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Category: Flourishing (page 35 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

January 23, 2009

The Agents are the Heroes

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

How many remember the movie Back to the Future?  I always liked the play on words in that title and I am liking it even more lately.  Why?  Because as agents that is exactly what we are doing:  going back to the future.  I believe the marketing theme for 2009 is going to be “old school.”  Going back to the “old school” ways of marketing… done with the tools of the future:  back to the future.  (Caveat: the future for me has a very Mr. Magoo aspect to it.  I appreciate the high-tech agents among us keeping the laughter down to a mild snicker.)  Chris Johnson understands “old school”, he was bleeding it here and here.  Jeff Brown understands old school – actually, Jeff probably learned this stuff when it was just “school”…

  • Touching your sphere of influence on a consistent basis is “old school” – using emails, webinars and blogging to do it is the future.
  • Tracking your marketing, your prospecting and your ROI from both is “old school” – using powerful software to do so is the future.
  • Picking up the phone and calling past clients or mailing something personal every day is “old school” – knowing there is no substitute for getting belly-to-belly is the future.

And WE are the future.  Those of us still here.  Our profession lost a lot of people last year.  Our profession needed to…  Many of us suffered just to make it this far and some of us are suffering still  (although some flourished… think about that).  But the point is, we are here.  We stuck it out because this “real estate thing” isn’t something we do on the side or because it’s easy money.  We are her because this is our profession.  We now reap all the opportunities of 2009… AND the responsibilities.  It is our charge to bring integrity and passion to everything we do.  You, all of you, are the heroes and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  You help people find their way, now more so than ever before, through a giant minefield of potentially devastating mistakes on their way to buying or Read more

January 20, 2009

Reading the signs and portents of Obama’s America

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow march to the top of the Capitoline hill at dawn, at the end of which the senior consul for that year would sacrifice a bull. Only then would the new consuls and the senators convene in the Curia to take up the Republic’s business for the year.

And Janus, for whom January is named, is the god of doorways, presiding not just over beginnings but also endings. Today marks not just the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but also the end of the Bush era in Washington.

Both Bushes, pere and fils, seemed to me to be fundamentally decent people, quite unlike the man who served between them. But Bush the younger, by being so roundly reviled as president, has nowhere to go but up from here. Someday Americans will have the fortitude to thank this man for calling Islamofascism by its true name: Evil. In the mean time, the bull is no longer his to slay.

I’m less afraid of Obama than I was on election day, but still I fear for capitalism and for individualism. The good news, always, is that socialism cannot work. The bad news, always, is that millions perish in the process of discovering that socialism cannot work. Janus may well be opening the door to a renewed appreciation for classical liberal virtues, but it seems likely that the glorious light we associate with ages of reason may be found at the end of a long, dark hallway.

The one hope I hold today is to be found in the photo at the top of this post: I hope that today is the beginning of a post-racial America. Everything we’ve done about race so far, for four hundred years, has been pretty stupid. I hope it turns out that electing a black president was the first Read more

January 17, 2009

BloodhoundBlog Radio: About Success With Jason Blackburn

by

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

Author website

Jason Blackburn of Laser Focus For Life was our guest on BloodhoundBlog Radio last week.  I “met” Jason on Facebook two months ago, when preparing for the “Power Of Twelve” seminar.  Jason wrote a referral script for my seminar and asked nothing in return.  That connection led to a number of telephone calls which made me realize that Jason had a lot to offer.

Jason points out that many of our actions are incongruent with our mission.  He explains that our actions need to be inspired by the “buy-in” from both our hearts and our minds.  Jason is not a “touchy-feely” success trainer. He’s a nuts and bolts sales pro with over twenty years experience.

I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from Jason.  You can hear our 40-minute interview with him here.

PS:  If you click only one link, click “referral script“.  Jason lays out a simple way to generate referral business in about 800 words.

January 3, 2009

A premium appeal for Vlad Zablotskyy: If you’ll give $200 to his defense fund, we’ll give you a set of BloodhoundBlog Unchained DVDs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the biggest stories we followed in 2008 was Vlad Zablotskyy’s legal battle with ePerks.com. The fight ended in a settlement, about which it were better for me to say nothing, but it suffices to say that ePerks has filed for bankruptcy.

Working together, we raised a ton of money for Vlad’s Legal Defense Fund — but not nearly as much as was needed. Brian Brady and I would like to do what we can to help reduce Vlad’s legal debt.

So here’s our proposal: If you will make a $200 donation to the Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund using the PayPal button shown below, we will send you a complimentary set of DVDs from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008. The DVDs sell for $199, so you’re essentially getting them for free, in exchange for your donation.

Why are we doing this? Because Vlad jumped on the grenade for all of us. What happened to him could have happened to any one of us. For my own part, I have tried to make this episode instructive for any other corporate attorneys who decide that webloggers are easy targets. But it remains that Vlad took the flak that could have been aimed at any one of us. We can only imagine what he and his family have been through this year, but at least we can help to lift this finacial burden.

Click on the “Donate” button and let’s put “paid” to this kind of intimidation against real estate webloggers.


Support Vlad Zablotskyy’s Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!

January 2, 2009

Kevin Kelly: A New Kind of Mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Technium:

Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.

While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

Read the whole thing.

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January 1, 2009

Happy New… ah, to hell with it.

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Please, allow me to be the very first to wish you a Happy New Year!  What’s that?  Not the first huh; the second?  The tenth?  Well just forget it then.  Truth be told “Happy New Year” is kind of silly isn’t it?  I mean, it’s just an imaginary line drawn in a calendar.  The time of year we just know we’re going to write the wrong date on our checks and when we do we’re still surprised by it: “Look what I did here Mac, I was writing out a check and I wrote ’08 instead of ’09!  Can you believe it!  Golly, I wonder how many more times I’ll make that mistake.”  (Note of explanation for the younger readers out there: we used to carry around these little pads called checkbooks.  They were nicely encased in a faux leather little cover and you would write on one of the sheets in this pad a kind of IOU that your bank would pay out of your account.  It had the benefit, especially right after the holidays, of creating a little time between when you paid something and when you necessarily had to have the actual cash.  You could not use them for online purchases, which was OK because the world was offline at the time.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah: saying Happy New Year on this day is a bit arbitrary.  When you think about it, we begin a new year every single day of our lives.  As a matter of fact, we begin a new life every single day of our lives.  Why don’t we wish each other Happy New Life each day instead of Good Morning?  Wouldn’t that put a much finer point on the power of today?  Oh I know what you’re thinking: “arbitrary or not, this is the time for Resolutions.”  Have you read the statistics on New Year’s resolutions?  Do you know how many are broken within hours of their creation?  (If so, please go ahead and post them in the comments because I didn’t bother to look them up – one of my resolutions is to Read more

December 31, 2008

Human sovereignty as a New Year’s resolution

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I hate lies, and I hate just about everything that doesn’t hate lies. We live our lives enmired in lies — in hoke, in smoke, in hints and allusions and innuendoes, in juice and hustle and jive — and it is entirely too easy to become one of the liars, de facto, without really intending to. My post on linking is one of the best things I wrote this year, and it’s apposite to the discussion I’ve been carrying out all week:

People are so used to marketing trickery that they expect it everywhere. The challenge for anyone seeking to change minds in the Web 2.0 world is to take away that expectation. Transparency doesn’t mean I am obliged to disclose to you the color of my underwear. Transparency means that if there is any possibility that you could entertain the smallest doubt that I am effecting some kind of sleight of hand to trick you into doing something you otherwise would not do, I have to give you the means of eradicating that doubt to your own satisfaction.

On Christmas, because of the latest episode of puerile posturing, I said to Teri, “I believe in Christmas. I won’t let it lie to me.” Later it came out as, “I believe in humanity. I won’t let it lie to me.” And the final form, I think, is, “I believe in life. I won’t let it lie to me.” That’s the architecture of this year’s Christmas story. Now all I need is the story.

I smile to myself at all the ways my life has conspired to put me where I am right now: A philosophically-adept obsessive writer, enraptured by the most beautiful and rigorous kind of ethics, with a background in high-volume, high-tech publishing problems, who works as a real estate broker and who spends much of his time thinking about the marketing of everything. Where would I be, by now, but here? It’s funny for me to watch people try to whimper-whip or brow-beat me into echoing their lies — after I’ve told them every way I can think of that I would Read more

December 31, 2008

Last call for end-of-the-year discounts on tickets for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, April 28 – May 1, 2009 — and catch us for free at Zillow’s offices in Seattle on February 12

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the front

and back

face of a door-hanger we have going out in high-equity neighborhoods starting January 3rd. In most of Phoenix, for now, listing is essentially limited to short sales and lender-owned homes, so most of our time this year will be devoted to buyers. But if this card — or variations on it — can pull the way we want it to, it should be worth around $3,000 a week, net of all expenses. The lord knows we can use it.

Brian and I keep getting mail from people wondering why we’re going to be teaching weblogging at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. We’re not. All we ever teach is marketing — on-line, on paper and face-to-face. There is a piece to this door-hanger that you’re not seeing that should more than double its response rate. That’s marketing — and there is no one else in the real estate industry who teaches the kinds of marketing that Brian and I cover as a matter of course.

