There’s always something to howl about.

Month: November 2010 (page 2 of 3)

One Lucky Son of a Bitch

What I like so much about BloodhoundBlog, is that as a general rule all points of view are welcome. However, along with that welcome mat comes a price. Those harboring contrary beliefs tend to make themselves heard, and more in ways reminiscent of the streets of 1880’s Tombstone than Mayberry. 🙂 Frankly, I prefer the Mayberry approach. Others opt for the OK Corral.

To each their own, which is also a Bloodhound policy.

It’s always fascinated me the way some insist others who are successful with a capital ‘S’ are merely beneficiaries of more bountiful injections of luck than the next guy.

It was a hard life-lesson for me coming to terms with the reality that regardless of my best efforts, there were others who could produce superior results. Realizing I was never gonna be a Hall of Fame baseball player was traumatic. There’s always a faster runner, etc.

Does luck have a part in our lives? Of course. Is it the deciding factor? Sometimes. You just won $200 Million in the lottery? I’m thinkin’ talent wasn’t part of the equation, and luck was the only factor. You’re worth eight figures, and it wasn’t inherited? It’s my contention and core belief that you earned your wealth, and that luck wasn’t a huge component.

Yet there are many, albeit a minority who will ascribe the creation of that wealth to luck. Many will go further, believing that sans luck, those who’ve succeeded on a grand scale, (however they define that) not only wouldn’t have achieved that level of success, but literally couldn’t have.

Luck, as Grandma taught me, is often the last gasp excuse for some who’re unable or unwilling to acknowledge others’ superior results. They literally cannot allow the concept of superiority through merit to become reality. She followed this up by saying that even though Sandy Koufax will always be an infinitely better pitcher than even I could even dream of, it would never mean he was a better person.

Throughout my life I’ve been exceedingly blessed by having rubbed shoulders with, and/or having direct access to, some very successful men Read more

The politics of dancing: Mothertongue and the art of negotiation.

I could argue that much of what goes on in the social sciences consists of pseudo-scientific “proofs” that the human mind is nothing special. Sure, volitional-conceptuality — the ability to engage in mental self-reference by means of abstraction and the ability to act upon those abstractions as a free moral agent — is unprecedented in the animal kingdom, but this dolphin has learned four of the first five letters of the Roman alphabet, and that chimp can stack three boxes on top of one another to steal a cookie. If that ain’t human, they don’t know what is!

Here’s what’s funny: They don’t know what animals are, either!

Monkeys don’t need to do a charmingly poor job at deploying human tools to survive, and cetaceans are perfectly adept at communicating with each other without a notation system — without what I would call fathertongue.

When I’m showing real estate, I’m careful to teach people, especially children, what a dog is doing with his tail. Up and wagging? Take it slow, but the dog is friendly. Straight down? Proceed with caution. Between the legs? Back off. The tail is a dog’s primary signaling device. That’s why people who want dogs to fight bob their tails.

But that wagging tail tells such a tale: “Hi, there!” the dog seems to say. “I am thrilled to make your acquaintance. As you can see by my wagging tail, I’m eager to make new friends. Might I have permission to sniff your anus? Full reciprocity, of course. Really, I’d be put out if you didn’t give mine at least a little sniff, too.”

That’s mothertongue, a complex initiation of negotiations expressed entirely in bodily signaling, with zero conceptual content — with no fathertongue. Animals are perfect the way they are. They are not somehow “better” if they master what are, to them, ontologically-useless parlor tricks. Moreover, human beings are exalted, not diminished, by dancing bears: The vast chasm between emulating human behavior and actually living it is only made more obvious when we see how pitiable that emulation actually is.

The higher animals communicate by mothertongue, and all but one species is Read more

The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude…

Kicking this back to the top. I wrote this years ago (urf!), but it’s one of the most important posts I’ve written here. –GSS

 
I had this as a comment late last night:

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

The author is Keith Brand from Housing Panic, writing under one of the half-dozen or so sock-puppet email addresses he uses. Don’t go looking for the comment. I have him blocked completely.

The comment was in response to my post last night, Stopping traffic to sell houses.

The remarks themselves are stupefyingly stupid, of course. Obviously I am arrogant and cocky — I think for good reason, but good reason or bad, I will be the first to lay the charges. “Insufferable bastard” fits me to a tee. “Incompetence” is simply comical in this context. I invented the idea of the custom real estate sign, was grasping for it through two generations of our signs before it was physically possible.

Oh, well. Who besides Keith Brand does not know that Keith Brand is an idiot? It’s very funny that he has chosen me as his poster child for a dumb Realtor, given who I am, given what we’ve done here. You could argue that this is the perfect testament to his stupidity, but there is more to be unearthed in the graveyard that is Keith Brand’s rotting soul.

Consider: Do I know I’m cocky? Do I know I’m arrogant? Do I know I am supremely competent — as a Realtor, as a real estate weblogger, as a real estate marketing innovator? I not only know that all of these things are true, they are among the very many proud facts of my life. So what could Keith Brand hope to achieve by saying,

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

Is this supposed to move me to despair? Me?

But: A different remark in a different context with a different person might have that effect. I am impervious to criticism. It’s either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, I am enriched for having learned better. If not, so what? But other people are different, Read more

All Things Being Equal… You’re Not Even Close

I was working with a group of agents this week on their 2011 business plan.  We were going through various forms of marketing and the expected returns when one spoke up and said: “The problem is, I hate calling people.  I can send letters and even emails, but I don’t want to call anyone.”  She is a very good agent as far as real estate agent activities go: she works well with clients, she shows homes well, she negotiates well and so forth.  She just doesn’t want to call people.  At all.  

“Okay,” I told her, “that’s not the end of the world.  If you’re not willing to call clients you can still be an agent, you just need to join a team that provides the clients or partner up with someone who has more clients than they can handle.”  That’s where the conversation got interesting.

Turns out this agent has tried my suggestion in the past and is looking for the right relationship right now.  “But,” she says, “the agents I’ve found so far are all so greedy.  They want a big piece of the commission.  All they do is hand me the name and then I do all the work.  I’m trying to meet an agent that understands our roles are different, but we both equally are growing the business.”

This is the problem with many self-employed people and real estate agents in particular.  They seem to think their value is tied to their time.  “All you did was give me the client’s name.  I did all the work so I think we should split 30/70 my way.”  This couldn’t be further from the truth and the faster you understand “value” in an open market economy, the smoother your business life will become.  Your value is not tied to the time you contribute.  It’s tied to the value you bring.  Hmmm, your value is tied to your value.  Can I get a big “Duh” from the Jeff Brown camp?

Apparently this comes as a surprise to some agents, but you are not all equal.  As a matter of fact, I’d estimate that 5% to 20% of you (and I’m Read more

Veteran’s Day

I was standing in line at Starbucks when I overheard a young girl (around 4 or 5, I would guess) ask her dad about a man wearing a ‘funny hat’. He responded ‘it just means he was in the navy or something’. The man in question was an elderly gentleman proudly wearing a baseball cap that said ‘Retired Marine’. As we were standing waiting for our coffee, I asked him about his military background and he said he is a 3rd generation Marine, giving 30 years to military service. We sat and I was happy to listen to his stories, some of which dated back to the Korean War.

Regardless of political affiliation, religious beliefs, profession, etc. Veteran’s Day is a day to be grateful for the sacrifices that have been made by our men and women who have donned uniform to serve our country. Not only are our service members asked to give more and more (longer, more frequent deployments), but also face a populace in which anti-military sentiments are common.

Having grown up in a third-world country in the midst of a civil war, where suspicion was given equal weight as facts, I know firsthand that freedom isn’t free. Regardless of my opinions about Obama, today, and everyday, I give thanks to those who selflessly serve for principles and values that transcend all.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” George Orwell

New Math… or An Old Game?

General Motors is preparing a public stock offering… you know, because it’s primarily owned by the government and unions right now.    The sale is expected to raise $10.6 billion, most of which is going to the government against the $50 billion bailout last year.  Since government is literally us (I mean, the $50 billion didn’t come from some savings account the Fed has from working nights and weekends as a pizza delivery boy, right?), that means we are selling an asset we purchased with bail out money… back to ourselves… and then putting the money we took from our left pocket into our right and claiming to have paid ourselves back.  Not sure, but I think there’s a nice big dollop of irony in there somewhere. 

This is all well and good so far as socialist, potato-passing goes.  I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that, while I don’t speak political gobbley-gook, I understand it just fine.

