BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 43 of 266)

August 10, 2011

What could be worse than Uncle Sam as the nation’s mortgage monopolist? How about Uncle Sam the monopoly landlord?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures.

The U.S. government rescued the two mortgage giants in September 2008 and has funded them since the financial crisis. Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of the nation’s mortgages and nearly all new mortgages.

Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Fannie and Freddie have been hoarding foreclosure inventory in Phoenix for months. Now I know why. Witness:

It also might meet the growing demand for rentals.

So would selling them, except then they would be owned and managed by people who are working for profit, not political functionaries.

But wait. There’s more:

Private investors could also be allowed to oversee the conversions.

That is to say, all the best Fed-friendly butt-buddies will be cut in on the graft.

And you thought the Federal government could not screw the housing market up any worse…

August 9, 2011

They don’t know them as the world’s most elite warriors.They know them as “Dad”.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

The last 48 hours has been kind of a blur for me. My friend Gary Lundholm, who is a broker with about 160 agents in a couple of offices in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA emailed me on Monday am with an unexpected need. (I am going to tell you more about Gary in a future post…he is a Bloodhound and his office is thriving in this economy).

The SEAL Team that was killed in the helicopter crash in Afghanistan was based in his area. Among the agents in his office are many Navy Veterans (Gary is as well.) and spouses of active duty personnel. He wanted to do something to help the families.

He purchased SEALKids.com and wanted a site built so that his agents could all help gather donations from the local community as well as the real estate community for the children of these fallen warriors. Their goal is lofty. $100,000 for the kids of these fallen soldiers. Starting tomorrow morning, they will be sending this online to their friends locally.

If you know Gary at all, this is exactly the type of thing he is known for. (He’d never admit that, which is further proof.) So for the last couple of days on and off, we put together a site to help be a collection for funds to be donated to the Navy SEAL Foundation which will go to aid the families, who often cannot ask for help because they need to protect their identities. It is a close knit community.

It has been an honor to donate some time to work on this. I have cried often as I thought of my own kids and as I have thought of these families’ sacrifices.

I am not asking for donations unless you have it and want to give. I AM asking that you share this around with others so that those who can and want to give have the opportunity. I gave. I would not have posted that unless I had. My family and I decided together that it was something we needed to do.

One more thing that I would ask Read more

July 27, 2011

In the land of the free it might be too hot to go up (in flames) on the roof, but it’s always cool when you have an air conditioner cosy.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Since becoming a property manager in March, I’ve added some new hats to my collection: I am, like it or don’t, a bill collector and a tax collector. As of today, I am on the road to becoming an evictor, as well. I’m phlegmatic about all of this. I may not love those roles, but I freely contracted to take them on, and I have done them creditably, I think. Even so, I’m in the mood for a palate cleanser.

So: Here are some real estate photos I took this week:

Can’t figure out where to store those pesky spare gas cans? The whole roof is just sitting up there empty. We might-could build a dog run up there, too!

New in Phoenix this week: The official Aunt Fannie and Uncle Freddie® brand air conditioner cosy. It’s the perfect closing gift, but why wait until Close of Escrow to buy it?

However: Style is style and fashion is fashion, so here’s a somewhat different look:

Form follows function. If we can’t put looters in jail, we have to put ourselves and our things in jail instead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put gas cans on our roofs, dadgummit! This is still a free country, after all…

Well.

That doesn’t feel much better…

Here’s The White Stripes to change the subject entirely:

What’s the song about? It’s a break-up song, but we read it as a discussion of the most enthralling real estate of all.

And now I feel better.

July 26, 2011

Introducing Displet RETS / IDX: How I Spent My Summer Vacation….and the Following 2 Years

by

Real Estate

Author website

It all started with two phone calls to two separate IDX vendors:

Call #1

Eric: Hello. I really like your product and am considering moving from my current IDX vendor over to you.

Vendor #1: Great! Can I send you paperwork?

