BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 92 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

August 9, 2008

Redemption is egoism in action: In support of Mike Farmer, even if other people are criminal, I am not — but I will not cause them to become good by becoming a criminal myself

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Not completely off topic, but well above the normal fray. I wrote this ten or twelve years ago:

 
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a “justice” that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst.

We can make a joke by saying, “Political philosophy is the means by which ethical systems betray themselves.” There are actually a host of reasons for this, and all of them are amusing to me. For one, a political system has a meta-goal apart from the ethical system in which it is rooted: It must function in the real world.

Moreover, the political system itself has a meta-ethical or even extra-ethical goal in that its proponents will tend to imbue it with what they view are essential survival characteristics even if these betray the ethical system in which the political philosophy is putatively based. Any form of argument that the polity can or should or must do what it would be immoral or criminal for any individual to do is a form of this error. The counter is, but if we don’t inflict this injury, the polity won’t survive. And the counter to that is that a dispute resolution Read more

August 9, 2008

There’s more to the mortgage relief bill than just mortgage relief

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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).

Notes for insiders: The legislative thumbprint of the National Association of Realtors is churn. The NAR is not necessarily for or against any legislation. Instead, their lobbyists will look for ways to introduce short-term incentives to churn real estate — artificial inducements to buy or sell real estate now rather than on the consumer’s own timetable. In this bill, getting rid of seller down-payment assistance, introducing the new-buyer tax-credit and revising the capital gains exclusion rules all promote short-term churn. What about the long-term? The NAR knows it will be able to lobby for new real estate-churning legislation next year — at every level of government. This is just another example of the fundamentally anti-consumer character of the NAR.

Here’s another thought: Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of regurgitating Zillow’s gee whiz press releases, the real estate reporters of the mainstream media actually reported on what is really going on in real estate?

 
There’s more to the mortgage relief bill than just mortgage relief

Having trouble making your mortgage payments? You might be able to make a change in your loan, thanks to the mortgage relief bill President Bush recently signed into law. Under the bill, you can convert your high-interest adjustable-rate loan to a lower-interest fixed-rate note if you meet what might, in a declining market, seem to be Catch-22-like guidelines: Your payment must be more than 31% of your income, and your new loan cannot exceed 90% of your home’s value. Help is available — provided you don’t need it.

Starting October 1st, seller-paid down-payment assistance grants will be outlawed for FHA loans. This is bad news for lower-priced neighborhoods in Metropolitan Phoenix, where as many as nine out of ten homes are being sold with down-payment assistance. Expect to see a flurry of this activity in the next two months.

But the left hand gives where the right hand takes away: Buyers who have not owned a home for three years can take a $7,500 “refundable” tax-credit if they buy between April 9, 2008 and July 1, 2009. The credit Read more

August 8, 2008

Friday Afternoon Fun: Can anyone tell me what the hell this bowl of tossed jargon-salad says — if anything?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This came in my spam this morning, and I gave it nine seconds of my full attention: Babbling jargon-filled nonsense, probably with a well-hidden chokepoint to spill coins into the author’s pockets.

That was my instant take, but the truth is I don’t actually know what it says. To the extent that I actually tried to read it, it was too painful for me to pursue.

It could be you have more patience than me. If so, you might take a stab at figuring out what it says. It doesn’t actually matter, since the meatballs atop this sticky bowl of word spaghetti are the same ones who brought us Realtor.com and all the other big-hit NAR disasters. If anyone actually believes these wheezing antiques can outrun the VC-funded Web 2.0 world, I have a few dollars I might be willing to wager. The NAR will solve every problem it confronts by force of arms, as always.

But: That doesn’t mean you can’t have some Friday Afternoon Fun trying to parse the mangled prose that makes up this proposal. Plus which, I’m inclined to be very generous if you should unearth the chokepoint.

Note that this deeply heartfelt manifesto appears on a page full of advertising. Classy… Inman “News” dipped its pen in this spittoon, of course, but that’s such an obvious outcome it’s not even worth making jokes about… Oh, fine. Here’s one, just because it’s Friday:

Q: What do you need to get fawning, uncritical attention for your press release from Inman News?

A: A press release.

Read carefully and I expect you will discover how the NAR hopes to rape agents and consumers over the next decade. But remember this as you read: Divorce the commissions and every bit of this nonsense goes away, as it should.

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August 7, 2008

Unchained melodies: Take Five

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m with John Rowles — and then some — on the true, mostly unrealized, power of branding in real estate. I’ve been meaning to write about it, but I’m sick for the second time this summer, and it’s left me beyond stupid at the end of the business day.

