BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 89 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

September 18, 2008

Pressing news from the world at large: We will survive

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One:

If we go back to 20 percent down payments, the market will be more stable. I’m sure that in a free market we would see 20 percent down payments. Barney Frank is the only person I can think of who still wants to lend with little or no money down. He’s welcome to do it, but I dare him to use his own money instead of ours. –Arnold Kling, EconLog, via Cafe Hayek

Two, Donald Luskin at Poor and Stupid:

I’m quoted extensively in Debra Saunders’ column in today’s San Francisco Examiner.

On the campaign trail Wednesday, Obama bemoaned “the most serious financial crisis in generations.” He said the exact same words the day before…

“The most serious financial crisis in generations?”

Donald Luskin, a chief investment officer with the Menlo Park investment research firm TrendMacrolytics and an economic adviser to McCain – who tells me he has never talked to McCain – remarked that if Obama “had a little bit more experience,” he would “put these things in more context.” Luskin has lived through five or six recessions, and “this ain’t one.”

It isn’t a recession because the U.S. economy has grown in both of the last two quarters. Read: It is not receding. And while Luskin sees the unemployment rate as “a little high,” it is “not as high as it typically is in a recession.” Yes, Luskin is concerned about inflation, now at 5.4 percent. The drop in oil prices may help…

Luskin questioned what has happened to politics, when a candidate “must pretend this is a recession or you’re seen as hard-hearted.” And: “What does it say when we can’t be nuanced? And we can’t say, ‘Look, we’re in a little bit of a slowdown, but the fundamentals are strong’?”

The answer, of course, is that Democrats can’t win without trashing the economy. As Luskin pointed out in a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, in Obama’s famed anti-Iraq war speech back in 2002, the then-Illinois state senator suggested the war was waged “to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Read more

September 16, 2008

Life as a big, unchained hound in a big, unchained world…

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I don’t give a rat’s ass about traffic, but I care a great deal about being as big as we are.

It looks like those new Technorati numbers are going to hold, and that particular screenshot sings to me. We’re not as big as the real estate porn blogs or the bubble blogs or the investor blogs, but we are far and away the biggest of the category I call the RE.net, the real estate industry weblogs.

My delight is not a matter of traffic or links, that’s just so much shoes on the carpet. What matters to me is not where we are but, rather, how we got here.

In email today a friend of BloodhoundBlog said:

I love it that you’ve done this, but I love it most because you’ve done it without the Twitterati, despite people making public pronouncements that they are boycotting BHB, by bowing to no one, by keeping your own counsel.

And that’s exactly right. I don’t care if nobody is listening, so long as we’re doing this work our way.

But consider: Hardly anybody bothers me, these days, with bad advice on what and how to write or how to manage this weblog, but this used to be a common thing. But we are what we are despite all that bad advice.

I know there are a certain number of people reading here — even if they have insisted publicly that they don’t — who don’t understand what we are doing at all. There are a small few who understand all too well — and it drives them completely crazy. Another small few get it and love it and catch every delightful little nuance of the theater of the thing. But the ninety-and-nine — and I never forget the ninety-and-nine — are here for their own reasons, and a healthy self-interest is the perfect expression of the unchained ideal.

I know that you are confronted all the time with what I consider to be horribly bad advice — kiss up, kiss ass, bend, yield, compromise, to get along you’ve got to go along. Of all the many things we can do Read more

September 16, 2008

No sharks allowed! The predictable consequences of government regulation of the financial markets

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I wrote this for No Treason in July of 2002:

This morning’s New York Times has a curious piece on Alan Greenspan’s recent denunciation of greed.

The article consists of a series of quotations from Ayn Rand and from Greenspan in the days when he was incontestably in the Randian camp. On Usenet I wrote:

Well, I had wondered when someone here was going to remark upon Greenspan’s denunciation of greed, but I thought the article itself was very good. I expect the Times thought that merely quoting those texts was damning enough, but I thought they were nice selections. It would have been nice to point out that these events are the consequence not of capitalism but of our fascist mixed-economy, of Orren Boyle, not Hank Rearden, but I think the Times may have done its own cause more harm than good.

