BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 27 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

December 30, 2009

Why are people in New York and Connecticut unhappy, while the folks in Louisiana and Tennessee are more satisfied with their lives? The obvious answer is the true one: Taxes and spending.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from The Wall Street Journal: People in high-tax states are less satisfied with their lives than those in low-tax states.

Who knew?

That’s not a fair question. Everyone who can do math already knew this. But what’s interesting is that it points the way forward for all states, especially the ones currently losing their high-earning tax-slaves to less onerous tax-plantations: Cut taxes. Cut spending. Get rid of your kleptocratic union laws.

Or: In the words of John Galt, “Get the hell out of my way!”

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason — ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

In states with high property, income, and sales taxes like New York, people have less money to spend on other things that make them happy. They have less money to spend on vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care. Another problem may be that people receive a low return on their tax dollars. The study’s authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don’t provide Read more

December 30, 2009

Making New Year’s resolutions is easy. It’s keeping them that’s hard. How people are getting year ’round results from their year-end goals.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The Wall Street Journal comes more than resolutions. More, even, than sheer resolve. A set of specific tactics and techniques to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions enduringly.

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

My resolution is to read the whole thing.

December 24, 2009

Howling for the hard-working dogs: “We interrupt this Christmas Season for the following brief commercial transactions.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Rich full day today, lots of variety. Working Christmas Eve with me were home inspector Mike Elsberry (two houses), wood inspector Joe Letourneau (two houses) and our handyman, Mark Deermer (one house). We had a plumber working at one of our listings, as well. I could tell by the (lack of) traffic on the streets that a lot of people took the day off, but I am delighted that so many of the people that I work with were working today.

I’m going to work quite a bit tomorrow, Christmas Day. Mail, of course. But I’m also going to service a listing and take a look at half-a-dozen vacant REOs. Nothing terribly time-consuming, more like errands than anything else. But it’s work I want and need to get done, and I don’t want to put it off.

I think this is all part of the revolution incited by these devices — alike unto the idea that privacy is an artifact of inefficiency. I don’t take time off as a binary state event, and it kind of drives me crazy when other people do.

I think it’s insane that too much of the commercial world comes to a complete standstill on special days. But at least we are not insane enough to be consistent. No one preaching the virtue of sacred pretend-poverty wants for the power plant or the hospital emergency room to shut down from now until the Feast of the Epiphany.

Even so, it is simultaneously plausible to me that I might have something to prove: I’m going to celebrate my Christmas, and I am not going to interrupt anyone else’s. But I can do valuable work for my clients tomorrow, and it is important to me to get it done. And, at a minimum, my clients will be ahead of the game and my workload Saturday will be lighter. Everybody wins.

But here’s the thing: I think you’re going to work tomorrow, too, even it’s only to deal with your client email. And I think this is something to be celebrated, not condemned. We work in the pursuit of happiness, as Jefferson had it Read more

December 24, 2009

My car is not a real estate office. In 2010, my car is going to become a wi-fi-enabled mobile real property exchange and conference room.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the car we bought for me in July. It’s a used Kia Rondo, a semi-unassuming wannabe minivan that I have denominated with this demanding appellation: Prometheus.

My favorite god, as you might have guessed, from all of human history. Prometheus, you will recall, stole the fire of the gods from Zeus and gave it to the people. An alternate reading of the Greek cites Prometheus as having borne the gift of mind to humanity, a rendering of the tale I like even better. If you are a life-sucking real estate broker or any other functionary of the life-sucking National Association of Realtors, the memes that move me will tell you a lot about my long-term plans for you.

But: Sometimes a minivan is just a minivan. I chose the Rondo because a client of mine rented one when he was in town, and I realized it was the perfect real estate car. I had looked at more expensive so-called “crossover” vehicles, but we have practiced and perfected the art of being cheap bastards. At ten grand out the door, the Rondo seemed like the optimax choice.

And this has it proved to be. I’m in it a lot, and it is a very comfortable roaming office for me. I don’t know how other Realtors deal with all the lengthy phone calls that go into selling real estate, but I take down a whole bunch of them from my car. I can make anywhere from one to five calls between stops, and if I were not doing those calls from behind the wheel, I wouldn’t be doing them at all.

But wait. There’s more. I bought the Rondo because I knew I would be doing more and more real office work from the car. The vehicle has three cigar lighters, and I have 300 watt 110 volt power inverters plugged into two of them. That is to say, two three-prong outlets in the front seat and two more in the back. I could be working on my laptop, an assistant on another and a client on a third, all of us plugged in to Read more

December 23, 2009

From the Files of Captain Obvious: Five Fundamental Real Estate Business Truths

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I. am. not. BawldGuy. And I don’t play one on this, or any other blog. Okay, now we’ve got that (not-so) deep dark secret out into the open… If you are approaching BawldGuy status, God Bless You, and keep on truckin’ and you go girl! You can move along, because this is for those of us who are working on real estate at the ground floor level.

