Category: Blogging (page 65 of 84)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I really, really like ideas, and I sometimes feel like I should talk about them in a larger, more comprehensive way. Events intrude, always. Plus which, I think extended rumination is what god made retirement for. For now, we gallop on horseback through the museum of my mind, since this is what I have time for.

I love having Russell Shaw with us, because he is serious, rigorous and thorough-going. But he sees the world from where he stands, and very few of us command similar heights. Russell says, in essence, “I charge more because I’m worth more.” This argument has unassailable particular merit, as do the similar arguments made by Our Lady Ardell and the avuncular Jeff Brown.

But the argument does not invert, as many wish it could: “I’m worth more because I charge more” is the fallacy non sequitur. How much commission should a Realtor charge? In fact — in actual, demonstrable, undeniable fact — some large fraction of the NAR membership is earning nothing.

Surplus capacity argues either for lower prices, for liquidation of some of that capacity, or both. Ardell argues with some cogency that nothing will be done from the inside about prices — although she might be surprised at what can be done from the outside. Even so, the quantity of real estate transactions will not go up with a marginal reduction in transaction costs. We still sleep one pillow per capita. In any case, the problem of excess capacity can easily be solved by eliminating the real estate broker’s safe harbor from tax withholding laws.

Brokers really don’t even have much reason to oppose this, if we presume that the quantity of real estate transactions is inelastic. In other words, if a broker can anticipate 1,000 transactions a year whether he has 1,000 agents or 100 agents, then the only real difference to his business is the marginal cost of tax-withholding itself — which that broker will surely find a way to socialize to the agents anyway.

Privately, our own billionaire brain trust — god help us if they ever dun us! — has been reflecting on the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The voters of Arizona passed a number of those pernicious ballot initiatives Cameron argued against Monday night.

Probably the most consequential is a coercive increase in the minimum wage. Warm-hearted people like to think of poor people making more money, but the net consequence of minimum wage laws is to get marginal employees — such as teenagers, the handicapped and people recovering from really bad decisions — fired, while lowering the marginal costs of alternatives to local human labor.

In other words, when you raise the marginal cost of employing goofy neighborhood kids, you essentially lower the marginal cost of adding labor-saving equipment or sending that labor off-shore. This is pure Bastiat, the seen and the unseen. What is seen are the shiny, happy people working at Taco Bell — already a capital-intensive response to high labor costs — for much more money. What is not seen are the many more people who had been working there, but who were fired because they were unprofitable at the coerced higher wage.

The good news is, if you own, say, a real estate brokerage, the cost of independent-contractor labor just went down, and the quality of the labor pool soared.

Remember, avoiding slavery is easy. Just keep running faster and faster…

Here’s are some faster-paced idea to speed the race:

Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch both have news on like.com, a visual search engine. Like images.google.com or whatever, you can do keyword searches for images. But the cooler feature set is to use an image to search for other, similar images. Picture yourself standing outside a house, looking at all the junk mounted around the electrical panel, and the client says, “What’s that?” Wouldn’t it be sweet to whip out your digital camera and reply, “Let’s find out.”

The XBroker nails a manifesto to the door of the Treasury.

Christine Forgione at NY Houses 4 Sale has a stout defense of why you need a Realtor. (Am I the only person who sees this site as one giant link? Real Estate Snippets look like this to me, too, like everything is encapsulated within one giant link.)

Kris Berg from The San Diego Home Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, good grief. Having returned from an extended drive-time radio stunt, Sellsius blog spreads a trail of Zillow crumbs. I don’t have time to bother with it, but this came in with a trackback:

We say: You can’t shakedown the innocent. If you pay-off, you’re guilty.

So a large gentleman shows up at your retail store. He’s tossing a baseball as he talks to you about the benefit of supplemental plate-glass insurance. It is by preying on the innocent that many, many large gentlemen in New York City — where Sellsius is located, incidentally — make their living.

Who can’t figure out why Zillow.com would pay not to be smeared as being racist…?

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I know a lot of people who don’t vote. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re philosophically opposed to the whole business. For my own part, I vote for just about the same reason I go to Mass, and about as often. Since 1848 or so, the main objective of government seems to me to have been universal penury. But as huge a drag as the state has been on wealth creation, it is failing nevertheless. By the quality of our ideas do we “out-run” those who would enslave us. This is hardly ideal — there is no justice to being a slave, and there is no justice to living as a fugitive from slavery. Even so, I could make a Dawkins-like argument that eluding the pandemic wealth-destruction of government is an evolutionary goad — “How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?” In any case, here is my celebration of some ideas that caught my eye today:

Phil Hoover from Boise Real Estate Blog is one up on all your shaggy-dog stories. Phil (blogrolled) had a great take on “Real Estate’s Broken Business Model” that I had noted but failed to mention when it appeared.

Christine Forgione at NY Houses 4 Sale tells an inspiring story with a $66 million happy ending. (Also blogrolled — boneheaded oversight; I live out of my feed reader.)

Lee Ovington, the Illinois-based appraiser from Valuation 411 tell us what he likes about Eppraisal.com.

Kevin Boer at Three Oceans Real Estate argues that Realtors will never be disintermediated, but Pat Kitano at TransparentRE.com offers some possible caveats. Here’s a thought: The $99 divorce. It only works where the split is unclouded by children or property. But imagine a $999 FSBO package: The usual MLS-only marketing package with a buy-back guarantee for the buyer. Quoting me:

From the buyer’s point of view, the buyer’s agent’s compensation can be thought of as a risk premium. An important benefit the agent brings to the transaction is a reduction in the risks the buyer takes on in purchasing a home. There is certainly a value to this, but that value Read more