There’s always something to howl about.

Month: June 2010 (page 1 of 4)

The Evolution of a Salesman

When I graduated college in 1992, I couldn’t wait to put what little I’d learned into play.  Fortunately, I had a role model (“Who We Are”/”People”/”Ken Jones”) willing to let me shadow him like a puppy dog twelve hours a day.  Before long, I became a pretty solid “ad man”.  But it wasn’t the media planning or copywriting that inspired me.  It was consulting with our clients.  It was listening to their problems and challenges – and finding creative ways to solve them.  Problem was, the company I worked for at the time was fat and happy.  They had “enough” business to pay for our waterfront office space and their German automobiles.

I thought that mentality sucked.

At the time, I was low man on the totem pole.  Frankly, I’m not even sure my status qualified for a head on the totem pole.  This was a status I gratefully would never relinquish.  Yet, typically it was either me or Ken who opened shop every morning and the two of us would inevitably lock up every night.

After finishing the annual Port of Miami print media plan three months into the year – and by the way, you ain’t lived until you’ve duked out a 12-insertion deal with Inbound Logistics magazine – something strange happened… I ran out of things to do.  We in the real estate/mortgage profession can’t even fathom this ever happening, right?  I was getting a paycheck every two weeks and was doing absolutely nothing to earn it.

Apparently, my ass-sitting didn’t bother the owners of our ad agency very much.  But it bothered the hell out of me.  We needed some new clients – and if the owners weren’t going to get off their duffs to find some, hell… I would.  Now if you’d known me then, you’d probably be laughing right now.  I was barely old enough to buy a beer.  I’d literally just gotten my degree.  I had absolutely zero business experience.  And I was picking up the Yellow Pages and cold calling some of the largest and most prestigious advertisers in the Tampa Bay area.  I was too young, stupid and naive to know it wasn’t going to work.

Have you Read more

Yogi Berra Wishes He Could Be This Good

From the Associated Press – This just in.

WASHINGTON — Homebuyers would get an extra three months to complete their purchases and qualify for a generous tax credit under a bill overwhelmingly passed by the House on Tuesday. The bill would give buyers until Sept. 30 to complete their purchases. The extended deadline only applies to people who signed purchase agreements by April 30. The National Association of Realtors estimates that about 180,000 homebuyers who already signed purchase agreements are likely to miss the Wednesday deadline.

“We owe this to the people who have essentially followed the rules who are caught by a closing date,” said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The Realtors group says the tax credit has generated 1 million new home sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise………..

Really?

Of course none of this comes as any real surprise for us.  But as Greg celebrates the inception and blossoming of Bloodhound Blog, and as I consider the many faceted Yogi Berra and what he would say concerning this about face in policy, I can only share the following video.  It’s a microcosm of Congress and NAR, much funnier, and certainly something Yogi would like.

Real Estate Declaration of Independence

I’ve been a bit quiet on BHB due to some personal issues I’ve been working through.  But, I was very happy to see Greg’s latest post on challenging everything!  I had a little holiday brainstorm today and wrote a post on my local Lake Chelan blog on a Real Estate Declaration of Independence for the consumers of services from Real Estate Professionals.

I want to share it here on BHB and get your thoughts on what I missed, should add or could have said better!  So, without further ado here is my Independence Week start to the Real Estate Declaration of Independence:

Real Estate Declaration of Independence

We, the people who buy and sell real estate, hold these truths to be obvious:

  • We the people believe that information on real estate for sale should be readily accessible without surrendering our private information.  We reject having to register on a web site in order to view listings in an area.  We value our time and will contact a real estate professional when we are good and ready for their services.
  • We the people reject all policies of the National Association of Realtors that are not in the best interest of the real estate buying and selling public.  Limiting our access to information, restricting our ability to a free and open market through regulation and limiting our market choices are all examples of policies we reject that are designed to line Realtors pockets at the expense of the public.
  • We the people reject “Dual Agency,” where a real estate agent has an inherent conflict of interest with his agency and fiduciary duties by attempting to Read more

Four years of the dog: Happy Birthday to all the hounds…

I want to challenge everything.

After four years of hammering away at this thing, the other night I finally came up with a mission-statement that best describes my own involvement here — and everywhere:

I want to challenge everything.

I love classical ideas, but not because they’re old, and I love new ideas, but not simply because they’re new. I don’t love the sound of breaking glass, but I definitely understand the appeal of iconoclasm — image-breaking. I’m pretty sure that anything I might think about is oriented 178 degrees out of true, but I also know I am at odds with the hideous sameness of everything no matter how badly it is twisted out of reason. I want things to be better — I can’t look at anything without seeing how it could be better — but even before that, I just want for things to be different. We have this incredible gift — this reasoning, recollecting, choosing, daring, defying mind — and yet all we can think of to do is the stupid, the small, the vicious and the banal.

I want to challenge all of that.

And this has been a very good home for me, for that reason among many others. Four years ago today I posted the first entry in BloodhoundBlog. The post was about disintermediation, a very common theme in my writing, and it still holds up pretty well. More than 60 people have written with us over the years, producing almost 4,400 posts as I write this. Just short of 2,300 of those posts are mine, to give you an idea of the kind of howling I’ve done, but everyone who has worked here has done exemplary work. For some of them, the best writing they’ve done anywhere has appeared under Odysseus’ nose.

I’m very proud of this thing, and it matters to me a great deal that I am able to find pride in the things I do, the things I’m involved in. I’ve always been very good at making enemies, and BloodhoundBlog has proved to be an excellent resource for making new enemies. But I’ve forged some irreplaceable Read more

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.5: It’s raining soup and all you can do is piss and moan that Big Mother hasn’t given you a free bowl.

Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack:

Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead:

This is the power of (relatively) free markets. Not only can you buy more stuff, better stuff, stuff that was completely unobtainable in 1964, at the same time very smart people have figured out how to make you much more productive than you would have been in 1964.

Chances are you had almost nothing to do with this incredible productive miracle. If you are like most Americans, your major exports are half-digested junk food and bitter lamentations about the unseemly unfairness of everything for everyone, everywhen and everywhere. But this simple example, provided by The Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute, illustrates what has really been going on in your life, while you have been so busy complaining about how horrible everything is.

We are puerile as a race, about which I will have much more to say later. But even if you are thoroughly grown up in your own thinking, it’s good odds that you have spent your entire life looking at the world upside down, concentrating with a dour dread on everything that does not matter while blithely ignoring everything that does.

Do you want a very good reason to be cheerful? The world outside your mind is all but entirely wonderful, a thing of beauty and infinite splendor. It’s only that world inside your mind that is a mess. I’m thinking it’s time you cleaned house. How about you?

< ?php include "cheerful.php"; ?>

FNMA Lends a Helping Hand (to Our Moral Backside)

Two days ago, FNMA announced their new policy regarding strategic defaults; it’s a mortgage death penalty: seven years before the offender is eligible for another FNMA loan.  Finally, they got one right.  Yes, you read that correctly; if you make your profession in the business of real estate, Wednesday’s announcement is cause for celebration on more than one level.  I’ll explain why in a moment, but first let’s dispense with the two primary arguments in favor of strategic foreclosure we see over and over again from the bubble-heads on the left:

Already we’ve got Shahien Nasiripour on The Huffington Post (I know, that’s an easy target – but it’s usually wise to start slow and thoroughly warm-up one’s disdain muscles) trotting out the tired argument about how the average homeowner should be allowed to default because the corporations that hold mortgages do it themselves.  Mr. Nasiripour would apparently like to see individuals and large corporations share the same default outlook.  I wonder if he would also prefer that homeowners negotiate their own individual, custom loan contracts; pay much higher commercial insurance premiums; price home loans on the specific risk of the homeowner rather than a pooled risk; and so on.  Either he hasn’t thought this all the way through, or he’d actually like to see the cost of home ownership much higher than it is now.

The other misleading argument is neatly presented by Ezra Klein at The Washington Post.  Actually, kudos to Mr. Klein because he not only presents the other misleading argument, but he also manages to mislead us on the very definition of a strategic default.   The essence of the second argument, in his own words: “…a mortgage is a specific contract. It says that if the borrower stops paying, the bank forecloses on his or her house.”  Not quite.  The contract specifies foreclosure as one (and there may be more) remedy available to the bank if the borrower breaks the contract.  The point of the contract itself is a promise by the lender to loan money at a rate and term that will not vary from what’s specified in return for a promise by the borrower to repay the loan as specified.  That’s not such a Read more

This Year

Is half over.

How much money have you made?

How many people have you helped?

