…continues today at The Property Monger with the eleven posts that didn’t make yesterday’s cut. Jon Ernest is one of my favorite real estate webloggers: Smart, opinionated and very, very funny…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Category: Blogging (page 63 of 84)
Two of the posts in the Carnival of Real Estate really popped for me. Toby Boyce at Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio explores the reasons why a buyer’s market in real estate seems so bizarre. And Bryant Tutas at ActiveRain teaches sellers what they knew all along.
Have I mentioned that Kris Berg is a brilliant real estate weblogger? Steve Berg is no slouch, either, but he suffers Mercury’s misfortune. Mercury is an amazing planet. It was fascinating to Einstein. But just when you’re ready to take account of all of Mercury’s unique features, you catch a glimpse of its golden-haloed neighbor and all conversation stops. Unjustly eclipsed. It ain’t fair, it just is.
The Real Estate Bloggers wonder how the shift in power in Washington will affect real estate. Not my ideal state of affairs, but gridlock can effect the Metternichean stasis: “Govern and change nothing.” More freedom? Bring it on! Lower taxes? Even better! Likelihood? Zero. Absent those, few if any changes in the laws give people the opportunity to plan in a stable environment. We could have done better before this. The challenge now is not to do worse.
Kevin Boer at Three Oceans Real Estate is looking for shady agent stories. As rough as I can be on my fellow practitioners, in the abstract, I tend not to believe stories like these. They always seem to involve friend-of-a-friend transactions, the kind of Baconian distances that induce spontaneous telephone games. I’ve run into dumb Realtors and lazy Realtors. I’ve run into Realtors who thought I was a dumb Realtor. I’ve run into a lot of Realtors who have never discovered that it possible for Realtors to pay small sums of money to make trivial sticking points go away. And I have run into a very great many Realtors who were smart, honorable, efficient and a joy to work with. So: If you want to cry to me about abuse, show me the bruises, show me the scars, show me the hospital records, show me the police report, show me the trial transcript. Everybody has a sob story. I’m from Missouri…
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…is up at The Property Monger. Host Jon Ernest celebrates the Carnival’s twenty-first-iversary by awarding 21 winners, split across two days. Grand prize goes to Northern Michigan Real Estate Blog with an argument about last week’s NAR anti-trust ruling.
We entered Russell Shaw’s essay on The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if it made the second string at The Property Monger. That post was one of the selections for The Carnival of Marketing, though, hosted this week by The Real Estate Tomato.
Cathleen Collins is dictator-for-now in judging which BloodhoundBlog post to enter in The Carnivals of Real Estate, Marketing and Business. I stuck her with the job because I can trust her to judge fairly among our many very talented webloggers, without playing favorites in my direction. It’s more responsibility than I want to take on.
But we decided to have a second competition within the Bloodhound Pack, call it the Carnival of Bloodhound. Based on the votes of contributors, the first Carnival of Bloodhound winner is Richard Riccelli’s “Charmed, I’m sure”, a quick take on how to write listing copy that makes houses sell faster and for more money.
Finally, kudos to the brain-trust at CoRE Headquarters. Rather than get worked up about what is and is not a true real estate post, they simply added three categories: Investing, local real estate and real estate professionals.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.
One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.
For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.
Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.
Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!
This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.
Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.
Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.
The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.
Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:
If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.
If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more
Teresa Boardman guest blogs at The Real Estate Tomato with some excellent advice on honing our technology skills.
Free The Drones has more on the Google Sandbox.
Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets is raising a stink about smelly houses. This may be the perfect answer to the question, “Why preview?”
More counter-intuitive rising-home-value news from Hot Property at BusinessWeek. If there were as many different ways to count groceries, you’d never make it home with a dozen eggs.
Back home in San Diego, Kris Berg has an excellent cautionary tale on the peril of ignoring the preliminary title report.
Two words: Galen Ward. The man is a poet.
Geri Sonkin at All About Long Island has thoughts on discounting. My preliminary conclusion is still that buyers don’t care very much, but I’m still playing with the idea. Three of the houses I have closing in December I would not have had without the flat fee buyer’s agent’s commission, so that’s a counter-argument.
