BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 69 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

November 4, 2009

What could be more important than television?

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I had a dental dilemma yesterday, and it’s left me less than useful. I’m working — I wrote a contract earlier this evening — but I’m housebound for now. It gives me time to post, for a change, and this is an important topic that I’ve wanted to take on for quite some time.

The issue?

Television.

I almost never make time for it, and then not regularly, but there are exceptions in my life (facilitated by on-line and on-demand re-runs).

Thus:

1. Glee. Incomparable harmonies. Preciously POMO, but still deliciously rude. Corollary: Baseball sucks. Cut it out.

2. Madmen. Will Donald Draper defenestrate this Sunday?

3. South Park. I have concluded that Leopold Stotch (“Butters”) is the glue that holds the show together.

I would like to have something of moment to say about Entourage, which we always enjoy when we see it, but I’m too cheap to pay for HBO.

November 4, 2009

Vook dead yet? Doesn’t matter. If you want to sell blades, first you have to find stubble that people are willing to pay to have shaved.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more

November 4, 2009

Voters discover a cure for Obamania?

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I actually feel kind of bad for the should-have-known-better folks who voted for Obama. It was obvious to me last fall that he was a false-flag candidate, a stone liberal masquerading as a centrist. And I understand that, for true stone liberals, he’s actually been somewhat of a disappointment. But for people who can do math, their misplaced faith in Obama has to sting twice, once for having been so dreadfully wrong, and once again because snarky assholes like me just won’t let it slide.

But here’s the good news, from my point of view: Last night’s results may have the immediate impact of putting the brakes on all this tax-and-spend stupidity. The larger stupidities will endure, of course, but we just might have gotten ourselves shut of the home-buyer’s tax-credit last night. Surely this is an event worth celebrating.

This is Instanpundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds in today’s New York Post:

But [Obama] was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of “czars” while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

With the economy tanking (unemployment is much worse after Obama’s deficit-swelling stimulus than Obama’s advisers predicted it would be with no stimulus at all), with the promised post-partisanship dissolving into witch-hunts against hostile media and the promised post-racial America devolving into the awkwardly staged “beer summit,” with the “necessary war” in Afghanistan the subject of endless dithering and the promised “smart diplomacy” materializing as a series of awkward missteps by Hillary Clinton, the froth has become a lot less frothy.

Republicans, who were prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt a year ago, now can’t stand him. Independents who voted for him are deserting in droves. And Democrats don’t seem that happy either.

The good news for Obama is that he doesn’t have to run for re-election for three more years, so he still has a chance to get his feet under him. But for Congress members facing elections in a year — including Read more

November 1, 2009

“The net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This from my Arizona Republic real estate column:

As I write this, the entire real estate industry is on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the $8,000 first-time home-buyers tax credit is going to be extended.

It’s not really a tax credit, it’s a taxpayer-funded subsidy, a “gift” extracted by force from everyone who does not buy a house under the program. The money taken from taxpayers — either now or later by deficit spending — is money that cannot be spent or invested elsewhere.

And it’s not as though this were a zero-sum game. The actual marginal sales — the home sales that would not have happened without the subsidy — may have cost taxpayers from $40,000 to $75,000 each. And as huge as those numbers are, they ignore the interest cost of the borrowed money, the opportunity costs of mal-investment and the compound interest value of those opportunity costs.

Government action cannot create wealth. At best, it moves wealth around. At worst, government destroys wealth by taking it away from the very people who have new ideas and new technologies to invest in.

But as bad as this tax credit is, it’s only temporary. Someday it will end. The mortgage interest tax deduction — which almost no home-owners actually get — is forever. The government dominance of the secondary mortgage market — FannieMae, FreddieMac, GinnieMae, etc. — is forever.

And here’s the real kick in the head, given all we’ve been through in the real estate market over the last eight years: The National Association of Realtors reports that 59% of all new home loans this year were underwritten by the Federal Housing Authority, the Veterans Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

What this means is that a huge number of homes will have been sold this year with down-payments ranging from 3.5% to -5%. Six out of ten new mortgages are essentially nothing-down loans.

The U.S. government wants to buy your vote by making home-ownership easy. But the net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values.

 
Steal this book: I’ve written over 200 Read more

October 28, 2009

If you want to do what you can to kill this pestilential home-buyers’ tax credit…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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…today is probably the day to make contact with your state’s U.S. Senators.

(Incidentally, if you want for your political communications to have maximum force, you have to do more than write a check. You’ll get double the impact is you make a photocopy of your check — and then mail the photocopy to your candidate’s opponent. This should be very effective over the next two years in “purple” districts.)

