There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2009 (page 1 of 6)

Happiness is a green status board…

That’s the SplendorQuest server a moment ago. The numbers come and go, but it’s a rare thing for the server load to go over 5% right now. During the worst of our recent attacks, we were redlined at well over 90%, an enormous amount of computing power.

We still have a lingering problem with the MySQL server, but this is much abated by having rid ourselves of these battalions of termites. We’ll get that taken care of shortly, too.

Thanks for your indulgence during our recent troubles.

Thwat?

Sorry everyone…The writing around here over the past 12 hours or so has been nutty good and really high brow, so I feel a little bad about taking it down a level.

But… this is just too fun to let slip by without sharing? From Inman, in probably thousands of inboxes this morning:

thwat

Reds

[Brian Brady asks for advice. This ain’t it. I wrote a book in 1988 about human civilization, a condition I believe human beings can but so far have not attained. I’m thinking of revisiting the topic, if only because I fear those kinds of ideas might have to transcend a dark age. I wrote the following essay seven years ago, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate — but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. –GSS]

 
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.

To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”

After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”

As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”

HUH?!

And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.

They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims — unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.

But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.

When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists — or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans — heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.

But to listen carefully — and I am cursed with the skill of listening Read more

Mother Nature is not a MILF

Now the hard part—fabricating an essay that somehow pertains to real estate and ties in with the above catchy title; one that popped into my head while hydroplaning through a stop sign in a downpour earlier this month.  At the next red light I quickly texted the lofty thought to myself  expecting to come up with an accompanying  point (and several hundred additional words) once I made it safely back to my desk—my writing desk that is. Not my selling desk. I have a separate hard, cluttered surface for each, you see.

More accurately, what I’ve set up are creative stations for each side of my brain;  right brain/writing desk,  left brain/selling desk.  And it’s not hard to tell when I’m performing the wrong  creative duty at the wrong desk, either; I basically suck at whichever task is at hand, I’m always running  behind schedule, and I don’t make any money.  Anyway, that  Mother Nature idea was almost three weeks ago.

So tonight  I was reading  Jeff Brown’s latest post (and most of the 100 or so comments that were bound to ensue) when finally, the ideal segue hit me.  Transparency!  Why not try and give that clear concept a whack myself since, as hard as I tried to think of a comment to insert, I had nothing intelligent to add to Mr Brown’s already lengthy thread.  Perhaps  instead, I could unveil a few secrets of my own that the BawldGuy might feel are nobody’s fiscal business.  Actually, I  agree with him (and his grandparents) on this one but I happen to be sitting at my selling desk  in boxer shorts now so…. down they come.  Ah transparency.

* In 2006 I earned more income selling real estate than the combined government salaries of the Vice President of the United States and a typical  City of Chicago Streets and Sanitation worker on the ‘no show’ payroll.

* Last year, according to the cover of Parade Magazine, I basically matched dollar for dollar with the average preschool teaching assistant in Youngstown, Ohio (Fail perhaps, but not quite Perish).

* So far this selling season, I’m keeping  signing Read more

From Russia, With Love (How Americans Could Learn A Thing Or Two From The Former Subjects of the Soviet Union)

Stanislav Mishin writes a weblog called Mat Rodina.  His email address suggests that he is in his  late 30s which means he grew up “back in the U.S.S.R.”   Stanislav was probably one of the kids the nuns made us think of when we prayed for “the children in Godless Russia”, back in my grade school days.

Stan, ol’ buddy…if you’re reading, please pray for me.  Your article in Pravda was right on the money.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

As much as this arrogant American hates being punked on the pages of Pravda, I’m terrified and I need your petitions.  This economic recession is like a New York City power outage and our politicians are walking away with a television set on each shoulder….but Stan, ol’ buddy, you already know this.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

Precisely.  I visited with my parents last month and they asked me what I thought of President Obama’s first 100 days.  I replied, “Well, you gotta respect the speed and efficiency with which he’s looting our country“.

Stan, ol’ buddy, your conclusion is scary:

The Read more

Transparency — Newest Weapon Of The PC Crowd

Transparency in real estate brokerage has gone from a truly noble concept to a weapon sometimes lethally wielded by the PC crowd. Most notably bullies coming forth claiming to possess Holy Script describing transparency, no doubt salvaged from what must be the third tablet lost by Moses on his way back down the mountain.

