BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 22 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

June 10, 2008

The fall and rise of a real estate titan: “Tony has the most valuable asset known to man: unwavering spirit and confidence in himself”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In line with Chris Johnson’s post this morning, a charming real estate story from The American Spectator:

Recently, I was contacted about a hot deal in Buckeye (the fast-growth, west side of Phoenix) by a very bright, young Phoenix wheeler-dealer.

We’ll call him Tony (not his real name). Tony was, and still is, one of the smartest guys I have ever met. I first met him as super-charged go-getter sitting in one of the thousands of real estate cubicles on Camelback Road. At that time, he brought me a deal that turned out very well, and he was pleasant and honest throughout the whole process. Over the years, as I predicted at the time, Tony would quickly move out of the cubicle and into something bigger and better. History proved me correct and by 2004, Tony had a fancy office on the Camelback Miracle Mile with a secretary that looked like she just stepped out of Vogue.

Sitting in his plush office, Tony was still Tony, going 1,000 miles per hour and talking up deals, but in a nice and pleasant way. He had picked up a few nice souvenirs of the ongoing boom, including a fancy spread in the 85253 zip code where he entertained lavishly, a sleek new private jet, and a very cool yacht in Marina Del Rey. At Tony’s 2005 Christmas Party, I could have sworn that half the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders were there at Tony’s Paradise Valley house.

Anyway, Tony was calling me after a long absence. I had missed the ’06 and ’07 Christmas parties, but I can only imagine their lavish scale. Tony was now on the phone saying he had a great deal that I should look at “right away…this one you’re gonna love.” I have heard that line a million times, but in Tony’s case, I trusted his judgment and agreed to meet that day at my office. Tony arrived, pitched the deal (I was already fairly familiar with the location and the dynamics of the site), and indeed, it was a deal. It was exactly right for one of my clients in Read more

June 9, 2008

Support the Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund: A real estate weblogger is being throttled by corporate bully ePerks.com. The free speech rights you will be fighting for are your own…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Update: It seems likely that Vlad’s cost to defend himself from this specious claim (if you read the complaint, you will discover that the alleged offense is entirely absent from Exhibit A) is going to start with a $5,000 retainer. It seems unlikely to me that the matter will go to court, but, if it does, things will get really expensive. If you haven’t done so already, click on the “Donate” button. You’re not defending Vlad, you’re defending yourself.

 
The months’ long persecution of real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy by ePerks.com’s Ben Behrouzi came to a head today. Behrouzi has served Zablotskyy with a lawsuit claiming that a post on Zablotskyy’s weblog caused Behrouzi to suffer “harm and damage.”

Behrouzi also claims that Zablotskyy has exposed him to “hatred, contempt, ridicule and disdain.” The petition itself is a bad joke, but it is beyond all doubt that that Behrouzi has exposed himself to “hatred, contempt, ridicule and disdain” by the months of ludicrous posturing he and his attorney have engaged in.

At some point the full petition will be available for us to read. [Amending this: You can read the complaint on Vlad’s weblog.] In the mean time, Vlad Zablotskyy needs your help. The lawsuit was filed in California, but Vlad lives in New Jersey. He will have to fight a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages by remote control, paying law firms in both states. The suit itself is a complete joke — a Personal Injury law firm with a drive-up window comes to mind — but it will still cost serious money to defend.

I’ve set up a Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund through our PayPal account — and I’m about to put the bite on you in two ways.

First, click on one of the “Donate” buttons you see in this post or on our sidebar and give as much as you can. I know that many Realtors and lenders are hurting for money right now, but there is no better cause for you to fight for than your own right to speak and write as you choose. If you happen to be Read more

June 5, 2008

Planning to retire at 50? Good on ya! Have you made plans for living a hundred years beyond that? In a world that changes like dreams?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Unless you come down with a fatal disease or find yourself in a gun battle, you’re probably going to live a lot longer than you ever imagined. This week’s news is interesting, but life-extension is a secondary consequence of everything associated with free markets. That trend is centuries old by now — better food and water, personal hygiene, continuous improvements in medicine, the widespread availability of something as mundane as fresh cow’s milk.

And just think how much longer and richer your life could be if you weren’t carrying 50% or more in parasitic government weight on your back. The interesting thing is that the rate of change is increasing far faster than governments and other misanthropes can drag it down. My own personal dictum has always been, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.” The literate third of the globe is at that point now. The other two thirds are just a few years away. If we can navigate the next few years without blowing ourselves up, we will reach a point where the average middle class household in the United States will control more real wealth than entire countries would have owned just a few centuries ago.

