BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 35 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

August 21, 2020

New tricks for an old dog, because there is always something to howl about…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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“‘I usually work alone…’”

BloodhoundBlog is renewed and refreshed as of this morning. I’ve deployed a new theme for the first time ever, trimming away every distraction from the ideas that move this place – or that once did and perhaps will again.

What’s the point? Why bother?

I have a number of reasons: The boys have been muttering about it here and there, and I want a place where I can talk about real estate. That much was a problem, since our antiquated theme (installed with version 1.19 of WordPress) had lost its editing power with recent software upgrades.

Even more important is this: We can’t rely on social media. I am at this moment banned from Twitter, for weeks now, for praising Forest Whitaker as an actor. I wish I were making that up. My sad experience with every sort of content-contribution site is that eventually I get thrown off the island, with all of my contributions deleted. To hell with that…

So in with the new, by way of the Hoffman theme. No Odysseus picture for the header, yet, because I’m not sure I’m done. I grew very fond of the block editor on LinkedIn, and I want it with this upgrade – and I have not yet worked out how to get it. We’re working from the “classic” editor for now, which is adequate but not ideal. But we are working, or we are at least fully-functional and ready to work.

If you had posting privileges on BloodhoundBlog, you still do. Log in from this link, and reset your password if necessary. Write what you want. Write what you honestly believe. Above all, write about the ideas that might get you banned or shunned elsewhere. That would be my plan, anyway.

I had BHB stats yesterday, for the first time in years, and this post popped up, to my thinking a choice expression of what BloodhoundBlog does best: Dancing joyously while holding up a mirror to hypocrisy. Don’t even get me started on “Gin and Juice.”

So: Link, promote, subscribe. We can have a conversation away from the censorship of Big Read more

May 11, 2020

Q: What will #Redfin and the other #iBuyers do when the market actually gets ugly? A: Discover real estate.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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‘#Redfin Now, as the iBuying service is known, “performed better in a downturn than some had feared,” CEO Glenn Kelman said.’

Downturn? Hasn’t started yet. I don’t like being the bearer of bearish news, but the shit-hammer will be obvious, when it falls.

Primus: Many, many jobs are not coming back. Vacation rentals have cratered. Notices of Default will be mailing soon. Inventory will surge, relative to demand. Prices will fall. When accrued equity has been bled away, actual foreclosures will ensue.

Secundus: The anti-profit sector (government, schools, hospitals, charities) will soon crash from lost revenue. The jobs lost are those currently buoying the coronavirus-disrupted market. Second wave of defaults/listings/foreclosures.

Tertius: Whether or not the grasshopper states get away with fleecing the ant states – note that the Republic itself is at risk from this larceny; what does that do for confidence? – cadillac pensions in the grasshopper states will be getting a haircut. Third wave of defaults/listings/foreclosures?

It took us 14 years to get from where we were in 2006 to where we are right now.

How long until we get back here?

Don’t ask Glenn Kelman. He clearly does not have a clue.

October 1, 2017

My ideal closing date is always yesterday: The perfect real estate listing in the reckless teenage years of the new millenium.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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On Facebook of late I’ve written about the idea of the perfect offer – the sum total purchase contract package most likely to win the de facto auction I am holding for my real estate listing.

We’ll talk about this in some detail, in due course, but for now the decision matrix for the ideal offer is obvious:

Highest safest soonest closable net return.

The price is the price, and you can lose me fast by dicking around. List or better? I like cash now, financed fast and FHA almost never. We’ll discount your offer for the time-value-of-money, obviously, but also for the closing-risk entailed by every new dawning day. My ideal closing date is always yesterday.

The corollary of the perfect offer is the perfect listing, and that’s an elusive prey. What we want is a marketing presentation – home, listing, photos, collateral – that cannot not elicit avid offers.

I list almost never lately, mostly repeats and referrals, which for me means a lot of investors. My sellers can be tight with a buck, but they’re rational. That matters, because a perfect listing wants a near-perfect house.

How near-perfect? FHA/VA-able, obviously, but I want more than that: Turn-key livable from Day One, with upgrades and spruce-ups as needed, cleaned to mother-in-law perfection and staged to charm. I want to be indubitably appraisal- and inspection-prepped, but more than that I want to be better than my competition – by a lot.

