There’s always something to howl about.
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
A rose is a rose, but the desert has a beauty all it own…
No matter how busy I get, I always want to make time in my life for beauty — wherever I might find it. I spied these lovely cactus flowers in the front lawn of a hugely distressed foreclosed home. Sad stories abound. Bad news is the only news people can be bothered with. But every day is a new beginning, a brand new shot at grace. If you quarry the good within you, then splendor is everywhere you go…
I want to write bumper stickers. Like this:
What would you shout in my place?
A. It could happen.
B. Whoda thunkit?
I’m dumbstruck: When all you have are fangs, everything looks like an artery.
Sweet dreams, Poohbahs.
I’ve loved Jott.com since it was introduced. I use it every day — mainly to send reminders to myself, but also as my primary interface into Google Calendar. No more. Jott ends five years of gamely trying to get people to understand its value on May 3rd.
A lesser cause for mourning, Cisco flipped the switch on the Flip video camera line today. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for this for a while. The best idea Flip had was easy integration into YouTube — a feature your phone has by now, I should expect. Meanwhile, we switched almost all of our video to our Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot cameras as soon as we got them.
The first BloodhoundBlog Unchained was clip-documented via Flip cameras, so I am not indifferent to see it go. Just to put extra icing on the Flip’s farewell cupcake, Cisco paid — wait for it — $590 million for the company in 2009.
Ultimately, I won’t weep, though. I can’t remember the last time we used the Flip for anything. Jott, on the other hand, is going to leave a big hole in my workday.
So Republicans got hustled on their paltry budget cuts. What a surprise. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is busy fixing what’s wrong with America by tinkering with abortion rules and gun control laws.
This is an excellent way to blow a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It seems obvious to me that what needs to be cut is not spending but regulation. If the Feds dumped OSHA, for example, that would not only not only cut the budget by all those staff lines, it would result in an “economic miracle” of new productivity. The same would be true at the state and municipal level. Less government means more wealth twice: Fewer “broken windows” and the added productivity that results from investing the money that would otherwise have been wasted on regulatory broken windows.
This is something Realtors and other real estate professionals can be doing in this unprecedented moment: Teaching the Tea Partiers what matters in an emergency and what can wait for calmer seas. Quoted below is economist Thomas Sowell with an excellent idea: Get America’s billionaire tax-vampires off our necks:
Trying to reduce the deficit by cutting spending runs into an old familiar counterattack. There will be all kinds of claims by politicians and sad stories in the media about how these cuts will cause the poor to go hungry, the sick to be left to die, etc.
My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires. Many, if not most, people are probably unaware that the government is handing out the taxpayers’ money to billionaires. But agricultural subsidies go to a number of billionaires. Very little goes to the ordinary farmer.
Big corporations also get big bucks from the government, not only in agricultural subsidies but also in the name of “green” policies, in the name of “alternative energy” policies, and in the name of whatever else will rationalize shoveling the taxpayers’ money out the door to whomever the administration designates — for its own political reasons.
The usual political counterattacks against spending cuts will not work against this new kind of spending-cut approach. How many heart-rending stories can the media run about billionaires Read more
Here’s a fun little exercise for your brain:
Suppose I sneak up behind you, throw a burlap bag over your head, tie you up and then lock you in my basement. Would you regard that as a crime?
I don’t mean just a call-the-cops crime or a phone-your-lawyer crime. I don’t mean simply a violation of some arcane statute law. Even if we were on a desert island, with no written law of any sort, would you still regard my actions as a crime against your person and your liberty?
I know I’m asking you to think for yourself, all by your lonesome, with no hints or signals from the mob and no helpful pre-printed guide to clue you in to the “right” answers. Poor you. So I’ll cut you a break: You can feel free to quit this tiring exercise at the very first instance that you are able to truthfully answer, “No, I would not regard that as a crime.”
So let’s do another one:
Instead of locking you in the basement, let’s say I let you work all day in the sunshine and fresh air, tilling and tending to my fields? You are still my prisoner, but you’re not tied up or locked up. Would you still regard that as a crime?
And, hey, we all know that forcing people to work for free is slavery, so what if I pay you a nice wage for your efforts? You’re still my prisoner, and you still have to do the work I tell you to do, but now you’re being paid handsomely. Would you regard even that little trifle as a crime?
So how about this? Suppose I set you free? Manumission! Just like you pictured it! There’s only one catch. Whenever you buy or sell food, you have to do it through me, like a feudal serf. There are other people who could trade with you, perhaps leaving you with quite a bit more profit than I will, but you are forbidden from doing business with any of those people. You must go through me, paying my price. Would you regard that as a crime?
Clarify Read more
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde
Like the kitschy “antique” phones at Restoration Hardware, this is decadence.
