’re the only folks in real estate who have used Virtual Earth, Google Maps and a proprietary map, so if you have questions on the relative merits of each service, please just drop us a line.

That leaves the cost at around a few million dollars per year to build a real estate search site with national scale, which is still too expensive. While hardware costs decrease every year, Read more

December 11, 2008

Colloquial Warming

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

It is my contention that a man has the right to drop an F-bomb in the privacy of his own Bluetooth as long as it is not: sexually suggestive or within 50 yards of an elementary school; in a restaurant within earshot of my wife before coffee and dessert have been served; or, if the suicide F-bomber himself is the Governor of an actual constitutional (not emotional) state and his cell phone has a federal wiretap warrant included in his original Friends and Family package. These are just a few of my personal demilitarized zones, mind you, and shouldn’t be assigned any politically incorrect weight other than already simply stated. No more, and certainly no less, please.

The emails and phone calls began flooding in shortly after the following career shattering announcement hit the national news wires early Tuesday morning: Ill Governor Blago Peddles Senate Seat For Mucho Dinero.  The first to ring me up was fellow midwest blogging Ambassador Chris Lengquist from BBQ Capital in KC who cut straight to the chase and bluntly asked, “Mr. Petro, are you now, or have you ever been, ‘Candidate Number Five’?”

“(Bleep) no,” I replied into my headset as I shredded my 2005, 6 and 7 tax returns. “And if I (bleeping) was, I wouldn’t admit it over a (bleeping) cell phone,” swallowing my SIM card sideways.

“Then you didn’t try to broker President-elect Obama’s vacant Illinois Senate seat to the highest bidder?”

“(Bleep) no,” said I, once again, while simultaneously jiggling loose a paper jam with my toe, slipping the Rolex off my wrist and into a carved-out hardback copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations, and formatting the hard drive of my laptop.  “I can’t even broker a furnished, junior one-bedroom in this heinous market much less a vacant seat of a junior Senator I’ve only met a handful of times…if at all….or ever…allegedly. Besides, downstate Illinois is not in my farming area. I’m a Chicago boy, for crissakes, not (bleeping) Deep Throat,” choking (and doth protesting too much, I suppose).

“So then, you are not trying to ‘parachute’ yourself into the vacant golden chair coveted by Read more

December 11, 2008

BloodhoundBlog.net can map domains: Your free real estate weblog can look just like you’re hosting it yourself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It took some time to work out all the kinks, but we’ve got domain-mapping working on BloodhoundBlog.net.

What does that mean?

You can set up a free BloodhoundBlog.net weblog, say, something like myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

Then you can go to a domain registrar like Godaddy.com and register your own domain, perhaps MyOwnDomain.com. You don’t have to buy a hosting package or anything else, just the domain.

Then, with a little help from us, you can set up MyOwnDomain.com so that it displays myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

From the point of view of both your users and search engine spiders, your weblog is hosted at MyOwnDomain.com.

Here’s an example, a melancholy celebration of Dayton by Teri Lussier. The blog is built on BloodhoundBlog.net, but, because of domain-mapping, it looks like it lives on its own server.

WordPress.com charges $10 a year for domain-mapping. We’ll do it for free — with the stipulation that you really are a hard-working real estate blogger. If you’re really pounding out the content, we can help you customize your blog’s theme, too.

Between money work, web work and WordPress work, I’m coming and going, but we have a lot of cool announcements coming up. Stay tuned…

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December 11, 2008

“The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.

More:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary Read more

December 11, 2008

In Like A Lion – Out Like A Lamb – 15 Minutes Of Fame Is Almost Over

by

Associate Broker

Author website

Infamous Real Estate Investor Casey Serin Puts His Web Domain On Ebay

Many of you might remember Casey Serin from a few years ago – a young man who watched too many late night infomercials and bought too many courses from gurus who taught the so-called “secrets” of making the big bucks in real estate – a young man who ventured out and purchased and eventually lost some eighteen or so homes, many of them to foreclosure. He went from zero to negative hundreds of thousands of dollars in no time flat.

Casey was quite the character with his online accounts of his impending doom on his blog Iamfacingforeclosure.com – a blog where he chronicled his dealings on selling his houses by short sale before the lenders foreclosed on them – to an audience of not-always-so-adoring fans who would post some rather scathing comments on his blog with great regularity. His day-to-day existence was a source of vicarious pleasure for many – a lot like witnessing a train wreck in slow motion.

His blog provided such a detailed account of his obvious repeated instances of mortgage fraud that it ultimately had to come down, it was just a matter of time.  Oh there’s much more to that story – you can Google it – and to be honest, I’ve forgotten the bulk of it already. Honestly, I thought Casey was off the stage. For good. Forever.

He has gone through some various machinations chronicled in Wikipedia – and his last gasp of public persona might be the sale of the domain that he set up ostensibly to blog about penny stocks, as evidenced by his listing on Ebay. I guess when you’re no longer detailing your crimes in real-time, nobody really cares anymore.

Casey’s tale of woe was the type of a story that needed a Howard Beal kind of crescendo and ending – perhaps streaming video of the Feds breaking into his apartment to take him away Elian Gonzalez-style, or something else equally as riveting and bizarre.

No, it’s finally over for Casey. He rode that pony of fame for all that it was worth – Read more

December 11, 2008

If Mortgage Rates Are Not Going Below 5%, Where Are They Going?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

There was an interesting post yesterday asking Why Won’t Mortgage Rates Drop Below 5%?.  Brian Brady answered the question with a supply and demand analysis and as usual, I cannot disagree with that reliable old tool (the supply and demand analysis… not Brian 🙂 ).  But I wonder, is there more at work here than supply and demand?  Reading his post reminded me of something I have been telling my clients lately and meaning to share with everyone else:  Belief runs the show.  I suggest that Belief & Fear have supplanted Supply & Demand as our modus operandi.

The markets of late are moving as much on belief as they are on fundamentals.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining.  At least fundamentals is a player again.  For the last couple of years the markets based their valuations on leverage, blind optimism and a smug sense of higher intellect – all the while recording profits in the sand.  It is kind of nice to see some fundamental analysis come back into vogue.  But we do not relinquish old habits easily.  If I believe that ABC Company will (or should) profit ten cents per share, I will pay a price based on that belief – almost as if the profits were already announced.  This, of course, is what leads us into the strange world of Wall Street where a company’s shares can get whacked even after they announce record earnings IF their earnings turn out to be less than I thought they should be.

What does all this have to do with mortgage rates?  The fed has hinted at buying down mortgage rates using various tools at their disposal.  The market has now partially priced this belief into the mortgage backs.  Rates are down, at least to some degree, because the market believes they will drop even lower.  Once again, we equate assumptions with knowledge.  I don’t mind it up to a point; and here’s the point: lately I have had more than one client elect to wait on their purchase (or at least their purchase mortgage) because they want a piece of that Read more

December 10, 2008

Why Won’t Mortgage Rates Drop Below 5% ?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Mortgage-backed securities have been on a tear, improving more than a half a point in the last week.  This means that the 5.25% rate, offered at 1 point last Friday, should be offered at a half a point today….BUT….

…that isn’t the case at all.  Mortgage rates may very well rise while the mortgage-backed securities market improves.  I told you that the only relevant indicator of mortgage rates is the mortgage-backed securities market.  Why would I reverse my position?

This conundrum is a Freshman year Macroeconomics 101 case study; supply and demand.  Rates have improved since the Fed hinted at a 4.5% world.  Demand has risen, for mortgage money.  Lenders have cut back their workforce or disappeared altogether.  There just ain’t enough folks to process the paperwork so “supply” is down.

Lenders are making it clear that they just hate refinance transactions, because of nebulous valuations, in their pricing.  Expect refinance transactions to become even more expensive, in 2009. What this means is that your soon-to-be-neighbor , who is buying a home with a 3% down payment, may very well get a 5.25% rate while you, who has more equity (in a similar home), may be offered 5.75% for a refinance.

Lenders won’t get fooled into believing that business will pick up next year so they won’t be adding to the workforce.  Market volatility may encourage profiteering as long as rates stay low.

December 9, 2008

Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their Read more

December 9, 2008

Dear Rob- It’s not perfection vs. authenticity, it’s authentic perfection!

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

“The question, really, is one of perfection vs. authenticity.”

Nice try Rob, but yer still wrong. 🙂

The Notorious ROB Hahn wrote a post in which he called me out for a little discussion we had- who’s “better”- Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, and he drew some parallels to real estate marketing.  As far as who’s better- in the end, it always comes down to taste, which, as Rob clearly illustrates, there is no accounting for. But he’s young, so I’ll give him a pass for now. Rob Hahn is a smart and funny guy who likes to push the discussion forward, so I’m willing to bet he’ll take this ribbing with the good humor that’s intended, but if not, he’ll probably be blogging about it, and as for me, I love that I have a reason to post some of the finest dancing ever committed to film.

My take away from our discussion and how it relates to real estate is different from Rob’s. It isn’t one of perfection vs. authenticity, the bigger question is from whom can we learn the most and how do we apply it?

Warning: The rest of this post draws parallels between movie musicals and real estate. If that is something that will make your eyes glaze over, this would be a good time to stop reading.

Fred Astaire was famous for his quest for perfection. It was authentic to him. It’s what made Fred, Fred. You might, as Rob Hahn does, find Astaire’s perfection intimidating, but we can learn something about business from him. We can understand that practice does make perfect. That paying attention to details is extraordinarily important, and that perfection is not a bad word.

A white tie and tails in an Art Deco world may not be your thing, here in 2008. But Astaire knew his audience and he knew what he was selling. His audience, 1934, was dealing with a depression. They wanted fantasy, they wanted romance, they wanted to escape, if only for a few hours, from the reality they faced everyday. They wanted to see beautiful people in beautiful clothes, living a beautiful Read more

December 9, 2008

The Scenius.net scenes reader can tell if you’re working at your desktop web browser or on your iPhone…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…and switch Cascading Style Sheets intelligently. What it needs are more shared scenes.

Making a shared Scenius scene is work. Not a lot, but some. What do you get in return:

  • Added-value content for your blog and for any blog that echoes your scene
  • A quick way to promote news or ideas you think are important without writing full blog posts
  • By your links, you draw attention to your blog from other blogs in your content sphere
  • Your scene links back to your blog, so the more it echoes, the better for your SEO posture
  • When other blogs echo your shared scene, they are exposing your blog to their readers, which can lead to new readers — or new business

Your weblog put you into the narrowcasting business, and that’s a great thing. Building a shared Scenius scene will put you into the broadcasting business, a boon that gains in benefits — for everyone — the more it echoes.

What’s in it for me? With each scene, I’m taking a link back to BloodhoundBlog — a non-monetized weblog. In other words, I’m working for free, which is not at all unusual. You live in a world infested with sleazoid vendors, each one of whom wants to nick you for monthly fees for work you can easily do yourself. I will show you — for free — how to build yourself a broadcast platform that will benefit everyone involved, yourself the most.

There are a few people working (behind the scenes as it were) on shared Scenes that will debut in the next few days. This is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Good for your readers. Good for the writers you feature. Good for the blogs echoing your shared scenes — and good for their readers. And good for you.

Review the terms and conditions and let me know when you’re ready to get started on your own shared Scenius scene.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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