BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 20 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

November 24, 2008

My BloodhoundBlog wish list as we embark on the SplendorQuest

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.

I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.

I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.

What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more

November 14, 2008

SplendorQuest: kiss me…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

kiss me your glory i kiss you my joy
kiss me your giggling girlishness
     i kiss you my mannish boy

kiss me your tickling i kiss you my laughter
kiss me your before your before your before
     i kiss you my ever after

kiss me your promise i kiss you my prayer
kiss me your fire i kiss you my air
kiss me your hunger i kiss you my need
kiss me your giving i kiss you my greed
kiss me your worship i kiss you my vow
kiss me your present your presence your presents
     i kiss you my endless now

kiss me your seeking i kiss you my knowing
kiss me your staying your staying your staying
     i kiss you my never going

kiss me your wisdom i kiss you my clever
kiss me your always your always your always
     i kiss you my always forever

November 13, 2008

By making war on private property rights, the National Association of Realtors is making war on everything we are as Americans

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m responding here to a comment from Dave Phillips, who is to be commended in advance for bearing up to the strain.

I will invite President Gaylord to read and possibly respond if you promise to be a good doggy and engage in polite discussion (i.e., avoid inflamed rhetoric like “Rotarian Socialism” and “inane kleptomania”). It would serve no useful purpose to just piss him off. He is a reasonable man and would appreciate your sound reasoning.

Is he a reasonable man or a daffodil? Rotarian Socialism and kleptomania are exact and perfect descriptions of the way our country is run. If the man can’t bear to look at the world as it is, he needn’t bother talking to me.

“Everything the NAR does is anti-consumer.” I respectfully disagree. Defending mortgage interest deductibility (based on the current tax establishment) is very much in my favor as a consumer. Is it also self-serving? yes.

This is the seen and the unseen, classic Bastiat. You see a tax deduction and regard it as being to your immediate pecuniary advantage. You don’t see all the other taxes that are raised to make up for that deduction.

Worse, you don’t see that the NAR is not seeking your interests but its own: The deduction causes you to value housing above other investments, contrary to market forces, which results in your buying a home when you could and probably should be making more productive use of your surplus income. The goal? Commissions for NAR members, not your interests at all.

Still worse, you don’t see that the recession we are going into was caused, fundamentally, by overvaluing housing as a market good by means of tax deductions, credits, exclusions and deferrals. In five years you could be walking around shoeless, dining out of garbage dumpsters, but at least your mortgage interest will be tax-deductible.

In other words: You are a consumer in your every economic transaction, not just when you are paying your mortgage. Past lobbying by the NAR and CRA groups will result, at a minimum, in the pillaging of your retirement accounts. How is that “very much in [your] favor as Read more

November 13, 2008

Passion play: A working plan for working our brains until they explode at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I like Teri’s idea of an exploding brain. Or maybe we can think of the brain as a kernal of popcorn — hard and seemingly inflexible until just the right application of heat makes it explode into something eight times its original size. In addition to all the other things people might call me, I am most adamantly an evangelist for expanding minds, so here is the rough game plan I worked out for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix on the flight home from Orlando:


Click on the image to open a PDF version.
(Updated to reflect the actual dates of the event.)

Here’s the way this is going to work: If you come to Unchained, we want you staying at our hotel — even if you live in Phoenix. Why? Because the scenius we plan to build is going to look an awful lot like a boot camp. If you’re with us from 5 pm on Thursday to 5 pm on Sunday, you could end up working as much as 54 of those 72 hours. Some people need more sleep than others, but the harder you work at the work we plan to set before you, the greater the benefits you will reap.

What benefits?

Recall that you’re going to be completely overhauling your marketing profile. Each one of those eight labs will be hands-on, step-by-step explorations of the course matter. You won’t be working on examples or dummy versions, you’ll be working on your own marketing materials, making them better and more effective in collaboration with your instructors and team-mates.

