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Category: Group Therapy (page 70 of 81)

January 27, 2009

Turning LiquidBlue into steady green: Is it possible to found a new real estate brokerage without going broke?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cleveland real estate broker John Kalinowski and I have been batting around some ideas of his on how to structure his new brokerage to make it work well for everyone — clients, agents and ownership. Surely I’m not the best person to ask about this, since we are doing everything we can to avoid adding agents. So John decided to throw it out to the Bloodhounds — contributors, commenters and readers — to see if y’all can come up with better ideas.

Here’s John’s epistle to the dawgs:

Hi Greg!

I’m reaching out to you and the Bloodhound community for a little advice as I prepare to take the next step in the fascinating world of real estate brokerage. I left RE/MAX in early December to start Liquid Blue Realty with a secret weapon of sorts, a custom sign sign idea built around your original concept. So far the response has been beyond incredible. It takes a ton of work to create each sign, and they’re not cheap, but the attraction is unlike anything I’ve seen in our area.

Our market is in a state of transition, just like everywhere else, with agents concerned about whether or not their brokers will survive, and struggling with monthly desk fees and transaction charges. Right now I have one other truly excellent agent working with me, along with two part-time admin assistants who have the ability to work full time. I’m ready to start talking to other agents, and I plan on being very selective in who I choose to join our company. Our approach to listing homes is an important part of our business, and providing a reliable, repeatable listing experience to the public is one of my main goals.  No matter who a seller works with at our company, I want to make sure they receive the same attention to listing detail and transaction management as I bring to my clients.

Where I’m stuck is how to best create a compensation plan that makes sense, particularly with all the extra services we intend to provide to our agents.  We will partner with them on their listings, taking 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 5, 2009

Free “gifts” for real estate webloggers: “The need to deny influence is damaging to the soul”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On Vendorslut Eve, here are a couple of quick notes on free “gifts” and their intended influence:

Richard Riccelli points out this New York Times article:

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

It’s not just a matter of subliminal influence. When every pen and pad you use comes from a vendor, the vendors are underwriting your office supplies budget. The “in-kind” gift translates directly to an “in-cash” benefit.

Here’s a very complete disclosure on this issue of “gifts” and affiliate marketing from the Mortgage Sales Blog:

While most of the information provided on this mortgage blog does not include product pitches or personal agendas, some of the authors may generate income by selling services to loan officers or real estate agents.

Personally approved mortgage vendors participate on this blog as a way to expand their online reach, develop relationships with our readers, and prove that their products are worth taking a look at.

In the instance where it is not obvious, I will make every attempt to be fully transparent with our readers about any affiliate agreements where the Mortgage Sales Blog receives financial compensation by promoting a product or service on this blog.

As of Jan 4th, 2009, the Mortgage Sales Blog (Mark Madsen) has not promoted any product or service where an Read more

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!

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 29, 2008

A trolley comes to Phoenix: Tendency in reporting and why it matters

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So it’s almost five days since I dropped the dime on the bribe gifts being thrust upon the contributors to AG. Has anyone publicly renounced them so far? We got to see Jay Thompson issue some tepid caveats about the gift products — from our pages, not AG’s. And we got to watch in horror as Russell Shaw imploded, which wasn’t pretty. But if anyone has actually come out and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” — I’m not aware of it.

Doesn’t much matter, by now. The moment is gone.

You — meaning you, the invisible reader — will react as you choose, and that is not only your business, but it’s your perfect right. But I can give you a very simple lens for understanding the issue, one that not even the chorus line of tap-dancers who showed up in our comments could manage to gainsay:

Suppose you are finally about to be interviewed by the real estate reporter from your local “City” magazine. Very big deal, very exciting, maybe your chance to break through to the target market you’ve spent a fortune trying to attract. But then you discover that the reporter has taken $2,000 in in-kind gifts from your fiercest competitor. How does that make you feel? Is it possible that the reporter is on the up and up and the gifts mean nothing? Well… yeahhhh… Is is plausible to you that you are about to be served up like a plate half full of cold leftovers? That’s what’s running through your head, isn’t it? Taking expensive gifts from people you write about doesn’t mean you are necessarily corrupt, but it sure makes you look and smell corrupt.

In our comments threads, there were a lot of specious arguments made in defense of taking these bribes, or at least not renouncing them. One of them was the notion that “everyone is biased.” This is a very common fallacious dodge — which is to say a persuasively invalid argument. We start by acknowledging the obvious facts that each of us has a unique point of view, and each of us is operating Read more

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 24, 2008

My own little gift on Christmas Eve: I’ve discovered a way that a contributor to BloodhoundBlog can get fired…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I would ask, is this sick-making to me alone? — but I heard about it from a nauseated reader before I had seen it myself.

We don’t take any money out of this site at all, not even Amazon affiliate fees. I don’t want for anyone reading BloodhoundBlog ever to doubt our integrity.

I am repelled by advertising on real estate weblogs, but taking in-kind bribes for pimping vendors and their dubious wares is simply corrupt.

Until today, there were no rules for BloodhoundBlog contributors — if for no other reason than because it had never occurred to me that anyone could do something this disgusting, much less celebrate it. Today we inaugurate our first rule:

If you write for us and if you have taken bribes in the form of cash or merchandise from a vendor, please send me your resignation. If I find out that any BloodhoundBlog contributor has taken bribes from a vendor, I will fire you on the spot. I love having our contributors here, but we each one of us have to be above reproach, now and always. This is the way I built this place, and thus it will remain, even if I have to go back to writing alone.

The one bright spot in this, for me, is that not one of these jackals made their bribe offers to me.

Un-frolicking-believable…

I have two more posts scheduled for the day, but I’m so angry I could spit. I’m going to mix myself a drink and toast, one by one, the people I know for sure I can trust.

December 20, 2008

Joe Strummer: My thoughts on the looming crisis

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Joe Strummer” is the pseudonym of a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. He runs a weblog of his own — under a different pseudonym — and leads a life of joy, contemplation and undisturbed privacy under his real name. But no matter how he is denominated, Strummer is an expert in the Austrian School of Economics, a colloquium of great minds who are, alas, the eternally unheeded Cassandras of the decline of Western Capitalism. In this essay, penned yesterday, Strummer shares with us his reflections upon the burgeoning economic crisis:

 
My thoughts on the looming crisis

by Joe Strummer

This is a graph of the nominal value of the assets that the Fed has “owned” over time. Notice the fairly flat, slightly rising line until September/October of 2008.

Two points about this graph. First, the Fed did not get value for the $1.2 trillion it has purchased in “assets” since October. The $1.2 trillion in nominal value is actually nearly worthless. That’s because these “assets” are the mortgage backed securities backed by now- or soon-to-be-broken promises to pay by individual homeowners.

Second, the Fed has merely pumped about 1.2 trillion of dollars into the market place free. In other words, it has taken nothing out of the economy of value. When the government adds currency – what Jim Cramer calls, dropping wads of cash from helicopters – without getting anything in return, it’s called inflation.

Now, $1.2 trillion in new currency is bad, but not nearly as bad as when the Fed loans money to banks at a .5 interest rate. The Fed simply is printing money for any bank that wants to borrow it at .5 percent. Consequently, banks are now borrowing to 1) cover the losses they incurred to make themselves solvent, and 2) to have cash reserves that they can then use when the economy picks up to lend at future, higher interest rates.

All of this inflation hasn’t hit the real economy because banks are hoarding that money to wait for better borrowers or because borrowers simply are hunkered down right now trying to wait out the storm.

When the economy starts Read more

December 18, 2008

Inman “news” has always been a FUD-driven vendorslut cesspool — that’s not new — but what is it doing to the Web 2.0 ideal?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Can you read this?

It came this morning in a piece of spam from Inman “news.”

Spam — unsolicited commercial email from vendorslut central.

And: Spam with FUD, InmanStyle: “If you can afford to ignore breaking real estate news and emerging technology trends, then Unsubscribe.”

That’s creepy, sleazy, slimy and repugnant — which is to say it’s marketing as someone from Brad Inman’s epoch understands it. Like all the relics Inman “news” tries to shove down our throats, Bran Inman is a dinosaur — a giant, thrashing reptile incapable of discovering his own irrelevance. Holding someone like him to Web 2.0 standards of behavior is like expecting an actual dinosaur to regulate its own body temperature — it’s more than he can ever do.

But remember that Inman “news” is now allegedly run by people from “our” world.

Do you wish to claim that they don’t know what spam is?

Is it your contention that they don’t know what FUD is?

Evil is doing something you know in advance is wrong. Is there anyone who believes they didn’t know that issuing this treacly piece of spam was morally wrong by standards they understood perfectly well, in advance of their acting?

I’ve been telling you this for a long time, but, sadly, we could not have asked for a more telling example:

When exponents of the vendorslut cesspool — Inman, vendors, the NAR — tell us they want to be a part of our world — what they always mean is that they want to suck us into their sewer of lies.

The things we call surprises almost always result from our failure to pay attention to stone obvious manifestations of reality occurring right before our eyes.

My advice, always: Mind what goes into your mind…

December 16, 2008

What matters more — Attitude or Aptitude? I had always put my money on Application, but I realized the best bet is all three

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and 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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