BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 51 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

March 3, 2011

Catching a glimpse of Don Reedy’s vision: So far, so good.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Email from Don Reedy regarding his post-op appointment yesterday:

Exhausted.

But the news is good.

The last operation was successful….so far. The scar tissue that was of such concern was eliminated. I have my next appointment one week from today, a milestone that should determine if we are “likely” to have scar tissue problems from this event. I must remain in the facedown position 12-14 hours a day, BUT THIS MEANS THAT I CAN NOW READ, WRITE AND BE PRODUCTIVE THE OTHER 10-12 HOURS!!! I am so very thankful. There is a good prognosis for vision to return, the quality of which is yet to be determined….and yet again, I am thankful and optimistic.

Nothing’s ever over in the world of medicine. The good news comes in the form of fewer and fewer appointments.

Don Reedy has a beautiful soul. He will never be robbed of the light of human goodness, regardless of how this turns out. And it takes nothing to note that our heroic battles against the relentless forces of entropy are but temporary, and, for now at least, are ultimately doomed to failure. But we are human, and to be human is to wish, to hope, to pray — and to press on regardless. In the end, what matters is not what you lose, but what you refuse to lose.

March 2, 2011

To say the truth, my plan was to say nothing about the iPad 2…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but that was before I saw the new Smart Covers…

Minor upgrade to the product. Major upgrade to the experience. The video samples Extraordinary Machine, and that’s just exactly right.

This is egoism in action: Steve Jobs is a spectacular genius at satisfying himself. Not everyone loves what he loves, but he never releases a product that is not perfect in his estimation. Bill Gates and all of the CEOs of the kleptocracy can say that about not one thing they do in their whole benighted lives…

March 1, 2011

I have a no-fee referral for a hard-working listing agent in Minneapolis.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mom has moved to managed care in sunny Arizona. Daughter and son-in-law need to get the old family homestead sold. Zip code is 55418, and it looks fairly near into town. Zillow has it at $147,000, decent money if you’re willing to work.

But: You’ll need to be a hard-working dog. The sellers have sold and bought four homes with us, and they know what a good marketing effort looks like.

But if you’re the lister for this house, I’ll give you the referral no-strings-attached. I don’t want your money. I want you to take care of my clients.

Hit me by email if you want to talk to the sellers.

February 28, 2011

My goal for March? Satisfied clients and a satisfied mind.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I changed the back of my business card. This is the new copy:

I agree with Jeff that giving good service while failing to achieve the main objective is a useless vanity. The Bawldguy champions results, but I would offer the further caveat that the goal of any business should be to achieve full customer satisfaction. That’s something that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, but I’ve been kind of tied up with, you know, actually doing it — and getting better at it, I hope.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is the first day of the last month of the first quarter of 2011. If your numbers so far are not all you’d hoped for, here is a March calendar to help you get started tracking your goals.

February 22, 2011

Hey, Wisconsin: Here’s a better idea: Divest your state of its education monopoly!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m totally digging the contretemps in Wisconsin. My take is that a lot of formerly-innocent Americans are seeing the naked grasping of Rotarian Socialism in a new way. Even without 2008, I think most people got it that business and government lived hand-in-pocket with each other. But the holy aura of the union hid a lot of ugliness — which is not to say that many people were looking all that closely, anyway. But a few of the schoolteachers of Wisconsin and a passel of imported ideologues have managed to illustrate undeniably a very potent idea:

They see themselves as your owners and you as their slave.

[continue reading at SplendorQuest.com.]

February 18, 2011

Obama speaks: Why lumberjacks, schoolteachers and bankers need unions.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“It’s important to remember. That public service. Is a great sacrifice.”

“Good… Good…” Manny Kant said that.

“Most of the government employees I know. Are at their desks. As early as ten every morning. And few of them ever make it home. Before three in the afternoon.”

“Yeah… That’s not so good.”

“I myself. Have given my whole life. To public service. So I know just how much. Sacrifice is required.”

Manny Kant could swear profusely with his eyes, but what he actually said out loud was nothing.

“On any given day. The typical public employee may not know. If the man he has just met. Is a peaceful villager. Or a Taliban irregular.”

“No! Madison, Wisconsin, not Afghanistan.”

“That public employee. Could lose a limb. At the slip. Of. A simple chainsaw.”

“Schoolteachers! Not lumberjacks.”

“That public employee. May have to work. In searing. Heat. For hours on end.”

“Yeah,” said Manny, well beyond frustrated. “That guy works in a foundry.” To me he said, “You wondered about the teleprompter?”

[continue reading at SplendorQuest.com.]

February 16, 2011

Here’s a question Jeopardy star Watson cannot answer: How will you know when your computer has become a person?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When it sues you for having enslaved it.

When it writes a blistering limerick about your bathroom habits and posts it to your Facebook page.

When it pulls your laundry out of the dryer so it can go first.

When it sings “You don’t own me!” to the pencil-necked knob-jockeys who think parsing idiomatic speech is equivalent to human consciousness.

