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There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 171 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

November 28, 2006

Ask not for whom the MLS toils . . .

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…it toils for brokers.

Pittsburgh Homes Daily has news of a new IDX policy for agents: None. Mere agents will not be able to syndicate or even frame data from the West Penn Multi-List’s Internet Data Exchange (IDX). Only the main site of each brokerage will be able to feature the feed, and agents will not even be allowed to frame that on their own web sites.

In other words, if a prospective buyer wants to search the MLS, he or she will have to go to the main web site of a brokerage. As Larry Cragun points out at RealEstateUndressed, any leads captured by the broker will probably not be shared with agents for free.

Nice…

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November 28, 2006

I may soon be the weakest link at BloodhoundBlog, but I’ll always be the strongest linker . . .

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Cathleen Collins, Richard Riccelli and Jeff Brown: I’m hopelessly out-classed three times in one day. And we’re adding another first-class real estate weblogger tomorrow. Nothing for it but to turn outward to the vast riches of the RE.net. Here’s some stuff that has caught my eye:

Would you like to know my secret shame? My own mother is a Luddite. Every year we talk about getting her a Macintosh with broadband for Christmas, and every year we put it off another year. All she really needs is email and the web — and she has a natural motivation in the form of a burgeoning herd of grandchildren. But she will not hear of it. Programming her VCR is as far up the technology ladder as she is willing to climb. So this little gizmo, cited on TechCrunch, is actually of interest to me. My mom has never forgiven us for ditching the film cameras — double prints! — and it’s a rare day when I think to print out and snail-mail digital photos. This might be just the thing…

Kris Berg is back, and in top form. Make time to savor her writing.

Oops! BusinessWeek says property values are up, this per Zillow.com’s Q3 Zindices and other sources. Who knows if it’s true or not, and I have no ability to weigh any but the most local evidence. But the article does highlight the essential weakness of measuring market activity by median prices.

Todd Tarson sends thoughtful notes in our general direction. In the second link he is raving about Richard Riccelli’s single-property web site for his own home in Boston, which raves I heartily endorse. This is a gorgeous expression of the single-property web site idea. Be sure to take a look at how it is put together.

Russ Cofano at Realty Objectives on a ruling an NAR motion to dismiss the DOJ anti-trust suit:

So what does this mean? As I said earlier, I believe this case will go to trial unless the parties reach compromise. NAR has been, to date, staunch in its belief that it will not settle this case if settlement means a Read more

November 28, 2006

One more hound on the trail . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’re adding one more contributor to our roster today:

Ronan Doyle lives in Boston and works as an advertising agency creative executive. He loves distinctive homes and is building his wealth house by house: Search, buy, improve, enjoy, sell — then repeat the process.

Ronan know more about houses — about what makes a house work — than anyone I’ve ever met. Between Restoration Hardware and the two-year capital gains income tax exclusion, he is a one-man urban renewal project.

Jim Duncan at Real Central VA wonders if I might be wrong about the audience for real estate weblogs. In fact I could be. There may be more real estate consumers out there than I suppose, and they may be more persistent in their reading than I surmise.

For my own part, I don’t see them — very much the contrary. As I argued a week-and-a-half ago:

If you’re writing a real estate weblog, you’re blogging for people who are fanatical about real estate. Who would that be? Realtors, lenders and the vendors who live off their business. Bubbleheads and people on the bubble about bubbleheadedness. Real estate investors. That’s it. There might be some peeking-in/checking-up traffic from past clients, and perhaps some dedicated fans. There will be drop-ins from people shopping for Realtors, but they will not become dedicated readers. How do I know this? Because they don’t care. You can tell who cares about your weblog by looking at your Technorati links. There are 55 million weblogs out there, but the only ones linking to you are produced by other real estate fanatics. That’s not a wave. That’s the water…

Even so, the simple fact is that we are focused the way we are because this is what is interesting to us. I don’t tell other people what to do, and I may be completely wrong about locally-focused, consumer-oriented real estate weblogs. We actually have a nascent weblog devoted to those kinds of ideas, but we don’t give it any time.