Other matters: We are that close to negotiating a space for Unchained Orlando, this despite the best efforts of the NAR to dominate every meeting space. I may have an announcement tomorrow.

But for tonight, Al Jarreau and three fingers of Irish cough syrup. G’night.


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August 6, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the decade: RECS wrecks twenty-six reputations for only a buck

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This

incites no end of questions for me.

For example, exactly how will my mastery of Real Estate Cyberspace have improved by sending these schmucks a dollar?

If I send two dollars, can I be twice as wizardly?

Precisely how much value should my clients put on a real estate designation that is just as difficult to obtain as an Official Inman News sippee cup — but $148 cheaper?

Yes, yes, I’m sure there’s fine print, but I’m a high D and I don’t care. Here’s the question that made me crazy for days:

I don’t know of all of those twenty-six people who lent their names and faces to this vastly stoopid promotion, but I know of quite a few of them. Presumably they took some pains to make themselves famous in the real estate vendor space. My question:

Why would they deliberately wreck their reputations by associating themselves with this sleazy wreck of a real estate designation?

I’m quite serious. I’ve had this email open all week, trying to figure it out. I get slimed all the time by creepoids trying to leech away the value of my recommendations, but the sole power I have in the marketplace of ideas is my reputation for integrity. Because I never attach my name to crap, you know that, if I do praise a product, I’m doing so for reasons I consider valid. I can’t imagine taking money to endorse a product, but, surely, it is far worse to take money to endorse a product that — by its own admission — is not even worth a dollar!

And it’s not one wannabe real estate bigfoot up there, it’s twenty-six of them! Reputation is all there is in the Web 2.0 world. Why would they squander the intellectual capital they worked so hard to accumulate?

I couldn’t work it out, but then I stumbled on an infomercial-like sales presentation that made the whole issue clear to me:

Mind what goes into your mind.

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August 4, 2008

Another real estate model, a less-radical variation on a current theme that can work within the present regulatory context: A national franchise of real estate franchisors, each of whom is committed to sustaining the value of the brand

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I read Rob Hahn’s ideas about brokerage-as-law-firm last week. I thought that much was kind of naive — a reflection of a lack of understanding the legal realities of real estate brokerage — but I didn’t jump in because I thought some of his other ideas were interesting.

Here’s the problem: A law firm is based on 1040 employment. The real estate brokerage safe harbor makes it extremely beneficial for brokers to have nothing but 1099 employees. There is no reason to expect that to change unless the IRS removes the safe harbor — three weeks after hell has frozen over.

The Team model works, but it’s inherently small-time.

Branding could work — but doesn’t — because the independent contractor status of agents dilutes the brand to homeopathic concentrations.

Hard-branding like Bloodhound does can only work with very strict control. Redfin has this — but it also has 1040 employees.

All that notwithstanding, present-day brokers are at risk of being wiped out at any minute by several liability — the designated broker is responsible for every idiot he puts out on the street.

Here’s a solution that makes sense to me:

The ideal case would be to get rid of licensing altogether, to get rid of the broker’s level of licensing or to get rid of the salesperson’s level of licensing and call everyone a broker, but none of that is necessary.

Instead, imagine an IntegratedRealty.com business entity that consists of a franchised brand for fly-you-own-flag brokers or brokerage entities. As the owner of IntegratedRealty.com, I franchise the brand and require certain standards and practices from the franchisees. I maintain offices, so, to all appearances to the public, we’re just like Realty Executives. Except that I am not anyone’s broker, and each individual franchised broker is the head of his or her own Team. They write and own their own contracts, and they’re free to sever their relationship with IntegratedRealty.com per the terms of our contract, with their representation contracts going along with them.

This could be rolled out city-by-city, like Realty Executives, or cross-competitively like RE/Max. Each new instance of IntegratedRealty.com could itself be a franchise, so you could Read more

August 2, 2008

New FlexMLS system is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Phoenix-area Multiple Listings Service

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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).

 
New FlexMLS system is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Phoenix-area Multiple Listings Service

Metropolitan Phoenix got a brand new MLS system this week. MLS is the Multiple Listings Service, the system by which Realtors share their listings with one another. Until this week, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service had been using a computing system called Tempo to share listings. As of this Monday just past, we have switched to the FlexMLS system.

Had you guessed that something had changed? If your Realtor has been sending you listings from a saved search, or if you had been receiving updates to a Tempo Gateway, all that stopped on Monday morning. Chances are your agent has spent much of this week rewriting searches and reestablishing gateways. The FlexMLS system is more robust than anything we’ve had before, but it’s also quite a bit more complicated. It may take a while before things get back to normal.

So why make the switch? For one very good reason, to tap into that much more robust technology. Tempo permitted a crude kind of map-based search, but FlexMLS allows you to select houses from within multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons. So, as an example, I can search for homes that are either within walking distance of Apollo High School or within walking distance of Valley Metro bus lines servicing Apollo High School.

There’s more: The FlexMLS pricing software is comparable to the tools appraisers use. Realtors will have to stretch themselves to learn how to tap this power, but our Comparative Market Analyses are going to be painstakingly accurate.

But not without some growing pains. ARMLS is by far the largest MLS system FlexMLS has taken on so far. This first week has been a trial for the North Dakota company — a strain on their servers, and, no doubt, a strain on their tech support staff as well.

And workaday Realtors are sharing the pain. No doubt many are grumbling, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But FlexMLS is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Read more

July 30, 2008

Bloodhounds and the Bar: Introducing Chuck Marunde

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’ve picked on and pissed off so many attorneys over the past two years that I’m amazed one actually wants to join the pound. But Chuck Marunde is not just a real estate attorney, he’s also a working real estate broker — not to mention a very talented writer.

Here is the man speaking in his own behalf:

After practicing real estate law for 20 years in Washington, Chuck concentrates on residential sales in Sequim and Port Angeles on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Chuck has personally closed 100’s of transactions and litigated most real estate issues.  He founded his first real estate law website in 1995, and is a minority shareholder in an International technology company.  Chuck is the author of numerous magazine and Internet articles with a primary focus on real estate. Because he has two sons who became professional athletes (Strongman and Mixed Martial Arts), he has also authored articles on the Strongman sport and has been a freelancer for Ultimate Grappling Magazine. In his spare time, Chuck is a sports photographer.  Chuck has combined his love for real estate and technology to create a growing Internet presence in his market. Chuck has degrees in Economics, Law, and Education.

Port Angeles is a quaint New England fishing village accidentally misplaced at the tip the Olympic Peninsula in the Puget Sound. Beautiful country, and a milder climate than any New Englander has a right to expect. The Olympic Peninsula is a rain forrest, and the whole of it is about the most radical tourist experience you can have without leaving the lower 48 states. As much as I love Port Angeles, my favorite spot on the OP is Ruby Beach. Highly recommended. Take the kids.

Meanwhile: Chuck joins us today as the newest hound in the pack. Here’s hoping he doesn’t come to regret running with such a lawless crowd.

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July 29, 2008

I slipped my DISCo in Orlando: Psychometric analysis that’s actually simple enough to be useful

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A big part of the StarPower curriculum is the DISC system of psychometric analysis. I’ve talked quite a bit about Myers-Briggs and Cathleen is a big fan of the Enneagram. These are useful tools, especially for self-analysis. But INTJs will behave very differently from INTPs — and from each other, for that matter — so having a tight bead on someone in Myers-Briggs terms is not all that preternaturally useful.

The DISC system, on the other hand, is simultaneously very useful in real life and very simple to deploy. Once you understand the four DISC categories of behaviors, you can make reasonable on-the-fly analyses of the people you happen to be working with. High D? Don’t waste time on details, unless you are asked for them — and then don’t stammer. High C? If you don’t volunteer volumes of detail, you must be hiding something.

There is a good deal of academic theory behind the DISC system, and I don’t want to portray myself as an expert. Cathy and I took two short classes on the subject, both taught by serious amateurs. Even so, we learned a ton about what we’re doing right with people, what we’re doing wrong, and what we could be doing better.

There’s more: We set about to do a gut-feelings-based DISC assessment on everyone we know, this for practice. When we finally get around to deploying a CRM solution, we’re going to use DISC to classify our clients. This will be useful at every touch, but one thing we thought of doing was deploying DISC-oriented drip campaigns: Cut to the chase for the D’s, fun and games for the I’s, home and hearth for the S’s, charts and graphs for the C’s.

Brian and I were talking about this on Sunday, and we both thought it would be interesting to DISCify the cut-outs on a landing page. That’s not just fun for marketing geeks, it’s a testable procedure that should result in higher conversion rates.

There’s no end to the value in this system, since it enables you to tailor any presentation to the predictable psychometric style of the person you Read more

July 28, 2008

Unchained in Orlando: Scouting Disneyville for the perfect location

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We got to go to StarPower this year as guests of Russell and Wendy Shaw, which was very gracious on their part and positively dispositive on ours: We could not have made the trip without them. I’ll write more on our StarPower experience, because we came away with some very interesting ideas to play with.

For now, I want to talk a bit about Orlando. It was my first time there, and I might have passed on StarPower if I hadn’t had the secondary objective of getting the lay of the land in the Magic Kingdom. In fact, we didn’t even see anything of Disney — other than Disney-dazed kids, that is — but we got a very good feel for the area around the Orange County Convention Center where BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando will be held.

Here are some photos, just for fun:

This is the North/South building of the Convention Center. It’s immense, but, even so, it’s much smaller than the West building.

This is just the main entrance to the West building. This is where you will find the trade show floor of the NAR Convention. The NAR has also reserved all of the available meeting space in the nearby hotels, to what end I do not know.

Everything you’re seeing here is along International Drive, a fun, walkable commercial district lined with hotels, restaurants, shops and other attractions.

Here’s a little bit of International Drive’s whimsy. StarPower was held at a huge Ritz Carlton/JW Mariott golf resort, but we stayed in a hotel off of International Drive. We had a rented car, and I can navigate with some confidence in this Southwest quadrant of greater Orlando.

We’re Realtors, and we never go anywhere without looking at the real estate. Friday night while I was negotiating the sale of one of our listings, Cathy was in a state of complete rapture as we drove very slowly along South Bay Drive. If you’re looking for a place to play Google StreetView games, this is it.

Orlando in July was surprisingly pleasant. In November, it should be simply heavenly.

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July 27, 2008

Just when you thought Microsoft Internet Explorer couldn’t possibly suck any worse, it finds a way to suck with WordPress 2.6

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Did you ever wonder why Bill Gates doesn’t have any children? It’s because he found a secret incantation by which, having named his company after his pet name for his most private appendage, he succeeded in making schmucks of us all. Top that, Steve Jobs!

Just when you thought you were about to escape into the cloud, Bill Gates has his revenge: There is a bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer that causes it to issue juicy error messages to some users of WordPress 2.6.

No fix but Firefox, so far — or a Macintosh, of course. Your mileage may vary, but if you see the words “Operation Aborted,” you might issue a little incantation of your own…

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July 27, 2008

A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish

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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).

 
A real estate sign of the times: Our first custom yard sign printed in both English and Spanish

We do things that other brokers in the Phoenix area don’t do. We’re not the busiest listing brokerage — not by miles — but we’re among the most aggressively innovative in our marketing practices.

Our yard signs have always been very big, to try to grab as much attention as we can get for our listed homes, but for the past two years we have been building custom signs for our listings.

Working with Signs By Tomorrow in Peoria, we have been able to build huge, custom, four-color signs for our listed homes — featuring giant photographs of the interior and exterior of the house and custom descriptive copy about the property.

Our signs stop traffic. I know because I will often sit in my car a block or two away and watch passing cars as they slow down and stop to take in the sign, look over the house and grab a flyer.

We have a home listed in Peoria right now, and we took things one step further for this property. We know that a significant number of people in the surrounding area speak Spanish as their first language, so both the flyer and the custom sign are printed with one side in English and one side in Spanish.

Working from the English version of the Flyer, Enrique Lopez of YourPrintSource.com prepared the Spanish translation. This copy was typeset for both the flyer and the sign. If you approach the home — 7813 West Beryl Avenue — from the East, you’ll see the sign and flyer in English. From the West, you’ll see the sign and flyer in Spanish.

Just because there’s no reason not to, the photos on each side of the sign are unique. Instead of four pictures, we were able to use eight.

We also added a Spanish version of the flyer to the MLS listing so that Spanish-speaking buyers can read about the features of the home.

Regardless of our endlessly-debated border policies, as Read more

July 27, 2008

What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

 
What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key.

All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, but I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a cop — not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone or for some later iteration of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. I might have a laptop and printer in my trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but I don’t have that computing power on my person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I’m perfectly happy to give up printed documents if I can shoot PDFs in all directions at will. This sounds almost implausible, but I think we might be down to the sclerotic real estate industry itself as the obstacle: Realtor associations, lenders, title companies, and all of the many branches of government.

It’s common, when discussing ideas like this, to throw up technical issues. The technical problems are truly trivial. The problem we face in real estate is the dinosaur mentality of our leadership. Properazzi.com has an iPhone interface, as do Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The National Association of Realtors 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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