Moreover, you’ll be building scenius scenes at all levels of interaction. The whole conference will be a giant scenius, a chance for you to learn and to teach with some of the hardest-charging minds in modern real estate marketing. Your labs will form smaller scenes, and the work you do in ad hoc teams will be the smallest of scenius scenes — as small as two people working together by the hotel pool. This kind of intense interaction, if you dare to immerse yourself in it, will leave you drenched in new knowledge, new skills — Read more

November 4, 2008

I’ll show you my electoral-college map if you’ll show me yours…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made this map last week, and I might change it a little if I were redoing it tonight. I’m not for McCain (although I am decidedly against Obama), but here I am simply illustrating in red those states I would be very surprised to see McCain lose tomorrow. If I were to redo the map tonight, I might throw Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin to McCain, along with New Hampshire and half of Maine. Anyway, here is my thinking as of last week:

I could be wildly, wildly wrong, and you’re free to express the belief that I am — without flames, please — provided you’re willing to eat crow should it turn out, in the end, that I am wildly, wildly right. Bear in mind that all I had to do was keep this map secret to avoid the possibility of eating crow myself.

But: You can play this game, too. If you go to RealClearPolitics.com, you can create your own electoral-college map so you can show the rest of us how you think the election is going to play out. Email your map to yourself and then paste the link to your map in a comment to this post.

Why, you may ask, am I representing such a strong win for McCain when you have been told for weeks and months that Obama will win in a landslide? It’s because I don’t believe what I’ve been told. It may turn out that everything you’re hearing is true. For now, at least, I’m inclined to think otherwise.

If you’re interested, here is a stunning contrarian analysis of this election from Sean Malstrom:

The Undecideds *have* decided: they have decided not to declare their choice to pollsters.

The polls are way, way off this election cycle. Pollsters have admitted that this election has the highest ‘refusal to respond’ number. The ‘undecideds’ are people who don’t want to declare their choice. Why would they do that? If you belong to a Union, and they tell you to vote for Obama or ‘else’, you will not answer a pollster for it could be a union boss checking up Read more

November 1, 2008

Defusing the Unabomber: Why individualism will triumph regardless of any temporary setbacks

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We spend so much time picking at our scabs that we but rarely notice how amazingly rich we are, and how much richer we are getting day-by-day. There are at least a thousand men and women as smart as Aristotle walking the earth right now. If you are a computer geek, you surely know the name of Donald Knuth, but what you may not have considered is that there are 10,000 Knuths alive right now. If you click on this link, you will read an account of an extraordinary scientific achievement, but the most extraordinary thing of all is how ordinary such accounts have become, how commonplace, how much to-be-expected. We are so rich that we cannot even begin to count our riches.

I wrote this essay just over thirteen years ago, when the internet was very young, but it is apposite, I think, today and every day.

–GSS

 
Defusing the Unabomber

I’ve been trying for a week to write something about the Unabomber and his pesky manifesto, and I can’t seem to get the job done. In this voice, the studious essayist voice, I can’t take him seriously. In the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie voice, the only other style I’m working in right now, I can’t make light of the murder of three innocents.

I can make fun of anything. I’ve been writing Willie stories for ten years, and, with few exceptions, all of those stories ridicule the ridiculous. I have 308 words of a Willie story about the Unabomber. In it, he is represented as a cowboy wino who has just sold a pint of blood and who terrorizes strangers by popping paper bags.

But I can’t work with him in even so grotesque and ludicrous a shape. I think of him and in my mind’s eye I see children making angels in the snow. And then I see those children blown to a bloody pulp for committing the horrid act of creating artifacts of technology.

I see William Shakespeare and I hear him denounced as a mere hobbyist. Was he brother to the Queen? A Lord of the court? A lowly actor with a potent muse? Read more

October 30, 2008

Twenty-five most influential bloggers? Influence upon whom? Toward what objectives? Or: Why collectivism makes my skin crawl

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brad Coy sends news that I have been named as one of the Inman News “25 Most Influential Bloggers” for 2008. I don’t know this first-hand, since you have to be a member of the Inman Secret Handshake Club to gain access to the “Special Report.” Not quite true: You can also buy the thrilling “Special Report” for only $79.00. That’s only $3.16 an influencer.

