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Category: Blogging (page 46 of 84)

June 20, 2007

Subprime Lending Fallout Goes Upstream to Take Down Two Major Hedge Funds: What does this Mean To Real Estate Investors?

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Two major Bear Stearns Hedge Funds face foreclosure due to their significant exposure to the subprime lending market. While this does not fall under the category of real estate investor, I spent last summer working for Bear Stearns and interacting with many of their hedge funds. Based on the very limited details of the stories out now, I cannot be certain if I have worked with these two particular funds. I can be certain; however, that it would not be a good time to be in the mortgage space at Bear Stearns.

In my three months at Bear Stearns, I met some of the smartest people in the businiess. While this is not an advertisement to work at Bear Stearns, I think they are a very well run organization with smart people. This of course begs the question, how could something like this happen to such smart people? Furthermore, with all of the subprime lending issues out there, what does this mean for borrowers who are less creditworthy?

Simply put, in my humble opinion, the subprime market will be doomed for some years (at least five or more). Since I know this site is filled with a ton of very smart mortgage brokers, I will outline my reasoning.

Consider the following information:

1) Many subprime lenders have filed for bankruptcy

2) Major buyers of Mortgage Backed Securities (like Bear Stearns) are having issues with subprime mortgages

3) Despite what the National Association of Realtors says, the housing market seems to be taking a slow and steady turn for the worse

4) Major Banks have tightened their lending policies

Lets take an example of a typical transaction before the subprime fallout. A low creditworthy borrower applies for a subprime loan. Some intermediary or mortgage broker, supplies them with the best loan for them from either a bank or a conduit lender. The bank/conduit lender then sells the loan to an investment bank (like a Bear Stearns or Goldman Sachs) to free up more money to lend and to remove the risk off their books. Finally, the investment bank packages this loan in the form of bonds that investors looking Read more

June 19, 2007

Status Quo Real Estate Investors Don’t Make Real Money

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

I have never been a huge fan of the status quo. While I have some appreciation for the mundane, I would rather blaze my own trail than do things as they have always been done. Interestingly enough, this really comes in handy when approaching investment properties. Doing what makes sense to me may not be the status quo, but it makes me feel comfortable.

Recently, I was looking to close a deal on a 32 unit apartment complex. When asked by my agent how many of the units I wanted to look at, I remarked, “Uh, all of them.” He seemed taken aback by this, and then mentioned that taking a sampling of the units was the status quo. Perhaps looking at five or ten and then extrapolating what the other units look like is a tremendous timesaver. Lucky for me I had all the time in the world.

Interestingly enough all but four units actually looked good, but those four units looked really bad and had a material effect on my offer and the amount of concession I asked for. Looking at all the units would have saved me about $8,000 had I closed this deal. Even as an investment banker, I cant make $8,000 for three hours worth of work.

I will also take this brief interlude to point out the inherent conflict between realtor and investor. That extra two hours actually cost my realtor about $380 (3.5% x $8,000), plus two hours of actual work he could have done securing additional deals. Clearly the status quo worked in his favor. I don’t mean to suggest that is why he mentioned it, but I do mean to suggest that it is harder for him to work in my best interest when our incentives don’t align.

As investors it is important to remember that a deal and all of its components must make sense to you. While the status quo is surely there for a reason, it may not be in your best interest to follow the status quo. Many first time investors or investors who are unsure of themselves fall back on Read more

June 18, 2007

Jay Thompson, Greg Swann, weblogging and liquor: The First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference is on June 21st

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reminding you that Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and I will be speaking the Phoenix Area Active Rain Gathering and First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, to be held on Thursday, June 21st, at 3pm.

The event is being put together by Shailesh Ghimire of CTX Mortgage. Visit Arizona Mortgage Guru for more details.

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June 18, 2007

Real Estate Relationships: Do What you Say you Will Do

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

The long absence is finally over. After a grueling finals week and graduation, a two week vacation, a move to New York City, and a failed real estate deal, I am back with the pack. Based on the great content that I have seen coming from the site, I can assume my absence has gone unnoticed. In order to come back with a bang, I thought I would share a quick life lesson about real estate. The lesson: Real estate is a people business, so it is important to do what you say you will do, and maybe more, but certainly never less.

Here is a quick example. My latest deal to buy two apartment complexes in Greensboro ended in utter failure because one person simply did not do what they said they would do. Before considering this deal, I wanted to be sure there would be enough financing in place to make it happen. While I could have really stretched, begged, and borrowed to get all of the 20% that I needed for the down payment, my trusted mortgage broker recommended I partner with a local investor. He assured me that he could find me a suitable partner within the 30 day due diligence period, so I proceeded with the deal.

To make a long story short, no partner ever materialized and I was forced to bow out of the deal shortly before the end of the due diligence period. Given my upfront nature, I had already informed all parties that this deal hinged on me finding a suitable partner, which over a group dinner my mortgage broker ensured everyone would happen fairly quickly. Fairly quickly, turned into days, then a month and still a partner had yet to emerge.

In the end the mortgage broker’s reputation was trashed after this deal. My agent, who does a lot of great commercial work in the area, has decided not to work with the mortgage broker again. Additionally, the seller’s broker has also black listed this broker, and I think it is obvious that it will be a cold day in a very hot place Read more

June 15, 2007

What makes a group blog work? It ain’t duct tape and baling wire

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Drew Meyers at the Carnival of Real Estate blog has a post this morning on what makes multi-author weblogs work. He interviewed me, Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide and Jessica Swesey of Inman News Blog.

Like this: “What are the top three things that lead to a successful multi-author blog?”

My answer:

I’m tempted to answer talent, talent and talent. There’s more to it than that, though. BloodhoundBlog is blessed to have very talented writers, but we’re twice blessed that they’re such thoughtful, thoroughgoing people. Add to that they are so easy to get along with, and we have a killer line-up.

Lots more where that came from. Give it a look…

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June 14, 2007

Blogging for Dollars – It’s time to make money.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

As the tester at my second failed attempt to get my driver’s license said many years ago, I am easily “attracted and distracted”. That, and the fact that I at one point drove on the sidewalk, no doubt contributed to my poor marks.

On any given day, my To Do list would crush a Hummer. I have more lofty goals than I have time, but at least I am trying. I’m admittedly not a pioneer, but I am an aggregator. I read, listen, learn, and then assimilate the information and ideas in an ongoing attempt to build a better mousetrap.

This week, I owe my inspiration (okay, distraction) to Project Blogger and to Phil Hoover. Like a lot of you, I have been watching the Project Blogger apprentices at work, and have filed away a hundred good ideas. In particular, Greg’s insanely great idea fell under my “Why didn’t I think of that?” category. The hyperlocal or neighborhood blog is a concept which I have since been toying with, but I hadn’t quite mentally worked through the process. The problem for me was two-fold.

Time – There is never enough of it. I try to contribute here, and I have my own blog to feed. I also have to manage a static website (not to mention a real estate business). Duplication – I am currently knee deep in cross-contamination. I link from here to there to here and back to the other. Too much synergy, to use a word from the corporate muckity-muck dictionary, risks confusion, lack of focus, and ultimately a lost audience.

Enter Phil Hoover. In a series of emails, Phil has been keeping me posted on his efforts to expand his blogging efforts into the hyperlocal arena. We know him from his Boise Blog, more recently from his Eagle Real Estate Blog, and now, at the subdivision level, from the Brookwood Subdivision Blog. And I think he may have built, at least in concept, a better mousetrap.

Static websites and the dodo bird: One is endangered and the other extinct. I suspect I won’t get much argument from this audience of bloggers and Read more

June 14, 2007

An RE.net taxonomy: Identifying types of real estate weblogs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a first strike at a taxonomy of real estate weblogs. Taxonomy is the science of categorizing things. Of course, not everything can be neatly categorized, but the elucidation of categories can focus the mind, helping us to understand where certain weblogs might fit, which are hybrids of two or more categories, and which can only be described by the creation of new categories.

Again: This is a first strike. I may not have created enough categories, or I may have created some in error. I may have certain weblogs — offered here as examples — miscatalogued. If you think I’ve got something wrong, say so. If we can whip this into a decent shape, I may built it as a separate page, something we can lay by for an enterprising newspaper reporter — or the nonesuch, whichever comes along first.

In any case, here’s my first swing at the ball:

June 13, 2007

We finally made the paper! Oh, wait, we didn’t . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a pretty much boundless contempt for the Arizona Republic. The paper’s real estate coverage is eclipsed in its stupidity only by its insipidity. There is no conceivable issue upon which ASU’s Jay Butler is not the absolute authority, and there is never an occasion when the news, no matter how good, could not be worse. I’m utterly amazed that they let me write for them — albeit, not very much — and I await that “Goodbye Look” phone call in my every waking minute. In fact, I think I deserve 1,500 words on the front page of the business section every Sunday, but that would require a different Republic — or perhaps an alternate universe.

But today comes vindication, yes?

No.

Glen Creno wrote a report on “Valley realty bloggers” and managed to omit any mention of Phoenix-area real estate webloggers. No Jay. No Jonathan. No Greg. No Russell. Here’s the really fun part: Of the “Valley realty bloggers” he does mention, only two are actually in the Phoenix area.

Who’s in the article?

  • The Housing Doom bubble blog in Gilbert, AZ
  • Shannon Hubbard’s Phoenix blog
  • Housing Panic — in London, England
  • I Am Facing Foreclosure — in Sacramento, CA
  • The Real Estate Bloggers — in Atlanta, GA

Who’s not in the article? Their names are legion.

Is that link clear? Webloggers are constantly derided and diminished by mainstream media reporters who can’t do the simplest research.

The fact is, I don’t care. We’re talking to people who are paying attention. If the hometown paper were to discover what is going on under its nose in the epicenter of real estate weblogging, I would lay awake nights wondering what we had done wrong…

More: Jonathan Dalton, Jay Thompson.

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June 12, 2007

Redfin’s Sweet Digs weblogs resurrected as neighborhood sites

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From John Cook’s Venture Blog:

“Sweet Digs” is back — kind of.

The Redfin real estate blog, which was shut down last month after agents complained to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service that the home reviews were hurting sales, is making its return today in a modified state.

No longer will Redfin bloggers post in-depth reviews of open houses. Instead, the posts will detail information such as price reductions, past sales, open house listings and the number of homes for sale in certain neighborhoods. It also plans to do previews of new listings.

Sweet Digs also will be launched later this summer in Boston and Southern California, the company’s two newest markets.

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June 7, 2007

The question: How do you write so much? The answer: I don’t . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lani Anglin asked me in email about my “blogging regimen.” That would almost seem to imply a plan or a schedule, and I don’t do things that way. So I ignored that idea and responded to her second remark: “I’m curious to know how you crank out so many freakin’ blogs.”

Here’s my short answer: I don’t write very much here. I could write quite a bit more. I don’t think the quality would suffer, but I think your patience might. This is what I wrote back to Lani:

I can write 2,000 words an hour if I need to. I can dictate good-enough text at 150 words a minute for as long as necessary. It’s not any sign of genius, it’s more like running: Do it enough and you get good at it. When I was a younger man, I used to write at least 8,000 words every day, seven days a week. The Grand Opera stuff takes more time, but not as much as you’d think.

If you watch the fifth to the tenth minute in Video Verité, you’ll see me deliver a lecture, ex tempore, on the aesthetics of discursive prose. It’s not perfectly-drafted text, but I could whip a transcript into shape in no time. But it would be a lot better — more informative, more memorable, and probably longer — if it were written as an essay rather than spoken.

As it happens, I wrote about writing, among other things, when BloodhoundBlog was just short of a month old. We were just starting to get some attention, and I wanted to memorialize the blog’s beginnings:

 
Word-slinging in the Rain — or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog…

None of this is new to me — except for the parts that are.

I’ve been writing on the nets since before there were nets. Since BBS systems — I ran two of them at different times of my life. Since CompuServe was a time-share system called MicroNet that charged $3.00 an hour for half-duplex transmission at 300 baud.

(Think about that! “Baud” is Bits of Audio Data. My first modem had an acoustic Read more

June 6, 2007

Jay Thompson and Greg Swann to speak at First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference on June 21st

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and I will be speaking the Phoenix Area Active Rain Gathering and First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference, to be held on Thursday, June 21st, at 3pm.

If you’re going to see Russell Shaw speak at Arizona Real Estate Commissioner Sam Wercinski’s event, you’ll probably still have time to make the Blogging Conference. The Commissioner is providing lunch and we’ll be having drinks after the Conference, so you can make a day of it.

The event is being put together by Shailesh Ghimire of CTX Mortgage. Visit Arizona Mortgage Guru for more details.

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June 6, 2007

Why Lindsay Lohan Doesn’t Like Redfin

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I’ve been BADD. Again. But I’m trainable.

Sometimes I write in stream-of-consciousness fashion, and sometimes it just takes more than a couple of sentences to develop an argument or idea. This style of communicating, I now know, is deplorable execrable lamentable just plain WRONG.

So, this morning, I will develop my new skills as I share my opinion on why limited-service business models might not be in every consumer’s best interest.

Tomorrow, I will be sharing my thoughts on the legal fiasco involving Natural Hazard Disclosure Statements in California, Property ID, and ostensible purported so-called RESPA violations. I am making a diorama.

(Total Word Count: 97 not counting strike-out boo-boos, Graphic Images Intended to Capture the Attention of and Entertain the Reader: 1, Lindsay Lohan References to Ensure that Post Content Doesn’t Get Overlooked in Feed Reader: 1)

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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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