BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 76 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

March 29, 2009

The mapmaker’s dilemma: What the hell are you doing with your time?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That’s a screen shot of the user interface of the beta version of the mapping software I talked about on Friday.

This version:

  • Creates a Google Maps KML file from a list of street addresses
  • Assigns a user-selectable map marker to those addresses
  • Optionally creates a folder on the file server for that address — to serve as an engenu folder
  • Optionally creates folders and folder structures, thus to create an engenu hierarchy
  • Optionally builds links from the map markers to the individual street address folders

This is me writing to the Swallow Hill Gang last night, a very brief outline of features and capabilities:

Any valid addresses, one to a line, will produce a KML file that can be imported into Google Maps.

Like this, which is me and my best beloved:

314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You’ll have the map marker you choose. I’ll be adding more.

If you select Folders, a folder will be created for that address:

“314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you select Links, the folder will be linked from the map marker.

If you select Links without Folders, neither one happens, for obvious reasons.

If you precede a line with a tilde — “~” — a folder is created, and subsequent address lines and their respective folders and links are created hierarchically. Like this:

~Top Level Folder

would create a folder at the top level named “Top_Level_Folder”.

This structure:

~Top Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

would create a link to a folder from the map marker for my house inside of the “Top_Level_Folder” folder, hence:

“Top_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you do this:
~Top Level Folder
~Top Level Folder/Second Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You would get this:

“Top_Level_Folder/Second_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

You have to build each level of the hierarchy as you go. No harm, no foul if you try to create a folder that already exists.

You can do this:

~Love
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door
322 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door/And Baby Makes Three
402 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

and you will have created what I hope will be a by-now obvious hierarchy.

If all you want to do is create a folder hierarchy, Read more

March 27, 2009

Building customized Google Maps and engenu folder structures from lists of addresses

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I have very alpha software that makes a KML file that Google Maps will eat to make something like this:


View Larger Map

It’s kinda-sorta like ZeeMaps, except I get a true Google Maps map, which I can then customize and embed.

I start with a list of addresses, which I can type if I absolutely have to.

There’s more: I’m going to build in the ability to create an engenu folder structure from the list of addresses, so that a site like this essentially builds itself.

For that kind of engenu site, I’ll cut my time from 40 minutes to 20 minutes, on the order of two minutes a page for brand new, original, knock-your-socks-off content.

March 26, 2009

Reflecting upon the Obamanation: “Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’ve been thinking about the disgusting spectacle of millions of Americans presuming to have an opinion about whether or not some AIG employee deserves to be paid a bonus. This was once a country where the idea of minding one’s own business was virtually a sacrament. And then I can’t turn on the television without seeing some grandmother bragging that Medicare makes it possible for her to dine on her own grandchildren. And to top it all off, tonight I’ve been trading depressing emails with Joe Strummer about our progress down the Road to Serfdom.

I know people think they understand what I’m talking about, when I talk about political philosophy, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true. The simple truth is this: I am sovereign in my person — and so are you. I do not have the right or power or privilege or duty to push you around by force, and you do not have that right or power or privilege or duty with respect to me. That’s easy to understand when we’re only talking about we two: If I overstep the boundaries, you will surely help me find my way back to the righteous path. But there’s no difference whether we’re talking about two people or two billion people. Each one of us is free in our person, free as a necessary consequence of being what we are.

Does that mean that other people cannot try to push us around by force? Obviously not. It simply means that failing to respond to human beings as sovereign entities, each one of us a unique end in himself, is wrong — epistemologically incorrect, morally unrighteous, politically criminal.

All of economics is based in collectivist premises, which leads to statements that are true but fundamentally irrelevant. Smith taught us that leaving men free to produce is better for everyone — which does not matter, because each one of us is free regardless of the benefits freedom yields for other people. Hayek among others points out that enslaving us is bad for everyone, which also does not matter. The impact upon the collective is meaningless. Read more

March 25, 2009

Is your business about to take a quantum leap? So is mine, so all I have time for is this: Whip your on-line and off-line marketing message into shape now, to make the most of the business coming your way

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’re looking for the long, newsy pitch, I’ll try to get to it later this week. But for now I am working with and incubating more solid money work than I have in three years. I expect your dance card is starting to fill up, too.

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March 24, 2009

By applying CDSs to CDOs, did AIG go MIA? Or could the SEC, the OTS and one unhired CFO have kept it from turning up DOA?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A totally killer run down of the Wall Street mess from — you’ll never guess it — Rolling Stone magazine:

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That’s the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers’ credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren’t much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don’t know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word “zero coupon bond” in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize “toxic” risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage Read more

March 23, 2009

Just when you think the comedy can’t get any more rich…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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So I told them how badly they had screwed up, and, god help ’em, they set about to fix their mistake:

Good grief. How sad…

The Arizona Association of Realtors has some kind of event coming up, too, and, it goes without saying, I’ve been snubbed from that, too.

Listen up, functionaries: It’s totally cool. I’m not going to do anything that gives aid and comfort to any branch of the NAR, nor to any exponent of the co-broke. I’m sure the more intelligent members of AAR and ARMLS might like to hear what I have to say, but — taking account of where your eyes are right now — what do we need you for?

Even so, you have to admit the whole thing is funny…

March 23, 2009

Nest Realty, Jim Duncan’s new broker, joins the custom sign club

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Long-time real estate weblogger Jim Duncan moved to a new brokerage recently — Nest Realty. As a part of their launch, they’re building custom real estate yard signs, the prototype for which you can see above.

Jim asked for my thoughts on the signs, and I’m going to go into this at some little length. All of this touches on the stuff we’ve been talking about since last week.

First, I think these signs are striking, very interesting graphically. The grid layout is sweet and fine, a very clean style of communication.

Second, I want that middle sign to be a hell of a lot bigger. My guess is that it’s 18 x 12, a very common size for real estate signs. We do our middle sign at 24 x 36. Jim’s sign is in much better taste than ours, but I need for people to know that they’re seeing a custom sign, so I think I need to grab them by the throat.

Third, my belief is that for custom signs to work, they have to have that paragraph of small text we use on our signs. The marketing objective of the signs is to stop traffic, not simply to promote a fleeting awareness of a home for sale among passing drivers. We’ve been using that paragraph of small text from the beginning, long before it was possible to make custom signs. We know from hours of observation that people slow down, stop, read the sign, take the flyer — all because they had to slow down to find out what that small text was saying.

There are some nice marketing ideas at Nest’s main web site, and the site for this particular home is worth a look. The HDR photos are incredible, and I want for them to be a lot larger.

This is a case where I don’t find the web presentation of the home to be at all satisfying, and that’s another one of the points that I hit all the time. We know from talking to our open house visitors that people will spend hours at a single-property web site if you Read more

March 22, 2009

Why should you buy real estate — and lots of it — now? Well, inventory abounds, prices are low, and interest rates are incredibly low. And there’s one other factor you might take into account…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Follow the tiny blue line. That’s the growth of the U.S. money supply. That vertical surge you see there at the right is, essentially, a doubling of the number of dollars in (virtual) circulation since August 2008. Every dollar you own will soon be worth fifty cents. And every dollar you owe will soon be worth two bucks. You do the math…

March 21, 2009

Victor Davis Hanson: “I’d prefer one gall bladder surgeon to fifty Botox experts, a good Perkins engine mechanic to 1,000 deconstructionists at the MLA, one competent chemist to fifty government attorneys.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Victor Davis Hanson, a brilliant old Hellenist, here seeming more old than brilliant, wonders, “Who is John Galt?”

We sense we are trimmers and redistributors, and wouldn’t dare build a new dam a transcontinental railroad, a new 8-lane freeway.

Instead we would sue, file reports, argue, quit, delay—anything other than conceive a majestic idea and finish it, sighing, “It is not perfect, but damn good enough and will do.” Instead, here in California we are simply destroying agriculture by drying up its sources of water-giving life—a once brilliant farming that was the sum total of millions of brave lives from 1880 to 2000 who took a desert and fed the world.

Instead, ensconced in the Berkeley Hills or Woodside, our elites demand of better others to save for them not people, but a smelt, a minnow, or a newt-like creature that must have the entire Kings or San Joaquin River as it dumps its precious cargo out to sea.

So as scare snow melts, it goes out to the ocean, gratifying a lawyer or professor in Palo Alto that rivers flow as they did in the 19th-century, as millions of acres go fallow, hundreds of thousands lose jobs, and we feel so morally superior to those of the past who really were our moral superiors.

It is easy to dismiss our ancestors as illiberal, or with the caveat “Oh, but if we were as poor as they were, we’d have to prove just as tough”, but we still sense they were different in the sense of far better. When I drive up to see those Sierra dams poured in the 1920s, one wonders how they made such things with only primitive machines, and in contrast, are amazed with our sophisticated tools, we do so much less. 

This self-congratulatory generation can hardly, as we are learning, build a Bay Bridge again. Yet when we see on the Internet pictures of a new aircraft carrier we are stunned in amazement—we did that? We built such a powerful, sophisticated ship? We—at least someone— can actually still do things on rare occasion like that?

The American people are, to be frank, nauseated Read more

March 20, 2009

The Financial Post: “Aging self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Is this the end of America? Canada’s Financial Post:

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.

Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues, but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U.S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations Read more

March 20, 2009

There are no second acts in American real estate listings: It’s priced right, prepared right, presented right — and the house still won’t sell. What do you do now?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Barry Bevis in Tallahassee is looking for help. And he’s willing to pay for it.

He has a listing that he’s having trouble moving, and he’s looking for marketing ideas to draw the attention of a buyer.

Here’s Barry’s note:

I have a great listing that just won’t sell…

I’ve given it my version of the Bloodhound treatment: Custom Sign, Website, URL and lots of photos. You can see the home by clicking here.

It’s in a preferred neighborhood with parks and shopping within walking distance. It has been well maintained and is priced well — according to comps and other brokers feedback. It has a great yard and a hot tub!

The negatives: After a year of trying to sell I know them! Small Master bath and No Half Bath. Tile Counters in the kitchen — our area prefers Stone. The cost to cure these “issues” is beyond what the seller can do.

We did start with it priced too high. The seller was “not in a hurry” and wanted to try a higher price. I said okay because he is a friend — knowing all along that it was a mistake. Now its in the ballpark and would appraise at the new list price.

I get a couple of people in a week — and loads of website traffic. But no offers. Not even obnoxious low ball offers.

So the seller keeps asking me what to do… Besides lower the price. So this month we are dropping the price 1K a week, a 4K price drop. That will make it show up on any buyers automatic web searches as “Price Reduced.” We are also offering to pay a point to drop a buyers interest rate, likely below 5%.

What else should I be doing?

I’m looking for ideas to ignite interest in this home and get it sold. I’ve got a $100 AMEX gift card to the most creative idea. Greg and I are the judges.

Step up and tell me what to do!

This is a tough problem, one I wish I were unfamiliar with. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives.” One of the Read more

March 18, 2009

The quest for all the world’s riches is over: It’s in your iPhone…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The feature set for release 3.0 of the iPhone operating system was announced yesterday, but I think the photo above says just about everything that needs to be said.

Yes, that’s the iPhone serving as its own graphic equalizer user interface in order to maximize the performance of a third-party peripheral.

There is no one else in product design who thinks like this.

The huge benefit of naming things is that it enables us to conceptually separate this from that, to isolate particular objects or ideas so that we can think about their unique properties and potential.

The outrageous curse of naming things is that we tend to force-fit whatever it is we’re thinking about into the shoebox we’ve crafted for it by naming it.

Do you see? A public hallway is a shopping mall, and vice versa, but few of us can think of both at the same time. A mobile phone powerful enough to please Steve Jobs is going to be powerful enough to do almost anything, but only people who think like Steve Jobs can find the almost anything inside the phone.

Every other smart phone on the market is just a phone with some gadgets slapped on as afterthoughts. The iPhone is well on its way to being almost everything…

March 16, 2009

“What do you mean, stop the party? We haven’t ripped off the new neighbors yet!”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the fun devices in Part III of Atlas Shrugged is something author Ayn Rand called “the policy of the microsecond.” Despite the high-flown philosophical claims of the looters, their actual motivation was never anything other than “the expediency of the moment” — one absurd rationalization after the next, justifying theft and visiting the consequences of that theft upon its victims.

Just about a month ago, as a comical palliative for the housing mess, I wrote this as a joke:

[I]t would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

That’s the logic of the policy of the microsecond. We don’t want to stop stealing wealth from innocent people. We don’t want to amend our ways and do better going forward. We don’t want to undo the awful damage occasioned by centuries of accelerating criminal government. No. All we want to do is find a way to get through this crisis. We’ll worry about the crisis caused by this “solution” — the crisis of the microsecond after this one — later on.

So guess what happens? I might have been joking, but we live in a world beyond satire. From the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration should seriously consider granting resident status to foreigners who buy surplus houses in this country. This makes more sense than the president’s $275 billion housing bailout plan, which Americans greeted with a Bronx cheer.

The federal bailout forces taxpayers to subsidize overextended homeowners who bet on ever-rising house prices and used their abodes as ATMs, and it doesn’t get to the basic problem — the huge inventory of excess houses. We estimate that 2.4 million houses over and above normal working inventories are left over from the 1996-2005 housing bubble. That’s a lot, considering the long-term average annual construction of 1.5 million single- and multi-family units.

Excess inventory is the mortal enemy of house prices, which have already fallen 27% since the peak in early 2006. We predict another 14% drop through the end of 2010 if nothing is done to eliminate Read more

March 14, 2009

Independence, for Realtors, comes from having a broker’s license

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came up in a private discussion, but this piece of the pizza is a matter of interest for all Realtors. Ready?

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

I don’t think I’ve ever said this in public, but I promise you it’s an oversight that should have been obvious all along.

Everything Bloodhound is about being as independent as you can possibly be.

That doesn’t mean you don’t engage with other people. What it means is never being in a situation where you have to put up with other people, whether you like it, hate it — or you want to kill someone because of it.

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

A favorite game of dipshits who flitter into BloodhoundBlog is to pretend that they don’t understand what I am talking about when I deride vendorsluts.

Here’s a definition that will do no good at all: A vendorslut is a sleazoid who takes your money and gives you next to nothing in exchange for it — usually while binding you to an outrageously unfair contract.

And by that definition a huge number of real estate brokers are vendorsluts. Their entire business model is based not on selling real estate but on milking wide-eyed real estate agents for every penny they have, then dumping them as soon as they’re all milked out.

I can hope that no one reading this is some venal broker’s sucker, but that con-game is baked in the cake.

For that reason alone, you should:

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

Obviously, I believe that your best move is to up your own organization, to turn your practice or your team into your own brokerage instead.

But even if you choose to work as an associate broker, having your broker’s license gives you options.

Yes, your legal liability increases, but, as with all advanced education, having your broker’s license brings with it significant marketing advantages.

And if your own designated broker moves on or gets sick, you have the legal qualification necessary to move into the big boss’s chair.

Perhaps more importantly, with a broker’s license, you are a bigger threat, should the big boss get the idea he might want to sever you.

And, recalling that Read more

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