Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Category: Real Estate (page 149 of 266)
Brian Brady’s pick, Fight the power by Public Enemy (NSFW):
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Actions have consequences. When we became a group weblog, I set my sights on the very best writers. We haven’t recruited actively until recently, but, even so, a lot of the most talented voices in the RE.net have ended up writing here. Three of this week’s short list of thirteen nominated posts came from BloodhoundBlog, and I cut mercilessly to get down to three. Worse (better!), four more of the thirteen were written by BloodhoundBlog contributors working from their home weblogs. And this week — for the first but probably not the last time — all three winners come from the Bloodhound kennel. I would apologize for that, except that would require me to apologize for having the wit to pick out good writers in the first place!
All that said, The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Brian Brady for 2008 Housing Market Outlook For U.S. Investors:
While astute investors will have a virtual plethora of homes to buy, in the first half of 2008, they shouldn’t be PAINFULLY picky. Investors should be judicious but painfully picky is a sure-fire way to ensure that no deal will ever make sense. The shift in housing next year will put an upward pressure on rents, over the next five years, as the percentage of home ownership declines from its national high. It is conceivable, in the transition markets of Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, that rents could rise as much as 20%, in the next five years, as those former homeowners lease homes. The long-term fundamentals of these markets still make sense. More people move to those locales than leave each year so steady population growth is on an investor’s side.
While the forecast for 2008 is grim, there are silver linings amidst this black cloud. Investors will have opportunities to own great properties if they understand that while we may not be touching the bottom, we can see the bottom through clearing water. Investors should analyze property investments and consider purchase offers with both economic and utilitarian values in mind. In the aforementioned Phoenix example, digging your heels in and proclaiming that "the Read more
Cathy caught this this morning:
Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog has been Photoshopped into the hands of Frank, Dino and Sammy.
Any other Easter Eggs in that video?
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Daniel Rothamel offers up Frank Sinatra’s version of Paul Anka’s My way, citing these lyrics:
For What is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels, and not the words of one who yields. The record shows, I took the blows, and did it my way.
Okayfine. For my own part, I’ve always thought this song lays it on a little too thick, as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll at his thickest makes plain:
Sid Vicious gave it a pomo send-up, but the tune just might be beyond parody:
I do like the idea, but I worry that the first-person protagonist might be too much a Walter Mittyesque legend-in-his-own-mind. And so I end up here, with Limp Bizkit, to me a more convincing expression of the sentiment:
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
I guess my point is, if you’re one of these people considering giving up on blogging in exchange for paying more attention to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, or whatever they throw at us mere mortals, bear in mind you are giving up on something rather unique and wonderful. But I would say that.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
It’s been an interesting year, in the sense of the old Chinese proverb about interesting times. Interesting in this context meaning hard times. Mortgage brokers are scrambling, trying to give great service while simultaneously discerning between serious borrowers and serious time wasters. Real estate agents, many of them in he business since 2000 or later, never having experienced even a normal market, are being harshly introduced to reality. I’ve recently learned some of the agents with whom I’ve become friendly during the great times, have taken 8-5 jobs. Many of them are wondering how long they can hang.
Turns out real estate, lending, blogging, marketing, and all the other jobs, require expertise and hard work. Go figure.
Another surprising development has been how experience has also quickly risen to the top as a quality attribute the last couple years. (Think my tongue almost penetrated my cheek on that one.)
Because there is not nearly as much business going on these days, the small things are creating big problems. I don’t mean by themselves though. It’s because, in my opinion, people are reacting poorly under pressure. A small problem, a 2 on the 1-10 scale, will arise. They respond though, as if it’s a 10. They do this because even a small threat to their acutely reduced income, scares them silly. Over time, their credibility suffers, as nobody around them takes them seriously. No matter how it’s framed, a problem worthy of only a 2 rating, doesn’t become a 10 just because it’s treated that way. People aren’t stupid — they notice — sometimes. In an alternate scenario, others become infected by this overreaction virus. Now all around are behaving as if the 2 is in reality a 10. I’ve seen easily solvable problems become deal killers — they died from the dreaded, ‘2 into 10’ fever.
It can get ugly when that happens. Egos get involved, emotions take over, and before anyone realizes it, the elevator has crashed thunderingly into the basement.
My first really tough market when everything went to hell in a hand basket, began in the last quarter of ’79. Read more
A BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast of the praxis used to create BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcasts. Let’s get clicking, shall we?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
A baker’s dozen this week. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
< ?PHP
$AltEntries = array (
"Marlow Harris -- Iggy's House Iggy’s House and B.S. Realty”,
“Jeff Brown — Lenders lend Lenders Clearing Deck To Blink, Uh, Lend — What Will They Think of Next?“,
“Robert Ashby — Credit crunch What Should be Done About the Continued Credit Crunch? How About Nothing?“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR speak Why use a realtor – decoding nar-speak“,
“Chris Johnson — 2011 Why 2011 might not even be the end“,
“Michael Wurzer — Advertising Everything Is Advertising“,
“Brian Brady — Market outlook 2008 Housing Market Outlook For U.S. Investors“,
“Kris Berg — Real estate blogging The Real Reason Your Agent Should be Blogging“,
“Jim Watkins — Foreclosure Sad Story of a Family in Foreclosure: Some things You Hate to See“,
“Mariana Wagner — RE agent You know you’re a real estate agent if…“,
“Geno Petro — Serendipity Serendipity, straight up“,
“Jay Thompson — NAR COE 7,373 Words – The NAR Code of Ethics“,
“Cathleen Colins — Memories Memories of my Dad in the house he never got to see”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++)
{
$pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]);
$radioGroup .= "
$radioGroup .= “$pieces[0], “;
$radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
}
echo (“
- $radioGroup
“)
?>
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’m a firm believer that you can often learn as much by a bad example as you can a good one.
Yesterday this little nugget slipped past my spam filters. Something, I don’t know what, compelled me to read it.
I need your help. Do you know someone that knows lots of Realtors and or Loan Originators that may be interested in earning an extra $1,500 – $12,000 a month?
The perfect person might be an Title rep, a Realtor, a rep for a Home Warranty Company, a Loan Officer, or just someone you know looking for an opportunity.
We need people to show folks how to get out of the ice age and generate business quickly using a new approach – especially in a down market.
<< Blah blah blah insert plan to dominate the world via CD ROM business cards here. >>
Just standard spammy crap we’re all inundated with on an hourly basis. Then came this part:
Forget the Caveman, our program is so simple even a Realtor or a Loan Originator can do it.
Huh? What marketing genius came up with this?
I can just see a bunch of people, sitting around an office (or more likely in a booth at Pauly’s Pub and Pool Hall) brainstorming how to market their wares:
“Anyone have any ideas?”
“We could buy an email list and spam people!”
“Excellent! Run with that one. Just be sure to leave out our web address and make sure if anyone interested hits ‘reply’ to the email that it will be undeliverable, OK? Let’s make it as hard as possible for people to contact us!”
“Oooh oooh! How about if in the body of the spam, we insult the intelligence of our target market group!”
“You are a freaking genius! That’s a fabulous idea!”
Now I’m sure no readers of this weblog would be as clueless as these folks appear to be. But it does point out that it’s probably a good idea to stop and think about your marketing materials.
Here are a few tips to keep you from pulling the trigger on something and setting yourself up to look like a fool:
- Read your copy out loud. You might be surprised how different it sounds from what you’ve Read more
What constitutes real knowledge? By real, I mean knowledge that is truth, not logically provable by means of rational debate.
If that sounds ambiguous, let me focus the picture a bit.
After the 1927 real estate collapse, the infant Federal Reserve Board decided the best course of action was two-fold in nature. Constrict the money supply, and raise interest rates.
They arrived at that strategy, one which in hindsight would seem to have caused (or at least exacerbated), instead of avoided the Depression, by means of rational debate, logically put forward. We can assume they thought it was clearly the right thing to do. Put plainly — they weren’t trying to cause the Depression.
They were tragically incorrect. Their logic was akin to ‘proving’ the world is flat, which was rationally believed — and logically, God forbid, scientifically proved — for centuries.
How might history have been altered, had the Feds flooded the banking system with cash while simultaneously slashing interest rates? Again, logic tells us they’d have more likely than not, avoided the Depression.
In reality though — we don’t, rather we can’t know that. We can convince ourselves by virtue of the last 80+ years of experience since then — but in the end, we just don’t know for sure.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting the Treasury Department is in the late stages of negotiations with major lenders to avert next year’s tsunami of interest rate adjustments on over 2 million sub-prime loans.
I’ve been telling anyone who’d listen, for over a year now, lenders were simply not gonna foreclose on hundreds of thousands of homes. The thought itself is ludicrous. The Wall Street gang(sters), better known as either Bears, or one-way @$%^&#’s, are gonna be beside themselves when this is announced. So many of them are invested in bad news — in the most literal sense. They need the economy to tank, at least a little. They’ve shorted everything but their four martini lunches. 🙂 For many of them, good economic news is now bad.
Many other Wall Streeters will be elated by this news. The Bulls Read more
Remember Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? Well, Broker Greg’s theory is Men are Sellers, Women are Buyers. His observation is that prominent in a selling couple is the man — dickering over commission then exacting justification for those commissions; and when offers come in it will be he who will haggle over the details. On the other hand, when shopping for the new house, he doesn’t want to shop: “Garage for my stuff? Fridge for my beer? Sold!”.
So Thursday night, Husband Greg was perplexed. First, he surprised himself by doing physical labor. This is against his credo — the human mind is supposed to engineer methods to circumvent physical toil. But it was time for me to unstage Oregon. It closed yesterday and I had to get all my stuff out. When I buy staging inventory, I’m always careful to limit the heft of each item to something I can move in and out of the house without (Greg’s) help. However, I’m just recently recovered from pneumonia — a solid month of complete bed-rest. So there was Greg, huffing and puffing with the grunt work as I daintily packed my pashminas and platters.
But what really floored Greg happened after he had packed up our last load, while we were sitting in the drive-through line at Wendy’s, waiting to celebrate with Frostys. And I broke down crying. Through my sobs I hiccuped that I would probably never be inside of 718 West Oregon again. This brought my dear articulate Greg to speechless amazement.
We Realtors know we bring value to the real estate transaction… each in our own particular way — our value proposition; but we all offer the consumer the value of our experience from sheer numbers of transactions we work with. In comparison, years and years typically pass between transactions in which any individual consumer is involved. What is so easy for us Realtors to lose sight of, specifically because we do handle so many transactions, is the emotion involved in the process. Those of us who work with buyers get to see the elation of clients preparing Read more
The printed membership directory came in today’s mail. Straight to the trash barrel, unopened.
Who’s the real moron, though? I pay to belong to the Clueless Morons Club. I pay to have the Morons-in-Charge print and mail a membership directory for me to throw away…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
The F.Q. Story Historic District Home Tour is tomorrow, so I’m going to be out for much of the day. In consequence, I’m moving the deadline for Odysseus Medal nominations to 9 am, to give me time to put together the short list.
Between church and the hangover brunch, there aren’t a lot of nominations on Sunday mornings, anyway. But if you had plans in that direction, amend them. Anything that comes in after 9 will be kicked into next week.
I can’t predict my time tomorrow, so my thought for BHB.TV was do do a piece on BHB.TV — how it’s done. If you have other topic ideas, speak up.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing