BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 167 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

January 5, 2007

Communication a good reason to use Realtor

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

 
Communication a good reason to use Realtor

Why do you need professional representation when you buy or sell a home? It’s not because of the Multiple Listing Service. As we have seen, Realtors can put a transaction together in ways you hadn’t foreseen. More importantly, an experienced Realtor knows how to keep your transaction from falling apart.

My wife had a house close on Dec. 22, just in time for Christmas. She was the listing agent, and the house sold in 21 days. The buyers came in without a contingency on the sale of another home. But they were coming from out of state, and their communication with their lender was beset by delays.

The sellers were buying their next home in Boise, Idaho, and that transaction was contingent on the sale of their home in Arizona.

Without discussing the date with either my wife or with their buyer’s agent in Boise, the sellers scheduled their closing in Boise for the same day as their closing in Arizona, Dec. 15. They scheduled their movers to deliver their furniture on that same day. And they invited their whole extended family to spend the holidays with them in their new home.

Now God loves the uninitiated in real estate transactions, and he graces them with the unshakeable faith that things always work perfectly. Especially with out-of-state buyers. Especially with delayed and incomplete communication with the lender. Especially with contingent sales. Most especially with simultaneous closings — in two states.

Consider the disclosure chain: The buyer’s lender to the buyer’s agent to my wife to the Boise buyer’s agent to the Boise seller’s agent, with my wife also keeping the lender on the Boise property in the loop, and with each Realtor and lender keeping their clients and the title companies up to date.

The buyer’s lender was late, making everything else late, with dozens of phone calls among the parties to keep everything together. Everything closed a week late, barely averting the disaster of a huge extended family spending Christmas in a motel.

Who needs Realtors? That’s easy.

Anyone who doesn’t do this Read more

January 4, 2007

Tomato soup in the rain: The Real Estate Tomato at Rain City Guide . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide interviews Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato:

What do you think real estate blogging will look like 3 years from now?

The unfathomable amount of content that is generated because of this (gold)rush to blog will persist longer than you and I, no doubt… but in 3 years the blog will no longer be the tool that “gets it done”. TheVlog (video blog) will be the most effective marketing platform for real estate. As the internet, television, Xbox, music, etc. merge into one console, and we sit 15 feet from the flat screen with remote in hand, browsing through channels/websites/whatever do you really see us reading? Video will be the most effective form of marketing (it already is, duh), and learning how to embrace it on an independent basis (like the blog) will be crucial to real estate agents in 2010.

I knew we should have bought that sixty-inch plasma for Christmas. Read the whole thing. Tomatoes are too damn pungent, but Jim’s vision is to be savored anyway…

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January 4, 2007

Twisted minds: Was BusinessWeek bamboozled by bubble-blogstress?

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Was a big-time Sixth Avenue media giant flim-flammed by a Gilbert, AZ, housewife, nom de guerre “Twist,” who has set herself up as an authority on the residential real estate market and its feverishly-sought collapse? From BusinessWeek Online’s Hot Property:

In Phoenix, the numbers seem to go kerflooey every December. In December 2005, the number of houses that were withdrawn from the market plummeted to just 87, from 3,673 the previous month and 5,882 the month after. (Twist defines withdrawals to include listings that are expired, withdrawn, pending, or temporarily off the market.) In December of ’04 in Phoenix, withdrawals declined so much that they supposedly went negative–specifically, a negative 1,234. Of course, there is no such thing as a “negative withdrawal,” so this has to be some kind of bookkeeping fudge.

As it turns out, the only thing wrong with this is everything.

I have no idea why we’re talking about November and December of 2005 and January of 2006, but these are the actual numbers for Expired, Cancelled, Sale Pending and Temporarily Off Market listings from those months, as taken this afternoon from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service, the MLS system for the Phoenix area:

November 2005
Expired: 1021
Cancelled: 2444
Pending: 1
Temporarily Off Market: 1
Total 3467

December 2005
Expired: 2134
Cancelled: 2218
Pending: 2
Temporarily Off Market: 1
Total 4355

January 2006
Expired: 1568
Cancelled: 2582
Pending: 3
Temporarily Off Market: 6
Total 4159

November 2004 (amended to orignal post for completeness)
Expired: 640
Cancelled: 1200
Pending: 0
Temporarily Off Market: 0
Total 1840

December 2004
Expired: 1062
Cancelled: 1001
Pending: 0
Temporarily Off Market: 2
Total 2065

January 2005
Expired: 605
Cancelled: 1363
Pending: 1
Temporarily Off Market: 3
Total 1972

Why are so few homes listed as Sale Pending or Temporarily Off Market? Because the status of those listings has changed in the intervening months, most of them to Sold.

