As an expression of profound self-knowledge, tonight I am going to mount a power strip between the sofa and the loveseat in our living room…
Category: Egoism in Action (page 21 of 26)
Realtor, Associate Broker
In the weeks before Unchained in Phoenix. I stopped reading my feed reader. I was wall-to-wall with Unchained work and wall-to-wall with money work and something had to give. I’ve read this and that since then, but I’m over 16,000 posts behind in my reading. Oh, well…
When I knew for sure that we would be getting iPhones this Summer, I switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire as my feed reader, this because the desktop and iPhone clients will sync to each other. Same subscriptions on both, but what I’ve read on the iPhone won’t show up on my Mac and vice versa.
So I added the feeds I really wanted to NetNewsWire, but I also kept the old set running on Vienna. Interestingly to me, since I made the switch BloodhoundBlog has added over 200 posts, an astounding accomplishment. Something in WordPress or a plug-in is wasting post numbers, but we are over 3,000 posts, total, on the blog in just a couple of years. Even more impressive is the depth of our posts. If your goal is to understand the world of hi-tech real estate, reading here will be more beneficial than reading everything else put together.
So let’s hear it for the dogs: The best, the brightest and by far the loudest voices in the RE.net. It’s an honor for me to write in such a company.
So far, 2008 has been very, very good to our tiny little real estate brokerage, but it certainly didn’t start that way. Q4 ’07 and Q1 ’08 were plenty scary for anyone in real estate, and I’m sure they contributed to putting a lot of people out of the real estate business. We normally go to Las Vegas at Independence Day for our wedding anniversary, but this year we did not. We were busy with money work, which was most welcome, but we were also gun-shy about spending money.
July rocked, August rocked, and we’re picking up buyers if not listings with alacrity. It’s time for Greg and Cathy to have some alone time. Even so, we’re still more than spooked about money, and we both have Read more
[I wrote this in March of 2007. I’m revisiting it now because it fits so well with the essay I wrote last night about honesty. At just about the same time I wrote this post, I penned an essay about an idea I call The Implied Accusation — the elephant in the room. I lucked upon a sweet cover of the Tom Waits tune quoted below, so I’m adding that as well. –GSS]
I believe in integrity, but I believe in a very Latinly kind of integrity. It’s normal for me to translate words in and out of Latin, to write and think in those words in the way that they are composed from their Latin atoms. So when I think of the word “integrity,” what I think of is “all one thing.”
And I try to live that way, too, with my whole life, as best I can manage it, being the expression of one idea: Splendor.
I’ll give you a definition, which I will immediately qualify:
Splendor is the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it, you are your idealized perfect self.
What’s the qualification? Splendor is not words, and it is not merely thoughts or deeds. Splendor is the tone and the timbre, the warp and the weft of a life spent pursuing it. Words, deeds, thoughts, actions, hopes, dreams, plans, memories, work, leisure, solitude and companionship — everything you do in the pursuit of positive values and nothing that you do in quests for disvalues.
This is such a simple idea, and I love it better than anything. It is everything I want to be when I am being the best person I can be, and it is everything I want for everyone I see. It’s one of the reasons I love being a Realtor, because this job, at its best, is all about Splendor, helping people get the most and the best that life can offer.
I don’t talk to my clients directly about this, but they get the idea. We Read more
I had a house close yesterday, and there was a little incident as I was trading keys with the buyers that I found instructive.
Back story: These folks came to me through my Arizona Republic column. That column produces almost no business for us, and I don’t milk it for business. But the clients it brings out are invariably very interesting, and they often bring with them multiple transactions. This particular family will do two listings and one purchase, and it was the purchase that closed yesterday.
They had started out thinking in terms of $800,000 homes in very tony desert locations. There are health issues, so I suggested that a smaller home closer to town might work better. We ended up buying a very nice home that comped for $425,000.
They were willing to risk losing the home in order to make sure they weren’t overpaying, so we offered $335,000 — $90,000 under two recent comp sales. We got that price, and the seller didn’t flinch at our repair requests. A fun, painless transaction, my kind of deal.