You can catch a preview of our marketing curriculum in Seattle on February 12th. We’ll be doing a free Unchained preview at Zillow HQ, 999 Third Avenue, Seattle, WA, on Thursday, February 12th from 1pm to 5pm. Scott Cowan is organizing the event with help from Drew Meyers and David Gibbons from Zillow. Marlow Harris will be joining us, along with some other Seattle blogging luminaries. The grand finale will be a debate between Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman and BloodhoundBlog iconoclast Greg Swann, moderated by Brian Brady, American Real Estate’s Number One Marketing Maven.

I gotta go. I’m showing this morning. But I wanted to remind y’all that today is the last day for a couple of big discounts on Unchained tickets. The Early-Bird price — $100 off — goes away altogether today. And the Unchained Alumnus discount will drop from $200 to $100 at midnight tonight. That’s $100 in savings, either way, for acting today.

Click the appropriate button below to sign up now.

CyberProfessionals: $397


















Unchained Alumnus: $497 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















Early-Bird Price: $597 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















The full price Read more

December 30, 2008

House Keeper

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Can a man save his face, his ass, and his house at the same time? The moral and Big Board gods claim naught.  But still, rooting through the year end financial rubble atop my desk—the economic equivalent of the Gaza Strip, I consider the question (pondering Realtor that I am).

I tally my Christmas card total while I search the mail pile for fellow holiday survivors. I uncover just three scant acknowledgements this dim Season; one from my parents with a modest check enclosed (made out to my wife, of course); one from my daughter with a nice handwritten note; and one from our missing housekeeper. The latter is a nativity scene, written in Polish, and sent to our house via Air Mail.  I’m assuming it either says ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘I Quit!’ We haven’t seen her in weeks. Perhaps she moved back to her motherland where she can actually make ends meet scrubbing floors. I suppose she just resigned before we had to let her go anyway. (I mean really, who can’t keep their own house clean?)

I turn back to the task at hand and continue sifting through the pulp, avoiding paper cuts, and careful to sidestep 2nd Notices from lesser, non FICO reporting insurgents; my dentist, the Chicago Tribune Classified Section, the lawn service guy who never picked up my leaves this year. I hear a mutter beneath the wrack before electronically mine-sweeping my Schwab account to stave off the more formidable creditors for yet another 40 days and nights (with Grace Period); Bank of America Mortgage, BMW Financial Services, my genius accountant.

I look again at the three lone Seasons Greetings and reflect. I haven’t physically written, licked, stamped or sent out an actual Christmas card in years—not to family, not to friends, not to clients. I’m surprised I receive anything in the mail at all, to be honest. Between Twitter, Facebook, and Harry and David, all I seem to do anymore is Text and order online. Like an iPhone crackwhore, I find myself scrolling the cyber alleys for expired listings and below market abandominiums.  It has to Read more

December 29, 2008

2008 in Dog Years

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

2008 rocked! Yeah, the economy tanked, but I do believe that crisis means opportunity so I’m not sweating that right now- I’m looking for ways to make the best of this situation.

Professionally, this year has been productive. That shouldn’t be misunderstood to mean that I’m swimming in transactions, because I’m not. But I’m not in debt and I’ve grown professionally through some experiences. Due to my own failure to communicate, I experienced a painful wake-up call from some clients while I was at BHBU in Orlando. What can you do when you are 1000 miles away? If you are me, you stop what you are doing and communicate. And communicate. And communicate. And you do what you need to do to make things right- and I have. And then you take a drive to Coco Beach with your husband and have one of the most wonderful dinners of your life. I’m grateful for clients that let me know their thoughts and let me work to fix things. So now I’m stronger, smarter, and more prepared than I’ve ever been- that’s progress, that’s productive.

For many reasons, mostly of my own creation, I have never been focused on my business the way I need to be. This fall a family situation changed and suddenly I had the opportunity to see things a bit more clearly. Uninterupted time is now mine. Goals? Time management? Focus? It’s mine all mine! And now I can take the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve been surrounding myself with and slowing honing and really get to work. This is good. This is very good. 2008 rocked but 2009 should be slamming and if it’s not, I’m hanging up my license.

This was a dog’s year for being online. It was amazing to meet so many people on twitter, at conferences throughout the year, and through emails. And to all the people who have vented publicly and privately about BloodhoundBlog, thank you. I’m a better and stronger person because of you, I hope each of you can say the same.

Greg Swann, this week, and this post, this post, and this Read more

December 29, 2008

Net Happiness is Not Based on Net Worth

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

As 2008 comes to a close it’s important to remember… well, it’s important to remember what’s important.  Ben Stein does a pretty good job of that in this article.  He is ostensibly talking about the fallout from Bernard Madofff’s Ponzi scheme, but he says a whole lot more:

We are more than our investments.  We are more than the year-to-year or day-by-day changes in our net worth.  We are what we do for charity.  We are how we treat our family and friends.  We are how we treat our dogs and cats.  We are what we do for our community and our nation.  If you had $100 million or $100,000 a year ago and now you have a lot less, you’re still the same person.  You’re not a balance sheet, at least not one denominated in money…

It’s a tough thing to remember in a business measured by commissions.  Our lives are surrounded by miracles and drowned out by laughter.  Having money may improve our lifestyle, but it does not improve us.  Losing money may cause us hardship, but it does not lessen us.  Our happiness is a function of how happy we see ourselves at our core.  It is a choice of awareness.  Ben Stein gets that.  Choose to be happy – it’s more fun.

December 28, 2008

The Goal-Getters Game: Yes, you want to set goals for 2009, but here’s a game to make sure you actually follow through on them

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Goal-Getters Game is a variation on some of the ideas we have been playing with in email since Thanksgiving.

So first: ‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, made in haste and forgotten more hastily.

The Motivational Speaker Circuit, both inside and outside of the real estate world, is always all over the idea of goal-setting. But real changes in you life can only come from goal-achieving.

In our email discussions, I brought up Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” system of goal tracking.

Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

Teri has mentioned that she is already Read more

December 26, 2008

Over $100? You Better Improve My Friggin’ Bank Account!

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

I was inspired to write this post as I read the comments on Brian Brady’s recent post on Cyber Pros… The conversation turned to the relative value of various barcamps, seminars, and conferences. As you might’ve guessed I have some thoughts on the subject. Go figure.

I’ve attended seminars etc. since the mid-70’s. Back then, and until the internet created its own mushroom cloud of ‘experts’, they existed for the sole purpose of sending you back home better off than when you arrived. In those days the seminars were taught by the giants of the industry. I spent much of my late 20’s attending seminars in awe of the speaker. Unfortunately that’s not so these days.

From 1976 through about 1999 I was able to rely on coming away with much more than fool’s gold or networking opportunities when I laid my money down on seminars, or conferences. The gold standard (pun intended) was in 1980 when I completed the intense/expensive six day long CCIM courses, all five of them then. The info I learned and applied in those five weeks was phenomenally effective, salient, and results oriented. They were there to teach — and let the chips fall where they may. The failure rate for CI 101 back then was about 50% — with an open book final. That’s real. They didn’t, and still don’t tolerate posers.

I don’t know a single soul from those courses to this day.

Of course, if I’d taken them recently, that wouldn’t be the case. I’d of been better off having networked with classmates. But given the choice of either or? Give me the information, the knowledge, the ability to successfully apply every time. Though I attended investment real estate seminars like a groupie back in the day, nothing impacted my ability to produce positive results for my clients and my business more than the CCIM classes. Nothing, not even close.

I’ve been to a couple barcamps. The cost is usually so low, from free to $100 or so, that if I take away the proverbial ‘one nugget’ plus the cool networking, I’m a happy ‘camper’. I Read more

December 26, 2008

Do You Know How to Iron?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

I attended a Christmas dinner party earlier this week.  It followed the script of most such dinner parties, which is to say: it was remarkable – the same way almost all social gatherings turn out to be remarkable.  They start slow: a few people in various corners of the living room, their conversations hushed and directed at the same person who accompanied them through the door not ten minutes earlier.  Then the wine is opened, some appetizers are laid out and enough people show up that a tipping point occurs.  As if by design the conversation hubs begin to move, some groups grow in size while others diminish, strangers are pulled in and couples become less dependent upon each other.  Eventually, the dinner is served and new friends engage in cross conversations around the table.  It is a predictable, if not awkward transformation leading to a unique treasure each and every time.

This party was no different.  I sat down on the couch and was soon engaged in a wonderful conversation.  Forced to guess her age I would say sixty, but she could have been seventy and she could have been fifty.  She was well traveled and she was observant.  It was easy to sense a certain wisdom in her person and I was fascinated.  She had recently returned from a trip to Europe and exuded a confident happiness that intrigued me.  “What’s the secret?” I asked.  She looked at me for a moment, trying to gauge whether I would understand her answer I supposed, then replied, “I iron my clothes now.”  She could see in my face that I was confused and I could see in hers that she had gauged correctly.  “Over in Europe, people still care,”  and she went on to explain how Europeans were more considered in the clothes they wore and how they looked.  This appealed to her in comparison with the casualness prevalent in America.  So… now she irons her clothes every morning.  It requires a little extra time and a little extra effort but it makes her day special.

I thought about that conversation all the 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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