There’s always something to howl about.
I used Batch Geocode yesterday to make a wonderful “quick and dirty” map of homes for a relo buyer
All it needs is Address, City & State.
Grab the info in Excel Format from your MLS Search, paste into the Batch Geocode Window, and it creates a great, scalable map with labelled balloons. The legend even includes the rest of the information from the spreadsheet data. WAY COOL.
I hate the idea of belaboring this topic, because I think it should be obvious. But it keeps coming up, so I wanted to take a moment to shoot it down. If the headline seems really boring to you, that’s only because you’re right. Feel free to make your exit while your faculties are still unbenumbed.
In response to my post this morning on the sartorial elegance of Todd Carpenter, Dave Gooden says:
I don’t understand your need to pile on people like this.
I never pile on anyone. Piling on is done by groups of people, generally speaking fairly stupid people. I always stand alone in everything I do.
But: That’s beside the point.
Without piling on, John Kalinowski adds:
I can’t understand for the life of me why you waste time insulting others publicly, which seems to happen often on this site.
Both comments are specious, in the sense that I wasn’t insulting anyone. I was tweaking Todd Carpenter for a comical photo of the most un-besuited person I know wearing a suit.
But I’m willing to entertain these questions, if only because these kinds of complaints come up fairly often, and it’s plausible that I can help people better understand how I use my mind.
I will say first that I consider rebukes like these to be unconscionably rude. I am chastised — to my face, in public and behind my back — for being some sort of paragon of bad behavior, but I would never in my life consider it good character to presume to remonstrate my host while I am a guest in that man’s home. If I have a big-enough problem with your behavior, I will certainly take you to task, but only on my own property, never on yours. In this respect, I am regularly amazed that people would seek to address minor issues of style while committing an outright betrayal of my hospitality.
In the same way, it would never occur to me to tell someone else how to write. Your mind is your property. Do what you want with it. I will tell you now — and I’m sure I’ve said this Read more
The logic is so simple, and the result is usually so predictable, having a ‘Ladies Night’ at the local bar or club is a no-brainer. The more foxy ladies there are, the more guys there’ll be to buy ’em drinks etc. Why else would a local bar be packed on a Wednesday night? Gimme a break.
Listings are our foxy ladies. If worked correctly, every night is Wednesday — if you’re a lister. Look, for the record, guys go to bars on Ladies Nights ‘cuz it makes sense to hunt in a guaranteed target rich environment, right? Same with real estate buyers — they tend to congregate where the listings are.
But let’s look at this through the Ladies’ eyes.
They’re the magnets and they know it goin’ in. From bank owned Barb to rehabbed Richelle to young and perky Pamela, they congregate together, knowing there will no doubt be more than enough guys to go around. There’s usually all kinds of gals for all kinds of guys. But make no mistake — no gals? No guys.
Buyer’s markets are what I often describe as a ‘get while the gettin’s good’ situation. Sellers, if possible, tend to stay home when they realize for every buyer there could literally be dozens of houses from which to choose. This is why you won’t find bars lasting long with an extreme undersupply of ladies. Though guys are surely an integral part of the equation, women are in the driver’s seat with rare exception.
This is even true when the gals out number guys on a given night. You know I’m right. See the trio of lovely young ladies over in the corner? They’re all pretty nice, but geez-a-lou, look at the one in the middle. Absolute perfection — a vision of everything that is feminine pulchritude. You think she’ll have a tough time meeting a cool gentleman even though the ladies out number the men 5-1? Yeah, me neither.
This is all my very roundabout way of pointin’ out the obvious. Buyers are a huge part of my business, no doubt about that. But Read more
It’s not that I couldn’t somehow get my hands on a late model Ferrari if I really wanted one (and I doubt I’m any different than most happily married men of my demographic in this regard). After the divorce, I’d simply have to move in with relatives, liquidate whatever is left for 100 pennies on the dollar, then slap down the balance on American Express between billing cycles, that’s all. With the proceeds I could probably score a pretty decent off-lease, if not road worn, Enzo Berlinetta…in the least desirable color—with stock rims. I’m just saying.
I want one, but ideally…I want one 20 years ago. (Actually, I’ll just take the 20 years ago and you can keep the Ferrari and this whole real estate business.) A 32 year old Realtor in a Ferrari is a Bad Ass but a 52 year divorcee old living at home with mother is….well, just plain sad—especially when forced to park a high mileage phallus behind her Subaru in the driveway. (God how I hate that Freud.)
