But remember: A little mustard goes a long way.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 54 of 84)
>Do I really need single-property websites?
>Which is better, Postlets or VFlyer, or why can’t my website template provider just give me a darn feed to my property pages so I can avoid the whole mess altogether?
>Does Dustin have a ponytail? (I like to think so, but it is hard to tell conclusively from his thumbnail photo).
These are the things that weigh heavily on me this morning. So many thoughts, yet I don’t know where to begin. Writer’s block? I have come to the conclusion that this is not so much a condition in which you have nothing to say but the symptom of a loss of focus.
Real estate, unless you operate a finely tuned machine in the Russell Shaw spirit, is a highly cyclical business. Over the years, I have found the cyclical nature of the work and, yes, the paycheck to be the most difficult part of what we do.
Just Say “No”
Life, too, is cyclical. I have been living blog-free for the better part of two weeks. We have joked about the addiction, and an addiction it is. Much like the addict who chooses abstinence to cure the compulsion yet finds himself consumed with the very thought of the “abuse” every moment of the day, I too have struggled with the “I should, but I can’t” demons. The difference is that my abstinence wasn’t a choice.
Life happens, and an event in my personal life recently sapped my every ounce of energy and demanded that I instantly realign my priorities. Enter loss of focus. I suspect we all get somewhat derailed from time to time, and the true challenge is finding your way back, is in not letting your paralysis linger. Don’t get me wrong; it was just a bump in the road, but the tendency in the aftermath is to focus eyes on the pavement while denying yourself the awe of the distant views.
>Why does the sleazy local agent, possessing such an underdeveloped frontal lobe that he undoubtedly signs his contracts with an “X”, get so much business?
>Should I go to the Inman Conference this summer? (That might answer my Read more
The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it holdeth not in every point, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we may thereby both see and remember almost all the passions before mentioned. But this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost; and in it: To endeavour, is appetite. To be remiss, is sensuality. To consider them behind, is glory. To consider them before, humility. To lose ground with looking back, vain glory. To be holden, hatred. To turn back, repentance. To be in breath, hope. To be weary, despair. To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation. To supplant or overthrow, envy. To resolve to break through a stop foreseen, courage. To break through a sudden stop, anger. To break through with ease, magnanimity. To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity. To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. To see another fall, disposition to laugh. To see one out-gone whom we would not, is pity. To see one out-go we would not, is indignation. To hold fast by another, is to love. To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. To hurt one’s-self for haste, is shame. Continually to be out-gone, is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die. — Thomas Hobbes
There is much to criticize in the RE.net. But one would hope that we would criticize criminality, venality and intentional transgressions, rather than honest, even if thoughtless, errors. From the former, we want not the correction of the bad behavior, but rather its elimination. For the latter, we can be big enough of spirit to help our brothermen learn to do better where they might have done badly. It is certainly within the bounds of reason to argue that Hobbes was more than unnecessarily dour.
Alas, we have a new candidate for The Cheez-Whiz Prize, a new weblog devoted to derision called “realweenie.” (I won’t link to this for the same reason I’ve stopped linking to Housing Panic.) It’s a Six Apart weblog, Read more
It appears the Wall Street Journal has sniffed out major issues in the sub prime lending market only two weeks after Brian Brady broke the news here first. They focused on one of the strongest lenders, New Century, who is now poised to take the biggest fall because of their lax lending practices and perhaps illegal accounting. So why do I bring this up? Simple, it’s a great time to talk about some great investment opportunities on the horizon.
Let me start by saying that this truly is a tragedy. Many unsuspecting people will lose their homes because of poor lending practices. Additionally, many mortgage companies will go under costing thousands more their jobs. While this does not appear to be the 1980’s S&L crisis reborn, it will have some serious repercussions on the mortgage and asset back securities industries.
So where is the opportunity for the investor? Essentially, the foreclosure market will be flush with properties in the coming years. As defaults continue to rise, foreclosures will soon follow. Worse yet, many of the banks that make these loans will be trying to get them off their books as soon as possible. This creates great investment opportunities in markets that might have been inaccessible before. Lots of these loan products were/are huge in markets like California and New York, where prices have sky rocketed. Additionally, with the influx of bank owned properties on the market, expect housing price increases to slow in these markets.
Furthermore, many mortgage companies are now tightening their belts. Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, has completely stopped doing 100% financing. Since they are the industry leader, it is safe to assume many of their peers will follow. This practice will push more people to renting because essentially less people will be able to afford to buy.
This is one example of a way to makes lemonade from some pretty bitter lemons. The ripples of the sub prime fall out will be far and wide, but make no mistake, there will be people that do pretty well because of it. Regardless of your opinion on how or why this situation Read more
…is up at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy. Jay Thompson did a fantastic job, as you would expect. My post on The Implied Accusation in real estate took top prize, but there are many great entries. Give ’em a look…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
The other day I was on the phone with Jessica Swesey from Inman News and 17 bigfoot real estate webloggers. We were discussing the plans for the Bloggers Connect event at this summer’s Inman Connect. Someone suggested that a panel could address how bloggers can come to be treated as “press.”
To which my instant reaction was, “Ew!”
I really like Jessica Swesey, but, to me, “media” or “press” or especially “mainstream media” suggest the worst kind of teacher’s pet, hall monitor, establishment toadyism. Support the blood drive! Adopt a puppy! Come to the Ladies Auxiliary Bake Sale! It’s not the intense fascination with bad news that riles me as much as the plastic-smiled saccharine boosterism. I am least comfortable when I don’t know if I am being lied to. When I lend my mind to the “press,” I feel like I am being lied to in one way or another most of the time.
This is exactly what weblogging evolved to eliminate. Love him or hate him, Charles Johnson is never trying to hustle you or pander to you. Webloggers say exactly what they mean, and they document every controversy with copious links. Doubt me? Please do! Here’s how you can find out everything I know, with links at each stop to further amend your knowledge. You will die trying to pursue all the links, but — unlike all the preening Read more
Some of you may have noticed a drop in my postings over the last two weeks. The driver behind this has been mid terms. For those of you who don’t remember what that was like when you were in school, imagine doing all of the work you do in a typical month in a week. All of my studying got me really thinking about this issue of theory vs. practice. One of my pet peeves about most educational experiences is that there is too much theory and not enough practice. Worse yet, many of the theories do not work in practice. I thought I would spend some brief time outlining a few higher level theories that work and their implications in practice (don’t click away, I promise there is good practical knowledge to come).
Theory #1: Most markets tend to have a natural vacancy rate and there is a mean reversion tendency if prices get too high or too low. A lot of very complicated math proves this out for most markets
Practice #1: Most markets tend to stay at a certain vacancy rate. If the level of vacancy gets too high, rents come down until the natural vacancy rate is achieve. If vacancy gets too low, expect prices to increase until this vacancy rate is achieved.
How can the investor use this? Take a look at the historical vacancy of a market. If you are technically literate a simple chart will give you an idea of the natural vacancy rate. If you are not, you can probably simply eyeball it and be close. Try to buy when vacancy levels are above the natural vacancy rate. Properties will be cheaper and you will experience appreciation by simply waiting for the market to correct itself. This is a simple strategy that really works in practice. Smart buying can keep an investor in profits in an up or down market. This point is an interesting twist on buy low/sell high. Essentially buy vacant, sell full.
Theory #2: Interest rates affect cap rates directly and indirectly. As interest rates rise, cap rates rise and property values fall. Additionally, Read more
We’re listing Thursday, and it’s been long enough since we’ve done one of these Grand Opera listings that I have a lot of new stuff to invent from scratch. Ideas are easy, it’s execution that’s hard. The sign and the collateral cards are built and being printed. We’re playing with a card that plays off of the sign to emphasize the differences you get by listing with us.
If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can monitor the changes in the web site/weblog named in the sign over the next 48 hours or so. The template is one I’ve been playing with for our brokerage web site (itself to be a weblog), but this version of it will be unique to this house.
I’ve got other balls in the air, too, so I might be thin on the ground for a little while.
James Hsu asked me to define Realty.bot, so here’s an on-stilts explication:
A Realty.bot is an internet start-up that plans to undertake some part of the residential real estate transaction, usually as an adjunct to selling advertising.
Trulia.com and PropSmart.com are listings.bots, acquiring listings by scraping, direct entry and XML feeds.
Zillow.com and several others are AVMs, Automated Valuation Methods, and Zillow is graduating to a direct-entry-only listings.bot, but they don’t like that designation.
Redfin.com can seem like a Realty.bot, but, as with many other new entrants, it’s really a brokerage with a higher-tech front-end.
Arguably, a true Realty.bot is strictly a media/advertising play, but that’s something that could change in time. ShackPrices.com, for example, plans to become a leads vendor, and it is not unreasonable to argue that this may be the ultimate business model for most/all Realty.bots.
A better bright-line dividing point might be face-to-face end-user contact. We may come to a point where a Realty.bot is distinguished from other vendors by being untouched-by-human-hands, a completely automated real estate product offering.
By then I will have made up different words.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Do you know what stinks? The world is acrawl with canned-spam, cookie-cutter, rinse-and-repeat weblogging advice — and people follow it slavishly instead of keeping their own counsel, living their own ideal, following their own star.
That is: If I read another weblog post on how to write weblog posts, I think I’ll scream. To absolve myself of charges of hypocrisy, in advance, this not a post about how to write posts, it’s a post about how to write.
Do you want to know how to write? Here’s the tiniest taste of a first lesson: Start in the middle.
Not: “This is my report on…”
Not: “Webster’s defines…”
Not: “How can I begin to tell you…?”
Start in the middle, the way you’d start a phone conversation with someone you knew would be calling.
Like this: “Do you know what stinks?”
Oh, yes, comforting rules abound, but they are the very same rules you rebel against in every other aspect of your life. You say, “I don’t want the cookie-cutter taupe-on-taupe one-size-fits-all same-damn-thing.” And yet you scour the web, looking for sage advice about how to produce weblog posts that will not challenge, will not inspire, will not aspire, will not invoke, convoke or provoke, will not do anything except testify to your perfect ability to master perfectly bad advice.
