There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
From Google Blogoscoped, for geekFun: A series of conversational idioms expressed humorously in PHP and C code.
My favorite?
if ( ape.inLineOfSight(it.x, it.y) ) ape.do(it);
What is it?
Teri was talking about it last night: Monkey see, monkey do.
Technorati Tags: blogging, technology
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
The very first thing she said to me was, “I’m Anastasia.”
She had pronounced the name ‘Anna-stay-juh’ but I took care to be more formal. I nodded gravely and said, “‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’. I’m honored.”
She giggled delightedly. “Why’d you say it that way?”
“To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To embroider the air, to perfect it with the perfect sound: ‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’.”
She giggled again and that was answer enough.
She was four-and-a-half on the day we met. Not awfully, terribly short, but at no risk of scraping her head on anything. She had a round little face that had borrowed too much mischief to be cherubic but was angelic nevertheless. Her hair was brown and it was almost always almost everywhere; it was obviously brushed and tied and obviously instantly disarrayed by her mischievous wanderings. She was a beautiful child, beautiful inside and out, but her eyes were the crowning glory of her nobility. They were bluer than blue, deep and dark and purple, as purple as the crest of a dynasty. They were clearer than any gemstone, and they seemed not to reap the light but to sow it. For all the days I knew her, I could never see enough of those purple gemstone eyes.
“What’re you doing there?” she asked. I was sitting in the shade of a little olive grove reading a book. She was standing on something behind the block wall of the property next door, just her head and shoulders above the wall.
“House-sitting. You know what that means?” She shook her head and her hair flew into a more advanced state of disarray. “It’s like baby-sitting only easier.”
“Why’re you doing it?”
I shrugged. “The official answer is, I’m helping out a friend. The unofficial answer is, TV, refrigerator, hot and cold running everything. Does that make any sense to you?”
It might have or it might not, but we’ll never know, because she changed the subject. “I have a kitten. His name is ‘Sputin.”
I said, “Rasputin. Somebody likes Russian names. Say it: ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
“Why?”
“Just say it. ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
She said, “‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.” Her voice Read more
BloodhoundBlog made its reputation, from the very beginning, digging up bones to pick with vendors. And of all the vendors that I, personally, have picked on, surely the one I have picked on worst is Redfin.com and its CEO, Glenn Kelman. But of all those vendors, of all those exalted CEOs, only one has come here to beard the Bloodhounds in our own kennel. And only one has called me after hours at home to try to help me see his point of view.
That one, solitary maverick CEO? The incomparable Glenn Kelman, of course. Call him what you will, he is sui generis, an entirely unique specimen.
And because — take him as you find him — he is unique and smart and funny and thoroughly original, I am proud to announce that Glenn will be joining us for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, the Social Media Marketing conference we will be hosting for real estate professionals in Phoenix from May 18-20.
Kelman will be one half of our keynote event, a presidential-style debate on New Wave versus Old School Real Estate Brokerage.
And who will be defending the more-traditional strategies of residential real estate representation? None other than the matchless Russell Shaw, mega-producing Realtor nonpariel.
But wait: If you’re expecting a food fight, put down those mashed potatoes! Both of these gentlemen are too bright and too self-assured to get bogged down in acrimony or name-calling.
Here’s what you should expect instead: A moderated debate with introductory speeches, responses, and then a flow of questions and answers from a panel of real estate luminaries — and directly from the audience. The purpose of BloodhoundBlog Unchained is to explore the intersection of Social Media Marketing with personal and direct marketing, so we know going in that there is validity on both sides of the debate. We will benefit from the diverse viewpoints of two masters of the real estate marketing craft.
Plus which, it should be a boat-load of fun. Both men are naturally funny, both possessed of a sharply poignant yet charmingly self-deprecating wit.
Even so, their debate probably won’t be a love-fest, either. But if something in the middle Read more
There’s Grant’s Tomb, looking a little scruffy in Riverside Park in Manhattan:
And here’s your chance to take a truly dizzying tour of the Guggenheim Museum:
These images, and many more, are brought to you by 360cities.net, a Google Maps mash-up of 360 degree panorama shots from all over the world. Probably more useful for fun than for real estate — but it’s definitely fun.
Tipped: Google Blogoscoped.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Down Payment Assistance is another creative financing option you can deploy to make sure yours is the home that sells
It’s a hard world for home sellers right now. It’s possible that things are slowly getting better, but a qualified buyer still has at least ten suitable homes to choose from.
Does this mean you might sell now, or you might sell a little later? Probably not.
Does it mean you might sell for your price, or you might have to accept a little less? Probably not.
What it means is that, if your home is not the one that answers most of a potential buyer’s needs, it probably won’t sell at all in this market.
We’ve talked before about being the most appealing — best priced, best prepared, best presented. These are the homes that will sell to the best qualified buyers — while the near-misses languish month-after-month.
We’ve talked about using seller-financing to help less-qualified buyers. Carrying back a note for a third mortgage entails a risk of loss, but, again, that marginal difference can be moot if the house wouldn’t sell otherwise, or if it sells months later for a much lower price.
There is another creative financing avenue you can pursue, although this one comes with an assured loss to the seller. It’s called Down Payment Assistance. Through programs like AmeriDream or Nehemiah, sellers contribute a portion of the sales price to serve as down payment or closing cost assistance to the buyers, who receive those funds at close of escrow as a grant.
This is what I call Psycho Lender Math at its worst, since the lender is permitting the sellers to discount the home by a huge percentage while pretending that that same pile of money is coming to the buyers as a grant from a neutral third party.
The house still has to appraise for the full purchase price, so it really is just a seller discount disguised as a shell game — but if it means your house sells while all the others languish, you still might be ahead of the Read more
Judging this contest, I get to read a lot of talented writers. But only one can connect Amy Winehouse to real estate and have it all make the most delightful kind of sense. The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Geno Petro for She tried to make me buy a rehab…:
Truth is; I can barely swing a hammer….Let me rephrase that; I can swing the hell out of a hammer but just not in a constructive way. I am not the fixer-upper type, in case we haven’t met. (See mug shot above for clarity.) I probably err to the side of demolition, if anything.
That being said, my lovely wife (and occasional muse) found a possible second home that in theory, could fulfill our retirement needs during those forthcoming platinum years that Dennis Hopper pitches on the Ameriprise commercials during prime time every night. All things equal, he’s my favorite corporate sell out so far this century, that Dennis Hopper. Cool, quirky and rich beyond words, for sure.
“60 is the new 40,” exclaims my man, sharply dressed in black, The Spencer Davis Group blaring in the background, and looking unlike like any beshaded 72 year old cat I’ve ever met. And I’m all over it. According to DH, I’ve got 40 more good ones ahead of me. According to his math and blueprint for living, I’m barely 34. When he comes on the plasma in high def I get a sudden urge to run out and invest in something spectacular before I lose another precious second. I yearn to join the expedition, or at the very least, embark on the journey to financial freedom. After all, one man’s destination is another man’s starting point. Ask any truly wealthy person (9 figures+ by my definition) and I’m certain he will tell you as much. “It’s the journey, not the…” whatever.
But the ‘hidden gem’ my wife came across this past weekend, a shack on the Tennessee River, needs some serious attention; more attention than I’m prepared to pay for, quite frankly. She found it on the Film Location site our own house is registered with (unbeknownst to me until a few months ago). And in case you didn’t know, there is a market Read more
Another killer day yesterday, almost 1,600 unique visitors on a Sunday. We’d have been lucky to have half this on a Sunday two months ago — and we were doing great then!
Just everyday content — lender stuff, Realtor stuff and the long tail. But here are three interesting questions to ask yourself this morning:
1. In the greatest real estate agent in the world contest, how did Greg Boser get to be number one — for now?
2. Why is Eric Blackwell going to win the contest in the end?
3. If you have a geographical listing farm, how can you dominate every possible search term referring to that farm with multiple page one entries?
Eric already figured out the answer to question number one, and he may or may not share his results with you.
I think he’s pledged to tell you the answer to question number two, once he wins the contest.
For the answer to question number three, you’ll have to come to Unchained. As before, I’m not terribly interested in being your buddy, and I for damned sure don’t want to be your wet nurse. But we have some brand new ideas about driving traffic — just the kind of seeing around corners ideas you expect from BloodhoundBlog. If you’re in business to make money, we’re going to show you a better way to be found by your clients — and a better way of working with them once they find you.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Oh, good grief.
Normally, when the RE.net goes through one of these public breast-beating episodes, I just stay out of it. I don’t read the posts, first because they’re stupid and comical, and second because there’s nothing that I’m going to say that’s not going to fan the flames. The arguments always turn on the Fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make a Right, as do all appeals to the mob, and people running in mobs are just an embarrassment to the idea of being a human being.
This is unintentionally hilarious, though, so I thought I’d quote it. If you don’t know what’s going on, I promise you it does not matter.
I’m going to leave my opinions out of the discussion in order to leave more space for these people to see the error of their ways, apologize profusely, and re-enter our community in a constructive manner.
Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Greg Swann, founder of BloodhoundBlog, which is justifiably famous for telling the straight truth, and this seems like an apposite moment to remind you that the theme song for the upcoming BloodhoundBlog Unchained Social Media Marketing Conference is “I won’t back down” by Tom Petty.
Here are the Heartbreakers performing that song at the Super Bowl:
If you’re looking for buddies — kindly folks who will forgive all your short-comings, at least until it becomes expedient to turn on you — this is probably not the place for you. If your plan is to commit egregious acts of cupidity or stupidity and somehow escape withering criticism — change the channel. If you entertain a Romper-Room-like dream of playing placidly with all the other special kids on the short bus — you’re on the wrong bus.
If, on the other hand, you want to learn how to organize your working life so that you never again have to take shit from morons, you’ve come to the right place. We are all about the ninety-and-nine here, and we are all about the work — deploying better ideas to do our work better, faster and more profitably. I don’t go out of my way Read more
We have 18 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 74 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:
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“Morgan Brown — McCain’s Mum on Mortgage Reform McCain’s Mum on Mortgage Reform“,
“Morgan Brown — New conforming limits New conforming limits – what will it do to jumbo loan rates?“,
“Nick Bostic — Save the World (and some money) Save the World (and some money)“,
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We’ve been doing very well since the start of the year, but this week just ending was the biggest ever in the history of BloodhoundBlog.
Our file server crashed for over four hours this evening or we would have broken 14,000 hard clicks for the week. Our main readership comes to us by RSS and email subscriptions, but hard clicks are often the source of new subscribers. We had two days this week where BloodhoundBlog scored over 2,500 unique visitors, more than double what we were doing at the end of last year.
What was the huge controversy that brought all this traffic? You guessed it: Conforming loan rates.
This was a big week for us, too, because we were finally able to launch BloodhoundBlog Unchained. There are a million Realtors and a million lenders out there who need to find a way to blend their traditional marketing into the Web 2.0 world, and we’re grateful that we have the platform and the opportunity to teach what we know — even as we are learning everything we can.
How did BloodhoundBlog get this big, this fast? We’ve never cared about traffic, and because of that we’ve never cowered or catered or kow-towed to anyone — and we never will. Speaking only for myself, I have never cared about being popular — very much the contrary! What I do care about is telling the truth — completely. That we are where we are is as much a testament to your integrity as it is to ours. For this I am very grateful.
But hang on tight. We’re in for a hell of a ride — and we’re just getting started.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
We finally sorted out the details on the venue for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We’re going to be at The Heard Museum Event Center in Downtown Phoenix on May 18-20th, 2008. Note the slight date change; that was a wrinkle in our negotiations.
The facility itself is beyond cool — a vast Phoenix mansion converted to a world-renowned museum of Native American culture and history — along with a spacious conference center and break-out rooms. Docent-guided tours of the museum will be available after conference hours.
But the big news today is that we’re finally able to start selling tickets for the event. And to reward the true Guerrillas who have hung in here with us through three months of arm-wrestling, we’re offering the full package — a $350 value — for $149.
That’s a limited-time offer, needless to say. We have limited seating, so we want to make sure the grunts on the ground get first crack at availability. By the time the corporate weenies pull out their gold cards, the price of admission will be quite a bit higher.
So: Get busy. Everything Unchained will be happening at the BloodhoundBlog Unchained weblog. If you go there now, you can click on the PayPal button to make sure that there will be a seat for you at BloodhoundBlog Unchained.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Choosing second-best could get you the best possible home
Last week we talked about how, even with so many unsold properties, multiple buyers can somehow land simultaneously on the one property on the market that approaches perfection.
This is perfectly natural human behavior, if you think about it. Who hasn’t thumped a melon? Who hasn’t reached into the back of the cooler for the fresher milk? Who buys the brown ground beef when there’s redder meat available. We were not just born to shop, we will perish if we don’t learn to shop wisely and well.
It’s no different for houses. You have a certain amount of money available, and a certain selection available to you for that money. It’s completely natural that you would shop until you find the home that is far and away better than your other choices.
And it’s perfectly natural that other buyers would come to the same evaluation of the available inventory. They wold have bought the same melon as you, except you got there first.
But there’s still an important difference. A good melon is as good as it’s going to get, and a bad melon cannot get better. But a house can almost always be improved.
Here’s a melon-improvement strategy for financially-savvy home shoppers.