But wait. There’s more. The Times quotes Rand as saying “I make mincemeat out of the kind of businessman … that runs to government for assistance, subsidies, legislation and regulation.” Precisely what kind of corporate executive — not businessman — do they think has committed these awful crimes?

Does the New York Times think that the securities market, the sine qua non of these scandals, is free?

A year or two ago, conservatives were rejoicing that half or more of Americans were now ‘capitalists’, owners of the means of production, either directly or through retirement plans or mutual funds. Now that the New York Times is lamenting the sad fates of these — call them by their right names: Indiscriminate, uninformed, degenerate gamblers — is anyone happy to have the nation’s capital in the hands of such cry-babies?

Does the New York Times honestly believe that ordinary people should own securities? Does the New York Times believe that anyone who would gamble his retirement savings on the most volatile of stock issues should be pitied for suffering the predictable consequences of what Greenspan calls “infectious greed”?

Back when he was young and admirable, Alan Greenspan wrote that going off the gold-standard “put a penny in the fuse-box” of the American economy. Actually, the old and tired Read more

September 15, 2008

Tom Johnson reports on hurricane clean-up efforts in Houston

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Our good friend Tom Johnson in Houston by email:

Minor house damage to report, nothing that lets the weather in. We are one of about ten homes with power in our neighborhood (100homes). We were on the clean side of the storm, about 80 miles away from the hard hit part of Houston. We are very fortunate.

Watch the clean-up of the 4th largest US city. I have a feeling it will astound. The false alarm from Rita gave public officials around here a dress rehearsal on how to screw up, and I think they have a pretty good handle on what is required. There have been some FEMA issues but it was kind of funny. Yesterday FEMA informed the State that they weren’t able to move the relief commodities from Reliant Stadium to the Points of Distribution. The state, probably correctly, is focused on the coast and was unable to shift the National Guard to the PoDs. The Mayor and County Comm. just told the State to get out of the way. Apparently they had established some kind of volunteer corps for this type of eventuality. The state handed off permission to talk to FEMA to local authorities, and once the local to FEMA direct billing was verified with Chertoff, the trucks were rolling to the PoDs last night. They are fully stocked this AM and have restocking in place so there will be very little running out. The logistics of the relief effort are fascinating to me. It is totally devastating to a citizen to sit in line for what will be hours in the early days to be told we just ran out, so, keeping the supplies coming is as important as the initial relief effort.

All taxpayer paid workers were expected to be at work today. As the mayor said: This is going to be the largest garbage pick up in history.

I’ll have more as it processes.

I expect the Houston Red Cross would be happy to hear from you.

September 14, 2008

Fannie and Freddie fall to foreclosure, but, still, lenders lend

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

 
Fannie and Freddie fall to foreclosure, but, still, lenders lend

I write this column at the beginning of the week, and it appears at the end of the week. My topics are usually timeless, but, if I turn my attention to current events, there’s always the chance that I’ll end up with my foot in my mouth.

Even so, the news that matters most in residential real estate this week is the takeover by the federal government of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FannieMae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FreddieMac). These two quasi-private corporations define the lion’s share of the secondary mortgage market in the United States.

What does that mean? If you got a conforming loan for your home, it will have been sold into the secondary mortgage market in short order. FannieMae or FreddieMac would have guaranteed the loan to investors, this so your lender could have had a renewed supply of capital from which to make new loans. Federal Housing Authority and Veterans’ Administration loans would have been guaranteed by those entities, and sub-prime (non-conforming) loans would have been marketed directly to private investors. The secondary mortgage market exists to keep loan originators liquid in a market where very few people keep their savings in banks.

Given the federal takeover, has the sky fallen on the secondary mortgage market? No, although things may be a little sluggish as the newly-installed management teams learn the ropes. But as San Diego real estate broker Jeff Brown says, “Lenders lend.” There are still plenty of dollars chasing mortgages, so there will be mortgages chasing dollars. It’s plausible that interest rates could even go down, now that the secondary mortgage market has a rich Uncle Sam to back its loans.