I’m sure I’ve cited this before, and this version of the film is an antique by now — it’s almost a year old — but this is a very compelling presentation:

Of course you cannot make any detailed plans about living decades longer than you expected with everything changing constantly — and at an ever-accelerating rate of change. The truth of the matter is, if you live to be 150 years old, you have a decent chance of living forever. The even more startling truth is that the ever-accelerating rate of change in all branches of technology is racing us toward a singularity, a point where all of our models of understanding break down and we have no rational means of predicting what will happen.

No one can predict the future more than a few years out, but what you can do is reprogram your mind. In omnia paratus — prepared for everything. If Read more

June 2, 2008

BloodhoundBlog in the terrible two’s and the me-me-me meme

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had mail last night from a sweet kid who wanted to tag me in what she called a MeMe game. I thought that by itself was nice take on the idea of memes as represented in the wired world of real estate, but it also put me in mind of a promise I made a while back:

Inlookers: I will be happy to entertain any other What would David Gibbons do?-type questions. You can email me; I’ll shield your identity. Or you can use the “Ask the Broker” button — if you fudge the email address field, it’s completely confidential. If your question is obnoxious, don’t waste your time — because I don’t waste mine. But if you have a sincere question about BloodhoundBlog or me or whatever […] fire away. I am surely also the most forthcoming — and loquacious! — person any of you are ever likely to meet. If you want to know something, just ask.

This is not a vanity on my part. People who have met me in person will tell you that I don’t ask many personal questions. I see them as bring not so much impertinent as irrelevant. All I care about is work — mine, yours, ours. But if there’s something you’re just dying to know, don’t suffer in ignorance, and, for goodness’ sakes, don’t gossip. Ask away. I will conceal nothing.

BloodhoundBlog will be two years old on June 29th. The world of real estate weblogging has exploded since we got started — but my argument is that you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re doing everything we can do expand this world we live in, to help more and more real estate professionals understand the implications of Web 2.0 marketing. In the coming weeks, I plan to revisit some of the underlying philosophical issues that drive BloodhoundBlog — to illustrate where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.

Louis Cammarosano sent this along yesterday:

Was going over our google analytics re the HomeGain blog and was checking sources of traffic. Someone came to our site from a Google search excellent real estate marketing. Click on the Read more

May 27, 2008

All roads lead to Rome, but where three roads converge, the trivia that is yet another meme game is to be found

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eight questions, eight mostly inadequate answers:

1. Who is your favorite musical artist? (post a youtube video)

I like so much stuff that this becomes completely unfair. If you watch my choices of videos on BHB, those doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of my tastes. The folks at Unchained got to hear songs from my iTunes library, which includes a lot of bootlegs and otherwise unobtainable stuff. All that notwithstanding, if I had to pick one first-among-equals favorite, it would be Bob Dylan. But just writing that feels like a betrayal, because everything I love in art comes from a kind of visceral honesty that Dylan almost never achieves — mostly studiously avoids. But take a look at this:

The real Blind Willie McTell was a fairly ordinary early blues musician. He was nothing compared to Skip James, in my opinion. And why is Dylan celebrating the blues in a ballad? I think McTell is a cypher for Dylan in this song, and I think this is as close to an auto-encomium as we can ever expect from the man. In any case, this is great art from the first note to the last, an Apollonian frenzy made more violent because it is so tightly constrained.

2. Who is your favorite artist (post a flicker photo)

I don’t have a favorite visual artist. Of everything I’ve seen, Rodin is the most interesting to me, this because he is truly in love with humanity. I’ve worked in photography most of my life, at one time very seriously. I hate almost everything associated with the visual arts.

3. Who is your favorite blogger?

Again I must disappoint. Everything I love in art is a form of literature — even the music I love best. Almost no one in the history of literature was able to write both very quickly and very well. Shakespeare could, as could Mencken, but they don’t update their blogs that often. There’s no one in the world of weblogs who makes me crazy like the great writers of the world’s literature. How could there be? That’s an unfair standard to judge by. To have Read more

May 21, 2008

Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’m kicking this back up to the top. At the time I wrote this, I thought it might be enough to make the jackasses at ePerks.com come to their senses. Apparently not. If you are a real estate weblogger, and if you don’t want some sleazoid attorney pulling these stunts on you, you need to set your shoulder beside Vlad Zablotskyy’s and fight for your right to free speech. Let the world know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. –GSS]

 
Sleazeball lead vendor ePerks.com (corporate motto: “We don’t totally suck because we can’t get anything right!”) has found a great new way to respond to criticism: Censorship.

Real estate weblogger Vlad Zablotskyy exposed ePerks to what by BloodhoundBlog standards amounts to very mild scrutiny. His posts elicited a number of horror stories from Realtors who had been misused in their dealings with ePerks.

