There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
Don’t blame me for this, pin the blame on Matthew Hardy.
Note that if you happen to be the constantly-besieged president of a beleaguered trade association, I will be in Las Vegas on Monday, November 12th. I can show you how to get out in front of all these ethics complaints.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
We’re adding another new BloodhoundBlogger today — and I’m not done yet.
Today’s addition? A well-known name in the RE.net, Jim Duncan:
Jim Duncan is a third-generation Realtor, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a long-time real estate weblogger. He is active within the NAR, and has made a name for himself as an ethical lodestone in real estate.
Jim was one of the first webloggers to make contact with us when we started BloodhoundBlog. He is a very thoughtful man — a man full of thought — and he is never hard to find, since he’s always on the side of the angels.
I think Jim is one of the most important voices on the RE.net, period, particularly on the subject of Realtor ethics. So why didn’t I invite him to join us a long time ago? Pure thoughtlessness on my part. For the most part we have added people by self-selection, and I have tried to avoid stepping on toes. (Honest, I have!)
In any case, I finally caught a clue and thought to ask, and Jim was gracious enough to accept.
Last night in email to me, Brian Brady pointed out that we had had 15 posts by nine contributors in the past two days. We’re not trying to overwhelm you, but we are trying to do what we came here to do. More and more, you will have to learn to treat the enblogged globe like television, tuning in to what works for you and switching away from what doesn’t. I know we are not for everyone. But for real estate professionals who care about the ideas that will drive our industry in the twenty-first century, we need to be a hot-button on your remote control.
And if it all gets to be too much for you, you can tune out everything except the Jim Duncan Channel.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I caught this bit from the GeekEstate Blog in my feed reader.
That’s the list of weblogs in the suitable-for-framing map of “Real Estate Web 2.0” produced by the 1000Watt Consulting group, a consortium of people who make money by not understanding the difference between wattage and luminosity.
Notice anyone missing? It’s not just us. Curbed can’t find a parking space. Rain City Guide is left out in the rain. Even Bert and Ernie, who have been everywhere, can’t make it here.
We get snubbed from dumbass beauty contests all the time, and I take a certain kind of delight in it. First, nobody has to be told what is going at BloodhoundBlog — or anywhere else that matters. And second — and this is especially rich — the essence of Web 2.0 is that no one can tell you what does or does not matter. The first middle-men to be disintermediated by Web 2.0 were the would-be arbiters of taste.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Okay. So Cathleen is wicked sick, coughing like a rented tractor. We’re busy, and I don’t mean just a little. Applications are up, originations are up, rates are down, demand is maybe just short of a frenzy, and the mechanics of doom today accidentally discovered that the implications of currency inflation are that their desperately-sought collapse in values may already have happened — and no one noticed.
In any case, just to complicate my life, I agreed to present with Steven Groves this weekend at PodCamp AZ at The University of Advancing Technology.
We’ll be doing the session on “Real Estate and Social Media.” It’s Steven’s show, and his passion as well, so it should be worth seeing. We’re on from 3:30 to 4:30 pm, and we may be accessible in video live on uStream.com as well. I would like to shoot digital video, too, if we can rope a volunteer to operate the camera.
The links I’ve shown here will give you all the details. See you there!
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
The other day Cathy asked me what a semi-conductor is. It takes courage to ask me an open-ended question, because you risk getting the full answer. We started with integrated circuits, which is what most people mean when that say “semi-conductor,” then got into the conductive properties of metals and minerals, slid from there to quantum physics and electron tunneling, jumping to the idea of electronic gates, which leads back to Boolean algebra, all of which briefly encapsulates the idea of contemporary computer science.
But: The role of semi-conductors in all this is relatively recent, so we talked about Pascal’s automated looms, Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace’s invention of software engineering, Turing’s Enigma and the idea of the Turing machine — which, despite all the hype you read, is the underlying engineering for the computer in front of you right now, scaled up a bazillion times.
The Turing machine was mechanical. The role of semi-conductors in data processing came even later than that. So: We talked about integrated circuits, about Moore’s Law and most importantly about the information explosion, the practical corollary of Moore’s Law. We continued with the idea of the Semantic Web, the notion that, very soon, instead of you trying to find the data you want, the data you want will avidly be trying to find you.
There’s more: We talked about multi-core computer processors and their implications, particularly about their application in compute-intensive functions. As a matter of physics, there is a finite limit to Moore’s Law. Heat is a significant problem right now, but even postulating computers running immersed in liquid nitrogen, data moves at the speed of light. At some point, no matter how close together chip-makers manage to plant circuits, propagation delay will limit further speed increases.
