BloodhoundBlog

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Author: Greg Swann (page 95 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

July 6, 2008

Friday is iPhone day: Do you know of anyone who is building a paperless real estate contracts-processing application for the iPhone?

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The headline asks the question. In Arizona, forms software is a monopoly controlled by the Arizona Association of Realtors, which simply means that the solution available to us is satisfactory to no one.

That much is very sad, since filling in the blanks on PDF files is about as easy as you can get in the world of dedicated applications. It’s built into the Acrobat API. Even so, ZipForms is an amazingly buggy, amazingly Window-centric piece of crap.

Do you know of anyone out there who is pushing the envelope? I suspect the AAR is planning to make a change, but I know it will just be another half-assed Windows kludge. Is there anyone, anywhere doing better work?

The iPhone is the perfect platform for writing contracts, since, with electronic signing, you could transmit an executed copy to your client, to the other agent, to title, to the lender, to the inspectors — to anyone, just like that. If paperless doesn’t also mean deskless, it doesn’t mean enough to suit me.

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July 5, 2008

Musical chairs: You can buy a home on leased land for a bargain price, but you must be prepared to sell before the music stops

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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).

 
Musical chairs: You can buy a home on leased land for a bargain price, but you must be prepared to sell before the music stops

We’re preparing to list a condominium that sits on leased land. Land leases aren’t common in the Phoenix area, but they do exist.

The most common way to own real property in the Valley is in fee simple: You own the land and all the structures on it, plus any mineral, water and air rights that haven’t been alienated by legislation or previous sale.

A very distant second way of owning property is the condominium plat: You own the airspace described by your interior walls, and you and all of your neighbors own the land and structures in common. Most often you will also own the air conditioner, and possibly also the roof. These are expensive to replace, so crafty developers and their HOAs socialize the risk to you.

We have a few co-ops in the Phoenix area, but very few. In a cooperative, you and all of your neighbors own the land and the structures in common, and you have a right to occupy your living space.

In a land lease, the structures can be owned in any one of these three ways — by individuals, by a condominium HOA or by a cooperative corporation. The important difference is that the land is owned by a landlord, and the landlord will be taking that land back someday.

What happens to the structures? They revert to the landlord’s ownership, and the former owners of those structures are left owning nothing.

In essence, it’s a game of musical chairs. The structures on the leasehold pass from owner to owner, but, when the music stops, no one then on that land has a place to sit. This tends to depress property values on leased land.

But land leases are written for very long terms, and a lot can happen in that time. If the landlord gets a huge offer for the land, the people who own the structures could get bought out early at Read more

July 4, 2008

A suite in the Augustus Tower with a view of the South Strip, a bucket of ice and a bottle of Old Bushmills — and a gorgeous blonde I was lucky enough to marry… But if you take away everything except Cathleen, we’ll still have a wonderful anniversary

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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It’s our wedding anniversary today, and normally we would be in Sin City, swimming and playing. But Q4 2007 and Q1 2008 were lean enough that Cathy insists on wasting our money paying bills, rather than wasting it in Las Vegas, where money is meant to be wasted.

It’s funny to me that I get such a charge out of Vegas. I’m not quite abstemious, but inebriation appeals to me not at all. I have nothing but contempt for negative expectation games — gambling, that is. And the Cirque de Soleil has yet to put on an extravaganza that can’t put me to sleep.

But give me a high perch with a view and I could stand there in jaw-dropped awe all day long. Out of everything that Sin City can be, what it is to me, more than anything, is a commercial real estate ant farm, a diorama where there is so much activity to be seen that the scene is never boring.

Caesars’ Palace, seen above, was built by Jay Sarno, who also built the original Circus Circus. Sarno lived and died as Las Vegas intended, losing both properties to his excesses. But he saw first and best what Vegas could become, and Caesars’ is still the best expression of the idea of the themed resort.

As it works out, Q2 didn’t suck, and Q3, three days old, is off to an auspicious start. It could be we’ll have a turkey buffet at Thanksgiving to make up for missing this trip. We need to work when there’s work — and I’m showing in the morning — but my Best Beloved and I need to make time — to take time — to concentrate on each other, without the unceasing distractions that come from selling real estate from our home.

We’ll have a great anniversary, anyway. We’re good at getting things right. But Vegas is the place where you just can’t have too many long-legged blondes, so we’ll have to make good this debt when we can.

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July 2, 2008

Do you work like a Bloodhound? I have a no-fee referral in Cary, NC

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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One of our past clients is looking for aggressive representation in Cary, NC. He worked with us on the buying side and later as a seller, so he knows all about how we work. That’s what he wants in his new locale. He’s smart, he blogs and he could end up being a very good source of referrals for you in the Research Triangle area. If you over-deliver in everything you do, the referral from me is free. I want to help him, but I want to help hard-working dogs wherever and whenever I can.

