BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 91 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

August 21, 2008

Rhapsodizing the iPhone: A full day of my chaotic life, hours of phone time, a trip to Pleasantville — and I could not love it more

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m totally loving my iPhone, so far. Wine Dog is right about power. I think I want two, one each for in- and out-bound calls. But it’s so far beyond any other phone I’ve ever had, I would never even think of stepping back to yesterday’s phone.

I have a piece of software called HandBrake for the Macintosh. It will convert DVDs to other file formats. It’s how I made this clip of Pleasantville last Summer. In early July, I ripped a full copy of Pleasantville in the iPhone’s ideal video format. I just watched it now. Excellent video, and theater-quality sound through the headphones. I’m ready to convert a DVD a night, while I sleep, and park them on a big hard disk for easy syncing.

I had calls drop today when I was in the mountains — nothing new for Phoenicians. Otherwise, the iPhone was fault free, and it works beautifully with the Jawbone headset. I do see power as being an issue, but it was with the Treo 650, too. I often drive for part of the day with my phone plugged into the cigarette lighter (what’s that?). With a hands-free headset, it doesn’t matter. Give me a strong voice dialer, and it will matter even less.

The Jawbone is so much better in sound quality that I’m thinking of pushing a lot more work toward Jott or other transcription software. Cathy is playing with OmniFocus, an iPhone-optimized GTD app. The iPhone is a software universe, rather than simply a set of tools like an ordinary smartphone, so there are almost unlimited horizons for us to discover.

My biggest challenge, I think, is to get Cameron interested in the iPhone SDK. Brian already has a project, and we can come up with dozens more. It’s not that this is the ultimate computing solution — far from it. But in many ways it is the optimax solution, the tool that offers the most, the most-flexible and the most-available computing power relative to its portability and form factor.

An example: I was talking to a reporter today from a business magazine about the availability of Read more

August 21, 2008

iPhone euphony: When you hear the beep, hang tough

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Seventeen months after Steve Jobs’ original announcement, Cathy and I finally got iPhones last night. Our Treo 650s were just about beaten to death, so the moment was right. We had known from the first that we were going to wait for 3G and extensibility. The immediate sell-out of the original inventory of 3G iPhones was like a sign from the gods. We are rarely early-adopters, preferring to let other people find the bugs in dot.oh.dot.oh releases. With luck, this week’s release of iPhone OS 2.0.2, which we installed last night, will be golden.

In the Googlefied world, everything is easy. The AT&T geeks knew nothing about how to convert from Palm Desktop the iPhone, but Apple has a fairly simple procedure. I got all my contacts and my calendar events going back to 2001 just like that. AT&T and Sprint are still squabbling over who gets to service my phone number — I can literally call myself, iPhone to Treo, on my own number. But, so far, everything has been easy and nothing has hurt.

Well, one thing is going to hurt. I’m losing the ability to record phone calls. Many of the podcasts you hear here were recorded directly on my Treo, and I will often use CallRec to “take notes” with clients or real estate news sources. That feature is unavailable, at least for now, on the iPhone. We’re gaining a lot, including a whole lot more power in the cloud, but I’ll miss being able to record calls.

I have a few iPhone plans for BloodhoundBlog, but they’ve been waiting for me to have a phone to test on. For now, if you want a BloodhoundBlog button on your iPhone home page, snag one. (Hit the plus sign at the bottom of your screen and follow the prompts.) Within the next couple of days, I’ll be adding an iPhone-only theme to make the blog easier to read on a small screen. But even now you’ll have one-click access to BHB — and Odysseus at his most glamorous on your home page.

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August 21, 2008

Splendor versus squalor: The part you throw away

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[I wrote this in March of 2007. I’m revisiting it now because it fits so well with the essay I wrote last night about honesty. At just about the same time I wrote this post, I penned an essay about an idea I call The Implied Accusation — the elephant in the room. I lucked upon a sweet cover of the Tom Waits tune quoted below, so I’m adding that as well. –GSS]

 
I believe in integrity, but I believe in a very Latinly kind of integrity. It’s normal for me to translate words in and out of Latin, to write and think in those words in the way that they are composed from their Latin atoms. So when I think of the word “integrity,” what I think of is “all one thing.”

And I try to live that way, too, with my whole life, as best I can manage it, being the expression of one idea: Splendor.