But wait: The price just went up to $3.29 an influencer, since, as with last year, I am renouncing this denomination.

I’m sure the people who named me to this list thought they were offering me some sort of distinction. To the contrary, I see it as a diminution of the work we are doing here. Among the influencers are people I see as being active exponents of knowing evil. The rest are decent-enough folks, but I don’t see them, for the most part, as being stout advocates for anything that I regard as being good or vital or important. Nice people, but they’re just people.

Influence by itself is a meaningless standard of value: Fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one. For the most part, the people in the RE.net whose opinions matter most to me already write here — and, of course, those great minds are all but entirely omitted from Inman’s list, even though their influence is more-positive and more-consequential than many of those included.

But none of that matters. What matters is this: I am either right or I am wrong — as are you. Agreement means nothing, endorsement means nothing, beauty contests mean nothing, dipshit lists like this mean nothing. All that matters is the quality of your thinking and and quality of your writing. The world is made by minds, not mobs, and I don’t want my name to be used to contradict that proposition.

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October 29, 2008

And after Big Mother is finished subsidizing the mortgages of allegedly prosperous, allegedly self-reliant Americans, could it also please wipe their pwetty widdle noses?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When there’s taxpayer teat to be suckled, it seems nobody sucks like Realogy. The essence of Rotarian Socialism is bald-faced theft in behalf of the Rotarians. I cannot imagine a more telling, more shameless, more shameful example of Kleptocratic prevarication.

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October 16, 2008

To Condi, with sweetness

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I wrote this essay six years ago. I knew even then that Rice wouldn’t run for president — she’s much too smart for that. Too bad, though. She would have been a great president, a great argument for everything America can be. I don’t see this promise in Barack Obama — much the contrary — and I hope to Christ I’m wrong. Nota bene: Many of the links will be broken by now. –GSS]

 
The Los Angeles Times has an article (registration required, alas) speculating on the prospects for a 2008 presidential match-up between Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.

It’s not a brand-new idea. I first heard of it from Andrew Sullivan. And the Times article is following-up on, without mentioning, a recent public address by William Safire.

I am in love with this idea, and not just because I have publicly and repeatedly declared my enmity for all things Clinton. I would love to see Hillary Clinton get trounced at the polls by Condi Rice, but, truly, I would love to see Hillary get trounced at the polls by just about anyone.

And I’m not changing my spots to become a Republicrat this late in the game. Everything I’ve heard about Rice suggests that she is the least objectionable sort of mainstream politician — pro free-trade, pro second amendment, anti big government. And like that other bright light of black conservatism, Justice Clarence Thomas, she seems to be driven by firmly-held principles, not will-o’-the-wisp polling results. But it remains that she is a mainstream politician, a decidedly small-L libertarian.

Nevertheless I want her to run and I want her to win. I want what she stands for to win.

And by “stands for”, I mean what she stands for as a symbol. This is completely unfair to her, I confess. It was unfair to Justice Thomas, too. And as much as I regret what was done to him for all the things he stands for, both in his principles and as a symbol, nevertheless I am glad that he was stout enough of heart and spirit to withstand his torment. He conferred upon America a gift Read more

September 16, 2008

Life as a big, unchained hound in a big, unchained world…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t give a rat’s ass about traffic, but I care a great deal about being as big as we are.

It looks like those new Technorati numbers are going to hold, and that particular screenshot sings to me. We’re not as big as the real estate porn blogs or the bubble blogs or the investor blogs, but we are far and away the biggest of the category I call the RE.net, the real estate industry weblogs.

My delight is not a matter of traffic or links, that’s just so much shoes on the carpet. What matters to me is not where we are but, rather, how we got here.

In email today a friend of BloodhoundBlog said:

I love it that you’ve done this, but I love it most because you’ve done it without the Twitterati, despite people making public pronouncements that they are boycotting BHB, by bowing to no one, by keeping your own counsel.

And that’s exactly right. I don’t care if nobody is listening, so long as we’re doing this work our way.

But consider: Hardly anybody bothers me, these days, with bad advice on what and how to write or how to manage this weblog, but this used to be a common thing. But we are what we are despite all that bad advice.

I know there are a certain number of people reading here — even if they have insisted publicly that they don’t — who don’t understand what we are doing at all. There are a small few who understand all too well — and it drives them completely crazy. Another small few get it and love it and catch every delightful little nuance of the theater of the thing. But the ninety-and-nine — and I never forget the ninety-and-nine — are here for their own reasons, and a healthy self-interest is the perfect expression of the unchained ideal.

I know that you are confronted all the time with what I consider to be horribly bad advice — kiss up, kiss ass, bend, yield, compromise, to get along you’ve got to go along. Of all the many things we can do Read more

September 13, 2008

A Bloodhound’s arrogance stumblin’ on the heart of Saturday night

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cross your fingers, Cathy may have brought home a $600,000 listing today. As my contribution to our household finances, I lassoed a $50,000 prize of my own. Mine will be fun for the whole family though: We’re going to discuss it here as a unique marketing problem. Why unique? It’s a vacant lot with a structure on it. It’s a tear-down that can’t be torn down. It’s a certified antiquity with no discernible historic value. In short: It’s a challenge.

Why did I take the listing? Because I’m committed to the idea that marketing real estate is not fundamentally different from marketing anything else. I believe I can target-market this outrageously anomalous property and get it sold. I think this will be a fun exercise, a chance to explore radically different ideas about selling real property.

I linked today to a post I wrote more than a year ago. Like this post, it has that strangely disorganized cohesion of a weblog entry — part essay, part letter to a beloved friend — but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written here. I reread it today, and Teri tells us in a comment that she did, too.

Here’s the best of it:

A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky Read more

September 10, 2008

Once more unto the breach for Vlad — and for your right to free speech

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The good news is that Vlad Zablotskyy is nearing the end of his legal battles with ePerks.com. As you will recall, ePerks sued Vlad to try to compel him to squelch criticism of the lead vendor.

That bad news is that Vlad has had to take a night job to help defray his mounting legal expenses. The Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund has raised a significant amount of money, but as anyone who has ever gotten trapped in the court system knows, there is never enough money to cover legal fees.

What can you do to help? Push the “Donate” button you see below or in our sidebar. If you want to add a button to your own weblog or web site, you can find the HTML code here. But the most significant difference you can make in Vlad’s life, right now, is to make as big a donation as you can afford.

Vlad is stuck in this quagmire a little longer, but it’s worth noting that no one else has been threatened, neither by ePerks nor by any other vendors. By participating in this Legal Defense Fund, we have made it plain that we will defend our right to speak freely — to speak truth to power. I count that a victory for the good guys. How about you?

Click on the “Donate” button and let’s put “paid” to this kind of intimidation against real estate webloggers.


Support Vlad Zablotskyy’s Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!

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September 10, 2008

Why should Realtors come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando? To learn the Bloodhound art of marketing listings, for one thing, as an expression of an attainable moral perfection

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I like to think that, as a secondary consequence of the things I do, I goad good people into becoming better people. This is a part of everything I do, but it’s why there is a category called “Egoism in Action” in BloodhoundBlog, and it’s why so much of what I write about is focused on the idea I call “Splendor.” As much as I can, I want to help the people I come into contact with — here and in the corporeal world — to navigate the path from rational self-interest to undiluted self-adoration — an attainable moral perfection.

I like to think I help good people become better people. I know beyond all doubting that coming into contact with me induces bad people to become worse people. I absolve myself of all guilt in the matter: I would never, ever encourage anyone to pursue any sort of disvalue. But Joseph Ferrara, as an example, seems to have wasted two years of his irreplaceable life sticking metaphorical pins into a metaphorical doll of me. How sad for him, but I am undaunted, undamaged, undiminished — quite the contrary.