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July 2, 2008

Video from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs: Introduction to The Way of the Farmer

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We got the manufactured BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs on Monday. I’ve been watching them as I work at my desk in order to approve the manufacturing job. Believe it or not, this is first I have seen of this video. It was shot to tape at the event, we had it mastered into DVDs in Scottsdale, then I immediately shipped it off to Texas for manufacturing. All along, I was expecting it to be kindasorta disappointing, and, so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. For a one-camera video shoot, it’s coming off okay.

There are tragedies, alas. In my convocation, I introduced all of the Bloodhounds who had come to Phoenix. For some reason, the videographer cut this off, so only Teri gets introduced. I’m sorry for everyone, but especially for Geno Petro, because I had pointed out for all posterity what an exceptionally fine writer the man is.

Appended below is about thirteen minutes from The Way of the Farmer, a presentation on hi-tech geographic farming.

If you’ve paid for DVDs, they’ll be shipping this week. If you have a real estate weblog, Brian Brady has a special offer coming up for you, but, if you don’t, you might want to click the button in the sidebar to get your own set of Unchained DVDs.

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July 1, 2008

Making the pack: How to break your way into BloodhoundBlog

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Lately, I’m getting two or three requests a day to write with us. They come from sweet, smart, earnest people, and, while I look at everything they send to me, I usually don’t have time to write back and decline their requests. That’s the one part of this job I really hate, because I’ve always hated being on the receiving end of that kind of transaction. On the other hand, I know from experience that the attention of readers is not something I give, nor something you get, but, rather, something that the writer seizes, takes by the irrepressible force of sheer talent. I’m in the unique position of being able to share this rostrum we have built with other people. But I can’t make anyone listen — not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

I had email yesterday from John Rowles, and, on the strength of that one email, without looking at anything else he had written, I invited him to join us. John’s letter was simply riveting. I read every work, all the way to the end, but I knew by the fifth paragraph that he would be writing with us. I can think of a dozen things I might think about, if I am deliberating about a potential contributor, and I will sometimes appeal to Brian or Teri or Cathleen for advice. But when a writer knocks my socks off — knocks them all the way across the room — there is nothing to think about.

I owe formal introductions for John, and for all the wonderful writers we added last week. For now, here is John’s email in its entirety:

Hi Greg:

1995-6: I was 26 and four years out from earning my BA in journalism when Web 1.0 happened. I spent those four years tending bar and working in ski shops while I started to build a portfolio of feature-length articles. My girlfriend  managed an apartment complex, and I met Bill while hanging out in her office. Bill had a computer setup straight out of the movie War Games, complete with a voice modulator (“Hello, Bill. Would you Read more

June 30, 2008

Project Bloodhound speaking in tongues: To whom am I speaking?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I had a lady phone me the other day who would rather have emailed. She was on our Phoenix real estate web site and she couldn’t figure out how to email me. In fact, my email address is associated with every post, just like here, but that wasn’t obvious to her. I revisited the sidebar, which is a topic to which we will return. But for most real estate weblogs, there is an ever more exigent problem: Who the hell am I speaking to in the first place?

If you’re the only person writing on the weblog, you might think you can get away without a byline on your posts. I think this is a mistake. Yes, people can go to your About page, but your job is to make connections, not to make people work. I think our way of doing things — an avatar plus every which way of grasping onto more content — is a better way of going at things.

We do our avatars with custom PHP, but I know they can also be done with the Gravatar software — I just don’t know how. I’m going to show you everything we’re doing at BloodhoundBlog — not because you should do all this, but just to show you how to do it.

The theme files you will want to edit will be named index.php, search.php, archive.php and possibly some others. You are looking for files that contain “the loop,” the means by which WordPress extracts posts from its MySQL database and displays them. The code for “the loop” looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : 
while (have_posts()) : 
the_post(); ?>

Any files that contain that code will need to be edited.

Edited where? Look for the div that already contains posting information — usually the date. You’ll be editing within that div. You can start with index.php, working iteratively until you get to something you like, then copy that code over to the other files you need to edit.

Important: Work on copies of your theme files! If you screw something up, you can always go back and start over.

This is what BHB is Read more

June 29, 2008

BloodhoundBlog at two: The scene of the real estate scenius

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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BloodhoundBlog came into this world two years ago today. I had tried twice before to craft a workable real estate weblog. The second attempt donated its 60-odd posts to BloodhoundBlog on the way in. But BloodhoundBlog was different from our prior attempts right from the start. We were focused on the national real estate industry from the beginning, mixing good writing, deep philosophy and radical new ideas into what has seemed to be a consistently heady brew.

In our first two years, we’ve served over 1.4 million pages to over 750,000 unique souls. We’ve written more than 2,800 posts and hosted more than 25,000 comments. As I write this, we have 600 Technorati links and 67,000 Yahoo backlinks. Those are interesting numbers, but these are more interesting to me: In the past two years (less than that, really, since we didn’t start tracking for about two months), 37,347 people have visited here here 200 or more times. Just short of 151,000 people have visited us nine or more times. And keep in mind that we live by RSS and email subscription. The flip side of this is that just short of half-a-million souls have come to the site only once, which I think is a nice illustration of the relative value of search-engine borne as against more-organic sources of traffic.

And, in reality, none of that matters. BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very loud voice in the RE.net, but BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very serious about big ideas. From the earliest days of the blog, we staked out a ground — the philosophy by which the most serious, most dedicated real estate professionals would thrive in the Web 2.0 world — and defended it with the ferocity of real Bloodhounds. We are always about the grunts on the ground, never about the bosses and vendors who seek to bilk them of their hard-fought earnings. We’ve built an audience not by dumb SEO stunts, not by kissing up to the NAR or the Inmanosphere, not by fawning or flattery or appeals to pity, but simply by delivering the goods day after Read more

June 28, 2008

Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[Okay, BloodhoundBlog will be two years old in less than an hour. Here’s one more little bit of our past in celebration. This is from May 31st, 2007. –GSS]

Question #1: Why did Microsoft call its new table-top touch-screen interface “Surface”?

Answer: “It” and “Thing” are trademarks of The Addams Family.

Question #2: What makes a great real estate weblog?

Answer: Whatever you do, don’t ask Inman Blog.

I don’t write about everything that tickles or rankles me. I couldn’t, even if I didn’t have other things to do. But I thought it was particularly ironical for Joel Burslem and Jessica Swesey to talk about weblogging in a video. Joel has proven blogger credibility. Jessica is a good reporter who has never impressed me as actually understanding weblogging as a distinct medium. I have told Brad Inman in private that he doesn’t “get” weblogging, to which criticism he issued testy but irrelevant rejoinders. If putting marks on phosphors in reverse-chronological order is weblogging, then there really are 70 million webloggers.

But take a look at this, as an example (and I’m picking on Inman because they’re professionals and, I hope, thick-skinned enough to bear up to the scrutiny):

In the middle of the 16th Century, the Great Chinese Wall was built to keep enemy armies out and to create a perception of invincibility. Gated communities were built in the US suburbs in the 1980s to keep urban criminals out and to create prestigious residential compounds. The building of walls and fences along the Mexican border are being built to keep workers and terrorists out and to appease a multitude of American nationalistic fears. The Great Chinese Wall did not work; gates in the burbs were irrelevant to safety and fences on the Mexican border will not stop people from risking their lives to find work. One of the ugliest walls in history was the Berlin Wall, which came down when freedom persevered over human repression.
Walls and fences are an admission of our failure to solve problems in a civil way. They divide people; they exclude; they fracture societies and communities.
In the 1950s in my small hometown of Carlinville, Read more

June 28, 2008

No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[This is a multi-stop time-travel journey. I’m writing this text, here within these brackets, on June 28th, 2008. I’m reprising a BloodhoundBlog post from September 15th, 2006, that in its turn reprises a PresenceOfMind.net post from September 14th, 2004, which in its turn is unearthing a rant I wrote in 1996. It will all make sense if you let it. This is more birthday celebration — the subject is disintermediation — but I happened to think of this because we latched onto Radio Paradise, today, an amazingly excellent Triple-A internet radio station in Paradise, CA. All of this fits together, I promise, and the argument about media from 1996 is still right on point. One of the things that I, personally, love about BloodhoundBlog, is that our audience has always been so outrageously bright. It’s very liberating for me to be able to be my whole self at work. Never doubt my gratitude. –GSS]

 
No static at all: Can Big Brother at the radio station foretell the future of the real estate industry?

I got XM Radio two years ago to the day, yesterday. Two years from now, the whole deal may be done: Between the iPod, streaming internet radio and Wi-Max, the eternal footman may already be snickering for satellite radio. Sic transit gloria mundi — and orbits nearby.

That’s a disintermediation story by itself, and we’re about to nest ourselves two layers deeper in order to talk about massive, earth-shaking cases of media disintermediation. The argument made here parallels the one made earlier this week by Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato: The exponential growth of bandwidth increases the power of individuals at the expense of elites.

But: I could just as easily argue the contrary: Feeding Dan Rather to the lions is exactly what a Roman Emperor would do to sustain his power while seeming to placate the mob.