That home you fell in love with is almost certainly a production home — a tract home. Yes, it’s in great shape, and it’s staged to perfection. But guess what? There are three more almost exactly like it for sale on the same street. They’re not as clean, not as nicely-decorated, not as well-marketed — but that works to your advantage.
The difference between your dream home and what looks to you like a bad melon is really just a matter of money. If you put that money into the bad melon, it will be as good or better than your dream home.
So, rather than competing for the best house and paying top dollar, you can use it as leverage to get a lower price and seller concessions on a home that could be even Read more
I’m not going to award an Odysseus Medal this week. The Short List candidates were very good, but nothing killed me, and I want for this award to celebrate work that is beyond excellent. But: I do want to cite two Honorable Mentions, two posts that I thought were very good, and which took us in directions we will need to travel as we come more and more to be our own sources of arcane information.
It’s funny actually: Our relationship as webloggers to the mainstream media is very much like our clients’ relationship to us. They want to take on more of the work that was once exclusively ours, just as we seek to take on more of the work that was once hidden behind the walls of print and broadcast outlets.
The two posts I am citing, The Proposed Solutions Are Going To Be Worse Than The Mortgage Crisis by Doug Quance and Barack Obama’s Mortgage Reform Policy by Morgan Brown, illustrate the kind of depth of understanding we can achieve when we apply ourselves. By now it seems likely that our presidential nominees have been chosen, and I look forward to this kind of thoughtful analysis of the real estate and economic implications of the candidates’ proposals.
Black Pearls we have, though, and more than just a few. Choosing one was a problem. The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Jim Cronin for Blogging Etiquette – The Blog Comment Policy – Do You Need One?:
Blogs are meant to be a two-way street. We are blogging for an audience. Engaging that audience to participate is a huge part of the the motivation and an element that can define a blog’s success.
So where do you draw the line?
What do you consider acceptable behavior by the audience, on your real estate blog?
For a lot of real estate bloggers, their blog is an extension of their business. This means that their reputation, credibility, personality, works, message and even their career are potentially on the line with every article published.
What are you doing to protect the above?
The following are a number of items that range from mildly Read more
I should probably stop picking on this little nebbish, but he’s such a champion at leading with his chin that I find him hard to resist. His theme? “Rewriting the book on how to kick ass.” I wish I were joking. I’m gonna guess that he wasn’t among the first picked on the ass-kicking team in grammar school, and I’ll bet a large dollar he wasn’t even in huge demand for the coloring-outside-the-lines squad. I just love it, though, that he’s so completely dysclued that his ass-kicking theme song is entitled — wait for it — Unchained. And before you trouble yourselves trying to imagine Kevin Boer and Noah Rosenblatt in day-glo-hued spandex tights with huge cod-pieces — these two being Davison’s envisioned rock stars of real estate — stop for a moment to consider that we are talking about marketing in the world of Web 2.0. Rock stars are all about “Me, ME, MEEEE!!!!” This role belongs to the customer, not the vendor — this according to this same mental midget a few weeks ago. Brian Brady and I are rewriting the book on real estate marketing, an iterative endeavor that will see its next big advance at the real Unchained. But if you want to find a Web 2.0 star, it’s not me or Brian or Kevin or Noah. If I were to pick one person who best expresses what consumers are looking for in a Realtor or a lender, I would pick Dan Melson. There’s is nothing of a rock star in the man, but if “fiduciary” had a face, it would be his — and that comes through in everything he does.
I, very much on the other hand, command attention. The words I, me and mine are sweet on my tongue, and I have to admonish again and again that what I am teaching and what I am doing are two different things. One of the persistent delights of my life is how well Teri Lussier understands this, and how much she is able to pull out of the things I say. Dilberts like Davison live a Read more
Late again. Sorry. I’ve had my Mac back since around Noon. Logic board this time, again no charge. In terms of replacement cost, I’ve got about 60% of a new computer for free. The back side is that I’ve never had to live with component failure — nor with the fear of data loss. Until Sunday, I had never backed up a Macintosh in my life. Today I made plans to buy a TimeCapsule.
Anyway, there are 12 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 78 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 9 pm MST Wednesday this week. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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“Doug Quance — Proposed Solutions Worse The Proposed Solutions Are Going To Be Worse Than The Mortgage Crisis“,
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“Jim Cronin — Blogging Etiquette Blogging Etiquette – The Blog Comment Policy – Do You Need One?“,
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“Michael Creel — The Perils of Being a Realtor The Perils of Being a Realtor“,
“Mike Farmer — Fundamental Solutions Folk Music, Blame and Fundamental Solutions“,
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