I’ll give you a definition, which I will immediately qualify:

Splendor is the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it, you are your idealized perfect self.

What’s the qualification? Splendor is not words, and it is not merely thoughts or deeds. Splendor is the tone and the timbre, the warp and the weft of a life spent pursuing it. Words, deeds, thoughts, actions, hopes, dreams, plans, memories, work, leisure, solitude and companionship — everything you do in the pursuit of positive values and nothing that you do in quests for disvalues.

This is such a simple idea, and I love it better than anything. It is everything I want to be when I am being the best person I can be, and it is everything I want for everyone I see. It’s one of the reasons I love being a Realtor, because this job, at its best, is all about Splendor, helping people get the most and the best that life can offer.

I don’t talk to my clients directly about this, but they get the idea. We Read more

August 20, 2008

“Shoot the elephant in the room before he breaks all the furniture?” Yes, because even if we don’t always do well by doing good, we must always do the right thing — even when no one else is watching.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I had a house close yesterday, and there was a little incident as I was trading keys with the buyers that I found instructive.

Back story: These folks came to me through my Arizona Republic column. That column produces almost no business for us, and I don’t milk it for business. But the clients it brings out are invariably very interesting, and they often bring with them multiple transactions. This particular family will do two listings and one purchase, and it was the purchase that closed yesterday.

They had started out thinking in terms of $800,000 homes in very tony desert locations. There are health issues, so I suggested that a smaller home closer to town might work better. We ended up buying a very nice home that comped for $425,000.

They were willing to risk losing the home in order to make sure they weren’t overpaying, so we offered $335,000 — $90,000 under two recent comp sales. We got that price, and the seller didn’t flinch at our repair requests. A fun, painless transaction, my kind of deal.

But wait. Didn’t I betray my sacred duty to milk the consumer for every last penny? I talked myself out of a commission on $800,000, then talked myself down again to a commission on $335,000. I don’t even think that way. I got a smokin’ deal for my buyers, and we all had fun every step of the way.

Because we’re doing multiple sides, we gave them a break on all three commissions. They didn’t ask, we just did it. Commission is always the elephant in the room, so, no matter what we plan to do, we always raise the issue first.

Why? Because doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, no matter what.

But also: Because affecting to ignore the elephant in the room only serves to make you look oily, evasive and corrupt — and the other party can use your presumptive corruption as leverage against you.

I believe that we do well by doing good — that consistent virtue reaps commensurate rewards in the long run. But even if we don’t, doing the Read more

August 18, 2008

Kodak’s new Zi6 hand-held video camera is pricey and comes with no memory, but if it’s QuickTime HD native, it might be worth it

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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That’s Kodak’s brand new Zi6 hand-held video camera. If it looks a lot like a Flip camera, there’s a reason for that. At first glance, it’s a virtual Flip cam clone, right down to the built-in USB connector and the YouTube video-sharing software.

And like the Flip camera, the optics are nothing special. This is not a camcorder, much less a pro-quality video recording device. This is a hand-held solid-state-memory camera meant to be used to capture memoranda, video podcasts or embarrassing moments at parties.

The Kodak version of the concept stands out from the Flip, though. For one thing, it’s pretty costly — $179.95 list. Much worse, while it can handle SDHC memory cards up to 64GB (which could equate to a day-and-a-half of continuous video), it actually ships with nothing but its own on-board memory. After overhead, there is 30MB left for video — not enough for a sustained belch from a practiced teenager.

By contrast the Flip Mino lists for $179.99 but ships with 2GB of memory — 60 minutes’ worth. The Flip Ultra lists for $149,99 and ships with the same 2GB. Both the Kodak and the Flip Mino use a rechargeable battery scheme. The Flip Ultra uses AA batteries, which is by far preferable to me.

Where the Kodak pulls away from the pack is in video quality. The camera can shoot 720p HD video at either 30 or 60 fps. A short lens and lots of camera motion, but better-than-TV-quality video. Go figure. More significantly, Kodak claims that H.264 is one of the native capture formats for the camera. That’s QuickTime, folks, the MOV format. That implies on-board hardware compression, which would make clips from this camera wicked easy to edit in Apple’s Final Cut video editing software.