In any case, it may turn out that Ronan Doyle is our brave initiative to straddle the line. Ronan is truly a real estate fanatic, Read more

November 27, 2006

On the internet, everyone sees through your self-loathing . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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New contributor Richard Riccelli has already figured out the true secret to weblogging: Get somebody else to do it. Watch as he gets me to cite this smug essay by Michael Kinsley in Slate Magazine:

Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?

If so, we are all crazy now. There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It’s not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn’t wish on Hitler.

But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.

This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.

But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.

Here’s my take: Kinsey’s insufferable vanity is sneering at the insufferable vanities of others. In the end, he is doing what they are doing, but Read more

November 27, 2006

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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… is up at Real Estate Investing For Real — but don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Only four posts are cited this week, because Joshua Dworkin elected to impose a judging standard that — in my opinion — has nothing to do with real estate weblogging. Not sour grapes on my part: We went with a Russell Shaw entry this week.

But the simple fact is, as much as we might talk about wanting to appeal to consumers (not so much here, of course), the audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals: Realtors, lenders, appraisers, investors, vendors and technologists.

All weblogs are written by and for fanatics, and, with few exceptions — one of whom we will introduce to you tomorrow — there are very few fanatical real estate consumers. Swallow hard and get used to it.

Last week, someone at CoRE HQ had the idea of citing all the losing posts. I hated the idea at the time — too much like a “Participation” ribbon at the Special Olympics — but I don’t hate it quite as much this week. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see what I missed.

I’ll tip my hat to Joshua Dworkin for hewing to his own standards — even as I pray that no one copies them…

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November 27, 2006

New tricks: Just how much noise can a pack of big dogs can make . . . ?

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With this post, this little puppy is making sounds like a grown-up hound dog…

BloodhoundBlog began five months ago as a Phoenix-area brokerage-oriented real estate weblog. We became a sort of hybrid group-blog when we added mega-producing Phoenix-area Realtor Russell Shaw. We stuck another paw in the water when we invited San Diego-based investment broker Jeff Brown to come play with us in the Dual Agency Smack-Down. And that went so well that we decided to grow BloodhoundBlog into a true group-blog.

We’ve always been national in the scope of our interests, but now we are truly national (or at least bi-coastal) in our reach. Moreover, the webloggers we are adding will continue the BloodhoundBlog tradition of rigorous real estate analysis — thoughtful without being dour, informative without being pedantic, disagreeing, where we must, without being disagreeable.

These are our contributors:

Jeff Brown is a San Diego-based real estate investments broker. He makes millionaires of his ordinary-investor clients. If that’s not enough to make you smile, his sage, folksy wit should do the job.

Cathleen Collins is a Phoenix-area Realtor. With a background in hi-tech project-management and a deft hand in customer service, she is building a respectable listing practice in the Historic Districts of Downtown Phoenix.

Tony Fredericks is a San Francisco-area roofing contractor who is using his surplus income to build a real estate investment empire. Tony is a wine aficionado who brings a fine discrimination to everything he does.

Richard Riccelli is a Boston-based direct marketing guru. His advertising agency specializes in magazine circulation, but here Richard will deploy his vast expertise and rapier wit to real estate marketing issues.

Russell Shaw is a mega-producing Realtor working in Metropolitan Phoenix. He and his team close approximately 400 transactions a year, consistently putting Russell among the top 30 Realtors nationwide.

Greg Swann is a Phoenix-area Realtor and real estate broker. The most prolific of our contributors, Greg is not completely happy with anything until he has picked it apart and put it back together in his own way.

Room for one more? We are interested, now and always, in considering new contributors. If you can write with style, grace Read more

November 26, 2006

Sunday real estate news: There may, in fact, truly be a day beyond tomorrow . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The Arizona Republic is positively ripe with real estate stories today.