So this middle-aged guy zooms into my rear view mirror on the freeway entrance ramp last evening, hesitates for a double-bump tach rev, then screams past me on the right in 1st gear. He was neatly tucked into a couple hundred thou of handcrafted, precious scarlet metal and buttery cowhide. His straw gray, combed-over tonsure hovered in the breeze above a sun-chapped bald spot. A rose gold Chopard watch, with matching cuff links, deflected all remaining rays of Envy as he dissolved into the North Shore Chicago smogset. Judging from the pink gold blur, I pegged his left wrist alone at around 50 grand. Clearly, our little speedster’s got more jack than any man knows what to do with. His engine sounded like an amped-up Joe Satriani guitar riff in the dusky ether. His license plate read RAINMKR. I’ve been behind this ass clown before. He used to double park his banana cream Bentley at a renowned Viagra Triangle watering hole during happier hours. Must have gotten a divorce. If he got a red Ferrari then somebody got a house. Read more
My votes:
“MIBOR? That’s above my pay grade.”
And:
“No, this is not a clip-on tie!”
In October, 2006, I had a problem. While getting ready for a trip to the Outter Banks, I was bouncing my 17 month old on my lap, drinking a coffee and checking my emails. Fast like lightning, he spilled the Starbucks on my Toshiba…and in an uncanny feat of chance, the coffee had also gone into the back of my Networked Drive, and my Router.
A cleanup made my computer seem to be OK, but it wasn’t meant to be. About 10 minutes later, my Venti Verona seeped into the computer, and it breathed its last. I was using ACT 6.0, nothing online at the time, and it was tweak-figured to my liking. Activity series, word docs, and all. Gone, toasted, busted. A trip to the data recovery center at MicroCenter said it was dead to them, dead to all.
The whole disk.
My backup disk was in worse shape, taking it out of its casing revealed that it had been entirely saturated in coffee. My son in one swoop, used a 1.85 cup of coffee to destroy a $700 laptop and a $300 backup drive. In a lot of ways, I was a proud dad.
But, I had a problem: I was leaving for vacation without a database. My lifelong history of maybes, dids, mights, won’ts and dids-but-with-someone else was gone. I only had my pipeline of 7 deals in the Flagstar pipeline, and the emails that my gmail had archived. And that was it. Nothing else–nothing else at all.
That was about the best thing that ever happened to my throughput. That blessing from Jack doubled my income and my capacity to produce.
One of the things every realtor-mortgage lender (that doesn’t use something like Kaliedico) does is over-report and overestimate their pipeline. The reason for this is the maybes. These are the folks that could benefit from you, but don’t feel a sense of urgency. They may not get the paperwork together for weeks or months. But they close, and they kill your inventory turns because you count ’em in March, April and May. And hey, you are right at the beginning of each Read more
Thanks to Ryan’s earlier post, I have spent the morning digging into the NAR’s attempt to label the Google Search Engine a “scraper”.
Clearly, the intent is to stifle Realtor.com’s competition.
There is no other explanation for a rule that specifically targets SEO by dictating that we cannot put the content that consumers search for (addresses, MLS#s, the names of developments, etc.) in the places that Google looks for it (page titles, URLs, etc.), while Realtor.com continues to publish that same information in those same places.
How stupid is this? Let me count the ways:
The instant one of the boards we deal with tries to enforce this rule, I will be filing a compliant with both the FTC and the DOJ and mine will be one of many.
As roadblocks go, whatever the NAR throws up will be a joke. Ryan has already demonstrated that Read more
Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:
Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage? BAHAHAHHAAHA!Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.
The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:
My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.
Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in Read more
In response to the juicy IDX discussion going on over at Agent Genius, I figured I’d take a stab at misappropriating some property data featured over at Realtor.Com.
After 10 minutes, I had 100 of the latest Indianapolis properties listed for sale posted to my website and indexable by google.
Here’s a look at the results: Retechulous.com/Category/NAR-BLOWS
If you have a minute, check out the article over at AG and if you can find a way to get involved, please do so. I guess you could say this little scraping stunt is me contributing in my own obnoxious way. That, and I’m also now looking for a non-NAR Pa broker to hang my license with….
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I wasn’t born when General MacArthur gave “the speech“, at West Point but I’ve read it a hundred times. I delivered it as an exercise for a public speaking class in college.