October 25, 2009

The bad news: Tens of thousands of people, including IRS agents and including at least one four-year-old, fraudulently claimed the $8,000 first-time home-buyer’s tax credit. The good news? When these morons take over your health care, you’ll probably die before you suffer too terribly much…

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From Politics Daily, the you-just-can’t-make-this-shit-up section:

Four-year-olds are adorable, trustworthy, and, having never owned a home before, fully eligible for the first-time homebuyer tax credit that Congress passed in 2008.

As a result of that loophole and numerous faulty reporting mechanisms, a House panel learned Thursday of tens of thousands of cases of fraud in the tax credit program, including more than 500 instances of people using their children — including a four-year-old — to apply for the credit to get around income caps and a requirement that the purchaser has never owned a home.

Together, fake or faulty claims for the $8,000 refundable tax credit may have cost the government up to half a billion dollars so far, investigators told the Ways and Means subcommittee.

Russell George, an inspector general with the Treasury Department, told the subcommittee about the most brazen instances of bogus claims that he had come across since the IRS created a filtering system last May to weed out suspicious applications.

George said he had found nearly 20,000 returns for people who may not have actually purchased homes; thousands for people who already owned homes; 3,200 taxpayers who could not prove they were in the country legally; and an unspecified number of IRS employees wrongly applying for the credit.

It is completely implausible to me that anyone could expect anything other than disaster from government-run anything. I like to say that governments are only good at one thing — killing people — but even that isn’t true of the U.S. government: The Army expends 20,000 rounds of ammunition for every confirmed kill. No worries, though:

This week Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) began a push to expand the credit to all homebuyers and extend the deadline, now set for Nov. 30th, to July 2010.

Good plan…

October 24, 2009

“See, the thing is, Don Corleone, I just want you to steal my competitor’s assets and give them to me. I don’t want for you to tell me what to do with them after you steal them for me. Capisce?”

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Rotarian Socialism in action:

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt favors net neutrality, but only to a point: While the tech player wants to make sure that telecommunications giants don’t steer Internet traffic in a way that would favor some devices or services over others, he also believes that it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.

The impulse is to say, “What a schmuck!” But once they’ve screwed up the internet, that will be one more once-free aspect of American life that will be enslaved forevermore.

Here’s a little rule of thumb to head off objections: If an allegedly-valuable social objective cannot be effected without force, it’s crime.

October 20, 2009

What makes “progressive” utopias like Portland seem so cool to the cognoscenti? Could it be a zoning-enforced racism?

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From newgeography.com:

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

More:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to Read more

October 15, 2009

When you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything…

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

Here’s what happened: I had to stop walking because I was sick. You may not know it, but on top of all the other scourges it entails, the state really has it in for itinerants. You may never have wanted to run off to Alabama with a banjo on your knee, but I’d bet you’re more than a bit dismayed to discover that you can’t. Got to have a fixed address, so they can inflict all their precious ‘benefits’ on you.

So I had to stop walking and I had to see a doctor, and of course I couldn’t. I’ve walked myself right out of society, and I have an inkling I may have walked myself right out of the human race. At least that’s the way Nurse Martinetti made me feel.

That’s really her name, but I think she must have married into it. She looked like American Gentry to me, which is to say John Bull white trash six generations from the last capital crime. Short, bottle-blonde with a cut that looks cute on smudged-nosed tomboys, thick through the ankle and the cortex. My guess is she became a nurse because she red-lined the psych profiles for meter-maid.

First, it’s not a doctor’s office, not anymore. It’s a ‘Health Services Cooperative’. We all know what a cooperative is: It’s a place where you go to not get whatever it is you came for. It would make too much sense to stay home, where you already don’t have it. In any case, Nurse Martinetti is charged with making sure that no one gets anything they came for, although they might get stuck (literally!) with quite a lot they’d have sooner done without. But I wasn’t even that (un)fortunate, because I don’t have a fixed address.

Nurse Martinetti gripped her clipboard and said, “What do you mean? How can you not have an address? Everyone has an address. Some people even have two!” She looked at me as if I were something a puppy accidently left on the carpet.

“…,” I said with a shrug.

“Are you homeless?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I sleep Read more

October 15, 2009

Dead Mac Society: Cupertino, we have a problem…

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I have a Macintosh IIfx that is old enough to vote and yet still runs perfectly. But just a little while ago, we lost the hard disk in Cathy’s iMac, and this morning my own precious piece of Iridium woke up by not waking up.

I saw some screen noise in my noodling about, so I’m hoping it’s a circuitry issue. That would almost certainly mean that the machine itself is slag, but, as long as the hard disk has survived, all is not lost.