I don’t have to be luxurious or dramatic, just two or three cuts above everything else my potential buyers are seeing. For the same money or a little more, my house is your new home – and everything else is a work-in-progress.

We list just after midnight on Friday morning, this to maximize the marketing benefit of the Days on Market tally but also to maximize buyer frenzy: We offer up the scratch when we know buyers will be itching. My listing should be referenced in many, many “We must see this Saturday” emails.

The listing price? My best guess of the full appraisal value on the day of listing – no discounts, no testing-the-market, just what the Read more

September 30, 2017

Who’s afraid of the big, bad bot? Real estate “AI” is a cargo cult – of trivia.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’ll talk more about this as we go forward: I am listing almost never, but I am listing as close to perfectly as I can. I have made myself into a killer real estate listing agent by way of behavior modeling: Double-thinking appraisers and experienced agents to get to the unassailable price, then selling to absolutely everyone in the process. That includes writing rebuttal language in private MLS fields for agents to deploy on their buyers – selling by attenuation.

That doesn’t end. Under Contract is a dance of magnets, a war of attrition among mutual repulsions. This is where closing skills really matter – and that’s why I am selling my client’s interests all the time, to everyone, all the way to the close.

My point? Come and get me, robot. I don’t give a rat’s ass where the nearest Starbucks is, but I know how to get to the closing table. You don’t.

September 30, 2017

“Make a sound. It might make you feel right at home.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Who’s got something to howl about? Could it be you?

I always have real estate news, just not a hell of a lot of it. I’m a lot less about marketing and a lot more about fundmanentals, these days, but I’m listing more as game theory than as a job, anyway.

Too weird for words, right? Wrong. Nothing is in my world.

The boys say they want to play, and I’m game even if I might not be all that verbose. I do have ideas on marketing – that is, the fundamentals. And I have a Zillow pot-boiler aboiling. And there are meta-issues out there, so far successfully ignored.

But: At the same time: Even at this very moment I am not writing a Willie story that could easily be a movie but could also be a one-set play on its way to proving that it could be a movie but which has to be finished, first, before it can be anything else.

So: Dudes, we’re open for business. Decade-old PHP still works the way I wrote it, and I’ve upgraded WordPress and the plug-ins. We might do some housekeeping later, but for now it’s nice for me to see that big dog’s nose.

Have at it.

December 31, 2013

Want to be a better, more-perfect version of yourself? Master something difficult this year.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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M
You weren’t just cheated of an education when you were young, you were cheated out of the full awareness of your own humanity.Mait Jüriado / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I always love to read about the outrageously nefarious bad guys who are doing all the things we hate. Doesn’t matter who “we” are, since the bad guys afflicting every “we” are always blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil.

I guess it’s useful to exaggerate your opposition, but here’s the thing:

Everyone I remember from school was a fuck-up.

Start with a good solid two-thirds compliant drones, dutifully going through whatever motions seemed to be required. Maybe half of the rest were glib and lazy. Even the straight-A apple-polishers were just phoning it in, doing the minimum necessary to get the grade from the glib-and-lazy grown-up teaching the class.

Am I misrepresenting the world of education? Is there anything you can think of that you did in school that you’re truly proud of now. Away from athletics or the school play, was there anything in your academic life that you gave everything you had? Was there anyone else who did that?

Was there any class that you took — ever — where you had to bust ass every day or risk get hopelessly lost? And when you got to that class, was that the end of your forward progress in that discipline?

The kids from the hard side of the quad — the maths, the sciences — know what I’m talking about. The kids from the soft side of the quad — the arts, the social sciences — may be recalling a graceless exit from the maths and sciences.

But the truth is that virtually all of us were denied the kind of education that was a matter of expected routine for our grandparents. Partly this is our fault: Too often we were grade-greedy glib-and-lazy fuck-ups. But mostly it was the fault of our teachers — and their teachers.

Were they outrageously nefarious bad guys, hell-bent on depriving us of a decent education? Were they blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil, conspiring to enslave us in a state of Read more

November 12, 2013

When I start a church, I’m going to call it The Second Church of I-Don’t-Go-To-Your-Church.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Temptation
Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

How do you know when a time is right for your idea? How about when someone else comes up with something similar?: Atheist ‘mega-churches’ take root across USA, world. For the past three months, I’ve been thinking about starting a church evangelizing egoism and excluding no one, and here is the something similar. I’m reading this as a publicity stunt, but we’ll see. That’s definitely not what I’m about.