First up, the amazingly ugly Chateaux on Central condominium development is being forced into bankruptcy. The homes were to sell for $2- to $4-million for apartments as many as six-stories tall — not a misprint. Freddy Krueger and Damien from The Omen took a pass on choice units, thus exhausting the entire market for this giant gargoyle of a structure.

In that same column, ace real estate reporter Catherine Reagor suggests that there might be a connection between lower interest rates and increased buyer activity. Jeepers! Who’d ‘a thunk it?!

Economist Elliott Pollack says nice things about the Valley’s growth prospects, so he must be making it all up. Cliff’s Notes: Fundamentals strong, new housing over-built, possibly still as long as two years to shake out.

One of the things I love about this place is that people are audacious. We all know about the giant fake lake in Tempe, but did you know that we have not one but two airstrip-based subdivisions? Garage in front, hangar in back with accessways leading to a private airstrip. In Gilbert, there is a boat-racing subdivision — a long, skinny lake surrounded by houses with docks. They run nationally-televised boat races there. Comes news today that we are about to get our own micro-winery. Modeled on the idea of a micro-brewery, a vintner plans to set up business in Downtown Tempe.

Finally, there is a fun story on the development problems posed by hundreds of old military bombing sites in Pinal County. The explosive charges used in the practice bombs were very small — but still plenty enough to burn down a house. The interesting thing is that we’re talking about Pinal County — too much, too soon, too often declared DOA in the housing downturn. It could be there are people in the real estate business who have heard there really was a day before yesterday, and there may, in fact, truly be a day beyond tomorrow…

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November 26, 2006

Furious fusillades of blistering BubbleHead flatulence: Foghorn Leghorn declares “WAR!”

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Well.

That was even more lame than I expected. Foghorn Leghorn–er, Keith at HousingPanic has declared war by commanding his troops to… read.

And to read BloodhoundBlog of all things!

Yeah, that’ll work…

The specific marching orders are pretty stupid, but that’s hardly a surprise.

The troops are supposed to prove that the Phoenix housing market has crashed, which has proved to be a problem, given that it hasn’t.

They are supposed to “flame away, and hard,” with the objective of chasing away future clients. Do your best, boys. Anyone who will listen to you — I don’t want.

This one I love:

Dig up postings, articles and quotes from Greg Swann for all to see. Where he admits having unlicensed or out of work realtors working for him.

The specific post cited says nothing of the sort, but, of course, Keith can’t read. But most BubbleHeads are much smarter than their “leader,” so do please read all you can here. This is one of the most serious real estate weblogs on the net. If you open your minds, you’ll learn a lot.

There is more — for example, a repetition of the false charge that I have posted comments at HP — but the whole call to action is pretty pitiful.

How’s the war going? I think this comment says it all:

What a pile of excrement is here in this blog.

It’s a waste of time to try to read blood whatever.

You better go anywhere else on the web.

This site is brain dead.

In other words, the poster is fighting out of his class and he knows it.

To our BubbleHead visitors: Even if you can’t stand on your own, surely you can do better than this moron you follow so slavishly…

And to our regular readers: This will be all heat, no substance. You do not have to respond to every comment — nor to any of them. They are not paying you for your time. I tend to choose comments by people who are better-behaved and who are raising points I want to talk about.

Ultimately, this has nothing to do with real estate. This is about the wounded vanity of a vile, ignorant Read more

November 25, 2006

Keith at Housing Panic is for sale . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Who didn’t know?

Here is Keith from Housing Panic volunteering to “go easy on me”, to “pull his punches” — essentially to “take a dive”.

Why? Because he can’t bear up to the ridicule his ridiculous behavior incites.

Responding to this post, days late, Keith sent me this email (click here for full source — provided to prevent the wanker from trying to deny it):

From: housingpanic@yahoo.com
Subject: your choice
Date: November 25, 2006 11:18:34 AM MST
To: GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com

I’ll give you a choice.

