BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 38 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

July 21, 2012

Not everything can be coordinated in cyberspace. When you gotta move, don’t take a turn without Twist.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Twist screen shotCathleen and I have been playing with a new iPhone app called Twist. (Hat tip: GeekWire.)

What is it? In the shortest possible summary, Twist is ETA software. You tell it where you’re going, it tells you and the people you’re meeting there when you will arrive. Or they can tell you when they will arrive, so you don’t waste time thumb-twiddling. ETA is calculated on your actual motion, so it doesn’t tell anyone anything until you actually hit the road.

Twist integrates with iCal (which integrates with Google Calendar). It will tell you when you need to leave for an appointment so you won’t be late.

It also taps into your contact database, so you can select any destination you already know about. Twist keeps track of your past destinations, so reusing them is a breeze. And you can set up favorite destinations you use all the time (like your home or office), adding in the contacts associated with that site, for one-touch Twisting. (Realtors: Think about how many times you go back to a house you have listed or put under contract.)

And it integrates with Google Maps to give you driving directions and real-time progress updates on your travels. I don’t use GPS, and I’m off-the-charts kinesthetic, so this is more gee-whiz fun for me that something I need, but the people on the other end can track my mapping, too.

Here’s the PR movie for Twist, which for some reason is focused on dating:

Who (besides nervous daters) can use Twist? Happily-committed couples; if you’re cheating, Twist will tell on you. Bosses with drivers on the road, stipulating that the ability to supervise creates a liability for failure to supervise. And: Real estate professionals. Twist makes it easy to plan your day, to coordinate with clients, vendors and other team members — and to tell your spouse and kids when they might expect to see you again.

What would I change in the software?

I want every event in my calendar to be Twisted automatically, in the background, without my intervention. Moreover, I want the calendar integration to be more heuristic: It it looks like Read more

July 16, 2012

The world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the map to that world is written in the lines of your face.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A couple weeks ago we got together with an old friend whom we had not seen in some while. She made a huge point of remarking that my appearance had not changed at all, which I dismissed as a kindly untruth, sweet but surely very far from being accurate.

It turns out she was closer to the truth than I had guessed. I am speaking about Man Alive! at The 21 Convention in August, and I had to come up with a head shot for the event.

This is me on April 15, 2001, the photo I’ve used at BloodhoundBlog since its inception:

This is me on July 9, 2012, a week ago today:

A little more weight on me, and a little jowlier, but not much difference. The set of my features is a constant, a reflection of the world I see outside my mind.

This is me from Man Alive!:

Your mama told you, when you glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial expressions we wear most often – habituated Mothertongue emotional reactions – inscribe themselves into our skin.

We listed an actual equity sale on Friday, and we’re getting ready to do another one Friday next. I’m waiting right now to get the signed contract on a buyer side, also an equity sale. That much is good, since we have fared very poorly in ForeclosureWorld. But I just lost a buyer side that we need very badly, and I have not had any confidence that we can hold onto our own home for the past four years. Desdemona died, Shyly died, and Odysseus is making his last orbit around the sun. I’ve had family shit, and Cathy lost her father and is slowly losing her mother.

In short, I could wish for more triumphs and fewer tragedies. But the world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the reality of my own life is that I have to make a conscious effort to remember pain as soon as it’s over. I love my life best when I’m too Read more

July 5, 2012

“But we’ve got to have some regulation!” How else are insiders going to get their mitts onto sweetheart mortgage deals?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Regulation is rent-seeking, Rotarian Socialist graft, and that’s all it ever is. Who sold out the housing market? The regulators, of course.

AP: Countrywide won influence with discounts.

HousingWire: Investigation reveals Countrywide VIP program scope and influence.

Bloomberg: Countrywide Used Loans For Favor With Fannie Mae, Report Says.

I love this bit from the AP story:

Among those who received loan discounts from Countrywide, the report said, were:

—Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

—Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

—Mary Jane Collipriest, who was communications director for former Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, then a member of the Banking Committee. The report said Dodd referred Collipriest to Countrywide’s VIP unit. Dodd, when commenting on his own loans, said that he was unaware of receiving preferential treatment but knew his loans were handled by the VIP unit.

The Senate’s ethics committee investigated Dodd and Conrad but did not charge them with any ethical wrongdoing.

—Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

—Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., former chairman of the Oversight Committee. Towns issued the first subpoena to Bank of America for Countrywide documents, and current Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., subpoenaed more documents. The committee said that in responding to the Towns subpoena, Bank of America left out documents related to Towns’ loan.

—Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif.

—Top staff members of the House Financial Services Committee.

—A staff member of Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas, a member of the Financial Services Committee.

—Former Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif.

—Former Housing and Urban Development Secretaries Alphonso Jackson and Henry Cisneros; former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. The VIP unit processed Cisneros’s loan after he joined Fannie’s board of directors.

—Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, was an exception. He told the VIP unit not to give him a discount, and he did not receive one.

—Former heads of Fannie Mae James Johnson, Daniel Mudd and Franklin Raines. Countrywide took a loss on Mudd’s loan. Fannie employees were the most frequent recipients of VIP loans. Johnson received a discount after Mozilo waived problems with his credit rating.

The report said Mozilo “ordered the loan approved, and gave Johnson a break. He instructed the VIP unit: ‘Charge him ½ Read more

July 4, 2012

“It’s not the people, it’s the idea. The idea makes the people great, as great as they want to be.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Happy Independence Day. This is me, fiction from The Unfallen:

 
Bel Canto is about halfway between Central Square and Harvard Square. When they emerged into the cool of the night, they turned left, toward Harvard Square. They walked along in a contented silence, and she felt very close to him for no reason she could name. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his coat and his left elbow was sticking out there, like an invitation. Without asking permission she stuck her hand inside the crook of his elbow and kept it there. He looked down at her hand and smiled, so she knew it was all right. She knew they would look like an old married couple to the students pushing past them, one of those Yuppie couples who inhabit the high-rises on Mass Avenue. There’s a first, she thought, to be tickled at being mistaken for married.

Central Square is the shopping district for a number of blue collar neighborhoods. As you walk out of it toward Harvard Square, you see a little bit of everything — the Cambridge Post Office and city government buildings, free-standing houses, high-rise apartment towers, frat houses for both Harvard and M.I.T., cheesy little office buildings, restaurants, bars, fringe businesses — everything. But as you draw near to Harvard Square, Harvard asserts itself, and the eclecticism of the no-man’s-land between town and gown gives way to extremely absurd art galleries and extremely unappetizing restaurants and extremely fanatical radical bookstores and extremely incomprehensible retail stores devoted to every extremely incomprehensible pursuit or pastime known to the mind of man — or at least the Harvard man.

But even that can’t last. The real estate in Harvard Square proper is extremely valuable. If you cannot pay the rent, the landlord will direct you to a more suitable location closer to Central Square. In Harvard Square itself, absurdity is found only out of doors.

And it was out in full force tonight. At the Harvard Square station of the subway the plaza was rife with milling weirdness. Little teenage skateboarders with their strange haircuts and black street poets and homeless Read more

July 4, 2012

Unchained melodies: Darling, be home soon.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. Cathleen and I have been a couple since January, 1998, but we got legally, lawfully married on Independence Day in 2002. Our “our songs” are No Myth and Thunder Road, but there are some “my songs” that I think of often to remind myself of why I so much love being married to this woman.

That recording brings out the jazz in the song’s DNA, but no one, so far, has done a good job of finding the country song that’s in there, too.

I understand this all the way through me. I don’t always like being around other people, but when I do, the person I like to have near me most, most often, most enduringly is Cathleen.

So “Darling, be home soon.” I can’t think of a recording of this song I don’t like, but Derek Trucks just kills on the slide guitar at the end of this one.

And we close with John Hiatt expressing a mystery I understand very well:

June 29, 2012

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield: BloodhoundBlog is six years old today.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I almost let this day slip by without taking notice of it. Shame on me. Six years, almost 5,000 posts, and the only place in the RE.net where truth will out and where hustlers dare not dissemble and jive.

I am sad, to say the truth, that the promise I saw when first I began this crusade for a cleaner, more honest kind of real estate is by now all but shattered. Realtors went from bus benches and urinal cakes to their digital equivalents in the form of Facebook “likes” and Pinterest panderings — all without ever once stopping to think about the things we might have and should have done, the things we could have done and the world we could have made by doing them.

Even so, here’s my take, always:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
      –Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

If you loathe your self so much you can’t live without having your ass kissed, BloodhoundBlog is not for you. If you’re desperate to learn the latest tricks for deceiving your clients, you’ve come to the wrong place. But when the stench of corruption is ripe in the streets, when you want for once not to be lied to by the people you pay to lie to you — when you want to know the truth, no matter how painful it might be — you know where to find us.

Here’s a toast to BloodhoundBlog and to all the people who have written here over the years!

June 29, 2012

You say you want a revolution? Here is how to restore freedom in America.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Will Republicans repeal Obamacare next January — or ever? Don’t hold your breath. Mainstream politicians of both parties are addicted to corporate campaign contributions — and who knows what other kinds of bribes? — so what we will get will be a pathetic, cosmetic “reform” of Rotarian Socialist medicine. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If you want to restore the liberty of the American people, you will need to change the United States Constitution. And you will have to do that by constitutional convention and state-by-state ratification, because there is no way that Congress will vote for the necessary changes.

In a very short summary, here is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by libertarians, by free-market conservatives and by the Tea Party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks is proposed amendatory language, followed by a discussion of the objective to be achieved.

1. “The words ‘general welfare’ appearing in the United States Constitution or its Amendments do not create any powers of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of the government of the United States. Any legislation authorized by the words ‘general welfare’ is repealed.” This gets rid of one of the most pernicious pieces of federal elasticity.

2. “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that clause is repealed.” This does away with the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. The interstate commerce clause is second only to the general welfare clause as a means of enlarging the power of the national government.

3. “Amendment 16 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” Goodbye federal income tax. The federal government will have to return to taxation by capitation — the head tax.

4. “Amendment 17 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” This language puts the Senate back under the control of the states. This was a vital check on federal power. Read more

June 27, 2012

Did you Seymour Glass? It’s a perfect day for an iPhone killer.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Project Glass. Too much to love. Phone with no hands. Video with no hands. Internet with no hands. I can use an iPad when I need it, but 80% of what I’m doing with mobile computing, this can do. Here is where we’ll miss Steve Jobs. Google is better than Microsoft with new ideas, but what we’ll notice, when this ships, is everything that should be there but isn’t.

 
More: No phone on-board, no stereo ear-buds. A lot of hardware for so little functionality, a lot of room for me-tooish clones. This is the first of many new ideas where the passing of Steve Jobs will be sorely felt.

June 24, 2012

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

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Six years ago Friday, I launched BloodhoundBlog with the words cited in the headline:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others. This may or may not work in the long run for companies tapping into and amplifying open-source-like works of the mind. Consider that aggregator software levels the playing field for small players. The interesting thing is what it will do to companies whose entire business model is based on scarcity and hoarding. If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I’ve hit that theme again and again over the years: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. The question that will decide if there is even to be a newspaper is, can they hold onto my eyes for as long as fifty seconds? And will someone pay for those eyes in the random hope of piercing my vast indifference to advertising?

It comes down to career advice, I think, for the newspaperati and for all of us: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic. And: If you’re committed to sharing information even in a marketplace where ordinary information is so abundant as to be without monetary value, what are you going to do to make a living?

At Forbes magazine, Susannah Read more

June 13, 2012

Internet savvy Phoenix real estate broker seeks a buyer, a partner, an investor or a job.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A note to the Bloodhounds: I want to come in from the cold. If you know of a biggish Phoenix brokerage that could use my skills and assets, I’d appreciate the referral. –GSS

I own a very small boutique real estate brokerage — good reputation, strong good will, clean books, and colossal internet power — but I am ready to move on to something else. Stripped to the essence, this is what I have to offer:

  • A very strong internet presence consisting of several hundred-thousand web pages on a number of domains. I have several custom-built automated IDX sites, and I can throw 300,000+ backlinks at any web page, raising any web site’s standings in the Search Engine Results Pages virtually overnight.
  • A FlexMLS-based IDX real estate search site that scores on the first page of Google for a number of very-high-value search terms.
  • Me: A sales professional with a deep background in print and internet marketing and strong systems, applications and API programming skills. I built all of the web sites discussed below, and I have a lot of experience building workable IDX/VOW RETS solutions from the FlexMLS database. I have high-level relationships with real estate industry technical professionals and vendors, and I can present comfortably to groups from 50 to 50,000 people.

In short, I have a freight train’s worth of internet power being pulled by a mule-powered real estate business. The interent presence I bring to the table would be of substantially greater benefit to a much larger brokerage. Here is a summary of my internet assets:

  • BloodhoundRealty.com — Main brokerage lead-generation site. It’s built as a WordPress weblog at the top level, but it subsumes thousands of pages, including separate web pages for every community and subdivision in Metropolitan Phoenix. The idea is to capture long-tail searches and upstream them into qualified leads. I have technology, so far not implemented, to effect the same kind of long-tail search-capture for every street address in Metropolitan Phoenix, taking those searches back from the national Realty.bot sites like Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Realtor.com.
  • FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com — The most robust MLS search in Metropolitan Phoenix, and one of the strongest Read more
June 4, 2012

Unchained melody: Sam Cooke with “A change is gonna come.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Sorry if I seem to be ignoring y’all. I am all but completely unable to make an honest living in real estate right now, and that leaves me with next to nothing to say about making an honest living in real estate.

I am not without things to say, of course. Never that. But I am doing most of my talking at SelfAdoration.com just now.

Here’s proof: A post about changing your life for the better featuring the incomparable Sam Cooke singing A change is gonna come.

Art first:

Then rhetoric:

You have a unique, inviolable nature as a type of entity. You have many characteristics in common with other entities, and with other organisms, and for the most part you cannot change those characteristics. But every purposive action you can take is guided by your conceptually-conscious mind — by your free choices — and you can always resolve to choose differently going forward. When you do, your life will change — for the better, if you choose wisely. You know this is so, and, in consequence, if you simultaneously insist to yourself that it is somehow not so, the cognitive dissonance will make you miserable — and progressively less efficacious over time.

But if instead you accept your true nature as a human being for what it is, and then act accordingly, your life will get better and better in every way. No one can absolve you of your sins, since you answer to your self alone. But for the same reason, no one can rob you of your triumphs.

There is much more on that theme in this week’s “movie of the week” — a video podcast I am doing every week.

If you have not yet read Man Alive!, I entreat you to do so — and to share it with everyone you love. We all say we want to see the world change, but the book offers an actual strategy for making the change you’re looking for — in your own life and in the lives of everyone on Earth eventually.

Looking for the Cliff’s Notes? Here is one very potent idea: The world won’t change 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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