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Category: Flourishing (page 25 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

February 27, 2010

Dawn In America Part Two

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The American People will take Socialism but they won’t take the label  –Upton Sinclair

I believe that the American people will want the label of  “unfettered capitalism” but will not necessarily adopt the economic system.  Americans like government in small doses but they like (and mostly trust) their government.  The morality of the argument for voluntaryism, while sound, will be difficult to adopt.  Those of you, who believe that government is the problem rather than the solution, should never stop saying  “I told you so”  when Statist policies fail but you would do well to remain aware to the fact that Americans like a little bit of government. That is how we can thrive amidst chaos.

Let’s talk about how we might prepare ourselves for the next 20 years:

I don’t believe we’re in a depression nor even a recession nor do think the 1930’s were a depression.  Rather, I believe we’re in the middle of a huge economic shift like the one we experienced in the early part of the 20th century.  The economic decline of the 30s and the current economic decline was a fallout from a shift in technology.  The economic decline of the 1930s was some 25 years after the implementation of the assembly line at Ford Motor Company.  It took that long for the economy to absorb the shift from a mostly agrarian society to a manufacturing society.  It was no easy shift, either.

Critics in the 20’s and 30’s claimed that we couldn’t eat machines but crop yields increased “spectacularly” in the twentieth century.  Domestic food production was so efficient that, despite what Willie Nelson said 25 years ago, American farmers were quite prosperous.  The market rewarded those who improved our lives by moving us along roads, on top of the water, and through the air…faster and cheaper.  Americans wanted to travel because we were already well-fed.

Is it any surprise that the current economic decline happened some 25 years after IBM’s introduction of the PC?  Is this really a “failure of capitalism”, as Van Jones might have you believe, or an unexpected response to the Fed trying to prop Read more

February 25, 2010

Meet the Third Thing…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail — just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think — though I am by now less lean-look’d a prophet. It’s just that no one wants to hear it… –GSS]

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic Read more

February 25, 2010

A Future By Halves vs. A Future of Have-Nots

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Voluntaryism vs Social Democracy

Two quick polls: First, all those who enjoy belonging to a society that provides some minimal safety net for the least among us, please raise your hands… Ahh, I see some hands going up. Very good. Second, all those who occasionally enjoy being forced to do something against their will by threat of a gun, please raise your hands… Right, masochists aside I see no hands raised. Very good. The problem is, you cannot have one without the other. Thus spoke the Voluntaryists.

On Monday night I was invited by fellow Bloodhound Brian Brady to attend a debate entitled Voluntaryism/Market Anarchy vs. Democratic-Socialism held in a little hot bed of thought and cafe called Cafe Libertalia. It was an engaging evening spent listening to the point / counter-point discussion on the very legitimacy of government itself. You can gain a more detailed understanding of Voluntaryism here and of Social Democracy here. (Although if you’re a regular reader of BHB you’ve no doubt gained quite a bit of free-market, Voluntaryism philosophy from our Greek emeritus: Greg Swann.)

I must be honest in admitting that I know quite a bit less about Social Democracy philosophy than I do Voluntaryism, and the debate was of little help. The team on the Social Democracy side presented a less than cogent argument for a society wherein free markets and democracy exist in ever changing ratios, as dictated by the people themselves. When asked, the speakers could not name a single  society where this system currently exists.  When pressed, they admitted that the countries currently attempting it are abysmal failures.  But this did not dissuade them from the idea that it could exist. Their logic – such as it was – stemmed from the idea of pure democracy (one man, one vote) and concluded that the majority would decide which means of production should be left to the free markets and which to the nurturing womb of centralized government. “How can you be against that?” they asked.  “We’re not advocating government take-over; we’re saying Read more

February 22, 2010

I like dual agency so much that I’m writing a commercial for it — and you can help!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, I don’t like dual agency. The more I’ve thought about it, over the years, the more I see that it cannot possibly done in a manner that it is actually fair to both parties. And that ignores the perceptions of the principals.

The one little bit of glue holding the Rube Goldberg machine of dual agency together is the fact that very few consumers even know what it is. Many times, I have had to explain dual agency to people who were either going through it or had in the past. Not surprisingly, none of them had been fully-informed by their agent about the risks of dual representation — although many of them suddenly understood what had smelled fishy to them.

