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There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 81 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

January 3, 2009

If selling is not a viable option, you need to fall in love with your house all over again

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
If selling is not a viable option, you need to fall in love with your house all over again

The foreclosure market dominates the news, but it remains that good old-fashioned American homeowners occupy the overwhelming majority of Phoenix-area homes. That’s the good news.

And here’s some even better news: If you have significant equity in your home, you can probably refinance right now, reducing your monthly payment.

But here’s the bad news: Unless you absolutely have to, you probably won’t be moving for at least five years.

Don’t believe the number you see on that refi appraisal. At most, your house is worth the same amount as a comparable lender-owned home, plus the net cost to bring that home up to the livability of yours.

Swallow hard. You may have read in the paper that Americans lost $2 trillion in real estate equity in 2008. That’s a specious number. Money is the stuff you can fold up and spend. The equity in your home is unrealized money. You weren’t rich when your home was worth a lot, and you’re not poor now that it isn’t.

But what you are is stuck, practically speaking.

You don’t want to sell your house for what it can bring right now. If you do, you will lose money. But, refi or not, you’re making your payments.

If your home really was purely an investment, like a stock, it might be wise to dump it, take your lumps and move on.

But your home is not only where your heart is, it is very probably where most if not all of your savings are. You need to wait for the market to turn so you can sell at a profit.

So what should you do?

My advice: Paint.

Patch that stucco and paint it. Caulk the wood at the eaves and the trim and paint it. Clean out the house one room at a time and patch and paint the walls, repairing and painting the molding.

You’re stuck in your house for the next five years. It’s time to fall in love with it all over Read more

January 3, 2009

A premium appeal for Vlad Zablotskyy: If you’ll give $200 to his defense fund, we’ll give you a set of BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the biggest stories we followed in 2008 was Vlad Zablotskyy’s legal battle with ePerks.com. The fight ended in a settlement, about which it were better for me to say nothing, but it suffices to say that ePerks has filed for bankruptcy.

Working together, we raised a ton of money for Vlad’s Legal Defense Fund — but not nearly as much as was needed. Brian Brady and I would like to do what we can to help reduce Vlad’s legal debt.

So here’s our proposal: If you will make a $200 donation to the Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund using the PayPal button shown below, we will send you a complimentary set of DVDs from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008. The DVDs sell for $199, so you’re essentially getting them for free, in exchange for your donation.

Why are we doing this? Because Vlad jumped on the grenade for all of us. What happened to him could have happened to any one of us. For my own part, I have tried to make this episode instructive for any other corporate attorneys who decide that webloggers are easy targets. But it remains that Vlad took the flak that could have been aimed at any one of us. We can only imagine what he and his family have been through this year, but at least we can help to lift this finacial burden.

Click on the “Donate” button and let’s put “paid” to this kind of intimidation against real estate webloggers.


Support Vlad Zablotskyy’s Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!

January 2, 2009

Kevin Kelly: A New Kind of Mind

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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The Technium:

Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.

While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

Read the whole thing.

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January 1, 2009

Upgrade play Part II: Grunion contact form

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All of the stand-alone BloodhoundRealty.com-hosted blogs (that is, the SplendorQuest.com blogs) are going to WP 2.7 this weekend, with a few changes in our standard line-up of plug-ins. If we host you at BloodhoundBlog.net, your big changes will wait for the release of WordPress Multi-User 2.7.

But the plug-in discussed here, the Grunion contact form, is available to you from any weblog we host. (SQ.com admins may have to Activate it.)

Here’s how you use it: Put the words contact-form between [square brackets]. That’s all. You’ll get a contact form that emails its responses back to you. Very simple, very smart.

So: In the text-input box shown below, tell me how much you like the Grunion contact form:

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

December 31, 2008

Human sovereignty as a New Year’s resolution

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I hate lies, and I hate just about everything that doesn’t hate lies. We live our lives enmired in lies — in hoke, in smoke, in hints and allusions and innuendoes, in juice and hustle and jive — and it is entirely too easy to become one of the liars, de facto, without really intending to. My post on linking is one of the best things I wrote this year, and it’s apposite to the discussion I’ve been carrying out all week:

People are so used to marketing trickery that they expect it everywhere. The challenge for anyone seeking to change minds in the Web 2.0 world is to take away that expectation. Transparency doesn’t mean I am obliged to disclose to you the color of my underwear. Transparency means that if there is any possibility that you could entertain the smallest doubt that I am effecting some kind of sleight of hand to trick you into doing something you otherwise would not do, I have to give you the means of eradicating that doubt to your own satisfaction.

On Christmas, because of the latest episode of puerile posturing, I said to Teri, “I believe in Christmas. I won’t let it lie to me.” Later it came out as, “I believe in humanity. I won’t let it lie to me.” And the final form, I think, is, “I believe in life. I won’t let it lie to me.” That’s the architecture of this year’s Christmas story. Now all I need is the story.

I smile to myself at all the ways my life has conspired to put me where I am right now: A philosophically-adept obsessive writer, enraptured by the most beautiful and rigorous kind of ethics, with a background in high-volume, high-tech publishing problems, who works as a real estate broker and who spends much of his time thinking about the marketing of everything. Where would I be, by now, but here? It’s funny for me to watch people try to whimper-whip or brow-beat me into echoing their lies — after I’ve told them every way I can think of that I would Read more

December 31, 2008

Last call for end-of-the-year discounts on tickets for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, April 28 – May 1, 2009 — and catch us for free at Zillow’s offices in Seattle on February 12

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the front

and back

face of a door-hanger we have going out in high-equity neighborhoods starting January 3rd. In most of Phoenix, for now, listing is essentially limited to short sales and lender-owned homes, so most of our time this year will be devoted to buyers. But if this card — or variations on it — can pull the way we want it to, it should be worth around $3,000 a week, net of all expenses. The lord knows we can use it.

Brian and I keep getting mail from people wondering why we’re going to be teaching weblogging at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. We’re not. All we ever teach is marketing — on-line, on paper and face-to-face. There is a piece to this door-hanger that you’re not seeing that should more than double its response rate. That’s marketing — and there is no one else in the real estate industry who teaches the kinds of marketing that Brian and I cover as a matter of course.

You can catch a preview of our marketing curriculum in Seattle on February 12th. We’ll be doing a free Unchained preview at Zillow HQ, 999 Third Avenue, Seattle, WA, on Thursday, February 12th from 1pm to 5pm. Scott Cowan is organizing the event with help from Drew Meyers and David Gibbons from Zillow. Marlow Harris will be joining us, along with some other Seattle blogging luminaries. The grand finale will be a debate between Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman and BloodhoundBlog iconoclast Greg Swann, moderated by Brian Brady, American Real Estate’s Number One Marketing Maven.

I gotta go. I’m showing this morning. But I wanted to remind y’all that today is the last day for a couple of big discounts on Unchained tickets. The Early-Bird price — $100 off — goes away altogether today. And the Unchained Alumnus discount will drop from $200 to $100 at midnight tonight. That’s $100 in savings, either way, for acting today.

Click the appropriate button below to sign up now.

CyberProfessionals: $397


















Unchained Alumnus: $497 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















Early-Bird Price: $597 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















The full price Read more

December 30, 2008

The return counter — Looking AG’s Trojan Horse in the mouth: MyMarketWare works hard for the money, almost hard enough…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Continuing with my discussion of the bribe/gifts proffered to the contributors to Agent Blunderbuss, here’s a quick look at MyMarketWare.com.

I looked at this product when it was introduced and was not all that impressed. I like it better on second glance.

What is it? YASPWSS: Yet Another Single Property Web Site Solution. Like many of these services, the offering is pretty light-weight. And like seemingly all of them, it inflicts treacly music upon the end user. But, to be fair, the price for a site, hosted for a year, ain’t bad.

Keep in mind, as you read, that my frame of reference is our own engenu sites. I can do anything I want, to any level of detail or depth that I want, and I can reorganize an entire, huge web site on a whim. There is no YASPWSS on the market that is going to impress me.

MyMarketWare works to one level deep. That is, from a site’s “home” page, you go one level down, no deeper. Given that architecture, I would have loved to have seen at least the on-site links done within an iframe on the index page — pseudo AJAX.

You can link to off-site pages, which is a bonus, since it makes the sites effectively infinitely extensible.

The pages of the sites themselves are built in ASP, with a huge block of obfuscated code near the top of each one. Positioning on the pages is effected with both CSS and HTML tables, which seemed odd to me. MyMarketWare promises decent SEO from these pages, but they seemed very verbose, to my eyes.