Eric: Well, there are a few features it’s missing – indexable listings and some conversion features I would like. Is there any way I can pay you guys to add these features for me? I have a decent budget for these features & understand that you would need to roll them out to the entire system, since you don’t provide custom IDX solutions.

Vendor #1: Sorry, we don’t take any customization orders.

Eric: Really? It seems like a win/win, since I get want I want, and you get to charge me to improve your own product.

Vendor #1: Sorry, it’s just something we don’t do.

Eric: hrrrrrm

Call #2:

Eric: Hello. I really like your product and wanted to get some more info.

Vendor #2: Great! What can I tell you?

Eric: Well, I already have a nice website and wanted to see if I could implement your indexable product on my own site.

Vendor #2: No, we have a proprietary system that it integrates with. You would have to move your site over. We charge $125/hour for that.

Eric: Okay…$125/hour is a little high, but I can live with that. I do tinker with code a bit and have some good, local vendors. Is there any way I could get access to just my site, once it’s moved over, in case I want to make my own customizations?

Vendor #2: No. You’ll have to use our developers and work on our schedule for any customizations.

Eric: Are you sure? It’s pretty easy to add directory specific FTP or shell access.

Vendor #2: There’s no way we can allow you to work on the site yourself or use your own vendors.

Eric: hrrrrrm

At this point, I was pretty frustrated. I spoke with a handful of developers in early stages of RETS projects with good, misguided intentions. They saw RETS from the consumer’s perspective, which is fantastic, but they didn’t understand RETS from an agents perspective – namely that Read more

July 25, 2011

Do you want to know how cool ARMLS could be? Sell it as a business and see what someone who is working for money can do with it.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of life: Not-for-profit “businesses” suck. Don’t believe me? We’ll discuss it after you get back from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

To be fair, I’m willing to regard the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service (ARMLS) as something of an exception, at least as administered by Bob Bemis. Under the last guy, it was run like the Mayberry Jail. This was not entirely a bad thing for me at the time, but it was nothing at all like a business. And the Bemis ARMLS is no business, even now, even if it is significantly more efficient — which is not entirely a good thing for me now, alas.

But: ARMLS is a sleepy not-for-profit fiefdom that has been thrust by fate into the data-processing business. As an MLS, it’s not awful. But as a data-processing business — it sucks!

Why? For the same reason every other not-for-profit “business” sucks: Profits and losses are the guideposts to customer satisfaction in business. Without them, a not-for-profit “business” cannot ever hope to achieve customer satisfaction — which is not to imply that most of them are even trying.

Here’s the news, by way of Inman: ARMLS, now owned by four Phoenix-area Realtor associations, is to be sold for $4.75 million to the Arizona Association of Realtors instead.

First, metropolitan Phoenix Realtors will be robbed of an extremely valuable asset, and then all the other Realtors in the state will subsidize us hotshots in Phoenix, but that’s all just good old-fashioned Rotarian Socialism, to be expected from any crime syndicate with “Association of Realtors” as a part of its name.

And, as you might guess, the grand plan is to create a statewide Arizona MLS, so every neck can be conveniently strangled with one noose. ARMLS über alles.

But that’s all just the garden variety stupidity we expect from any not-for-profit “business”. We know from organizational theory that every sort of “service” organization comes to be a force of evil deployed against its own supposed “masters”. Do you disagree? Clearly you’re not spending enough time trying to renew your driver’s license.

I like Bob Bemis, along with the people I Read more

July 15, 2011

Regarding the Zillow.com IPO: “Since when is a seven year old company with really no large scale growth prospects that has lost money every single year on revenue less than $45 million/year worth half a billion dollars? Am I missing something?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The question comes from a comment to a post at Seattle-based start-up blog, GeekWire. The news? Zillow.com is bumping the per-share price on its forthcoming IPO to as high as $18, up from the $12-$14 range it started with when the public offering was announced.

