BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 74 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

May 11, 2009

Making a virtue of necessity is usually an error…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:

Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage?  BAHAHAHHAAHA!

Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.

The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:

My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.

Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in Read more

May 10, 2009

Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but the BattleBack book…

I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.

(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)

But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.

Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.

I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.

It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process Read more

May 9, 2009

The goal of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained training conference is to push the bums out of the real estate business

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

We publish a national real estate industry weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 42 contributors from all over the country, each one an expert in his or her own right. Together we talk about real estate marketing and technology, lending and investment. If you want to know what Realtors and lenders really think, BloodhoundBlog is your keyhole into the industry.

The blog is all about the wired world of real estate, how the participatory internet is changing age-old paradigms of real property and mortgage marketing. When we started three years ago, the Web 2.0 idea of online interaction was still very new. By now, it’s hard to remember a time when these technologies were not ubiquitous.

BloodhoundBlog’s mission is to help Realtors and lenders keep pace with internet tools. In service of that objective, we produce an annual conference called BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Real estate professionals come from all over the country to learn how to market their services in what amounts to a post-marketing marketplace.

This year’s conference ran last week from Tuesday to Friday. We encamped in a hotel near Skyharbor Airport and worked all but continuously for 72 hours. Our world is changing so fast that we felt we had to work that hard, just to learn everything we need to know.

What’s all this to you? BloodhoundBlog is all about promoting excellence in every conceivable way. We do everything we can think of to train Realtors and lenders to provide a better-quality experience by every means attainable.

My objective, expressed baldly, is to chase the bums out of our business. Licensing purports to do this, but it has not. Trade organizations like the National Association of Realtors should do this, but they don’t. But if we can educate consumers to demand better service, better information, better representation, then the bums and the crooks will go get jobs. That’s the way free markets work, when they’re working properly.

Meanwhile, real estate professionals are just catching on to the idea that consumers can see everything we do. Drop in on BloodhoundBlog and keep an eye on us.

May 9, 2009

My own first-hand foreclosure story

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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On April 27th, ironically the day before BloodhoundBlog Unchained commenced, IndyMac Bank posted a Notice of Trustee’s Sale against our home. I didn’t know about this until this week, although I had known it was a possibility.

This is really nobody’s business. But as a matter of steadfast policy, I have never let anyone make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself. I know I tend to excite the most evil sentiments in people with evil minds, so they may want to take this opportunity to further their self-destruction. This matters to me not at all. I live my life well to the right of the zero on the number line, and the only people I deal with or care about do the same. People who pursue disvalues are of no value to themselves, nor to anyone.

But so as not to introduce this topic and then leave it unexplained, here’s what happened: For the past three years, our outflow has exceeded our inflow. This is not an unusual story in the real estate business, and we have been lucky to have enough high-paying work to at least keep us within reach of profitability. During this same time, as you have seen here, we have completely reengineered everything we think about marketing, with the ultimate test of those ideas beginning only now.

But our debt load became severe enough last year that we had to make some hard choices. I elected to take a chance on our mortgage payments, since there was a plausible threat that we might lose the house anyway. Our choice was to keep the doors open at the risk of those doors themselves. I could see an upswing in our business activity, to the extent that I expected to catch up on the mortgage by the second quarter of 2009, and to catch up on everything by the fourth quarter.

I still expect this to be the case. My one mistake was that I didn’t think IndyMac would pull the trigger this soon. I played chicken and I lost, so now, in addition to buying back Read more

May 8, 2009

Query: Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I can’t believe I’m writing this, at this hour. My weariness from this week hasn’t had a chance to overcome my leftover weariness from last week. Sooner or later I’ll make enough money to check into a rest home!

But: Brian Brady, Richard Riccelli and I have been talking about this all week, and I thought I’d run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

So:

Should the Bloodhounds write a book?

If so, what book should it be?

I’m the worst anti-dead-tree snob there is, but the Gary Keller books have proved that print still has legs. We want a way to get through to the 99% of agents and Realtors who have but barely dipped a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. It seems clear that we have to carry the word to them in a format they can (literally) grasp.

So how would you advise us? I know what I want, and I know what Brian wants and what Richard wants. What do you want? What would you want if you were a punter on the sidelines wondering if the topics we take up here are worth worrying about? What might you want if you were a consumer, not someone in the real estate business?

I’m interested to hear where your thoughts run.

May 6, 2009

Meet the new dogs: Six new Bloodhounds to fill out the pack

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We added six new BloodhoundBlog contributors last Friday at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Actually, we added seven, but Dave Smith of the Real Estate Blog Lab has elected to take a pass for now to free up time for other projects.

It’s no accident that all of these folks are coming out of Unchained. A year ago, BloodhoundBlog Unchained was something that we did. By now, it’s something that we are. The blog and the events are conjoined, like a two-headed Cerberus, and each generates content and cultivates talent for the other.

One of the things we do here, one of the things we’ve always tried to do, is to make stars of our contributors. In a world without middle-men, the engaging expression of expertise should earn a writer a cachet of authority, and that authority should influence larger and larger audiences. We have built a big megaphone for talking to real estate professionals, and we want to make that megaphone available to the most creative and talented people we can find.

So: Here are the new dogs. I hope you’ll make them feel welcome.

It would be an understatement to say that Ira Serkes was the stand-out student at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. The man is a geyser of fascinating real estate marketing ideas, which he shares with an unrestrained delight. Ira and his wife Carol are Realtors in Berkeley, California. Ira co-authored “Get the Best Deal When Selling Your Home — SF Bay Area Edition” and Nolo Press’s best-selling book “How to Buy a House in California.”

Scott Cowan is a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog. He organized our invasion of Seattle in February, and, while we were there, he signed on to work as a staffer for BloodhoundBlog in Phoenix. That is, he and Brad Coy served admirably as the Vice Presidents in Charge of Everything Else. Scott sells classic homes in the Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and the Puyallup areas of Washington State. If you want to make his day, ask him about the $8,000 home-buyer credit.

Kerry Melcher may be the most unlikeliest contributor to a weblog that has always endeavored to bring you unlikely contributors. Kerry is Read more

May 5, 2009

Reflecting (very) briefly on the Phoenix real estate market: “I got my job through the New York Times”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last Tuesday, while racing around doing real estate work and preparing for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, I was interviewed by the New York Times about the Phoenix real estate market.

I’ve been interviewed a zillion times before, and it’s cool and fun and it means absolutely nothing. I got picked because of this article, from my column in the Arizona Republic. I spoke to the reporter for 45 minutes on the phone, and about twelve of my words made it into the newspaper.

Okayfine. That’s the way it works. I’m just waxed fruit in these tableaux and I know it.

But here’s the cool part: Yesterday I got a call from a potential client about the article. Never happened before. Real estate investor from Canada looking to balance his risk by picking up some lender-owned homes in Phoenix.

As a marketing strategy, talking to reporters is probably less productive than handing out business cards in the supermarket parking lot, but serendipity is where you find it.

 
Further notice: Today I was interviewed by MacLean’s magazine about Canadians buying real estate in Phoenix. The reporter found me where? In the New York Times. Clearly there is a difference…

May 2, 2009

Are you looking for a flinty-eyed steward to protect the value of real estate? Whatever you do, don’t turn to a banker!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

If there’s one thing we can say we’ve learned from the housing bust, it’s this: The worst conceivable stewards of financial assets are bankers.

At every step of the real estate market’s retrenchment, the bankers have been right there, on the spot, ready to make precisely the wrong decision — days, weeks or even months late.

Can’t make your payments? Put the home up for sale. Will the bank honor an offer short of the amount owed? Maybe. Maybe in six weeks, maybe in six months. Will the buyer still be there when the bank finally responds? With prices declining by thousands of dollars a month?

So the bank has to foreclose on the home — at an imputed value far lower than it could have had from the short sale. And then it must list that home for sale at a still lower price.

But don’t waste your time looking for evidence of prudence or even simple greed in a lender-owned listing. The home will be filthy, with fixtures and smoke alarms missing. The kitchen range will have been stolen, thus to assure that the home is not accidentally sold to an FHA or VA buyer.

If the bank inadvertently approves a purchase contract for the home, it will do everything it can to avoid recouping even a tiny fraction of its losses. First the bank will attempt to savage the deal by completely rewriting the contract. And everyone involved in the process will be insanely overworked, so that even the simplest question will occasion a two- to five-day delay.

Absolutely nothing will be done to address even deal-killing defects. But because the decision chain is so convoluted, negotiations over problems will drag on for weeks or even months. That way, when the deal falls apart, as many do, the bank will be able to relist the house at an even lower price.

