BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 48 of 266)

December 8, 2010

Kris Berg took the words right out of my mouth…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Now granted, I am not a big fan of Inman News all of the time (I really don’t like people charging for news..I think it is a tired model, but that’s just me and my own bias)..and I am and always have been a big fan of Kris Berg and what she writes.

Why? Because often I find myself just wishing I had pushed the publish button a bit earlier on something and then I find that she writes it with a lot more clarity and humor than I can.

When I grow up, I wanna write like her. And I am sure I am not alone.

Take this post for example.

I am officially tired of people crying foul about Zillow’s reviews. Not because I liked them, but because if you did not want Zillow, you should not have BUILT them (Zillow). And make no mistake, we (collectively as REALTORS who sent our listings to them) built them.

We built REALTOR.com and got pencil sharpenered. (old Russell Shaw reference that you need to Google – grin)

Many of us warned the industry that when you supplant your own online presence by giving your online assets **cough**listings**cough** to others, that one day the chickens would come home to roost and they would do something with that presence (like charge you, review you, sell you zip codes, sell ads on their site to people you find objectionable,etc) that you might or might not agree with.

Whether people like the person they woke up with in the morning is irrelevant. The fact is, they found them attractive at 2 am.

You can always vote with your feet.

So note to real estate industry: If you don’t like reviews, do something about it. If you are ok with it, be sure that you are ready for more of the same. More will be coming.

Note to Kris Berg: Beautifully written. (seriously). Merry Christmas to you and yours. 😉

(Further observation…I think the reviews are a pretty lame idea and my guess is that they will die under their own irrelevant and easily spammable weight, but time will tell.)

December 7, 2010

When the grasshoppers vote to enslave the ants, the ants vote with their feet: “I opt-out of California.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From newgeography.com:

So, in protest to the insensitive indulgent big-spenders that run Sacramento, I say, “Don’t touch my junk!!!” My beautiful California home is now on the market for $2,000,000. My next home will be in a no state income tax state like Texas or Nevada. I will not buy that new Jaguar that I was planning to purchase for $75,000. I will keep my old Cadillac and deprive Sacramento of $6,562 from its 8.75% sales tax. My next purchase for my real estate business will be an office building in Prague in the Czech Republic, a democracy that has lower taxes and fewer regulations. My income will remain either offshore or in a state that does not confiscate like the money grubbers in Sacramento. And, I will not be investing my capital to create any new jobs in California. In the digital age, my staff will be located in states that are a little more business friendly.

Apparently, I am not alone. Migration out of California exceeds the rate of almost every other state. Why are my fellow “high-earners” leaving the Golden State? Maybe it is because California ranks nationally in the bottom two for business friendliness while placing third in state income taxes.

We have Jerry Brown as our Governor again, meaning that he will live his entire life without a real job. The Central Valley, once agricultural wonderland of America, has Depression era unemployment, this as a result of a green-inspired court water shut-off designed to protect an Anchovy sized piece of bait called the Delta Smelt. And, our brilliant voters – including those working class voters most impacted – rejected Prop 23. That means that on January 1, 2011, California must begin to reduce our greenhouse gases by 40%. To achieve this noble goal, we seem certain to make ourselves even more uncompetitive with other countries and other states.

If that was not enough, voters also approved Prop 25 which allows the public union dominated Democrats to pass its budget with a simple majority. They did such a good job ($20 billion shortfalls) when they were forced to obtain a 2/3rds Read more

December 3, 2010

Achieving your goals: Things can get a great deal better, over time, if you work at them just a little bit every day.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my November:

Not bad, and the guitar is sounding pretty decent by now. I’m more action than traction selling real estate, but that’s been the story of my life for the past five years.

Here’s the secret decoder ring, what all those sloppy symbols mean:

S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.

G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.

W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.

X – Work out for half and hour.

A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.

C – Write a real estate contract.

O – Open an escrow.

$ – Close an escrow.

Better news first: The server is rockin’ and I’m getting a lot done a little at a time.

Walking and working out are doing great things for both my physique and my psyche. I bumped my repetitions on free weights from 30 to 40 to 50 reps. I’m headed for 60 reps in December. I lost six actual pounds of weight, but, more importantly, I dropped an inch at the waist and at my belly. The accretion of new muscle mass will burn away fat at a steady pace, so I feel like I’m getting where I want to go.

