There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 36 of 84)

The Odysseus Medal: “We Realtors are ironically, the easiest people to manipulate because we count the money before it’s printed”

Here’s the thing: I am a complete sucker for good writing. I like big ideas, I like radical ideas (ya think?), I especially like profoundly and transparently ethical ideas. But if you can write entrancingly about just about anything — I am duly entranced. We live and learn by telling stories, and all of the arts, at their best, are most fundamentally literary. The burnished word is the reflection of humanity’s godhead, the breath of the sublime made manifest in speech, in poetry, in prose, in the drama, even in the cacophonous news of our everyday lives. We are animals, and so we sleep and scratch and snuffle. But we are a spectacular genetic accident, a thing of nature that cannot exist except as an artifact, a man-made thing. By dint of our conceptualization, given form in speech and in abstract notation systems, we are a thing apart from nature, the god-like consciousness that gives nature meaning beyond mere randomness. In our words, in the works of our unprecedented minds, we celebrate all we are and all we can become. And so it would not be wrong to say that I am continuously in the thrall of human life well celebrated.

Hence: This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Geno Petro for Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar:

I won’t promise ‘lightning in a bottle’ to a potential client but I will pledge to use my resources (spend my own money) in the most efficient manner I see fit. Let’s face it, the Listing Agent is in the hole the minute he walks out the door with the Exclusive and only collects when the property actually sells–correction: …when the property actually sells under his watch. Phone calls from Vegas are never good under any circumstance, I’ve found.

I’ll try not to promise the Moon no matter how much I allow myself to be manipulated by the situation (potential paycheck). And that is why we do it, you know. We Realtors are ironically, the easiest people to manipulate because we count the money before it’s printed. We may say we don’t but most of us secretly Read more

It’s cherry-picking time down at the feed reader: Subscribe to BloodhoundBlog content by author

Joel Burslem, writing from The Future of Real Estate Marketing, a multi-author weblog, this past week posted an extended complaint about multi-author weblogs.

Okayfine. It struck me as a beef about form over substance, but — what the heck? — there’s no accounting for taste.

The one kvetch that is surely valid is this:

I’d love to be able just to get Mike Arrington’s perspective on TC or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s posts from RWW or Pete Cashmore’s contributions to Mashable for example and cut out all the rest.

To use a (loose) analogy – I’d liken many multi-author blogs right now to my local cable company. They’re bundling an awful lot of channels in my cable package that I don’t want.

One thing that would help if more multi-author blogs feeds aped the a la carte cable model (which is sadly lacking right now too), or like podcast subscriptions in iTunes. These blogs ought to clearly let me pick and choose the authors I want and bundle a unique feed for me based on my selections – not just stuff everything down a pipe at me.

This is actually easily done in WordPress, and it’s something I’ve thought about doing for a long time.

And today is that day. It’s been possible for a long time to get a BloodhoundBlog author’s archive of posts by clicking on that author’s picture. Beautiful people like Kris Berg, Cathleen Collins and Dan Green are consistent beneficiaries of this feature. That would seem to suggest that the feature is being discovered mostly by accident of impulse, so now, in any particular post and in the Frequent Contributors section of the sidebar, “Post Archive” and “RSS Feed” are also supported by text links.

From my point of view, anyone who would subscribe to a Michael Arrington feed and skip Duncan Riley doesn’t get technology, but the essence of capitalism is that each of us should be able to have exactly what we want and nothing else.

In the mean time, we will continue to grow — in contributors, in scope, in importance, in reach, in influence. As with the best of group weblogs in the larger Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

A dozen nominees again, which is boiling down to one entry out of five. Already you’re looking at what I view as the cream of this week’s crop.

We are slaves to the news, of course. This week’s fires in Southern California dominated our attention. Congress seems desperate to do something ruinous to the mortgage industry. Microstoopid spent way too much to buy a small piece of a big fad that will be gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe three years from now. I ignored almost everything about this. Likewise for Zillow’s announcement that their ERA deal makes them Trulia player in the on-line listings game. RE/Max has a national real estate listings portal. The Realty.bots have PR departments, at least so far. The RE.net is temporary, like all news, but I try to filter for what is actually important and not just noisome.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

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“Michael Wurzer — Living history
Living History“,
“Jay Thompson — Negative news As a fellow Realtor I am disappointed that you post such negative news“,
“Kris Berg — Healing Healing“,
“Dan Melson — Lending reform \”Fixes\” for the Mortgage Meltdown – You Can’t Keep A Bad Idea Down“,
“Morgan Brown — Lending reform Barney Frank – Broker’s Worst Nightmare“,
“Kevin Boer — Move/Active Rain What The Microsoft-Facebook Deal Means For Real Estate — Part 2: Revisiting Move.com Vs. ActiveRain“,
“Krista Baker — Negotiating buyer’s commissions Negotiating Commissions with Buyers“,
“Gary Elwood — Credibility The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You“,
“Brian Boreo — Real estate weblogging Waking from my blog reverie“,
“Jeff Brown — San Diego Fires San Diego Fire Update — It’s Now Approaching Historical — 10% of Population Evacuated“,
“Jeff Kempe — Socratic dialogue Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.