Poor Joseph is an extreme specimen, but he is hardly alone. Closer to home is Jonathan Dalton, who seems to devote some huge fraction of his every waking moment to trying to vanquish me in his imagination. He does this in secret, without naming me or linking to me. I wouldn’t even know it was happening, except that people keep sending me his snarky little posts. I cannot imagine what crime the poor slob has committed, that he would punish himself endlessly with thoughts of me, but never doubt that nature is just: Whatever his crime, certainly he believes that obsessing over me — striving with all his might to shout me down inside his own mind — is the fate he has earned and deserved. How sad for him.

Here’s a recent specimen of poor Jonathan’s obsession:

So when you read that a listing agent will be checking your house every other day and will hold your house open every single weekend until it [sells] Read more

September 7, 2008

Introduction to “A consumer’s guide to the divorced real estate commission” — the eBook

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is the introductory text to an eBook I have prepared discussing the idea of divorcing the real estate commissions, a topic I have discussed here at some length. You can find the eBook by clicking here. If you like, you can post a button linking to this book — there is code at the end of this post. But my primary motive for putting this together is to appeal to the various consumer-facing personal finance weblogs. I don’t foresee any meaningful reform in the real estate industry originating from the inside, so I am doing what I can to arm consumers against the pernicious evil that is the National Association of Realtors. –GSS]

 
Introduction

Here are three interesting real estate questions, two that came to me directly and one that was commended to me by Rudy Bachraty of Trulia.com.

Question #1: “Potential buyers for our home ($800K – California) have a realtor but he did not find our home for them. The buyers did and have visited both times without him. He has played no role whatever in bringing us these buyers. If we accept their offer why on earth should we give him 3% ($24K) of our home’s equity for contributing nothing whatsoever?”

Question #2: “When looking at homes on our own and calling the listing agents ourselves to set up appointments, does that obligate us to go with the listing agent if we decide to place an offer on the property?”

Question #3: “Since the amount of work involved doesn’t really differ according to the value of the house, financially, it seems like the percentage commission would make higher prices more favorable from a buyer’s agent’s perspective. If this is the case, why would the buyer’s agent be motivated to help negotiate the price down?”

Now, there are nice, long, complicated answers for each of those questions, and nice, long, complicated answers are the very essence of a certain type of salesmanship. It’s called Tap-Dancing, and it works — at least if you’re easily confused. But here are much shorter, much more truthful answers to those three questions:

Answer #1: If you want to hang Read more

September 1, 2008

It’s September 1st: Do you know where your next paycheck is?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Time is physics, the stately transit of the stars and planets. Time is space is mass is energy, four faces of the same one thing, elegant in its simplicity.

The passage of time — or, rather, the awareness of the passage of time — is a human artifact, a man-made thing. The Greeks or their forebears gave us seconds and minutes and hours — elegantly composed of factorials. Days, weeks, months, decades, centuries, millennia — time marches on, don’t it?

Here’s my thing, and it’s something I don’t think I’ve ever talked about with other people: I am constantly aware of the passage of time. It matters to me that I get things done, so I am always measuring my performance against the clock.

Even moreso if I have set aside time to complete a task.

Even moreso at the end of the workday.

Even moreso on Friday afternoons, when I look back to see what I accomplished for the week.

And much, much moreso at the start of a new month, when I not only look back at what got done in the month just past, but also look ahead to what the coming month promises.

If you’re in straight commission sales, you live out of a pipeline, that’s understood. It’s nice to watch those paychecks coming out of the pipeline, but the haunting question — always — is what am I doing right now to put future paychecks into the pipeline?

Like many people reading here, August was a great month for us. I won’t know until I see the final numbers, but it may have been our best month ever. Certainly it’s in the top five.

September shows real promise, both because lenders are getting back on their bicycles and because Phoenix is suddenly very appealing to all-cash buyers.

But still… I look at the calendar and I think about that pipeline…

I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got to go to work.

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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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