So far nothing surprising. Lead vendors suck. They persist by virtue of creating an artificial marketing chokepoint, interposing themselves between consumers and the vendors who can satisfy their needs:

In the Web 1.0 world, lead vendors snapped up domains and fought hard for dominance on organic and pay-per-click keywords relating to real estate sales, mortgage origination and refinancing. By these means, they harvested contact information from interested parties, which they were then able to sell to Realtors and lenders, often for enormous fees. The lead vendors created an artificial chokepoint by marketing, then charged practitioners a premium to gain access to the consumers trapped at that chokepoint.

It is hardly shocking that most of the victims of lead vendors come to hate the scum who run these scams.

In the long run none of this matters. The Web 2.0 world disintermediates all man-made chokepoints. ePerks.com is one with the dinosaurs — and sic semper tyrannosauris!

But wait. There’s more. Instead of ignoring criticism on what is (sorry, Vlad) a low-traffic weblog, instead of asking itself “What would David Gibbons do?”, instead of engaging the enraged while retooling the chokepoint like Homegain.com’s Louis Cammarosano, ePerks.com chose to do the stupidest thing any corporation or government can do in the Web 2.0 world: It sent a Read more

May 7, 2008

A celebration of Western Civilization and the Scientific Revolution

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is quoted from a John Derbyshire dismissal of a creationist documentary film. That much is good. This much is great:

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It’s a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, Read more

April 19, 2008

Marketing performance: BloodhoundBlog is the last place crybabies should go when they need to have their boo-boos kissed, and, therefore, it is the last place to go looking for crybabies

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to talk about the idea of marketing performance as a disruptive strategy — but not quite yet. I’m using the term as a gerundive: Developing tools and techniques that by far eclipse your competition, then promoting that outsized commitment to excellence in your marketing. Not: “I’m the best.” Not even: “Here’s why I’m the best.” Simply this: “Here is everything you’ll get that you can’t obtain anywhere else.” This is the means by which we can flush most of the bums from the business even as we supplant the sclerotic dinosaurs who claim to be our leaders.

As a matter of general notice, it were well to take account of a couple of salient facts:

  1. This is not an alien message to the BloodhoundBlog audience. The people who come here are already committed to doing the best job they can do as Realtors, lenders, investors. We appeal to the elite of real estate professionals, and, not coincidentally, we tend to repel the crybabies, the mediocrities and the wannabe predators.
  2. In consequence, beating up on the crybabies, the mediocrities and the wannabe predators is probably a pretty poor strategy here. Most readers here would not just agree with but would joyously amend denunciations of specific bad behavior. But generalized complaints about unspecified groups of miscreants may have the opposite effect: The uncontested best of a group of people rising to the defense of the uncontested worst.

That’s as may be. There are no groups of people, there are only individuals. Defending a group is no less irrational than attacking that group, but I have no use and no time for irrationality in any flavor.

I’m interested in individual practitioners becoming so much better at the performance of their jobs, and so much better at marketing that performance, that they put themselves beyond competition. I want to put the bums in another line of work, and I want to put the dinosaurs in a museum, where they belong. To my ears, everything else is pointless noise.

I’ll deal with this all in detail, but not now: It’s Saturday, Realtor day, and I gotta go to work. Here Read more

April 18, 2008

The practical value of living by abstract principle: “I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Why is hewing to abstract principle, which is so often derided as being “impractical”, in fact the most practical course of action you can take? Because, when you cave in to bullies — in addition to committing a grievous injustice to your own interests — you are telling them in no uncertain terms that you’ll do it again.

I saw this passionate business letter cited at Coyote Blog the other day, but it was my friend Richard Nikoley who unearthed the gem quoted below.

I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable’s modus operandi in these matters. I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs’ practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am “uncompromising” in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is Read more

April 13, 2008

“It’s the difference between grabbing junk food from the drive-thru and sitting down with people you love for a leisurely and lively dinner.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s Teri Lussier talking about the experience of settling in for a serious read at BloodhoundBlog, as against cruising the blogiverse.

I’m inclined to agree — and I’ve never been stingy with words. But here’s a thousand words Cathleen wrote yesterday afternoon while she was staging and preparing a house for listing:

The world is rich with Splendor. Sometimes you have to sweep a little debris out of the way to catch sight of it, that’s all.

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April 11, 2008

A deeply philosophical discussion of the flame war that will not be happening at BloodhoundBlog

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, good grief…

I can credit both sides of the rancorous dispute that is not going to happen.

I agree with Russell Shaw that Barry Cunningham can run roughshod over opponents in debate, and I knew without having to be told that Russ was steaming over this.

I agree with Barry on the factual prognosis for real estate. I watched it happen in the graphic arts, and I’m watching it happen in dozens of other industries.

I was laughing with Brian Brady on the phone last night that I have inadvertently introduced a second standard on ad hominem comments: Zero tolerance for everything else, but a wider latitude on Barry’s threads. I’ve stepped in when things seemed to be trending a little too flamey, but, for the most part I haven’t had huge objections.