YouTube is pretty strong on compression, so my thinking is that a YouTube video from the Kodak Zi6 (dumb name; it’s not a German roadster) is not going to look much better than a YouTube video from a Flip camera. But if you’re shooting hand-held video to be edited with high-end software, it’s plausible that the Zi6 could save you a boatload Read more

August 17, 2008

Give me your money, Part II: Emergent investment opportunities in the recovering real estate market

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Last Tuesday I met with a potential real estate investor. She’s an investor because she’s got the money, the credit and the will to dip her toe in the water. She’s a potential investor because she has never yet been a landlord. That’s okay. I’ve worked with many potential investors, some of whom have gone on to own multiple properties, most of those — not all, alas — very successfully.

Mostly when I do these kinds of interviews, I talk about premium suburban single-family rental homes. This is normally the safest and most economical way to start a real estate investment plan in Phoenix. This is especially true right now, when the right rental home will be cash-flow positive from day one. Our rents are low but stable, and our home prices can be very low right now.

But I also talk about other income opportunities in real estate, if only because land-lording is not for everyone. I would not advise a first-time investor to take the plunge in a large multi-family community or a strip mall, but there are plenty of other ways to take advantage of our current market conditions.

An example? Flipping. Never was heard a more discouraging word right now, but flipping has a horrible reputation because ten bazillion TV-tycoons bought at the top of the market and sold their refurbished masterpieces at auction. Now, when entry prices are low and trending lower, a slow flipping strategy promises nice rewards.

Here’s one slow strategy: Find a great flip candidate at a rock-bottom price. Buy it to own as a rental, doing what you have to on the way in to make it marketable as a rental. Hold it in that state — with the monthly cash-flow covering your costs — until prices recover to your satisfaction. When the tenant’s lease expires, do the refurb and sell.

Here’s another one, a strategy that worked very well from 1997 to 2006: Buy your cheap refurb candidate and move into it. Redo the home slowly, room by room, especially when the materials for doing a particular room are very cheap. Sell it after you’ve owned Read more

August 16, 2008

What went wrong in the real estate market? We told homeowners to treat their homes like securities investments — and they did…

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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).

As a matter of eating crow, I will attest that I publicly denied that housing prices could ever behave like securities prices, falling far below their fundamental value. The market has proved me wrong. We’re writing contracts on REO properties where the purchase price is well below the replacement cost. I read a listing for a potential rental property in a not-awful neighborhood that is selling for $49,500. We anticipate prices like that in premium rental neighborhoods when the Ameridream/Nehemiah calliope grinds to a halt. A house in Detroit was listed last week for one dollar. This bust behavior is just as irrational as the boon behavior — and it is a choice opportunity for people who are not irrational. Nevertheless, I was wrong. The real estate industry told buyers that homes were an investment just like securities — and damned if they didn’t believe us.

 
What went wrong in the real estate market? We told homeowners to treat their homes like securities investments — and they did…

If you were to turn back the clock on the Phoenix real estate market by four years — that would be just about right.

Judging by prices for bread-and-butter homes, it’s just as if the last four years didn’t happen. The average stucco and tile suburban dream home sold in July of 2008 for almost the same price you would have paid for it in July of 2004.

A lot has happened since then, of course. The 1,400 square foot single family home you could have had back then for $150,000 soared to $250,000 by December of 2005. That seemed like $100,000 in free money, and, regrettably, many people borrowed against that paper equity in their homes. Even if they did not, it has proved difficult to eradicate that entirely imaginary $100,000 from list prices.

The real estate market got hammered good and hard by two very bad ideas. The first is that homeownership is an unlimited good, that everyone should own a home regardless of their circumstances. Governments — and the National Association of Realtors Read more

August 15, 2008

My blossoming love affair with flexMLS, the new MLS system adopted by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This

is the F.Q. Story Historic District in Downtown Phoenix as rendered by the flexMLS MLS system recently adopted by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. ARMLS is 30,000 Realtors working in the fifth largest city in the U.S. — and the 14th largest market area — so this is a big MLS system by any measure.

This particular map looks a whole lot better on the screen. I had to scale drastically to get it to fit here. Here’s the good news: You can see it for real, live, on a “portal” that I built for this post.

Do this:

Go here.

Your user name is: Jack Swilling

Your password is: demo

Please don’t reset the password, or no one else will be able to get in. For all of me, I would make passwords optional, but that’s only because I hate them with the passionate heat of a thousand suns — no big deal.