I like that question, because it parallels one of my own: What, precisely, can Zillow hope to do — other than provide big paydays for its VCs and founders — with $71 million in new funding? Which parts of the site will require that much build-out?

My take: The web-tech IPO craze that’s going on right now is just the next phase in the rape-the-rubes strategy Wall Street has pursued since internet start-ups came on the scene in the late ’90s. There is plenty of money to be made churning the stock of “businesses” that, in the end, all amount to MySpace.com — all hype, no actual value.

What’s the name for that phenomenon…? Oh, yes — a bubble.

The good news: Cynthia Pang Nowak, formerly Redfin.com’s queen-bee PR geek, is now signed on with Zillow. While she may be both the smartest and most breathtakingly beautiful woman on the Puget Sound, it remains to be seen if she can answer the BloodhoundBlog question: What would David Gibbons do?

Meanwhile, GeekWire.com deserves your daily attention. Run by Todd Bishop and John Cook, formerly the start-up reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, it’s kind of like TechCruch in the rain — but without the bluster and hyperbole. The daily email digest is quick way to keep up with the wired side of our world.

But: Am I all wet? Does Zillow.com look like a buy to you at $18? Can it go to $36? To $180? To $0.01? I like the people who work there, and the founders have been very good to us from the beginning. But I’ve never seen the value of Zillow.com, except as an advertising play, and I still don’t. As with the comment quoted above, am I missing something?

July 14, 2011

Geno Shrugged

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I recently bought the book, How To Write A Sentence (and how to read one) by Stanley Fish, but it still didn’t give me what I wanted.  What I wanted was assurance that all those tricky uses of semi-colons and parentheticals, gerunds and so on, that I mastered during my state college educational stay, were still in literary vogue. You know, in case I ever publish something besides here.

I’ve been receiving The New Yorker in the mail every week or so for the past twenty years so,  in theory, I could probably learn as much in those volumes (and saved paying $19.99 USA for the Fish book) if I ever did more than simply browse the cartoons, movie reviews, and fluff essay pieces–Sedaris, Larry David, etc– and then immediately stack the latest issue neatly on top of the previous issue with tiny alleys separating each pile, on the floor, next to my bookshelf. My wife keeps threatening to scoop up the whole multi-tiered lot and haul them to the curb, all 1,000 or so cleverly covered magazines,  but I beg her otherwise. To reconsider. A modification, perhaps…

“Since I failed as a real estate developer,” I tell her, “At least allow me to construct a pulp fiction/non-fiction skyline on my own office floor.  As of this morning the stacks most closely resemble Omaha, Nebraska, from a bird’s eye view. I suppose that’s a city.

And to be truthful, I really didn’t ‘fail’ as a developer because I never actually jumped in with both feet (I know, two ‘ly’ adverbs and a cliche in a single sentence but in case you missed it the first time: state college. Hel-lloo!) and I never lost any other people’s money. I guess I could have been a bit more ruthless and turned a buck or two but we’re talking about residential real estate and in the end, somebody has to eventually live there. At least, that is, until the banks stop merely threatening and actually figure out a way to first scoop it all up…and then haul it all to the curb.

July 13, 2011

Wired: “Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A fascinating story about open source programmers deploying Microsoft’s Kinect hardware in amazing off-label applications.

From Wired magazine:

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Read more

July 12, 2011

Wall Street Journal: “A home is a lousy investment.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ahem: “Today’s young people would be foolish to imitate their parents and view ownership as the cornerstone of personal finance.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

At the risk of heaping more misery on the struggling residential property market, an analysis of home-price and ownership data for the last 30 years in California—the Golden State with notoriously golden property prices—indicates that the average single family house has never been a particularly stellar investment.

In a society increasingly concerned with providing for retirement security and housing affordability, this finding has large implications. It means that we have put excessive emphasis on owner-occupied housing for social objectives, mistakenly relied on homebuilding for economic stimulus, and fostered misconceptions about homeownership and financial independence. We’ve diverted capital from more productive investments and misallocated scarce public resources.