Nothing but a coy little pomo trick of the mind, but this is how it starts: You have no reason to prefer our product over any other, so we’ll tease you with nostalgia and cool-geek chic, instead. There’s a laptop that praises itself on the strength of its Unique Selling Proposition: Interchangeable “skins.”
You heard it here first: Computers is dead.
But despair you nothing: Particle physicists have caught a glimpse of an unseen aspect of our world, unthought of just a year ago. These are the first days of understanding mass as subatomic physics. Very cool.
The implication? Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to my right. But that says nothing about where I can take myself. The human race is Fortune’s treasured pet, obviously, and with luck we will continue to outrun outright predation, the terminal stage of cultural decadence.
Which side are you on? Are you just another gelatinous face in the mob, grasping for some way to trick people into doing business with you? Or do you have the character to bring real value to the marketplace?
Could somebody please get these retards a job they can handle?
Hey, NAR grand poohbahs, wanna look smart? Just stand next to FannieMae.
This post is grown from a comment left by Brian Summerfield, editor of Realtor magazine. Before I begin, I want to commend Brian for daring to show up here to debate this topic. I think he’s wrong, but the man has more guts than the people who pay him.
Now then: I said:
Doesn’t mean that banksters would not have come up with other flavors of larceny.
To which Brian replied:
Greg, you toss this off as an afterthought, but I see it as a key point. You say the sine qua non of the Great Recession was NAR, but it was in fact systemic flaws in the global financial system. Without collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps, there would have been no Great Recession. And NAR had nothing, nothing, to do with the creation of those “innovations” of finance.
As you, the reader, may have noted, there are people writing and commenting here who are more than unusually interested in philosophy — as a map of the universe and as a discipline of the mind. Brian’s argument turns on what normal people call “hypotheticals.” Jim Klein calls them contra-factuals, where I am apt to rave on about subjunctivity. In all three cases, we are talking about the same thing: We are making what we hope are logical claims about imaginary worlds, worlds not in evidence.
The universe outside our minds has an independent and prior existence, and the objects and events that comprise that universe are real and factual existents. When I make a statement about the real world — the universe of real things — my statement is subject to independent verification. The object I claim to see is either present or it is absent. The event I claim is happening is either occurring or it is not. Disputes about statements like these are possible only to the insane or to philosophy professors — but I repeat myself.
So: These things really happened:
1. The National Association of Realtors either wrote or lobbied for a great host of Rotarian Socialist laws devised to churn the residential real estate market for the benefit of real estate brokers Read more
I threw down the gauntlet — and not for the first time:
It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.
The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.
We know they’re spying on us. And we know their PR pimp demonstrated that he got bilked when he paid for his law degree, so poorly does he argue.
So: Why doesn’t the brave National Association of Realtors — the largest, richest, most-powerful Rotarian Socialist corporate-welfare-tit-sucking political pressure group in the land — why won’t it stand up on its hind legs and defend itself?
For a first reason: Because it can’t. Better than any of us, the grand poohbah blood-sucking vampires of the NAR know beyond all room for doubt that it was their legislative initiatives that were the seeds, stems, stalks, branches, trees and forests that caused the housing boom, the housing bust and the Great Recession.
And for a second reason: Because they are actively plotting to do still more, still worse damage to the American economy. They will not stop sucking until they have sucked the body politic dry.
How do we know all of this true? Cum taces, clamas. When you say nothing, you shout.
They don’t defend themselves because they can’t. They know they are criminals. They pray, every sleepless night, that you do not know it.
In fact, the silence of your putative “leaders” does not prove me right. That would require an argument — an argument only I am happy to make. But the fact that the National Association of Realtors does not challenge my arguments is potent evidence that they themselves believe I am correct.
Are you waiting for the NAR to argue that someone else is responsible for the Great Recession — for the ruin of your own finances and for the devastation to be delivered to your children and grandchildren?
Don’t hold your breath. They know they’re at fault. And so do you.
Hey there, toothy-grinned, glad-handing Realtor: How’s the world treating you?
Business is not so good? Your house is worth less than half of what you paid for it? Your kid has three degrees but can’t get a job?
Are you looking for someone to blame for your troubles?
Guess what? There really is a mastermind of evil in the American economy. A vast parasite, a vampire king, with an insatiable appetite to devour everything that used to be known as “the American way of life.”
Are you being preyed upon by banksters? By Wall Street tycoons? By Chris Dodd and Barney Franks?
Those are the folks we like to blame, when we seek explanations for the Great Recession.
But who is really at fault for your miseries?
The sine qua non cause of this disaster — of the national economic malaise and of your own personal financial situation — is… wait for it…
The National Association of Realtors.
