BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 72 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

July 18, 2009

With MLS listings available everywhere on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

Here’s an intriguing question: Given that it’s so easy to search for homes on the internet, why do you need a buyer’s agent?

Face it, if you use the MLS search tool on my web site, you’re seeing exactly the same listings I see. And you know better than I ever could what you like and what you don’t like.

By now, the home search process is at best a partnership between the agent and the buyer. In some cases the buyer and I will work together to perfect our search criteria. But many buyers simply search the available inventory on their own, emailing me the MLS numbers of the homes they want to see.

So why do those buyers need a buyer’s agent?

Realtors hoarded the MLS data for so long that even they came to believe it was the source of their value to buyers. But this is very far from the truth.

You don’t need me to search for listings, although I’m happy to do that. And you don’t need me to open lock-boxes. You need a buyer’s agent to guide you through what is in fact an arcane and perilous process — potentially a financial disaster. You might not need me to find your next home, but you need me to make sure that you get it — or that you pass on it, if that is what is truly in your best interests.

A skilled buyer’s agent will write the kind of purchase contract that will prove surprising to you at every turn, with every term and condition tailored to achieve your best advantage. Your agent will supervise the inspection process and negotiate the optimal solution to the repair issues. Your agent will be prepared for every pitfall in the escrow process.

If you bought and sold houses every day, you could do all these things yourself. It’s because you don’t — and because the seller and the listing agent are looking to take advantage of your naivete at every turn — that you need a skilled buyer’s agent as your steadfast champion in Read more

July 16, 2009

For those of you following the lurid drama of our lives…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We bought our house out of hock today. All it took was a tiny little pawn ticket and a great big check. Our small feat of redemption was actually paid for by June’s receipts, but I got myself into this mess by surfing the payables, and I got myself out the same way. We retired the outstanding debt eleven days early, and it’s been a while since we’ve been that early on anything.

That notwithstanding, we are very far from being out of debt. But June was great, July is good, and August and September promise to be two of our best months ever. If the fourth quarter lives up to its promise, 2009 could end up being our best year so far. By this time next year, we could owe nothing but the mortgage — which is good, because our credit will take a while to recover from these past three years.

There is none of this that is anybody’s business, actually — except that people choose to affect to make my business their own because of who I am and how I behave. That’s fine, even if it sometimes seems to me to be simultaneously voyeuristic and masturbatory. I have a job that pays pretty well when it pays anything at all. When we got slow three years ago, we made a very big bet on internet marketing, which we were already pretty good at back then. By now we kill, and we’re getting better by leaps and bounds every single day. If you think our financial troubles prove our marketing ideas wrong — you just keep thinking that way. By the time you understand what it is we’re doing, we will have leapt into a completely different orbit.

Meanwhile: For all the good-hearted folks who wished us well in all of this: Thank you. I’d rather not have done this in public, but I couldn’t have picked a nicer bunch of people to do it with.

Now switch off this insipid soap opera and go do something productive with your life!

July 12, 2009

Some questions about using DocuSign for electronic signatures

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’ve avoided DocuSign because ZipForms was so terrible in the Mac world. While the new implementation is not great, it’s better. And as kludgey and expensive as DocuSign seems, I really, really want electronic signatures.

But I have questions:

1. Can I use DocuSign to do my “broker oversight” signatures? That’s not a legal question. I’m just asking, is it possible?

2. If I receive a document — say a counter-offer — from another DocuSign-using Realtor, can I use DocuSign to get my client’s signature on that document?

3. Same question, but just an ordinary PDF? How about an ordinary fax?

4. What about added documents? We do a lot in the way of extended additional clauses, especially on listings, with each version of those clauses being unique. Is it possible to add our own forms in a DocuSign envelope?

5. What do you love about DocuSign?

6. What do you hate about it?

I’m grateful for any insights you can offer.

July 8, 2009

San Diego dogs: When BloodhoundBlog Unchained comes to San Diego during the NAR Convention, will you be ready to stand up and howl?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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When we wrapped up BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, Brian Brady and I were already talking about doing an event in San Diego during the National Association of Realtors Convention. Since then, we’ve both gotten really busy, which makes planning for anything difficult.