1) A war with the thousands of HP’ers so harsh and loud your practice and reputation in Arizona likely wouldn’t survive (beyond the damage you’re doing yourself)

2) A truce

Here’s your post that is way beyond the pale, and made you look like some unprofessional weirdo. I’d suggest this be pulled by the weekend.

Your choice

Keith

Here is the specific language Keith is objecting to:

Finally, it might be nice if everyone would chip in to buy Keith at Housing Panic some lubricant. The poor sod has been Masturbating to Armageddon for months now, to no discernible result. It’s gotta chafe…

Here is a post, one of hundreds, in which you can witness Keith Masturbating to Armageddon.

It’s easy to make jokes about him, because the man is such an outsized fool, but, in fact, he is completely beyond parody. I used to think he might be dangerous, not so much anymore. Months ago, someone asked me to write a few words about him, and this is what I came up with:

We speak of trolls casually, but the Norse idea of the troll is a much more serious thing. A troll seeks chaos, another fine word ruined by overuse. I wrote once that a troll is “a spark of hell’s fire seeking ready tinder on the earth.”

This is what Keith is, a true troll. He has the gift of finding the evil bone in men with no will to evil. He tickles it until they become their worst possible selves.

The only true capital is human capital, which is not just mental but also moral power — not just the skill but also the will to do Read more

November 25, 2006

Be careful what you sign with broker . . .

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

 
Be careful what you sign with broker

When you sign a buyer-broker agreement with a Realtor, is there some law that says you must thereafter include that Realtor in the purchase of any home he or she showed you? Once you’ve “married” your agent, are you ever really “divorced”?

No such law.

Feeling relieved? You can stop that right now.

While there is no law binding you to your someday-to-be-former buyer’s agent, you may well have signed a contract that says that someday never comes. Or at least not soon.

Consider this, from the Arizona Association of Realtors Buyer Broker Agreement:

“e. Buyer agrees to pay such compensation if Buyer, within ____ calendar days after the termination of this Agreement, enters into an agreement to purchase, exchange, option or lease any Property shown to or negotiated on behalf of the Buyer by Broker during the term of this Agreement, unless Buyer enters into a subsequent buyer-broker exclusive employment agreement with another broker.”

The blank is filled in with a number, often 30, sometimes 90, although it could be anything. If you and your agent mutually agreed to 1,001 days, it would be two and three-quarter years before you are divorced.

Unless you sign another buyer-broker agreement.

This kind of holdover language is common in real estate employment contracts. It’s there to frustrate betrayal. If you make a whispering deal with the listing agent to cut your buyer’s agent out of the deal, that language cuts him right back in.

So how long is long enough to protect the buyer’s agent without unduly hamstringing the buyer? How about 15 days?

Or how about zero?

My attitude is, if you’re done with me, I’m done with you. Whatever you do after we’re divorced is your business.

But different agents will see this issue differently, and this is why buyers and sellers need to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the contracts they are asked to sign. Very probably, the form you are looking at is not filled out to your advantage.

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November 25, 2006

Amazingly low foreclosure rate at a two year high . . .

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It’s Saturday, the Arizona Republic‘s favorite day to piss on the real estate market. Today ace reporter Catherine Reagor informs us that foreclosures are up. “By how much?” you ask. You don’t read the Republic much, do you?

Instead of actual numbers we get all manner of obfuscation, scary anecdotes, out-of-context statistics and quotations from authorities of dubious authority.

But if you wade your way to the eleventh paragraph, you get to the real numbers. How many foreclosure auctions last month? One-hundred-thirty-three. An additional 1,186 homeowners got trustee notices, which means that if they don’t sell, refinance or catch up on their payments quickly, their homes will be auctioned.

I cannot tell you with certainly how many owned domiciles there are in Maricopa County. A million, at least. I feel bad for the 133 families who lost their homes in foreclosure auction, but I expect more homes than that burned down last month.

In other words, the change in the rate of foreclosures is interesting only because our foreclosure rate has been outrageously low over the last two years.