Meanwhile, the guitar is sounding fine to me. Music of any kind is a kinesthetic art: You need to know what to do, as a matter of praxis and theory, but your muscles need to know it, too. To play the guitar, you have to have a perfect muscle memory of dozens of common hand shapes, and you have to be able to hit those shapes perfectly, with a lot of torque, precisely on time. It ain’t easy, which is why it’s so easy to make painful noises on the guitar.

But playing the electric guitar is its own reward. An acoustic guitar has its own sound and it’s own style of playing. But the essential component, when you’re playing an electric guitar, is not the guitar but the amplifier. I can pull a lot of sound out of a solid-body electric without plugging it in. But Read more

December 3, 2010

Zillow says, “If you will send us your clients as web traffic, we’ll be pleased to sell them back to you, again and again, from now on.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: What do you do when your massive Realty.bot web site, target-marketed to equity-rich home-sellers, finds itself in a real estate market where most sellers are upside down and do not give a rat’s ass what their homes might sell for?

A: Punt.

This is an eyeball play, up front, just pure traffic-baiting. But the genius of it is that it turns into FUD for the agents in the long run: A million necks, one noose.

These sites are just noise, by now, just more “media” — uninformed opinions from people who make their living doing something other than selling real estate. Delivering your clients to them strikes me as a poor idea.

December 1, 2010

Violent Change in Store for Real Estate Agents

by

Realtor, Attorney

Author website
The real estate business is obviously in the midst of dramatic changes, and that is certainly an understatement.  I just published a new book entitled The New World of Marketing for Real Estate Agents (Early Adopters:  The New Millionaires).  The book will be available on Amazon for $14.95, but what I’d like to do for Bloodhound readers right now is give them a free eBook version that can be immediately downloaded and read on their computer or iPad.  Some traditional brokers undoubtedly will think I am a radical, but I think my arguments for a new business model are supported by the evidence.  Here is an excerpt from the book.

How is real estate marketing changing? The traditional bricks-and-mortar real estate brokerage is hemorrhaging, and all that keeps this archaic business model alive is consolidations.  As offices close, some agents quit, but the survivors move their licenses to another sinking ship, a ship that looks just like the last one and often with the exact same name on the bow.  The changes in real estate marketing are dramatic.  According to the NAR, we’ve lost 300,000 agents nationwide since 2006, and one NAR spokesman suggested we need to drop from 1.1 million agents to 750,000.  This past week two more offices closed in my small market, and the press is not writing about these closures.  But this is happening all over the country–it’s just not front page news . . . for anyone who still reads the front page.

These changes in real estate marketing are killing traditional business models. Bricks-and-mortar real estate brokerages that stubbornly refuse to bridge the gap to an entirely new business model will die a slow and painful death.  It’s one thing for brokers to ride their own ship down, but it is quite another thing altogether for those brokers to sell tickets to real estate agents with promises they can’t keep.

The most unfortunate thing about all of this is that the agents who think they are doing what it takes to survive are only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Many of them truly do not know or comprehend how Read more

November 23, 2010

California’s Long Term Real Estate Outlook

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Even though we can’t be sure of what our income tax rate will be for 2011, we do have a kinda sorta idea of the high side, right? Lookin’ for more to be thankful for this Thursday? If you don’t live in California, trust me, be thankful as you anticipate tax day.

Those who’ve worked hard to produce, often employing breadwinners in the process, will be payin’ almost half of each dollar earned at the margin, if the current federal rates aren’t renewed. In my town you can add the constant irritation of a 9.5% sales tax. Is it really a mystery why so many people and businesses are puttin’ the Golden State in their rear view mirror?

The seeming paradox is that the population continues its upward trend. That trend has been more or less a net economic positive since the end of WWII. However, in my opinion, that is rapidly changing, and has been for quite awhile.

The producers are hittin’ the exits. New producers aren’t arriving in nearly large enough numbers to make up the shortfall. Smart folk don’t run into a tax chainsaw on purpose.

When whatever ya wanna call normal finally returns to the economic scene, CA will still be a tax tax tax state. And, lest we forget, history shows that those who love taxes also love spending — taxpayer’s money.