Gentlemen, I want for you both — and for everyone reading this — to understand something that, like the oceans of air I am immersed in, is too obvious to me even to notice most of the time:

Weblogging is theater of the mind.

What we do is entertainment. It should be interesting, fact-based, persuasive — all that serious stuff. But we are competing for attention with radio and television, not Oxford University. I certainly want to talk about things that matter to me, and I have huge goals for real estate and for the world at large that I would like to see effected. But none of those things is going to happen overnight — and none of them in response to a blog post.

If Barry Cunningham paints the world with a broad brush and that makes you hot under the collar, the most interesting question is this one: Are you angry because he’s outrageously wrong — or because he might be right? When an argument is absurdly off the mark, we ignore it. Ha, ha. Who cares? It’s when things are too irritatingly right that we get irritated. Your emotional reactions tell you almost nothing about the world outside your mind — and almost everything about the world inside your mind.

But more importantly, all you need to do to defeat an erroneous Read more

April 4, 2008

Because of who I am, because I will not keep my mouth shut, I might understand better than most of us what it means to be an American

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Witness:

“Hu spread malicious rumors and committed libel in an attempt to subvert the state’s political power and socialist system,” the court verdict stated[.]

Every time you take notice that there is no gun barrel pressed to the base of your skull, you might say a prayer for the soul of George Mason.

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April 1, 2008

State-mandated licensing of interior designers is our only possible protection from life-threatening color clashes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Coyote Blog, Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice argues against occupational licensing for interior designers in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design, completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who practice interior design to use that term without government permission.

You might stare at them incredulously for a moment, then look down at your calendar and say, “Oh, I get it — April Fool!” Right? Wrong.

These folks represent the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that “Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and quality of life.”

Legislative analysis by a half-dozen states that rebuffed ASID’s attempts to cartelize interior design — including Colorado, Washington and South Carolina — has failed to support ASID’s claim that the location of your couch or the color of your bedroom walls is literally a matter of life and death. As the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies put it, there is “no evidence of physical or financial harm being caused to . . . consumers by the unregulated practice of interior designers.”

Lacking any factual support for its sweeping public welfare claims, ASID and its supporters often resort to fear-mongering.[…]

If there were any credible evidence that unregulated interior design presents a genuine risk to consumers, ASID would certainly have found it by now. They have had plenty of time (more than three decades), resources (dues for Read more

March 31, 2008

Black Pearl Marketing Minute: A sneak peek at a BloodhoundBlog Unchained promotional radio spot

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Barry Cunningham asked me to make a 60 second promotional spot for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, to be used in the regular rotation on Real Estate Radio USA. What can one say except, “Hell, yeah!”

Even so, I’m just not that comfortable in the do-what’s-expected waxed fruit world, so I came at the thing from my own angle. I made a podcasty kind of in-your-face kind of commercial. Who knows if it will pass muster.

Anyway, you can have a sneak peek by clicking on the podcast link below.

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March 22, 2008

SplendorQuest: Jesus Christ Superstar

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I wrote this at Easter in 2003, just short of five years ago. –GSS]

Tomorrow is Easter, and all good Catholics will go to Mass. In our parish, every Mass will be packed, and there will be overflow Masses in the school cafeteria. But Catholic or not, Easter calls our attention to Jesus Christ Superstar, one of the best of the rock operas, and certainly the best of the filmed rock operas.

Director Norman Jewison delivers what is very self-consciously a film, with elaborate use of long lenses, slow-motion and stop-action photography. The central character is Judas Iscariot, played by Carl Anderson, with the Nazarene cast in the role of a loud foil, always the reactor, never the actor. This cannot be pleasing to doctrinaire Christians, but it is very effective in the film. In the same way, the turmoil of Annas and Caiphus, of Pontius Pilatus, and of Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter add drama.

But the moments of highest drama are reserved for the Nazarene. First, on Palm Sunday, the massed disciples sing, “Hey, J.C., J.C., would you die for me?” Jewison freezes for just a second on actor Ted Neely’s horrified expression. Later, on Maundy Thursday, the prayer of the Nazarene from Gethsemane is excruciating, no pun intended, all but unbearable.

But the star of this movie is always the music. There are places where the lyrics clunk, a curse of rock opera, but the rock is hard and convincing, and the voices, particularly Anderson and Neely, are fantastic.

Inter alia, apparently Jewison had some kind of anti-Vietnam message in mind when he made the film, but for the life of me I can’t see it now.

For an alternate take on the same material, you might pick up Jesus Christ Superstar–A Resurrection. This is a studio-recorded double-CD crafted by a cadre of Georgia musicians who love the rock opera and wanted to make a rock recording from it. Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers sing the parts of the Nazarene and Mary Magdalene, respectively. The voices come and go, but the instrumentation is inspired.

In the Passion, Saint John bends over backwards to 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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