Transparency is honest dealing from a basis of rock ribbed integrity — nothing more and nothing less. The rest is self righteous dung.

I dare you to demand to know what your dentist, doctor, CPA, attorney et. al. are netting from fees they charge you for their services. What a joke — a bad joke, but a joke nonetheless. Who do these buncha Kumbaya, hand-holding yahoos think they’re kiddin’ anyway? Transparency my ass. They want information their parents/grandparents would’ve had the good manners never to seek in the first place. Why? Cuz it’s none of their damn business and they knew it. Of course that begs the question that so much of what they ask for is wholly irrelevant.

When shopping for a doctor, what’s important to you? Is it ultimately expertise, experience, cost, or how much he’s netting? Do you divide there fees by the time spent with you? When you read that, doesn’t it come off as a stoopid question on its face? Dunno about you, but when deciding upon a service provider I look first and foremost for results. (Oops, there I go again, lobbying for a business world based upon merit.) If there’s more than one provider on that short list, then we get down to a more detailed examination — comparing the aforementioned, here’s that pesky word again — RESULTS.

My favorite uncle just had successful minor (oxymoron?) heart surgery. He’s a pretty smart guy, one of the smartest I’ve ever met in person. Please tell me without stuttering or launching a personal attack, how knowing his surgeon’s profit margin, or any info like that, would’ve aided him in deciding who was gonna repair his heart? And pretty please, don’t bring me the usual weak crappola about ‘how can Read more

If Not Us, Who?

I’m in a lousy mood today and I need your help.

The crooks are resurfacing.

If you thought the bad guys have been flushed out of the system, I’ve got some bad news for ya.  We spend an inordinate amount of time debating who and what caused the mortgage meltdown.  We spend very little time debating how we make sure it never happens again.  The key word I want to emphasize here is “we”.

It’s not up to the government to fix this mess.  It’s not up to NAMB, or NAR or Ghostbusters.  It’s up to US – the folks in the field and on the street that see the dishonesty and suck in the stench seven steps before it gets packaged into mortgage backed securities.

I wrote an article entitled The Code:  How the Mortgage Industry Could Self Regulate a few days ago.  Alas, my baby blog is a PR2 and I doubt too many people saw it.  I think it’s an important concept and I am grateful for a venue like Bloodhound Blog to facilitate the conversation.

If you leave it up to your government, you get lame-brain ideas like HVCC.  I’m telling y’all right now, right here that I’m going to do my little part to protect the general public from the bad guys.  We need to clean up our own industry.  Brian Brady has it right in my book:  you do wrong and he’s gonna “come down on you like a ton of bricks”.  People look to us as fiduciaries, and I do believe in buyer beware.  But unfortunately the doofus who doesn’t do his homework and gets himself ripped off just lowered the property values of every smart guy on his block.

So here’s the question I want to pose to the Bloodhound Community:

I know a bad guy, a predatory lender who ripped off hundreds of borrowers.  He went away for a while and now he’s back.  What can I do about it?  How do we take our industry back?

Truzilla IDX = N/A R.Com?

When I was looking into whether or not Realtor.com was publishing scrapable rss feeds based on searches a few weeks ago, I also took a look to see if Trulia was doing the same thing.

Sure enough, they are, but of course the quality and the diversity of the types of feeds they’re offering are way juicier than Realtor.Com’s. Not surprising.. absent a Move/NAR type hook up, these guys actually have to innovate, right…

So, with all this fuss over local boards and NAR trying to control the “misappropriation” of property data by regulating idx feeds, I’ve been wondering if one couldn’t just turn Trulia into a personal, free idx solution using the same method I used to tap R.com…

The ingredients?

  • Lotsa fresh goog juicy dynamic content.
  • Not all, but enough mls info to make your visitors at least hang around for a little while.
  • Sales Transaction, REO, Pre-foreclosure data and any other information not available in local idx data either because of local
    board regulations or limitations in the fields available in the mls software.
  • And more…

In short, you could probably “scrape” your way to a more informative site then your competitors have without the need to wrestle with the threat of an absurd Mibor type situation.

[An Example Start Here For The Curious]

But It’s A Half Measure…

Sure…that could work, sorta. But Trulia’s info isn’t all that comprehensive to begin with and you’d be offering your visitors a half-assed hacked up version of true idx. So we’re back pretty much to square one, with some extra dynamic content but no free idx via Trulia.