The price of a home will still be, relatively speaking, far more expensive, and much of the time older than their counterparts in other states. Lifestyle? Weather? The last few years has shown that those who have the financial option to leave, and many who simply can’t afford to remain, are hittin’ the road, Gettin’ Outa Dodge.

At some point, even great weather and lifestyle become overpriced.
 
I speak as a CA native. The trends of the last 20 years or so have saddened me. To each their own, but my view of CA’s real estate future, especially investments, is not positive. I think many have allowed their micro view to override the macro realities. When a state transitions from producer friendly to a taker state, the Read more

November 21, 2010

Fathertonge instant communication ideas on the web.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLQ9ATx7n8

The above is not embeddable, but a demo-y version of this lovely song:

yeah, I been through a lot and you can’t scare me/go on baby, if you just dare me/i’ll break through any wall–just gimme a call/….i’m a prize fighter.

Fathertongue For the Web

I know that this shorthand isn’t totally innate.  Still,we have, for the most part, been on the web regularly for a decade or more, there are some conventions that signal “what happens next” to people.  It’s not true nose-to-anus father-tongue, but it’s not far off.

Anyway, some Fathertongue ideas as I understand them.  Quick, symbolic shorthand ideas to communicate, in broad strokes, what happens next.  After reading Greg’s post last week, I was thinking of the practical: how can I more properly communicate in my own business (and by extension that of my clients) what will happen when working with me.

That post got me thinking about websites, and quick shorthands for approval, welcome and other things.  That post got me to do stuff to my own business (and I’ll report on the results at the bottom of this post).

How can I create a “scent trail” that’s big and loud?

I started with the green checkmarks in various places–to signal approval.

Check-icon.png

success-check.png

These are, of course familiar to all of us that have bought something.  They are there to get us to buy things.

I then took my checkout page and changed the field entry order and put a lock by it “visa number”.  I also threw in a lock in several places:

 

 

 

Screen shot 2010-11-21 at 3.36.27 PM.png

The lock, in both places, was stock images from  somewhere, the lock by the credit card button is said to decrease abandonment.  My cart is a two step cart: I send people to a page where they enter their name and phone number first, and then if they chose not to, I can now call ’em and ask why.

Now, before I did this, and added our ‘fathertongue tail wags”  I had an ugly cart and 1-step checkout process.   “Here’s a big-ass form, go nuts with it.”  My form that sometimes (often) took a long time to load because of some of Read more

November 18, 2010

I just “feel” that mortgage rates could drop, for a short period of time

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Didn’t I just tell you mortgage rates will be rising,  ten days ago?

I sure did, and I think I offered a pretty solid, fundamental explanation of how the bond bubble will pop.  That hiss you heard, directly after my post, was the rapid escape of helium from the bond balloon.  Back then, the 4.0% FNMA bond was trading at 102.75, while today, that bond is trading at 101.50, after reaching a low of 101.25.

What’s that mean to your customers?

The very same $300,000 loan, they could have locked in with no points, on November 8, 2010, will cost that customer about $5,000 extra, in closing costs, today.

I “feel” they’ll have a shot at getting close to that no-point pricing before the month is over.  Let me explain the difference between “feeling” something and “being pretty certain about” something.  I’m pretty certain that the sun is setting over the yardarm of below 5% mortgage rates but I’m having a little difficulty reading the sun dial.  I know it’s sometime between 3PM and 8PM for this mortgage rates rally.

Still, before the last ray sinks into the sea, we’ll see some rallies.  Here’s why I “feel” that way:

  • The Fed is buying between $600B and $900B worth of bonds.  It is resolute that this sort of monetary policy is what is needed to lower unemployment.  So certain is it that it is fighting back against political criticism of QE2.
  • The GM public offering was received very well yesterday.  Investors jumped at the chance to own the electric car company so much that GM expanded it’s offering and is trading higher, post-offering.
  • The Irish bond bailout appears to be happening.

Traders are calming down, and trusting the power of central banks’ and governments’ bailouts again.  A trader’s loyalty is about as reliable as a lap-dancer’s love but, for the near-term, bond traders think  QE2 just might drive bond prices higher.  They ain’t selling too much and they ain’t buying too much.  Expect them to watch what happens through next week, then pile on the bond train, hoping to make a quick buck.  That’s good for mortgage rates, in the short-term.

Eventually, Read more

November 18, 2010

Wheeere’s Johnny?

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

   I happened upon an HGTV re-run the other morning while waiting, impatiently, for the French press water to boil. I stood before the ubiquitous 42 inches of plasma in our kitchen (itself, a residential multi-plex food prep/family room, laptop wireless docking station, and occasional espresso/dessert/wine/tapas bar for ourselves and the ever present house guest, or two, or six…) and recalled a simpler domestic time, back in….

The Day

   In the 1960s, the Petro family kitchen was barely big enough for two grouchy adults, three kids, and an AM radio. Our infrequent household guests were offered Maxwell House and served spaghetti and meatballs on big clunky plates. We had one army green rotary telephone attached to the wall, used mostly for sending and receiving bad news. When it rang, everyone’s heart dropped.

   Our dearly beloved Emerson TV/HiFi cabinet was reminiscent of a thick mahogany coffin. It had its own dedicated wall, in it’s own dark paneled viewing room beneath one of my mother’s oil paintings. The setting was proper, solemn, and predominately prime time. Back then, ‘wireless’ meant, well…it meant there was simply never any wire when you needed some. It was more of a bad thing than a good thing. You know what I mean. 

Reality Bites

   I steeped the morning nectar and settled in to watch an older segment of  House Hunters. At once I was cyber-sucked back to a virtual real estate WTF of a housing market long since past; a pseudo-realistic scenario starring three perfectly staged, non-foreclosed, dream homes, a deer-in-headlights couple with one in the oven, and a Stepford wife Realtor named Roxanne.   I laid back, clicker loose in hand, and unwillingly suspended my post-housing bubble disbelief.  I gazed on as my iPhone pinged an endless wave of inedible Spam (the even worse kind).

   Roxanne, the star of this particular episode, was strikingly unfamiliar. What is with all the famous nobodies on the tube today? If you’re a casual, part-time channel surfer, as I am, then it’s even more confounding.

Where’s Johnny?

   Back in the Day you had your Lawrence Welk, your Walter Cronkite and your Johnny Carson. Three totally Read more

November 17, 2010

A warning to loudmouths everywhere: Cathy’s into pain compliance . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Kicking this back to the top. Cathleen is trying to get the very willful Ophelia to walk to her heel, and that put me in mind of this song, which I wrote almost four years ago. –GSS]

 
So: This is a long way in…

First, Ophelia, our newly-adopted Redbone Coonhound, gets all over the nerves of Desdemona, our English Coonhound. A deafening racket ensues. Fortuitously, Odysseus the TV Spokemodel Bloodhound, who is in fact the loudest dog on Earth, doesn’t add much to the cacophony.

But: We were running out of seconds of silence in which to place hurried phone calls. This is not the ideal way to run a real estate business.

I try not to be one of those guys who pretends to have three testicles, but, nevertheless, it usually falls to me to be the bad guy. When there’s constabulary work to be done, the constable’s lot is a terrible one.

So this Monday just past, I decided more or less unilaterally that Desdemona was going to get a shock collar to control her barking. Cathy was all in favor of painless solutions, but we have tried all of these, at considerable expense. I knew that I was going to have to take the blame for inflicting pain on poor Desdemona, but we were all but entirely unable to communicate in our own home.

So: We got the collar. Desdemona moderated her behavior almost immediately. And, biggest surprise of all, my dear sweet tender-hearted Cathleen has become the world’s most vocal champion of pain compliance for dog training. She’s so happy with the results Desdemona is exhibiting that, yesterday, she bought a remote-control training collar for Ophelia.

All this is hugely funny to me, and it all seems to fit so well with with the rest of our insane lives, so I wrote a song about it — up-tempo and loud. And with all that as introduction, here are the lyrics:

Cathy’s into pain compliance

Don’t bark, don’t bite
Don’t growl at night
Don’t post anonymous tripe
Don’t sniff, don’t snivel
And spare us your drivel
You’re hardly the last word in gripes
     Attorneys yearn to cluck defiance
     But Cathy’s into pain compliance

Don’t spout Read more

November 16, 2010

Looking for a Realtor designation that really means something? How about this? “Too Outspoken For Redfin.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin.com is in the long, slow process of firing us from their referral partnership program. I’ve known this was going to happen since last Tuesday. It’s what I was writing about in my most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate post:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

The actual coup de grâce hasn’t happened yet, but Glenn Kelman placed a sweet call to me last night to apologize to me, as a friend, for not countermanding the bold policy initiatives of his middle managers.

This is nothing to me, for a lot of reasons. I grew up hiding from my poor long-suffering mother, so she wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell me what to do and not do. I spent the first half of my working life hiding from my employers, doing truly remarkable work, like a cobbler’s elf, after the bosses went home. This is why I don’t have a job now, and haven’t had one for decades. I know from experience that if I have anything that looks at all like a job, sooner or later, my fated role will be to serve as the rag doll in someone else’s self-destructive fit. I actually felt that gloomy foreboding twice, on the way into Redfin’s referral plan, so it’s not as if I can claim to have been taken by surprise.

It’s a stupid thing to do, of course, but, while I’ve been fired several times in my life, I’ve never been fired for a good reason. Cathleen and I responded rapidly to every inquiry Redfin sent us, even though many of the referrals they passed along were from loosely motivated, suspicious folks with serious qualification issues. I tried to explain to them that, even though I sell a lot of cheap houses, I’m selling most of them to millionaires, while Cathleen almost always works with very well-heeled homeowners. That entreaty hit a corporate policy wall, with the result that any financially well-qualified buyers Redfin Read more

November 14, 2010

The politics of dancing: Mothertongue and the art of negotiation.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I could argue that much of what goes on in the social sciences consists of pseudo-scientific “proofs” that the human mind is nothing special. Sure, volitional-conceptuality — the ability to engage in mental self-reference by means of abstraction and the ability to act upon those abstractions as a free moral agent — is unprecedented in the animal kingdom, but this dolphin has learned four of the first five letters of the Roman alphabet, and that chimp can stack three boxes on top of one another to steal a cookie. If that ain’t human, they don’t know what is!

Here’s what’s funny: They don’t know what animals are, either!

Monkeys don’t need to do a charmingly poor job at deploying human tools to survive, and cetaceans are perfectly adept at communicating with each other without a notation system — without what I would call fathertongue.

When I’m showing real estate, I’m careful to teach people, especially children, what a dog is doing with his tail. Up and wagging? Take it slow, but the dog is friendly. Straight down? Proceed with caution. Between the legs? Back off. The tail is a dog’s primary signaling device. That’s why people who want dogs to fight bob their tails.

But that wagging tail tells such a tale: “Hi, there!” the dog seems to say. “I am thrilled to make your acquaintance. As you can see by my wagging tail, I’m eager to make new friends. Might I have permission to sniff your anus? Full reciprocity, of course. Really, I’d be put out if you didn’t give mine at least a little sniff, too.”

That’s mothertongue, a complex initiation of negotiations expressed entirely in bodily signaling, with zero conceptual content — with no fathertongue. Animals are perfect the way they are. They are not somehow “better” if they master what are, to them, ontologically-useless parlor tricks. Moreover, human beings are exalted, not diminished, by dancing bears: The vast chasm between emulating human behavior and actually living it is only made more obvious when we see how pitiable that emulation actually is.

The higher animals communicate by mothertongue, and all but one species is Read more

November 14, 2010

The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. I wrote this years ago (urf!), but it’s one of the most important posts I’ve written here. –GSS

 
I had this as a comment late last night:

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

The author is Keith Brand from Housing Panic, writing under one of the half-dozen or so sock-puppet email addresses he uses. Don’t go looking for the comment. I have him blocked completely.

The comment was in response to my post last night, Stopping traffic to sell houses.

The remarks themselves are stupefyingly stupid, of course. Obviously I am arrogant and cocky — I think for good reason, but good reason or bad, I will be the first to lay the charges. “Insufferable bastard” fits me to a tee. “Incompetence” is simply comical in this context. I invented the idea of the custom real estate sign, was grasping for it through two generations of our signs before it was physically possible.