It’s the NAR that obstructs consumers’ access to market alternatives to old-fashioned real estate brokerage.
It’s the NAR that insists on subsidizing homeownership at the expense of other, more-productive uses of capital.
It’s the NAR that manipulates the tax laws to induce thoughtless consumers to overpay for homes they never would have — and never should have — bought in the first place.
It’s the NAR that makes war on the rights of Americans to use and enjoy their real property as they choose.
It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.
The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.
The NAR’s legislative initiatives are uniformly criminal in their objectives. The purpose of all economic legislation is to induce by force an outcome that would not occur in the absence of that force. This is crime, no different from a mugging.
As the author of every state’s real estate licensing laws, the NAR mugs consumers by preventing them from doing business with whom they choose — on the terms Read more
Or is it getting interesting out there?
I showed to twelve different parties this week, and I put the ball through the basket four times — two of those with Property Management Agreements after COE. At least two leases, too, with other leases still in doubt. I’m working all day from my car, but that’s always been my favorite place to be.
Is it just me, or has the worm turned?
How could Dan Connolly need an introduction? He’s been running with the dogs in our comments for years. My fault for not inviting him to join us sooner, but Dan took the hound by the ears in his own behalf. He’ll have a post up for us shortly to let us know what we’ve been missing.
I asked Dan for a brief bio, and this was his response:
Bio? I was licensed in 1986, w/RE/MAX since 88… Internet marketer… family man.
I don’t like to toot my own horn.
I am committed to ethics and will always go the extra mile.
I don’t really know what else to say.
Ah, well, the man might be demure, but I don’t think we’ve ever found him to to be shy of thoughtful opinions. Please make him feel welcome.
This is a response to a comment from Robert Worthington. I’ve turned it into a post because I talk too much.
> On average how many visitors are you getting monthly to your site?
I have no idea. I’ve never been fastidious about analytics, and by now I’m useless. I have no idea which pages are tickling Google (known to my stupid soul as Urchin — that’s how long it’s been since I bothered with any of this) and which are not. Most everything is new, so most pages, presumably, are not even hitting my Analytics account, which I have not visited in years, in any case. I suck at SEO, too. And my CRM-life is CRM-free, still, after years of kvetching about it.
I need a high-C to bring order to my life, clearly, but there’s more:
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook. I don’t write much on my real estate weblog and I never go off topic. I don’t get many comments from normal people, I don’t unmoderate comments from real estate professionals, and I don’t encourage comments in any case. The calls to action are email or phone. I write here and there and nowhere else.
I do not believe my clients need me to be their buddy.
I do believe they need me to be an expert on residential real estate and how to go about buying, selling, renting, leasing, improving and profiting from it.
So: I have written tons of content over the years, and I deliver it all on my real estate blogsite. I have no idea how many people see it, nor how many dig in and read it. But I know that the people I hear from are almost always pre-sold on working with us, and most of those contacts turn into closed transactions — many of them multiple transactions, some with multiple-transaction referral trees.
On top of that, we deliver tons of dynamic content, mostly in the form of MLS listings. Every dipwad in town has search, but we have the best MLS search available from any Phoenix real estate brokerage, and we’ve optimized it in ways that other brokerages Read more
My tenth house for this year is closing today, and I may be leasing up my two vacant rental properties between now and five o’clock. I know, I know — I’m missing out on all those wonderful paper fish on TwitBook, but my experience is that paper-fish chowder doesn’t make for a fulfilling meal.
Oh, well. Each man to his own saints. But, unlike TwitBook, where spitballs cast at other Realtors come back a thousand fold, when I say the words “I have a no-fee referral,” what that means is pretty simple:
I have an opportunity for you to catch a real fish — and cash a real paycheck — and all you have to do is deliver the frolicking goods!
It’s not nearly as much fun as wasting time on line while you pretend you are doing work, but everything’s a trade-off, ain’t it?
Here are the notes from the seller:
I am a huge fan of your blog. And though I am not a real estate agent, I used many of your sites articles and initiative to help me locate and buy my current home. Unfortunately, I never came across an informed agent who understood the value of proper high tech research and the value I was bringing to the deal. Sadly, the agent that I settled with for the purchase was nothing more than a functional tool for me to direct. Much disappointment (though I worked a great 25% off market buy in the end!)
And as I now I am selling my previous house – I beg you assistance: How can a well prepared seller locate a forward-thinking agent?
I do want a energetic agent. I do want a marketing savvy realtor! I do want a custom yard sign that shows the price! I do want the listing to appear where the buyers are looking online. And on and on.
Get it? You have to be a Bloodhound. You’ve got to be prepared to do the work.
But if you are, I’ve got a deal for you, all tied up with a bow, and all you’ve got on TwitBook is a Read more
