It’s clear even to him, by now, that history will no longer regard him as being the most inept American president…
Author: Greg Swann (page 70 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
Believe it or don’t, just yesterday I was telling Cathleen that I felt remiss in not having made fun of the Vook lately. The Vook, as you will recall, is Brad Inman’s latest attempt to prove that he stumbled onto half a billion bucks by accident. The trouble is, as he is discovering, pissing away that kind of dough isn’t easy, no matter how clueless you are — and Inman takes a back-seat to no one at cluelessness.
Even so, I need to issue a mea culpa of my own: The Vook has actually made it to the marketplace, a feat I would have bet against. Simon and Schuster — which has always made all of its profits from crossword puzzle books — turns out to be possessed of its own Inmaniacal cluelessness: The New York publisher is issuing Vook content, apparently because its printed books are not already selling badly enough.
But: Don’t despair. Even though there are very few people who are stupid enough to buy this stupid gadget, the Vook will still serve a purpose in the history of marketing: It will make the Zune look popular by contrast.
Okay, so all the Realtors know that short sales are like a jack-in-the-box: You crank and crank for weeks or months and nothing happens, then everything pops all at once.
Happened to me today, with the Sphinx-link bank suddenly lurching to life in order to issue two must-rush-now documents that reiterate terms my buyers have already agreed to.
That doesn’t matter. Must-rush-now! Must-have-today! Must return to hibernating state no later than 5 pm.
So Mom is at home and Dad’s at work — and both of them are 35 miles away from me.
We could trade faxes, but the originals are already barely readable.
But: No worries: We’ve got DocuSign on our side.
I set up the whole workflow: I sign, Mom signs, Dad signs — and then the whole package goes back to the lister, all untouched by human hands.
Note that I set everything up so that I could leave if I needed to, once I had signed, and the rest of the job would percolate through the ether on its own. I love this feature, since I no longer have to nurse documents.
But, as it works out, the whole job, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, was done in seven minutes flat.
I plan to write more about DocuSign when I have more time, but for now: If you don’t have DocuSign, get it. Your time is your money, and, in consequence, this is some of the best money you will ever spend.
And now the bank can roll over and go back to sleep…
P.S.: Just got confirmation that the lister has the documents. Twenty-two minutes total.
I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.
As a species, that is.
Through all of human history.
Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”
That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded, as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.
But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.
But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.
[Continue reading here, if you like. This project is way off topic even for a blog as topically-liberated as BloodhoundBlog, so if you want to follow along at home, the main action will be at SplendorQuest.com.]
I’ve never loved video as a means of promoting real estate listings. I much prefer lots and lots of really big, really detailed photographs.
But: The SMS marketing we’re doing with DriveBuy Technologies makes video a necessity. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is simply too compelling an opportunity to pass up.
Hence, on Thursday I pounded out six videos for three of our listings, all in about three hours total labor. That’s everything, from set up to sequencing to background music to recording voiceovers.
How is that possible? I used iMovie, the more basic movie-making software for the Macintosh. I also have Final Cut, but iMovie makes making basic plug-and-chug videos a breeze. Even better, it integrates directly with YouTube, so I can publish from within the app.
I’m promoting houses, so I’m using photographs, not full-motion video. Assembling these little films is quick and fool-proof.
How’s the quality? You tell me. I think these are more than adequate to the task.
Let’s take a look:
The house…
And the neighborhood…
This is just plain vanilla Ken Burns stuff, and you can take it the way the software does it or manipulate the effect yourself.
Here are two more, made for 1946 East Vista Drive:
The house…
And the neighborhood…
These two were done using iMovie’s Scrapbook theme, and all the transitions were done automatically by the software.
One more: 5708 East Paradise Lane:
The house…
And the neighborhood…
These videos used iMovie’s Photo Album theme, again with no manual intervention.
Without doubt you could do even cooler stuff by intervening with the software, but these results seem pretty sweet to me without my having to do a lot of manual tweaking.
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):
When I was a kid, my Uncle Jack, my mother’s oldest brother, told me a story I’ve never forgotten. He was at a little county fair way out in corn country. Nothing special, just beauty contests for hogs, cheesy little rides and sticky, sugared confections.
Late in the day, the ice cream vendor decided to pack it in, announcing that he was giving away what was left of his inventory. People elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, so eager were they to get something for nothing. They walked away with the ice cream piled into their bare hands, rushing off to their cars, leaving a trail of melted drips behind them.
The lesson I took from my uncle’s story was that those folks didn’t really want ice cream. They were willing to get themselves dirty, and to get their vehicles dirty, just to have something for free. Most of them probably didn’t even eat the ice cream, and they certainly couldn’t have enjoyed it. Imagine trying to inhale a glutton’s quantity of chocolate-fudge-swirl before it melts all over your clothes.