I’ve been given the gift of time in 2009 and looking back and looking ahead, I see some obvious truths about the real estate business. Some of these are based on mistakes I’ve made, but as long as we learn from them, I’m okay with sharing.

Truth #5: I like twitter. I don’t like facebook. But who cares? Without a goal–driven plan to use either for a very specific reason, then I’m wasting time on both, and I’ve wasted time so you don’t have to. Use them to chat, or use them to market, or use them to sell, but understand the difference and if you are going to use them for business, have a plan and follow the plan. Don’t get sidetracked, and do stay focused. If you are a lender or a vendor then you might want to network with real estate agents, but if you are an agent, then stop talking water cooler and find people who can tell you to go to hell.

Truth #4: You don’t need social media to do a great job in real estate. You don’t need to  blog, or twitter. You don’t need to go to conferences. You can. You might learn a nugget or two, but it’s entirely unnecessary to your success, and it just as likely will be a huge waste of your time and energy.

Truth #3: To be successful in real estate, you need to meet as many people as possible. Lucky us, people are everywhere, and we can find them through any means- the method is really unimportant to getting to close. What’s Read more

December 22, 2009

Darth Vader With a Toothache – A Better 2010

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Ever looked over at the agent down the hall and wondered how they get from home to the office without hands-on help? They usually didn’t get past the front door back in the 1960’s, at least in our offices. I remember vividly that you were tough or you found another place to work. Cream puffs generally didn’t get too far into Dad’s job interview before they knew they weren’t in Kansas anymore. There was no such thing as laser beams back then, unless he was starin’ right through ya.

Dad used to conduct what I’ll call no nonsense weekly meetings back in the mid-20th century. Attending my first one three days after my virgin day at the office was, um, eye opening. It was Tuesday, October 21, 1969. Dad was his usual toned down Zig Ziggler self, with undertones of Darth Vader nursin’ a toothache. It was the first time I’d ever seen how others perceived him as a boss.

They soaked in every word as if he was readin’ off the third tablet Moses lost while coming back down the mountain. Though I could believe it cuz he was hugely successful (1,000 sides/yr), and arguably charismatic, I wasn’t sure about ‘why’ he was viewed this way until much later. One thing for sure, you worked for him or you took up space elsewhere. Even though the firm did so many sides a year, he never had more than 28 full timers, complimented by a dozen or so part timers. To this day I’m convinced the profile of his typical agent was ‘assassin’.

This is all prelude to explaining how a one act pony like Dad (his words, but painfully accurate), went from zero to over a 1,000 sides yearly in just over a year. Ryan Hartman’s excellent post about dominating the market struck a deep chord with me. Not just because it reminded me of the ‘good ol’ days’, but because I think he may have found the key to the mint.

That aside, the plan, whatever it may be, is secondary to the combination of unflappable belief and consistent, Read more

December 17, 2009

Next year we’re going to splurge — maybe — starting with the twenty-first thousand dollars for the month

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my favorite Christmas card this year:

I helped Stephen and Suzanne Kranick buy that house in the weeks before Thanksgiving. I think it’s cool that they love it so much that they made it the star of their holiday card.

I put two houses into escrow today. I’ve done that before, but Cathleen and I are both packing transactions into January at a nice pace. I’m still holding out hopes for one more all-cash deal in December, but the calendar is turning on me day-by-day.

But here’s the thing: The pace we’re on right now puts us at $20,000 gross commission income a month for 2010. I’m sure that sounds like a lot of money to anyone who is not in the real estate business, but it ain’t. But our marketing costs are where they’ve always been — very low — so we’re right on the cusp of proving the claim I’ve been making here for coming on four years: It is possible to do this job without spending fifty cents on the dollar for client acquisition and without feeding a vast cadre of useless eaters.

It’s plausible to me that we could be at $40,000 a month by the third quarter, and from there it’s not a huge jump to seven figures, GCI, per annum.

But: Meanwhile: We are cheap bastards. We never hesitate to spend whatever it takes on mission critical tools, and that will always be the case. But we have been very tight on every discretionary expenditure for a long, long time. And as much as business has sucked over the past four years, it is being tight that has gotten us through the worst of it. A lot of Realtors didn’t make it, as we all know.

So: Cathy just had her birthday, and from me she got a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for her iMac. So romantic…

But, even so, we can foresee that we are going to have a little money for luxuries in the coming year, and the question plaguing me has been how to manage that kind of spending without going crazy on the upside, as it were.

Here’s Read more

December 17, 2009

Looking for reasons to be cheerful this Christmas? Thanks to the free market, everything is better than it was when you were a kid

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Reason.TV:

It’s worth thinking about as statists strive to destroy innovation in medicine (via Obamacare) and industry and transportation (via environmentalism). If it gratifies you to weep about how bad things are, compare the America of your youth to the police states of Communist Europe in that same epoch. Whatever complaints you might have with liberty, things could be — and will be — a lot worse when you have unleashed the leviathan state on every aspect of your life.

December 4, 2009

Embarrassing Confessions & Marketing Memory

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Two quick confessions:

I can’t throw a baseball.
I’m pretty sure I just scared a potential client away.