I wish I were making this up. I want to deride bankers as being clowns, but that’s unfair to the clowns. They produce wealth, rather than destroying it — and they dress better for work, Read more

May 1, 2009

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix 2009: A quick wrap-up…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t know how I’m still awake — and from moment to moment I’m not. But we wrapped up Unchained in Phoenix tonight, and I wanted to take a quick minute to salute everyone who was part of an amazing experience. Two fingers of Bushmills — more would be a waste. To all the dogs and to everyone who learned to howl like a Bloodhound this week, we are in your debt. This was by far the best Unchained event so far, and we are but begun. Per ardua, ad astra!

April 30, 2009

Marketing the Geek Marketing content to incipient geeks

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As promised to the Unchainees, here are links to the stuff I talked about in my presentations:

First, Here’s the main Geek Marketing presentation page. If you want to follow along from home, feel free to pursue the links.

Second, Here is Cheryl Johnson’s engenu help page.

Third, for the people who came to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, you can make your own demo engenu pages by clicking on your own name from this link.

April 25, 2009

Greg Swann’s BloodhoundBlog Unchained homework

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, here’s are homework assignments for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

First, until this week I had no idea how deprived folks in the Windows world are. Just about everything I do is built around the idea of truly robust FTP software, and it turns out that this does not even exist for Windows users. Y’all are stuck behind the Iron Curtain and you don’t even know it.

The vast suckage that is Windows FTP drastically affects my plans, but I’ll work it out.

Meanwhile:

If you don’t have one, download and install a decent FTP client. Core FTP LE isn’t awful, and it’s free.

You’ll also need a decent text editor. Komodo edit is actually quite good, and it’s also free.

I’m going to be helping Mark Green talk about CRM and automated database solutions. If you want to play along with some of those ideas, sign up for the free demo of Heap CRM.

Heap is not all the way there as a real estate CRM, but it is adequate for the ideas we’ll be discussing, and a 31-day demo is free. Note that the link above goes to my Heap affiliate account, the vast proceeds from which my wife spends on food for stray animals.

But wait. There’s more.

I upgraded engenu today with the mapping software I talked about here.

You will need to download and install engenu on your file server.

If you have previously installed engenu, you won’t need to install a new copy of engenuPageDex.bin (your password file). (Likewise, if you have a customized “skin,” don’t install engenuComponents.) Even if you don’t want the mapping software, you should install the new version of engenu. First, there have been dozens of small bug fixes since the last official release. And second, I want you to get comfortable with your FTP client.

Do you need some remedial help with engenu? Cheryl Johnson is the world’s most unlikely super-hero, but you can see her heroic efforts at making engenu more understandable here.

And: We’re ready to rock. Class schedules are up.

Students are split into two groups, Alpha and Omega, and you can discern whether you are the aboriginal specimen or the Read more

April 24, 2009

Unchained Melodies: Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Everything I see lately of what was once so decisively “our world” just looks to me like intramural patty-cake. That’s as may be, by now. It is what it is. I am not in it. I am not of it. And I am quite a bit less interested in it than I was when this was still an avoidable fate. But I know — and in a year’s time everyone will know — that BloodhoundBlog is what’s left outside the walls of the Praesidium. We are free because we understood that chains can be forged from burnished gold and not just pig iron.

But I am a rude dude in a rude mood, tonight more than most nights. We’re four days away from BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and I am profoundly inspired by all that we are going to do. And I look around me and I realize that “our world” is what it has always been. It doesn’t matter who chose to kneel for those “glittering prizes and endless compromises.” All that matters — all that ever mattered — is who didn’t.

Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight.

April 20, 2009

How to sell every house in the neighborhood — except your own…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Even with as much grief as I lay on practitioners, I feel myself obliged to confess: I do not believe that any so-called professional real estate salesperson could come with with a marketing strategy quite as repellent as this:

Tipped by Barry Bevis: “Drove by this yesterday while showing clients homes in the same neighborhood. Average house in this neighborhood is $175,000. Nothing the age of the FSBO home selling for $200K. My clients laughed. We just put their house on the market ‘Bloodhound Style” and had it under contract in four days. I wonder how long the FSBO will be for sale!”

(PS: Our friendly visitors from the cute little yellow school bus have taught me that one cannot possibly be too obvious, so it is incumbent upon me to point out that the phone number and email address are not obscured on the original sign.)

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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.

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