This is just for fun:
Here’s wishing all of us — contributors, commenters, subscribers and the ninety-and-nine — happy and healthy holidays and the best year yet in 2009!
Author: Greg Swann (page 82 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
I would ask, is this sick-making to me alone? — but I heard about it from a nauseated reader before I had seen it myself.
We don’t take any money out of this site at all, not even Amazon affiliate fees. I don’t want for anyone reading BloodhoundBlog ever to doubt our integrity.
I am repelled by advertising on real estate weblogs, but taking in-kind bribes for pimping vendors and their dubious wares is simply corrupt.
Until today, there were no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors — if for no other reason than because it had never occurred to me that anyone could do something this disgusting, much less celebrate it. Today we inaugurate our first rule:
If you write for us and if you have taken bribes in the form of cash or merchandise from a vendor, please send me your resignation. If I find out that any BloodhoundBlog contributor has taken bribes from a vendor, I will fire you on the spot. I love having our contributors here, but we each one of us have to be above reproach, now and always. This is the way I built this place, and thus it will remain, even if I have to go back to writing alone.
The one bright spot in this, for me, is that not one of these jackals made their bribe offers to me.
Un-frolicking-believable…
I have two more posts scheduled for the day, but I’m so angry I could spit. I’m going to mix myself a drink and toast, one by one, the people I know for sure I can trust.
I’d like to introduce you to some really nice folks. Take a look:
The couple on the left are the Anybodys, Jeff and Janice. Jeff is a middle-manager for GE. Unless he owns a Pizza Hut. Unless he’s a Civil Engineer for the county health department. Janice is a schoolteacher — or a stay-at-home mom — or the assistant manager of the parts department at the Saturn dealership.
On the right is their real estate agent — real live real estate agent Allie Howard.
This is good real estate marketing, profoundly effective in all kinds of ways. Virtually anybody can see themselves as the Anybodys. They are exceptional examples of everything that is unexceptional in American middle-class life. And Allie is just geeky enough, just semi-hip enough, just po-mo enough and just down-to-business enough to connect with the Anybodys in the intense but decisively temporary marriage that is a home search.
Everything in this photo is perfect. The clothing is casual but expensive — in just the right colors. That hand-written type face is an homage to the “Hello!” of the original Macintosh. Everything about this image is devised to make you feel comfortable about proceeding with a real estate transaction with Allie.
So who is responsible for this inspired piece of marketing?
Redfin.com, that’s who.
That’s right, the home of the geeks is working very hard to become the just-geeky-enough place for Janice — not Jeff — to shop for a home.
Just two weeks ago, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman was wondering among the Bloodhounds if hi-tech companies like his would crush all the Mom and Pop brokerages. But here we see that self-same Kelman working very hard to compete with Mom and Pop on their own turf.
Let me make two interstitial points, if I might.
First, do not underestimate Glenn Kelman. We’ve beat up on a lot of people in the last 30 months, but, as far as I can tell, Glenn Kelman is the only one among them who is actively trying to figure out what he’s getting wrong. That doesn’t mean we have been right, necessarily. But Kelman is going to keep testing and revising his Read more
Totally stunning email this morning from John Kalinowski of LiquidBlueRealty.com. John is a profile in courage, to my way of looking at things. He’s just launched a brand new brokerage. In this real estate market. In Cleveland. He’s being very sweet to the Bloodhounds in this note, but this is an amazing amount of work he has undertaken:
I finally had a minute to sit down and send you a note, to thank you for all the help you’ve provided me, even though you weren’t aware you were helping! I’ve been following your site for quite some time now, absorbing every little tidbit possible, and in the last two weeks left RE/MAX to start my own brokerage in the Cleveland Market, Liquid Blue Realty. I’m building the entire company around the custom sign idea, and so far the response has been incredible, to say the least!
I am eternally grateful to the Bloodhounds (and to Russell Shaw) for all the inspiration that has pushed me to make this move. I even built my own website, using WordPress and the Thesis template, even though I’ve never had a blog or built a site before. I probably wouldn’t know what WordPress was if I hadn’t started following your site.
Our signs are 24″x36″, just like yours, but are actually printed directly onto a sign material that is made of some sort of hard plastic with aluminum bonded to each side. Our printer owns what amounts to a giant inkjet printer that can basically print on anything that will fit inside (I’ve seen them print on a bedroom door!), and uses waterproof ink. They use the same process to print conventional signs for other agents, and the panels are about 1/8″ thick and weigh about 5 lbs, so these are serious signs.
Believe it or not, I create my sign files on a PC! I start with MS Publisher with a full-size 24×36 image, then print to a PDF using Acrobat Distiller at 300 DPI. I then jump between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to fix the CMYK values on the blue color, and to create the huge 350mb Read more
Here is both the best and the worst of BloodhoundBlog Unchained so far.
It’s the best, or a piece of the best, because it covers a great deal of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology in rapid-fire fashion.
It’s the worst, or of a piece with the worst, because it’s me delivering a lecture, rather than us doing the work I’m talking about.
There won’t be any lecturing at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, but there will be a whole lot of the doing of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology.
This video represents just a slice of the content on the DVDs from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008. We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve learned a lot about how to share what we know, so what we really want is for you to come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix this year. But if you can’t do that, there’s a whole lot of great information covered on those DVDs. If you can’t be with us in April — or even if you can — the DVD set could be a great Christmas gift for your career.
We’re marketers, and because of that we know that sales increase when the barriers to commitment are low. So let’s commit, shall we?
Enroll now for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix
If you’re ready to rock, all you have to do from here is click a PayPal button to reserve your place at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. The event runs from April 28th to May 1st, 2009. Many more details can be found at the BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix weblog.
Fair warning: This won’t be cheap. If you’re looking for the best possible deal, and if you qualify, joining the CyberProfessionals might be your best bet. And if you’ve entrusted us with your money before, either last May in Phoenix or in November in Orlando, we want to express our gratitude with a special Unchained Alumnus price. But whatever you end up paying, we’re going to make it worth your while and then some.
Here’s how the prices break out. Just click on the appropriate button Read more
“Joe Strummer” is the pseudonym of a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. He runs a weblog of his own — under a different pseudonym — and leads a life of joy, contemplation and undisturbed privacy under his real name. But no matter how he is denominated, Strummer is an expert in the Austrian School of Economics, a colloquium of great minds who are, alas, the eternally unheeded Cassandras of the decline of Western Capitalism. In this essay, penned yesterday, Strummer shares with us his reflections upon the burgeoning economic crisis:
My thoughts on the looming crisis
by Joe Strummer
This is a graph of the nominal value of the assets that the Fed has “owned” over time. Notice the fairly flat, slightly rising line until September/October of 2008.
Two points about this graph. First, the Fed did not get value for the $1.2 trillion it has purchased in “assets” since October. The $1.2 trillion in nominal value is actually nearly worthless. That’s because these “assets” are the mortgage backed securities backed by now- or soon-to-be-broken promises to pay by individual homeowners.
Second, the Fed has merely pumped about 1.2 trillion of dollars into the market place free. In other words, it has taken nothing out of the economy of value. When the government adds currency – what Jim Cramer calls, dropping wads of cash from helicopters – without getting anything in return, it’s called inflation.
Now, $1.2 trillion in new currency is bad, but not nearly as bad as when the Fed loans money to banks at a .5 interest rate. The Fed simply is printing money for any bank that wants to borrow it at .5 percent. Consequently, banks are now borrowing to 1) cover the losses they incurred to make themselves solvent, and 2) to have cash reserves that they can then use when the economy picks up to lend at future, higher interest rates.
All of this inflation hasn’t hit the real economy because banks are hoarding that money to wait for better borrowers or because borrowers simply are hunkered down right now trying to wait out the storm.
When the economy starts Read more
Look at these custom yard signs from Mariana Wagner’s iTeam real estate brokerage in Colorado Springs, Colorado:
Mariana reflects: “Not exactly how yours is set up, as our wind and freezing temps make the hanging sign a disaster, but these rock. (We have installed a 1-800# on the bottom of each sign, as well.)”
I like the white space, especially, a vital design element I too often leave out. And I really like the way that Mariana and her team play with the Keller Williams color scheme without being imprisoned by it.
I’m dying to hear how they sell — the houses and the brokerage.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
Workable real estate deals may require even more creativity
I do a lot of work with buy-and-hold rental home investors, more and more of whom are able to come into Phoenix with all-cash offers. Poor me, I know.
But: I’ve been spending a lot of my time, lately, thinking about “triangle-trade” strategies — old-style funding mechanisms that we were happy to forget all about when money was easy.
So picture a buy-and-hold investor with 100% equity who wants the best deal he can get when he sells his former rental home. Why not do a lease-purchase instead of a straight sale? The investor can help his buyers accumulate a down-payment, perhaps working with them to improve their credit score at the same time. The investor gets a higher purchase price, the buyers get a lower monthly payment, everybody wins.
Or how about selling with a contract-for-deed? There are a lot of people out there with great incomes but lousy credit — more every day. If an investor — or ordinary homeowner — is willing to take on the risk of a carrying back a note, the home can sell now, rather than languishing on the market.
Or if the seller isn’t able to carry the whole mortgage, how about carrying back a second loan? If the seller has the equity, and if that will swing the balance with the buyer’s lender, it can make sense.
San Diego Realtor Don Reedy has come up with his own blast from the past: Parents help their kids get into homes by co-signing on the loan and helping with the payments, then share in the equity on resale.
Single people or single parents or childless couples could do the same sort of thing with a larger home: Go in on the home together as tenants-in-common, using their combined income to qualify for the loan, then paying the mortgage and sharing in the equity on a pro-rated basis.
Buyers are not in short supply, nor are homes available for sale. Creativity could make all the difference, going forward, in putting workable deals Read more
Can you read this?
It came this morning in a piece of spam from Inman “news.”
Spam — unsolicited commercial email from vendorslut central.
And: Spam with FUD, InmanStyle: “If you can afford to ignore breaking real estate news and emerging technology trends, then Unsubscribe.”
That’s creepy, sleazy, slimy and repugnant — which is to say it’s marketing as someone from Brad Inman’s epoch understands it. Like all the relics Inman “news” tries to shove down our throats, Bran Inman is a dinosaur — a giant, thrashing reptile incapable of discovering his own irrelevance. Holding someone like him to Web 2.0 standards of behavior is like expecting an actual dinosaur to regulate its own body temperature — it’s more than he can ever do.
But remember that Inman “news” is now allegedly run by people from “our” world.
Do you wish to claim that they don’t know what spam is?
Is it your contention that they don’t know what FUD is?
Evil is doing something you know in advance is wrong. Is there anyone who believes they didn’t know that issuing this treacly piece of spam was morally wrong by standards they understood perfectly well, in advance of their acting?
I’ve been telling you this for a long time, but, sadly, we could not have asked for a more telling example:
When exponents of the vendorslut cesspool — Inman, vendors, the NAR — tell us they want to be a part of our world — what they always mean is that they want to suck us into their sewer of lies.
The things we call surprises almost always result from our failure to pay attention to stone obvious manifestations of reality occurring right before our eyes.
My advice, always: Mind what goes into your mind…
Lender Bob says, “Hey, I’m a lender. I want to get Realtors to notice me. Hell, I want to get in front of them so often they can’t forget me. What can I do?”
Realtor Beth chimes in with, “He’s got the right idea. I’m a Realtor. I’ve got a blog and all, but I don’t feel like I’m talking to the people in my farm. How can I get my name and my ideas in front of them ever day?”
Vendor Bill adds, “I’ve got things once worse. I need to sell marketing ideas to Beth and Bob, both, but how can I break through the clutter?”
These are problems that can be solved by Scenius scenes. With the right scene, you can aggregate content and share it with people you want to do business with.
Watch:
Lender Bob can link to financial news and stories on factors that influence interest rates. He can make this scene available to Realtors in his market, who will have Bob’s free content available to share with their own readers. Florida Lender Kevin Sandridge is getting ready to do just this in his market.
Realtor Beth can link to local news stories and then echo that content to other weblogs in her market area. I’m doing this with Phoenix Area Headlines, but Beth could do other things as well. For example, she could do a “best of local blogs” scene to spread the link love around. Or, like Chicago Realtor Thomas Hall, she could do a scene on green real estate.
Vendor Bill has the easiest job of all, if he learns to think Scenius: He doesn’t need to cut through the clutter, he needs to slice it and dice it and serve it up in his own scene. I’m playing with this idea with Switched-On Marketing.