But still… Macs don’t fail. And two Macs don’t fail this close to each other in time.

After Cathy’s machine went south, we added a 2 terrabyte backup server — even though I have never backed up a Macintosh in my life.

Not the end of the world, but this is going to bite a big — and expensive — hole in my day.

October 14, 2009

The passive path to active real estate investment marketing

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I was talking with Jeff Brown on the phone yesterday about how much we depend on passive marketing devices — our Phoenix real estate weblog mainly — to generate new business.

We don’t even do all that much. By now there are much better resources to turn to than me for advice on how to do real estate weblogging. But what we do is consequential, because we are constantly adding to our inventory of hard-headed real estate information.

As an example, I wrote a post this morning on the factors that contribute most to the profitability of Phoenix-area rental home investments. That post in turn supports a basic guide I have prepared on rental home investing in suburban Phoenix.

What am I up to? I’m pre-conditioning future clients, for one thing. I’m sharing a lot of hard-headed information, but I’m also letting them know what it’s going to be like to work with me. In addition, I’m splitting the herd, isolating the people I will want to work with and sending the others packing.

The weblog post will have a future in other locations. I can use the HTML to make a very compelling Craigslist ad. And, in the long run, that post will add to the content on our static real estate investments page.

Here’s the best news: The people I hear from who will have pursued all of this information will come to me pre-sold. I won’t have to cover as much of the basics with them on the phone. They will not have picked up the phone to call me until they had already committed to hearing more of what I have to say. They won’t be slam-dunk conversions, necessarily — investors never are — but their business will be mind to get — or to lose — with no significant competition.

I am not diminishing more active prospecting strategies — much the contrary — but this is the kind of thing that I can set up once that will pay me over and over again. And as others here have noted, the climate for rental home investors in Phoenix just keeps getting better Read more

October 10, 2009

The news media may insist that the real estate market has turned the corner, but my attitude toward work is simple: “Just say yes!”

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This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

We represented the buyers for a million-dollar house, our first, that closed this week. A week from now, we will be listing a million-dollar home, also a first for us. We are carrying two listings at $450,000 right now, with another to come, and we will be listing another home at $800,000 shortly.

But also this week, I sold a property for $65,000. Just a few weeks ago, one of my listings sold for $27,000.

Am I schizophrenic? I hope not. But I am scared to death to say no to anyone right now.

Salespeople like to say yes. It’s not in our nature to turn people down. We like to make people happy if we can.

But I have no idea when this recession is going to end, so I don’t want to pass on any opportunity that might present itself.

Here’s the funny part: We’re living with a foxhole mentality, but 2009 is going to be our second-best year since we came into the real estate business. We’re not rich by any means, but we’re making more money than we have in the past three years.

But here’s the unfunny part: Virtually all of our income for 2009 is coming to us in the second half of the year. Our business was all-but-moribund in the first two quarters, and we came much too close to losing our own home.

So I am not proud, bashful or shy. If you have a real estate problem, I’m ready to talk about it. We’re working sixteen hours a day, at least, seven days a week. We haven’t taken time off in three years, and I don’t know when we will take our next vacation.

The job is survival right now, and I know we’re not alone among Realtors in thinking this way.

I’m nobody’s bear, and I would love to believe all the cheerleading I hear in the news about the real estate market. But my strategy for now is to just say yes to every opportunity I get to earn a living.

 
Spread the word: Click here for a printer-ready version of Read more

October 9, 2009

Flying beyond flyers, here is our first full-color brochure for our first million-dollar listing

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A week from today, we will list our first million-dollar residence. (The web site is a placeholder as I write this. We’ll begin to populate it next week.)

But the home is a spectacular specimen, and we wanted to do something more to bring that out. So yesterday we put together our first full-color brochure for a home.

That’s the outside face. Full-size is 17×11″, with a fold in the middle to permit it to fit into our flyer boxes. You’ll have to imagine where the fold will split the image.

And here is the inside face. If you click on either image, you can see the full-size, full-bleed pre-press files. Fair warning: They’re 87 megabytes each.

Here’s the text from the inside front panel:

True luxury, true elegance is not a
vast accumulation of shiny trinkets,
a mass of dazzling distractions.
The artifacts of genuine wealth are
streamlined, refined, stripped down
to the essence. Simple. Unaffected.
The best expression of your limit-
less lifestyle is a home that serves
as the jewelry box for the precious
treasure that is your family…

And that’s why god made Lord & Taylor…

This is going to be a fun one for us, a chance to put every idea we’ve been playing with to the test.

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