[Aside: Shouldn’t these guys do the right thing and disclose to their visitors that their’s isn’t a comprehensive “search engine?” I’d buy ads on trulia in a minute if they could say something like: “Yo, we don’t have all the listings, but we’re real good at roping you in, so why don’t you click this guy’s Read more

Lower June, 2009 Mortgage Rates Rely On Central Bank Action

May Day in the mortgage rates market is over.  The market got spooked by triangulated opinions about the viability of the US Treasury as a going concern.  In response, mortgage traders sold off mortgage-backed securities, some 3-4%, in 4 days, to drive mortgage rates from 4.75%  to the 5.375% current level.

Tom Vanderwell thinks mortgage rates could bounce as high as 5.75%, in the next 30 days unless there is MASSIVE intervention by the Fed.

MOTIVE: It helps to understand that Ben Bernanke is a disciple of financial activism as a means to combat a potential economic depression.  Aware of his activist philosophy, scrutiny of the April, 2009 FOMC minutes would lead you to believe that the Fed is targeting retail mortgage rates to be under 5%.  Mortgage rates north of that number are counter-productive to the fiscal policy designed to deleverage the average American.

MEANS: The Fed has another $700 billion at the ready to stabilize the mortgage-backed securities market and artificially lower retail mortgage rates to under 5%.

METHOD: The Fed would have you believe that not only are they going to purchase those MBS for the consumers but for the viability of the Central Bank (this is spin, plain and simple).  In short, the Fed is saying  “the financial institutions are so healthy that we must direct our attention to the consumer if WE are to remain a going concern”.  I’m exaggerating a tad but that’s the Fed “spin” to justify the massive intervention I expect.

My opinion about the Fed’s actions are irrelevent to the near-term home buyer and mortgage shopper; my analysis is not.  Expect the Fed to drive mortgage rates lower into June.

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

What Happened, What Does it Mean, and Where Do We Go From Here?

Wow!  What a day in the mortgage and bond markets today.   I think it’s a good thing to say that while a lot of us saw this coming, very few of us expected that it would happen today.    Let’s walk through what happened, what it means and where we go from here.

What happened? A couple of things happened that caused the bond market to go into a free fall (okay more than a couple):

  • Several analysts and rating agencies have raised significant questions about whether both the United Kingdom and the United States will be able to continue to pay their debts as the staggering amounts that they are borrowing to keep their financial systems afloat are well, truly staggering.
  • As GM inches/races/inches (depending on the moment) towards bankruptcy, it is becoming obvious that the US Government is going to have to shell out a LOT more money to keep GM somewhat afloat (another approximately $50,000,000,000 – but who’s counting?)
  • Although the headline number looks good, as we discussed earlier, the existing home sales for April were less than spectacular.
  • Case Shiller came out with their housing price value reports and they showed a pretty nasty case of the housing price drops.   That means that the collateral for mortgage backed securities is dropping in value making them less desirable.
  • A number of reports have come out recently that showed that the performance of mortgage backed securities is continuing to suffer and mortgage delinquencies are continuing to rise.   We talked about one of those reports here, and another one of them here.
  • Oil prices have been going up and the people in OPEC who control a lot of that are talking $75 to $80 a barrel while we’re only at $63 right now.   Increasing the risk of inflation puts pressure on rates.
  • The Federal government, through their manipulation of the long term Treasury and mortgage backed securities markets (also known as buying the market), had been keeping mortgage rates artificially lower than what the economic, financial and mortgage portfolio conditions would typically warrant.
  • Oh and there’s this little thing called North Korea firing test missiles and Iran running ships in Read more

Some listings are extra FUN!

Sometimes, out here in more rural America, we have properties to sell that you can’t just drive up to in the Lexus and click off the security system to show.  I usually have a property or two a year that are a bit more challenging and immensely more fun to work with and show.

Saturday, I took a several hours to view a new listing.  In that time, I only saw bits of it.  This particular property is pretty big,  1 mile by ½ mile for 346 acres.  It has 16 individual tax parcels and is mostly undeveloped.  It is surrounded by forest and has over 2000 feet of elevation change across it.  It does have power, a well and amenities.  Access to part of it is via a dirt road.  Other parts also have dirt roads that go near or into the property.  While this property is spectacular wilderness, it only takes 20 minutes to get to the edge of it from town or my own home.  This is a fun property!

I was reminded of a conversation at Unchained one evening about good real estate agent cars.  While I can often use a sedan, maneuvering around boulders on a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff just isn’t what a Lexus is made for!  Things are a bit less civilized on a listing like this!  I’ve used SUVs, pickups,  jeeps, ORVs and even snowmobiles to show my most fun listings.  No worries though, I’ve never seen nor heard dueling banjos at any of these remote properties.

joe-creek-northwest-from-top-of-parcel-p

Part of the fun in selling one of these ranch or acreage types of properties is to figure out the best way to show it to clients and explain how to show it to other agents.  I also like to be able to talk to clients before a showing and make sure they have an expectation on what we’ll be doing.  If they have height concerns, I might avoid a narrow path cut into a cliff and just show that part from the bottom of the hill.  If we’re hiking, I try to make Read more

Who is the NAR Advertising Helping?

Wow, crazy spending in our government should cause rising interest rates in the future.  Government incentives, mandates, moratoriums and Fed manipulation of the housing market, which got us here in the first place, are running amok right now.  The unintended consequences of all these actions are yet to be seen.  The NAR is advertising NOW as a great time to buy, just like they did in 2006 and 2007.

I get buyers and sellers asking me what I think will happen, as I had this weekend.  I can tell them with certainty that I expect that things will change from where we are today.  Do I tell them the NAR line that it’s a great time to buy a house?  No.

I don’t think it is necessarily a bad time to buy a house, and may even be a pretty good time to buy a house, depending on somebody’s particular situation.  On the other hand, if the person who is thinking of buying isn’t sure they’re going to stay put, with the cash flow to pay for their home for a pretty good while, it may be a really poor time to buy a house for that person.

How about selling?  I’ve sold two homes that I personally owned in the last six months.  Is it a great time to sell?  It was for me.  And sell them I did, in about 1/5 the typical time on market in the area.  Could I get more for them in the future?  Maybe but I can’t tell you how far into the future that might be.  I tell clients that this may, or may not, be a good time for them to sell depending on their situation.

So, the NAR advertising line irritates me.  I don’t find it helpful at all.  It undermines the credibility of real estate professionals to simple mind numbing “it’s time to buy” repeated over and over.  That’s the kind of help I can do without.  While my crystal ball on the future is no better than anyone else’s, I just want to be there help my clients and friends through actions that Read more

Kipling on the land we live on and the land we love

I am reputed by Macleans magazine to be well-versed in verse, so, in concert with my soul’s sister, Teri, I will lend my ear to the muses in the celebration of glorious land:

Sussex

by Rudyard Kipling

God gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
    Yea, Sussex by the sea!

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
    No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
    But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
    And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
    Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
    Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
    As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
    At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
    The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
    All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
    The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
    And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
    Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
    Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
    Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
    Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
    Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days
    The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
    The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
    And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
    Dreams, as she dwells, apart. Read more

Under all is the land: Celebrating property rights wherever you live

I think about this every now and then. Under all is the land- real estate not as business, but as a sort of philosophy, a big idea. Greg wrote an incredible piece about this in his usual big thinker style. I can’t take this on from the place Greg’s at, but I can see this from the street level- from where I’m working.

My transactions with first time buyers and with HUD owned homes are teaching me a few things. You may not deal in that market. It’s very gritty. Not everyone wants to get their hands that dirty, or do that much work for a couple hundred dollars, and believe me when I tell you that there are times I understand that completely. But le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, so against the best advice of some of the best brains in the business, I’m working with the people who do not take home ownership for granted, they didn’t grow up assuming they will ever own a home. And in spite of all this collective intelligence pointing me elsewhere, I love working with people who are excited about owning property. Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Think about how incredible that statement is: Owning property. Land. Something that can’t get moved, can’t be taken away. I know eminent domain exists. Forget that for just a moment and think about the history of man. Property ownership equals freedom. The right to own property? That’s extraordinary! So while I understand I could make more money with less work if I worked at real estate differently, I get a huge kick out of helping people who see what I see when they buy a home.

These are people who may have grown up under circumstances that would not have precluded home ownership. They may have grown up in parts of the country that have become too exclusive for the average person and they have been shut out of a life they literally helped build. Perhaps they are not children of privilege but children of other circumstances. They Read more