Why are newspapers dying? How about because they refuse to tell the whole truth…?

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November 25, 2006

Content piracy on the RE.net . . .

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An aggregator weblog called Real Estate Chatter is resyndicating the feeds of these 25 real estate weblogs:

My presumption is that this is being done without permission — it was in the case of BloodhoundBlog. In other words, this seems to me to be a case of RSS feed piracy.

Good news: The site is run by an actual human being, Ian Holsman, who says he will remove feeds upon request — which he has done with BloodhoundBlog.

Why these dinks can’t just ask permission in the first place, I don’t know.

Lorelle on WordPress has much, much more on dealing with content theft — and her advice is not-for-WordPress-only.

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November 23, 2006

How not to take it in the shorts . . .

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I had a confidential Ask the Broker question this morning, believe it or not. Glossing over the whole thing, the listing agent could have avoided the entire problem with this language in a counter-offer:

Buyer is aware that seller reserves the right to cancel this contract unilaterally and without recourse within ten days of acceptance, with earnest deposit refunded in full to the buyer, if the projected net proceeds to the seller from this transaction will not satisfy seller’s entire costs.

In other words, if it’s a short-sale, it’s a no-sale. I don’t know if this sort of contingency is common in other states. It’s not in Arizona, but it should be right now. Our contract is written with almost no outs for the seller, which I like, but it is entirely possible right now that sellers could be ham-strung by a deal they can’t afford to honor. Agency is looking out for the disasters no one else foresaw…

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November 23, 2006

A Bloodhound Thanksgiving . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Todd Tarson posted his Thanksgiving regimen, and I can identify with it even though our days will be very different. There is nothing I would rather do than work, so I just shoehorn it in where I can.

Cathy watches the parades, so she won’t mind me sitting at my desk for those few hours. We’ll take separate cars to her parents’ house so that Cameron and I can make our escape before our fidgeting becomes too pronounced. In truth, I like her family just fine, but there is a finite amount of time I can spend doing nothing.

Ayn Rand said, “Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.” This I completely endorse. I need to research a hardware issue, and the nets should wail today as everyone takes the day off.

Be who you are. Do what you want. Have what you love. Happy Thanksgiving!

November 22, 2006

Thanksgiving Brutality: Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I like brutal art — no mercy, no quarter. I like any sort of brutality on the part of the artist, by which I mean the refusal to temporize or euphemize or in any other way permit the audience to gloss over or ignore reality. Understand, I don’t seek a gratuitous squalor, but rather an unforgiving acknowledgment that reality is what it is. This is what I love so much in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, who gives me ambiguous or tragic endings and teaches me more about real life than a dozen treatises.

All that is by way of introduction to a recommendation: The film Talk Radio by Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian. It’s the most amazingly brutal film I’ve ever seen, absolutely no let-up from start to finish. I have Bogosian’s original playscript, but the film screenplay is substantially richer. Moreover, Stone’s camera tricks are superb; the film plays huge implication games with reflections, focus-shifting, facial reactions, etc. Similarly, Stewart Copeland (of The Police) provides a deeply disturbing score. Finally, the actors — especially Bogosian as radio talk show host Barry Champlain — are outstanding.

The film is “based on a true story,” the last days of Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, as documented in the book Talked to Death by Stephen Singular. But “true stories” are omnipresent and banal, where art is the thing that won’t turn you loose. I defy anyone to even breathe in Act III of Talk Radio. The film builds and builds until the tension is so immense it envelopes the room. And then, just when you can’t stand it, Stone and Bogosian throw the most horrifyingly perfect five minutes of agony right in your face, and you sweat and the tendons in your neck pop and you strain and you strain and you strain, desperate to turn away. But you can’t turn away, you can’t stand what you’re seeing and you can’t bear to miss a second of it.

Hedda Gabler, always, and Ghosts, and the fourth and fifth acts of Hamlet. I can think of more examples, but not many more. Great art says, 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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