But wait. Didn’t I betray my sacred duty to milk the consumer for every last penny? I talked myself out of a commission on $800,000, then talked myself down again to a commission on $335,000. I don’t even think that way. I got a smokin’ deal for my buyers, and we all had fun every step of the way.
Because we’re doing multiple sides, we gave them a break on all three commissions. They didn’t ask, we just did it. Commission is always the elephant in the room, so, no matter what we plan to do, we always raise the issue first.
Why? Because doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, no matter what.
But also: Because affecting to ignore the elephant in the room only serves to make you look oily, evasive and corrupt — and the other party can use your presumptive corruption as leverage against you.
I believe that we do well by doing good — that consistent virtue reaps commensurate rewards in the long run. But even if we don’t, doing the Read more
“Oh that the Roman people had but one neck, that I might cut it off at a blow!” –Caligula
Here is the naked essence of Saul Klein’s so-called “MLS 5.0” proposal:
The MLS of the future will bring a marketing service and benefit to the industry by being the single point of entry for listing data and then, based upon the election of the broker, distribute that information to web portals, newspapers, even radio and television, handheld devices and applications.
The emphasis was in the original, which is a nice illustration of how much Klein trusts you not to see what he’s up to.
What does that sentence actually say?
It says that Klein’s idealized “MLS of the Future” will be a national monopoly system controlled by real estate brokers and the NAR — to the immediate and permanent detriment of independent MLS systems and vendors, Web 2.0 listings aggregators and — most especially — individual real estate agents.
What Klein is proposing, ignoring the presumed benefits to accrue to his own ventures, is to give the real estate industry one chokepoint, one bottleneck, so that the NAR can put a choke-chain around it.
Who will control that “single point of entry for listing data”? The NAR.
Who will control who can and cannot have access to listing data? The NAR.
Who will have the entire real estate industry in a chokehold? The NAR.
This is so diabolical, it makes me wonder if the fix is already in — if this evil plan is going to be rammed down our collective throats in November in Orlando.
Let’s assume it is not. Klein’s proposal is an undiluted evil, and it is incumbent upon everyone working in hi-tech real estate to oppose this vicious plan with every fiber in your being.
To say more is to gild the lily. I think Klein’s actual objective is to pull off another Realtor.com heist, to get the NAR to sell him a national MLS monopoly. But the benefit to the NAR is obvious: With a national monopoly MLS system, brokers will once again have the power to bring their agents to heel. If you understand what it means Read more
Teri Lussier sent me this clip as a celebration of Unchained in Orlando:
That’s sweet, but I always think of this when I think of lullabies:
And that’s so brutal that it’s almost unimaginably brutal — until you look at this:
That’s the real face of war. Not well-turned-out soldiers with their bootlaces smartly tied, not bombers or aircraft carriers. War is your grandmother wailing because everything she has ever known has been burned to a cinder.
Julie Gold is a great songwriter. She wrote From a Distance, and Bette Midler couldn’t quite ruin it as a massively over-produced anthem. But Nancy Griffith, on her best days, can sing a simple song simply. This is a lullaby for the people who are not sleeping in Tbilisi.
Not completely off topic, but well above the normal fray. I wrote this ten or twelve years ago:
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.
The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a “justice” that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst.
We can make a joke by saying, “Political philosophy is the means by which ethical systems betray themselves.” There are actually a host of reasons for this, and all of them are amusing to me. For one, a political system has a meta-goal apart from the ethical system in which it is rooted: It must function in the real world.
Moreover, the political system itself has a meta-ethical or even extra-ethical goal in that its proponents will tend to imbue it with what they view are essential survival characteristics even if these betray the ethical system in which the political philosophy is putatively based. Any form of argument that the polity can or should or must do what it would be immoral or criminal for any individual to do is a form of this error. The counter is, but if we don’t inflict this injury, the polity won’t survive. And the counter to that is that a dispute resolution Read more
“The shame of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue onely thereby were disgrac’d: But as the Image of a King in his Seale ill-represented is not so much a blemish to the waxe, or the Signet that seal’d it, as to the Prince it representeth, so disordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his Elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties. Negligent speech doth not onely discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance. If it be so then in words, which fly and ’scape censure, and where one good Phrase asks pardon for many incongruities and faults, how then shall he be thought wise whose penning is thin and shallow? How shall you look for wit from him whose leasure and head, assisted with the examination of his eyes, yeeld you no life or sharpnesse in his writing?” –Ben Jonson
Teri suggested this, but it’s one I’ve always loved, too. Leslie Gore looking all of 19 years old, taking down You don’t own me in less than two minutes:
Here’s a Don Dilego cover of The Kinks’ I’m not like everybody else. This was the B side to Sunny Afternoon and I wore the grooves right off that 45.
Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.
That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.
Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.
There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.
And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.
This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.
Start here: Read more
Idea-by-idea, house-by-house, we are writing the book on the art of listing premium-priced homes for sale. The things we do are often beyond useless at lower price points, and we’re not a part of the canapes and cocktails circuit where high-end homes are sold. But for executive homes, luxury homes, historic and architecturally-distinctive homes, the kinds of marketing tools we are perfecting are very effective.
Effective at what? At selling the house, of course. Everything we do is about selling the house. If we happen to make a strong impression on the neighbors or on other people who see the work we are doing, so much the better. Even so, that’s not the point. People should be impressed by the commitment we make to selling our listings, but our purpose in making that commitment is to get the house sold.
Here’s a true fact, apparently known to everyone except real estate agents: Consumers — the people we hope to make our clients — see us as being lazy and cheap. They think we’re overpaid, but it’s probably less that they think our paychecks are too big and more that they don’t see any effort on our part to justify those paychecks.
A typical listing is a lockbox and a sign. Is there a flyer? Or is there just an empty flyer box? Has the flyer been edited with a ballpoint pen to reflect price reductions? How many photos are there in the MLS listing — and are they any damned good?
The marginal cost of everything I’ve talked about so far is essentially nothing, amortized over a few dozen listings. The one exigent out-of-pocket cost might be the post for the sign, and I have seen real estate signs nailed to trees. I wish I were joking.
If consumers see us as being lazy and cheap, it’s only because far too many of us are lazy and cheap when it comes to servicing our clients. It’s comical, actually. The Realtor who pisses away $5,000 acquiring a client worth $10,000 in gross commission income can’t bring himself to spend fifty bucks out-of-pocket on that client.
There’s a Read more
The Associated Press has a story this morning on on how weak and powerless people feel when they spend too much time obsessing over the news and not enough time pursuing their values.
I thought I’d share with you a photograph that seems to me to be a perfect expression of how weak and powerless humanity really is:
(Many more here.)
The universe, by definition, is everything there is. But your every experience of the universe starts and ends inside your mind. Your experience of life will be precisely as splendorous or as squalid as you want it to be. Do you want to change the universe, forever, for the good? Start by changing the way you think.
This is a response to a comment that grew up to be a post:
Louis Cammarosano: “[I]f it wasn’t for “Vendor” Zillow, Unchained Phoenix would have shown a loss.”
No, we would have done the show in a different facility, without food. Zillow.com paid for our guests to have a much better experience than they would have had otherwise. I’m very grateful for this, but it had nothing to do with what were doing. If we can, I want to pay for Orlando entirely from receipts, so that we will have heard the last of these specious charges.
Louis Cammarosano: “The anti vendor rhetoric falls flat when your conference was sponsored by one and you have become one yourself.”
Falls flat for whom? Is there anyone reading this who thinks that we are casting about for a way to make milch cows out of Realtors and lenders, in the way that virtually everyone associated with the Inman.com/Realtor.com/Move.com world seeks to milk Realtors and lenders? I’m completely serious. If you really think that, let me know, because I will want to dial up the anti-vendor/anti-broker/anti-NAR rhetoric quite a bit. I am sick to death of putatively self-employed business people being swindled by one huckster after another, and I am doing everything I can think of to put a stop to it. If I haven’t made that abundantly clear by now, the fault is mine, and I will mend my ways with renewed vigor.