Could that be what’s going on right now with the $8,000 first-time home-buyer’s tax credit? I happen to be carrying three listings that are undeniably “investor’s specials” — which means they’re a good buy, but they need a lot of work. Even so, my phone is ringing off the hook with agents trying to sell those houses to owner-occupants — folks with very little cash trying to get an FHA loan so they can buy a house, thus to get $8,000 in “free” money.
Do those buyers really want homes, or do they just want that free money? What will happen to the properties when the $8,000 is spent? Should we dial the clock back to 2006 to see if anything looks familiar?
Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors is campaigning for even more “free” money to bribe even more otherwise-unmotivated buyers. The only thing that could make the deal sweeter would be a double hand-full of “free” ice cream.
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Yesterday I had mail from a Realtor who had proposed the idea of custom yard signs to a listing prospect. The client’s eyes lit up, and he saw not only the immediate possibilities but the future portents. Here’s what the Realtor had to say about it all:
One thing I found so interesting is that any time you mention custom signs, all the agents who don’t use them make comments about how worthless they are, but this guy, the client, the seller, got it immediately. Got the reason for it, could see how it would stop traffic, understood it all — without me selling him on it.
Funny how you have to sell agents on stuff that would make perfect sense to their own clients.
We’re adding three new contributors today. Two of them are envelope-pushing Realtors, but one is a certified, bonafied real estate client, an educated consumer who can tell a hawk from a handsaw — and who isn’t shy about speaking his mind about the utility of either one.
That consumer is Damon Chetson, a BloodhoundRealty.com client from way back and a long-time contributor to our comments threads. Damon is a newly-minted criminal defense attorney in Cary, NC, but he will be talking to us here about how he perceives the real estate industry as an informed outsider.
Robert Worthington is another frequent BloodhoundBlog commenter. He’s a hard-charging Realtor in Manitowoc, WI, and he spends all of his spare time looking for technobabble bubbles to burst.
Greg Dallaire is another Wisconsin Realtor, working out of Green Bay. Not only does he have a first name that rings sweetly to my ears, he sings a song very dear to my own heart: “I’m passionate about implementing technology into my business to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and increase profitability.”
As you might have inferred from my absences, punctuated by brief bursts of brevity — the wit of soul — I’m a busy boy. I’m about to become a busier boy, because I want to undertake a task for the ages. In the mean time, this was my response to the email cited above:
The actual message of Read more
…prepare yourself for the asshole cops…
Just think: If you just keep voting for more and more government, eventually the nanny-state might find a way to stuff you back up into your mammy’s womb. Or, failing that, they’ll exterminate you and everyone you know and love. Either way, the world will finally be rid of the pestilence of pesky humanity.
Black humor? No shit. But at least you don’t have to wonder who’s the asswipe now…
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):
If you live in New York or Boston or Chicago, there will come a day in the Spring when the cold will seem to be in full retreat. The sun will be shining. The icicles on the trees will be melting, and the tickle of the cold drops of water on your hair and neck will make you want to throw your arms out wide and rejoice in your release from the awful prison of Winter.
That happens in Phoenix, too, but it happens six months earlier, on September 15th. Mid-March has its own charms, when the citrus trees open their blossoms and the air is thick with the nectar of heaven perfected. But it’s when the Summer breaks in Phoenix that people come outdoors, knowing that the next ten months will be simply perfect.
Consider: On August 15th, the late-afternoon temperature could be 115 blistering degrees. The sun will be relentless, seeming to hang for hours above the horizon, seeming never to set. The relative humidity will be 40% or more — which doesn’t sound too bad until you remember the temperature. Late in the day, huge storms could come thundering into the Valley of the Sun, flooding the low-lands and even tearing the roofs off of older houses.
That season — we call it “the Monsoon” — lasts from July 15th to September 15th. But when September 15th rolls around… paradise ensues. Daytime high temperatures drop to below 100 and the relative humidity tops off at below 10% — so dry you can smell the dry leaves and pine needles baking in the sunlight.
That might still sound too hot to you, but it’s not. It’s just perfect, an ideal time to be outdoors — all day and all night. There is simply no place like Phoenix, no place on Earth. We suffer, slightly, during the Monsoon, but we are repaid with ten months of the kind of weather that other cities are lucky to see for ten days in any given year.
And Winter — which you are just now beginning to dread — Read more
Brian and I gave a three-hour presentation last Friday to a small group of top-producers at the Phoenix Association of Realtors. We asked Bloodhound Terry Melcher to help us set it up, and she packed the room with some of the most successful Realtors in Metropolitan Phoenix.
