BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 130 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

September 18, 2007

New Times likes the present: Smarmy, tendentious blather wants to be free!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then, and, in that spirit, The New York Times has discovered that cowering behind a paywall is a profitless pursuit of irrelevance. More from TechCrunch:

The history of paid content goes back to the collapse of the Web 1.0 bubble, a time before content monetization was a sure bet through programs such as Google Adsense and others. There was a backlash against free content for a while, and a number of companies launched pay-to-view programs. The New York Times was one of the last to maintain this model.

Surely, with the Wall Street Journal being acquired by News Corp, the WSJ pay-to-view program must now be on death row. Similarly, the Australian Financial Review’s paid AFR.com service has been rumored to be on its last legs for some time, and will shortly close.

Most importantly: this is a win for all of us. The notion of paying to access content is flawed in a connected online world where virtually everything is free, particularly content. Companies such as the NY Times can make money from providing content for free. The fall of the model for all publications is nigh.

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September 17, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Propagating better ideas in real estate by celebrating better ideas in real estate

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is probably not much of a secret, but I really love ideas. I think the argument that smart people can improve the NAR cartel from the inside is absurd, but the instant form of the claim — that I could advance Realtors’ use of technology by wasting my time at committee meetings — is especially specious. It’s no goal of mine to change any life but my own, but, even so, the best technological benefit I can bring to Realtors, lenders, investors and thoughtful consumers is right here: Explicating our own new ideas and and drawing attention to other peoples’ innovations. Ideas are an attribute of active minds, and minds and meetings are sets with the tiniest of intersections.

Among all the other virtues I might claim for it, The Odysseus Medal competition is a celebration of great ideas in real estate. Here are this week’s winners:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Dan Melson for Should Lenders Be Permitted to Sell Real Estate?:

Let us ask about real estate which has become owned by the lender. Why should lenders lack an ability shared by every other citizen, resident, illegal alien, and even people who have never set foot in the country – the ability to sell their own property? There’s no requirement for anyone else to use an agent. It may be smart to use an agent, but everyone else has the legal right to go it on their own. Why not lenders?

I’ll tell you why. Because not only would lenders being able to get into the business threaten the interests of the major chains that control most real estate, but this requires lenders to pay those same firms money if they want to get the property from their bad loans sold – and they need to get the property sold.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly eager to compete with yet more big corporations with huge advertising budgets. It remains the right thing to do. Right for the industry, and right for the consumers. As I’ve said many times before, rent-seeking is repugnant, and that’s what NAR is doing – seeking Read more

September 17, 2007

Richard Epstein on zoning, Kelo and the “takings” clause

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Dr. Richard Epstein is my favorite never-happen candidate for the Supreme Court. An expert on the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”), in the linked podcast, he

makes the case that many current zoning restrictions are essentially “takings” and property owners should receive compensation for the lost value of their land. He also discusses the Kelo case and the political economy of the regulation of land.

Click here for a direct link to the podcast.

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September 16, 2007

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

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We had a ton of very strong entries this week. I had to eliminate more than half to get to a short list of twenty nominees. If you didn’t make the cut, don’t despair. You’ll come back even stronger next week. Everything was terrific, a real treat for me going through them. These twenty survivors are must-reading.

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:

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 or, more easily, here.

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September 15, 2007

I invented a brand new social networking technology today, so, once somebody implements it, I want my iRadio for free

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. Even so, here’s a cool idea I had today.

First, art is selection. You have to stand back, because I can define art seven different ways in seven seconds. But one thing that art is is the selection of seemingly disparate elements into a pleasing whole. In this way, disc-jockeying can be seen as an art form.

Second, social networking can be viewed as communication by shared creation — collaboration.

So: Imagine an iPod-like device that allowed you to broadcast your music over, say, a 25 yard radius. You are now a DJ for anyone who wants to tune into your hyper-hyper-local radio show.

As an elaboration, imagine the each one of these iPod-like devices could work as either a sender or a receiver of hyper-hyper-local radio shows.

As a further elaboration, imagine that self-selected groups of people could create temporary networks of these iPod-like devices. In the receiving mode, each would retransmit music sent by the device in the transmitting mode, slightly expanding the transmission radius. The user of the transmitting device could elect to continue transmitting or could pass the baton of transmission along to another device in the network.