What bothers me here is the math.   The plan is to sell about 365 million shares at between $26 and $29 each, raising an estimated $10.6 billion.  This will value the company at around $48 billion which, surprise, surprise, is Ford’s capitalization.  As a matter of fact, if the shares sell near the high end of the range, GM’s capitalization will be closer to $60 billion – which means bigger and, ostensibly, better than Ford.  (Side note: Ford saw the problems ahead of time, made the difficult choices, accepted no public welfare, didn’t forever alter the bond market and our basic understanding of risk/reward investing, came through the worst economic times the auto industry had ever seen and recently reported record profits… but they’re market capitalization is the same as or less than GM’s? I suppose that’s the price you pay for actually thinking the rules of the market place should apply to everyone equally.  Makes one wonder though, how happy Ford’s stock holders would be – and how much money they might be spending right now – if Ford’s efforts had been properly rewarded in the free market and they were not in competition with the US Government.)

Back to the math.  Most of this ($10 Read more

I’m a time-waster. How about you?

Here’s the point: My name is Greg Swann, and I am a time-waster. My next closing is Wednesday, November 17th, 2010.

It’s news that is my special poison, a quick check of major news and opinion sites several times a day. Stir that in with email, some of it work, some of it work-ish, some of it just more time-wasting. And blend all of that with lots of tiny little brief chores done for clients at various stages of “the process.”

That’s a half-productive day. I start at six, finish at six or nine or one — the next day. And if I spin in place like that all day, I can get half as much done as I should have.

It’s not that I’m working from home. I’ve worked from home for almost twenty years, and I’ve always been able to get a lot done when I need to.

And it’s not the internet as such — duh! I’ve worked on the internet for most of my life.

And I’m not even really a bad, bad boy. It’s just checking this for a minute and that other thing for a couple more, all while taking care of business, yes-sir-ee-boss. By the end of the hour, I’ve rarely wasted more than 20 minutes, so what’s the beef?

The beef would be the stuff that’s missing between these two slices of bread, as it turns out.

I don’t care for the example being set by prominent members of the RE.net on social media sites, but I also don’t care if their seemingly-constant TwitBooking helps or hurts them.

This is what I care about: Hundreds and thousands of ordinary working stiffs are mimicking those poor examples, in the mistaken belief that scrupulously documenting every burp and bowel movement will make them successful.

But, from my own corpus: “Egovangelist, motivate thyself!” It’s all one thing, and the way to help other people get good at getting things right is to get good at getting things right. I love to think of myself as a hugely productive being, and the job that matters most to me is not scolding other people for being Read more

Things That Make Ya Go Hmmm

I was born and raised in Southern California. Learned to swim in the ocean under the watchful eyes of local surfers we knew wouldn’t let us go permanently under. I’ve lived in the suburbs of L.A. and Orange County, and along its coast. Life in Manhattan Beach in the late 50’s to early 60’s is the closest thing to Heaven on earth we’ll ever know. From around eight years old or so, you could walk anywhere without adult supervision, sans fear of anything but not makin’ it home before Dark:30.

Just before turning 16 I opted to move from Orange County to San Diego to live with Dad. Mom wasn’t pleased, but understood the need for a boy of that age to be around his dad. It was only 100 miles down the 5, not exactly an intercontinental move. Just two months short of my 16th birthday, it wasn’t horrible timing.

A San Diegan for over 43 years now, I’ve seen it morph from a kind of citified, relatively hick free Mayberry, to what it is today, which is, I’m not sure what. If ya peer in closely, you might be able to see, as I certainly do, remnants of the barely surviving infrastructure of its Mayberry past. But honestly? It’s just for show — we can’t go back.

None of this is really the point though, as I’m taking advantage of the platform here to harken back to days when character mattered, and political correctness meant you voted.

Even a month ago, if you’d told me I’d be seriously entertaining the idea of putting 59 years of SoCal in my rearview mirror, I’d of been confused as to why you’d even think such a thing. But for the first time in my life, the thought of leaving California doesn’t seem abhorrent to me.

I’m now thinkin’ the unthinkable — moving to another state.

At first I thought it was a transitory mood, melancholy brought on by California’s childish, mostly entitled electorate. Please don’t think I’m being unkind, as my words are being chosen carefully. But after a week of Read more

Realtor Prayer for Veterans

The National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics starts with this:

“Under all is the land……..”

Today, on the 235th birthday of the U.S. Marines, and in anticipation of tomorrow, Veteran’s Day, I suggest that every Realtor, every American, and every freedom loving citizen of the world stop to consider the cost of that freedom. I dedicate once again this article that is reprinted from a 2007 post. I was lucky enough then to work with a young Marine and his wife to help them buy a home here in Oceanside. Meeting them moved me. Hopefully reading about them will move you as well. I’m dedicating this post and calling it….