What is not so plausible is the notion that investors will suddenly abandon housing altogether. Things will shake out. The ideal situation would be for a new free-market clearinghouse for the secondary mortgage market to arise. A business like that could cherry-pick the strongest loans, those least likely to go into foreclosure, leaving Read more

September 13, 2008

A Bloodhound’s arrogance stumblin’ on the heart of Saturday night

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Cross your fingers, Cathy may have brought home a $600,000 listing today. As my contribution to our household finances, I lassoed a $50,000 prize of my own. Mine will be fun for the whole family though: We’re going to discuss it here as a unique marketing problem. Why unique? It’s a vacant lot with a structure on it. It’s a tear-down that can’t be torn down. It’s a certified antiquity with no discernible historic value. In short: It’s a challenge.

Why did I take the listing? Because I’m committed to the idea that marketing real estate is not fundamentally different from marketing anything else. I believe I can target-market this outrageously anomalous property and get it sold. I think this will be a fun exercise, a chance to explore radically different ideas about selling real property.

I linked today to a post I wrote more than a year ago. Like this post, it has that strangely disorganized cohesion of a weblog entry — part essay, part letter to a beloved friend — but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written here. I reread it today, and Teri tells us in a comment that she did, too.

Here’s the best of it:

A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky Read more

September 13, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Working like a dog to achieve specific marketing objectives

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Teri Lussier:

My other question: Good ideas and bad ideas. This bites me in the butt over and over. My brain is great at generating ideas, not so great at knowing what makes an idea great. Something new or different is not always better (I need to have that tattooed on the inside of my eyelids). The million dollar question: How do you know?

The way we work is to think backward from the marketing objective: What event or outcome do we want to have happened? “Sell the house!” is a lot to tear off in one mouthful, but how about, “What can we do to get visitors to sit down and ‘try the house on’ in their minds?” That’s where the coffee table book came from.

I wrote the original version of our sign philosophy before I created our first yard sign. That sign was very different from the signs we make now, but that paragraph of small text was there from the very beginning. I knew that if a yard sign was actually going to work to sell the house, I had to get people to stop their cars, and that paragraph of text has been doing that one little job ever since.

This is all Richard Riccelli again, thinking in terms of direct response marketing. The big yes to the house is an accumulation of smaller yeses to particular marketing tactics, so the most effective marketing efforts will consist of taking away the negatives — eliminating the deal-killers. Who can you turn to for that kind of marketing advice? Your buyers. When you show, again and again your buyers will teach you what’s not working in other listers’ houses. Learn from your buyers and eliminate the turn-offs from your own listings.

That’s important. People will read the things I write and decide that I’m talking about tricks or gimmicks or tactics. I’m not. I’m talking about a complete home-marketing strategy, and each individual element of that strategy is expected to fulfill a particular strategic objective. But our strategy starts with four obvious tactics that are omitted in at least 90% of the homes Read more

September 11, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: How we do open houses

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Alas, not every visitor to BloodhoundBlog has the sublime gifts to preen at length about the salutary benefits of a carefully-cultivated humility. Some people, oddly enough, come here to learn about real estate. From my email:

I’ve been looking at your listing/marketing process, and am curious about your open house strategy. You comment something to the effect that you hold opens every week because a) you have the time with only really salable listings and b) there are lots of unrepresented buyers out there.
 
We’re probably a little more old school that you, but we try to not be “lazy, stupid and cheap.” We try to price realistically, and we try to promote our opens energetically. Sometimes we get a lot of traffic, but sometimes we don’t (FWIW, we’ve got just over 12 months of inventory right now, and falling, but still very high prices). Is your market way different from ours? Do you get lots of traffic all the time, or is it hit and miss? Just curious.