If you are not interested in what you’re writing, how could you expect anyone else to be interested?
If you are convinced (by your own conviction or by having imbibed from too many fonts of false wisdom) that you cannot hope to connect with other people except by resort to EZ-reading tricks — dumbing the entire universe down to the drooling imbecility of the dumbest conceivable specimen — why would you expect anyone to respect and reflect upon your brilliance?
Good grief!
If you are writing to manipulate, follow the rules. They work.
If you’re writing to sell a product, follow the rules. They work.
If you’re writing to hide, writing to dissemble, writing to occlude, writing to obfuscate, writing to pull the wool over as many eyes as you can capture — follow the rules. They work.
But: If you are writing to communicate — make Read more
Agents who take more pictures negotiate better. The ever-clever Kevin Boer.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at Salt Lake Real Estate Blog. Host Nigel Swaby invokes a March Madness format. We entered Brian Brady’s interview with Lenn Harley. Brian made it to the Elite Eight, but not to the Final Four. Next week’s Carnival: The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.
The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is also up at The Landlord Blog. We entered Jeff Brown’s article on accelerated depreciation. This is the best investment article I have ever read anywhere, by the only standard that matters: Money. When it appeared here, I immediately sent it to every one of my investor clients. If you didn’t do the same, amend that omission immediately. In any case, it didn’t win. Go figure…
We had a lot of great stuff last week, but The Carnival of BloodhoundBlog award goes to Jeff’s essay. When a sweet and thoughtful man shows us how to make thousands more per year from our investments, a tip of the hat doesn’t even begin to pay the debt we owe him…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’ve been sitting on a post from Jeff Corbett, The X-Broker, for a few days. Jeff Argues that Realty.bots will eliminate buyer’s agents. This actually ties in with recent announcements that major brokerages will be feeding listings to Realty.bots like Trulia.com and Google base. I get the idea Jeff thinks these are good things. I think he’s mistaken.
Start here: Jessica Swesey at InmanBlog asked:
If the DOJ wins and NAR is forced to retract policies, what is the likely chain of events to follow? Who wins and who loses?
My reply:
If the DOJ tries to play pirate with the current system, the big brokerages may go all in-house, which they could easily do already. Then there will be no small brokerages.
Jeff objects to this, but it’s not an unreasonable proposition.
Note, for example, the the overwhelming majority of listings in Tucson are held by one brokerage — Long Realty. Who gains more from the cooperative system imposed by the TARMLS system — Long or all the little brokerages competing against it? If Long pulled out of TARMLS, what would happen happen to those smaller players?
In Phoenix, the market is dominated by Realty Executives and by RE/Max, Keller Williams, Coldwell-Banker and Century 21 Franchises. If they pulled out of ARMLS, either in isolation or by forming a new big-boys-only MLS system, brokerages like mine would be wiped out overnight.
Too much of this debate is beside the point. Pundits simultaneously attribute too much and too little importance to the MLS. From a professional’s point of view, Realty.bots are not comparable to MLS systems, and they probably never will be. They are good for window-shopping by consumers, not for searching by professionals. But wresting control of the MLS away from brokers, somehow forcing them to produce content against their own interests, will not change anything that matters in the practice of residential real estate representation. The reason for this is simple: What is wrong in residential real estate representation has nothing to do with the MLS itself.
We’ll come back to that. First: Buyers buy from the selection that is available to them. This is true of everything Read more
When I met The Leggy Blonde, I had a 34-inch waist. I was working out for at least 45 minutes every day, and I was maybe a can-and-a-half short of six-pack abs. I had been through a pretty bad car accident, and being in good shape was a secondary consequence of re-mastering the art of ambulation. (I can’t run at all, if you want to challenge me to a contest you know I’ll lose.)
Things change. Being enthralled by a woman takes time, and among the blocks of time I devoted to being enthralled — then being involved, then being a couple, then being a team, then being espoused — was the time I had spent working out. I have worked from home since 1993, and in all that time the refrigerator has never once forgotten my name.
By now I have a 45-inch waist, which doesn’t even count this great bulbous thing that hangs over my waist. I’m 47 years old, but I have always felt like I was 19. I weigh about 250 pounds, where I have always felt like I weigh about 160. I never, ever cease to be surprised when I see this old fat guy staring back at me from the mirror.
At the New Year, I resolved to do something different. Until the last ten years or so, I had always made time to read for pleasure. And, obviously, I haven’t been making time to work out. Now and then, catch as catch can — not enough. So I resolved to put in at least a half-hour a day on the stationary bike, this so I could also read at the same time.
The reading part is working out fine. I know the exercise is also working out, because I can feel the strength in my thighs, calves and glutes. My wind is better, and my overall stamina is improved. But I’m not seeing any visible weight loss. I’m not worried about losing pounds, so far, because muscle mass is more dense than fat. But I would like to see some evidence of evaporating fat.
Take it to the next Read more
I popped in to Grow a Brain and found this gem. Warning: Very strong language.
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Upgrade to 2.1.2 now. BloggingPro…
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