Under All are the Graves….

Saturday, December 8, 2007
It’s Hardly An EOD

I took a young couple out looking for homes today. First time we had met, and our initial introduction had been through my web site and a couple of emails.In the course of our meeting I engaged in my usual convivial chatter, finding out in small snippets where they were from, what they were dreaming, and of course, what they “did for a living.” Now an old philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote “if you label me, you negate me”, and being not quite that old, but old enough to remember and revere the 60’s, I always ask “what do you do” hoping it creates something that really takes me to the core of that person, not just to the superficial meaning of his or her life as labeled by a job.

So today I asked “what do you both do?” She said, “I’m ex-military, and he’s still on active duty.”

“What branch?”, I asked.

“I was in the Air Force”, she said, “and he’s in the Marines.”

We’re here in Oceanside, California, home of Camp Pendleton, and some of the finest young men and women in the whole world. I myself served as a Marine many years ago, but continue to find that meeting and interacting with young service people always makes me glad I live in the San Diego area where so many opportunities arise to do so.

“What do you do Read more

Attention Brad Inman: I don’t want your dipshit “most influential” citation again this year, either, but it is beyond obvious that I am by far the most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate.

Let’s start with some music, just to set the mood:

So: If you run in the wrong circles, these are the kind of “arguments” you can expect to hear about me:

  • Greg Swann is mean.
  • Greg Swann is rude.
  • Greg Swann is vulgar.
  • Greg Swann is angry.
  • Greg Swann is cynical.

Here is an argument you won’t hear anywhere, except possibly at BloodhoundBlog:

  • Greg Swann is wrong, and here’s why…

You won’t hear the latter argument for two reasons: I don’t take positions I can’t defend with an impervious impenetrable invulnerability. And: If I should happen to discover that I have been wrong, generally I will be the first person to figure that out and I will announce my error to the world immediately.

What explains all the ad hominem arguments cited among the first set? You figure it out.

These are the kinds of games that some folks are running while making these persuasively useless claims about my character:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

In each of these cases, I think they’re doing me favors — which assertion will probably just piss them off more. People who run in mobs don’t like me, and I don’t like them. Anything dominating personalities can do to recruit those folks to their own side of the table can only save me time in the long run.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this song summarizes my position on this kind of behavior — along with every other kind of behavior:

Recent events have made it more than obvious that I am by far the most influential person in the wired world of real estate. People are wasting irreplaceable hours and days of their lives obsessing over me, topping each other with tales of how ardently they don’t pay any attention to me.

Why would this be so? Again, you have to figure this out on your own, but my take is that they know I’m right and yet they don’t want to be right.

Witness:

Mama Grizzly Knows Sumptin’: It’s Sunset For Low Mortgage Rates

One of the things I love about the internet is that links last.  For your soap-operatic pleasure, Sarah Palin asks a national author if he read his own newspaper, when he criticized her remarks about inflation:

So, imagine my dismay when I read an article by Sudeep Reddy in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the fact that I mentioned inflation in my comments about QE2 in a speech this morning before a trade-association. Here’s what I said: “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”

Mr. Reddy takes aim at this. He writes: “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact.” Really? That’s odd, because just last Thursday, November 4, I read an article in Mr. Reddy’s own Wall Street Journal titled “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise PricesPackagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies.”

It’s common knowledge that Sarah Palin is a vacuous bimbo, who gathers her economic news from the Wasilla Women’s Club Newsletter, right ?

Call me suspicious but I watched an amiable dunce win the Cold War, without firing a shot.  Let’s just say I’m less inclined to question the intelligence of country bumpkin politicians, after living through Reagan, and am more inclined to second guess the propagandists at the major dailies.

Whodathunk Mama Grizzly would face the Wall Street Journal, though?

Mama Grizzly and Mama Brady know something about inflation; they do the weekly grocery shopping.  When Mama Brady told me that our grocery budget had to be adjusted upwards, while I was remarking that our budgeted monthly fuel expenses had to be adjusted  as well, I started thinking that inflation might just be around the corner- that’s not good for mortgage rates.

Tête-à-tête in Tombstone

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

When the shadow blocked the doorway of Johnny Ringo’s, everyone in the bar looked up. The door was propped open and traffic was brisk. The glare of the late afternoon sun fought the gloom of the little taproom to a draw. But then gloom captured the turf enduringly, and we all looked up to see why.