I have no idea what “Twist” was failing to measure, but a Realtor would only be concerned with Expired and Cancelled listings, recognizing that the other two categories are nebulous and subject to change.

And, obviously: Bubble bloggers are notoriously reckless with numbers. They have an agenda, so they tend to throw out any data that do not fit their preconceptions. I have no idea if that’s what has happened here, but I can’t see Read more

January 3, 2007

Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs: The BloodhoundBlog interview with Rain City Guide . . .

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Beat out the Dustman with the Rain Dogs for I am a Rain Dog, too. A snippet:

Q: What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

A:

  • Greg Swann: Totally unfair question: I have over 160 weblogs in my feed reader. From the RE.net, you can bet we like the weblog if we’ve recruited its author as a BloodhoundBlog contributor. There are people we can’t approach (such as RCG’s very talented talent pool), and some we love — such as vendors — who would compromise either us or their employers by working with us. By now, a significant part of my attention, in reading real estate weblogs, is devoted to recruitment.

    Away from the RE.net, I read a lot of weblogging blogs, marketing blogs, SEO blogs, Macintosh-fanatic blogs and techno-geek blogs in general. Lately, TechMeme gets a lot of my time, simply because it links to such interesting content.

  • Brian Brady: Active Rain Real Estate Network. I’ve developed online friendships and a reader following there. I love Freakonomics Blog because of the off-beat hypotheses they formulate to otherwise explained problems.
  • Doug Quance: BloodhoundBlog, of course… and I have many others, but I wouldn’t want to offend those who, because of brevity, wouldn’t make the list.
  • Dan Green: My non-real estate blog list includes a strange mix of PopSugar, Olson’s Observations, Sabernomics, and Copyblogger.
  • Kris Berg: At the risk of sounding gratuitous, Rain City Guide was the first blog I encountered that really made sense to me. Since then, I have discovered many, many others that seem to strike the same, often elusive balance of having local and national appeal, of being instructional and entertaining, and of speaking to industry professionals and consumers. My first stops each morning include Sellsius, The Real Estate Tomato, 360 Digest, 3 Oceans, Bawldguy Talking, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Real Central VA, RealEstateUndressed, Blue Roof, and (of course) The San Diego Home Blog, to name but a few. My feed reader includes about forty blogs at the moment, which is far fewer than for a lot of bloggers I know of, but barely manageable for me. I have been slumming over Read more
January 3, 2007

The frumpiest little dump in the Midwest makes news again . . .

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O, the ignominy! Danville, IL is in the news again…

This time, my frowsy little fly-blown hometown amends its past notoriety as the cheapest-of-the-cheap housing markets by refusing to release its abysmal sales data at all:

[T]he Danville Board of Realtors in Illinois has decided to withhold sales data from the National Association of Realtors trade group after the Danville metro area ranked as the lowest-price market in the nation during the second quarter of 2006.

“We looked into it – all avenues of what we should do,” stated Debbie Borgwald, executive officer of the Danville board, in the article. “We want to let people know Danville is a great place to live.” She also told the newspaper that the low prices for the metro area had generated negative publicity.

I personally am only interested in rental homes that will appreciate in value. It’s nice to be cash-flow neutral or even mildly positive, but all the money from residential real estate investing comes from leveraged appreciation. An “alligator” in a growth market is the world’s most lovable pet.

However… If you’re the kind of investor who likes to buy cheap dumps for the positive cash-flow that can accrue from providing affordable rental housing to motorcycle enthusiasts and tenants even less savory, by all means go to Danville. You can pick up single-family homes for $20,000 or less. The rent might only be $300 or $350, but the houses will throw off positive cash-flow no matter how you finance them. Plenty to choose from, too…

January 3, 2007

Project City Center in Las Vegas: Now that’s a model home!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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What you’re seeing is an over-the-shoulder peek at the new model home center for Project City Center in Las Vegas, to be built on the Strip-front parcel formerly occupied by the Boardwalk casino-hotel-resort, as well as behind the Monte Carlo and New York-New York properties — all owned by MGM-Mirage. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

The $24 million sales pavilion for the residential components of MGM Mirage’s $7 billion Project CityCenter isn’t your average model home community.

The nearly 30,000-square-foot pavilion, which opens today, is on the Strip between New York-New York and Monte Carlo.

With a spacious design, two different scale models of the CityCenter site, high-tech features and information about the project’s four residential developments, the sales pavilion is designed to give potential CityCenter owners a taste of what life will be like inside the 66-acre urban village.

“We’re using a number of audio visual tools and state of the art technology that will put the perspective buyer inside their residence and present to them information about CityCenter that they might not know,” said Tony Dennis, executive vice president of CityCenter’s residential division.

The sales pavilion, which is a temporary structure, has individual boutiques dedicated to CityCenter’s four residential developments; Vdara Condo Hotel, The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Veer Tower and Residences at The Harmon. In total, CityCenter will encompass 2,700 residences.

The sales pavilion includes model units, floor plans, unit locations, interior design options and other details.

Project City Center (we can only hope this clunky name will be changed) is the kind of real estate development I’ve been waiting to see for more than twenty-five years: Residential, retail and commercial all in one structural footprint.

This is not a brand new idea. Rockefeller Center in New York combined retail and office spaces. Copley Place in Boston is a shopping mall with office towers above it, anchored by two hotels — all of it built on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike. By now, the mantra “mixed use” is intoned for every new condo project cooked up.

This is not enough. The ideal — at least my ideal — would be to create a structure that, at least Read more

January 3, 2007

Glow, baby, glow: The revolution will be illuminated . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Seth Godin is on a tear about fluorescent light bulbs, and I join him in it not just because he’s promising a link for a trackback.

No, there is a matter of profoundly-important principle here: The redemptive power of Capitalism. The curly fluorescent bulb shown above is one of many in our home. Bulb-by-bulb we are swapping out the old Edison-style bulbs with fluorescent bulbs.

Is it because we’re granola-fed greenies right down to our Birkenstocks? Not hardly. It’s because we’re greedy, and we want to hold on to as much of our money as possible. Lumen for lumen, fluorescent bulbs are a lot cheaper than incandescent bulbs, and, because they are outrageously long-lived, they are cheaper to replace as well.

I have zero faith in the good intentions of capital-E Environmentalism as a movement. I see it as a further expression of the global totalitarian movement. The original Marxist argument — the vicious exploitation of the incredibly rotund poor people — is so obviously absurd, Environmentalism was cooked up as an unanswerable substitute.

If there were such a thing as a true environmentalist movement, its very first target would be government interference in real estate — starting with the collectively-owned roads that yield up thousands of acres of pristine land to taxpayer-subsidized development every month. The fact that capital-E Environmentalism does nothing to combat the massive environmental destruction caused by government argues to me that its actual objective is — surprise! — more government, not “saving the earth.”

But this is not about Environmentalism, it’s about Capitalism. Just as companies like Pur and Brita used the free market to solve the problems resulting from government mismanagement of the potable water supply, so, too, are entrepreneurs using simple market solutions to reduce the costs of government-regulated energy — “saving the earth” as an unintended consequence.

You have to give Marx his due, though. World-wide, 159 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Marxism has produced nothing but mountainous mounds of corpses — 160 million and counting. In that same time, Capitalism has taken us from coal oil lamps to fluorescent bulbs (and light-sensitive LED night-lights in Read more

January 3, 2007

ShackPrices.com takes on the big fish from a lofty perch . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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ShackPrices.com hits the big time at InmanNews (free for now):

The latest real estate site to trace its roots to this rainy city is ShackPrices.com, which plots home listings in the Seattle area and western Washington state on Google maps.

ShackPrices.com went live a few weeks ago, and joins a growing list of sites aiming to simplify the hunt for real estate. Its founder, Galen Ward, has a technical background in mapping and databases and is a contributor to the Rain City Guide real estate blog.

Other real estate search sites vying for consumer attention include Trulia, HomePages.com, Realtor.com and the many broker-operated sites that also include listings.

“Our goal at the site is to make the process of finding and buying a home easier for consumers,” Ward said. Unlike some real estate search sites, ShackPrices is a member of the multiple listing service, which enables it to display a more comprehensive list of local properties for sale than a site operated by a nonmember.

The site enables consumers to enter home-search criteria from the homepage, and also features “Suggested Shacks” — homes that buyers might be interested in viewing based on their criteria and a proprietary algorithm.

Ward notes the importance of “all the niche decisions that go into buying a home” like neighborhood information that he felt were lacking in many existing real estate sites.

“When I started making maps and working in spatial databases four to five years ago, it occurred to me one day that the world is really lacking in info about what’s nearby a house. You could look up the price and size and stats on a house, but it was really lacking on the context of what the neighborhood was like, how close it is to amenities, what the views are,” he said.

