BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 103 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

April 13, 2008

“It’s the difference between grabbing junk food from the drive-thru and sitting down with people you love for a leisurely and lively dinner.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That’s Teri Lussier talking about the experience of settling in for a serious read at BloodhoundBlog, as against cruising the blogiverse.

I’m inclined to agree — and I’ve never been stingy with words. But here’s a thousand words Cathleen wrote yesterday afternoon while she was staging and preparing a house for listing:

The world is rich with Splendor. Sometimes you have to sweep a little debris out of the way to catch sight of it, that’s all.

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April 13, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have 17 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 60 posts. This week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Barry Cunningham -- What Would You Do? What Would You Do?”,
“Brian Brady — How to save a declined loan Mortgage 911“,
“Chris Johnson — Blogging is Not Prospecting Blogging is Not Prospecting, Or Even Close.“,
“Courtney Tuttle — 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less“,
“Dan Green — Do-It-Yourself Divorce Why A Do-It-Yourself Divorce Requires Professional Mortgage Advice“,
“Dave Smith — A Tool to Help Pick Keyword Targets A Tool to Help Pick Keyword Targets“,
“Eric Blackwell — Seller / REALTOR relationship What a Seller / REALTOR relationship should NOT feel like.“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Why Blogging is Prospecting Roll Over, Secretariat – Why Blogging is Prospecting“,
“Loren Nason — Who is Your Webhost and Why it Matters Who is Your Webhost and Why it Matters“,
“Mary McKnight — How to use demographics How to use demographics to craft real estate blog posts that target your readers“,
“Richard Warren — Real Estate Wholesaler So You Want To Be A Real Estate Wholesaler?“,
“Russell Shaw — The Objections I Want To Be A Lister – The Listing Presentation – The Objections“,
“Steve Leung — Generating a Lead Using an E-Book The Anatomy of Generating a Lead Using an E-Book“,
“Teresa Boardman — Know when to Walk Know when to Walk“,
“Teri Lussier — Working with engenu Working with engenu; a painless geek tool even an ‘I’ can love!“,
“Tony Schuricht — start investing in real estate again Five reasons to start investing in real estate Read more

April 13, 2008

Zillow.com’s Mortgage Marketplace brings anonymous apples-to-apples mortgage rate quotes to consumers, free consumer leads to lenders

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Zillow.com’s Mortgage Marketplace brings anonymous apples-to-apples mortgage rate quotes to consumers, free consumer leads to lenders

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a broad array of mortgage quotes without having to make dozens of phone calls? And what if you could make a true apples-to-apples comparison among quotes? Better still, what if you could remain anonymous, making yourself known to the lender only when you are ready to do business?

Seattle-based real estate start-up Zillow.com last week released its long-anticipated mortgage lending product, called the Mortgage Marketplace, and it offers all those features and more.

Unlike Zillow’s “Zestimates,” the loan quotes are generated by real people, working lenders. Zillow will basically be acting as a hands-off intermediary between borrowers and loan originators.

Consumers using Zillow’s new Mortgage Marketplace will be able to anonymously solicit bids for loans from participating lenders. The consumer will fill out a detailed form disclosing all pertinent financial details.

The form will be submitted anonymously to participating lenders, who will, in their turn, produce estimated loan quotes, submitting them, through Zillow, to the consumer. The consumer will then have the choice to make direct contact with particular lenders to decide whom to do business with.

To a very large degree, the information asymmetry between lender and borrower will be done away with, since the loan quote will detail every fee associated with the loan. Moreover, Zillow will be implementing a reputation-management system whereby borrowers will be able to rate lenders on their performance.

In return, the lenders will receive Zillow’s mortgage leads at no cost.

What’s in it for Zillow.com? When you fill out a form requesting a loan quote, Zillow will be writing “cookies” to your local browser. They won’t be storing your financial details on their own servers, but they will be able to access those cookies in the future to target specific ads at you according to your demographic characteristics. Zillow will also be selling access to these cookies to other ad-supported sites.

So, just as with free-TV, in exchange for looking at advertising, you will get free anonymous Read more

April 11, 2008

Unchained Melodies: Tom Waits performing “Clap Hands” and “Time”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Youtube let me down tonight.