But: We’re both bursting with lots of new ideas. Brian was regaling me on the phone tonight with some incredible viral conversion ideas. I know that Teri Lussier wants me to talk about persuasive copy, but right now I’m more interested in the persuasive power of the elephant in the room. Plus which, there are a lot of Bloodhounds we can call upon to talk to us about what they’ve been doing.

As with last year’s Unchained in Orlando, the NAR has attempted to lock up every possible meeting space, and, as with last year, they’ve failed to lock us out.

My question is this: When we come to town, who is coming with us? What we’re going to do is a one-day event, an all-day marathon of ideas. I’m inclined to support freedom-loving people everywhere, so we might also stage an adhocratic mastermind session while we’re there — partly a scenius, partly a demonstration of the intellectual mettle of this little apartnership we have going. When the Bloodhounds howl, criminals and cockroaches run for cover.

This is just running a flag up the pole to see who salutes. The price is $100 for the one-day event, and, if you make the commitment, we’ll give you a $100 break on the price of our next full conference in Phoenix. If you want to join us, click the PayPal button below.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $100 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in San Diego on Friday, November 13th, 2009


















Here’s a real kick in the head: I will turn 50 years old that weekend. If you’re in town with us Friday, we’ll cut you a piece of birthday cake.

July 2, 2009

Rotarian Socialism in action: Taking lessons from the NAR and the NAMB, Wal-Mart is using compulsory health insurance as a weapon to destroy its smaller competitors

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Today is July the Second, the date of the actual drafting of the Declaration of Independence. By now the United States is just another National Socialist oligarchy, a savage jungle of predatory pressure groups, each one looking to plunder the national treasury at the expense of all the others, each one hiding behind an elaborate camouflage of high-blown rhetoric.

Whatever the putative purpose of some piece of legislation, the actual purpose is to advantage some pressure groups to the disadvantage of others. The putative purpose and the high-blown rhetoric are for the children — for the dumb-ass voters, that is — while the legislators and the lobbyists know that its all a matter of getting in enough snout-time at the public trough.

Freedom means freedom from government — nothing else. We trade our freedom away a drop at a time, like a never ending blood transfusion, never pausing to think that the pigs at the trough might not stop at just a little blood, might not stop at the replacement rate, might not stop until every drop of blood, every dollar of excess production and every last liberty of the American people are completely exsanguinated.

The American patriots bellowed, “No taxation without representation!” We have since learned that this actually means, “We yearn to be fools and jackals in our own behalf!” And the cackle we deliver up to black humor is a premonitory death rattle. For it is obvious that the man being taxed is not represented, and the man with his snout in the taxpayer’s trough is represented in ways you know nothing about.

Consider this atrocity of Wal-Mart’s, a company once deserving of great respect, brought to us by Cato @ Liberty:

A couple of years ago, I shared a cab to the airport with a Wal-Mart lobbyist, who told me that Wal-Mart supports an “employer mandate.”  An employer mandate is a legal requirement that employers provide a government-defined package of health benefits to their workers.  Only Hawaii and Massachusetts have enacted such a law.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  Wal-Mart is a capitalist success story.  At the time of our conversation, Read more

June 29, 2009

Building the perfect Bloodhound, three years into the job

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Cathleen took most of my client contact off my hands Sunday so that I could have time free to play with a new API the FlexMLS folks are getting ready to release to their client MLS systems. I love FlexMLS, and I haven’t said nearly enough good things about it here, but let this stand as endorsement enough: If your MLS is on the cusp of its vendor contract, get FlexMLS. It’s plausible to me that other companies might have cool stuff, but other companies don’t listen to geeks like me. FBS is wicked smart to begin with, but they’re smart enough to know that nobody knows everything. By listening to the user base, they’re able to grow their product in ways that will matter a great deal to all of us going forward.

So for Act one, I worked out how to build radius searches from any valid street address. By software, I mean. I want to be able to work from street addresses to build searches on the fly.

Act two was just brute force API programming, building semi-custom searches into 11,000 or so unique pages. (I’ve mentioned that Realtors have a publishing problem, but I’ll bet you weren’t thinking in the thousands of pages.)

Act three was a quick-search form. A lot of folks already have stuff like this from their IDX vendors. The difference is that I can build as many as I want, as elaborately as I want, using the most common or the most arcane fields in the MLS system. As an example, imagine a weblog post about central vacuum systems coupled with a quick search form featuring homes with central vac. Can your IDX system do that?

That’s innovation, y’all, and there is a point at which it is nothing more for me than ars gratia artis — art for art’s sake. I play with new ideas not to make money or to skin elephants, but because I love new things, and I love to wring every last drop of implication out of anything I lay my hands on. I can find the marketing — and, one hopes, Read more

June 27, 2009

The “cap and trade” bill is full of outrageous proscriptions on private property rights — so the NAR is campaigning against honest appraisals instead of fighting the growth of the nanny state

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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If you had your blast email spam from NAR President Charles McMillan, you know what’s important to the Grand Poobahs: Appraisers are all of a sudden just too dang honest, and that’s bad for business. Meanwhile, the so-called “cap and trade” bill that narrowly passed in the House of Representatives last night is full of nightmare provisions impinging on the rights of private property owners to do what they want with their land and structures. Where was the NAR? Elsewhere, of course. Where else?

From JammieWearingFool:

Beyond what it will do to our economy, at the end of the debate House GOP Leader John Boehner took to the floor and started reading from the 300 page amendment that the Democrats drafted and dropped on the legislatures at 3 AM, there was literally hundred of items to impose federal control over your life. Here are some highlights.

Want to replace a window? Not so fast. First you must pay for an appraisal of your house to measure its energy efficiency and receive calculations of both before and after the proposed change. Hey, it may be a great excuse for those guys trying to avoid putting in that big bay style window that the missus has been bugging you about.

Are you having a new house built? Back up, Skippy. This bill includes language that tells you exactly where you can put your electrical outlets.

Did you know that for one sort of appraisal service related to determining energy efficiency there is only one company you can use? Yup, it is right in there along with the name of the company. How is it that this one company managed to land the only contract to service 300 million Americans? Who is this company?

I wish I could answer those questions, but all of those provisions and more, Rep. Boehner went on for almost an hour citing them and still didn’t get through the whole 300 pages, is not available. You see because of when the Democrats dropped this amendment at 3 AM the text of it is not available. So much for that transparency. The total bill runs on Read more

June 24, 2009

A little bit of honey cake for Desdemona as she makes her last escape

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’re going to lose Desdemona, our English Coon Hound, tonight. She’s been with us for more than ten years, and she was an adult when we adopted her. A long life for a big dog.

Desi is by far the smartest dog we’ve ever known, the most willful, the cleverest escape artist, the most vociferous howler. She is maybe six brain cells short of writing angry poetry and howling on stage like the canine version of Tori Amos. There is nothing about this dog that is not astonishing.

This is Desdemona with my son Cameron, a long time ago:

Here’s an encomium Cathleen wrote to Desdemona’s intelligence in September of 2001:

Desdemona’s going to have a sweet year

Because our coon hound, Desdemona, runs away so easily and so tenaciously, we let her stay in the house when we aren’t home. This acknowledges that Desdemona has won the war. Well, of course she has… she won every battle. You’ll recall, she escapes over our 6′ block fence, even after we added an electric wire to the top; even when we strapped her into a full body harness and tethered her; even when we tethered her at both her collar and her harness and attached the two together; even when we put her into a kennel and tethered her at both her harness and collar and ran the two cables out of separate sides of the kennel; even when we drugged her.

The only thing she couldn’t escape from was a $200 solid plastic shell of a kennel, but after a few times in that box she learned how to splay herself so that anyone who tried to stuff her into the kennel came out of the box bloody and Desi, of course, never came close to going in. So, after spending about $600 on gadgets guaranteed to keep dogs where they’re supposed to be, Desdemona won the war and now gets to stay in the house when we’re not at home.

The spoils of war include more than the simple luxury of staying indoors. They include staying indoors unsupervised! Which means we’ve had to make changes in how Read more

June 22, 2009

Just because the real estate market is being trumpeted by bull horns, that doesn’t mean it’s time to retract your bear claws

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m the leading bear in an article in Saturday’s Toronto Globe and Mail. I wasn’t as dour as the overall slant of the article, but it remains that the Phoenix real estate market is overbuilt. We have more kitchens than cooks, and, as long as that is so, a robust and enduring recovery is not possible.