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January 2, 2007

Riccelli.com launches — with a chance for you to win . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Erstwhile BloodhoundBlog contributor Richard Riccelli has launched his new web site. Richard’s real job is circulation marketing for magazines, and that is the new site’s focus. He’s looking for help ironing out the wrinkles, though. If you pay him a visit and offer constructive criticism, you might just win a free subscription to a magazine:

The new year starts with a new and improved resource for subscription marketers.

Click and you’ll get 113 Certainties for Circulation Success plus several other free and fun-to-read articles.

You’ll see examples of e-mails, landing pages and banners that captured new subscribers.

And check out the new logo. Yes, that’s a carrier (actually homing) pigeon on the badge. Humble and hard-working, soaring but direct — you get the idea… 

Bonus: You can win a free subscription to The Week or Harvard Business Review — your choice — just for taking a look and telling me what you think.**

Hope to hear from you soon. And happy new year!

Richard Riccelli, Inc.
32 Claremont Park
Boston, MA 02118-3002 USA
T +1 617 266 1036
F +1 617 266 0191

Riccelli.com –> new web address –> but no worries…

…your old bookmarks and e-mail addresses should automatically take you to my new site and inbox.

 
**P.S.  I’m after picky-picky-picky criticisms, frank reviews, even anonymous “you-need-to-knows.” Anything and everything you think would make the site better (or at least better spelled). Send them to richard@riccelli.com. The best comment or contribution before January 31st wins a gift subscription to one of two splendid magazines. OK, you’re right, they’re clients.

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January 1, 2007

NAR dead pool . . . ?

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One of the things Cathy did yesterday between finishing her real estate work and popping the cork on the champagne (she makes me do that, of course), was paying our dues. Not figuratively — literally. Yesterday was the deadline to pay the following creditors:

  • Phoenix Association of Realtors
  • Arizona Association of Realtors
  • National Association of Realtors
  • Real Estate Buyer’s Agent Council (ABR)
  • Council of Residential Specialists (CRS)

I don’t know what this cost us, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.

Here’s the interesting thing, though: How many people didn’t do it?

The first three are paid in one lump sum. You don’t have to belong to ReBAC or CRS, but you have to belong to the local, state and national Realtor’s associations to call yourself a Realtor. Taking account that we know that some significant number of Realtors didn’t do very well in 2006, how many, do you think, did not renew their membership?

The NAR Fact Sheet touts 1.3 million members for now. How many fewer will there be at the next reckoning…?

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January 1, 2007

LongTail.TV: Welcome to five-hundred-thousand-channel television . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’ve written a lot about radio here, to the extent that you might get the idea that I really like radio. I do, and I think this might apply to a lot of people who habitually work very long hours.

One of my very favorite radio movies is Pump Up The Volume. It’s actually a teen angst film, I suppose, but the interesting wrinkle for me is pirate radio. In the end the protagonist calls upon his audience to set up their own pirate radio stations, to break the mainstream media monotony monopoly with thousands of new voices.

That much is impractical, of course: Pirate radio stations cost money and require technical expertise. But guess what? The there that could never be there turns out to be here, in weblogging. This is pirate radio made practical, 57 million alternatives to Dan Rather. Quality comes and goes, but — my goodness! — choice abounds.

Here’s a further development on the same theme: WatchItVegas.com. What is it? A net-based, on-demand TV station. The owner produces the videos used by the DiamondScan signs on Las Vegas Boulevard, so he has the technology and the content to set up his own TV station.

What does it mean? In the short-run, practically nothing. It’s net video, after all, small and crappy. But in the long-run…

I have an uncle who shoots trap and skeet. He’s good, maybe two or three rungs below the Olympic level of competition. The guys who do this are fanatics in the best web-based sense of the word. There aren’t many of them, but they are devoutly interested in what they do, and they are free-spending to the point of extravagance to get their hands on the absolute best of everything.

Can you say LongTail.TV? Sure you can!

We are graduating from five-hundred-channel television to five-hundred-thousand-channel television. If there is a niche, if there is content and if there are advertisers, there will be a net-based TV network. The advertisers are optional, actually. We don’t want them here, for example.

But: Advertisers want the biggest possible return for the smallest possible outlay. If an internet television network devoted to fanatical Read more

January 1, 2007

Real estate resolutions: Cough less, earn more . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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When I get sick, I get really sick. I’ve had full-blown pneumonia twice in recent years. I have always been able to blast through illness, but, sometime after my arms got too short to read without glasses, that privilege was revoked. In consequence, when I get a respiratory infection now, I try to take it very seriously. Not as seriously as Cathy and our doctor might like, but I do my best.