Here’s the thing, and I guess I can’t say this enough: We don’t do anything the way other Realtors do it. Many of our ideas are original to us, things we worked out on our own. But many others are tactics that we have heard about from other agents. These ideas we Bloodhoundize, a process I’ve talked about before. We strip the idea down to its essence, then rebuild it from the ground up our way, so that the fundamental marketing objectives don’t get lost in the shuffle.

What could be more ordinary than a Realtor holding an open house? Here is our policy on open houses from ABetterListing.com:

We hold Open Houses every week until the home is sold. Why? Because there are an awful lot of un- or under-represented buyers out there, and we want for them to be able to see our home. We avoid dual agency, but we have no problem showing the home to buyers who accidentally left their buyer’s agents at home. If a listing is near the commuter traffic flow — and most of ours are — we like to Read more

September 10, 2008

Once more unto the breach for Vlad — and for your right to free speech

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The good news is that Vlad Zablotskyy is nearing the end of his legal battles with ePerks.com. As you will recall, ePerks sued Vlad to try to compel him to squelch criticism of the lead vendor.

That bad news is that Vlad has had to take a night job to help defray his mounting legal expenses. The Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund has raised a significant amount of money, but as anyone who has ever gotten trapped in the court system knows, there is never enough money to cover legal fees.

What can you do to help? Push the “Donate” button you see below or in our sidebar. If you want to add a button to your own weblog or web site, you can find the HTML code here. But the most significant difference you can make in Vlad’s life, right now, is to make as big a donation as you can afford.

Vlad is stuck in this quagmire a little longer, but it’s worth noting that no one else has been threatened, neither by ePerks nor by any other vendors. By participating in this Legal Defense Fund, we have made it plain that we will defend our right to speak freely — to speak truth to power. I count that a victory for the good guys. How about you?

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!

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September 10, 2008

Zillow.com launches Mortgages Unzipped, a new consumer-focused lenderblog

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Hither. The weblog will be an adjunct to Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, with a crew of loan bloggers and frequent ZMM mortgageurs providing the content. Our own Brian Brady and Tom Vanderwell are early contributors, and Zillow’s man on the job, David Gibbons, will be looking to add more writers as time goes on.

Visit the site for more info.

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September 10, 2008

Why should Realtors come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando? To learn the Bloodhound art of marketing listings, for one thing, as an expression of an attainable moral perfection

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I like to think that, as a secondary consequence of the things I do, I goad good people into becoming better people. This is a part of everything I do, but it’s why there is a category called “Egoism in Action” in BloodhoundBlog, and it’s why so much of what I write about is focused on the idea I call “Splendor.” As much as I can, I want to help the people I come into contact with — here and in the corporeal world — to navigate the path from rational self-interest to undiluted self-adoration — an attainable moral perfection.

I like to think I help good people become better people. I know beyond all doubting that coming into contact with me induces bad people to become worse people. I absolve myself of all guilt in the matter: I would never, ever encourage anyone to pursue any sort of disvalue. But Joseph Ferrara, as an example, seems to have wasted two years of his irreplaceable life sticking metaphorical pins into a metaphorical doll of me. How sad for him, but I am undaunted, undamaged, undiminished — quite the contrary.

Poor Joseph is an extreme specimen, but he is hardly alone. Closer to home is Jonathan Dalton, who seems to devote some huge fraction of his every waking moment to trying to vanquish me in his imagination. He does this in secret, without naming me or linking to me. I wouldn’t even know it was happening, except that people keep sending me his snarky little posts. I cannot imagine what crime the poor slob has committed, that he would punish himself endlessly with thoughts of me, but never doubt that nature is just: Whatever his crime, certainly he believes that obsessing over me — striving with all his might to shout me down inside his own mind — is the fate he has earned and deserved. How sad for him.

Here’s a recent specimen of poor Jonathan’s obsession:

So when you read that a listing agent will be checking your house every other day and will hold your house open every single weekend until it [sells] Read more

September 9, 2008

A reprieve for seller-paid down-payment assistance programs? Brian Brady has the inside track

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Inman News is reporting today on a possible reprieve for seller-paid down-payment assistance programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah. As you will recall, Brian Brady gave you the heads-up on this initiative on August 27th. Brian will be checking in shortly with details of his schmoozing adventures with Barney Frank’s kitchen cabinet. Cliff’s Notes: Don’t tear up those purchase contracts just yet.