I personally want a lot more photos than MyMarketWare makes available, and I want to be able to sort and organize them by category. The slide show software, apparently available on one page only, was fairly robust.

There are decent contact and scheduling forms, and MyMarketWare promises to feed your site’s details to various Realty.bots — which is probably also being done by other vendors you are using.

My overall rating of MyMarketWare’s demo single-property web site was “eh” but not inadequate. It does a decent job at what it does, but Read more

December 29, 2008

The return counter — Looking AG’s Trojan Horse in the mouth: No mere API-ing ape, Dwellicious is a true dead-pool mash-up

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
        –Robert Burns, To a Louse

In a comment on AG’s bribe/gift extravaganza, I said:

And, yes, the Dwellicious campaign stunk to high heaven. It’s headed straight for the dead pool, once it actually launches. The same dumbass “idea” has already failed several times. To say anything else is absurd.

That remark turns out to be grossly unfair. Dwellicious is not all-on-its-own to the dead-pool destined, it is a mash-up and mash-note-like send-up of a vast host of future dead-pool denizens.

Here’s the pitch. People will shop at lots of different Realty.bots, see? So Dwellicious gives them an easy way to organize all the houses they are finding on these various sites. It has social-networking tools built in, since, apparently, social-networking-type homebuyers can’t even go to the bathroom without permission from their TwitterButtBuddies. Not only that, but Dwellicious taps into every available Realty.bot and social-networking API, which will possibly prove to be astounding if anyone ever accidentally uses this silly site.

I watched the Dwellicious PR campaign a few weeks ago, assuming that it had to be astroturf, but today is the first time I have paid even one second’s attention to the product itself.

It’s actually quite an instructive clusterfrolic, if there are web entrepreneurs out there who want to learn how to get just about everything wrong.

Here’s the straight dope: Dwellicious seems to have been developed by paying devout attention to the TwitWit echo chamber — without one second or one dollar being devoted to actual market research.

Premise: People will shop at lots of different Realty.bots.

This is almost certainly false. Homebuyers window-shop at sites like Trulia and Zillow. When they get serious, they move to a particular, robust and — important concepts ahead — complete and non-redundant IDX or VOW search engine.

(A subsidiary premise of the entire dead-pool-bound Realty.bot movement is the idea that some strange imaginary people might want to purchase a residence in more than one major Read more

December 29, 2008

A trolley comes to Phoenix: Tendency in reporting and why it matters

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So it’s almost five days since I dropped the dime on the bribe gifts being thrust upon the contributors to AG. Has anyone publicly renounced them so far? We got to see Jay Thompson issue some tepid caveats about the gift products — from our pages, not AG’s. And we got to watch in horror as Russell Shaw imploded, which wasn’t pretty. But if anyone has actually come out and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” — I’m not aware of it.

Doesn’t much matter, by now. The moment is gone.

You — meaning you, the invisible reader — will react as you choose, and that is not only your business, but it’s your perfect right. But I can give you a very simple lens for understanding the issue, one that not even the chorus line of tap-dancers who showed up in our comments could manage to gainsay:

Suppose you are finally about to be interviewed by the real estate reporter from your local “City” magazine. Very big deal, very exciting, maybe your chance to break through to the target market you’ve spent a fortune trying to attract. But then you discover that the reporter has taken $2,000 in in-kind gifts from your fiercest competitor. How does that make you feel? Is it possible that the reporter is on the up and up and the gifts mean nothing? Well… yeahhhh… Is is plausible to you that you are about to be served up like a plate half full of cold leftovers? That’s what’s running through your head, isn’t it? Taking expensive gifts from people you write about doesn’t mean you are necessarily corrupt, but it sure makes you look and smell corrupt.

In our comments threads, there were a lot of specious arguments made in defense of taking these bribes, or at least not renouncing them. One of them was the notion that “everyone is biased.” This is a very common fallacious dodge — which is to say a persuasively invalid argument. We start by acknowledging the obvious facts that each of us has a unique point of view, and each of us is operating Read more

December 28, 2008

The Goal-Getters Game: Yes, you want to set goals for 2009, but here’s a game to make sure you actually follow through on them

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Goal-Getters Game is a variation on some of the ideas we have been playing with in email since Thanksgiving.

So first: ‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, made in haste and forgotten more hastily.

The Motivational Speaker Circuit, both inside and outside of the real estate world, is always all over the idea of goal-setting. But real changes in you life can only come from goal-achieving.

In our email discussions, I brought up Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” system of goal tracking.

Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

Teri has mentioned that she is already Read more

December 28, 2008

“U.S adults” may not want foreclosed homes, but homebuyers sure do

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
“U.S adults” may not want foreclosed homes, but homebuyers sure do

Did you see in the news where only 47% of U.S. adults would consider buying a foreclosed home?

An amazing number, isn’t it? What does it mean?

Almost nothing, of course. The real estate market in Phoenix, along with many, many other cities, is dominated by foreclosed homes right now. They are virtually all that is selling.

So how could so many homes be selling if so many people are averse to buying them?

This is a nice lesson in the uselessness of public opinion polls. “U.S. adults” are not homebuyers. Homebuyers are homebuyers. Asking U.S. adults how they feel about sushi or blackberry wine will tell you nothing about their sales, either.

What the survey does tell us is that the news has gotten out about the sometimes difficult process of buying a foreclosed home — especially a short sale — and about the often dismal condition of those homes.

And yet, foreclosed homes are selling and virtually nothing else is.

Why?

Because they’re cheap, that’s why. Even in the nicest neighborhoods, a lender-owned home will sell at a discount of 50% to 80%, compared to owner-occupied homes. In not-as-nice communities in the West Valley, you can pick up a stucco-and-tile 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1,500 square foot home with a two-car garage for $50,000.

As I write this, there are 120 homes like that, all built 1995 and later, listed for $75,000 or less.

Let the price rise to $100,000 and there are 690 available right now.

Last month, 191 of those homes sold for $100,000 or less. That’s an implied absorption rate of 3.61 months, arguably a seller’s market.

So on the one hand an undifferentiated population of U.S. adults, who may or may not be in the market to buy a home, has a generally negative opinion of foreclosed homes.

And on the other hand there is a land-office business in foreclosed homes.

We will see many years’ worth of foreclosures in our market. How we feel about that in the abstract makes no difference.

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December 28, 2008

Psalm

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top of the blog, as well. I think this is a good example of the kind of behavior that has been denounced for millennia by would-be bosses, but I also think this approaches an ideal expression of how human beings should behave. Plus which, it’s the stuff I’ve been talking about all week, boiled down to its essence — and I think it’s good Sunday reading besides. I live to be proud of my life, and the moments that gave birth to this essay are among the proudest of those I’ve lived so far. This is the best I have within me. This is a seed I long to see cast to the winds, to grow wherever it can take root. –GSS

 
Psalm

Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you cringe.

Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the Read more

December 26, 2008

A sermon for the ninety-and-nine: Don’t mimic bad examples among big-name real estate webloggers

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from December 21, 2007. This was, I think, the second the the last time that I pissed off the echo chamber clique of big name real estate webloggers by pointing out that they were thoughtlessly committing a serious error. I was right about the issue addressed here, which is why, despite three or four days of mob outrage, no one adopted the insulting video tactic discussed in this post.

I don’t like the way people behave in these mad spasms, but I don’t care, either. The only behavior I control is my own, and, as I discussed last night, I never take an action I know in advance is morally wrong. Doesn’t mean I’m never in error. My contributions to BloodhoundBlog, very often, are discussions of what I’ve learned from my many, many errors. But I strive never to be intentionally in error.

But I have a unique understanding of the ontology of human ethics, and it’s something I feel a responsibility to share with the readers of this weblog. If you want to see everything I’ve written here on the subject, pursue the Egoism in Action category.

Or don’t. I’m easy enough to ignore — which will tell you a great deal about those mad spasms, if you trouble yourself to think the matter through. But if you want to profit by my experience at this kind of mass communication, I’m happy to share what I know. –GSS

 
I always thought that bible story about the lost sheep was stupid. If it were me in the story, I would stay right there with the ninety-and-nine, making damn sure that tomorrow it wasn’t the ninety-and-eight. Too bad about the lost sheep, but the mission-critical job has to come first.

Here’s an interesting fact about weblogs, and about internet discussion forums in general: You will almost never hear from the ninety-and-nine. If you manage to build an audience, you will hear from people who are reading your site. That’s a good thing. But if you take those people as being representative of your audience, you are making a mistake. You Read more

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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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