Category: Group Therapy (page 47 of 81)
To be honest, I would like to hear from other folks on what they’re doing about their goals. I will tell you from my own experience that perfect performance is elusive, but if you make the effort to track your efforts, it’s a lot easier to stay on track — and to get back on track if you stray. I may write a MySQL app with a PHP front-end, just to make record-keeping that much easier.
In October, I tracked a lot of stuff, so much that I ended up not tracking some things, so much was there to keep track of. In the photo, my goals are documented at the top:
S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.
G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.
W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.
X – Work out for half and hour.
A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.
C – Write a real estate contract.
O – Open an escrow.
$ – Close an escrow.
It’s at the end of that list that I fell apart. I had a ton of appointments, and I wrote a lot of contracts. These are not hugely meaningful: It takes me a lot of contracts, right now, to get to one closed escrow. I actually closed two deals — only two — but one of them was a short sale that I held together against all odds for nine months. That’s not a proud accomplishment, financially, but it speaks volumes about improvements I’ve been trying to make in my sales skills. I opened four escrows, which is the threshold of a pace I’d like to improve upon. Altogether, it was a pretty good month for real estate work.
Software was no problem at all — most days quite a bit more than 30 minutes. Much of this was the server swaps we went through, but I wrote a ton of new software, some of which I’ve discussed in recent posts. I have quite a few more tricks up my sleeve, plus a lot of my recent work Read more
Never forget: The collapse of the global economy was caused by the National Association of Realtors.
Vickie Cox Golder, current Grand Poobah of the National Association of Rotarian Socialists, sends this little note:
Tomorrow is election day. As a proud member of the REALTOR® Party, I hope that you will join me and the entire NAR leadership in casting your vote tomorrow for the candidates at the local, state and federal level who will provide needed leadership to restore a healthy housing market and who believe strongly in the value of homeownership.
Here’s a very simple fact to be mastered:
More than any other person or group, the collapse of the global economy was caused by the National Association of Realtors.
There are plenty of other grafters to be blamed, of course, but without the tireless lobbying of the NAR, property rights in the United States would not have been so grievously undermined, and none of the economic monkey-wrenching in the real estate market would have occurred.
When you’re going over your wrecked finances, the key villain, at every turn, turns out to be the NAR.
Big, history-making election tomorrow. Chances are, it will turn out to be meet-the-new-grafters-same-as-the-old-grafters. But if there is real change to be seen in American political life, it will start with the restoration of the rights of property-owners.
If the NAR had any sense, it would become a stridently pro-ownership lobby. Instead, it will continue as the blood-sucking vampire it has been since its inception. And for this reason, you should lean all over your congress-creeps to ignore the NAR’s every grasping entreaty.
Do you actually want a free economy — so your children can earn as much as their hard work can gain them? If so, you have to stand for the repeal of every law affecting real estate transactions. Their sole purpose is to enrich the members of the National Association of Rotarian Socialists at the expense of consumers — leading, ultimately, as we are seeing, to the impoverishment of all of us.
The NAR is a cancer on the body politic. If they won’t learn better, at least you can.
Pathetic fact number one: Jay Thompson is crowing that his company is in the top 5% of Phoenix-area real estate brokerages.
Pathetic fact number two: Thompson’s Realty has 104 closed residential transactions in ARMLS, year-to-date, spread across 21 licensees. Yeah, that’s fewer than five closings per head. Still worse, Shar Rundio accounts for 24 of those closings. That gets the other 20 mirror-foggers down to four deals each, on average. Jay and Francie have six closings between them. For reference, Cathleen and I have closed 27 properties, total, so far this year — and we’re broke!
Pathetic fact number three: Jay Thompson is the poster-boy for the TwitBook model of selling real estate. Like so many other dipwads in the TwitBook world, he’s set up an on-line academy so you, too, can learn how to close a deal every other month or so.
Your clients won’t believe bullshit. Too bad so many Realtors and lenders will.