My argument would be that no fully-informed consumer would embrace dual agency, but there are exceptions: People who want to take unfair advantage of the other party. There is a name for the role you would play in that scenario, as the Realtor: Shill.

Not only is dual agency exceptionally good for cheating one of your clients — normally the buyer — it’s also excellent for leaving the impression in the minds of both buyers and sellers that you yourself are a cheater, a liar and a person of egregiously low character. That’s some first-rate marketing, Jasper!

Here’s my take: As a very easy baby-step on the road to raising your own standards for the benefit of your clients, swearing off dual agency can’t be beaten. There’s a lot more you can and should do, and BloodhoundBlog is full of ideas for raising your standards. But there is nothing else you can do that will communicate to your clients your commitment to putting their interests first as compelling as renouncing dual agency. And no matter what else you might do, if you do not renounce it, you’re still going to look like a snake to anyone who actually understands dual agency.

So as a step toward informing consumers about what is really going on in a dual agency transaction, I thought I would make a commercial about it. The spot would feature a bunch Read more

February 16, 2010

The Only Thing We Have to Fear, is Ourselves

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

In my late twenties, as a trader on the floor of the options exchange, I was a “Master of the Universe”.  That’s a very common affliction down there.  Apparently, when you put a bunch of young, fearless, risk-takers together and give them the power to move markets around the world, you end up with a bit of a monster.  At one point I attended a symposium with my fellow traders; each of us secure in our status as Cowboy and Superman rolled into one very special gift for the world.  We listened to the latest market analysis systems and celebrated our shared royalty.  Amidst all the revelry was a speaker who didn’t have a financial background; he was more of a self-help, motivational kind of guy. (Believe me, the last thing that group needed was motivation!)  I remember not paying much attention to him – you know, being a “Master of the Universe” and all – but I wish I had.  He wasn’t there to motivate us, he was there to help us – to keep us from losing ourselves… an effort made mostly in vain.

Within days of the symposium all was blissfully forgotten; let’s face it, what could these talking heads possibly teach a “Master of the Universe?”  All, I should say, but this bit of wisdom from the self-help guru – the one who was so out of place.  This stuck with me and I damned him for it:

If you want to know who you really are, listen to that quiet voice you hear while driving home after a meeting, late at night and tired, with no one else in the car and the radio off.  That voice is who you really are… and the fears that voice brings forth are what you really fear.

Over time I was pretty sure I understood what he meant… but I didn’t.

I was thinking about this the other day.  I had just finished with a group of agents in my POPs Program, where we had been favorably comparing the stress AND the fun of being Read more

February 15, 2010

Res ipsa loquitur — wirelessly: Mobile phone use soars.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via LiveScience.com:

Separate reports out last week show that mobile phone use is soaring in the United States and globally, and data moving across mobile networks is expected to grow dramatically over the next four years.

One report by comScoreMobiLens shows that Americans want to do more than talk on their phones, and they’re willing to pay for it. A total of 234 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. used mobile devices in December 2009. In the past year, smartphone ownership increased from 11 percent to 17 percent of mobile users, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32 percent to 43 percent and unlimited data plan subscriptions rose from 16 percent to 21 percent.

Every month, comScore measures how often people use their phones to send text messages, access the Internet, play games, use downloaded applications, or “apps,” check their Facebook profile, watch videos and listen to music.

In the latest comScore report, all of these activities showed an increase from the previous report period. Though most of the increases are modest because the survey was conducted over a short 90-day period, texting and visiting a social networking site or blog increased more than 2 percent.

The report also reveals users are shifting from the more utilitarian phone operating systems toward more media-focused operating systems that have more functionality. While RIM, the operating system for BlackBerry devices, remained the leading mobile smartphone operating system in the U.S at 41.6 percent, it saw its market share drop slightly along with Microsoft and Palm.

Meanwhile, Apple, which owns a quarter of the mobile market and is ranked second, saw a gain in popularity for its media friendly iPhone platform. Likewise, Google’s Android operating system surged in popularity with the launch of Motorola’s Droid in November, allowing the company to double its market share in just three months. Like the iPhone, the Droid is built for multimedia content.

Separate research released by Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs. The company projects that this figure will increase Read more

February 14, 2010

Who could foresee that “global warming” would be exposed as a hoax?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So quickly, I mean. It was an obvious hoax, at least to me. Environmentalism is the new poverty for Marxists, the new insurmountable crisis that can only be solved by universal slavery under a one-world government. If you didn’t see through that pose, you must have slept through the twentieth century.

(For future reference, whatever the supposed emergency, if the proposed solution is more government, the “crisis” is a hoax and the sole objective is more government. This ain’t rocket science.)

Even so, I am delighted to cite two local angles on the “global warming” hoax:

First: Phoenix was one of the cities used to fudge the records on rising temperatures, although I don’t think our teeny-tiny little local hoax has been exposed yet. What they did was move the temperature collection apparatus at Sky Harbor Airport from a position over grass to a new spot over blacktop. Voila! Several degrees “warmer” every day, just like that.

And: Just because the world hasn’t actually gotten warmer since 1995 doesn’t mean winter is a frozen, lifeless hell everywhere. Today — February 14 — we used the air conditioner at home for the first time this year.

February 13, 2010

The epistemology of Splendor: Apprehending the memes that move me.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a great week.

That’s not something I get to say all the time — rarely more than fifty times a year.

The truth is, most of the time I feel like an undocumented refugee from a forgotten country known as A Different Way Of Thinking. I don’t feel any huge bond of commonality with most of the people I know about, and, when I do, that just by itself is a cause for celebration.

What’s different? I could say “I love myself” or “I love my life,” but those sentiments are too vague to be useful. It seems easier to me to define what I’m talking about by negatives, rather than in affirmative statements.

So, for example, it never occurs to me to start a sentence with the words “With my luck…” or “Knowing me…” These are very common expressions, and it’s plausible to me that the humble attitude being expressed by those phrases is faked — that the speaker doesn’t actually feel the — to me — humiliating self-degradation implied by the words. But it doesn’t occur to me to express humility in the first place, not even faked humility.

To the contrary, if I could paint a picture of my own idealized self-image, it might be something like a conquering Viking, sword held proudly aloft, or a virtuoso pianist in that eternal instant of silence when the last note of the concerto has faded into the ether but somehow still rings on in the mind’s ear. I don’t actually see myself that way, but that’s a way of imagining what my life looks like to me from the inside.

And just that much is boundlessly funny to me, since, if it were measured by any presumably-objective standard, my life has been a colossal failure. I’m not rich, not even close. My personal relationships have mostly been disasters, to the extent that I am very careful about letting people get close to me. What little fame I might claim amounts to notoriety — and I have complete contempt for other people’s opinions anyway.

And yet inside my own mind, none of that matters. I love Read more

February 2, 2010

iPad observation #9: I went digging through the heap of festering garbage that is the Vook and came home with an education.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an Read more

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #7: When you’ve built a product that turns whole worlds upside down — what happens next?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve got more to say, but I’m running out of Sunday. Here’s what’s next:

The iPad is the first move in the disintermediation — disintegration — of dozens of well-established institutions in our society.

Vendors of mediocre crap like Windows computers and Android cell phones are done for. Established on-line retailers are finished. Broadcasting in the spectrum is kaput. Best of all, the union-organized ignorami called schoolteachers will be put out of work.

In a circumstance such as I describe, what would you expect to happen?

My answer? Rotarian Socialism.

When the mediocre feel threatened, they pass laws. When the established face disestablishment, they pass laws. And when the ignorant get organized, they pass laws.

If anyone besides me could clearly foresee what a disruptive influence the iPad is going to be, they would already be clamoring for protection from the awful consequences of free choice.

Here’s the good news: Almost nobody can see what is going to happen. They might be myopic, but at least they’re very proud. They will insist — one may hope until it is too late — that Apple cannot be doing what it clearly is doing.

The bigger threat, in the near term, would be the Antitrust Laws, which say that your company can grow as big as it wants, as long as it’s really mediocre like Microsoft. But if you’re growing because you are satisfying — ecstatifying! — consumer demand, the Feds have to come in and bust your company up.

Here’s hoping that everything that matters in this revolution of the mind will have happened before the Rotarian Socialists can marshall their defenses.

And on that note, I will shut up.

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January 31, 2010

OK, OK, I finally get iT!