In a Hollywood Western, about a half-hour after the second-act gun-battle, a seeming rout for the bad guys, the respectable townsfolk start poking their heads out to see if it’s safe to come outdoors. Then they gather in the town square and cluck about how much they abhor violence. This is done as comic relief and to set up the expectation of peace, to be spectacularly defeated by the third-act gun-battle. (Can you imagine what fun it is to sit through a movie or a play with me while I pick it apart line by line?) Today some of the townspeople of the RE.net have decided my brief war with Keith at Housing Panic was unseemly. Oh well. Kris Berg brought home a nice post on Realtor bashing, and, of course, Jay Thompson was a combatant. Other remarks suggest that — alike unto the comments of the BubbleHeads — people still don’t understand the issue: When someone tries to extort away your right to say what you choose, that is when I will be eager to engage in a discussion of what is ugly or a waste of time. At the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp Read more
My best friend said it best.
“You’d better quit burning that candle at both ends!”
His wife, a nurse, agrees. “Get some rest, Doug!”
Perhaps it’s a good recommendation for all of us, every now and then. To take the time to allow our bodies, minds, and souls to rejuvenate… to become anew.
For now, it’s more than a recommendation to me, as I have no choice. But with the rest will come wellness… and in wellness I will once again take my turn at bat.
Meanwhile, please accept my thanks for extending me the honor.
Forgive the absence of links, although I may have to throw in a couple of unreferenced quotes for effect, but my intent is not to fuel a ridiculous “debate”, for lack of a better word (although there are many better words). Anyone who cares about the catalyst for my comments will have to do their own research.
“Antagonize” was a word my children learned at a very young age, as in “Stop antagonizing your sister.” It really is time to stop all of the silliness, and quit antagonizing one another. Like any good mother, there comes a time when you have to ground the children. Greg – Go to your room for using the “M” word. (And like any good mother, I will laugh hysterically when you leave the room, because I really found your wordplay raucously funny). Keith and all of your Housing Panic friends, I am sending you home for behaving badly as well. The term RealtWhore, while considered by you and your friends to be quite clever, is clearly a derogatory remark and very childish. We will do it again when everyone can play nice.
Obviously, what we have here are some very divergent opinions on the real estate market trends. What bothers me the most at this moment, however, is what seems to be the underlying theme: The utter lack of respect many (most) people seem to hold for our profession. And in a perhaps unprecedented blogging moment, I insist that you DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS POST. It’s not that I know and fear that many will disagree with my remarks, but only that I am not looking to pick another playground fight. Consider it my therapy session.
I am truly tired of the sport of Realtor bashing. Here are the promised, unreferenced remarks, all unfortunately real and recent quotes:
(Realtors have a) lack of class, lack of education, lack of intelligence.
I find (the) ‘profession’ and business vile and disgusting in that it pretends to act as a fiduciary for home buyers and is nothing of the sort.
Why do you put your picture on your Blog comments/business cards/bill boards (if Read more
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
We’re adding another contributor this morning, Doug Quance of Broker’s First Realty in Atlanta:
Doug Quance is an Atlanta-based Realtor and Associate Broker. Backed by his team, Doug is in the vanguard of the Realtor 2.0 movement toward hi-tech, full-service real estate.
Doug managed to get good and sick over Thanksgiving, so it’s a particularly cruel injustice to do this to him today, but he insisted we proceed as planned.
Athol Kay at The Real Estate Guide calls us The Borghound Blog, which was a lot of fun. This much is true: We’re doing our best to recruit the very best real estate webloggers. But the last thing we want is that “one cut of face and figure,” “the prison-uniform” of some uniform school of thought. To the contrary. Our diversity is our strength. (Didn’t I get a badge from the NAR that says that?)
In any case, while we are not The Borg, today we are a nonet to be contended with…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Today, Jeff Brown is a thorn among roses. We’re adding a new contributor, San Diego Realtor and super-blogger Kris Berg. With Cathleen Collins below the BawldGuy and Kris above, the median quantity of hair approaches the statistical mean.
But rich, luxurious, full-bodied hair — or none at all — is no measure of the prowess of a BloodhoundBlog weblogger. And, of course, no one can be encapsulated by a capsule biography, but it falls to me to write one anyway:
Kris Berg is a San Diego Realtor and Associate Broker who is avidly building a business with her husband, Steve, while raising a family, maintaining a home and writing cleverly original real estate commentary.
If you haven’t read Kris at The San Diego Home Blog, you’re missing out on one of the great treats of the RE.net. She writes pertinent real estate commentary with a style all her own — sometimes raucously funny, always precisely on target. I can’t wait to see what she’ll write here…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Well.
His “offer” is essentially extortionate. The “or else”?:
A war with the thousands of HP’ers so harsh and loud your practice and reputation in Arizona likely wouldn’t survive (beyond the damage you’re doing yourself)
Now anyone who is paying any attention here — a company that excludes Generalissimo Foghorn Leghorn — could have predicted with perfect precision what I would do in the face of something like this: Make it public, of course, in spades.
So: Keith puts on a predictable pantomime of outsized outrage, heavy on the high-moral dudgeon. And the mouth-breathing morons zoom in to BloodhoundBlog to poke around at random and issue inane comments — heavy on the profanity, light on the grammar.
This much is a big yawn. There are thoughtful, intelligent people among the BubbleHeads, but I can’t imagine that any of them is so lacking in self-respect that he would take “orders” from a detestable thug like Generalissimo Leghorn.
That’s as may be. The thuglets who do shake a leg the Leghorn way gave another perfect demonstration of why I have referred to them as Brown Shirts and Flying Monkeys. One Junior G-Man dug up and published my address (ahem — it’s on our web site) here and on Housing Panic. An amazingly drunk man in Connecticut left 23 very long incoherent voicemails on my cell phone. A cadre of relatively literate BubbleHeads tried to figure our how to censor me by means of Arizona Association of Realtors or Arizona Department of Real Estate complaints. It might occur to you to wonder if they have not heard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — but of course they have. Thuggery and principle are moral opposites, never doubt it.
There’s more, but it’s all nothing. I told Keith in advance that it would come to nothing. The original Read more
Cathleen Collins, Richard Riccelli and Jeff Brown: I’m hopelessly out-classed three times in one day. And we’re adding another first-class real estate weblogger tomorrow. Nothing for it but to turn outward to the vast riches of the RE.net. Here’s some stuff that has caught my eye:
Would you like to know my secret shame? My own mother is a Luddite. Every year we talk about getting her a Macintosh with broadband for Christmas, and every year we put it off another year. All she really needs is email and the web — and she has a natural motivation in the form of a burgeoning herd of grandchildren. But she will not hear of it. Programming her VCR is as far up the technology ladder as she is willing to climb. So this little gizmo, cited on TechCrunch, is actually of interest to me. My mom has never forgiven us for ditching the film cameras — double prints! — and it’s a rare day when I think to print out and snail-mail digital photos. This might be just the thing…
Kris Berg is back, and in top form. Make time to savor her writing.
Oops! BusinessWeek says property values are up, this per Zillow.com’s Q3 Zindices and other sources. Who knows if it’s true or not, and I have no ability to weigh any but the most local evidence. But the article does highlight the essential weakness of measuring market activity by median prices.
Todd Tarson sends thoughtful notes in our general direction. In the second link he is raving about Richard Riccelli’s single-property web site for his own home in Boston, which raves I heartily endorse. This is a gorgeous expression of the single-property web site idea. Be sure to take a look at how it is put together.
Russ Cofano at Realty Objectives on a ruling an NAR motion to dismiss the DOJ anti-trust suit:
So what does this mean? As I said earlier, I believe this case will go to trial unless the parties reach compromise. NAR has been, to date, staunch in its belief that it will not settle this case if settlement means a Read more
We’re adding one more contributor to our roster today:
Ronan Doyle lives in Boston and works as an advertising agency creative executive. He loves distinctive homes and is building his wealth house by house: Search, buy, improve, enjoy, sell — then repeat the process.
Ronan know more about houses — about what makes a house work — than anyone I’ve ever met. Between Restoration Hardware and the two-year capital gains income tax exclusion, he is a one-man urban renewal project.
Jim Duncan at Real Central VA wonders if I might be wrong about the audience for real estate weblogs. In fact I could be. There may be more real estate consumers out there than I suppose, and they may be more persistent in their reading than I surmise.
