BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 55 of 81)

March 2, 2010

SplendorQuest: Should we celebrate John Galt Day on June 1st?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this coming on four years ago, one of my last posts to PresenceOfMind.net, my philosophical/political/literary home on the web. The planned strike of our undocumented friends has come and gone, but the underlying idea — a strike against the looters on June 1st — still resonates with me. What say you? Is this something worth pursuing? –GSS

 

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will kill you with a blithe indifference if you make even one small mistake. If you have never been to the desert, you do not have a referent for solitude. Far more than the serenity that comes from a fundamental awareness of your own aloneness, true solitude must carry with it at least a tinge of fear. When you experience a silence so total that you can hear the footfalls of a tiny lizard fifty yards away, you also come to realize that no one, no one, no one will hear you if you shout for help. Twist an ankle and you die. Lose the path and you die. Misjudge the weather and you die. Set you hand where you should not — and you die.

And yet I can go to the desert on a lark, armed as a child of Cain with nothing but two bottles of water, a tank Read more

February 28, 2010

Mark Steyn: “When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

National Review Online:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

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 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 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 12, 2010

Google and the artifacts of inefficiency

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

The interwebs are BUZZING about Google Buzz and how benevolent Google co-opted everyone’s contact lists from their Gmail accounts. I wonder how many million valid email addresses Google captured in the first 30 minutes of Buzz going live? I try to remember that Google is the same benevolent company that assisted the Chinese communists in censoring the internet for the billlions imprisoned in the PRC. More recently Google has gotten a Federal bailout in the form of assistance from the NSA to secure Google’s servers from the same ChiCom hackers they used to happily work with ‘doing no evil’, except for entrenching the folks who invented the involuntary liver donation.

The point is this: be aware of the cost of “free stuff”, no matter how cool. The price may be more than you are willing to pay in terms of your professional reputation. I would suggest that a cost benefit analysis is in order. What is the cost in professional reputation for all your social media efforts? Are your friend lists, contact lists and customer rosters available for any non-#RTB data scraper to start spamming with listing flyers? It is surely something to think about.

I don’t care if Google renders a contextual ad in my gmail account. I do care if my clients start getting real estate spam from competitors. Below is a relevant video.

Related articles
February 12, 2010

#RTB (raising the bar) is #ROT (restraint of trade). If you want to do something that will actually benefit consumers and will run the bums out of the real estate business, #STFU (stop being a tweetard) and #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods) already!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’d have more to say about this, but everything I have to say is encapsulated in a single URL: BloodhoundBlog.com.

I was mildly interested in this #RTB (raising the bar) nonsense until I figured out that it’s just more Rotarian Socialism: Make it harder for punters to get a real estate license so that the few who make the cut can make more money with less competition. Nice.

Meanwhile, an email correspondent sent me to Twitter to search on a particular #hashmark. There were more than 30 tweets in a span of 20 minutes, from perhaps a dozen tweetards — all of them theoretically real estate professionals.

Why theoretically? Because if you’re pissing away your day on Twitter, you’re not selling real estate, underwriting loans or doing anything else productive.

And all of those clients you claim to have cultivated via social media? They can see what a goof-off you are, just as much as I can. If I were steaming by the phone, waiting for you to return my call, I would just love to watch you kibitzing with your butt-buddies around the virtual water cooler. Now that’s service!

Here’s the only standard of value that matters to consumers: #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods)! Your clients want for you to treat them the same way you yourself would want to be treated, were you in their place.

It’s easy to figure out what to do, harder to get the job done — harder still to get it done well. But that is all that matters. And if you’re not going to deliver the goods, then you, too, are one of the bums I want to see pushed out of this business.

Whether you’re a dinosaur pissing and moaning in the bullpen down at the brokerage office or a shiny new dino.bot giggling on-line with all the other shiny new dino.bots — you are the problem.

Until you are prepared to put your clients first — all the time — you have nothing to say about raising anything. Raise your frolicking standards! And if you don’t — if you won’t — hard-working dogs like me are going to help Read more

February 11, 2010

We are all on welfare now: “The government’s assistance in the housing market now is less about giving us a soft landing than it is about having us furiously flap our arms to stay aloft.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Examiner:

The unspoken, bottom line: The federal government has already nationalized the housing industry. We’re not just talking about Uncle Sam providing a few subsidies, or even taking over a few of the big players, as they have in the auto industry. This is a complete takeover. Every new mortgage today is a government mortgage.

Over the last two years, government mortgage and mortgage-backed holdings have grown on net by nearly $1 trillion. Private investors and institutions have shed more than $1.5 trillion — through foreclosure losses, pay downs, and by selling to government.

The effective result is a government-run housing market. Barofsky reports that right now, the government is responsible for about 100 percent of all new mortgage activity. You read that correctly. To put it in his own words:

“According to Federal Reserve net borrowings data, the federal government and the organizations it backs now guarantee or issue almost all net new borrowings for mortgages and MBS.”

February 11, 2010

I wanted to say, “Let’s hear it for the dogs!” — but before I can, I need to say: “Let’s clean house for the dogs…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of BloodhoundBlog life: This is a very busy place. It always has been, but this one site — BloodhoundBlog — has been a huge resource hog virtually from day one.

We started off on a shared account at GoDaddy.com, but our traffic and our RSS subscriptions were killing us, so we had to move to a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com.

Not long after that we had to move again, this time to a dedicated server. We ran all our domains off of that one box, but it was BloodhoundBlog that created all the headaches.

Since we’ve been on the dedicated server, we’ve had to go into both the server software and our WordPress configuration again and again to try to squeeze more performance out of the hardware.

As you will recall, we had a huge crash last summer, losing days of data and hundreds of comments. At that time, we moved to a different dedicated server — having smoked the first box to death.

And guess what? Here we are again. We’ve been redlining this server for months. In the past few weeks, we’ve been running from 30% to 75% of capacity for twenty hours a day. Surely you’ve noticed the sluggishness of service while waiting for posts to display or for comments to post.

So we’re moving yet again. Sometime tonight (I hope), we will be upgrading to much more robust hardware, a much faster server with four times our current hard disk footprint. I wish I could say that this will be our last move, but I’m sure it won’t be.

Unlike the server swap last summer, we’ll be moving to new IP addresses, which will entail an update to all the Domain Name Servers in the world. What that means is that the BloodhoundBlog you see over the next few days may or may not be the new server. If you land here by way of a non-updated DNS server, you will be landing on the old server. When I can, I’ll post a note to the new server to distinguish the new one from the old one.

Practically speaking, a DNS 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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