BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 55 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

October 29, 2010

Two more pix from my planet…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That’s my PhoenixBargains Twitter account as of last night. That account is nothing but auto-Tweeted real estate spam, six weblogs (five automated, one normal) running Twitter Tools plus FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com promoting its activity via Posterous (for now; I have plans to make this more robust and more interesting).

The first time I mentioned the PhoenixBargains asccount here, it had 54 followers. It’s now up over 300, the lord alone knows why.

Here’s a treat from last night:

Phil Gordon is the Mayor of Phoenix. He lives in my neighborhood, North Central Phoenix, but I doubt he’s looking for homes. Probably some minion on his staff was looking for local TweetFeeds and found me. I think we’re up to 500-ish new Tweets a day, every one of them software-generated, so they should have plenty to read…

October 12, 2010

Foreclosuregate? A scandal? If you want to sue for damages, it behooves you to have suffered a real, actual, material injury.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I had buyers back out of a purchase contract at the last minute, earlier this year. They got cold feet, and they had no remaining contingencies, so they understood they were losing their earnest deposit. The seller’s agent wanted to fight about it, making a lot of noise about specific performance. But here is what was interesting to me, thinking about the legal issues in the abstract:

The deal was a short sale.

In other words, had the sale proceeded to closing, the seller’s actual material gain would have been zero dollars and zero cents.

Taking account that we cancelled the contract, the seller’s actual material loss was — wait for it — zero dollars and zero cents.

Arguably, the seller might have suffered financial damages as a result of losing the home to foreclosure, rather than losing it in a short sale, but these consequences could never have been subject to my buyers’ control.

In other words, though we did not go to court, I could not see a way for the seller to claim any sort of material injury by the cancellation of the contract. He had no real, actual, material consideration at stake.

Why bring this up?

Because I think this is the end of the road in the so-called “Foreclosuregate” “scandal.”

To bring us up to speed, the Wall Street Journal wonders if we’re headed for housing armageddon. Not to be outdone, CNBC insists that foreclosure fraud is worse than you think.

Here’s what I think: If there were procedural laxities in the handling of paperwork, there was no intent to defraud. And laying that aside, there are no former homeowners who can claim that they were avoidably injured by mis-handled paperwork.

Why was your mortgage foreclosed? Because you stopped paying it. Did you have any rational reason to believe that you could keep your house once you had stopped paying your mortgage? No. If the paperwork that led to your foreclosure was not prepared to perfection, does that give you the right to retain possession of a home you are not paying for? No.

Voters are fools, of course, and the Attorneys General of the many states Read more

October 12, 2010

The defenestration of Don Draper: My take is that Mad Men will end Sunday with a bouncing exit from the biggest baby on Sixth Avenue.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I don’t have time for this, but I wanted to get my bet down on paper so I can bask in the glory — or ignominy — come Sunday night.

1. Don Draper is a coward. Whenever things don’t go his way, he tries to run away.

2. This season, he has played tentatively with the idea of making a real, adult commitment to his made-up life, but, even then, he has successfully run away, again and again, from his own redemption.

3. This most recent episode, “Blowing Smoke,” shows Don actually making a commitment — to the ad agency, to his relationship with Faye and to Peter Campbell.

4. All of this will fail.

5. When it does, Don will make the flying exit foretold episode after episode in the opening credits.

6. This will be the end of the series.

Tune in to AMC Sunday night to see if I’m right.

October 7, 2010

I had a hugely productive day yesterday, despite everything, so I got to give all that time back today.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’re back, after some travails.

Yesterday, I showed with two different clients, wrote five contracts, opened one escrow and moved 39 domains. I finished the day in South Phoenix, just as the mother of all storms was rolling across the Valley of the (cloud enshrouded) Sun. Y’all think you have weather where you are, but you ain’t seen a storm until you’ve lived through one of ours.

Witness:

That’s hail, forty-five minutes after it pummeled everything, followed by heavy rainfall, followed by still fairly warm temperatures. In other words, that’s some hardy hail. There are more photos here.

I left my clients soon after that photo was taken. The streets were paved with rushing rivers, and the trip home, which should have taken 20 minutes, lasted a full two hours.

Even so, the server swap was grinding on without me. We had a little trouble getting the (very big) BHB database back on line, but all else was pretty smooth. Scenius.net is down, and I have to make a host of minor fixes to some of my PHP files, but everything else seems to be normal.

Was all this worth it? We’re faster than a raped ape, and i haven’t done anything to supercharge our performance yet. It sucks when things don’t work just as you planned, but this — at last — was the right move.

October 2, 2010

It’s October the second. Do you know where your goals are?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That, literally, is a snapshot of my goal-pursuits for September 2010.

W is for walking every day for 30 minutes, a little over a mile, with Cathleen, Shyly, Odysseus and Ophelia. I sneered at walking before we started doing it, thinking it nothing compared to a hard half-hour on my mountain bike. But wrestling with 150 pounds of Shyly and Odysseus makes a work-out out of a walk. Ophelia is only 60 pounds, but she’s so puppyish and impulsive that she gives Cathleen and even better work-out.

The X is for weight-lifting, also 30 minutes a day. I’m doing this at around 6:20 in the morning — up at 6, then just enough time to deal with the overnight email as I hydrate and put two Tylenol into my bloodstream. Free weights work best when you are pushing yourself to the outer limits of your endurance. I do 30 repetitions each of ten exercises, all upper-body for now. The last four or five reps of each exercise are right on the verge of being agony. I literally feel as if my bones are not just going to break but to snap with a resounding crack. But like hitting your head against the wall, it feels so good when you stop.

S is for software, and you would not believe how easy it has been, this past month, for me to put in at least 30 minutes a day on our web sites. I started the month with a great idea that gradually destroyed the SplendorQuest server. While that train wreck was progressing, I built another set of cool tools that is generating huge quantities of new content — and a huge number of click throughs. But by the time that got cooking, I had created a monster on our dedicated file server, so I got to finish the month moving us into four new homes. The last three domains of that effort will be done today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, I know how to rebuild the first monster project on its own new home in such a way that it will be sleek and fast Read more

September 28, 2010

We’re gonna move: BloodhoundRealty.com and all of its subfolders and subdomains is moving to a new server.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m sure you’ve noticed the pain we’ve been going through. I made a big mistake a couple of weeks ago, and, in the process of fixing that, I uncovered systemic problems in our current file server arrangement that are most easily addressed with a match.

Which is to say, we’re going to burn this playhouse down. Last week, I moved FreePheonixMLSSearch.com and Scenius.net. Yesterday I moved 31 of our lower-traffic domains. Starting today, I’m going to begin the process of moving BloodhoundRealty.com itself to a new server.

This is no small task. We have a huge quantity of content, along with four weblogs associated with this one domain. It will be a while before I do the DNS change — and I’ll tell you when I’ve done it — and it will be a while after that before you land on the new server. As with every DNS swap we’ve done before, there may be some lost comments, if you land on the old server after the new server has gone live. But: We’re fairly slow right now, so this should not be a huge obstacle.

I’m sorry for the hassle — and I’m sorry for all the hassle you’ve been enduring. By isolating our big time-sucks, I hope to make everything perform better. I’ve got some cool ideas I want to play with, but I need to wait for a more stable BloodhoundBlog to show off that stuff.

More news as details emerge. Meanwhile, here’s Loudon Wainwright III on the subject of moving:

September 26, 2010

My take on real estate bar camps: If you want to learn how to sell, you’ll learn nothing by “studying” with enthusiastic amateurs.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Jeff Brown wants to know if real estate bar camps are a waste of his time. My view is that they probably are, at least in terms of making maximum productive use of time taken away from money-making work. Jeff is a chatty guy, so I expect he can have a good time with any random group of real estate practitioners, but in terms of epiphanies major and minor — or even just an a-ha! or two to cover the cost of the gasoline — there’s just not that much there there.

First a caveat — thus to give you a chance to dismiss me if your mind runs easily to thoughts of thoughtlessness: I’ve only been to one real estate bar camp. Brian Brady and I did a half-day BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at Zillow.com’s headquarters in Seattle, and the first (I think) Seattle REBC was held the next day. Brian and I did a session that day with Ardell Dellaloggia, then I used Al Lorenz’ Windows laptop to do a session on Scenius — with the latter being of benefit to no one, I think. I spent much of the day in a conference room, conferring with anyone who would dare to talk to me, and that was reasonably productive. I taught much more than I learned, but I got to spend quite a bit of time with Al, and that man knows a lot of interesting stuff.

But: The event was opened by a vendor, and the vendorslut influence was an oozing slime everywhere. It was obvious to me that the ordinary punters were completely lost, and it was equally obvious that the vendors were “befriending” folks who had learned nothing — except that they were scared and clueless — picking them off like drunken sorority pledges at a fraternity mixer.

I’ve not done anything with the bar camps that have been held in Phoenix, second because the wired Realtors in town seem to want to have nothing to do with me, but first because the wired Realtors in town don’t seem to know very much that I’m interested in learning. If Read more

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