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Author: Greg Swann (page 160 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

February 26, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Inman’s real estate weblogging coverage

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(I was going to award The Cheez-Whiz Prize to Google’s applications suite, but I decided not to bother. I do think it’s silly to go from centralized processing to distributed processing and then back to centralized processing, but I can understand why people might do just about anything to get away from Microsoft.)

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Matt Carter of Inman News for his four-part series on real estate weblogging.

Part I appears today, with the other three parts appearing later this week. The articles will go behind Inman’s pay wall, so if you want to see them for free, hop to it.

Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide writes about the series, also, along with details about a Blogger’s Connect later this year at Inman Connect.

Carter’s series explores real estate weblogging at amazing depth, and I would say so even if he hadn’t given BloodhoundBlog a big write-up. The articles explore work being done by many of the better-known names in the RE.net, including BloodhoundBlog contributors Kris Berg and Dan Green.

For my own part, my hat is off to everyone who got to be a part of this series, and to the RE.net as a whole. And most especially to Matt Carter, who has given us a lovely portrait of where we are now…

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February 26, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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…is up at The Real Estate Zebra. Host Daniel Rothamel is one of our favorite real estate webloggers, so it’s a double honor to have our own Kris Berg win yet again for The ABC’s of Agent Hiring – Oops, They Did it Again. This is Kris’ second win and the fourth for BloodhoundBlog.

This week’s Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at TheMillionairesBlog. We entered Michael Cook‘s Negotiation 201: Don’t Just Think about the Best Price, but it didn’t take first place, alas.

There is much good reading at both weblogs. Go take a look…

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February 26, 2007

The truth will set you free — but your chains are forged from sob stories . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I was at a party about 13 months ago, a going away party for one of my clients whose house we had just sold. I had sold the hostess her house, and somehow or another we started talking about 80/20 loans — nothing down financing. She had just refinanced to retire the second mortgage, so she had 20% equity in her home at next-to-nothing in out-of-pocket costs.

All around the room, people started nodding and saying 80/20, 80/20. They had all done the same thing, a room full of young homeowners with their homeownership made possible by the no-PMI piggy-back loan.

This is Peter Coy in Business Week’s Hot Property:

Is Your Mortgage Choking You?

For an article in BW, I’m looking to interview people who have subprime ARM mortgages and are feeling squeezed by resets.

A few weeks ago, Coy admitted that margins of error in statistical reporting render much of it meaningless. I have never worked with a sub-prime borrower, but I would expect that, among the stories of people being “choked,” there must also be stories of people who bought homes they would not otherwise have been able to purchase, homes they have subsequently refinanced with conforming loans.

“Proof by anecdote” is bogus in the first place, since anecdotes abound (and they’re much easier than real estate to improve). But surely there are countervailing anecdotes for almost any phenomenon. This might seem to argue for presenting “both sides” of the story. To me, it suggests a better approach. An anecdote in a news article is almost always a fallacious Appeal to Emotion dressed up as testimony. With two or three sad tales, the reporter implies that a situation that might be quite rare is in fact ubiquitous — and that the “solution” propounded requires no rational defense. Facts are facts, and surely thoughtful people can digest them without all that saccharine. Why not leave the anecdotes out altogether…?

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February 25, 2007

Feed guarding: Protecting your weblog content from theft — or worse fates . . .

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Back in the dark days before the turn of the millennium, if you saw something I had written, down at the bottom there would be a little addendum: “Join my email update list.” If you did this, you would get a copy of every new essay or story I wrote at the time that I made it public. Not as convenient (or as annoying) as a Listserv, but you wouldn’t have to scrounge around on Usenet to find my deathless prose. Back then, a lot of people distributed content this way.

Dave Winer, the Tesla of weblogging, saw how stupid this was and invented a much more efficient alternative: RSS syndication. Instead of an email pushed from an email client, an email of updated content was pulled from a newsreader. Not only would I not have to undertake any special effort to send the email, you could receive it only if, as and when you wanted it. Genius!

What’s important about this is that, from the standpoint of my copyright to my original content, nothing has changed. Before I was pushing emails to individual readers. Now individual readers are pulling emails. But, simply because an RSS feed is easy to obtain, easy to repurpose, easy to resyndicate — this does not imply that I have waived any rights to my intellectual property.

People sometimes argue that RSS syndication creates a gray area in IP law. It doesn’t. In the United States, a transmissible work of the mind is presumed by default to be copyright protected. The presumption is rebuttable — for example by a waiver of copyright. But if you have not waived the rights to your work, you do not need to assert them by filing a copyright notice or by appending a copyright symbol to your work product. Your work is yours, and, except for fair uses for non-commercial purposes — e.g., a quote with a link in a weblog post — no one has the right to republish your content without your expressed permission.