Between 1980 and 2010, the value of a median-price, single-family house in California rose by an average of 3.6% per year—to $296,820 from $99,550, according to data from the California Association of Realtors, Freddie Mac and the U.S. Census. Even if that house was sold at the most recent market peak in 2007, the average annual price growth was just 6.61%.

So a dollar used to purchase a median-price, single-family California home in 1980 would have grown to $5.63 in 2007, and to $2.98 in 2010. The same dollar invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Index would have been worth $14.41 in 2007, and $11.49 in 2010.

No need to pass these facts along to the National Association of Realtors. They already know.

July 6, 2011

A Virtual Real Estate Broker Who Declares Freedom – An Anathema

by

Realtor, Attorney

Author website

This virtual real estate broker hereby declares freedom. Freedom from the traditional bricks-and-mortar business models that worship the institutions of the real estate industry. I have always been an iconoclast who is bored by the weekly office manager giving his inane speech about “get out there and get those listings.” I have always been sensitive to lies being clothed with smiles and the we’re-here-to-help-you pep talks by brokers who fully intend to get rich off all the ignorant agents they are using.

The very institutions in the real estate industry that claimed to take our membership money to help us . . . have become behemoths intent on supporting their own executive salaries and bonuses. Associations created to protect consumers have become massive organizations that manipulate and deceive the very people they claim to protect.

Like the saying, “Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me,” agents all across the United States seem to refuse to take responsibility for their own futures. As if they had no discernment at all, behaving like lambs to the slaughter, they glibly obey their traditional brokers and their associations, going to the office everyday like automatons, attending unproductive meetings, standing around the water cooler, chit chatting about some property that another broker sold, making a couple of cold calls, looking at the MLS online and surfing the Internet for hours under the guise of working.

Of course, they would defensively deny all this, but it is far too common today in the big offices. Not just big offices, but many offices around the country, even small ones. Greg Swan is quite right (talk about an iconoclast) when he wrote, “What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.” See The Unchained Epiphany. Read more

July 4, 2011

God Bless America

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

A few years ago I sold a very small condo to an Albanian family who came here having won the immigration visa lottery. They showed up in Texas with suitcases and two daughters. Both the father and the mother worked to provide for the family. The mother worked in the housekeeping department at a large Hilton Hotel. The father worked in the Deli department at Wal-Mart. The two girls enrolled in public school and started studying. The first thing the girls needed to do was learn to speak English as there are no Albanian bi-lingual programs at the Houston Independent School District. The oldest daughter started her American schooling as a 9th grader not speaking English in a very tough high school.

I met the family when this daughter was a rising Senior. She was in the top 10% of her class.

US Flag image: http://www.patrioticon.org


About a month ago, I received an email from this daughter, now married and with child on the way.

Long story short- Inspections for the oldest daughter and her husband’s home are next Saturday.

I love a job where you can serve your heroes. Happy Independence Day.

July 4, 2011

Private ownership of the land is the source not just of our freedom but of our civility and of our humanity itself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

The “cap and trade” bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week contains within it the seeds of a national building code. It rarely rains in Phoenix and it rarely fails to rain in Portland, but both cities will build new structures according to the dictates of some Washington bureaucrat.

Drive along 19th Avenue in Phoenix and you’ll pass block after block of condemned houses. They were taken by the city for the planned light rail expansion, now delayed. The neighbors are left to fight off the kind of vermin vacant homes attract while they worry what that blight is doing to their home values.

In Glendale, the city government is doing everything it can to prevent the Tohono O’Odham tribe from developing its own sovereign land as a casino.

The essence of the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day is the free ownership of the land. The Hoplite Greeks fought and died to protect their own lands. The Roman Legionnaires fought and died because their farms were their own property. A Cincinnatus — or a George Washington — lays down his arms because being a dictator is nothing when you can instead be a freeholder in the land.

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we Read more

July 4, 2011

The unchained epiphany: Working in the Web 2.0 world is not mastery of technology but the celebration of your own independence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top from April 8, 2008. — GSS

 
In comments to Sean Purcell’s “NAR Challenge”, Scott Rogers wonders why the NAR could not teach hi-tech real estate as well as or better than BloodhoundBlog.

The short answer is that we’re not teaching hi-tech real estate, not even close, and what we are teaching is anathema to the NAR.

In her own comment to Barry Cunningham’s post on the typewriter being state-of-the-art NAR technology, Newport Beach Realtor Stacey Harmon offers this serendipitous explication:

WOW. This video really highlights for me the opportunity that exists for Realtors who really embrace not only technology, but Web 2.0. What I see in this video is the application of technology to improve the “traditional” way of selling real estate. I think there is a whole emerging group of Realtors out there who are looking to utilize technology (in particular Web 2.0 technologies) to TRANSFORM how real estate is sold. I agree with Dave that this video speaks to 75% of Realtors – I work in one of the most lucrative markets in the US (Newport Beach, CA) and I’d say that this video accurately represents how most Realtors (that do any business in my market) view and utilize technology. I see this as a huge opportunity for anyone who is savvy enough to have even found this blog. Thanks for a very interesting post!

That’s an epiphany in text form. I don’t know Stacey, and I don’t want to characterize her thoughts, but that kind of epiphany is what BloodhoundBlog is all about.

We don’t teach technology, even though we talk about it all the time.

We don’t teach marketing, new-wave or old-school, even though marketing is constant obsession around here.

We don’t teach Web 2.0, even though many of the brightest lights in the wired world of real estate write, read and reflect here.

What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.

I am a rude, crude and vulgar man, so it falls to me to Read more

June 29, 2011

Lay down with dogs and you wake up with fleas? Worse. If you decide to rape the taxpayers via NAR’s RAPAC scam you get… plague!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Phoenix Realtor Forum, the monthly newsletter of the Phoenix Association of Realtors:

Alas, the plague is a swarm of vampire-like locust Realtors. These are RAPAC’s objectives, according to the article, with interstitial commentary by me in bold text.

  • Mortgage Interest Deduction: NAR opposes any changes that would limit or undermine current law.

    That is, people who don’t buy homes on credit, including people who own their homes outright, people who rent and working poor people living in mom’s basement or in their cars, should subsidize the incomes of very wealthy people. If this doesn’t make you sick, you’re much too sick already.
     

  • Capital Gains Exemption: NAR opposes any changes to the capital gains exemption on the sale of a home.

    How much does the NAR hate real property? Why isn’t its position to eliminate all taxes, or at least all taxes on real estate?
     

  • Depreciation/Tenant Improvements: NAR supports efforts to establish a permanent rule that more accurately reflects the depreciable lives of buildings and to conform amortization periods for tenant improvements more closely to the term of the lease.

    More tax subsidies for the rich, rather than getting rid of taxes altogether.
     

  • Government-Sponsored Enterprises: NAR is recommending that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be converted into government-chartered, non-shareholder owned authorities.

    Because it’s harder to hide the corruption if the SEC is pretending to pay attention to FannieMae and FreddieMac.
     

  • Mortgage Loan Limits: NAR supports making the current higher loan limits and formula permanent.

    Rich people need more subsidies!
     

  • FHA/Federal Housing Administration Programs: NAR is a strong supporter of FHA’s single- and multi-family programs.

    Poor people need subsidies, too!
     

  • NAR Credit Policy: NAR is calling on the credit and lending industries and regulators to reassess the entire mortgage lending policy structure and look for ways to increase the availability of credit.

    Because not enough unqualified buyers were rooked into buying homes they couldn’t pay for the last time we pulled these stunts.
     

  • Short Sales: NAR continues to push the lending industry to expedite short sales.

    Criminal penalties if they don’t? Don’t laugh. Government is nothing but force. If we are doing anything other than negotiating by means of the persuasions of the free market, one party is Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts