Author: Greg Swann (page 43 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
I got to the hospital after visiting hours, but the nurse led me to the room anyway. “There hasn’t been anyone,” she confided.
I pursed my lips in grim acknowledgment. “That’s why I’m here.”
Inside the room the patient looked like purple death. It was a critical-care room, bright and white and cheerfully clinical. The bed was surrounded by apparatus, with lines and leads and probes and IV tubes running to him. The only unbruised part of him that I could see were his eyes, and his eyes were more deeply wounded than anything.
I’ll tell you his story, but I won’t tell you his name. His name is yours. His name is mine. His name is legion…
I pulled up a chair and got as close to the bed as I could. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted him to see mine. His jaw was wired and he was breathing though a plastic tube mounted in his throat, which makes for a fairly one-sided conversation.
“I just came from the funeral,” I said. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen. The procession must have been two miles long. Kathleen Sullivan, mother of six, grandmother of two, with two more on the way, loving wife of Brian Sullivan – in the newspaper it’s just something that’s there, like the basketball scores or the stock tables. People die every day. People are born every day. It doesn’t seem to matter very much.”
I shrugged. “I think it does. I’ll tell you a story: About six months ago there was a woman driving down Endicott Avenue. Driving very safely, five miles an hour below the speed limit, doing everything just exactly right. There were some schoolboys riding their bikes on the sidewalk beside her, and, all at once, one of the boys decided to dart out into the street, right in front of her car. She stood on the brake pedal, but it was already too late. Screech, crunch, tragedy. The boy was killed instantly.
“She saw it, of course. His little schoolfriends saw it. Half a block away was the crossing guard, and she had Read more
Here is Brian Brady, this afternoon in Phoenix:
Brian has family here, which is why he is in town, and he was gracious enough to spend some time with me and Cathleen. We had a chance to catch up, as well as to talk about future BloodhoundBlog Unchained events. We talked about the love of human liberty, too, but I can attest that Brian definitely did not arrive in this vehicle:
Totally NSFW, like all things Matt and Trey:
More, because an event like this can’t be celebrated enough:
The Federal government wants to save your life by killing your livelihood.
This is something we might expect the NAR to object to, but the National Association of Realtors is too busy telling lies.
Meanwhile, here’s some actual good news: We are getting closer to workable video wallpaper.
William F.X. O’Connell — that’s Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie to you — has been making a game effort to go straight over the past few years. This paid off in abundance this morning, when he finally managed to get himself arrested.
Meanwhile, just yesterday Willie published a collection of his outrageously brutal Christmas stories at Amazon.com. It’s Kindle-only, but every smartphone and tablet computer has a Kindle reader by now.
These are the stories, all of which have been published here in various versions over the years:
The season’s greetings
A dumpster diver’s Christmas
A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan
A future more vivid
A father for Christmas
Merry Christmas, Princess Peach
A Costco family Christmas
How to slay dragons
Courtney at the speed of life
Cathleen and I did the line-edits on the final manuscript, and it was interesting to me to see how well the thing holds together as a collection. Separately, the yarns are almost too brutal, but taken together they have that certain cathartic something that left me feeling cleansed — beat up, to be sure, but better for having endured the punishment.
Anyway, y’all could do a favor or three for our jailbird friend:
- Buy the book — or give it as a present. At around 20,000 words, it’s a lazy afternoon or a cross-country flight in length.
- Review the book. It would be nice for Willie if you have good things to say about the stories, but it will be better for everyone if you simply tell the truth.
- Tell your friends. Here is code you can link from:
Willie has an account at SplendorQuest.com, so we can hide and watch to see what has to say about being a fully-processed citizen of the U.S. at last. In the mean time his presence at Amazon.com puts him all the way into the establishment, like it or don’t.
We’re introducing a new dawg today, one who puts his bite where his bark is, Hank Miller of HoundDogRealEstate.com in Atlanta. Hank is an associate broker, leader of a team of Realtors, as well as an appraiser. Here’s his credo, which I like a lot:
My objective is to call bullshit where I see it and have a little fun doing it.
