There’s always something to howl about.
I am a part of a panel presentation on blogging next week and want to add some levity. The problem is: I’m not funny.
I’m trying to find jokes about blogging on the Internet and I can’t find a bona fide laugher.
Q. Why did the blogger cross the road?
A. Because the WIFI signal was stronger there.
Does anybody have blogging jokes to share? In the absence of jokes, I’ll write them. And it won’t be pretty.
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Weblog documents, supports transition to new MLS system
This could get complicated, so put on your thinking cap.
Here’s the scoop: Beginning last Friday and culminating on July 1, 2008, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) is going to be switching from Marketlinx/Tempo, our current on-line MLS vendor, to the flexmls system developed and marketed by FBS Systems.
Bored yet? You shouldn’t be, because, although the primary beneficiaries of this switch will be Realtors, there will be quite a few interesting answers to your own “What’s in it for me?” questions.
Tech-savvy agents like us are dancing in the streets. At Bloodhound, we have a profound hatred for the kinds of buggy vertical market solutions foisted off on Realtors, so we have built our business on commodity and horizontal software tools. What that means is that systems like Tempo are so hard to work with that we have built our tools around their bugs.
So that’s the first benefit of the switch for Realtors and consumers alike: FBS is committed to working with the user base to achieve the greatest possible satisfaction. How do I know they’ll follow through? Because FBS President Michael Wurzer is an active participant in the real estate weblogging community. He can afford to lead with his chin because he’s prepared to effect this transition in the most public possible way.
But what’s in it for you? Here are a couple of teasers, with plenty more to come. If you’re out with your agent next summer and you see a house that sparks your curiosity, your Realtor will be able to look up the listing on the fly by smart-phone. Even better, by next November, your agent will be able to set you up with direct access into the MLS system. You’ll be able to run true MLS searches from your den.
Some of the geekiest Realtors in the Valley have set up a new weblog to celebrate and document this transition, The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange (PRETexchange.com). Feel free to join and advise us as we make the leap Read more
It’s Milk the Realtors week on the RE.net — with the shilling appeals for useless new “solutions” getting pretty close to actual sleaze — so I wanted to revisit a couple of themes we’ve hit before. Inherent in the Web 2.0 idea is a de-verticalization of real estate marketing. Big-budget interruption marketing doesn’t work, but intimate viral marketing does. Because of the Web 2.0 revolution, Realtors are free — at last — to control their own marketing — and their own costs.
“So,” say the shills and wannabe shills, “how can we cash in on that?” And the result is the Web 2.0 industry for Realtors: Vertical-market weblog vendors and vertical-market social marketing schemes.
Here’s a hint: You don’t need to pay someone money to “network” for referrals and agents to refer business to. All you need to do is network. If you’re paying attention to the RE.net, you already know three agents in every town in North America.
Here’s another hint: There is no such thing as an interesting amalgamation of hyper-local real estate weblogs. A hyper-local weblog is interesting because it’s hyper-local. Combining eight hyper-local weblogs is seven-eighths boring to every possible reader — as boring as the “Neighborhoods” section of the local newspaper, but harder to slog through.
You don’t need vendors to control your marketing, and getting in bed with vendors is potentially disastrous. These are my three simple rules for dealing with technology vendors:
This is philospher David Kelley in the Wall Street Journal. I think BloodhoundBlog presents a nice reflection of this argument, a joyous, fearless, unapologetic pursuit of new ideas.
Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production. Her point was stated by one of the minor characters of “Atlas,” a musical composer: “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes. . . That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels — what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor?”
As for the charge, from egalitarian left and religious right alike, that the profit motive is selfish, Rand agreed. She was notorious as the advocate of “the virtue of selfishness,” as she titled a later work. Her moral defense of the pursuit of self-interest, and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard, is at the heart of the novel. At the same time, she provides a scathing portrait of what she calls “the aristocracy of pull”: businessmen who scheme, lie and bribe to win favors from government.