I actually agree with the point you don’t quite make: Zillow.com — and possibly some other vendors fully within the Web 2.0 world — don’t deserve to be lumped together with the other companies making up the milking-machinery branch of the Inmanosphere. What can one say about this grievous injustice? How about: Dang.
BloodhoundBlog is a very costly endeavor. Our bandwidth needs are huge, so our hosting fees are fairly high. BloodhoundRealty.com absorbs all of that, along with any other costs associated with running this site. But those numbers pale when compared with the labor value — and the market value — of the content accumulated here — provided by me and by three dozen Read more
First, this is important: The easiest way to get someone to BloodhoundBlog is to type “BloodhoundBlog” into any web browser. The “.com” will be assumed by default, and BloodhoundBlog.com redirects to the full address of the weblog. If there is someone you work with whom you would like to see get involved in our world, all that person has to remember is that one word: BloodhoundBlog.
Why is that important? Because you are the most important factor in BloodhoundBlog’s growth. We don’t even have Google working for us right now, but it doesn’t matter. We have always grown on the strength of the content and on the strength of very bright people like you reading, commenting on, subscribing to, linking to and recommending that content.
Last night I looked in on Cheryl Johnson talking about the coffee-table books we build for high-end listings. One of the comments was an eye-opener for me:
Thanks for the BLOODHOUND link, I had not run across them yet and man what a good read, blew my 30 min quick.
Of the weblogs written by actual working real estate professionals — Realtors, lenders, investors, technologists, vendors — BloodhoundBlog has the deepest penetration: Most pages, most Technorati links, etc. It’s easy for me to forget that new people are coming on line every day — and that they have no automatic way of knowing about BloodhoundBlog.
So far, we have depended on viral effects to be found by those folks. But I want for people like Cheryl’s commenter to find us. You want it, too: It’s the people who care about doing their very best who will matter most to the world of real estate, going forward. We are each of us here for our own reasons, but, at the same time, we are all of us here out of a shared commitment to excellence. When you run across someone like the person who posted that comment, you need to send him or her here like a BloodhoundBlog evangelist. Not for our sakes, but for your own.
There’s more. After weeks of phone tag, it seems all but certain that we will not Read more
Here’s what doesn’t matter:
- ePerks.com and its sleazy attorney are trying to slime the webloggers who have come to Vlad Zablotskyy’s defense — but it doesn’t matter.
- Andy Beard and others are trying to push this story viral in the world outside the RE.net — but that’s ultimately beside the point.
- RSSPieces is offering a free weblog to anyone who writes a post in Vlad’s support — which is cool, but it doesn’t matter.
- Lord Matt is offering free advertising on the same terms: Write a post, get free ads — also cool, also doesn’t matter.
Here’s what matters:
Of the money Vlad Zablotskyy has had to spend so far on legal fees, three-fourths of every dollar has come out of his own pocket.
It doesn’t matter who says what about whom. It doesn’t matter if this issue draws more attention up the food chain. It doesn’t matter if people write posts or post the donation button.
But it does matter if you hang Vlad Zablotskyy out to dry.
I don’t know if the cause is cowardliness or cliquishness or simply cluelessness, but I have been all but completely dismayed by the response of the RE.net to this vicious attack on one of our own. A few principled people stepped up to the plate right away — last week, but also in the months leading up to last week. A far greater number have ignored the issue, with the result that Vlad has found more vocal champions outside the real estate weblogging world.
How sad for us that Vlad is willing to stand as a martyr for our right to speak as we choose, and we can’t even be bothered to make a donation in his defense — much less stand up on our own two legs and cry havoc — not even when we’re offered choice bribes for doing so!
We’re alone right now, you and I, just words on phosphors silently invading your mind. I don’t care if you’re a coward, or if you’re clique-ridden or clueless. It suits me fine to think that you’ve been distracted, and you’ve been meaning all week to make a donation. That’s perfectly wonderful. Read more