I also did some housekeeping this morning, trimming a dozen folks from our contributors list. No drama, just pruning folks who aren’t spending much time with us. We’ve never deleted an account, so if your name was ever in our sidebar, you’re always welcome here.
Meanwhile, I love seeing the stuff Brian Brady, Mark Madsen, Jeff Brown and others are doing. I spent a little time last week looking at what other weblogs in the RE.net are up to by now. For all of me, we’re the last stand against the vendorslut mafia. This is a resource to be treasured: BloodhoundBlog is the only place on the internet where real estate professionals can call bullshit — fearlessly and in undeniable detail.
When a Bloodhound howls, the rafters shake. That’s a sound I never tire of hearing…
Teri Lussier pointed this out to me last week, and I’ve been waiting since then for someone to plumb the implications. Ah, well, when there’s constabulary work to be done…
Here’s the news: The state of California is making ZipRealty pay it agents minimum wage for their time.
That’s huge. It’s just the thin edge of the wedge, for now, but the implication is that the real estate broker’s “safe harbor” exclusion from employment laws is about to be flushed into the Pacific Ocean.
This is why brokers pile on as many hopeless, helpless, hapless idiots as they can: Virtually everyone has at least one transaction in him, and the cost to the broker for the eventual failure of 85%+ of the new “hires” is nothing.
I don’t want to seem to praise employment laws, since their sole effect is to destroy jobs. But no other business would — or even could — be as wasteful of human capital as virtually every real estate brokerage is.
Could that be changing in California? Take note of this:
“Employers who previously were not concerned with minimum wage issues are now put on notice to ensure they are providing those basic protections to workers.”
And this:
After learning of the Bakersfield cases, California State Labor Commissioner Julie Su in September filed a $17 million lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court on behalf of hundreds of other ZipRealty employees statewide. That lawsuit is pending.
Brokerages like Zip (and Redfin, etc.) have a greater exposure, because they operate too much like real businesses. But I can’t imagine what the 25,000 or so starving California Realtors might be thinking just now.
But I think I have a fair idea what their brokers are thinking…
The National Association of Realtors is propped up on three flimsy stilts: The real estate licensing laws, the “co-broke” — the cooperating brokerage fee behind the MLS system — and the IRS-sanctioned independent contractor “safe-harbor.”
Unheralded by anyone who knows why it matters, the “safe-harbor” took the first Read more
I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. From PC World:
Forget phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The era of the Internet handle is emerging.
Instead of having to remember a phone number or an e-mail address, in a few short years we might simply find somebody remotely over the Internet via his or her handle, another word for an Internet nickname.
It would be similar to the way handles are used in instant messaging or Skype, except that the handle would apply to all modes of getting in touch, including a phone number or e-mail address (or several of each). In my case, my Skype handle, “MattaboyBoston,” could become the way you would reach me.
“People will no longer seek each other’s phone numbers or email address[es] when establishing personal or working relationships,” wrote Gartner analyst Adib Ghubril in a report on mobile predictions for 2012 and beyond. “Instead, they will ask each other, ‘What’s your handle?’ ”
Ghubril said that handles will have a huge advantage. They could remain unchanged for a long time, if not for life.
The idea is simply indirect addressing: If I depend on your physical address (or your phone number or email address), when you make a change, I am lost. But if I use an indirect addressing scheme — I address you by name, or by “handle” as this article avers — then the indirect address can always accurately reflect your current contact information, even if you change it twelve times a day.
The responsibility for maintaining accurate contact information moves from dozens or thousands of distracted and loosely motivated people to the one person most strongly motivated to make sure your messages get through — you.
As with all predictions, the ideas discussed in the PC World article are kludgy and stoopid. This all will actually happen as a beneficial side-effect of cloud-based data storage. We talked about this over the summer in discussions of a hypothetical CRM called Heidi:
An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as Read more
My apologies to y’all for my extended absence. I got good and sick on my way back from Anaheim, then doubled-down on dextro last weekend. I managed to put two houses into escrow, but I didn’t get a lot else accomplished.
And so I owe an even bigger apology to Rob Chipman, who joins our roster of writers today. We were talking with Rob about making this change for the past few weeks, but by the time he was ready for me, I was off the radar. In consequence, he has two posts ready to roll, and I’m just now doing the admin work to make that possible.
If you’ve been following our comments, you’ve gotten to know Rob well. He is a Vancouver real estate agent and property manager, and his brokerage, Coronet Realty, has been around longer than some of us have been alive.
Please make him feel welcome — and then go ahead and just treat him like family.
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
I can be counted upon to walk, after all.
When everybody’s nowhere and even the laundromats are empty. When the respectable stores are closed and the line at the 24-Hour Slurp ‘n’ Burp is 15 deep with people craving cold beer and hot salsa and high-octane unleaded. When there’s one lonely mailman in an immense empty truck delivering insanely last-minute gifts sent via God-Help-Me-If-I-Screw-It-Up-Again Express Mail. When the streets are empty and the highways are empty and the parking lots are empty and, for once, even the bars are empty — I can be counted upon to walk. You’re at home with the yule log blazing, with a glazed ham baking, with a Bordeaux breathing, with the children seething to tear into that cache of treasures parked beneath the tree. And Uncle Willie’s out walking on Christmas Eve, dragging his pencil on the pavement for no good reason at all.
“Storm windows,” John Prine sings. “Gee, but I’m getting old. Storm windows, keep away the cold.” And that’s a silly enough thought in the great outdoors. I was cutting through an apartment complex and the closed-for-the-holidays supermarket next door had left its parking lot speakers blaring. And the radio station was playing a song they’d never play if they thought anyone was listening.
I can hear the wheels of automobiles
so far away, just moving along through the drifting snow.
It’s times like these, when the temperatures freeze
I sit alone, looking at the world through a storm window.
Down on the beach, the sandman sleeps.
Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.
The country band, it plays for keeps.
They play it so slow…
I was about twenty feet away from a big blue dumpster and I heard a rustle. You can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take away the boy’s revulsion for rats, and I was suddenly in the mood to be walking elsewhere. But then there was a big tumble-rumble-boom, something big knocking into the steel walls of the dumpster, and I knew it wasn’t a rat.
And I knew what it was, too, and so do you. We call them Read more
A: Ahem.
I swear I’m not making this shit up. Witness:
“It’s time to do something different.”
Jeesh…
(H/T Linda Davis.)
How much attention have you devoted, over the past few years, to so-called on-line real estate marketing experts? How stupid do you feel now that those unwitting judas goats have sold out your IDX feed to Zillow?
Nobody likes to be mocked for being a dupe — the prospect of which, I freely admit, can make BloodhoundBlog a daunting place. But: Which is worse — being called a doofus or being a doofus?
BloodhoundBlog Unchained is a completely different way of learning net.wise real estate marketing. No dupes. No doofuses. No hype. No cant. No vendorsluts. We work as hard as we can for as long as we can, and we send our students home poor in sleep but rich in ideas.
Here’s what you missed yesterday at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Anaheim:
I demoed half a dozen ways of creating web pages and web sites automatically from raw content.
Scott Schang showed us how he has used WordPress and select plug-ins to create a lead-conversion machine.
Mark Madsen and Tony Sena illustrated the web marketing ideas that have launched their property management business into orbital velocity in just a few months.
And Eric Blackwell was the show-stopper as always, taking us through all the latest twists and turns emerge from from the Googleplex — and documenting a killer strategy for attracting sellers on-line, the holy grail of Internet real estate marketing.
We had other speakers as well, and Brian Brady regaled us with email marketing strategies until almost 10 pm.
But the highlight of our day was Realtor magazine’s on-line editor, Brian Summerfield, pictured above, who bearded the Bloodhounds in their own den. Brian very graciously and calmly defended the NAR’s more controversial stands, and the dawgs acquitted themselves admirably, engaging Summerfield with insight and without rancor. More that one person compared the talk to Nixon’s visit to China, but I’m not sure who was whom. 😉
Everywhere you turn there are so-called experts peddling so-called solutions — but the problems being solved are not your problems generating leads and closing sales. Instead, almost always, you are being sold, the the problem to be solved is the speaker’s carefully-concealed poverty. But Read more