Just as a matter of disclosure, our mortgage lender has filed another Notice of Trustee’s Sale against us. As I have discussed here before, we’ve been surfing all our our payables for quite a while. I don’t love doing this — but I don’t hate it either — but it’s what we can do to keep the doors open when there is not enough money coming through those doors. We’re lucky to be in business at all, considering how many other Realtors in Phoenix have been wiped out. This is not a tragedy on our end; we’ll buy our way out of hock before the Trustee’s Sale. And, of course, this is actually not any of your business at all. But I never want to be in a position that some noxious busybody can make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself.
That’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? Here’s a calendar for November. I’ll talk about my October tonight or tomorrow.
Meanwhile, here’s a good looking cat for Halloween:
Everything you need to know about SEO.
Now have a great weekend.
I had buyers back out of a purchase contract at the last minute, earlier this year. They got cold feet, and they had no remaining contingencies, so they understood they were losing their earnest deposit. The seller’s agent wanted to fight about it, making a lot of noise about specific performance. But here is what was interesting to me, thinking about the legal issues in the abstract:
The deal was a short sale.
In other words, had the sale proceeded to closing, the seller’s actual material gain would have been zero dollars and zero cents.
Taking account that we cancelled the contract, the seller’s actual material loss was — wait for it — zero dollars and zero cents.
Arguably, the seller might have suffered financial damages as a result of losing the home to foreclosure, rather than losing it in a short sale, but these consequences could never have been subject to my buyers’ control.
In other words, though we did not go to court, I could not see a way for the seller to claim any sort of material injury by the cancellation of the contract. He had no real, actual, material consideration at stake.
Why bring this up?
Because I think this is the end of the road in the so-called “Foreclosuregate” “scandal.”
To bring us up to speed, the Wall Street Journal wonders if we’re headed for housing armageddon. Not to be outdone, CNBC insists that foreclosure fraud is worse than you think.
Here’s what I think: If there were procedural laxities in the handling of paperwork, there was no intent to defraud. And laying that aside, there are no former homeowners who can claim that they were avoidably injured by mis-handled paperwork.
Why was your mortgage foreclosed? Because you stopped paying it. Did you have any rational reason to believe that you could keep your house once you had stopped paying your mortgage? No. If the paperwork that led to your foreclosure was not prepared to perfection, does that give you the right to retain possession of a home you are not paying for? No.
Voters are fools, of course, and the Attorneys General of the many states Read more
“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. A final end, a funeral’s toll, a little wisdom for your soul.”
Legacy is a bitch for most of us. What will you be remembered for? Do you know? Are you sure? Me? Heck, right now I’d be happy to simply know it’s not the little ditty you just read in ode to life and death! I attended a memorial this weekend for a truly remarkable man. In my lifetime I’ve had over 50 teachers, from Catholic grade school nuns to Princeton University professors. Of those, three stand out for their impact on me: there was Miss Carlson in 5th grade, who first taught me that life was fun even in a Catholic school; and my anthropology professor at Princeton who asked me a question so powerful, I finally left the church for good. But in between those two wonderful theological bookends, was Mr. Jerome “Jerry” Lipetzky, for whom the memorial was held. He taught me that there’s no end to learning and nothing quite so liberating as the exploration of a new interest. He was also one of the smartest and sarcastically humorous men I’ve ever met. (In his classroom there was not one square inch of wall space that was not covered with something funny, educational or challenging and usually all three at once.) My favorite memory to this day: a bumper sticker casually stuck to a small, flat boulder near the back of his room that read:
The World is Flat
Class of ’91
Think about that for a minute… humor, history, a little sarcastic jab at what we think we know, and how often we are wrong; that’s an amazing sticker and trust me when I tell you he was an amazing man.
So What…
“Yes, yes, so what’s the point of this post Sean?” Coming to it. At the memorial, one of the speakers stood before us and read aloud a list of seven rules, for lack of a better word, that Mr. Lipetzky tried to live his life by; each rule came with a short explanation. As I heard Read more
That, literally, is a snapshot of my goal-pursuits for September 2010.
W is for walking every day for 30 minutes, a little over a mile, with Cathleen, Shyly, Odysseus and Ophelia. I sneered at walking before we started doing it, thinking it nothing compared to a hard half-hour on my mountain bike. But wrestling with 150 pounds of Shyly and Odysseus makes a work-out out of a walk. Ophelia is only 60 pounds, but she’s so puppyish and impulsive that she gives Cathleen and even better work-out.
The X is for weight-lifting, also 30 minutes a day. I’m doing this at around 6:20 in the morning — up at 6, then just enough time to deal with the overnight email as I hydrate and put two Tylenol into my bloodstream. Free weights work best when you are pushing yourself to the outer limits of your endurance. I do 30 repetitions each of ten exercises, all upper-body for now. The last four or five reps of each exercise are right on the verge of being agony. I literally feel as if my bones are not just going to break but to snap with a resounding crack. But like hitting your head against the wall, it feels so good when you stop.
S is for software, and you would not believe how easy it has been, this past month, for me to put in at least 30 minutes a day on our web sites. I started the month with a great idea that gradually destroyed the SplendorQuest server. While that train wreck was progressing, I built another set of cool tools that is generating huge quantities of new content — and a huge number of click throughs. But by the time that got cooking, I had created a monster on our dedicated file server, so I got to finish the month moving us into four new homes. The last three domains of that effort will be done today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, I know how to rebuild the first monster project on its own new home in such a way that it will be sleek and fast Read more
I’m sure you’ve noticed the pain we’ve been going through. I made a big mistake a couple of weeks ago, and, in the process of fixing that, I uncovered systemic problems in our current file server arrangement that are most easily addressed with a match.
Which is to say, we’re going to burn this playhouse down. Last week, I moved FreePheonixMLSSearch.com and Scenius.net. Yesterday I moved 31 of our lower-traffic domains. Starting today, I’m going to begin the process of moving BloodhoundRealty.com itself to a new server.
This is no small task. We have a huge quantity of content, along with four weblogs associated with this one domain. It will be a while before I do the DNS change — and I’ll tell you when I’ve done it — and it will be a while after that before you land on the new server. As with every DNS swap we’ve done before, there may be some lost comments, if you land on the old server after the new server has gone live. But: We’re fairly slow right now, so this should not be a huge obstacle.
I’m sorry for the hassle — and I’m sorry for all the hassle you’ve been enduring. By isolating our big time-sucks, I hope to make everything perform better. I’ve got some cool ideas I want to play with, but I need to wait for a more stable BloodhoundBlog to show off that stuff.
More news as details emerge. Meanwhile, here’s Loudon Wainwright III on the subject of moving:
Jeff Brown wants to know if real estate bar camps are a waste of his time. My view is that they probably are, at least in terms of making maximum productive use of time taken away from money-making work. Jeff is a chatty guy, so I expect he can have a good time with any random group of real estate practitioners, but in terms of epiphanies major and minor — or even just an a-ha! or two to cover the cost of the gasoline — there’s just not that much there there.
First a caveat — thus to give you a chance to dismiss me if your mind runs easily to thoughts of thoughtlessness: I’ve only been to one real estate bar camp. Brian Brady and I did a half-day BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at Zillow.com’s headquarters in Seattle, and the first (I think) Seattle REBC was held the next day. Brian and I did a session that day with Ardell Dellaloggia, then I used Al Lorenz’ Windows laptop to do a session on Scenius — with the latter being of benefit to no one, I think. I spent much of the day in a conference room, conferring with anyone who would dare to talk to me, and that was reasonably productive. I taught much more than I learned, but I got to spend quite a bit of time with Al, and that man knows a lot of interesting stuff.
But: The event was opened by a vendor, and the vendorslut influence was an oozing slime everywhere. It was obvious to me that the ordinary punters were completely lost, and it was equally obvious that the vendors were “befriending” folks who had learned nothing — except that they were scared and clueless — picking them off like drunken sorority pledges at a fraternity mixer.
I’ve not done anything with the bar camps that have been held in Phoenix, second because the wired Realtors in town seem to want to have nothing to do with me, but first because the wired Realtors in town don’t seem to know very much that I’m interested in learning. If Read more
From The New York Post:
The latest numbers suggest we’re finally at the beginning of the end of the housing correction — no thanks to Washington.
Last Thursday’s numbers from Realtytrac seemed like bad news. In August, foreclosure auctions hit their second-highest monthly total in the report’s history: 147,003, up 9 percent over the month before and up 2 percent over August last year. That’s 7 percent below the peak month, March of this year.
And the immediate precursor to foreclosure sales — bank repossessions — hit their all-time high in August: 95,364, up just 3 percent over July but 25 percent over August 2009. That makes the ninth straight month repos have increased on a year-over-year basis. But foreclosure is a pipeline — and those numbers are the outflow end of it.
On the inflow end, things are slower. August saw 96,469 default or foreclosure notices go out, a 1 percent drop from July and a 30 percent fall from August 2009. And that marks the seventh straight month new foreclosures have fallen on a year-over-year basis. This trend — increased “outflow” and slightly reduced “inflow” foreclosure activity — means that lenders and loan servicers are 1) giving up on modifying mortgages when the borrower can’t pay, and instead repossessing homes and auctioning them off, but also 2) trying to manage the foreclosure pipeline to minimize the downward pressure on home prices.
Why isn’t this bad news? For starters, a multiyear tidal wave of foreclosure sales has been inevitable ever since the housing bubble burst: Too many people had mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay, mortgages with a face value higher than the home’s new market price. There’s never been any way for prices to start heading back up until they first find their bottom — which won’t happen until those bad mortgages are cleared away.
President Obama’s $75 billion mortgage-modification program was always going to be a huge failure — you just can’t keep people in homes they can’t afford — but now the markets are admitting it.
Every time I hear or read someone espousing the ‘find your passion’ mantra (Or should I say script?), my knee jerk reaction is to roll my eyes, sigh melodramatically, and wonder what percentage of these people are chanting that catchphrase to convince themselves and not you and me. Try this — being brutally honest, count how many people you know, first hand, who are literally passionate about what they do for a living.
I can name one — Grandpa. He’s long gone, but his two careers were marked by his love and passion for both. I maintain his case is anomalous. In my life I’ve had a passion for an avocation, baseball — specifically umpiring. I couldn’t believe they paid me for doing it. Whether I was on some forlorn diamond at the God forsaken hour of 9 AM on a Sunday morning for a bunch of 20-somethings with six fans in attendance, or a post season college game with a few thousand partisans watchin’, I loved it. It mattered not to me if it was a Little League game or a Pac 10 contest, the thrill was always there.
Still, it’s been my personal experience and first hand observation that easily over 95% of us aren’t that kind of passionate about what we do.
Yet I maintain, speaking only for myself, that I have a work related passion that keeps me goin’ beyond any desire to generate income. Furthermore, I think I may be in a large minority, if not the majority.
The passion I enjoy for my work has little to do with the work itself — though I’ll admit there are parts of it I thoroughly enjoy and even gleefully anticipate. But for the most part? I don’t love my work. And I’m betting you don’t either. We don’t hate it, at least most of it, but we don’t wake up in the morning excited that the Lord gave us another day to mess with those folks attached to our business who seemingly exist only to make our lives miserable. And no, I’m not talkin’ about our clients Read more
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox:
A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.
Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the “surprise hanging” can’t be on a Friday, as if he hasn’t been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left – and so it won’t be a surprise if he’s hanged on a Friday. Since the judge’s sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.
He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn’t been hanged by Wednesday night, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all.
The next week, the prisoner is hanged anyway, despite all the above. That’s the surprise…
The lesson I draw from this is that things are not always what we think they are. The world is full of paradox and real estate is certainly no exception. On the one hand it’s a profession with tremendous freedom of time, yet to be proficient (never mind truly successful) you must become a master of time management. The field of real estate is over-flowing with practitioners and competition can be fierce, yet the key to a smooth transaction is the ultimate cooperation between two “competing” agents. Almost every day as a real estate professional feels like a sprint to put out multiple fires, yet ultimate success depends on the realization that real estate is an endurance event comprised of doing small things right on a continuous Read more