That’s a larger question than I’m prepared to settle on a Friday night. Instead, we can think about the future of real estate while we revisit the history of radio. There’s quite a lot here that relates to weblogging, as well — which Read more

June 28, 2008

In the battle of the baseball cards, the biggest shoe-box wins — but Realtors who master the art of marketing homes will be fine

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[This post appeared on BloodhoundBlog on June 30, 2006, our second day. I’m reprising it now as a part of our birthday celebration. It’s fun for me to see how much of what I talk about here was with us on our very first days. –GSS]

 
Cathleen and I live pretty much continuously in a fairly intense business conference. We’re both paying very close attention to everything, and we are in nearly-constant contact. On the ground, we’re aware of what we like in the work product of our competitors, what we don’t like, what we think might be worth improving upon and what we know from rigorous testing is a complete waste of time and money. We pay even closer attention to the net.world, because that’s where our own bread is buttered, and because the internet will someday be the entire bakery. We’re about to skip away to Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary, but we’re taking three books on marketing — not real estate marketing, just marketing — with us.

That brings me to this, an argument that representation of sellers trumps home marketing. I don’t absolutely hate the premise. I have made a similar argument myself. What’s interesting to me — fascinating to me, a full-time obsession for me — is the idea that real estate marketing is somehow imperiled by internet-based disintermediation.

First, what is being done on the internet, so far at least, is not marketing. It’s listing, at best, the compilation of baseball-card-like stats, and if Realtors conflate the two, it’s because they have never understood marketing to begin with. “The houses sell themselves,” we say to ourselves, and there is a truth to this. If you take buyers where they want to be, they’ll pay to stay there. In crucial respects, buyer representation is the easiest sale in the history of sales. In other respects, it’s impossibly hard, of course, which is why the failure rate among Realtors is so high. But, unlike virtually every other type of sales, you do not have to convince the client to want your product before you can attempt to sell Read more

June 28, 2008

You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

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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).

 
You probably won’t sell your home for an above-market price, but even if you do, the home still has to appraise for that price

So your house is finally under contract. Congratulations. It took longer than you thought it would to sell, and you had to go through three price reductions before you got regular showings. But now you’re under contract and in escrow. You’ve made it through the inspections and you’ve taken care of all of the repairs. Nothing but smooth sailing from here, right?

Not quite.

Here comes some bad news you hadn’t anticipated: Your house didn’t appraise.

A lender will only lend on the appraised value or the purchase price — whichever is lower. If the appraisal comes in lower than the purchase price, something has to give.

If there’s an appraisal contingency in the contract — and there almost always is — the buyers can cancel the contract unilaterally.

More likely, they’re going to want you to lower your price instead.

If you don’t, you’re almost certainly killing that contract. The lender will not underwrite the loan, so the buyers will be forced to cancel using the financing contingency.

You could end up waiting quite a while longer for another buyer. And that buyer could offer you quite a bit less for your home. And even then, your house will still have to appraise for the purchase price. If home values continue to decline, you could live through this same nightmare a second time.

So does that mean you should cave on the appraisal no matter what? Not necessarily — depending on your objectives. If you need to move now, take your punishment and move on. But if you can afford to wait long enough for the market to recover, that might be the better option.

Appraisers and loan underwriters are skittish right now. Lenders are taking back homes and selling them for fifty cents on the dollar. Appraisers are being fastidious to make sure they are not overestimating values.

And all of this is just another reason to price your home to the market. You Read more

June 27, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Inman’s non-ad ad might be extortion, but at least you’re invited to help them betray their own advertisers — for a fee, of course

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is what you will see if you click on a link to an Inman News article:

First: What ad? There isn’t any ad there, just a ransom note.

Who’s the hostage? That would be you. Inman is deliberately interposing itself between you and what you want, demanding payment to get out of your way. That much is extortion, and it’s extortion of the Chokepoint Charlie variety, since the chokepoint is entirely an artifice manufactured by Inman in order either to extort your funds or to punish you by delay for refusing to be extorted.

Nice behavior, huh?

There’s more. The non-ad ad actually attempts to insinuate that it is a matter of prestige to have been extorted in this fashion. “Club members,” the concierge in the pro shop will inform you, “have first claim on available tee times.” If you cough up the dough demanded by this chokepoint, you’re not a schmoo who got rolled in exchange for faster access to regurgitated press releases. To the contrary. You’re a member, one of the privileged elite. In essence, it’s like a line pass in Las Vegas: You’re not some ordinary sucker. No, sir! You’re a very special sucker!

We’re not done. Consider the advertisers, even though I can’t ever remember seeing an ad in this non-ad ad’s place. The “social contract” between Inman and the advertiser runs like this: “We know that our readers don’t want to be delayed. We know they just want access to whatever it is they clicked through to find. So, in exchange for your money, were going to frustrate and betray them — with your ad being the instrument of that betrayal.”

I cannot imagine an advertiser stupid enough to want to try to engage the people it just pissed off, but this is literally the expectation governing that particular advertising space.

But now we’re back to the non-ad ad. What does it really say? It says that Inman will take money from advertisers to frustrate and betray its own readers. Unless those readers are willing to pay the extortion money, in which case Inman will frustrate and betray its own advertisers, from 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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