In this way, a group of people could DJ for each other, each sharing the best of their music collections with the others, each taking a turn as the creator of the collaborative artwork.

Picture a group of early-morning joggers or bike-riders. How about semi-sorta-suburban-strangers on a commuter train? Stuck at the airport? You can recruit volunteers to share in the misery.

iRadio? iBroadcast? iAmADJ? I think this could be a lot of fun.

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September 15, 2007

BlogRush: Viral weblog widget promotes for added traffic

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I added a viral blog widget called BlogRush to the sidebar. In principal, it should draw attention to BloodhoundBlog posts at weblogs were folks might not know about us. It’s a rebuttable proposition, but one I’m willing to test. If it works, it should work for the entire RE.net. It’s a quasi-MLM, so if you click through from our link, we get brownie points.

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September 15, 2007

An open letter to the technological dinosaurs who presume to control our livelihoods

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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To: Ron LaMee
VP Information Services
Arizona Association of Realtors

Ron:

Russell Shaw argues to me that I have been unfair to you, or at least unnecessarily rude. I don’t concede the point, but I am willing to elaborate on the issues at contest. In all honesty, I don’t expect anyone in my slice of the NAR cartel — the Phoenix Association of Realtors, the Arizona Association of Realtors, the National Association of Realtors, or the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service — to exhibit anything I would regard as an improvement, but it’s possible other, less-entrenched entities in other parts of the country can benefit from this discussion.

Before we get started in earnest, I want you to take a look at this map-based MLS search interface. Estately.com is my current pet, in no small measure because it integrates all kinds of neighborhood and transit information into its visual representation of MLS data. There are other cool tools out there: Windermere has a very sexy map-based search. RE/Max has a national MLS system, and Keller-Williams can’t be far behind in that regard. Even so, the market leaders for all of these very cool tools are third-party start-ups like Zillow.com and Trulia.com.

I realize that much of the software I’m talking about is outside your immediate purview. The point is that traditional Realtors are sinking fast, technologically, and you, Ron LaMee, are shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic while you try to hustle us into buying even more of the same obsolete crap we’re already drowning in.

Criticism stings while you’re getting it, but, in fact, it is by addressing the specifics of criticism that we substantially improve our performance. Most people take what they get uncritically — they take crap because they expect crap — but a sincere, informed critic is the best goad a person or organization can have to get rid of the crap in their product or service. Of course, most people and most organizations change nothing, preferring instead to resent the critic for exposing their crappy offerings to the light. In the free market, these problems are eventually corrected by auctioneers. It remains to Read more

September 14, 2007

Deadline looms for Odysseus Medal competition: Act now or weep incessantly Sunday afternoon

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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There are already a couple dozen nominees for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition. What are we missing? Only you know for sure. The deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something orbiting the skirts of perfection, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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September 14, 2007

If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

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This is me this week in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
    — William Shakespeare, Richard II

I am too familiar with my own ignorance to credit other people’s predictions for the real estate market. People who think they can foresee the consequences of billions of choices years in advance are fooling themselves — although probably not as completely as they are fooling their audiences.

Even so, a would-be home-seller listening to all the doom and gloom predictions on the news may by now be in deep despair, crying, like King Richard, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

I don’t believe any of this, but let’s stipulate it for argument’s sake. In reality, so far, resale prices for some of the hardest hit residential communities in the Valley are down around 16.4% from the December 2005 peak. This means those same homes are still up 54.1% in value from December 2003.

If we anticipate the worst — mass foreclosures, with lenders dumping properties for pennies on the dollar — what can you do now to escape ruin?

The answer? Price your property to sell.

If you live in an archetypical suburban Phoenix home, your house is worth today just about what it would have sold for in April or May of 2005. If you’re priced higher than that, you may be priced too high to sell.

Here’s another way of arriving at a reasonable price. Take the sales prices of truly comparable homes that sold last month in your neighborhood and subtract at least 3%.

This can’t be happy news, considering how much you might have gotten two years ago. But if there is worse news to come, this is the happiest news you may hear for Read more

September 13, 2007

Supplanting the NAR: Can we get to a better quality of real estate representation by way of the licensing laws?

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Coming back to this, with my apologies for the delay. I realized I was never going to have time for the whole feast at one sitting, so I resolved to take it on one bite at a time.

I want to examine some of the ideas and objections people have raised with respect to supplanting the NAR with a more rigorous predictor of quality representation. And: I’m being as vague as I can because, while I think we’re all interested in hearing specific ideas — or caveats about those specific ideas — I don’t think we’re anywhere near ready to erect or enact anything. In construction terms, we are not building, drafting plans, designing or even site planning. At this stage, we are talking about whether or not to build anything at all.

For what it’s worth, my natural inclination is to do nothing. For more than a year I’ve been talking about the kinds of things we do to obviate our competition. We get better day by day and they’re all standing around with their thumbs… duly engaged. Our reputation grows with every home run we hit. In the market niche we farm, we don’t need a third-party imprimatur of quality. Res ipse loquitur.

However: If we argue that there are too many would-be real estate practitioners, that many of these folks have much too little training and experience, and that buyers and sellers would have a safer and more satisfying experience if they learned to seek out higher-quality practitioners, then there is an argument to be made for creating something like an Underwriters’ Laboratories rating organization for real estate agents.

One of the commenters to my original post on this subject wrote:

If we want to eliminate half the licensees just raise the barriers to entry…require an apprenticeship…or raise the licensing fee…or make the licensing test harder…or make the continuing education harder…or all of the above. These steps alone will raise the quality of service in the industry.

These are ideas we hear all the time, of course. So why are they never ratified in law?

The real estate licensing laws are controlled by the brokers, Read more

September 11, 2007

How do you get a San Diego beach house to give a positively glowing review of itself?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Wait for the light. Kris Berg shows you how it’s done. Do not fail to look at all of the photos.

I’m sure we would all love to have bazillion-dollar beach houses to sell, but, whatever your market, this is the kind of above-and-beyond marketing that gets houses sold.

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September 11, 2007

Listings bulimia? While it is not yet ready to break the vicious cycle of bingeing and purging, Zillow.com is willing to nibble on your data feed to try to decide if it wants to eat it later

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Zillow.com is getting ready to get ready to take listings data feeds. The X in XML stands for eXtensible, but Zillow and dynamism sleep at opposite ends of the bed. In any case, if you ready to get started getting ready to go, Zillow is prepared to think about undertaking those last few items of preparation. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail, but what happens if you fail to plan (to plan (to plan (to plan (…))))? It’s a problem. As the Melancholy Dane advises, “Get thee to a vomitoria!” When it comes to lunch and data feeds, “a double blessing is a double grace,” so to speak.

I haven’t looked at the specs yet, but I have PHP for feeds into Trulia, PropSmart and ZeeMaps. If your broker won’t support you, it may be I can help.

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September 11, 2007

Would you trust this man with your most precious investment?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Four hundred families a year do. Believe it or not, that’s our own Russell Shaw in his salad days as a radio comedian in Phoenix in the mid-seventies.

Derrick Bostrom, of the band The Meat Puppets, maintains a virtual shrine to a radio show called Love Workshop:

“Love Workshop” was a fifteen-minute comedy program that ran on KDKB-FM radio in Phoenix, Arizona for most of 1976. The show was always somewhat of a mystery to me. During its brief life, “Love Workshop’s” hosts, Vern & Craig (Todd Carroll and “Wonderful” Russ Shaw) were my heroes, They just seemed to appear out of nowhere all of a sudden, offering the kind of savage humor I idolized in the “National Lampoon,” only they were right in my own backyard. And then it disappeared just as quickly.

The site is a weblog, of course, and today Bostrom reprints an old interview with Russ. Bostrom has also managed to collect recordings of Love Workshop episodes, which you can use to spice up your Russell Shaw MP3 collection.

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September 11, 2007

My 9/11 prayer . . .

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This is me, this time last year:

Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex.

I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and best can be. I don’t believe in heaven, but when I think of what was done that day, I pray there is an everlasting torment for the men who did it…

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