But this is where massively-parallel multi-core processors come into their own. Imagine not two cores, or four, or eight — the most you can buy in a computer store right now. Imagine 64 cores, or 256, or 1,024 microprocessors running side-by-side, splitting jobs up into 1,024 separate tasks and performing all of them simultaneously.
There’s even more at the outer edges of Read more
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” — Samuel Johnson
Kris Berg asked me last night about my experiences writing for money. This was something I was interested in when I was very young, but, again from Johnson, “The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.” I have an absolutely unbounded loathing for the word “submit,” and this was something I could never eradicate from my mind, every time I licked a hopeful envelope.
When I am retired, I may consider the matter again, although it seems certain that writing for money is going the way of recording pop music for money: Ever more popular, no money. That doesn’t even matter to me. I’ve given away everything I’ve ever written, and I don’t see myself stopping. It is up to the reader to decide if the product is worth the price — and we are so much mis-schooled that many of us don’t know how to evaluate something that comes to us without a price. But it is very satisfying to me to write and to know that my writing is not being mucked with by some drooling, drunken moron to whom I am expected to “submit.” That satisfaction, the freedom to write whatever I damn well please, has always been compensation enough for me.
But do not for a moment entertain the idea that I am not writing for money. Yesterday I had what I considered to be an unjustifiably low offer on one of our listings. You can’t blame a guy for trying, but, upon reflection, I decided that the problem was at least partly mine.
I’ve written quite a bit about writing for real estate, but I realized yesterday that I need to be doing more than rhapsodizing about benefits and lifestyle. I am a good persuasive writer, and some small part of the writing I do for a listing has to be devoted to wrestling with logic and not just gaily dancing with emotion.
So: I wrote this text and put it on the back of the flyer with the floorplan:
Defending the price of this home…
It’s common Read more
Today we’re adding another writer to our line-up, but we’re also revealing the secret subterranean agenda of The Odysseus Medal competition.
Every time I turn around, there is someone accusing me of underhanded methods. I was seeking to get rich at $6.17 a month as an Amazon Affiliate. The Odysseus Medal is alleged to be a link-baiting scheme. And — the worst of my crimes — I hogged all the good grades in school!
I live in a simple world. I figure things are pretty much what they seem to be. Certainly I am, as is anything I build. I don’t do double-talk. I don’t get it, and I don’t care to take the time to puzzle it out.
So what is the real, super-secret, ultra-nefarious objective of The Odysseus Medal?
To unearth and celebrate talent. Period. My secondary hope is that I might recruit talented writers whose work I haven’t seen before to come write with us. But I want to improve my own mind — as I assume you do, too — and a good way for us to achieve that objective is to tell each other about great writing and great ideas we find as we leap across these nets.
Ooh… Crafty…
Today’s introduction is a treat for me. I had never read him before Sunday morning. He was nominated for The Odysseus Medal, and I knew about a third of the way through his post that he had won it. By the time I had finished reading, I knew I wanted to recruit him for BloodhoundBlog.
Enough. The man:
Geno Petro is the voice of Chicago on the RE.net. A top-producing listing agent, he has done leasing and has worked in his own behalf as an investor. On top of all that, he is a stunningly original writer.
Geno Petro is an incomparable writer. Like Kris Berg, he takes you right into his world, and, while you are there, you cannot even imagine any other, so completely is it realized.
I love what we do here, but one of the things I love best is that it makes all of us stronger. We all have to run Read more
I’ve been saying this for a long time: Buyers are temporarily interested in listings. Owners are always interested in their homes. Zillow.com wants buyers, hence the move to accept listings feeds. But what they really want are owners, people who will come back to the site again and again, potentially to be sold new stuff every time they come back.
Remember 13 months ago when Zillow opened up and let sellers create Do-It-Yourself Zestimates, detailing all the unZestimated changes they had made to the home?
Today all that data gets put to use. Zillow has a brand new advertising program called Home Direct Ads that will use every bit of the data it has collected to target market ads to particular buyers, to vendors like movers or remodeling contractors — even to visitors to specific homes in the Zillow database.
From the company’s press release:
Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow® Home Direct Ads, a new set of patent-pending tools that enables advertisers to identify and connect online with homeowners who are on the verge of making major home-related purchases such as moving or updating the home they currently own.
The sophisticated toolset capitalizes on Zillow’s most compelling asset: data-rich, individual Web pages for more than 70 million U.S. homes that attract regular visits by the homeowners themselves. Zillow Home Direct Ads helps advertisers target ads to these homeowners by individual address, by value of their home, by psychographic cluster such as urban families with children, or even by whether they are planning to move. This type of intent and address-specific targeting has never before been available for advertisers online.
“What we’re offering advertisers is pin point accuracy on the purchasing intentions of homeowners, including the ability to forecast that they are highly likely to move or remodel well before they start the process,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow vice president of ad sales. “Our advertisers can target ads down to the specific address or home value, or learn other facts about the neighborhood and locality that will allow them to tailor ads directly to this audience. As a result, advertisers are Read more
Take a look at this map:
That’s the route from my home, in North Central Phoenix, to Johnson’s Ranch, a master-planned community in Queen Creek, AZ. The distance is 55 miles by the odometer, but travel time is more like two hours. It’s a brutal, awful trip, over two-lane roads for the last third of the ride, interrupted once a mile by four-way stop signs. In traffic, each one of those four-way stops could account for ten minutes of your travel time. An accident or an over-heated car could drive your trip time up to three hours or more.
What can we say with absolute certainty about Queen Creek?
How about this? It isn’t in Phoenix.
Johnson’s Ranch isn’t even in the same county as Phoenix.
So why, when the New York Times wanted to slime the Phoenix real estate market — why would it do so from Queen Creek?
How about because the real estate market in Queen Creek is astoundingly bad, and — unless you live here — you won’t know you’re being had.
Don’t confuse yourself. Skyharbor Airport is eleven minutes from my house, right in the heart of town. No one could fly into Phoenix, then drive through mile after mile of cattle-scrubbed desert to Queen Creek, and manage to confuse the two. The purpose of the article was deception, the same kind of slimy deception “professional” journalism has been able to pull off forever — until now.
Want proof? The Associated Press pulled the same stunt earlier this month.
I’m not being a pollyanna. The real estate market is rough right now in Phoenix. But it is a whole lot better than it is in Pinal county. Conflating the two is not an error of knowledge, it is a deliberate falsehood — just exactly as false as talking about single-family homes in New York selling for $350,000 — which I would imagine you could obtain 55 miles southwest of Times Square.
In any case, I’m not talking about these particular lies but about the pattern of lying, about the pre-canned story lines mainstream journalists try to foist off as “news” — until very lately with no Read more
Here’s the thing: I am a complete sucker for good writing. I like big ideas, I like radical ideas (ya think?), I especially like profoundly and transparently ethical ideas. But if you can write entrancingly about just about anything — I am duly entranced. We live and learn by telling stories, and all of the arts, at their best, are most fundamentally literary. The burnished word is the reflection of humanity’s godhead, the breath of the sublime made manifest in speech, in poetry, in prose, in the drama, even in the cacophonous news of our everyday lives. We are animals, and so we sleep and scratch and snuffle. But we are a spectacular genetic accident, a thing of nature that cannot exist except as an artifact, a man-made thing. By dint of our conceptualization, given form in speech and in abstract notation systems, we are a thing apart from nature, the god-like consciousness that gives nature meaning beyond mere randomness. In our words, in the works of our unprecedented minds, we celebrate all we are and all we can become. And so it would not be wrong to say that I am continuously in the thrall of human life well celebrated.
Hence: 
This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Geno Petro for Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar:
I won’t promise ‘lightning in a bottle’ to a potential client but I will pledge to use my resources (spend my own money) in the most efficient manner I see fit. Let’s face it, the Listing Agent is in the hole the minute he walks out the door with the Exclusive and only collects when the property actually sells–correction: …when the property actually sells under his watch. Phone calls from Vegas are never good under any circumstance, I’ve found.
I’ll try not to promise the Moon no matter how much I allow myself to be manipulated by the situation (potential paycheck). And that is why we do it, you know. We Realtors are ironically, the easiest people to manipulate because we count the money before it’s printed. We may say we don’t but most of us secretly Read more
Joel Burslem, writing from The Future of Real Estate Marketing, a multi-author weblog, this past week posted an extended complaint about multi-author weblogs.
Okayfine. It struck me as a beef about form over substance, but — what the heck? — there’s no accounting for taste.
The one kvetch that is surely valid is this:
I’d love to be able just to get Mike Arrington’s perspective on TC or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s posts from RWW or Pete Cashmore’s contributions to Mashable for example and cut out all the rest.
To use a (loose) analogy – I’d liken many multi-author blogs right now to my local cable company. They’re bundling an awful lot of channels in my cable package that I don’t want.
One thing that would help if more multi-author blogs feeds aped the a la carte cable model (which is sadly lacking right now too), or like podcast subscriptions in iTunes. These blogs ought to clearly let me pick and choose the authors I want and bundle a unique feed for me based on my selections – not just stuff everything down a pipe at me.
This is actually easily done in WordPress, and it’s something I’ve thought about doing for a long time.
And today is that day. It’s been possible for a long time to get a BloodhoundBlog author’s archive of posts by clicking on that author’s picture. Beautiful people like Kris Berg, Cathleen Collins and Dan Green are consistent beneficiaries of this feature. That would seem to suggest that the feature is being discovered mostly by accident of impulse, so now, in any particular post and in the Frequent Contributors section of the sidebar, “Post Archive” and “RSS Feed” are also supported by text links.
From my point of view, anyone who would subscribe to a Michael Arrington feed and skip Duncan Riley doesn’t get technology, but the essence of capitalism is that each of us should be able to have exactly what we want and nothing else.
In the mean time, we will continue to grow — in contributors, in scope, in importance, in reach, in influence. As with the best of group weblogs in the larger Read more
A dozen nominees again, which is boiling down to one entry out of five. Already you’re looking at what I view as the cream of this week’s crop.
We are slaves to the news, of course. This week’s fires in Southern California dominated our attention. Congress seems desperate to do something ruinous to the mortgage industry. Microstoopid spent way too much to buy a small piece of a big fad that will be gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe three years from now. I ignored almost everything about this. Likewise for Zillow’s announcement that their ERA deal makes them Trulia player in the on-line listings game. RE/Max has a national real estate listings portal. The Realty.bots have PR departments, at least so far. The RE.net is temporary, like all news, but I try to filter for what is actually important and not just noisome.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
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
$AltEntries = array (
"Geno Petro -- Lightning in a bottle Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar”,
“Michael Wurzer — Living history Living History“,
“Jay Thompson — Negative news As a fellow Realtor I am disappointed that you post such negative news“,
“Kris Berg — Healing Healing“,
“Dan Melson — Lending reform \”Fixes\” for the Mortgage Meltdown – You Can’t Keep A Bad Idea Down“,
“Morgan Brown — Lending reform Barney Frank – Broker’s Worst Nightmare“,
“Kevin Boer — Move/Active Rain What The Microsoft-Facebook Deal Means For Real Estate — Part 2: Revisiting Move.com Vs. ActiveRain“,
“Krista Baker — Negotiating buyer’s commissions Negotiating Commissions with Buyers“,
“Gary Elwood — Credibility The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You“,
“Brian Boreo — Real estate weblogging Waking from my blog reverie“,
“Jeff Brown — San Diego Fires San Diego Fire Update — It’s Now Approaching Historical — 10% of Population Evacuated“,
“Jeff Kempe — Socratic dialogue Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++)
{
$pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]);
$radioGroup .= "
echo Read more
Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
In 1991, I was approached by Garry Fairbairn (he must have been a beautiful baby) of the Western Producer in Saskatoon (or maybe it was Regina), Saskatchewan, Canada to write a simple batch global search and replace utility that the paper could use to translate American wire service copy to King’s English spellings — color to colour, favor to favour, etc.
That was the birth of Torquemada the Inquisitor. Ultimately it came to be much more powerful, but, in the beginning, it did nothing but search for and replace string literals. I was developing a reputation as a Macintosh software developer who was interested in big text-processing problems. There was a good reason for this: I had big text-processing problems and I wrote software to solve them. Torquemada used the then-new drag-‘n’-drop technology in the Mac OS to permit users to run an unlimited number of pre-saved search sets on an unlimited number of text files. If you could write well-defined, error-trapped searches, you could automate a big chunk of your workflow.
Subsequent versions added wildcard searches, type-casting, wild strings, case-conversion, etc. Torquemada was pattern matching along the lines of the Unix GREP utility, but it was optimized for repetitive tasks common to text-processing, word-processing and typography. It was very useful in the early days of web-page creation, as well.
I named it Torquemada because I had already written a utility called XP8 (expiate, get it?). This was built to correct a huge number of defects common to word processing files in those days. In addition, it would pre-code text to be imported into QuarkXPress — then and now high-end Macintosh desktop publishing software — with many typographic refinements coded into the text on the fly. XP8 would remove the excess white space from around the numeral “1,” for instance, intelligently ignoring the lining figures in tables. It did quote-conversion better than any software before or since.
These two utilities had fairly similar objectives, and both were built expecting to do huge batch jobs by drag-‘n’-drop. XP8 was a brute-force front-end to Quark, though, where Torquemada was a general purpose text revisionist. In practice, for Read more
Daniel Rothamel has managed to set up an event called NAR BloggerCon. I can’t figure out who’s getting conned, but I’m eager to find out.
Cathy and I are flying in and out for the event — my favorite way of going anywhere.
Date and Time: Monday, November 12th, 2007 @ 5:30pm.
Place: The NAR Bloggers’ Lounge – Venetian Hotel, 4th Floor, Room 4605
Be there if you can. If not, I predict there will be video…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