I built this search to show off just a little bit of what flexMLS can do. I’m not even a good tour guide on the subject. Cathy has a much richer base of experience than mine. For all the gee whiz technology we talk about around here, I am not an early adopter. The words you are most likely to hear from my mouth, when discussing new technology, are “mission critical,” and I won’t risk a mission critical function on something new until it is completely tested. I’ve been in love with the iPhone for 19 months — and I’m getting mine next week.

But, even so, this software is cool.

In the photo (or in the map view in the portal), you will see that I have defined F.Q. Story as three irregular polygons. Why? Because Realtors can’t spell. In principle, I should be able to use the “Subdivision” field in the MLS listing — but I don’t trust it. If the address is mapped correctly — and flexMLS makes it difficult to map a home improperly — it will show up in a polygon search.

And because I can use multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons to define a search, I can base my search of Read more

August 14, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained has a home in Orlando for a twelve-hour event — and the price for tickets just went up to $199

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have a place to howl in Orlando at last. We wanted something very sexy, very cool, but the constrictions on time and space were killing us. We finally settled on a hotel conference facility to get a room big enough to accommodate all the people who want to join us for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando. As a bonus, we get to go back to our original plan of a twelve-hour event. This will give us time to explore some mastermind ideas that we would have had to leave out of a shorter presentation.

The flip side of this is this: The Earlybird price is gone. If you go to BloodhoundBlogUnchained.com, the levy for tickets is $199 — full price.

But don’t take out a second mortgage — whatever that is. We’ve made arrangements with some good friends of the kinds of ideas we teach. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll spy opportunities on other web sites to snag Unchained tickets at a discount. If you want to pay us full price, feel free. But you will have plenty of chances to save yourself some money.

For example, lender Kevin Sandridge can get you into Unchained in Orlando for half-price. Be sure to thank him when you meet him in November.

There will be other offers out there — but don’t dilly-dally. We only have a limited number of seats available, and there will be 20,000 Realtors in Orlando for the NAR Convention. When the music stops, they won’t be seats available at any price.

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August 13, 2008

Give me your money, Part I: Sell locally, market nationally and build a real estate brand that actually means something to consumers

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’ve been interested to watch Sean Purcell, Mike Farmer and Rob Hahn talk about alternative brokerage structures, but the only structure that actually matters to me is our own. It’s possible that BloodhoundRealty.com will grow bigger in due course — all but certain given the work we’re doing this year — but I am never, ever interested in growing so large that I cannot directly control the quality of experience we deliver to each of our clients.

Cathleen Collins and I both work constantly to come up with newer ways of doing our work better, more ways of knocking the socks completely off of our buyers and sellers. This is a process I want never to stop, much less see reversed by the three-headed monster that passes for “management” in most businesses: haphazard philosophy, hamhanded preparation and tightfisted execution.

That is to say, we are a brand, no matter how small we are. We approached our business that way from the very beginning, to have the iconic idea of a Bloodhound speak for us in every possible way. We have never pursued personal promotion, preferring instead to promote the idea of this brand — not just the images but the underlying ideas.

Our market penetration is very slight so far, as must be the case for a boot-strapped brokerage. But there is no one we have worked with, either our clients or their warm networks or neighbors, who does not remember us or the ideas we stand for. We don’t hit 1.000 — although we have not missed on a listing in 2008, knock wood — but we hit the ball so hard that everyone remembers us in the neighborhoods where work.

They remember not us as people, but the brand. One of my favorite clients came to us when, frustrated that his house wasn’t selling, he turned to his wife and said, “What we need is the Bloodhounds.” He didn’t remember us, he remembered our marketing efforts and our results. Iconic ideas Google well, so he found us in one quick search.

This is the kind of branding that I think can make all the Read more

August 12, 2008

The “MLS 5.0” Manifesto: Everyone working in hi-tech real estate must oppose this vicious plan with every fiber in your being

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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“Oh that the Roman people had but one neck, that I might cut it off at a blow!” –Caligula

Here is the naked essence of Saul Klein’s so-called “MLS 5.0” proposal:

The MLS of the future will bring a marketing service and benefit to the industry by being the single point of entry for listing data and then, based upon the election of the broker, distribute that information to web portals, newspapers, even radio and television, handheld devices and applications.

The emphasis was in the original, which is a nice illustration of how much Klein trusts you not to see what he’s up to.