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  • Hands off those clocks! Daylight Savings Time doesn’t start until next week — but there’s still time to make Odysseus Medal nominations

    Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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    NAR BloggerCon: I am like so there…

    Daniel Rothamel has managed to set up an event called NAR BloggerCon. I can’t figure out who’s getting conned, but I’m eager to find out.

    Cathy and I are flying in and out for the event — my favorite way of going anywhere.

    Date and Time: Monday, November 12th, 2007 @ 5:30pm.

    Place: The NAR Bloggers’ Lounge – Venetian Hotel, 4th Floor, Room 4605

    Be there if you can. If not, I predict there will be video…

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    The soul of a bigger Bloodhound: Anticipating BloodhoundBlog.TV

    We’re about to grow to be a much bigger dog. We’re a media play to begin with — news and views, not sales and service. People lecture us all the time that we don’t get real estate weblogging, a point we might dispute. Weblogging about the real estate business, on the other hand, we do better than anyone.

    What we have coming is a new idea on a new domain, BloodhoundBlog.TV. (There’s nothing there yet; we’re too busy building the underlying technology.)

    Yawn! Yet another claque of clamorous real estate videos?

    Not on your life.

    We’re going at this BloodhoundBlog way, as webloggers: Serious about important ideas, always, but never stuffy or stilted — and never in anyone’s thrall. We’re going to do the same kinds of things we do here — in streaming, iPod-ready video.

    Here are some kinds of content we might take on:

    • The Talking Head, like Andy Rooney or Bill O’Reilly. This is akin to a weblog post, but it’s harder to do well than to imagine having done well. It works best from a well-rehearsed script, but some of the best YouTube videos we have linked to fall into this category.
    • How-To/Spot News/Actuality. This is like HGTV or a news broadcast. Plenty of room for creativity here: multiple locations, multiple interviews, music, still images or film clips.
    • Interviews. This is what we think of right now when we think of a general interest real estate video podcast. With a camcorder or a decent webcam, we can do this anywhere. Connecting through the Studio BHB set-up (about which more below), we can make a fairly tightly edited two-shot remote interview on the fly.
    • Group Discussions. This depends on Studio BHB. A group of us, contributors or guests, can come together in a video-conference, which we can store as a video. I’ve worked out a way to edit this kind of conference to make a visually compelling presentation on the fly.

    We are planning to do a weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast, combining the first three types of segments with a group discussion about those segments, about the real estate news of the week and about our particular favorites among Read more

    Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.

    [I was just finishing this up when I read Greg’s terrific post.  Timing in life and all that…]

    My first jaunt into online polemics was in the early nineties, the topic animal rights.  The Animal Liberation Front was active in the Northwest – burning fur farms and research labs to prove the efficacy of their argument – and my (then) wife was involved with the breeding and showing of dogs, the kind of thing that worked a True Believer into lather.

    Then, of course, it wasn’t blogs, but  newsgroups – talk.politics.animals, as I recall – and it should come as no surprise that conversations tended to get a little, well, testy.  I actually took a moderator position for a short time, part of my job to write, every third post or so, a plea of the “Can’t we all just get along?” variety, which would settle things down, but never for much longer than twenty minutes.

    [One can tolerate only so much. A reader had logged in to pour out his heart: He was a teacher in a middle school that, for a fundraiser, had staged a pig kissing contest.  The kids loved it, but the teacher was traumatized by the humiliation caused the pigs; he’d gone home and cried himself to sleep.  What could he do to make others understand?  I was asked to step down due to the insensitivity of my reply.]

    Turning someone already steeped in the dogma is impossible, but there are tools available to convince the fence sitters:  The first thing I did was read the literature, then I downloaded and printed out – I still have the somewhat yellowed copy within arm’s length of where I type – a list of forty three logical fallacies.

    Dialogue requires order.

    ====

    Unfortunately, the web and blogs have managed to define discourse down even further.   And – who’d have thought? – it’s even beginning to infect RE blogs.  I think that’s why Rain City Guide’s Dustin Luther issued his preemptive admonition,  brilliant in its brevity:  Attack ideas, not people; no personal promotion. All’s well, and RCG continues to be one of the best in quality dialogue.

    Then Read more

    When all you have is a hammer — disintermediate the bums!

    I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.

    Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.

    Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.

    But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.

    A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.

    “The world sorts itself out” is what Read more

    The Odysseus Medal — 99% of all sub-agents don’t even exist any longer, but why should that matter to the Wharton School of Business?

    I’m a busy boy. We’re busy with money work, but Cathleen has been sick, sicker, pneumoniated. The good news is, you don’t have to cut off your ear to take great pictures, you just have to hack like Selma on the Simpsons. I’m picking up the slack, plus I have a great new idea for BloodhoundBlog that we’ll be rolling out shortly. In any case, I might seem abrupt here, but that is no stain on the quality of today’s winning posts.

    Jim Duncan was one of the first real estate webloggers I became aware of when we started BloodhoundBlog. We discovered the power of the long tail together in posts about dual agency. He is always to be found on the side of righteousness in real estate — ethics, education, putting the client first with first-rate service. He’s a great blogger, too, as he demonstrates with this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, Wither false blame?, an extended riposte to a particularly lame lamentation about imaginary offenses by the sub-agents who no longer exist in most states:

    The author and professors make one accurate argument accidentally – until the real estate industry, mortgage industry, HUD, etc. embrace divorced commissions, we have a long way to go. Divorced commissions means simply that the buyer pays the buyer’s agent and the seller pays the seller’s agent. Until this is fixed, the perception will exist amongst those who don’t know any better – whether by unfamiliarity or neglect (as would seem to be the case in the Wharton professors’ cases) – that true representation does not exist.

    I come not to condemn the professors (I have read the Mortgage Professor site for years), but to enlighten them to the wonderful world known as the 21st century and Buyer Brokerage. While the seller may pay my commission now, the loyalty and trust I am earning is the buyers’.

    Here’s a proposal – First, apologize and clarify. Second, invite a guest speaker write a guest post on your blog and to explain to your classes what real estate agency and buyer/seller representation are. Explain how much the profession has changed in Read more

    The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

    A dozen nominees again. It’s a workable number, and it gets us down to nothing but very serious posts. There are three from BloodhoundBlog here, but there’s nothing for it. Two of the three dominated the debate this week. If anything, I’m less fair to our contributors in the final judging, to make sure I’m being fair to everyone else.

    Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

    Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

    Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

    < ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Morgan Brown -- FHA secure Qualifying for FHASecure and Refinancing in a Changed Mortgage World”,
    “Jim Cronin — Blogging for buyers
    Looking For Ready To Act Buyers? Blog These Proven To Succeed Real Estate Topics“,
    “Dan Green — Housing starts Why The Terrible Housing Starts Number Could Be A Signal Of The Housing Market’s Recovery“,
    “Jeff Brown — Social Security First Baby Boomer Applies For Social Security — Let The Games Begin“,
    “Kris Berg — Paper trained Paper Trained“,
    “Jim Duncan — Wharton calumnies Whither false blame?“,
    “Dan Melson — Going vertical Economics of Home Ownership in High Density Areas“,
    “Morgan Brown — Wholesaling DOA? Dead Man Walking – Wholesale Lending is Marching Towards Extinction“,
    “Benn Rosales — Despised Realtor Realtor most despised – an open letter“,
    “Brian Brady — Blog compliance Disingenuous Diatribe: Compliance is Crap-It’s About the Cash“,
    “Kris Berg — Face time Face Time or Facebook?“,
    “Jeff Brown — Hyperlocal blogging House Agents — Wanna Start the New Year Kickin’ Ass? Here’s How
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    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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  • Don’t live in fear of the NAR or your broker — disintermediate them!

    The stakes are high, as Brian has pointed out. You yourself have been smart enough to build a Web 2.0 marketing strategy, but now you’re faced with the possibility that your broker, with or without the help of the brokers’ cartel, the National Association of Realtors, may try to take it all away. Here are some things you can do to pursue independence now:

    • Get rid of the licensing laws. A minimum standard enshrined in law becomes the de facto maximum standard. Consumers have been deluded into thinking that the fog-a-mirror license denotes quality, so they don’t dig deeper for the added-value you bring to the marketplace. Even better, if there are no licenses, there are no brokers to tell you what you can and can’t do.
    • But: That won’t happen, so work in your state to get rid of the broker level of licensing. This is already the law in a few states. Every agent can fly his or her own flag as an actual entrepreneur. Even if you should elect to affiliate with a Keller 21Max franchise, you’ll be at liberty to take flight whenever you want, since all your contracts will be your own.
    • But even that is probably a long-term proposition. What will happen if your broker tries to shut down your weblog tomorrow? You need your broker’s license now — or as soon as you can get it — if your state still makes the distinction between salespeople and brokers. Even then your contracts aren’t your own, but you will have the ability to plan an orderly exit. And, having that mobility, you will have the power to negotiate with your broker as an equal.
    • I mean no slight to our vendor friends, but take and keep control of your marketing technology. Of particular importance: If your broker controls your marketing, your broker controls your business.
    • I despise laws, so I have complete contempt for “reforms.” The only reform that matters to me is repeal, which never, ever happens. Even so, a “reform” that would make a remarkable difference in the way the real estate brokerage business is conducted — even Read more