For my own part, I don’t see them — very much the contrary. As I argued a week-and-a-half ago:
If you’re writing a real estate weblog, you’re blogging for people who are fanatical about real estate. Who would that be? Realtors, lenders and the vendors who live off their business. Bubbleheads and people on the bubble about bubbleheadedness. Real estate investors. That’s it. There might be some peeking-in/checking-up traffic from past clients, and perhaps some dedicated fans. There will be drop-ins from people shopping for Realtors, but they will not become dedicated readers. How do I know this? Because they don’t care. You can tell who cares about your weblog by looking at your Technorati links. There are 55 million weblogs out there, but the only ones linking to you are produced by other real estate fanatics. That’s not a wave. That’s the water…
Even so, the simple fact is that we are focused the way we are because this is what is interesting to us. I don’t tell other people what to do, and I may be completely wrong about locally-focused, consumer-oriented real estate weblogs. We actually have a nascent weblog devoted to those kinds of ideas, but we don’t give it any time.
In any case, it may turn out that Ronan Doyle is our brave initiative to straddle the line. Ronan is truly a real estate fanatic, Read more
New contributor Richard Riccelli has already figured out the true secret to weblogging: Get somebody else to do it. Watch as he gets me to cite this smug essay by Michael Kinsley in Slate Magazine:
Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?
If so, we are all crazy now. There is something about the Web that brings out the ego monster in everybody. It’s not just the well-established tendency to be nasty. When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn’t wish on Hitler.
But even in their quieter modes, denizens of the Web seem to lug around huge egos and deeply questionable assumptions about how interesting they and their lives might be to others.
This is strange. Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
Here’s my take: Kinsey’s insufferable vanity is sneering at the insufferable vanities of others. In the end, he is doing what they are doing, but Read more
… is up at Real Estate Investing For Real — but don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Only four posts are cited this week, because Joshua Dworkin elected to impose a judging standard that — in my opinion — has nothing to do with real estate weblogging. Not sour grapes on my part: We went with a Russell Shaw entry this week.
But the simple fact is, as much as we might talk about wanting to appeal to consumers (not so much here, of course), the audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals: Realtors, lenders, appraisers, investors, vendors and technologists.
All weblogs are written by and for fanatics, and, with few exceptions — one of whom we will introduce to you tomorrow — there are very few fanatical real estate consumers. Swallow hard and get used to it.
Last week, someone at CoRE HQ had the idea of citing all the losing posts. I hated the idea at the time — too much like a “Participation” ribbon at the Special Olympics — but I don’t hate it quite as much this week. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see what I missed.
I’ll tip my hat to Joshua Dworkin for hewing to his own standards — even as I pray that no one copies them…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
With this post, this little puppy is making sounds like a grown-up hound dog…
BloodhoundBlog began five months ago as a Phoenix-area brokerage-oriented real estate weblog. We became a sort of hybrid group-blog when we added mega-producing Phoenix-area Realtor Russell Shaw. We stuck another paw in the water when we invited San Diego-based investment broker Jeff Brown to come play with us in the Dual Agency Smack-Down. And that went so well that we decided to grow BloodhoundBlog into a true group-blog.
We’ve always been national in the scope of our interests, but now we are truly national (or at least bi-coastal) in our reach. Moreover, the webloggers we are adding will continue the BloodhoundBlog tradition of rigorous real estate analysis — thoughtful without being dour, informative without being pedantic, disagreeing, where we must, without being disagreeable.
These are our contributors:
Jeff Brown is a San Diego-based real estate investments broker. He makes millionaires of his ordinary-investor clients. If that’s not enough to make you smile, his sage, folksy wit should do the job.
Cathleen Collins is a Phoenix-area Realtor. With a background in hi-tech project-management and a deft hand in customer service, she is building a respectable listing practice in the Historic Districts of Downtown Phoenix.
Tony Fredericks is a San Francisco-area roofing contractor who is using his surplus income to build a real estate investment empire. Tony is a wine aficionado who brings a fine discrimination to everything he does.
Richard Riccelli is a Boston-based direct marketing guru. His advertising agency specializes in magazine circulation, but here Richard will deploy his vast expertise and rapier wit to real estate marketing issues.
Russell Shaw is a mega-producing Realtor working in Metropolitan Phoenix. He and his team close approximately 400 transactions a year, consistently putting Russell among the top 30 Realtors nationwide.
Greg Swann is a Phoenix-area Realtor and real estate broker. The most prolific of our contributors, Greg is not completely happy with anything until he has picked it apart and put it back together in his own way.
Room for one more? We are interested, now and always, in considering new contributors. If you can write with style, grace Read more