Category: Real Estate (page 73 of 266)

May 30, 2009

Mother Nature is not a MILF

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Now the hard part—fabricating an essay that somehow pertains to real estate and ties in with the above catchy title; one that popped into my head while hydroplaning through a stop sign in a downpour earlier this month. At the next red light I quickly texted the lofty thought to myself expecting to come up with an accompanying point (and several hundred additional words) once I made it safely back to my desk—my writing desk that is. Not my selling desk. I have a separate hard, cluttered surface for each, you see.

More accurately, what I’ve set up are creative stations for each side of my brain; right brain/writing desk, left brain/selling desk. And it’s not hard to tell when I’m performing the wrong creative duty at the wrong desk, either; I basically suck at whichever task is at hand, I’m always running behind schedule, and I don’t make any money. Anyway, that Mother Nature idea was almost three weeks ago.

So tonight I was reading Jeff Brown’s latest post (and most of the 100 or so comments that were bound to ensue) when finally, the ideal segue hit me. Transparency! Why not try and give that clear concept a whack myself since, as hard as I tried to think of a comment to insert, I had nothing intelligent to add to Mr Brown’s already lengthy thread. Perhaps instead, I could unveil a few secrets of my own that the BawldGuy might feel are nobody’s fiscal business. Actually, I agree with him (and his grandparents) on this one but I happen to be sitting at my selling desk in boxer shorts now so…. down they come. Ah transparency.

* In 2006 I earned more income selling real estate than the combined government salaries of the Vice President of the United States and a typical City of Chicago Streets and Sanitation worker on the ‘no show’ payroll.

* Last year, according to the cover of Parade Magazine, I basically matched dollar for dollar with the average preschool teaching assistant in Youngstown, Ohio (Fail perhaps, but not quite Perish).

* So far this selling season, I’m keeping signing Read more

May 28, 2009

Transparency — Newest Weapon Of The PC Crowd

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Transparency in real estate brokerage has gone from a truly noble concept to a weapon sometimes lethally wielded by the PC crowd. Most notably bullies coming forth claiming to possess Holy Script describing transparency, no doubt salvaged from what must be the third tablet lost by Moses on his way back down the mountain.

Transparency is honest dealing from a basis of rock ribbed integrity — nothing more and nothing less. The rest is self righteous dung.

I dare you to demand to know what your dentist, doctor, CPA, attorney et. al. are netting from fees they charge you for their services. What a joke — a bad joke, but a joke nonetheless. Who do these buncha Kumbaya, hand-holding yahoos think they’re kiddin’ anyway? Transparency my ass. They want information their parents/grandparents would’ve had the good manners never to seek in the first place. Why? Cuz it’s none of their damn business and they knew it. Of course that begs the question that so much of what they ask for is wholly irrelevant.

When shopping for a doctor, what’s important to you? Is it ultimately expertise, experience, cost, or how much he’s netting? Do you divide there fees by the time spent with you? When you read that, doesn’t it come off as a stoopid question on its face? Dunno about you, but when deciding upon a service provider I look first and foremost for results. (Oops, there I go again, lobbying for a business world based upon merit.) If there’s more than one provider on that short list, then we get down to a more detailed examination — comparing the aforementioned, here’s that pesky word again — RESULTS.

My favorite uncle just had successful minor (oxymoron?) heart surgery. He’s a pretty smart guy, one of the smartest I’ve ever met in person. Please tell me without stuttering or launching a personal attack, how knowing his surgeon’s profit margin, or any info like that, would’ve aided him in deciding who was gonna repair his heart? And pretty please, don’t bring me the usual weak crappola about ‘how can Read more

May 27, 2009

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

May 27, 2009

Some listings are extra FUN!

by Al Lorenz

Realtor, Media Mogul

Sometimes, out here in more rural America, we have properties to sell that you can’t just drive up to in the Lexus and click off the security system to show. I usually have a property or two a year that are a bit more challenging and immensely more fun to work with and show.

Saturday, I took a several hours to view a new listing. In that time, I only saw bits of it. This particular property is pretty big, 1 mile by ½ mile for 346 acres. It has 16 individual tax parcels and is mostly undeveloped. It is surrounded by forest and has over 2000 feet of elevation change across it. It does have power, a well and amenities. Access to part of it is via a dirt road. Other parts also have dirt roads that go near or into the property. While this property is spectacular wilderness, it only takes 20 minutes to get to the edge of it from town or my own home. This is a fun property!

I was reminded of a conversation at Unchained one evening about good real estate agent cars. While I can often use a sedan, maneuvering around boulders on a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff just isn’t what a Lexus is made for! Things are a bit less civilized on a listing like this! I’ve used SUVs, pickups, jeeps, ORVs and even snowmobiles to show my most fun listings. No worries though, I’ve never seen nor heard dueling banjos at any of these remote properties.

joe-creek-northwest-from-top-of-parcel-p

Part of the fun in selling one of these ranch or acreage types of properties is to figure out the best way to show it to clients and explain how to show it to other agents. I also like to be able to talk to clients before a showing and make sure they have an expectation on what we’ll be doing. If they have height concerns, I might avoid a narrow path cut into a cliff and just show that part from the bottom of the hill. If we’re hiking, I try to make Read more

May 25, 2009

Kipling on the land we live on and the land we love

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I am reputed by Macleans magazine to be well-versed in verse, so, in concert with my soul’s sister, Teri, I will lend my ear to the muses in the celebration of glorious land:

Sussex

by Rudyard Kipling

God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart. Read more

May 25, 2009

Under all is the land: Celebrating property rights wherever you live

by Teri Lussier

Rust Belt Realtor

I think about this every now and then. Under all is the land- real estate not as business, but as a sort of philosophy, a big idea. Greg wrote an incredible piece about this in his usual big thinker style. I can’t take this on from the place Greg’s at, but I can see this from the street level- from where I’m working.

My transactions with first time buyers and with HUD owned homes are teaching me a few things. You may not deal in that market. It’s very gritty. Not everyone wants to get their hands that dirty, or do that much work for a couple hundred dollars, and believe me when I tell you that there are times I understand that completely. But le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, so against the best advice of some of the best brains in the business, I’m working with the people who do not take home ownership for granted, they didn’t grow up assuming they will ever own a home. And in spite of all this collective intelligence pointing me elsewhere, I love working with people who are excited about owning property. Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Think about how incredible that statement is: Owning property. Land. Something that can’t get moved, can’t be taken away. I know eminent domain exists. Forget that for just a moment and think about the history of man. Property ownership equals freedom. The right to own property? That’s extraordinary! So while I understand I could make more money with less work if I worked at real estate differently, I get a huge kick out of helping people who see what I see when they buy a home.

These are people who may have grown up under circumstances that would not have precluded home ownership. They may have grown up in parts of the country that have become too exclusive for the average person and they have been shut out of a life they literally helped build. Perhaps they are not children of privilege but children of other circumstances. They Read more

May 22, 2009

Trulia – A search engine?

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Quote from Rudy Bachraty on REBarCamp Denver’s announcement that he will be speaking there: (my emphasis added)

“Trulia is a real estate search engine and online community where you can find homes for sale and detailed local real estate information.”

This is the second time in recent days that I have seen Trulia refer to itself as a search engine. In my opinion that is no accident. So time for me to offer some clarity.

Ummm…OK…calling yourself a search engine is a nice little attempt to muddy the water in our little blissfully ignorant vertical and blur the differences between a scraper (which your site started as–more references available upon request), a third party listing aggregator, and a search engine. There are huge differences between them. Google is not a scraper. They are a search engine. They index data that resides on other peoples servers. You, on the other hand, pull the listing data onto your own site for the purposes of monetizing it.

Let’s see, how can I explain this the easiest way…perhaps a video:

You see, Trulia? I know search engines.

Search engines are a friend of mine…

and Trulia?…

You’re no search engine.

May 22, 2009

Is NAR Criminal or Clueless? What difference does it make?

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

I read the give and take between Greg and Mike DiMella (full disclosure, Mike is a client) with interest, because I respect them both, and it is always interesting when smart people agree to disagree and do so with civility and eloquence and without resorting to the ad hominem.

When that single MIBOR director derailed a policy change that went against them, even though it was unanimously approved by the NAR’s own technology committee, we were all left to discern a motive.

Was this the result of a long-standing “criminal conspiracy” (Greg)? Is this an attempt by some local MLSs, who see Google’s handwriting on the wall, to remian relevant by competing with their own members (me)? Or was this a consequence of the realities of trying to pull coherent policy from the collective mind of a large membership organization in a timely fashion (Mike)?

Its an interesting question, but the answer, it seems to me, is irrelevant in the discussion of what to do next.

One thing we all agree on, I think, is that the MIBOR director used his knowledge of NAR parliamentary procedure to work the system to MIBOR’s benefit and to the detriment of brokers and agents.

The prima facie evidence is that, at least for the next 6 months, Paula Henry is still being forced to dis-allow Google from indexing her site.

That means the damage is real.

Yes, it is contained to Indianapolis for the moment, but will it stay that way? My guess is that MIBOR will be huddling with other MLSs who share their control fetish over the next 6 months, and our friend the objecting director from Indianapolis will have a quorum come November.

Now that NAR has proven itself to be subject to the whims of directors who are nostalgic for a paper-bound MLS that brokers kept behind their desks, modern brokers and agents need to aggressively defend their own interests because, clearly, the organization that is supposed to do that is not.

I see signs of this happening now, with people getting fed up enough to get involved with their boards at the local level, but is that enough?

Perhaps Read more

May 20, 2009

It’s not an EOD

by Don Reedy, San Diego, CA

Realtor, Renaissance Man

I am stealing from myself in this posting, which I believe is okay because the message just never seems to ring loud enough for me. Some years back I met a Marine and his wife while showing homes. What follows is my recount of meeting them. It’s an account I hope some of you will follow with your own stories about perhaps your own EOD encounters.

U.S. Marine Corps

I took a young couple out looking for homes today. First time we had met, and our initial introduction had been through my web site and a couple of emails.In the course of our meeting I engaged in my usual convivial chatter, finding out in small snippets where they were from, what they were dreaming, and of course, what they “did for a living.” Now an old philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote “if you label me, you negate me”, and being not quite that old, but old enough to remember and revere the 60’s, I always ask “what do you do” hoping it creates something that really takes me to the core of that person, not just to the superficial meaning of his or her life as labeled by a job.

So today I asked “what do you both do?” She said, “I’m ex-military, and he’s still on active duty.”

“What branch?”, I asked.

“I was in the Air Force”, she said, “and he’s in the Marines.”

We’re here in Oceanside, California, home of Camp Pendleton, and some of the finest young men and women in the whole world. I myself served as a Marine many years ago, but continue to find that meeting and interacting with young service people always makes me glad I live in the San Diego area where so many opportunities arise to do so.

“What do you do in the Marines?”, I asked.

“EOD’s,”, he said.

I’m looking at him, and he’s a young guy who clearly loves his gal, his country, and is not a big talker like me. So I ask him, “EOD’s….what are they?”

“Explosive Ordinance Devices,” he says. “You know, Read more

May 18, 2009