There’s more. Eric Blackwell is using a scene as a way of getting his 100+ agents to get on-board the social media marketing train. Cheryl Johnson and I are both using Scenius scenes to manage our listings on-line — but that’s an advanced-class topic.
The point of this: If you’re in the business of self-promotion, we’ve Read more
I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.
But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.
I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.
And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.
But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.
Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?
Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked Read more
This is a form I wrote for a house that Cathleen may or may not have in play. The details have been fictionalized, but the underlying situation — a house trashed so badly that it becomes a menace to safety — will probably only become more common.
Caveat lector: I am an Arizona real estate broker, empowered by our state’s constitution to prepare documents incident to the transfer of real property. Your local laws will be different.
BUYER IS PURCHASING REAL PROPERTY AGAINST ADVICE OF BUYER’S BROKER
Buyer’s Broker herewith explicitly advises Buyer against the purchase of 123 Mulberry Street, Hadleysburg, AZ.
1. Buyer is aware that property has been looted by a previous owner, tenant, burglar, interloper or tenant-at-sufferance.
2. Buyer is aware that all kitchen appliances, fixtures, counters, cabinets, shelving and appurtenant items have been removed from the property.
3. Buyer is aware that the truss-mounted air-handler has been removed from the property.
4. Buyer is aware that the extent of any additional looting is undetermined and is substantially indeterminable.
5. Buyer is aware that attempts to repair or refurbish this property could result in further damage to the property and/or injury or loss of life to Buyer or Buyer’s contractors or employees.
6. Buyer is aware that repairing or refurbishing a property in this condition is a task that should be undertaken only by experienced building contractors.
7. Buyer is aware that additional damages resulting from attempts to repair or refurbish this property could destroy any or all residual marketable value in the property, with such loss in value being Buyer’s sole responsibility and liability.
8. Buyer is aware that injuries or deaths resulting from attempts to repair or refurbish this property could be construed by courts or insurance companies to be Buyer’s sole responsibility and liability.
9. Buyer is aware that many other residential properties, substantially in turn-key condition, are available nearby at reasonable prices.
10. Buyer has been advised numerous times of Buyer’s Broker objections to this purchase.
ERGO, BUYER ACKNOWLEDGES BY HIS SIGNATURE HEREUNDER THAT BUYER IS PROCEEDING WITH THIS PURCHASE AGAINST THE PROFESSIONAL ADVICE AND JUDGMENT OF BUYER’S BROKER, EXPRESSED REPEATEDLY AND STRENUOUSLY.
Buyer agrees to release, indemnify and hold harmless Buyer’s Broker for any and all losses, Read more
I don’t do well in despair.
Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.
What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.
I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.
That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.
You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.
But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure
Looking for some good news in the Phoenix residential real estate market? So is everyone else.
New foreclosures are down, as are new foreclosure filings. Lenders are working with homeowners to help them stay in their homes, just in time for Christmas. That’s good news right?
Maybe. It turns out that, of the folks who negotiated loan workouts in the first quarter of 2008, 60% are back in default on their loans.
It gets worse. The typical newer stucco and tile West Valley tract home lost 7.41% of its value. In November. Year-over-year, that house is down 35.46%. Compared to its high in December of 2005, that property is down 48%.
Now there is a silver lining. If you bought your home in 2003 or before, and if you have resisted the impulse to refinance it, you’re probably still ahead of the game, at least by a little bit. And with interest rates at historic lows, this might be the time, finally, to refinance to lower payment.
And investors and first-time homebuyers could not have things better: The selection of available homes is still very broad, prices are below replacement costs, and interest rates are deliciously low.
Better news — for people who don’t own homes: Prices could go a lot lower, and interest rates could drop even more.
But what, then, is the implication for loan workouts? Until home prices stabilize and start to rise again, a loan workout against substantial negative equity might not make the best financial sense.
As we talked about last week, the hit on your credit rating from a foreclosure is a terrible thing. But it’s plausible to me that you could recover from that faster than your home will once again be worth what you’re paying for it.
And that’s the worst news of all: We have mismanaged our economy so dreadfully that, for many people, the most financially-astute course of action they can take is to pretend to be deadbeats, to fake their way to Read more