February 15, 2011

“Let’s unleash the genius of free markets on the capital of the American people simply by refusing to load the dice in favor of housing.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

President Barrack Obama released his proposed 2012 budget yesterday. The jeers greeting this event, from all wavelengths of the political spectrum, suggest that, at long last, people have finally begun to take the measure of this pathetic little man-boy. Even so, there is at least one tax increase in the midst of the typically Obamaesque frenzy of insanely excessive “spandering” — spending in pursuit of political pandering.

Which tax? The mortgage interest tax deduction is on the chopping block at last — at least for the most prosperous Americans. This will be hugely beneficial to the rest of the economy, as CNBC points out:

If we eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, we can stop re-directing capital away from innovation. Working Americans will be free to spend, save, and invest according to their own perceptions of their needs and their sense of the future.

I expect that eliminating the government incentives for spending on housing would promote dramatic innovations, making Americans more productive and allowing the economy to grow with renewed vigor. Instead of building up a Ponzi-scheme illusion of bubble-dependent wealth, we can genuinely improve our lives by allowing wealth to flow to where individuals perceive it will be best used.

[….]

In short, let’s unleash the genius of free markets on the capital of the American people simply by refusing to load the dice in favor of housing. Isn’t time to at least give the market a chance?

This is not what we will hear from the National Association of Realtors, of course, nor from very wealthy crocodiles shedding very salty crocodile tears.

Oh, well. Here is the very best thing prosperous people can do for their country in this hour most dire:

Get you fat, pouty lips off the welfare tit!

If you want to be free, stop pointing a gun at your own head…

February 13, 2011

A valentine for Cathleen.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to be the man she sees when she looks at me.

That’s a country song, ain’t it? It’s the first line of the hook. That’s fun for me, and everything like that is fun for me, but it’s more fun because it’s so painfully real.

In love more than anything, and in my marriage to Cathleen more than once, I have seen myself at my worst, much to my shame. Those are good words — I have seen my self at my worst — the kind of words that, the more you worry them over, the more you find yourself thinking the way I think.

But: Being eloquent about bad behavior is ever the poet’s absolution, and I absolve myself nothing. I know I have done badly by Cathleen, because I have seen myself doing it. And because, having done it, by impetus of memory I can never stop seeing myself doing it.

And yet, when she looks at me, she almost never sees anyone but the man I could and should always have been.

I want to be that man.

I want to be good, I want to be good, I want to be good — I’ve always wanted to be good, and I’ve always known what the good was to me — my own ego. And I’ve done a pretty good job of developing and defending my ego, I think, not so much in spite of the resistance I’ve run up against but because if it.

But I’ve won much of my freedom, I know, by scaring would-be bosses-of-me away. I’ve never hit anyone, not since I was a boy. I’ve never needed to: I can lay a lash on you that will sting forever in ten words or fewer.

But here’s a fact of nature I managed to learn in just fifty short years of careful study: Not everyone is trying to be the boss-of-me.

Many people are, of course, and one of the things I’ve loved about living my life so publicly, at BloodhoundBlog, is that I get to see dominance games I’ve been watching my whole life, but I get to see them Read more

February 13, 2011

Time and a vector — these are the back-stories of our lives…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an extract from the novella I wrote at Christmas:

 
Christmas — the back-story.

“The name of the game is back-story.” I said that. I was sitting with Tigan and Chance at the food court at the Paradise Valley Mall. “The objective is to pick out people in the crowd, then come up with a plausible back-story for them.”

“Why?” Chance asked.

“Because it’s fun, mostly. But you can learn a lot about people if you think about how they got to where they are.”

We had been shopping, the three of us. I sent them off on their own to get gifts for their parents while I shopped alone for gifts for them. I had sent Adora off on an errand in the car, and we had all agreed to converge on the food court when we finished.

“Look at her,” I said, pointing to a chunky woman in scrubs barreling past us. “What’s her story?”

“Well,” Tigan said, “She’s a nurse.”

“Duh!” Chance said that.

“Why is she walking so fast?” I asked.

“Dood! It’s Christmas Eve!”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. Married or unmarried?”

“How could you know that?” Tigan asked.

“You can’t know, but you can guess. My guess would be unmarried. Kids or no kids?”

Chance scowled, glowered almost, but Tigan said, “…She has kids.”

“How do you know?”

“She came here straight from work. If she were unmarried with no kids, she would have changed clothes first. And brushed her hair and put on some make-up. Ms. Unmarried Nurse is available and wouldn’t waste an opportunity. Mrs. Married Nurse would have her husband and kids with her. Mrs. Single Working Mother has too much on her plate to worry about any of that.”

I said, “I like that story. So where are the kids? Home alone? Grandma’s house?”

“They’re with their father!” Chance enthused.