I thought James McMurtry doing Choctaw Bingo would have been a treat for Sean Purcell, and I would have loved to have latched onto videos of Tom Waits’ Falling Down and The Part You Throw Away for Geno Petro and Russell Shaw.

Struck out in three pitches.

Instead, we have this, Tom Waits doing Clap Hands and Time, two radically different pages from the man’s catalog.

Tom Waits is an acquired taste, and he goes well out of his way to make it hard for people to figure out why they should listen to him. This particular clip is from “Big Time,” which is second only to Bob Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clara” as the most stupidly self-indulgent rock movie ever made.

And yet… The first time I saw “Big Time” I loved it despite hating dozens and dozens of painfully stupid moments. I’ve followed Tom since I was a teenager — since he was barely old enough to drink. This is the art of brutality, and it’s not for everyone. I love Clap Hands, and I’ve forced poor Cathleen to listen to it thousands of times. But, whatever you do, be sure to hang in there for Time. Despite the PoMo performance, it’s a beautiful, heart-breaking song.

April 11, 2008

A deeply philosophical discussion of the flame war that will not be happening at BloodhoundBlog

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, good grief…

I can credit both sides of the rancorous dispute that is not going to happen.

I agree with Russell Shaw that Barry Cunningham can run roughshod over opponents in debate, and I knew without having to be told that Russ was steaming over this.

I agree with Barry on the factual prognosis for real estate. I watched it happen in the graphic arts, and I’m watching it happen in dozens of other industries.

I was laughing with Brian Brady on the phone last night that I have inadvertently introduced a second standard on ad hominem comments: Zero tolerance for everything else, but a wider latitude on Barry’s threads. I’ve stepped in when things seemed to be trending a little too flamey, but, for the most part I haven’t had huge objections.

Gentlemen, I want for you both — and for everyone reading this — to understand something that, like the oceans of air I am immersed in, is too obvious to me even to notice most of the time:

Weblogging is theater of the mind.

What we do is entertainment. It should be interesting, fact-based, persuasive — all that serious stuff. But we are competing for attention with radio and television, not Oxford University. I certainly want to talk about things that matter to me, and I have huge goals for real estate and for the world at large that I would like to see effected. But none of those things is going to happen overnight — and none of them in response to a blog post.

If Barry Cunningham paints the world with a broad brush and that makes you hot under the collar, the most interesting question is this one: Are you angry because he’s outrageously wrong — or because he might be right? When an argument is absurdly off the mark, we ignore it. Ha, ha. Who cares? It’s when things are too irritatingly right that we get irritated. Your emotional reactions tell you almost nothing about the world outside your mind — and almost everything about the world inside your mind.

But more importantly, all you need to do to defeat an erroneous Read more

April 10, 2008

Consider “24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot” and then tell us in detail how the world is going to work 15 years from now

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I get a huge kick out of this because I remember what tech.life was like in 1994. Everyone rebelling against Barry Cunningham’s pronouncements has very detailed ideas about future portents — and each one of those ideas is almost certainly hugely wrong.

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

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April 10, 2008

What happens when a hi-tech entrepreneur sells real estate in Silicon Valley? Introducing Steven Leung, our newest contributor

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Steve Leung was the second person to win The Odysseus Medal. This was before I started the formal competition, but, at the time, I made a standing offer to Steven to join us if he wanted to do. More than a year later, here he is:

Steven Leung has too many credentials to list: An MIT graduate, he has worked for Microsoft, Oracle and several internet start-ups. He brings that hi-tech experience to the hi-tech Silicon Valley real estate market.

If you read the Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog, you know the kind of thoroughgoing analysis Steven brings to real estate. I’m delighted to have him here.

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April 9, 2008

“Our role will remain strong, firm, indispensable. All we must do is adapt.” Wanna bet? The dinosaurs of the pre-web world of business will be supplanted, not disintermediated

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Richard Riccelli fingered this article on intimations of irrelevance in the advertising industry. Richard and I lived through the demise of professional typography, so I have a different take than some others here about the dreaded word “disintermediation.”

If the triumphant yelp is that some travel agents and some stockbrokers still have jobs, I will point out that some blacksmiths still have jobs, too. Attention must be paid and horses must be shod. That much is utterly beside the point.

Here’s my take on the matter: Don’t think in terms of disintermediation. Use the word “supplantation” instead. The dilbert in the advertising article is insisting that he is not a dinosaur — because he knows he is. He is being supplanted by much smarter ways of doing his job, and he will never, ever catch up — first because he doesn’t want to change, and second because the first-mover advantage is too great.

In the same way, there is no need to start a revolution to get rid of the pestilential NAR. They have no intention of changing, nor any ability to change — but it doesn’t matter. We don’t need to storm the Bastille, we just need to get on with what we’re doing. The NAR will persist in a state of increasing irrelevance, a rotting husk like the neglected Sunday newspaper out on the front porch, but it won’t matter at all in due course.

The same goes for everything. If we are not all the way onboard with the way business will be done, we will be left behind at the station. The work we do will be superficially similar to the work others have done in the past — but those others won’t be doing it any longer.

Will they have been disintermediated? Not if you insist that they haven’t. But they will have been well and truly supplanted.

When will that happen? Ask a blacksmith — if you can find one.

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April 8, 2008

Redfin.com wakes up, smells coffee, staples galoshes to forehead: Now Redfin buyers will be able to see homes in an almost-normal way

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The uncontested brilliance of the free market is that it is self-correcting. People like me have been bitching all along that Redfin.com’s approach to buyer representation was misguided if not outright evil. Conceding some huge chunk of the buyer’s agent’s commission to the buyer was certainly consumer-friendly, but pushing the cost of buyer representation off onto the listing agent was vile. “Stick it to the man” rhetoric might play well with Leslie Stahl, but we have no way of knowing how often the listing agent is working for one percentage point of the sales price — or even for nothing.

But: So what. So long as listers were too cowardly to contest Redfin’s claims to having earned the buyer’s agent’s commission even when it had violated the everyday understanding of procuring cause, every erg of outsized bitching was just so much wasted energy. If the Redfin experience was satisfying to its buyers, not much else seemed to matter.

Except…

Of course, the Redfin experience wasn’t satisfying to buyers. As much as they might like the idea of shopping for homes from an on-line catalog, when it came time to actually squeeze the fruit, a surprising number of them wanted to actually squeeze the fruit.

So: Redfin had to provide home tours when its cost structure was built around not providing home tours. Then it had to start charging cash fees for home tours. Then it built an elaborate mechanism whereby buyers could schedule two home tours for free, then pay $250 a pop for additional tours. And today, without fanfare, Redfin.com announces its Redfin Select program, whereby buyers can schedule unlimited home tours in exchange for a reduced commission rebate.

First: All hail The Market, which speaks lucidly even to deaf ears.

But second: Ugh.

Listen to this:

With Select, we take you on tour twice a week, every week, until you find a home.

That “twice a week” sounds a little school-marmish, doesn’t it? “You will walk in single file, boy-girl, boy-girl, in a neat and orderly fashion.” God help the poor relos in town from Thursday to Sunday. Twice a week means twice a week, pal.

Okayfine. Progress is Read more

April 7, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “It makes no difference what has happened. That is the past. Live in the future. Create it.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think I have a pretty good track record at picking contributors for BloodhoundBlog. The people who write here are a cut above, clearly, but I think what sets them apart is that they are all so interested in getting better. We’re all constantly reading, learning, thinking, inventing, re-inventing, and we all end up driving each other to new ideas. I love this, as you might guess, since it pushes me to do better, also.

Here’s a true confession: When Russell Shaw approached me to write with us, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. It was still just me and Cathy in those days. We knew of Russell, of course — no one who lives in Phoenix does not know of Russell Shaw. I have no idea what Russell’s firing clause looks like, but I built our firing clause from the literal words on his radio commercial: “Fire me at any time.”

Even so, I would not have thought to trust the Russell Shaw I knew through the radio. I had no reason to distrust him, nothing except the generalized mistrust in which I hold all Realtors I don’t know. In truth, there are a lot of genuinely nice people out there, but our business attracts more than its share of crooks, misanthropes and morons. I had no reason to think ill of Russell, but I had no reason to think well of him, either.

Two facts swung the balance for me. Second was Russell’s having mentioned that he had read Hugh Hewitt’s book on weblogging. Anyone who actually prepares for a new undertaking can’t be all bad. But first, I had read in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent that Russell knew that in the previous year his team had gotten 519 listings from 912 listing appointments. My impression of Russell was changed from then on — not the production, but the presence of mind to have tracked the statistics.

You can laugh at me, if you want, for having been so careful about what has turned out to be such a great decision. BloodhoundBlog is what it is because we don’t Read more

April 7, 2008

Who knew? It turns out condotels stink as a real estate investment

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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“Hey, pal, let’s make a deal. You can be in the taxi business just like that! Here’s how. You buy my cab, see? You own it, pay the note on it, handle the maintenance, all that stuff. But you won’t have to work all those crazy hours driving the cab, see? I’ll drive it for you, and we’ll split the meter. How can you lose?”

Or, to put an even funnier spin on it: What, would you suppose, is an even stupider real estate “investment” than a time share?

The Wall Street Journal has all the answers…

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April 6, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have 14 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 96 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. This week’s Short List is all Zillow Mortgage Marketplace posts, all of them written by lenders. If you’re not interested, you’re just not interested, but I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be.

Four of the Short List contestants wrote two posts each, so I’m going to count a vote for either as a vot for that person. If one of them wins, I’ll split the People’s Choice Award between both posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Zillow Mortgage Bourse Zillow Mortgage Bourse: How To Acquire Long-Term Clients”,
“Brian Brady — Zillow Mortgage Marketplace Zillow Mortgage Marketplace: One Way Transparency Like A Bad Online Dating Site“,
“Dan Melson — Zillow\’s New Mortgage Quote Forum Zillow’s New Mortgage Quote Forum“,
“Gina Gardner — Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends Dog Eat Dog: Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends in Selling“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community Zillows Mortgage Community. The Consumer is Ready, But is The Mortgage Professional?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp of an Anonymous Transparent Credit and Personal Information eXchange Between Mortgage Professionals and Consumer, to Create a Highly Trusted Mortgage Transaction Community“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Mortgage Launches Zillow Mortgage Launches – How do you rate?“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Quotes Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Rate Quotes“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillows On Line Mortgage Leads Zillow’s On Line Mortgage Leads: Is It For You?“,
“Todd Carpenter — I have a war to fight I don’t have Read more

April 6, 2008

Can’t wait? “Coming soon: superfast internet”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Times of London::

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

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April 5, 2008

Ask the Broker: What relationships must be disclosed in a real estate transaction, and what are the consequences if they aren’t?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We haven’t done one of these in a while. We get a lot of really good questions, but, for most of them, the answer is the same: “You need to talk to a really good real estate attorney in your jurisdiction.”

This one is different, with a couple of interesting problems:

I signed a contract on a home in Virginia. We just found out 3 weeks later after the home inspection the sellers agent is the brother in law to the seller. He never told us. My agent took a cut in his commission to make the sale go though and he was not told. Can this break a contract?

These are the two issues I’m seeing — your mileage may vary:

  • “the sellers agent is the brother in law to the seller” — and this was not disclosed
  • “Can this break a contract?”

There may be a specific answer to the first issue in Virginia statute law. In Arizona, my advice to agents would be to disclose only first degree relationships — blood, adoptive or legal: Mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, son or daughter.

Arguably, an agent could disclose any prior knowledge of the principal, guarding that person’s confidentiality, but I don’t see failing to disclose a brother-in-law as being a grievous injury. Am I wrong?

I’m thinking maybe the second issue — “Can this break a contract?” — is the real objection.

My answer: Almost certainly not. I can’t say for sure without reading the contract language, but I would be amazed if it included a contingency for undisclosed second-degree relationships.

In other words, if the failure to disclose the brother-in-law really is an actionable issue in Virginia, the action would be taken against the agent at the state licensing authority or the local board of Realtors.

Unless the agent is a party to the purchase contract, I can’t see how any misfeasance on his part could be considered a breach of that contract — which governs the performance of only the principal parties.

Others reading here may differ, which disagreement is invited.

And if you want to explore your full recourse under the law: “You need to talk to a really Read more

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