BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: May 2011 (page 2 of 2)

May 9, 2011

Me and my iPad: Slouching toward a still-more-mobile style of mobile real estate representation.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I got an iPad 2 Friday, my spiff for hitting my earnings goal ($1,000 per day, if you’re keeping score at home) in April. The dogs have written a ton about the iPad since its introduction, and my plan is to write a ton more as I get used to this little box.

Here’s my deal: How can I make a grand a day every month? How can I push that up to five grand a day? I’m on the move all the time. And I’m tethered to my desk all the time. And I need a way of reconciling that contradiction.

My MacBook went a long way toward dealing with this problem — and may the lord rain his blessings down upon Ronald MacDonald and all the other providers of free WiFi linkage. But a laptop wants too many resources to be universally useful.

How so? If I’m away from free-WiFi-land, I need to plug in an air card and wait for it to initialize. Not only that, I need a flat surface, and I need to give the laptop itself time for house-keeping. Plus which, I always need to nurse the battery, which makes me reluctant to use it for blue-sky purposes, for fear I’ll be powerless to deal with mission-critical problems later on. Still worse, I have to schlep the damn thing around — which makes it much too easy to leave behind.

The iPad takes away all of those problems:

  • WiFi plus 3G means instant-on internet virtually everywhere.
  • I can actually use it in my lap in my car — without moving to the passenger seat.
  • Ten hours of in-use battery life leaves me at little risk of running out of power — and the two iPhone power cables I already have in my car will both fit the iPad, as well.
  • And the iPad is almost too easy to carry: The size and weight of a magazine.

All that’s great, but it’s not as if the iPad does not introduce complications of its own. I’ll be going through everything in detail as I integrate the new machine into my praxis, but I’ll touch on a Read more

May 9, 2011

Brett Arends from the Wall Street Journal on Zillow’s morning gloom report: “All this bearish news makes me bullish.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Our friends at Zillow.com have figured out the secret to getting news coverage: Bad news:

Home values in the United States fell faster in the first quarter of 2011 than they have in any quarter since 2008, when the housing market experienced its worst performance, according to Zillow’s first quarter Real Estate Market Reports(1). The Zillow Home Value Index(2) fell 3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011, and declined 8.2 percent year-over-year to $169,600. Home values have fallen 29.5 percent since they peaked in June 2006.

Negative equity reached a new high mark with 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners with mortgages underwater at the end of the first quarter, up from 27 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. A homeowner is in negative equity when they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth.

Meanwhile, foreclosures(3) rose throughout the first quarter as banks unfroze moratoriums and allowed foreclosures to resume. Foreclosures had fallen in late 2010 due to the slew of moratoriums brought about by the “robo-signing” controversy. In March, one out of every 1,000 homes in the country was lost to foreclosure.

With substantial home value declines, as well as increasing negative equity and foreclosures, Zillow forecasts show it is unlikely that home values will reach a bottom in 2011. First quarter data has prompted Zillow to revise its forecast, now predicting a bottom in 2012, at the earliest.

“Home value declines are currently equal to those we experienced during the darkest days of the housing recession. With accelerating declines during the first quarter, it is unreasonable to expect home values to return to stability by the end of 2011,” said Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries. “We did expect substantial payback from the homebuyer tax credits, which buoyed the housing market last year, but underlying demand post-tax credit, as well as rising foreclosures and high negative equity rates, make it almost certain that we won’t see a bottom in home values until 2012 or later.”

My own take is that we are at or near the knee in the curve: While supplies of fire-sale-priced homes Read more

May 6, 2011

Which home is the right one for you? Coldwell Banker says it’s the property for which Coldwell Banker will get paid double.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Is this home the right one for you and your family?

No, sorry. That’s an exclusive listing. Your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker won’t get paid if you buy that house.

So is this the perfect home for you?

Oh, no! This home has serious systemic defects, the worst of which is… it’s a fizzbo… Not only will there be no doughnuts at the closing table, your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker won’t get paid if you buy that house.

But this — this is the ideal home for you and your family:

Why? Because your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker will not only get paid, she’ll get paid double, once for suckering the seller into listing with Coldwell Banker and once more for suckering you into a dual agency.

Here’s the full clip:

When you say “yeah” you are conceding my argument. When you say “but” you are contradicting yourself. If this commercial is not a sleazy hustle, what is it?

May 5, 2011

Has anyone else noticed…?

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

…a certain theme in Century 21’s latest attempt to make consumers care about a real estate brand?

Considering that the average age of a real estate agent is like 73, the women in these ads should look like this:

Blanche is even wearing a gold jacket!

Memo to Bev Thorne, CMO of C21: If you are going to cougar route, go full cougar. Why beat around the bush? :

May 5, 2011

Repeal The PATRIOT Act. Bin-Laden’s Dead.

by

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

Author website

STARDATE:  22 February 2002

Borrower:  Why do you need my driver’s license to secure me a mortgage?

Brady:  I’m required to by the new law, the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.  We mortgage originators have been enlisted in the GWOT, as the first line of defense.  I’m proud to do my part to help protect America and hunt down Osama bin-Laden.

Borrower:  That’s jacked up.  Did you know the PATRIOT Act also allows the FBI to execute it’s own warrants, tap your phone, read your email, intercept your written correspondence, and instruct your banks to not inform you that they are spying on you?

Brady:  You don’t have to be an agitator. I’m just doing my part.  In fact, the President said it not only is it our duty to protect the Homeland against marauding borrowers, he wants us to lend you more money… to get the economy moving, you see.

Borrower:  So..I can borrow ABOVE the value of my home?

Brady:  Absolutely.  It’s your patriotic duty.

Borrower:  Heil, baby.  Where do I sign up?

Geronimo is down.  Repeal the PATRIOT Act.  I know that freedom ain’t free but I now know tyranny can come disguised as tuxedo-clad theater goers.

May 4, 2011

MY SENIOR MOMENT

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A couple of weeks ago I joined millions of other Americans in the last minute ritual of rushing to the post office on April 15th and filing… my tax extension.  Brimming with pride over not procrastinating this year, a reward was in order.  Now this is normally the realm of chocolate frozen yogurt, but I wanted something more appropriate, maybe even a little dangerous; so I went down to the local Tea Party Rally.

Though a newbie to the whole “Astroturf” experience, I felt I had some idea what to expect thanks to the fine, unbiased reporting of our main stream media.  I braced myself for loud, selfish people who didn’t give a damn about the less fortunate.  I girded myself for cynical young radicals.  I steeled myself for the subtle racism reportedly running just beneath the surface. In short, I entered the raucous Public Square of the Tea Party by embracing the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.

Ha!  Somebody – I’m not sure if it’s the Boy Scouts or the Fourth Estate – owes me an apology.  I didn’t hear any loud, selfish rhetoric.  In fact, the speeches mainly concerned the social justice of liberty and even saving public employee pensions!  I did not see young radicals (though this was Oceanside, CA so distinguishing between subversive radicals and skateboarders is tricky).  And any “subtle racism” must have been drowned out by Ted Hayes’ standing ovation.

I spent hours looking out over the nearly two thousand people who attended, and it’s what I did see that surprised me: the predominate, if not prototypical, Tea Party activist is a woman in her early fifties who is, or soon will be, a grandmother.

Surprising, right?   I wasn’t prepared either.  (You see why I’m looking for an apology from the main stream media… or is it the Boy Scouts?)  The more I thought about it though, the more sense it made; who else would it be?  The Tea Party, at its heart, stands opposed to the generational transfer of financial devastation.  Now granted, parents are generally more protective of children than anyone else.  But most moms and dads Read more

May 2, 2011

Pieces of April for a morning in May: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I nailed down a house this morning at 6:50 am. It’s a hard dance to get the right house at the right price, but the world of email permits miracles to happen at any hour of the day or night.

We had a totally rockin’ April, more than three times our monthly nut. But the first check in April didn’t hit the bank until the 15th of the month, and, until this morning, we had zero dollars on the board for May. Even so, I told Cathleen that April 15th was our last day of poverty. We’ll see if that’s a prognostication I can defend.

Here’s a goal-getting calendar for May.

This is a simple procedure: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month. It works. So get on it.

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