There’s always something to howl about.

Month: March 2009 (page 3 of 5)

After the Great Recession: What Will Real Estate Be Like

Over at Redfin, we’ve been wondering plenty what the world will look like after the Great Recession. It feels as though we’re falling and falling, like Alice in Wonderland, with no idea what strange new world awaits us at the bottom of this very deep downturn.

What will the Internet be like? How will venture capital change? Most important to us, how will real estate change? Aready we have seen data-sharing policies liberalized, a radical decrease in the number of real estate  agents and a radical increase in quality, and lower spending from the major brokerages on web technology even as venture-funded businesses have continued to invest millions.

We’ve wondered whether there will be more brokers or fewer, if consumers will choose an agent based on data or a personal connection, if the next generation of consumers will be the data-driven scavengers we’re now seeing pick through distressed properties.

We’ve wondered if venture capital will continue to flow into this industry or leave it alone until the next big bubble. And so we thought we would ask the Bloodhound community the same questions. What’s your take?

Independence, for Realtors, comes from having a broker’s license

This came up in a private discussion, but this piece of the pizza is a matter of interest for all Realtors. Ready?

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

I don’t think I’ve ever said this in public, but I promise you it’s an oversight that should have been obvious all along.

Everything Bloodhound is about being as independent as you can possibly be.

That doesn’t mean you don’t engage with other people. What it means is never being in a situation where you have to put up with other people, whether you like it, hate it — or you want to kill someone because of it.

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

A favorite game of dipshits who flitter into BloodhoundBlog is to pretend that they don’t understand what I am talking about when I deride vendorsluts.

Here’s a definition that will do no good at all: A vendorslut is a sleazoid who takes your money and gives you next to nothing in exchange for it — usually while binding you to an outrageously unfair contract.

And by that definition a huge number of real estate brokers are vendorsluts. Their entire business model is based not on selling real estate but on milking wide-eyed real estate agents for every penny they have, then dumping them as soon as they’re all milked out.

I can hope that no one reading this is some venal broker’s sucker, but that con-game is baked in the cake.

For that reason alone, you should:

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

Obviously, I believe that your best move is to up your own organization, to turn your practice or your team into your own brokerage instead.

But even if you choose to work as an associate broker, having your broker’s license gives you options.

Yes, your legal liability increases, but, as with all advanced education, having your broker’s license brings with it significant marketing advantages.

And if your own designated broker moves on or gets sick, you have the legal qualification necessary to move into the big boss’s chair.

Perhaps more importantly, with a broker’s license, you are a bigger threat, should the big boss get the idea he might want to sever you.

And, recalling that Read more

If the congenitally big-hearted American people were to fixate upon a moderately competent administrative assistant and make that man president of the United States, what would happen?

They’d wake up and catch a clue, that’s what. From the Wall Street Journal:

It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama’s high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look at recent survey data shows that the opposite is most likely true. The American people are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives, and most likely support a different agenda and different policies from those that the Obama administration has advanced.

Polling data show that Mr. Obama’s approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. Rasmussen Reports data shows that Mr. Obama’s net presidential approval rating — which is calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove from the number who strongly approve — is just six, his lowest rating to date.

Overall, Rasmussen Reports shows a 56%-43% approval, with a third strongly disapproving of the president’s performance. This is a substantial degree of polarization so early in the administration. Mr. Obama has lost virtually all of his Republican support and a good part of his Independent support, and the trend is decidedly negative.

A detailed examination of presidential popularity after 50 days on the job similarly demonstrates a substantial drop in presidential approval relative to other elected presidents in the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason for this decline most likely has to do with doubts about the administration’s policies and their impact on peoples’ lives.

There is also a clear sense in the polling that taxes will increase for all Americans because of the stimulus, notwithstanding what the president has said about taxes going down for 95% of Americans. Close to three-quarters expect that government spending will grow under this administration.

Recent Gallup data echo these concerns. That polling shows that there are deep-seated, underlying economic concerns. Eighty-three percent say they are worried that the steps Mr. Obama is taking to fix the economy may not work and the economy will get worse. Eighty-two percent say they are Read more

Show Me Yours – Then I’ll Show You Mine

Looking At Rental Properties With A Whole Different Perspective

The more things change… well, the more they change.

In the past, when you represented a tenant in the lease of a property, it was understood that the tenant would provide authorization for the landlord to perform a credit check, if desired. This authorization, however, was a one-way street.

That was then… and this is now.

In the current real estate climate we find ourselves in – it would behoove you to inquire as to the financial stability of the landlord before allowing your client to sign a lease. It is becoming a more frequent occurrence to hear about another instance of a landlord losing a property to foreclosure during a lease.

While requesting the credit report of a potential landlord is an uncommon occurence – perhaps it should be as normal as the landlord requesting the credit report of the prospective tenant. After all – if the landlord defaults and loses the property to foreclosure, it will be the tenant who suffers.

If the landlord refuses to provide authorization to pull their credit file – perhaps they are hiding the fact that they have not been paying their mortgage… as is the case in many short sale situations I have seen. Yes, it happens. In the past two weeks, I have spoken with two three landlords who are defaulting with tenants in place.

Whether or not you insist on the landlord providing a credit report – you should make your client aware of the repercussions of a default on the part of the landlord according to the laws in your state.

That’s the night the lights went out in Pike County Georgia

lightswentoutpike

The Pike County Chamber of Commerce has decided not to host the annual Fourth of July fireworks this year because of the current state of the economy. You can read the whole story here: C.O.C. decides not to host July 4th event

No fireworks? No Celebrating our Independence? Are you kidding me?

There isn’t any doubt that times are hard. All we have to do is cut on the news, and gloom and doom is broadcast 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. Turn on the radio: Whenever they stop playing songs, the announcer is battering us with how bad things are, with how we’re living in fear and hopelessness. All we have to do is look at our neighbors and see them losing their homes to foreclosure. We all pray quietly that we won’t be next…

Next to lose our home. Next to lose our car. Next to lose our job. Next to lose a person that we love.

There is darkness everywhere.

That’s EXACTLY why we shouldn’t cancel the fireworks. That’s exactly why we need to celebrate our Nation’s Independence. That’s exactly why we need to go boldly into the night.

Fireworks. They are a reminder of a time when royalty tried to tax our people to death with an iron-fist from across the Atlantic. They are a reminder of the brave men and women who laid down their lives to fight for our Independence. They are a reminder of the men who signed their names on a piece of paper – even though many believed they were signing their own death warrants. They are a reminder of the soldiers that have died in days of old and in the most recent days of new. Some of those soldiers lived here in Pike County. Went to school here. Have families here. How can we dare insult their memory by not honoring their service?

Fireworks. They are reminders that we are a people that call ourselves Americans and we don’t all have to agree to get along. We come in many shapes. Many colors. Many sizes. We’re all unique. We’re all beautiful in our Read more

My ZinePal wish list: Editors copyfit by cutting and adding copy

This is an email I sent last night to Frank Worsley of ZinePal. Also copied on this email were Teri Lussier, Brad Coy, Cheryl Johnson, Brian Brady, Sean Purcell and Eric Blackwell, the folks who have been talking about ZinePal privately. I’m sharing this in the hopes that it will spark other ideas.

Frank Worsley: > Let me know if you have any feature requests or run into any problems and I’ll try to fix it for you.

Okay, Frank, you asked for it.

This is my wish list for ZinePal, but I’m copying these other good folks because we’ve all been playing with the software. We’re all affiliated with BloodhoundBlog.com, a real estate industry-focused weblog. We love ZinePal because we have huge and unending publishing needs.

Emphasize that: We love ZinePal. I’m going to ask for a lot of stuff, and the others here will chip in with their own ideas, but I don’t want you to despair in any way. We’re happy to help you make ZinePal better, if we can, but you’ve already kicked our teeth in and left us smiling about it. We’re in your debt, never doubt it.

My background: I was a typographer when that word meant something. Even so, I understand that the world has changed — and I have changed, too. I want a certain amount of typographic control, if I can get it, but I’m not prepared to jump out the window if I can’t have it.

Much more important to me is control over the copy. Typographers copyfit typographically. They have to follow the copy out the window. Editors copyfit by cutting and adding copy. Give me editorial control and I’ll solve my own typographic problems.