Economists have also known for a long time that trade is a positive sum game, yet most defenders of capitalism still wrestle with the “paradox” posed in the 18th century by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith: how private vice can produce public good, how the pursuit of self-interest yields benefits for all. Rand cut that Gordian knot in the novel by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice. Precisely because trade is not a zero-sum game, Rand challenges the age-old moral view that one must be either a giver or a taker.
The central action of “Atlas” is the strike Read more
Pardon my gushing: I adore the Bloodhounds. It’s a honor, and yeah still a shock, to see my goofy real estate picture on the contributor’s panel, but I sometimes wonder what unique thing I can bring to the Bloodhound table. I’m not a top producer, I’m not the world’s most opinionated blogger, I’m not a big thinker, I’m not the funny Bloodhound, or an expert in my field, and I’m not Grumpy, although I have shown signs of being Dopey. Alas, I’m past the age of being either cute or perky, I’m not a geek, or even a new guy. But none of this matters anyway, as I do despise labels.
What do I bring to this table? Since there is a bit of anarchy here, I could bring whatever I want to the table, but in the end I’m gonna shake what my mama gave me and dance with them what brung me. Today I’m bringing hyperlocal blogging.
Somewhere someone is reading this who is a new-ish Realtor, learning the business, and learning blogging, and working in a bit of a broken down market. Am I the only real estate agent in this situation? Hardly, although I am the only Bloodhound in this situation. Am I speaking of you? You are working to set yourself apart, to improve your odds of lasting in this business, and wondering how to work it in your market? This post is for you.
Greg’s advice for local RE weblogging has always been to remember the people we write for, who are not neccessarily the people who comment, and certainly not the other Realtors who show up on MyBlogLog widgets. He also advised me to find local bloggers and link early and link often. All this advice is beginning to pay off for me, and in the Bloodhound spirit of sharing, I’m here to encourage the other hyperlocal bloggers to stick to your Be-the-Community guns.
In my neck of the woods, few people know what a blog is, nor do they care, and that disturbed me at first as I had some niggling thoughts about using a blog in Dayton to generate leads. On occasion, it was tough to hear about thousands of hits per day to some blogs, and still keep my Read more
From Houston RealNews:
The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) may be a whisker away from providing listings data to real estate valuation site Zillow.com.
HAR Chairman Rob Cook released a statement today:
“Zillow receives four million visitors per month so we would certainly like to have our listings on the site…”
HAR already provides its listings to Realtor.com, Google [as noted in this HRN report], Homes.com and more.
So releasing them to Zillow would not be entirely unique.
If RE/Max and Keller Williams make deals with Zillow, they will have half of the MLS, nationwide, in two strokes of the pen. We are as excited as we are about the advent of FBS Systems’ flexmls system in Phoenix because Realtors on the ground need to deliver a convincing value proposition about searching for homes on our sites, rather than on national listing.bots.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, technology, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
When I installed the BlogRush widget, Tom Royce teased me that it’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t do. That’s true, and that was why I did it, because, as much as I might trust my instincts about goofy net stunts, it’s always possible that I’m wrong.
Not this time. BlogRush just plain sucks. I’m sure the developers are working gamely to produce the product they should have built before they launched it, but I don’t care. From my end, I rack up thousands of exposures they can never possibly deliver back to me — not that any of those turn into hard clicks anyway. As I might have foreseen, the BlogRush widget is like a commercial on television, instant eye repellant.
It’s off the sidebar. I have a downline of folks who followed me into this maze of twisty, turning passages, all alike, and I leave them to keep their own counsel. BlogRush may be doing something for somebody. It ain’t doing anything for me. And now it’s gone.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Get ready to throw out that WAP browser on your mobile phone (if you haven’t already). The iPhone, with its fully-functioning Safari browser, showed us that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. Now, the folks at Mozilla are working on a mobile version of Firefox.
A Firefox Web browser already exists for the Nokia N800, but this effort will expand Firefox’s mobile reach to many more handsets, especially as they come standard with more memory. (64 MB of DRAM seems to be the minimum that will be required). Mobile Firefox won’t be available until next year, at the earliest. But just as on the desktop, it will be an open platform on top of which anyone can build add-on applications. And that’s good news for mobile computing.
The decision to throw Firefox into the mobile ring is just one more piece of evidence for something that is becoming increasingly clear: The phone is the computer.
I’ve never understood the appeal of Firefox for the Macintosh. I don’t use a lot of plug-ins, in any case, but the user interface feels kludgey and Windows-like to me. Even so, I love this turn of events, particularly if developers continue to have problems delivering pages to Safari. In the long run, I want to control my world from my phone. (In the long-long-run, I want my phone to be mounted at the occipital bone in my skull, with the display hanging in virtual space about nine inches in front of my eyes.) Having robust browser power on smartphones is one more step in my direction.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Let’s play a little game of practical morality.
Imagine that you’re the Mozart of real estate webloggers, the Jimi Freakin’ Hendrix of the RE.net. Winner of the Carnival of Real Estate more than any other writer, winner of the Odysseus Medal, three-time nominee in a field of twenty nominated posts in this past week’s Odysseus Medal competition. Imagine that you are such an amazingly great writer that you can get away with anything, that you can get people to read everything you write, avidly, to the very last savory word. Imagine that even among the rivalrous best, you are acknowledged as the best of them all. Imagine that.
Now let’s reward your greatness.
First we will isolate you by sex, so as to imply that your lack of testicles disqualifies you from the real competition.
Then let’s group you among eleven ciphers, so as to dilute your greatness not to one-twelfth strength but to 1/144th, or possibly to 1/12^12, an infinitesimal residue of everything you are in your unique state of perfection.
Just to gild the lily, let’s ignore the worthy women who write with you, writers who, at their best, can see their way to the pinnacle you alone have pioneered.
What could possibly be missing from a celebration such as this?
Music, of course:
Congratulations, Kris. You’ve been “recognized”…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Frank Nelson, writing for the Sunday LA Times, outlined the knowledge crisis that affects our industries today:
“About half our members have never seen a down market,” said Colleen Badagliacco, president of the California Assn. of Realtors.
Edward Barrios, an agent with Shorewood Realtors in Manhattan Beach, believes a “gold-rush mentality” accounts for many of the people jumping into the real estate profession in recent years.
Some lack the necessary skills to keep pace with and interpret changing market needs, he said, and others are getting licenses just to trade their own homes, or do so for family and friends, saving thousands of dollars in commissions. “Every day,” he said, “I see agents who don’t know what they’re doing.
Agreed. I was astonished at the “gold rush” mentality in the real estate brokerage and mortgage origination business when I moved to San Diego in 2003. The effects of that mentality are being felt today. A local mortgage brokerage opted to cease its origination operations and concentrate solely on their business of buying out structured settlements. Essentially, they wanted to cash-in on the gold rush and hired originators, with little or no experience, and offered them unprofitable but generous compensation plans. Their strategy was to skim some money from the high volume.
They did themselves, their industry, and moreover, these originators a disservice. We’ve talked to a large number of their originators in the past two weeks; we’ve extended employment offers to two of them. One recent conversation was so ridiculous it was comical:
Are you closing 5 loans per month?
Uh, no. The market’s all jacked up.
Hmmm…perhaps you need some product education. How proficient are you on the AUS?
Say what?
Nevermind. Are you talking to at least five Realtors each day?
I won’t do business with Realtors.
Okay…how about CPAs, CFPs, insurance agents?
They refer business?
Let’s try something different. What sort of database management system are you using to keep in contact with your old clients?
Ah, man…I already refinanced those people up to their limits. They’re all pissed off now.
We, most likely, don’t have the resources you need Read more
Meet Dr. Glenn, CEO of a radically different venture-capital-funded real estate start-up. He’s charming, witty, self-deprecating, baldly transparent about his means, ends and motives. The people who saw him speak at Inman Connect were amazed at how engaging he could be.
Why amazed? Because his reputation has suffered from the verbal savageries of his alter-ego, the coarse and flippant Mr. Kelman, a vulgarian who cannot come within shouting distance of a mainstream media maven without shoving one or more of his plentiful feet into his vast, cavernous mouth.
It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup, in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:
Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.
We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.
When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.
Say what you want about the cretinous Mr. Kelman — I know I do — this article is a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate few of us Read more
I had a buyer in my car the other day. A nice, interesting, serious lady whom I’ve been emailing back and forth, and talking to for the past many months. But this was the first time we had met face to face. I thought we had built a truly congenial rapport over the summer. She was a referral. She is a dog-lover. Sadly, her mother had died during the past year after having spent some time in hospice. A lot of common ground and mutual respect. She was ready, willing and able to buy a house and I wanted to help her buy her ideal house for a price that’s right for her.
This should be easy. In this market there are ten homes for every buyer. We like each other. And I had an armful of worthy listings and a tank full of gas. So I was admittedly surprised when hours into our house-hunt I started to sense hesitancy from my client in response to some of my questions: basic questions like, “How much cash do you have to put into this transaction?”; “Have you thought about the earnest money?”; “Your loan officer said he can close within two weeks, how quickly are you planning on moving?”. I was surprised to find myself having to explain that I will be better able represent her if she’s forthright with me.
Later that evening I described the situation to Greg, my mentor, broker, husband, etc. He suggested that I still don’t see myself as a salesperson. I’m still operating in the project manager mode of my previous livelihood — facilitating the outcome rather than influencing it. But even though I don’t see myself as a salesperson, my clients all do. And along with that perception comes all the baggage that clients bring from having had a bad experience with a salesperson, or having heard of someone else’s bad experience, or having seen a movie like Glengarry Glen Ross, which portrays slimy salespeople.
Greg’s solution? Address the problem head-on. Go beyond where I had gone, which was to justify my need to know: Acknowledge that I’m Read more
As promised, this morning a cadre of Phoenix-area webloggers are launching The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange.
From the brand new weblog’s About page:
The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange is a group weblog created by the Phoenix real estate weblogging community, by members of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service (ARMLS) Board of Directors and by Michael Wurzer of FBS Systems, Inc. Its primary mission is to serve as an unofficial conduit of support and information for ARMLS members during the transition from Tempo to the flexmls on-line MLS system. Given the rapidly increasing role of technology in the practice of real estate, this mission is certain to creep into other areas of Realtor technology as time goes by.
There are a total of ten contributers to the weblog at its launch, including ARMLS President-Elect Gary Cumiskey. This is the roster of contributors so far:
Jay Thompson
Realtor
PhoenixRealestateGuy.com
Tony Marriott
Realtor
MarriottRealty.com
Steven Groves
Real Estate Technology Consultant
StevenGroves.com
Greg Swann
Real Estate Broker
BloodhoundBlog.com
Cathleen Collins
Realtor
DistinctivePhoenix.com
Michael Wurzer
President and CEO of FBS Data Systems
flexmls.com
Jonathan Dalton
Realtor
DaltonsAZHomes.com
Gary Cumiskey
ARMLS President-Elect
DryHeat.com
John Wake
Realtor
ArizonaRealestateNotebook.com
Russell Shaw
Mega-Producing Realtor
NoHassleListing.com
Other contributors will be added as the installation of flexmls proceeds.
The entire point of this exercise is to help Phoenix-area Realtors plan for, adjust to and profit from the coming change in our MLS system. Accordingly, if you publish a real estate weblog in the ARMLS service area, it would be a good thing if you were to echo this announcement. And if every wired Phoenix-area Realtor were to pass this information along to his or her colleagues — and brokers and sales managers — that would be very helpful.
The URL of the site — phoenixrealestatetechnologyexchange.com — is a mouthful, so feel free to share an abbreviated form: PRETexchange.com. Either URL will take users to The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange weblog.
For now this is a local issue, but national readers should not feel themselves left out — or unwelcome: Michael Wurzer and FBS Systems are letting true propeller-beanied Web 2.0 geeks have an on-going influence on their biggest installation so far. The work that is undertaken and documented at The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange could have a profound impact on MLS systems nationwide. And Read more
Redfin’s financial underbelly, the top-bazillion-bloggers and leftovers from last week’s ActiveRain thunderstorm. These are just some of the topics addressed in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition.
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 PDT/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
$AltEntries = array (
"Pat Kitano -- Active Rain What Active Rain should do now”,
“Kris Berg — Soledad Mountain “They made such a beautiful home.”“,
“Dan Green — Jobs Report Measuring The Statistical Insignificance Of The Monthly Jobs Report (October 2007 Edition)“,
“Jim Watkins — Lenders When Lenders Mess Up, Everyone Suffers!“,
“Dan Melson — Foreclosure Scam The \”We’ll Keep You In Your Property\” Scam“,
“Jay Thompson — WordPress 2.3 Upgrading to WordPress 2.3“,
“Jonathn Dalton — Weblog Comments Why Do We Allow Comments?“,
“Sandy Kaduce — Redfin Financials Dr. Kelman–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redfin“,
“Michael Seguin — Central v. Distributed Central vs Distributed – a familiar cycle“,
“Kevin Boer — Redfin Financials How Come Redfin’s P&L Looks Distinctly Unlike That Of A Traditional Real Estate Brokerage? Because Redfin Is Actually A Brokerage, Not A Landlord!“,
“Brian Boero — Online Marketing Online real estate marketing made simple“,
“Alex Mather — NAR REALTOR This, REALTOR That, An Open Letter to the NAR“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — FHA Reform FHA: A Siren Who Just Might Break Your Heart“,
“Michale Wurzer — Phoenix MLS Big News“,
“Glenn Kelman — Redfin Financials Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup“,
“Lani Anlgin — Aaron Anglin “Thank You” is not enough“,
“Kris Berg — The Inman 25 The Honor is All Mine!“,
“Greg Perry — Buyer Turnoffs The TOP 10 Most Offensive Buyer Turn-Offs“,
“Greg Tracey — Real Estate Market Things I Like About the Current Market“,
“Kris Berg — Birthday Brass in Pocket”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);
$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++)
{
$pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]);
$radioGroup .= "
echo (“
“)
?>
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
There is no question that I am one of the more dour of the Bloodhound gang; if we were the “seven dwarfs” I’m laying decent odds that I get tagged with the “Grumpy” moniker. And while I may, on occasion, revel in astonishment at the self-inflicted pain that the industry has kindly laid at our feet via the past 5 years of transgressions; I am in no way a fan of the current havoc buffeting our industry. I don’t like seeing people losing their jobs, their homes, their future plans – it’s not a pretty sight. But one thing I do like, is honest, important inspection of real estate and mortgage; and Greg Swann’s recent post on “You’ll Lose Money if You Buy a House? Which House?” reminded me of why I blog and what I believe we should all strive to achieve in one form or another through our blogging: cutting through the sound bites to get to the truth.
I believe that cavalier shibboleths are the primary cause of Realtor-focused ire on behalf of the disgruntled public. We’ve heard for too long that “Now is a great time to buy,” “Rates are dropping,” “It’s a buyer’s market,” and more that unfortunately to the everyday Joe just ring of hollow greed on the part of the real estate professional. And why do they ring of greed? It’s in the numbers stupid! It rings of greed because the main stream media is showing them graphs and charts and year-over-year figures that show real estate, as a whole, is a losing investment right now. They’re saturated with it. 6 months ago ask someone what the Case-Shiller Home Price Index was and you’d probably get a blank stare; ask today and you’ll probably hear about what the index is doing for that person’s MSA. This data dump has created a problem for real estate professionals.
The consumer is being fed numbers by the media on one hand and weak aphorisms by the RE machine on the other. The numbers, regardless of their flaws will win; because numbers have authority and sayings do not. In Read more
