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Author: Greg Swann (page 125 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

October 26, 2007

Phoenix has it’s problems, but they’re small compared to those in other cities

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). I’m not grave-robbing San Diego, but every big-news disaster turns out to be good news in the long run for the Phoenix real estate market. This was written on Tuesday, so the specific details are a little dated.

 
Phoenix has it’s problems, but they’re small compared to those in other cities

At BloodhoundBlog.com, we’re tracking the fires in San Diego County. Business is business, but a world-class disaster commands attention. Three of our fifteen contributors are in the fire zone. Two of the three have already been evacuated as I write this. Our hearts and prayers and donations go out to the victims of the blaze, even as we know that whatever we can do can never be enough.

But at the same time, we in the Valley of the Sun should take a moment to count our blessings.

As you approach Phoenix from California, you see them, one after another, vast warehouses, acres in extent. The space should really be measured in cubic feet, but the numbers would quickly become astronomical.

Why are they there? Because Phoenix is the perfect place in North America to build trans-shipment warehouses. No winter, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no mudslides, no uncontrolled fires. We do have a brutal summer heat, but that’s just so much hot air.

For these same reasons, Phoenix is an increasingly popular destination for server farms and colocation facilities. Critical commercial data must be stored or mirrored in places where it won’t be lost to acts of god or other freak events. Phoenix has a talented workforce, great air and ground transportation, a first-rate communications infrastructure and a tremendous surplus of electrical power. Major companies and major airlines park their data and their airplanes here because they know they’ll be safe.

Plus which, Phoenix is sunny all the time and it’s a great place to raise kids. We don’t necessarily think about everything when picking a place to live, but, as life expectancies increase, what we might call the marginal futility of death by accident soars. Your kids could live a lot longer than you Read more

October 25, 2007

The soul of a bigger Bloodhound: Anticipating BloodhoundBlog.TV

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re about to grow to be a much bigger dog. We’re a media play to begin with — news and views, not sales and service. People lecture us all the time that we don’t get real estate weblogging, a point we might dispute. Weblogging about the real estate business, on the other hand, we do better than anyone.

What we have coming is a new idea on a new domain, BloodhoundBlog.TV. (There’s nothing there yet; we’re too busy building the underlying technology.)

Yawn! Yet another claque of clamorous real estate videos?

Not on your life.

We’re going at this BloodhoundBlog way, as webloggers: Serious about important ideas, always, but never stuffy or stilted — and never in anyone’s thrall. We’re going to do the same kinds of things we do here — in streaming, iPod-ready video.

Here are some kinds of content we might take on:

  • The Talking Head, like Andy Rooney or Bill O’Reilly. This is akin to a weblog post, but it’s harder to do well than to imagine having done well. It works best from a well-rehearsed script, but some of the best YouTube videos we have linked to fall into this category.
  • How-To/Spot News/Actuality. This is like HGTV or a news broadcast. Plenty of room for creativity here: multiple locations, multiple interviews, music, still images or film clips.
  • Interviews. This is what we think of right now when we think of a general interest real estate video podcast. With a camcorder or a decent webcam, we can do this anywhere. Connecting through the Studio BHB set-up (about which more below), we can make a fairly tightly edited two-shot remote interview on the fly.
  • Group Discussions. This depends on Studio BHB. A group of us, contributors or guests, can come together in a video-conference, which we can store as a video. I’ve worked out a way to edit this kind of conference to make a visually compelling presentation on the fly.

We are planning to do a weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast, combining the first three types of segments with a group discussion about those segments, about the real estate news of the week and about our particular favorites among Read more

October 24, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Email from Jeff Brown

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On 10/24/07 10:44 AM, “Greg Swann” wrote:

Are you okay? Talked to Brian and he indicated the danger now confronts you.

Thanks — we’re not in danger, but the air quality sucks.  The fire is about 15 minutes or so mostly east and a bit south from us.

It’s so bad, the Fire Captain said they were confident they could successfully have it surrounded on or before NOVEMBER 4TH!

Not good.

The fires in the north, as I said earlier, are now working, much of the time, in concert with each other.

The wild card is the now fickle winds. We’re apparently transitioning from Santa Ana to normal weather. It makes it far more dangerous for the firefighters. An example in the last few minutes was a fire engine that had to back up at emergency speed from a home’s driveway, as several firemen jumped literally into a small brushfire threatening to trap and destroy the engine.

The winds’ velocity has slowed, but are now unpredictable. Again, not good.

Bottom line — looks like we won’t gain the upper hand on this thing for another week maybe.
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October 24, 2007

When all you have is a hammer — disintermediate the bums!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.

Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.

Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.

But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.

A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.

“The world sorts itself out” is what Read more

October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Brian Brady — Big Mother? Who needs her?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I heard from Brian Brady, who also seems to have escaped harm in the fires. His home came closest to being singed, and, while he has not yet been back to see it, he thinks it should be okay.

The podcast linked below is a free-ranging discussion of the fires, the response by individual citizens, and the kinds of structures that might replace those that were destroyed by the fires.
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October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Kris Berg — staring down disaster with a lithe sense of humor and a glass of Chardonay

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you might expect, Kris Berg’s take on the San Diego fires is phlegmatic and funny. She phoned just as I was posting the podcast with Jeff Brown.

Cliff’s Notes: Life is mostly back to normal in Scripps Ranch except that the air is grey with smoke and ash and the kids are off from school. Kris is as funny on the phone as she is in person.
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October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Jeff Brown discussing today’s events

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was able to connect with Jeff Brown, and we spent a few minutes on the phone talking about today’s events in battling the fires in San Diego.

I was unable to get through to either Kris Berg or Brian Brady, but I’m hoping this simply means their cell phone batteries are dead.

Jeff spoke with Brian earlier today and wrote about it here.

Lani Anglin was able to talk to Kris, which you can read about here.

From Jeff’s point of view, they’re over the hump, and we can only hope he’s right.
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October 22, 2007

The Odysseus Medal — 99% of all sub-agents don’t even exist any longer, but why should that matter to the Wharton School of Business?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m a busy boy. We’re busy with money work, but Cathleen has been sick, sicker, pneumoniated. The good news is, you don’t have to cut off your ear to take great pictures, you just have to hack like Selma on the Simpsons. I’m picking up the slack, plus I have a great new idea for BloodhoundBlog that we’ll be rolling out shortly. In any case, I might seem abrupt here, but that is no stain on the quality of today’s winning posts.

Jim Duncan was one of the first real estate webloggers I became aware of when we started BloodhoundBlog. We discovered the power of the long tail together in posts about dual agency. He is always to be found on the side of righteousness in real estate — ethics, education, putting the client first with first-rate service. He’s a great blogger, too, as he demonstrates with this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, Wither false blame?, an extended riposte to a particularly lame lamentation about imaginary offenses by the sub-agents who no longer exist in most states:

The author and professors make one accurate argument accidentally – until the real estate industry, mortgage industry, HUD, etc. embrace divorced commissions, we have a long way to go. Divorced commissions means simply that the buyer pays the buyer’s agent and the seller pays the seller’s agent. Until this is fixed, the perception will exist amongst those who don’t know any better – whether by unfamiliarity or neglect (as would seem to be the case in the Wharton professors’ cases) – that true representation does not exist.

I come not to condemn the professors (I have read the Mortgage Professor site for years), but to enlighten them to the wonderful world known as the 21st century and Buyer Brokerage. While the seller may pay my commission now, the loyalty and trust I am earning is the buyers’.

Here’s a proposal – First, apologize and clarify. Second, invite a guest speaker write a guest post on your blog and to explain to your classes what real estate agency and buyer/seller representation are. Explain how much the profession has changed in Read more

October 21, 2007

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

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A dozen nominees again. It’s a workable number, and it gets us down to nothing but very serious posts. There are three from BloodhoundBlog here, but there’s nothing for it. Two of the three dominated the debate this week. If anything, I’m less fair to our contributors in the final judging, to make sure I’m being fair to everyone else.

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 PDT/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 ( "Morgan Brown -- FHA secure Qualifying for FHASecure and Refinancing in a Changed Mortgage World”,
“Jim Cronin — Blogging for buyers Looking For Ready To Act Buyers? Blog These Proven To Succeed Real Estate Topics“,
“Dan Green — Housing starts Why The Terrible Housing Starts Number Could Be A Signal Of The Housing Market’s Recovery“,
“Jeff Brown — Social Security First Baby Boomer Applies For Social Security — Let The Games Begin“,
“Kris Berg — Paper trained Paper Trained“,
“Jim Duncan — Wharton calumnies Whither false blame?“,
“Dan Melson — Going vertical Economics of Home Ownership in High Density Areas“,
“Morgan Brown — Wholesaling DOA? Dead Man Walking – Wholesale Lending is Marching Towards Extinction“,
“Benn Rosales — Despised Realtor Realtor most despised – an open letter“,
“Brian Brady — Blog compliance Disingenuous Diatribe: Compliance is Crap-It’s About the Cash“,
“Kris Berg — Face time Face Time or Facebook?“,
“Jeff Brown — Hyperlocal blogging House Agents — Wanna Start the New Year Kickin’ Ass? Here’s How”
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    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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    • October 20, 2007

    Is Zillow.com shutting down? Could the media darling and incipient Double Jeopardy question be headed for the dead pool?

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Not so much, despite a prank posting on the realty.bot’s forums:

    Zillow will be shut down on Nov 2nd

    Their revenue stream is in concert with the real estate market. They simply ran out of money.

    Hence no price updates for over a month.

    The Cluetrain runs on Saturdays in Seattle, so David Gibbons rushed in to quash the rumor (once I had asked for a comment, I should add):

    OK, OK – Zillow is not shutting down.

    Quite the contrary. I’m sorry that Zestimate updates are delayed – there’s a sticky post in the Zillow forum that explains this further. The short story is that we’re preparing for a massive update to Zestimates and data – and have had to freeze site data while that project is ongoing. I understand that it’s frustrating and ask for your patience for a little while longer.

    Financially, the company is very healthy – but thanks for your concern. Yep, Homer; we did just raise a 3rd round of venture Capital – $30M – for a total of $89M to date. Ad sales at Zillow are better than expected – please remember to support our advertisers!

    New data will be on the site shortly – and much more cool stuff will launch over the next 3 months. We’re not going anywhere.

    The rumor was obvious bunk, but it’s cool that it shook some news loose from the Zillowtree.

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    October 19, 2007

    Cathy’s drama: Photos from the whatever-it-takes school of listing

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    These are photos from the listing I was working on last night. Cathleen took all the photos for this house. I can do a house a lot faster than she can, but she comes home with photos that are just stunning.

    Can poetic copy sell houses? Maybe not. Custom signs? It’s a long shot — but we do get a lot of sign calls. Elaborate web sites? You tell me. Photos like these? Everything’s a crap shoot, and, of course, nothing works if the price is wrong.

    But: If you assume that more than one house could be a good fit for that elusive buyer, then what should you do to make sure that it’s your listing and not the other guy’s that sells?

    Our answer: Whatever it takes. Dramatic photos can’t win the war alone, but they’re one more weapon in our arsenal.


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