So:

1. I want control over the feeds. I need for a feed to be forgotten if I need to reimport it. I need for as many posts as I wish to come in with the feed. I can work-around this by using categories in WordPress, e.g,

http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=7

Category feeds seem to come in in their entirety.

2. But: Once I have the copy in ZinePal, I need to be able to edit it in place. If Read more

BloodhoundBlog Radio: VA Home Loan Tutorial For California REALTORS

I recorded this webinar on March 11, 2009. The AUDIO IS HERE and will open in a new window.  Listen along and click through the links as I discuss them:

Ave atque vale: Bidding farewell to conversations past

Notice a drag in the action lately? Have you been getting the database error a little too often? Time-outs? Memory overloads?

Everything associated with Bloodhound Realty runs on a dual-core Xeon box. All by itself, no shared users. We have the whole server to ourselves. Two processors, two big disk drives, gigahertz ’til it hurts.

And we’re maxing it out in peak hours.

BloodhoundBlog has thousands of RSS subscribers, and we serve our own feeds. In the long run I might have to bite the bullet and sign up for a third party feed service like everyone else.

But there is another big problem that I’m making an effort to cure today:

BloodhoundBlog gets hit with spam comments around 5,000 times a day. Almost all of these are caught by Akismet, but each one is a strain on the MySQL database — the very chokepoint that’s getting maxed out.

So effective now, I’ve cut off all comments for posts over two weeks old. I hate having to do this, because sometimes pure gold turns up in a comment on an older post — and our archives are ripe with gold in any case. But the spammers are looking for juice, and older posts are where the juice is to be found.

I hate having to do this, but swatting at flies only gets you so far. Eventually you have to rob them of their food supply.

My apologies. But: Let’s hope this speeds up the action on the live conversations.

Kicking the CAMELS Habit: Is Your Bank “Safe and Sound”?

The FDIC developed an acroynm for the composite ratios it runs to “rate” the financial health of its member banking concerns.   An index, ranging from one to five is calculated and the FDIC premium charged to the institution is commensurate with its CAMELS rating.  “CAMELS” stands for:

  • Capital Adequacy
  • Asset Quality
  • Management
  • Earnings
  • Liquidity
  • Sensitivity

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco explains the CAMELS ratings and the highly-sensitive nature of the findings:

All exam materials are highly confidential, including the CAMELS. A bank’s CAMELS rating is directly known only by the bank’s senior management and the appropriate supervisory staff. CAMELS ratings are never released by supervisory agencies, even on a lagged basis. While exam results are confidential, the public may infer such supervisory information on bank conditions based on subsequent bank actions or specific disclosures. Overall, the private supervisory information gathered during a bank exam is not disclosed to the public by supervisors, although studies show that it does filter into the financial markets.

The average depositor might freak out if he discovered her bank had a 4 or 5 CAMELS rating and withdraw her deposits. How can a depositor do her homework if  the  bank can’t tell you its CAMELS rating ?   The good folks at BankRate.com have developed a similar system, loosely based on the CAMELS litmus test.  Here is how they describe their “Safe and Sound” ratings system:

Bankrate’s Safe & Sound ratings are comparisons to both industry peer norms and standards. In a very small number of instances, operating strategies that differ from industry norms lead to ratings that are not truly reflective of an institution’s financial condition. A Safe & Sound rating of one or two stars does not suggest that Read more

FART

FART Realtor designation

I’m not going to buy a CSM from SSMI. I’m already a FART.

  • Fracking
  • Awesome
  • Realtor
  • Technologist

Ok, you got me. FART’s not a real designation.
You can’t go to any classes and pick up a FART- I cooked this one up in my living room a few minutes ago after overdosing on some grapes and apricots.

But if you’re hip, I’m not going to charge you for the right to add some flatulant flare to your business card.

For a limited time only, I’m willing to let you use the FART designation if you can prove any 3 of the following.