In consequence, I’ve been laid up through the span of time we might have spent on big-picture business planning. Our course is well set, so we didn’t have a lot to worry about. But today Bonnie Erickson goes us one better with an excellent list of real estate resolutions for the coming year. Here’s a sampling:

  • Narrow my marketing focus to a manageable farm or neighborhood where I can meet the people and become known personally.
  • Focus my existing marketing to the narrowed sphere.
  • Contact each person in my sphere of influence at least once a quarter.
  • Contribute more to my networking group possibly through technology.
  • Finalize a cold calling system and stick to it.
  • Continue to contact expired and unrepresented listings.
  • Restructure my blog to incorporate more consumer friendly resources.
  • Re-examine my websites for consumer friendliness and SEO.
  • Continue to "bird dog" for investment properties which will be purchased for rehab and sale, rehab and holding, or sale without rehab to other investors.
  • Learn from losses in the business.

One of the things we were going to do last year and didn’t get to was implementing Daylite, CRM software for Macintosh networks. The big hurdle is taking all of our existing contact management “solutions” and merging them into one database, cleaning that for duplicates and errors, and then systematically adding to it. The task is even more daunting by now, but many of Bonnie’s resolutions show why it is worthwhile.

Easy for me to say. It’s a chore for Cathy and her pack of teenage hound-puppies. But touch-management, even if it runs on a database as faulty as memory, is worth money…

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December 31, 2006

Fred Flintstone speaks: Sniffing around video podcasting . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The link below will bring up a video we made in September of 2005. There’s much to apologize for: I do, beyond doubt, look like Fred Flintstone, no one went to the MTV school of interesting videography and my presentation is punctuated by too many um’s and random interrogatories (“right?”). Worst of all, this was near the apogee of the real estate boom in Phoenix, and my near-term and mid-term predictions have proved to be way off.

This was delivered to a college-level class of real estate pre-licensing students, so there is quite a bit of inside baseball. The file is huge, too, around 150MB, so you might want to give it a miss on that basis alone.

This video is called Real Estate in Real Life, Part I. Part II dealt with a four-sided, entirely-brokered transactions (that is, I introduced and represented all four sides). This was very intricate, and it’s a nice illustration of the Realtor’s art. I thought about posting that, instead, but good Realtors already know how to put complicated transactions together, and, of course, our BubbleHeaded friends have nothing to learn from anyone.

But: What I’m really doing is installing and testing the technology necessary for us to deliver audio and video podcasting content in the coming year. In the short run, I want to archive interviews with some of the amazing people we get to talk to. In the longer run, we may put together something more formal, like a podcasted real estate radio or television show.

For now: Watch it if you like. It’s informative and at least mildly inspiring. There will be more audio and video content to come in 2007.

December 29, 2006

BloodhoundBlog at six months: Getting our legs under us . . .

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BloodhoundBlog is six month’s old today. The first post, an accidental prophesy, was about the incipient disintermediation of for-pay content providers in the age of the internet:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I documented the birth of the blog soon thereafter, but it’s reasonable to argue that BloodhoundBlog is a natural progression in the erosion of the castle walls surrounding for-pay intellectual property. When Joseph Rago rails that weblogs are “written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” by what sum, precisely, is the Wall Street Journal enriched? Is it plausible that more wealth was “monetized” in the Rago-reaction than ever was realized by the original rant? If “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” who made more — Rago or the anti-Ragoons? And what persists, in the end, but another “free” opinion in an unmetered atmosphere of “free” opinions?

Their world is done. Ours is but begun. There may be a way to build a wall around original reporting, particularly where the information is time-sensitive, is difficult to obtain or is available only from an easily-restricted source. The obvious example is a real-time — as against time-delayed — stock ticker. What’s left after that? Habit? Status? Higher production quality — which may be a further expression of status? What argument can the vestigial Joseph Ragos make for the added value of “metered” air? It’s time for a deep breath, isn’t it? Why not? The air is “free.”

Do you want to argue for the superiority of your content? Good on ya! Produce superior content. Is it your goal to argue that your content is so much better that you deserve to be paid for it? Good luck with that plan. You may be able to draw enough eyes that you can dupe some advertisers into paying for the chance to try to hook a few — just like the endlessly preening broadcast news. If you see your future in a box office — a toll booth on the information superhighway — then do, please, take that deep breath. There’s a clue 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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