Brian was in town to help me shoot promotional videos for BloodhoundRealty.com, and we made a video of the speaking event as well. Don’t pester Ryan for a BHB.TV channel: It’s our usual garage-band quality production.
We cover a lot of ground in the 2.5 hours of video linked below, but there’s not a lot of cutting-edge stuff in there. If you’re new to our schtick, though, this might be a good short introduction to the BloodhoundBlog Unchained way of thinking.
[This is me, from 09/10/2006. –GSS]
Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999. I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex. I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.
Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.
I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and best can be. I don’t believe in heaven, but when I think of what was done that day, I pray there is an everlasting torment for the men who did it…
Technorati Tags: 9/11
Responding to Brian Brady’s BloodhoundBlog post about the profits and pitfalls of social media marketing, here — surprise! — is my contrarian take on the subject.
This came in for a trackback on my NAR tax-credit video post:
http://hottopics.blogs.realtor.org/2009/09/08/ my-nar-tax-credit-video-“tell-the-natio/
The link resolves to an https address — in other words, a secret inner-sanctum blog. They won’t stand up for themselves in the clean, clear light of day, but they’ll piss and moan to each other in private.
It’s not that they’re gutless, mind you — or not merely gutless. So much the worse, they know they’re wrong — and they still won’t do the right thing.
How horrifying to spend your whole life thinking you’re one of the good guys only to discover that you are every bit as corrupt as Charlie Rangel, immersed snout-deep in the corporate welfare trough, turning a million mostly-innocent entrepreneurs into cheerleaders and lobbyists for even more legislative piggishness, turning three hundred million innocent Americans into cannibal’s fodder for your million-vampire-feast.
Who killed liberty in America, the last best hope for freedom on this Earth?
Was it Alexander Hamilton and the Whig/Federalist/Republican party, the original champions of corporate welfare?
Was it Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party, who wanted freedom for everyone — so long as you’re not black, brown, red or yellow? Or was it Lyndon Johnson and the modern Democratic party, who want freedom for everyone — provided you’re not an American?
Or was it the National Association of Realtors, who helped to turn a nation of hard-working, hard-charging, fiercely independent people into a gaggle of sniveling beggars, who can no longer even imagine paying their own way in life, who spend all their time concocting new ways to despoil their neighbors.
With every passing day, we are that much closer to being a nation of vampires, and it was the National Association of Blood-Sucking Vampires who first taught us to attempt to live by plunder instead of production.
But as much as I despise what they have done, still I feel for them as people. So I’ll offer up this much as a salve for the scabs they can’t stop themselves from picking at:
Redemption is egoism in action.
When you discover you have behaved badly, either willfully or inadvertently, there are three things you must do:
1. Admit your error Read more
Want to know what Realtors can do to help resurrect the American economy? They can get the hell out of the way, that’s what.
Here’s my entry in the Al Lorenz/Don Reedy NAR tax-credit video contest.
Think you can do better? Please do. And tell everyone you know in the media to latch onto this with every tooth they have left in their dainty little lapdog jaws.
This used to be a free country. Whether or not it ever is again depends on what each one of us does now…
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):
Get a load of all that great housing news! Median prices are up! Sales volumes are up! The prognosis for the future? Up, up, up!
Here’s a different take: If it looks, walks and talks like hype, it’s probably hype.
Are houses selling well, compared to a year ago? They are — but the federal government is giving first-time home-buyers $8,000 in free money to buy houses right now. If that tax credit is not extended or replaced with something even more generous, the music will stop on November 30th.
And while median home prices may be up, prices for homes that normal working people actually buy are flat at best — and they have been trending downward since December of 2005.
But what about the shortage of available homes you have read about? What about the multiple offer scenarios, with homes selling for thousands of dollars over list price?
What would you expect to happen when you artificially stimulate demand at the same time that you artificially limit supply? We should be doing what your grandpa used to call “a land-office business.” Instead, even with $8,000 in free money, prices are still trending downward.
And that artificially-limited supply — all of the foreclosed homes that banks are withholding from the marketplace — will flood the market sooner or later.
If you’re in the real estate market right now, what you should do depends on your circumstances.
If you’re a seller, make a deal. Your carrying costs will almost certainly exceed any gain you can hope to realize by waiting out the market.
If you’re a first-time home-buyer, jump. If you’re not under contract by October 15th, you’ll probably miss out on the tax credit — and houses are not easy to get, taking account of the artificially-limited supply.
Buying with a loan? Interest rates are low for now, but they may not stay that way.
Buying all cash? Sit tight. As sweet as prices look right now, it seems likely they’ll get a lot sweeter when the banks finally release all the homes they’ve been hoarding.
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