Do you plan to do things exactly the same way that produced the results of the first 6 months?

Or do you need to change?  If you need to change, what will you do differently?

How much will it cost you?

What will be different that makes July-Dec produce different results from Jan-June?

What excuses might you be inclined to make?

Are you dead/complacent?

There are Only Four Things Certain Since Social Progress Began

(alternatively entitled – with all due apologies)
Though I’ve Belted You and Flayed You, By the Livin’ Gawd That Made You;
You’ve Made a Worser Man of Me, Socialism

 

“And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”  (from The Betrothed).  I have loved Rudyard Kipling from the very first time I read Gunga Din.  His pace and pattern appeal to me, as does his archaic sense of manhood.  I have argued before, and dare say would do so again quite successfully, that his poem If  is among the finest pieces ever written in the English language.  Of all the inspirational articles I have written and the many orations I have given, much time could have been saved had I simply gone in, recited If and walked out.  If you have never read it, stop what you are doing now and do so.  The answer to just about every event you may encounter in your life is contained in that poem.

This post, however, is not about Kipling’s great work If.  (If it were, I would certainly link to my own, real estate based homage to wisdom, and I’ve done no such thing.)  No, this post is about another poem Kipling wrote, one I am chagrined to admit I only recently discovered.  More mortifying still, I discovered it only because Glenn Beck is using a couple of lines from this poem to plug a new book of his.  (I’m not denigrating Mr. Beck, only lamenting the discovery of fine art through it’s crass commercialization.)

The poem refers to Copybook Headings and I was unsure what those were.  For the one or two of you out there as simple as I am, copybooks were primers used by school children to perfect their penmanship.  Across the top of each page was written a Biblical passage or similar lesson of moral imperative.  The children would copy the line over and over on the page below, thus improving their cursive and at the same internalizing certain truths.  Truths that, according to Mr. Kipling, are forgotten at our own peril.

Printed below in its entirety, this poem was written almost 100 years ago.  But you’d be amazed Read more

Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.

The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.

This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.

Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…

The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. Read more

The Spartan Approach to Real Estate Brokerage

As I was admitting to Sean Purcell this morning, a few times a year I get the idea to duplicate the brokerage model Dad used so effectively in the 1960’s to early 1970’s. When this happens, I quickly grab a couch and nap ’till the idea dies a solitary, friendless death. Although surely enough of his AH genes found their way through to his first born, puttin’ up with the day to day management of a firm doing that much business with that many meat eaters would be a challenge of the first degree.

His model was built on bedrock. Know in your heart of hearts the odds are better I’ll be the Padres’ opening day pitcher next year than they are for me starting a house brokerage — but if I ever succumbed to the periodic urge, this is how I’d do it — which is the same way he did it.

1. He didn’t hire pantywaists. Put another way, he hired carnivores. Frankly, I always thought if you emerged, cajones intact, after a job interview with him, you were easily tough enough for the business itself.

2. He hired adults. Don’t just slide by that statement. Take a mental inventory of the agents you’ve known awhile and the percentage who’re adolescents at best when it comes to their job and actually, you know, working. I rest my case.

3. He filtered for strong character and profound integrity. A hint of a whiff of anything less and you were shown the door. He could smell a guy’s fear in the parking lot as he drove up.

4. All agents had three options when it came to generating/conducting business — A) His way B) His way C) All the above.

5. Non-producers were not coddled. It meant you weren’t working — period. There’s the door.

To be fair, 1 & 2 really go together, don’t they? Those afraid of their own shadows should never be real estate agents, yet they comprise a huge minority, if not the majority of the agent population, always have. Being on the front lines in real estate is somewhat analogous to Read more

First time home-buyers tax credit, the morning after: “The government’s ‘gift’ to new home-buyers? A house immediately worth $8,000 less than they paid for it.”

From the National Review Online:

Things are looking worse on the housing front, with a severe drop-off in existing home sales following the expiration of the home-buyer tax credit. It’s hard to overstate how stupid this policy was. The government marketed it as a measure to boost residential real-estate prices by providing new home-buyers with a tax credit in the neighborhood of $8,000. Did you see the ubiquitous ads featuring the couple that gets an envelope full of cash from Uncle Sam? The idea was to convince potential home-buyers that they were the ones who would benefit from the subsidy, when in fact the opposite was true. The tax credit was a subsidy for sellers, not buyers, allowing them to increase their asking price (or avoid decreasing it) by $8,000.

The government’s “gift” to new home-buyers? A house immediately worth $8,000 less than they paid for it, and falling fast thanks to the sharp drop-off in demand that accompanied the expiration of the tax credit. Gee, thanks, Uncle Sam! I’m not sure the “predatory lenders” Obama likes to talk about ever did anything that sketchy.

This is good, but it’s still wide of the mark. As everyone here knows, the purpose of the tax credit was to churn transactions, so that realtors and their brokers could get paid. You’ll see more evidence of this later this week, as the NAR pushes you to lean on your congresscreep to support Harry Reid’s extension of the expiration deadline for the credit. There are still 180,000 unclosed transactions out there, and that means 180,000 commission checks held hostage by the demons of time. We can’t have that…

The Mirror Effect

Do you ever wonder how to deal with someone else’s opinion of you – especially if it’s negative?  Not how to handle a negative or even rude opinion; early on you should have learned that politeness is how we handle almost any situation.  No, I’m asking if you have a mechanism or coping skill for those times when you discover what someone else thinks about you and it’s painful in some way?  This is not an uncommon experience and might be especially common for real estate agents!  (I’ll leave you to find your own context on that one.)  Personally, I’ve heard a number of answers to this question and they are usually similar to the one found in The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.  While not completely representative of everyone’s answer, it’s close enough. This solution seems to lie in finding ways to ignore, become indifferent to, or otherwise devalue the offending expression.  (Mr. Ruiz, for example, points out that when someone says something about us, we should remember they are limited by their own view of the world – their own prism – and realize what they say, says a lot more about them, than us.)  This is both obvious and oblivious.  May I suggest something a little different?

The Mirror Effect
Of course other people see things through their own prism; so what?  Their opinions can not – and do not – hurt me in the least. How could they?  They are only words and, depending on your philosophical bent, the person saying them may or may not even exist!  If I feel hurt or pain (or happiness for that matter), you can be sure I am the sole cause.  I hear the words, I interpret them (through my own prism Mr. Ruiz) and I create feelings in reaction to my interpretation.  I create…  That’s where the wonderful opportunity lies.  The negative or painful (or happy) feelings are created from within.  That’s not just a difference regarding who is in control (per Mr. Ruiz and the rest, I am to develop some ability that will counter the hurt caused by the words or expressions of Read more

Superman

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

The little boy came gamboling up to me when I was just over the ridge. He was big for three, small for four, and cute by any measure. Brown hair, blue eyes and a smile as quiet as firecrackers.

I was cutting across the park on my way to the library, and I’d come a little closer to the playground than I had wanted to. Unaccompanied adults have no business being at the playground. It spooks the parents, and it ought to. For myself, while I like kids well enough, I don’t much like what comes with them these days…

“I’m Shotterman!” said the little boy. He struck a menacing pose. He was wearing little blue shorts and a black Mickey Mouse tee shirt. He had Spiderman sneakers on his tiny feet.

“Hi, Shotterman,” I said. “What are you?”

“Huh?”

“What are your powers, Shotterman?”

“Oh,” he said. “I can shoot.” He cocked his finger. “Pshew! Pshew pshew! Pshew!”

“Shotterman!” I announced. “Strange visitor from another planet with an uncanny aim and accuracy. Shotterman! Able to compete for marksmanship prizes on five continents.”

Shotterman laughed with delight, as I knew he would. This was entertainment he thoroughly understood.

And here’s a little something I understood: He doesn’t have a dad, not at home. Little boys don’t crave male attention when they’re getting enough of it. The nation is crawling with little boys looking for big boys to play little boy games, and I knew without being told that Shotterman was one of them.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I knew what he meant. “Nothingman,” I said.

“Nothingman?”

“Nothingman! A vanishingly small amount of substance, barely here at all. Nothingman! A homeopathic quantity of humanity.”

He looked at me as if he wasn’t quite sure if I was serious in my nonsense.

“Hunter!” called a voice from the benches over by the swings. Shotterman blanched a little.

Hunter!”

“Is that your name? Hunter?”

“No, I’m Shotterman.”

“Hunter Ryan Daniels! You get your butt over here and I mean this instant!”

I winced. I can get enough of that stuff. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s motivate.”

We walked back over toward the playground equipment and Hunter went “Pshew!” at anything that Read more