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

iPad is the real estate kiosk. I found this leaked video from December. The earth moved for me when I saw the guy change the kitchen cabinet finish. The 3D CAD interior design idea has been around for a while, but now you can put it in HER purse so SHE can redecorate your listing while waiting at the car wash. Then we go viral from the app store. She can then collaborate with all her friends and they all can redecorate my listing. One of them will buy it or redecorate some other house on my IDX site and buy that. Now I see.

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #6: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oscar Wilde said that, the best kind of philosophy — bonum, verum, pulchrum — the good, the true and the beautiful.

I don’t hate it that we are monkeys biologically, genetically. But I hate it when people act like monkeys. Despite everything else that is going on, last week we caught a glimpse of the fully-human life. The prospect for an iPad-like device to take over education is cause enough to celebrate.

To the unchained human mind!

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January 31, 2010

iPad observation #5: Linking frees slaves, sometimes, but the future of mobile real estate is unknown to attorneys from New York City.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact: I’m pretty much disgusted with the RE.net — which denomination I quarried with my own hands, back in my early days on the apellation trail. By now, just about everything looks to me like hoke, smoke, hustle and jive — smirking vendorsluts and the clueless suckers who can’t stop themselves from pridefully posturing about having procured their own plundering. I know that’s not fair — or not entirely fair — but it often seems to me, lately, that everything I have ever hated about the real estate business is successfully infesting the on-line world.

This will fail, all of it, in the end, and I’ll say why in detail when I get time. But for now I persevere by holding my nose and holding my ground. Whether it is the seemingly harmless simian chatter of net.monkeys desperate to prove their ape-titude to all the other net.monkeys or the craven schemes of hack vendors looking for just one more gullible fool to make their month, I’m well sick of it all. I haven’t looked at a feed-reader in many months, and my Twitterverse consists of my Best Beloved, Cathleen, and Teri Lussier.

The rest of the net, however, is a different thing. I’ve been following Apple tablet posts for months, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog is the only blog other than BloodhoundBlog whose client I have on my iPhone. On and off last week, and in greater earnest today, I’ve been looking for decent iPad posts from the RE.net.

Not hard to foresee, but Agent Shortbus doesn’t get it. Typically insipid kibitzing with no real understanding of the revolution the iPad will bring to the entire universe of commerce.

But, alas, the Shortbus set doesn’t have the vision to come up with a truly idiotic argument against using mobile devices to market real estate. This honor was earned by Rob Hahn, an attorney in New York City who doubles as a vendorslut consultant or a consultant to vendorsluts or some bizarre combination of the two. Realtors follow his musings religiously, apparently because they confuse being an attorney with being a Realtor, and Read more

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #4: Looking for a smart way to connect with your clients in a pull-based marketing world? Update your iPhone/iPad app.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I give away a lot of killer marketing ideas here, but I never worry about the competitive implications.

For one thing, I believe to the core of me that it’s raining soup, that wealth is pouring out of the skies and almost none of us is smart enough to reap that bounty.

But, second, I have learned through years of experience that, no matter how good my ideas are, almost nobody will ever follow through on them. We learned to sell, most of us, from people who believed to their cores that real money comes from laziness and lies. My way of marketing looks too much like work, I surmise, for people to adopt it in big numbers.

So much the better for me, I guess, although, to be frank, I would rather see Realtors doing more to earn the business — and the trust — of their clients.

In any case, here’s a way of thinking about marketing my way, a style of salesmanship based on integrity, transparency, follow-through and client satisfaction.

So: Start here: Build an iPhone/iPad app for your business. (See there? I just lost almost everybody!) The app has to be mission-critical and laser-focused on what your clients really need. Not — with emphasis — more idiotic self-promotion. If you’re not delivering something of value — in the estimation of your target-marketed end-users — you’re wasting your time.

Then get it on their iPhones and iPads. It ain’t easy, so you have to do it relentlessly. Ideally, everyone who can be expected to use you in the future — and to refer you to their friends and family members — should have your app on their iPhone or iPad.

Now you have the perfect means of staying in contact with those folks going forward. I’m not talking social networking, and my thinking is that drip marketing is probably a waste of effort. If they don’t unsubscribe, they’re going to ignore you except when they need you. It’s a pull-based marketing world, and your clients only really want to hear from you when they have a real estate need — not when you have a Read more

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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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