What does that sentence actually say?

It says that Klein’s idealized “MLS of the Future” will be a national monopoly system controlled by real estate brokers and the NAR — to the immediate and permanent detriment of independent MLS systems and vendors, Web 2.0 listings aggregators and — most especially — individual real estate agents.

What Klein is proposing, ignoring the presumed benefits to accrue to his own ventures, is to give the real estate industry one chokepoint, one bottleneck, so that the NAR can put a choke-chain around it.

Who will control that “single point of entry for listing data”? The NAR.

Who will control who can and cannot have access to listing data? The NAR.

Who will have the entire real estate industry in a chokehold? The NAR.

This is so diabolical, it makes me wonder if the fix is already in — if this evil plan is going to be rammed down our collective throats in November in Orlando.

Let’s assume it is not. Klein’s proposal is an undiluted evil, and it is incumbent upon everyone working in hi-tech real estate to oppose this vicious plan with every fiber in your being.

To say more is to gild the lily. I think Klein’s actual objective is to pull off another Realtor.com heist, to get the NAR to sell him a national MLS monopoly. But the benefit to the NAR is obvious: With a national monopoly MLS system, brokers will once again have the power to bring their agents to heel. If you understand what it means Read more

August 12, 2008

Introducing Jessica Wynn Horton, a once and future mega-producer

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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What do you do when you’re selling a thick slice of a billion dollars’ worth of real estate every year, when you’ve built your own RE/Max franchise from scratch, when you’ve hit the “30 Under 30” target at Realtor magazine?

Start over in another town, of course, and do it all again.

Today we add once and future mega-producer Jessica Wynn Horton to our roster of contributors.

In addition to her duties as broker, Jessica is hoping to replicate her earlier successes, this time with a decidedly Web 2.0 approach.

We’ll teach her what we can, but I think we’ll reap a good deal more from her experiences.

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August 11, 2008

Unchained lullabies: Splendor, squalor and war…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Teri Lussier sent me this clip as a celebration of Unchained in Orlando:

That’s sweet, but I always think of this when I think of lullabies:

And that’s so brutal that it’s almost unimaginably brutal — until you look at this:

That’s the real face of war. Not well-turned-out soldiers with their bootlaces smartly tied, not bombers or aircraft carriers. War is your grandmother wailing because everything she has ever known has been burned to a cinder.

Julie Gold is a great songwriter. She wrote From a Distance, and Bette Midler couldn’t quite ruin it as a massively over-produced anthem. But Nancy Griffith, on her best days, can sing a simple song simply. This is a lullaby for the people who are not sleeping in Tbilisi.

August 10, 2008

Dogs in Disneyville: The BloodhoundBlog Unchained curriculum in Orlando and how it will differ from next Spring in Phoenix

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We have a venue in Orlando, very comfortable with lots of hi-tech support, but I don’t want to announce it yet. Whether or not by malicious intent, the NAR has dominated every available meeting space near the Orange County Convention Center, so we had to think way outside the doghouse to find what we needed. Suffice it to say for now that it’s within easy walking distance of the Convention Center, it has ample parking, and it’s probably closer to your hotel room than the NAR Convention itself.

We’ve also decided on a curriculum for Orlando. Of the 20,000 Realtors who will be going to the NAR Convention, almost none of them are already working in our world. Many of them are not even in the wired world at all, but there’s not a lot we can do about that. What we can do is go through everything that is a part of our world in detail, building a repeatable, duplicable Web 2.0 real estate practice.

In other words, we’re going to do eight solid hours on what to do and how to do it: How to use your net.presence to attract prospects, harvest leads, manage them through time and convert them, one-by-one, into real-world real estate transactions — producing real, spendable income. If you already live in our world, some of this will be pretty basic for you. But we’ll have plenty of brand new practical ideas to make Unchained Orlando worth your time.

At BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, Geno Petro, Teri Lussier and others asked for something like this. From the inside, all of this stuff seems obvious to me, even though Brian and I approach it from somewhat different directions. But in discussions we’ve had since then, both here and in email, we’ve come to see the benefit of building a whole program of ideas, step-by-step. Think of it as Social Media Marketing meets The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. We have room for 500 students, and I would love to send 500 very dangerous real estate agents back to their home markets.

By contrast, the curriculum for Unchained in Phoenix next Spring 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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