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September 8, 2008

Sneak peek: Screen shots from the forthcoming REST for iPhone app

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Real Estate Success Tracker is a Customer Relations Manager/Transaction Manager for Realtors. It comes in Windows and Macintosh versions, plus a networked version that will work with clients on either platform.

REST CEO Matthew Hardy — a BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix matriculant — has been paying attention to the marketplace — unheard of among real estate product vendors — so REST has been quietly moving into the cloud. But Hardy has always been committed to both data security and to your ownership of your data, so REST in the cloud will be available only from your own REST client software — with the database running on your REST network server in your office.

And so the next logical step in this cloudwise progression is an iPhone client, and that is nearing completion. Shown below are three reduced screens from REST for the iPhone, which could be released in beta form as early as this afternoon:

REST is free to try. As a CRM it rocks, but it’s designed to bring systemization and automation to every aspect of a Realtor’s practice. As an example, it’s very easy to build Gary-Keller-style drip/touch campaigns for your clients, customers and prospects. Also very easy to build task scripts for assistants, which can then be assigned to clients or transactions.

Matthew and his team are working hard to integrate REST with the iPhone, bringing us one step closer to one of my long-held dreams: A unified contact database that is synced to every computer and mobile phone in our business. REST is one of the key components we are counting on to take our business into the cloud, and the iPhone app will be a big step in that direction.

BloodhoundRealty.com is a REST installation, but I confess we haven’t made the best use of it, so far. The software has been there for us, but we haven’t been there for it. We have an intern working now to correct our RESTlessness. But: Cathleen and I will both be running the beta iPhone app, so I’ll let you know how it’s working for us.

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September 7, 2008

Would that it were so! BloodhoundBlog is temporarily in the Technorati’s top 1,500 weblogs…

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That image looks nice, but I’m pretty sure it’s a mistake. We’re growing, always, but I don’t think we’re growing quite this fast.

I know that Technorati has been cleaning out its sock drawer, so, for all I know, that could be a true reflection of our Technorati reach. But I think I’ll wait a few days before borrowing against that number…

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September 7, 2008

Introduction to “A consumer’s guide to the divorced real estate commission” — the eBook

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[This is the introductory text to an eBook I have prepared discussing the idea of divorcing the real estate commissions, a topic I have discussed here at some length. You can find the eBook by clicking here. If you like, you can post a button linking to this book — there is code at the end of this post. But my primary motive for putting this together is to appeal to the various consumer-facing personal finance weblogs. I don’t foresee any meaningful reform in the real estate industry originating from the inside, so I am doing what I can to arm consumers against the pernicious evil that is the National Association of Realtors. –GSS]

 
Introduction

Here are three interesting real estate questions, two that came to me directly and one that was commended to me by Rudy Bachraty of Trulia.com.

Question #1: “Potential buyers for our home ($800K – California) have a realtor but he did not find our home for them. The buyers did and have visited both times without him. He has played no role whatever in bringing us these buyers. If we accept their offer why on earth should we give him 3% ($24K) of our home’s equity for contributing nothing whatsoever?”

Question #2: “When looking at homes on our own and calling the listing agents ourselves to set up appointments, does that obligate us to go with the listing agent if we decide to place an offer on the property?”

Question #3: “Since the amount of work involved doesn’t really differ according to the value of the house, financially, it seems like the percentage commission would make higher prices more favorable from a buyer’s agent’s perspective. If this is the case, why would the buyer’s agent be motivated to help negotiate the price down?”

Now, there are nice, long, complicated answers for each of those questions, and nice, long, complicated answers are the very essence of a certain type of salesmanship. It’s called Tap-Dancing, and it works — at least if you’re easily confused. But here are much shorter, much more truthful answers to those three questions:

Answer #1: If you want to hang 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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