Oh, well. Who besides Keith Brand does not know that Keith Brand is an idiot? It’s very funny that he has chosen me as his poster child for a dumb Realtor, given who I am, given what we’ve done here. You could argue that this is the perfect testament to his stupidity, but there is more to be unearthed in the graveyard that is Keith Brand’s rotting soul.

Consider: Do I know I’m cocky? Do I know I’m arrogant? Do I know I am supremely competent — as a Realtor, as a real estate weblogger, as a real estate marketing innovator? I not only know that all of these things are true, they are among the very many proud facts of my life. So what could Keith Brand hope to achieve by saying,

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

Is this supposed to move me to despair? Me?

But: A different remark in a different context with a different person might have that effect. I am impervious to criticism. It’s either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, I am enriched for having learned better. If not, so what? But other people are different, Read more

November 6, 2010

It’s 4:15 pm. Do you know where your Realtor is? A consumer’s guide to using social media to supervise your goof-off employee.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Your mortgage lender just called. The appraiser is standing outside the home you’re hoping to buy, but there is no key in the lockbox. The lender called you so that you could call your Realtor. Your Realtor in turn can call the listing agent, and then someone can get over to the house — pronto! — to let the appraiser in.

There’s just one problem: You can’t seem to get your Realtor on the phone.

Stuff happens. Your Realtor could be tied up with another client or stuck in traffic in a cell-phone dead zone. Heaven forbid, he might have been in a car accident.

But… There is another possibility…

Do you remember when you first made contact with your Realtor? Do you recall him telling you all about how hi-tech his business is, detailing his presence on all the biggest social media sites?

So: If you’re not getting your calls to your Realtor returned, where might be a good place to look for him?

How about Twitter, for a start? How about Facebook? Foursquare? Tumblr? Posterous? You might have to look in a few places, but there are only two kinds of hi-tech Realtors: The kind who work a lot and the kind who play a lot.

How can you tell if your Realtor is the kind who plays a lot? It’s easy. He’ll be leaving tracks all over the place, Retweeting jokes and commenting on Facebook photos and writing detailed reviews of burger joints and doing — and documenting — just about any activity on the face of the earth — except attending to your real estate transaction.

Here’s the sad part: Even if you’re seeing dozens of Tweets and Facebook comments from your Realtor, you’re probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg. You’re not seeing the direct Twitter posts or the private conversations being carried out on Facebook or in email.

But: If your Realtor seems to be wasting his entire day on social media sites, there’s a reason for that:

It’s because he’s wasting his entire day on social media sites.

I’ve tried pointing out to Realtors that schmoozing on Twitter or Facebook is bad marketing, so Read more

November 5, 2010

Swallow Hard — Make It Happen — Or Get Out

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

For the most part, it’s human nature to have a love/hate relationship with the results that have our name attached to them. I’ve failed far more often than I’ve succeeded. It’s not even close. Name a category in which I’ve endured the ignominy of defeat, and my hand is more likely than not be in the air.

Baseball is useful here, as it’s a game based on failure. Hall of Famers are players who failed somewhat less than their peers. Major leaguer hitters as a group, fail at a rate of roughly 75%. Those who fail a ‘mere’ 65-70% of the time often end up earning $1 Mil a month or so. Think that’s a thin margin separating average from excellent? Try this — The difference between a .250 and a .300 hitter? One measly hit a week. Really.

Ponder this.

In San Diego’s market, one extra skinned cat monthly at the median price, about $375,000 or so, would create additional GCI of — wait for it — $135,000. Median price in your market is $150,000? That’s an additional $54,000 or so. One more deal a month. Would that make the difference for your family? Would those results keep you in the business? Would you then stop making pathetic excuses for your failure to do what produces spendable results?

If you can honestly say that’s within your reach by quietly tweakin’ your effort a bit, super. Do it now. I’ll expect a Christmas card next year.

However, if you’re already killin’ yourself 25 hours a day, eight days a week, you may wanna consider doin’ something different so as to generate better results. How’s that for an original thought? Explaining an anemic bank account to those counting on you at home is not a Kodak moment, a truth to which I can effectively testify.

It was one of those moments when the phrase, ‘Winners don’t make excuses, they make it happen’ became real to me.

Adapting is really code tellin’ us to stop doin’ what ain’t workin’ and start doin’ things that do. Again — there are those who tell us 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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