One thing I didn’t say, but I wish were true: “Mr. Swann said he has clients from Canada, California, Oregon and elsewhere snapping up dozens of houses at a time.” I have dozens of investor clients, most of whom are buying nothing right now, since it’s stupid to compete for the privilege of over-paying for a rental home. I have one client who plans to buy dozens of homes, but who has not started yet.

The interesting thing is, it really is a great time to buy a house in Phoenix — except at the very low end. Sellers with equity are finally waking up and smelling the coffee, so the move-up market — at least below $500,000 or so, jumboland — is really starting to move. First-time home-buyers, enriched by the $8,000 tax credit, are butting heads with out-of-state investors for all the homes priced $100,000 and under. But for people with buying power, things are looking very rosy right now.

Even so, the Globe and Mail article is good reading. The authors explore a lot of systemic factors that could make our current mini-boom a fondly-remembered oasis in a desert of on-going bad news.

June 19, 2009

To celebrate BloodhoundBlog’s third birthday, let’s celebrate all of the insanely great ideas we have come up with…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Last week I was working, late at night, plugging street addresses into encartus, in preparation for building a bunch of new engenu pages for a new web site we’re building, an exposition of truly-distinguished homes in Paradise Valley, Arizona. While I was working, I got pinged by an incoming email, a moderated comment to Brian Brady’s first post on the idea of disclosing all real estate purchase offers.

While I was reading all the other great comments to that post, I got pinged again, this time a private email asking me what I thought about the nominees for Inman’s most-innovative blog award.

To misquote a line many Bloodhounds love: I don’t think about them. I will stop in at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy once or twice a month, and I know I’ve been to MyTechOpinon and the Clean Slate Blog. But I don’t associate any of those sites with innovation. They’re just weblogs, that’s all.

This is not sour grapes. I don’t give a rat’s ass about beauty contests, and I’ve deliberately painted Inman “News” into a corner: By consistently ignoring what is obviously the most innovative weblog in the RE.net, they come off looking like petulant crybabies even as they despoil their reputation as a “news” source. And does this malign neglect hurt us? Uniquely among RE.net weblogs, we’re a PR6, as is the Inman “News” web site. With no capital investment and nothing but part-time, amateur writers, we’ve pulled even with the life’s work of a big-baby billionaire. One would think the idea of gamesmanship was invented yesterday.

And please don’t post treacly little comments about how you get good ideas everywhere. I have no objection whatever to the Special Olympics, so long as you don’t insist on calling the contestants Olympians. The three innovations cited in the first paragraph of this post, three among hundreds, are more than enough to split BloodhoundBlog away from the herd.

But that’s the point. BloodhoundBlog is ten days away from being three years old. In those three years, we’ve pioneered a vast host of jaw-dropping ideas. If we stopped writing on June 29th, our anniversary, we Read more

June 18, 2009

Hectoring Rian from the iPhone 3G 3.0

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Yesterday I upgraded my iPhone to version 3.0 of the operating system software. So far, a pretty big yawn. Typing is plausibly easier, though still not easy. Cut and paste were not on my list of must-haves. Zillow upgraded its app to allow push notification, so your phone can tell you if one of your saved searches has popped up a new candidate. Okay…

I wasn’t unhappy with the iPhone before — quite the contrary! — but I don’t think I have any new reasons to be happier from this upgrade. Safari 4, by contrast, is totally killer, and I could not be more pleased with suddenly-faster-everything on my iMac.

One thing I played with right away on the iPhone was the new voice recording app. Not that impressive. It records losslessly at 44khz, which means the saved files are huge. They can be transferred only by email or hard-wired sync — no BlueTooth, no WiFi — and almost everything is too big to move by email. This is the kind of dumb, useless software I expect from Microsoft, not Apple, so one may hope it will get better in future versions.

Anyway, as a test, this morning I made a short little audio greeting card for Rian Lussier, who is about to undergo surgery. The file is a monstrous 25 megabytes, and it took over an hour to sync to my iMac (no hope of emailing a file that large).

Even so, the recording quality is not awful (there’s a buzz in places from me speaking too loudly), and the sentiments are what they are.

Godspeed you well, Rian.

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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.

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