What I want is a mission devoted to the idea of doing better. Just that. The doctrine is mine, Man Alive, et very cetera, but I’m a lot more interested in praxis than dogma. If you cross a soul-enriching music performance with a mind-enflaming motivational seminar, you’re halfway to seeing what I see.

Picture a real live church service somewhere, once a week. My ideal location would be a big bar on late Saturday afternoons, to put the idea of choosing admirably in mind just when it might be needed most. That can be simulcast by Ustream or Spreecast, so the whole world can join in, one mind at a time.

But: I’m digging living on the road a lot, so I would love to take this show on the road 15 or 20 days a month, too: Full-day hotel meeting room seminars with a ton of rotating content and drawing on local talent as well. If you think about the way seminar mechanics do major-city blitzes — TV spots and infomercials leading up to the show in three or four locations on successive days — that’s the kind of road show I’d love to mount. An operation like that could produce one or two new hours of tight, professional video every day.

What does victory look like? How about an operation on the scale of the big boys, like Joyce Meyer or Joel Osteen? That may be too far to reach, but we are entering the age of Garage-Band Televangelism, so anything is possible.

The creed? On top of everything else, there are these two principles:

1. I don’t go to your church.

2. I am not arguing with you.

All I want Read more

September 3, 2013

Rock Me Mama Egoism In Action: The link from art to human values and back.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything is all one thing, so this is a video essay about art about music about morality about song-writing about marriage about redemption – simple stuff. This is egoism in action, me being me.

This video connects directly to the argument I made on Friday about ‘conservative’ art, and all of everything I am saying – and everything I am doing – connects back to everything else I am saying. This is a one-hour immersion in Splendor.

An audio-only version is linked below, and that will show up also on iTunes in due course.

July 4, 2013

Celebrating the father of our freedoms: The freedom to own real estate

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

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

Celebrating the father of our freedoms: The freedom to own real estate

By the time you read this, Independence Day will have passed, but I thought I’d give you one more reason to celebrate our freedoms: Real estate.

We call our culture Judeo-Christian, but we owe our laws and political institutions to the Greeks and the Romans. The Greek Hoplites, in particular, are the model upon which Western Civilization is based: Individual family farmers, freeholders in the land they farmed, who owned their own weapons of warfare and who banded together as a virtually unconquerable infantry when their lands were attacked.

What accounts for the independence of the Greeks? Was it their unprecedented military tactics? Was it their superior weaponry? Or was it the savage dedication of free men fighting for their own land?

The Hoplites fought against ragtag slave armies, engaging in combat only out of fear of the lash, never losing sight of the chance to dessert. But the Greeks fought to retain the rights they had wrested from despots, rights ordinary people, until then, had never known.

We derive many more treasures from the Romans, among them the story of Cincinnatus, the retired general called back to battle and given dictatorial power because the situation was so dire. Instead of abusing that power, Cincinnatus won the war, set down his arms and picked his plow where he had left it.

We honor the citizen-soldier in the conduct of George Washington, who could have declared himself king of America, but who instead, like Cincinnatus, surrendered his power and went back to his farm.

Politicians will tell us that we owe our freedoms to representative government. This is twice false. The interest we share in government is the land we each own individually, like the Hoplites. Moreover, representative government without free ownership of the land is tyranny in camouflage.

Americans are free because we have the uncontested right to buy, use, enjoy, rent, let and sell the land we live on. If you have any fire-crackers left over, you Read more

June 29, 2013

Seven years of the dawgs: Reflections on BloodhoundBlog’s anniversary.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We started here, and still the question rings in my ear:

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

Big changes in the world since then. Brick ’n’ mortar retail is all but dead. Books, records and software ‘apps’ are aiming for a price point under ninety-nine cents — many of them all the way under. The supermarket real estate magazines are gone, and the thinning out of the classifieds put the newspapers on a strict diet. Their putative replacements, realty.bots like Zooliapads.com, are by now just sleazoid lead vendors. Unwired Realtors are enjoying their retirements while we are doing business without a fax line or even a land line.

That much is cool. I’m less sanguine about the people in this business than I am about the business itself. One of the things I haven’t loved about real estate has been seeing some of the incredibly scummy things people will do. Most of my clients have been great, and I love all of the people I work with long-term. But I’ve fired people who have left shit on my shoes forever, and this is not a happy outcome for me.

BloodhoundBlog has been a similarly-mixed blessing. I’ve met some wonderful people through this blog, and we’ve published some remarkable content. But I’ve seen the howling mob at its worst, and every day I get to see sleazy SEOs working overtime to make me regret sharing link juice with commenters. And meanwhile, the vendorsluts and their raving wraiths have turned our part of the internet into just another Realtors’ brothel. Don’t get any on ya.

And I am off to Planet Elsewhere. I wanted to hit the road for a while in the first quarter, but my Mammy died and then Odysseus started looking all deathful. So here I am mounting the expedition in the third quarter instead. I’m going to be in Las Vegas for the last three weeks (three nundinae, actually, but who’s counting?) of July, and then I will be in Orlando for the last three nundinae of August. I’m interested in making plans for September, October Read more

June 13, 2013

Practical ontology in real estate? Who ever heard of such a thing?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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NewHomeBuildingInPhoenix

From KJZZ Radio in Phoenix, The Way of the Bloodhound:

‘“From now on whenever you’re driving on the freeway look for a truss,” Swann said, referring to a roof truss on the back of a truck. “And when you start to see a truss every day, then things have turned around. If you see three trusses a day, then things have really turned around. But if you can go five days without seeing a truss on the freeway, then no one is building anything.”’

The linked story is from Peter O’Dowd, a journalist for whom I have huge respect — not alone because he listens when I talk about bug’s-eye-view real estate.

June 5, 2013

Bidding farewell to brave Odysseus…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s a dread we’ve learned to live with. I wrote about this day in fiction a couple of months ago so I would have the choice not to write about the facts today. I can make death beautiful — big deal. Nothing can make death tolerable, nothing but time.

But: He died as he lived, game and eager, his face alight with love for everything. Cathleen was there to hold him and his favorite vet, Doctor Blackwell, was there to say goodbye and I was there to make fun of the most adorable big dumb doofus I ever knew and he left this life with a smile on his face.

One last time: “Lay down, Puppy. Go to sleep…”

May 7, 2013

Reason Magazine: “How established homeowners use regulations to stop new low-cost homes.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s not mentioned in the Reason article, but the real curse of zoning is the prohibition of innovation. By forbidding all projects, land-use tyrants exclude not just the dreck but also the sheer genius. Some builder coud have come up with the modern equivalent of Wright’s Five-Thousand Dollar Home, but that guy works in software instead, where innovation is celebrated and rewarded.

Meanwhile, the hard consequences of coercive land-use regulations:

When a news crew showed up to film a public meeting in tony Darien, Connecticut, in 2005, some of the residents were less than thrilled. “Why don’t you fucking shoot something else?” one demanded. Hundreds crammed into the hearing, sneering and jeering during the presentation.

The fresh hell residents showed up to protest? A proposal to replace a nondescript single-family home on a one-acre lot with 20 condos for senior citizens.

In Snob Zones, journalist Lisa Prevost describes the heights of entitlement to which property owners ascend when faced with the prospect of new development, especially multi-family dwellings in neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. Prevost tours New England and finds an aging, declining populace bent on excluding outsiders. In town after town, affluent and working-class alike, residents line up to shout down new development no matter how modest.

In Darien, the need for the proposed project was clear; the town’s senior housing center had a long wait list, as did the last condo development built in the area (in 1994). Still, many townsfolk, expecting the project to open the floodgates to more high-density projects in the resolutely low-density burgh, were incensed.

Incumbent homeowners have a powerful weapon for vetoing change: zoning. In Darien and other exclusive zip codes, mandated minimum lot sizes kneecap developers who want to build something other than super-sized homes. In the process, they put entire towns out of reach for all but the wealthy. In hardscrabble Ossippee, New Hampshire, where it’s not uncommon for the working poor to live in tents during the summer months to save on rent, the zoning code flatly prohibits new apartment buildings.

Though Prevost, who covers the real estate beat for The New York Times, has no problem with 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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