The stranger leaning against the doorjamb was long and lean and very relaxed. He wore black wool trousers pegged at the ankles over ornately-tooled snakeskin boots. His dove-grey top coat fit him like a glove. Beneath it he wore a rich brocade waistcoat and a white linen shirt open at the collar. He had eyes the color of coal and flowing brown hair that spilled halfway down his back. His handlebar moustache was trimmed and combed and waxed to perfection. A red silk cravat finished the ensemble, that and two nickel-plated Colt 45s with carved ivory grips. The sidearms were mounted high, at his ribs, and a double-barreled shotgun, breech open, was slung across his left arm.

And even though Johnny Ringo’s is the tourist trap for the sophisticated tourist, still everyone gawked. Everyone except one man in the corner at the end of the bar, a man nearly perfectly concealed by the gloom. He looked up at the stranger in the doorway and there was genuine fear in his eyes.

The stranger was looking right at him. Looking right through him. He didn’t stare, he glared, and the room fell deathly silent — not a nervous cough, not a stolen breath. The fearful man tried to the hold the stranger’s gaze but couldn’t. He looked down at the drink before him on the table then looked up again quickly, something furtive in his eyes. The stranger nodded slowly and said, “I’m your huckleberry.”

Some moron guffawed in recognition but this didn’t relieve the tension, it added to it.

The stranger stood up straight and snapped the breech of the shotgun closed. He hefted it high in the air and the bartender snagged it with two hands. He mounted it on two pegs over the back-bar. Read more

What is Splendor? For me it’s exuberance and indomitability.

Start here: I’m not trying to piss you off. If you don’t want to read what I have to say, don’t. There are thousands of essays on this site, many recent and eye-opening, others older but canonical. You can find what you want here — or you can seek elsewhere. You have no reason to endure something you don’t want to read. You don’t have to, and I don’t want you to.

Now then:

This is funny: I live in a state of fairly continuous delight. It’s not always the case, but I would paint my state of mind most of the time — and especially when I’m working at something I love — as exuberance. It can be hugely external, and I know I sometimes wear my wife out when I’m playing with ideas out loud. But it can also be almost searingly apollonian — as here, as it happens — and I can sustain a kind of frenzied concentration for hours on end.

Why is it funny — to me, at least? Because it’s just excellent comedy, the radical juxtaposition of two opposites — the expectation that I simply must be angry or dour or cynical and the actual experience of being, for me and for people who spend time with me. I am having fun — deeply satisfying fun — almost all of the time. So much so that I don’t even think about it, except when I consciously direct myself to think about it. And that, thinking about the way my mind functions, is a delight for me just by itself.

Delight, exuberance, searing concentration — these are mothertongue ideas, and this is the job that art does for us: Poets and painters and playwrights and novelists use abstractions in ways that induce us to see not mere words or images but the essence of being itself. We know we are complicit in an illusion — not real life, just a simulation — but we surrender ourselves to it and live it from the inside, at least in imagination.

I have written hundreds of thousands of words in my life, but I Read more

In which I find more focus and dump the hocus pocus

Disclaimer: If your business is humming along, I doubt you will get much useful information from this post, however, please do feel free to share any productivity hints in the comment section. Thanks!

I made a public commitment, and so I thought I share where I was and where I’m going. To Jeff Brown: I have yet to do one single 6 hour prospecting day. Haven’t done one. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do 3 hours most days of the work week, but even that isn’t consistent, so that’s still a goal, and I’m still committed to hitting that goal, and I will, but it’s a tough one for me. Which brings me to my first point: Real estate is not an instant gratification business. And the church says, “Duh!” Right. Old-timers are laughing their arses off right about now and I am too. I really like instant gratification, but unfortunately, I can’t use it to pay bills, so if you are seduced by that, as I often am, be careful. Don’t lie to yourself about what is “working”.

Working requires thoughtful planning and focus. If you want to brainstorm an idea, give me a call, drop me an email. I am very very good at brainstorming. Making a goal, making a commitment to that goal, doing the basics, this focus comes less naturally to me, but that’s where the money is so that’s what I’m learning to do.  Know thyself: Hands down, best thing I’ve done to help me focus was to secure a private office. I had been “working” out of a desk in our family room. Oh, I know, my broker supplies a desk at the office, I could use that but my stuff is at home. Unfortunately, so are our dogs, our cats, our kids, the laundry, food, you get the point. Here’s my solution: My broker owns our office building and this being the Rust Belt circa 2010, we have a few Read more