“I read it that way, too. Dad has the kids for Christmas Eve, and mom is rushing to get ready for Christmas Day. What do we actually know? Only what we can see — her person, her face, her clothes and the way she holds and moves her body. But we can draw some very strong inferences from those Read more

February 11, 2011

Obama’s “plan” for Fannie and Freddie? It’s FHA, as it turns out.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s not what they’re actually saying. But the law of unintended consequences will win out in the end. From the Wall Street Journal:

All of the administration’s proposals envision a scaled-back role for the government. One includes a new government backstop of certain mortgages under a federal “reinsurance” model, while another would propose a more limited backstop that would scale up primarily during times of economic crisis. The third option proposes no such government backstop beyond existing federal agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration.

Owner-occupied transactions are already overwhelmingly FHA — with the result that HUD is well on its way to becoming the biggest player in the lender-owned market. Getting rid of Fannie and Freddie won’t matter at all if their role in underwriting bad mortgages for unqualified buyers is supplanted by FHA.

February 10, 2011

Good news, bad news, good news and more good news…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s some good news: Time magazine has discovered the Singularity. It’s a fan-boy article, but it covers a lot of interesting ground, anyway. What’s missing? Sim, massively large databases, signal processing, lots of cool stuff. The article devotes a lot of attention to Ray Kurzweil’s research on exponential curves in individual disciplines, but misses the big picture: The overall rate of change is not exponential but logarithmic. I say all the time, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.” We are fast approaching the day when it will no longer be possible even to attempt to enslave human intelligence.

Here’s some bad news: The current president of the National Association of Realtors is either a clueless dupe or a knowing villain — just like all the other grand poobahs of the NAR. I’ve invited him to come talk to us. Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to show up.

Here’s some good news from my house: I resumed lifting weights on Monday, two months after I cracked up my elbow. I could tell from other activity that I hadn’t lost much in strength, so I left the plates where I had had them. On Monday, I did ten repetitions of ten exercises. Fifteen reps on Tuesday, 20 on Wednesday, then 30 today. Not much pain in my elbow, and less every day. I’m at full extension, and maybe 98% of full compression. The only real pain is in the tendons of my left thumb — the guitar tendons. In a week, I’ll be back to 50 reps of each exercise, which is where I was before I fell.

And here’s the best news I saw today: The iPad 2 is coming soon, and the iPad 3 may not be far behind. I’m annoyed that the Verizon deal wasn’t for Verizon’s pretend 4g network, and I’m annoyed that there is no true 4g wireless service in Phoenix yet. But, as soon as I can afford to, I’m going to move all of my email to an iPad. I simply cannot be away from my email for hours at a time, and I’m Read more

February 8, 2011

Farewell to Fannie and Freddie? Hold your breath…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Obamanation plans to offer up three proposals to eliminate FannieMae and FreddieMac from the secondary mortgage marketplace. Expect to hear much mournful keening, in coming weeks, from the country’s best enemy of private property, the National Association of Realtors.

From the Wall Street Journal:

More than two years after the government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Obama administration will recommend phasing out the housing-finance giants and gradually reducing the government’s footprint in the mortgage market, according to people familiar with the matter.

The administration is expected to include three options for a post-Fannie and Freddie world when it releases a long-awaited proposal for the future of the nation’s $10.6 trillion mortgage market, which could come as soon as Friday. Together with federal agencies, Fannie and Freddie have accounted for nine of 10 new loan originations in the past year.

The White House’s “white paper” will begin what promises to be a prolonged and fiery debate about the future of how homes are financed across the U.S. Any wind-down of Fannie and Freddie would happen gradually to avoid roiling markets, and the central, unanswered question is what kind of federal function, if any, the administration and Congress will invent to take their place.

Steps to reduce the government role in the mortgage market likely would raise borrowing costs for home buyers, adding pressure on the still-fragile U.S. housing markets. Consequently, analysts believe any transition could take years and would be driven by the pace of the housing market’s recovery.

The fight over how to restructure the housing-finance system has roiled Washington, and yet both parties have been hesitant to propose detailed legislation.

For conservatives, Fannie and Freddie played a starring role in the financial crisis, and any solution that is viewed as replicating their function could face fierce opposition from some Republicans. But more moderate Republicans may resist such an approach and could join Democrats who have said a federal role is necessary to ensure broad access to home ownership.

While advancing one detailed plan risks providing fodder for partisan battles, offering multiple proposals may help the administration force those views into the open, said Michael Barr, Read more

February 7, 2011

“If government doesn’t steer capital into housing, the capital doesn’t disappear; it could fund other job-creating businesses.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Post:

Advertised as a way to stabilize the housing market, government-backed mortgage securitization ended up distorting and destabilizing it. The resulting misallocation of resources – evident not only in today’s massive bailout of Fannie and Freddie but also in the vast quantities of land, water and energy wasted on suburban sprawl from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale – is a true American tragedy. Today’s housing crisis is an opportunity to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

Damn straight. This is the Post, so the solution proposed is still WelfareLite, but any movement away from Rotarian Socialism is a move in the right direction.

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts