BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: September 2007 (page 4 of 6)

September 17, 2007

Richard Epstein on zoning, Kelo and the “takings” clause

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dr. Richard Epstein is my favorite never-happen candidate for the Supreme Court. An expert on the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”), in the linked podcast, he

makes the case that many current zoning restrictions are essentially “takings” and property owners should receive compensation for the lost value of their land. He also discusses the Kelo case and the political economy of the regulation of land.

Click here for a direct link to the podcast.

Technorati Tags: ,

September 17, 2007

Nobody Behind the Curtain — Cookies and Milk — Judo — And NOT Repeating History

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

What went on with the speculation about the Fed Funds Rate all last week, and will surely intensify today and tomorrow, has been almost, but not quite analogous to the scene in The Wizard of Oz, when we discovered there was a man behind thehide in plain sight curtain. The characters were told to ignore him — by the guy behind the curtain.

Dr. Bernanke is not in any way analogous to that guy.

Bernanke has, in my opinion, played this whole melodrama out while hiding in plain sight, instead of behind a curtain. He’s using what I’m now calling Bernanke Judo. That is, he’s using the other guy’s energy against him, which keeps them off balance. Nobody is paying attention to what he’s really been doing the last few weeks, because he’s got everyone watching his interest rate hand. Meanwhile, he’s been free to play out his real agenda with the other hand.

The almost humorous part of his plan is how simple it’s been to execute — again — in plain sight.

First he treated all the whiners on Wall Street like petulant children by giving them all cookies and milk. It came in the form of a cut in the Fed Discount Rate. Everyone smiled, and the warm and milk and cookiesfuzzies returned to the land of bulls and bears. Confidence was bolstered.

Then they all took a nap — as he knew they would. He knew exactly how to manage their fears and frustrations. Sure, they kept complaining, but they kept it down to a low, manageable roar. They figured they’d finally thrown enough tantrums to get their way.

Bernanke also knew that beyond everything technical and debatable, the one thing he couldn’t let fall below the critical floor, was confidence in the economy as a whole. He cut the discount rate.

So, what’s he been doing you haven’t heard much if anything about the last few weeks? Making history, that’s what.

I can’t find a two week period in the last 40 years where the Fed has increased money supply by over $110Billion — can’t find it. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, but Read more

September 16, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a ton of very strong entries this week. I had to eliminate more than half to get to a short list of twenty nominees. If you didn’t make the cut, don’t despair. You’ll come back even stronger next week. Everything was terrific, a real treat for me going through them. These twenty survivors are must-reading.

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:

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 or, more easily, here.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 15, 2007

I invented a brand new social networking technology today, so, once somebody implements it, I want my iRadio for free

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. Even so, here’s a cool idea I had today.

First, art is selection. You have to stand back, because I can define art seven different ways in seven seconds. But one thing that art is is the selection of seemingly disparate elements into a pleasing whole. In this way, disc-jockeying can be seen as an art form.

Second, social networking can be viewed as communication by shared creation — collaboration.

So: Imagine an iPod-like device that allowed you to broadcast your music over, say, a 25 yard radius. You are now a DJ for anyone who wants to tune into your hyper-hyper-local radio show.

As an elaboration, imagine the each one of these iPod-like devices could work as either a sender or a receiver of hyper-hyper-local radio shows.

As a further elaboration, imagine that self-selected groups of people could create temporary networks of these iPod-like devices. In the receiving mode, each would retransmit music sent by the device in the transmitting mode, slightly expanding the transmission radius. The user of the transmitting device could elect to continue transmitting or could pass the baton of transmission along to another device in the network.

In this way, a group of people could DJ for each other, each sharing the best of their music collections with the others, each taking a turn as the creator of the collaborative artwork.

Picture a group of early-morning joggers or bike-riders. How about semi-sorta-suburban-strangers on a commuter train? Stuck at the airport? You can recruit volunteers to share in the misery.

iRadio? iBroadcast? iAmADJ? I think this could be a lot of fun.

Technorati Tags: ,

September 15, 2007

BlogRush: Viral weblog widget promotes for added traffic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I added a viral blog widget called BlogRush to the sidebar. In principal, it should draw attention to BloodhoundBlog posts at weblogs were folks might not know about us. It’s a rebuttable proposition, but one I’m willing to test. If it works, it should work for the entire RE.net. It’s a quasi-MLM, so if you click through from our link, we get brownie points.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 15, 2007

An open letter to the technological dinosaurs who presume to control our livelihoods

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To: Ron LaMee
VP Information Services
Arizona Association of Realtors

Ron:

Russell Shaw argues to me that I have been unfair to you, or at least unnecessarily rude. I don’t concede the point, but I am willing to elaborate on the issues at contest. In all honesty, I don’t expect anyone in my slice of the NAR cartel — the Phoenix Association of Realtors, the Arizona Association of Realtors, the National Association of Realtors, or the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service — to exhibit anything I would regard as an improvement, but it’s possible other, less-entrenched entities in other parts of the country can benefit from this discussion.

Before we get started in earnest, I want you to take a look at this map-based MLS search interface. Estately.com is my current pet, in no small measure because it integrates all kinds of neighborhood and transit information into its visual representation of MLS data. There are other cool tools out there: Windermere has a very sexy map-based search. RE/Max has a national MLS system, and Keller-Williams can’t be far behind in that regard. Even so, the market leaders for all of these very cool tools are third-party start-ups like Zillow.com and Trulia.com.

I realize that much of the software I’m talking about is outside your immediate purview. The point is that traditional Realtors are sinking fast, technologically, and you, Ron LaMee, are shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic while you try to hustle us into buying even more of the same obsolete crap we’re already drowning in.

Criticism stings while you’re getting it, but, in fact, it is by addressing the specifics of criticism that we substantially improve our performance. Most people take what they get uncritically — they take crap because they expect crap — but a sincere, informed critic is the best goad a person or organization can have to get rid of the crap in their product or service. Of course, most people and most organizations change nothing, preferring instead to resent the critic for exposing their crappy offerings to the light. In the free market, these problems are eventually corrected by auctioneers. It remains to Read more

September 14, 2007

Attorneys, Condescension, Immaculate Perception and the NAR

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

It’s always dangerous – and not a little misleading – to extrapolate a whole from a part.  One of the problems facing the real estate industry is a phantom stereotype – generally negative – applied to all agents, when anyone in the business knows that the range spans the genius to the inept, the scrupulously honest to the corrupt.  I’d argue high professionalism for most, but in three short years in the business I’ve run into the gamut.

So I understand the pitfalls of where I’m going with this, but I’m going anyway:

Do law schools really have a required Applied Condescension class; and why is it so many attorneys have a self regard inversely proportional to their actual worth?

I admit some of this is anecdotal and personal: the only attorney I’ve ever had to hire I also had to fire; what she’d failed to accomplish in six months I managed on my own in six days. Recommended by a friend, she overpromised, under delivered and grossly overcharged. When I told her on her last billing I wouldn’t pay until she provided an itemization – which she never provided – she tried the intimidation game.  Didn’t work.  Oh, my, it didn’t work.

But much more recently and pertinent: First, there was this – Buying without an agent – written by an attorney at Rain City Guide.  Entirely self serving, badly argued with serious errors of omission, it generated some pleasant acrimony in the comment section – numbering over 150 – as well as a follow up rebuttal.  I’m not going to parse the whole thing, but you get the tone from the last sentence:

Regardless, for hundreds of dollars, you can save 3% on the purchase price, while getting legal services from an attorney, not an agent.

This is just another verse in an emerging chapter:  Save money and get better representation by using an attorney instead of a real estate agent!  Why?  Hey, who cares about home values, sewer scopes, oil tank decommissioning or elevation certs when you have this argument: “I’m an attorney, you’re not!”

The straw came a couple days ago.  I was at a Read more

September 14, 2007

Deadline looms for Odysseus Medal competition: Act now or weep incessantly Sunday afternoon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are already a couple dozen nominees for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition. What are we missing? Only you know for sure. The deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something orbiting the skirts of perfection, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 14, 2007

If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me this week in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
    — William Shakespeare, Richard II

I am too familiar with my own ignorance to credit other people’s predictions for the real estate market. People who think they can foresee the consequences of billions of choices years in advance are fooling themselves — although probably not as completely as they are fooling their audiences.

Even so, a would-be home-seller listening to all the doom and gloom predictions on the news may by now be in deep despair, crying, like King Richard, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

I don’t believe any of this, but let’s stipulate it for argument’s sake. In reality, so far, resale prices for some of the hardest hit residential communities in the Valley are down around 16.4% from the December 2005 peak. This means those same homes are still up 54.1% in value from December 2003.

If we anticipate the worst — mass foreclosures, with lenders dumping properties for pennies on the dollar — what can you do now to escape ruin?

The answer? Price your property to sell.

If you live in an archetypical suburban Phoenix home, your house is worth today just about what it would have sold for in April or May of 2005. If you’re priced higher than that, you may be priced too high to sell.

Here’s another way of arriving at a reasonable price. Take the sales prices of truly comparable homes that sold last month in your neighborhood and subtract at least 3%.

This can’t be happy news, considering how much you might have gotten two years ago. But if there is worse news to come, this is the happiest news you may hear for Read more

September 13, 2007

Supplanting the NAR: Can we get to a better quality of real estate representation by way of the licensing laws?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Coming back to this, with my apologies for the delay. I realized I was never going to have time for the whole feast at one sitting, so I resolved to take it on one bite at a time.

I want to examine some of the ideas and objections people have raised with respect to supplanting the NAR with a more rigorous predictor of quality representation. And: I’m being as vague as I can because, while I think we’re all interested in hearing specific ideas — or caveats about those specific ideas — I don’t think we’re anywhere near ready to erect or enact anything. In construction terms, we are not building, drafting plans, designing or even site planning. At this stage, we are talking about whether or not to build anything at all.

For what it’s worth, my natural inclination is to do nothing. For more than a year I’ve been talking about the kinds of things we do to obviate our competition. We get better day by day and they’re all standing around with their thumbs… duly engaged. Our reputation grows with every home run we hit. In the market niche we farm, we don’t need a third-party imprimatur of quality. Res ipse loquitur.

However: If we argue that there are too many would-be real estate practitioners, that many of these folks have much too little training and experience, and that buyers and sellers would have a safer and more satisfying experience if they learned to seek out higher-quality practitioners, then there is an argument to be made for creating something like an Underwriters’ Laboratories rating organization for real estate agents.

One of the commenters to my original post on this subject wrote:

If we want to eliminate half the licensees just raise the barriers to entry…require an apprenticeship…or raise the licensing fee…or make the licensing test harder…or make the continuing education harder…or all of the above. These steps alone will raise the quality of service in the industry.

These are ideas we hear all the time, of course. So why are they never ratified in law?

The real estate licensing laws are controlled by the brokers, Read more

September 13, 2007

In The Spirit of Sharing (or showing off).

by

Realtor, Audio Engineer

Author website

Well, Kris threw down the gauntlet, so to speak, and invited a sharing of our own ideas and intrepid adventures in home marketing. I know that many have been very open in their sharing of marketing ideas, especially our host, and I thought I would also share some ideas that I use.

First, I can absolutely see the benfits of a professional photographer, and while I is one, I know that there are better people than me, and I probably ought to delegate some of this (a gratuitous nod to Russell). But darn it! I like doing it. I am an endless tinkerer, and nothing thrills me more that playing with photos. Here are a few examples:

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

So, I’m not totally thrilled with my work, but who ever is? The point is that I’m always trying to get better.

Next, I tried a new flyer idea: a largish tri-fold flyer:

 

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

So, I print these off myself on heavy stock on my Phaser printer, and they come out looking pretty good (despite the 380 dollars a month for ink!)  I then create my own virtual tours:

One thing that I do with my tours that I haven’t seen many agents do is photograph the entire neightborhood and surrounding city. Depending on what’s around the property, I’ll photograph houses of worship, restaurants, cultural attractions, shopping, mountains, ball parks, zoos, etc. I think this is particularly helpful to out-of-town buyers who may not be that familiar with our local scenery.

Finally, I’ll take the virtual tour and burn it to a miniature, business card cd, with a picture of the home on the front and some contact information. This card, along with one of the flyers for the home, and an additional page extolling the virtues of listing with yours truly, will be sent to the homes in the surrounding area. I’ll leave a stack of these in a presentation holder inside the home for the buyer to take with them. I also give a stack to the owners, so they can give them to family, friends, co-workers, and curch-goers. I also keep a pocket-full of these things with me Read more

September 12, 2007

Dogs Playing Poker – What do you do with great property photos?

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Greg had asked me to follow up on some particulars of the twilight photos we recently commissioned for one of our seller’s homes and, specifically, how these shots translated into our brochures. Here goes.

dogsplayingpoker.jpg

As a foreword, I just love this whole conversation because it debunks the argument that all agents hold the tools in their marketing box as safely guarded secrets lest “the competition” figure it out. This is transparency at its best. The reality is, and my position has always been, that nothing I do is secret. If other agents don’t know what Steve and I are doing for our clients today, then they will tomorrow. None of us has a copyright on good ideas; we only own them to the extent that others are unwilling to invest the time and money to see our efforts and raise us one.

Many agents, of course, and many of them in my market will “borrow” my ideas over time, which will inspire me to do better yet,  keeping our little poker game going. In the end, everyone wins.

First, it took me awhile to admit that, while my better-than-most camera with wide-angle capability is pretty nifty, and while I consider myself having a keen eye for the shot, having produced about 4 gazillion flyers and brochures over the years, the professionals can do it better. Perhaps the biggest benefit to me, and Mr. Shaw will appreciate my newfound appreciation for delegation, is the time savings that I am realizing, which more than offsets any cost of privatizing the photography.

While I still have to be physically present during the shoot (and, in the case of twilight photography, this is a two to three hour event), the photos are delivered to me within 24 hours. I receive two zipped files, one containing the full-resolution photos and the other the photos resized for the web. Now I do not have to spend an afternoon throwing out the bad and adjusting the lighting on the good, nor do I have to resize the ones I will be using on the Internet. And, the photos are mine to do with as I please Read more

September 11, 2007

How do you get a San Diego beach house to give a positively glowing review of itself?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Wait for the light. Kris Berg shows you how it’s done. Do not fail to look at all of the photos.

I’m sure we would all love to have bazillion-dollar beach houses to sell, but, whatever your market, this is the kind of above-and-beyond marketing that gets houses sold.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 11, 2007

Listings bulimia? While it is not yet ready to break the vicious cycle of bingeing and purging, Zillow.com is willing to nibble on your data feed to try to decide if it wants to eat it later

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com is getting ready to get ready to take listings data feeds. The X in XML stands for eXtensible, but Zillow and dynamism sleep at opposite ends of the bed. In any case, if you ready to get started getting ready to go, Zillow is prepared to think about undertaking those last few items of preparation. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail, but what happens if you fail to plan (to plan (to plan (to plan (…))))? It’s a problem. As the Melancholy Dane advises, “Get thee to a vomitoria!” When it comes to lunch and data feeds, “a double blessing is a double grace,” so to speak.

I haven’t looked at the specs yet, but I have PHP for feeds into Trulia, PropSmart and ZeeMaps. If your broker won’t support you, it may be I can help.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

« 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