I used to be able to throw a baseball.  I played little league and pony league with some success.  There weren’t any pro scouts putting radar guns on me or anything, but I played right up until high school and I was regularly elected to the all-star team.  (Although looking back, it probably helped that I was much bigger than all the other kids and threatened to show them my Bruce-Lee-super-fist-of-temporary-death if they didn’t vote for me…  Nah, I’m sure it was my prowess inside the foul lines.)

Anyway, in high school I discovered my true calling: shot-put.  After that, I didn’t have occasion to pick up another baseball until my boys started playing just a year or two ago.  That’s when I discovered that I now had all the throwing grace and accuracy of a little girl.  You see, by my estimate I probably threw the shot – over the course of my competitive career – 15-20,000 times.  That pretty much wiped out any skill I ever had for throwing a baseball.  On the other hand, it created a near perfect shot-put technique that I can still demonstrate even now… as I enter my peak “mid 40s” athletic years.  (These are a lot like my peak “mid 20s” athletic years, only everything is now done while carrying around the extra weight of a small child.  It’s actually quite impressive if you think about it…)  Think about it or not, I can still summon dynamic and purposeful form because of a powerful adaptation called muscle memory.

Earlier this week, as I was parking my truck,  I noticed a car stopped in the middle of the street.  The driver was craning her neck to jot down information from an agent’s For Sale sign.  She then pulled up two houses and stopped again to take down information from another agent’s For Sale sign.  By this time I was walking down the sidewalk; I veered in toward the middle of the street and approached her on the drivers’ side.  “Hi,” I Read more

November 30, 2009

When Is It Best To Begin the Day’s Cat Skinnin’?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Regardless of what many of us prefer to believe, our day to day effectiveness has much to do with when our days begin and end. Yeah, yeah, I know, Captain Obvious etc. With one eight month exception, when it’s been my choice, I’ve not been an early riser. Ever notice that those who wake up later and stay up past midnight don’t pester the livin’ crap out of you about the merits of their choice? Don’t feel like gettin’ in a word edgewise for awhile? Ask anyone with a rooster fetish about the merits espoused by their dawn worshiping cult, and you may remain silent for the duration.

My theory has always been grounded in the empirical. As long as you’re not showin’ up for work late, then leavin’ early to make up for it, your 8-12 hours a day are still 8-12 hours a day. Kinda profound, don’t ya think? Still, the early morning crowers piously insist their hours are more productive than those beginning and ending later. They utter those words framed in a tone dripping with the unspoken accusation of ‘slacker’!

Is the listing you just took, or the loan you just closed worth any more or less based upon when you get up and go to bed? Apparently so to many.

I wanted to find out first hand. If one of our country’s most respected forefathers gave the idea legs enough to last for over a couple centuries, what was the harm?

Made a deal with myself to rise at 6 AM for the entire month of November. It’s been an eye opener, as I’ve learned Ben Franklin was full of what comes out of the south end of a northbound bull. Well, maybe not totally. I am gettin’ more done by 9 due to all the obvious reasons provided by being up and more or less not comatose before the #$%&^in’ sun is up. My waking hours haven’t really changed much though, which is counterintuitive to what all the lying bastards have been tellin’ us for centuries.

My kingdom for somebody to rationally explain the difference Read more

November 25, 2009

What am I thankful for? That we surfed the payables and survived!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This time last year, I crashed my car, totaling it. We used the insurance money to pay off our most urgent bills, so we weren’t able to replace it for quite a while. We had an old Mercury that I used until its lack of a working air conditioner made that impossible. After that, I rented cars when I needed to show. For three solid months I escorted buyers in an amazingly awful rented Ford Taurus. It was literally painful to drive — backache-inducing — but it was only $500 a month to lease.

The last two quarters of 2008 and the first two quarters of 2009 were all action, no traction, so we lived by surfing the payables — paying nothing before it absolutely had to be paid, and paying nothing at all on bills that didn’t have to be paid — including the mortgage.

And that’s a story that had a deferred happy ending. We got hit with a foreclosure notice much earlier than I was expecting. Business had picked up markedly by then, so we redeemed our pawn ticket earlier than we absolutely had to. Even so, it’s not an experience I would commend to anyone.

We got hit with a couple of judgments over very late debts, but that’s just business. We’re current on everything current, and we’re chopping down the old-growth debts one-by-one. It’s not pleasing to me to be a dead-beat, but, while we might be late, we’ve never skated on a debt and we never will.

Meanwhile, the world is young again. In the first five months of 2009, we didn’t make enough to pay the pet food bills. In the last seven months, we made enough to get current on the mortgage, to get current on our current accounts, to retire a bunch of past accounts, to buy me a new laptop and (as of today) a new iMac, and to put a decent used car under my buyer’s butts.

Better still, we’ve been rolling on a six-figure pipeline for months — no hopes, no maybes, no blue-sky wishful thinking — and it’s been rolling along nicely. This 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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