So: Your fine young weblog gets splogged: Your feed is “scraped” and republished with a lot of creepy Read more

February 23, 2007

Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman issues a non-apology apology: This is what it sounds like when pigs fly . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Oh, good grief…

If Redfin.com wants to make peace with the real estate industry, all it has to do is hold up its end. If it wants to be a cowbird bottom-feeding parasite — defaulting on its responsibilities and disbursing that default as “savings” — it has to live with the contempt fully earned and deserved by cowbird bottom-feeding parasites.

Glenn Kelman should take solace — or take a drink — or just take a nap — however. The contempt Redfin.com earns doesn’t originate in his inflammatory comments — even if these are really, truly, honestly, please-please-you-must-believe-me a real estate-specific form of Tourette Syndrome.

Did any one of us make it through middle school without understanding demagoguery? If so, here are the review notes:

The skinny kid spewing half-witted insults is a coward who is terrified of two things: That his posturing is ludicrous, and that you know it…

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February 23, 2007

The Blogfather Part II: I could have blogged all night . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The folks at ActiveRain are putting together a contest. It’s Pygmalion for webloggers, wherein experienced real estate webloggers take eager young blogging caterpillars into their tutelage, and, Henry Higgins-like, bring forth beautiful blogging butterflies in a few months’ time. The winning pair of bloggers will split $5,000 amongst their favorite charities.

(I predict my favorite charity will turn out to have something to do with stray animals.)

In any case, I’m looking for a patsy, er pigeon, er victim, er volunteer — I’m looking for a volunteer to learn the art and science of real estate weblogging with me as your tutor, er mentor, er insufferable bastard.

To disclaim is to disclose: I am not the gentlest teacher in the world. But I know a lot about weblogging, and I can teach you as much as can be taught about this art, this praxis, this obsession.

If you are at or very near the stage of being a total wannablogger with a will to make the leap to something that can blow kisses at true greatness, you’re my ideal candidate. I love you best in Phoenix, but if you’re not here, you’re just not here.

If you want to learn to do real estate weblogging wisely and well, with style, with grace, with humor and panache — I’m your volunteer.

But: I really, really like to win. So: Write to me and tell me why I should pick you as my co-competitor…
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February 23, 2007

Video can supplement photos and virtual tours in a listing, but it can’t supplant them . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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However…

BtoB:

One day someone will be driving through a neighborhood and they’ll see a sign with a podcast URL. A few minutes later they could be sitting in front of the property, watching a video tour on their cell phone.

When you create a brand new category, you’re a category-killer by default…

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February 23, 2007

HOAs don’t deserve hate; they have a purpose

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This is me from this morning’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
HOAs don’t deserve hate; they have a purpose

One of the ironies of our gilded age is that the free-market system, which provides a vast abundance of goods and services ever more cheaply and of ever better quality, is all but universally criticized and derided.

Meanwhile, no amount of fawning attention is too much for our governments, which will happily ram their “benefits” down your throat if you are the least bit reserved in your fawning.

There is one glaring exception to this perverse pattern, however, the only truly voluntary form of government: the homeowners association.

I suppose you could argue that you “join” the government of Glendale or Surprise by moving there, but no form of government is easier to escape than an HOA.

Even worse, as the potential for abuses among governments goes, the HOA is hated all out of proportion to the crimes it might commit. This HOA might get snippy about flagpoles and that one might have a minor league embezzler in its midst. But compared with the offenses municipal and state officials are routinely imprisoned for committing, an HOA hardly qualifies as a government at all.

Moreover, news is news because it is rare, not because it is commonplace. For every HOA that makes the papers because of some tawdry offense, there are hundreds humming away in the obscurity that is proficiency’s public reward.

Truly, the worst common offense an HOA can commit is being lax about upholding its codes, covenants and restrictions. Nobody wants to get a letter — or worse, a fine — from the HOA for an infraction of what may seem to be picayune rules.

But chaos spreads, and not slowly. When an HOA starts to neglect the little things, big things start to crop up almost at once. Before you know it, a once-delightful neighborhood will start to look seedy.

The purpose of the HOA is to maintain everyone’s property values. No one wants to suffer under an abusive HOA. But that’s a correctable nuisance.

A worse fate, possibly, is living with an HOA that has lost the will to lead.

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February 20, 2007

So what’s changed at Zillow.com?

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Last look before going to bed, I saw this image at Drew Meyers’ very insightful Insights weblog:

I bumped it up in FireFox and got the same image. Then I hit refresh and got a normal Zillow.com home page.

What had changed?

I know this won’t last, but I love it that I can bug people who work for multi-million dollar corporations in the dead of the night and have them answer me. I emailed Drew, and he replied in half an instant:

[W]e changed our wiki landing page, added page counters, and fixed some bugs.

The page counters are the primary feature that we added — which I think is a VERY cool feature (that numerous users requested). For instance, check this random house I just pulled up in Phoenix and scroll to the bottom of the page – http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=7786893

This is the counter from that page, clipped to fit:

A small enough change, I suppose, but most big things are accretions of little things. And we didn’t have to wait to find out what had changed…

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February 19, 2007

Real Estate Carnivals: Nigel Swaby wins Carnival of Real Estate Investing, our own Allen Butler wins Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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BloodhoundBlog was this week’s host of the Carnival of Real Estate Investing. Nigel Swaby from the Salt Lake Real Estate Blog was this week’s winner, with Creative Financing – Conversion to Traditional Mortgages.

We had a total of seven entries and four judges: Michael Cook, Cathleen Collins, Jeff Brown and Brian Brady.

This week’s Carnival of Real Estate was hosted by Pittsburgh Homes Daily. Our own Allen Butler won, with his SPAC Disease Reaches Pandemic Proportions.

This marks the third time BloodhoundBlog has won the Carnival of Real Estate. Past Winners are Kris Berg and me, Greg Swann. Michael Cook is a past winner of the Carnival of Real Estate Investing.

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February 18, 2007

Ask the Broker: What makes property values rise?

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This is a Phoenix-local question in its original form, but I intend to answer it from a broader perspective.

What is the forecast for home prices along the light rail route once the route is completed? Boundaries: 7th Ave to 7th St. and Camelback to Thomas.

The most important thing to understand about the forthcoming Trolley in Phoenix is that it’s built on the wrong route. This was deliberate. The greatest concentrations of bus passengers in Phoenix are in Sunnyslope and in South Phoenix, at either end of Central Avenue.

To the right is a Valley Metro map that I have amended. The correct route for the Trolley is shown in bright red, right down Central Avenue. This would move the greatest attainable number of passengers, both from the current Number Zero bus route and from all the transfers from the east/west routes along Central Avenue.

But the purpose of the Trolley is not to move passengers but to move the sympathies of voters, so Valley Metro deliberately picked a route that will serve far fewer passengers but will appease various politically-powerful factions (most especially the millionaires living on Central Avenue between Camelback Road and the Arizona Canal to the north).

But the question before us is: What is the real estate investment value of the Trolley?

The answer? Essentially none.

In the map, the darkest green stripe runs from Camelback south to Washington, from 3rd Avenue to 3rd Street. This region is zoned for high-rise development, subject to Historic Preservation rules and freelance NIMBYism. If any land is likely to be affected by the Trolley, it is this land. But: The people who will make money trading this land will be very experienced land brokers. The people who will lose money trading this land will be punters who think they are getting over on very experienced land brokers.

The middle green band is the land from the Arizona Canal to Washington, from 7th Avenue to 7th Street. This land is ripe, with or without the Trolley. Buy and live, buy and hold, flips, especially tastefully-done historic flips, tear-downs, rezoning for higher-density — there is no limit. People want Read more

February 17, 2007

Hugg a house or hug your Realtor? Discerning motivation in the pursuit of residential bliss . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have a searchBot running in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service to find our next home. We’re not actively searching, with a burning urge to move. But we know what we want, and, should it turn up, we may take the leap.

This is not terribly likely. We are professionals, after all. This means, first, that we have a very tightly refined set of criteria for the next home we will move into. And, second, it means that our next home will have to be a better-fit than our current home for our professional needs — a high hurdle to leap. Still, the bot manages to scare up a house or two a week, and we end up taking a closer look at maybe one out of twenty.

We are not unique as move-up buyers. We work with quite a few people who are pursuing this same strategy indirectly, through us. Sooner or later they will move-up to homes selling from $500,000 to $1,000,000 — when the right home comes on the market.

That’s traditional real estate in the age of the computerized MLS system.

Now let’s do the same thing without professional representation. We can go to Trulia.com and PropSmart.com and Zillow.com and ZipRealty.com and look at what may be four different inventories of homes or may be essentially the same homes — with the degree of overlap unknown. Still worse, some of those home will have been off the market for months, since, with some exceptions, there is no penalty for lax housekeeping in the databases. The contact information is what it is, and, obviously, there is no built-in provision for arranging showings.

The idea that the secret power of Realtors is control of the MLS is funny, but funnier still — for now at least — are these goofy alleged alternatives to the Realtor’s way of identifying candidate homes for buyers.

Enter the folks from Incredible Agent with a solution. What if, every time you ran across some dubious candidate home at some dubious Realty.bot, you were to race over to HomeHugg.com to leave that home a Hugg, which is analogous to a Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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