  • You’ve generated more than 50 Idx signups from your web efforts in one month. (This is really an easy one , many “FARTists” consistently hit 800-2000/ month.)
  • You landed you blog or website on the first goog page for your most competitive area keywords. i.e. “Bumbl&%^$ Real Estate.” Small markets count too, but if you’ve done this for a major metro area in under a year, then whoever you’re working for just isn’t paying you enough.
  • You’ve helped another agent create and run a niche blog, free of charge, because you love spreading the RE Tech gospel.
  • You’re “auto incubating” a large group of prospects using rss based newsletters or some geeky universal contact form you’ve hacked up to work with some obscure crm.
  • You can tell me in under 30 seconds which 3 long tail search strings your most proud to be ranking organically number 1 for at the moment.
  • You’re “autoblogging” your company listings out of the mls and into your site using some wp plugin that should probably be illegal.
  • You’ve got Ping associated with 10 or more accounts and you update regularly via IM
  • You’ve created at least 1 or 2 lead capture pages that regularly spew off registrations.
  • You’ve started and run a photo or video
    niche blog
    from the palm of your hand. And you update it almost every day.
  • You’ve written a blog post in the dark, after midnight, using the Iphone’s native notes app, from the guest bedroom, so your wife wouldn’t have to suffer your Read more

With zinepal.com you can create a targeted magazine in no time flat

The Scenius set, set in motion by Teri Lussier, has been playing with a clever little web app called zinepal.com.

It’s a further elaboration on the kind of feed games we’ve been playing for months, but zinepal takes us into the world of atoms.

What does it do? Working from RSS feeds you feed to it, zinepal makes a newsletterish kind of magazine, saving your selected content as a PDF file and also as Kindle tinder.

What can you do with it? Teri saw zinepal as a physical magazine, and Brian Brady wanted to take it to every barber shop in town.

Brad Coy saw it as a way of promoting $800,000 starter-condos to impoverished San Franciscans.

I don’t care a lot about paper documents, but a PDF file is much better than formatted HTML for communicating print-like ideas in email. And if the person on the other end wants to print — or forward — your content — shazam!

Other folks had other ideas, and they can speak for themselves.

But what can you come up with? Take yourself to zinepal.com and see what you can put together.

I traded email with the developer today. He’s eager to improve the product, and there ain’t nobody with publishing needs like Realtors and lenders.

In support of zinepal, I implemented feeds in Scenius scenes today. That way, you could use a scene to aggregate content from multiple sources, then pass that one feed along to zinepal.

This is a cool tool. It could use more graphic control, and you can paint yourself into some unsightly corners. But for a quick and dirty tool for turning blog-based content into (real or virtual) dead-tree content, zinepal rocks.

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I want my…I want my…I want my TA-R-P

This is getting too easy.  Financial Times interviewed Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis. His answers reveal why the quasi-government agency that BAC has become is destined to fail.  Read the whole article.  You’ll swear your reading Orwell’s Animal Farm.

FT: Do you regret your acquisition of Merrill Lynch?

Lewis:  I’d be less than honest to say that I haven’t had my moments, but I always try to step back and say don’t judge it by this time and look forward. I still think it’s a compelling, strategic acquisition and we’re going to be awfully happy to have done it over time.

BRADY (commentary):  Ken Lewis gleefully overpaid for the world’s largest securities’ firm out of  pride and ego.  The prospect of commanding the largest mortgage originator and securities firm appealed to Mr. Lewis’ ego.  His feckless behavior showed contempt for his shareholders and will be an expense to the people of the United States but why should he care?

FT: Was there a moment when you would have preferred to pull out of the deal?

Lewis:  We did in fact think about doing that . . . and consulted with the government about filling the hole [in Merrill’s balance sheet] if we didn’t get out. We were strongly advised that the best thing to do was to go forward with the deal on time. While we made the final decision, we relied heavily on that advice because we respected the opinions of the various agencies.

BRADY:  Ken ain’t calling the shots at BofA; he’s an overpaid government employee now.  Wanna know how I know?  Read the next question.

FT: Have you been surprised by the strings attached to the Tarp money?

Lewis: I’ve been surprised at the reaction of the public for those that have taken the Tarp money when we were doing what we thought was in the best interest of the country.

BRADY:  Read the last five words.  Ken Lewis’ responsibility is to do what is in the best interest of the BAC shareholders not the country.

The answer is, of course, to break up the banks and stop the government from competing with the healthy banking institutions. Read more