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
When I think of Greg Swann…my friend, my partner, my brother if you will, those three words, spoken by General MacArthur, come to mind:
Duty: If you have the good fortune to engage his services, you’ll find few real estate professionals who live the duty of “real estate advocate” like Greg Swann. I once thought Greg’s definition of duty impractical; I was wrong. Few real estate brokers or agents will choose Greg’s high standard of customer care. That doesn’t make those brokers or agents immoral nor does it make Greg Swann impractical but it does define the relationship you, a buyer or seller of Arizona property, would receive should you choose to employ his brokerage.
Potential home buyers should read:
Dual Agency Smack-Down: Real estate in real life . . .
A consumer’s guide to the divorced real estate commission: Why buyers and sellers each paying for their own representation is the most significant reform that can be made today in residential real estate
Potential home sellers should read:
How single property websites promote your property in Google.
How custom-made yard signs stop traffic
Honor: Few real estate brokers wish for lesser competition for the sole purpose of raising the standard of customer care but Greg Swann does. Greg organized three online real estate marketing conferences and is organizing one for this fall in San Diego. Over 150 real estate and lending professionals have been introduced to a higher degree of customer care through his carefully organized curriculum.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and Read more
I got lucky. I know it. But being prepared means you increase your luck, right?
So I got a call yesterday about a property I was advertising. It’s a HUD home, and one thing I love about HUD homes is that any broker who is signed up to sell them is encouraged to advertise them. So I have been doing just that. And it generates calls.
I received a call about one of these properties and I threw the play book out the window and just started talking to the caller. Just talking about the property- how much work it might take, and by the way, do you understand the HUD buying process? No? Well it’s different and here’s how… And are you in front of your computer? Okay then, go to this site and where it says Ohio, click there, and by the way, my site is The Brick Ranch so you can see more photos there, and Oh! you just bookmarked my site? Great! Thanks! So here’s more information and….
Suddenly. After 10 minutes of walking the caller through the process, and pointing them here and there, educating and giving away all the information I could in that time period, it occurred to me that maybe they were working with a Realtor. D’oh.
“Are you working with a Realtor?”
“Well.”
Darnitall. I braced myself.
“We have a Realtor who is selling our house.”
Gah.
“But, ” her voice lowers, “we really aren’t happy with the job he’s doing, so we are looking for someone else to help us buy another home.”
Oh. Okay then. I remember this part of the script.
“Would you like me to email you a list of homes as they become available?”
“That would be great!!”
Perhaps the beauty of knowing scripts is that it enables you to do a better job of just being yourself.
While Greg and Brian are talking about “Battling Back”; Eric, Teri and I have been talking about “Throwing Parties”. As in Rent Parties.
If you are not familiar with the term, Rent Parties flourished in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Musicians would make the rounds after their paying gigs, guests would pay a small admission fee to dance and party all night at someone’s apartment, and the host would end up with enough money to pay the landlord for another month.
Greg’s revealing personal post yesterday inspired the idea that we could throw a Rent Party online. And. the party could boogie on 24/7/365.
To my surprise the domain name virtualrentparty.com was available. By last night I had the bare bones foundation of the site up and running; and Teri had incredible visions of the good work that could be done. You can see our work at http://www.virtualrentparty.com
Meanwhile, I am plumb tuckered out. 🙂
Anyone who would like to work with us on building out the content please tell us in the comments; we’re thinking everything from video dance contests, to straight talk around the kitchen table about putting your financial life together. I will quickly and gratefully send any volunteer a login ID and password.
And yes, there are already a couple donations in the hat. I certainly respect that you didn’t intend to induce charity, Mr. Swann, but there it is, your friends won’t leave you to face trouble alone. If you won’t accept the funds, I bet Cathleen’s foster pet project would happily accept them, or Teri has some ideas in her community too.
…but the BattleBack book…
I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.
(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)
But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.
Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.
I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.
It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process Read more
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):
We publish a national real estate industry weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 42 contributors from all over the country, each one an expert in his or her own right. Together we talk about real estate marketing and technology, lending and investment. If you want to know what Realtors and lenders really think, BloodhoundBlog is your keyhole into the industry.
The blog is all about the wired world of real estate, how the participatory internet is changing age-old paradigms of real property and mortgage marketing. When we started three years ago, the Web 2.0 idea of online interaction was still very new. By now, it’s hard to remember a time when these technologies were not ubiquitous.
BloodhoundBlog’s mission is to help Realtors and lenders keep pace with internet tools. In service of that objective, we produce an annual conference called BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Real estate professionals come from all over the country to learn how to market their services in what amounts to a post-marketing marketplace.
This year’s conference ran last week from Tuesday to Friday. We encamped in a hotel near Skyharbor Airport and worked all but continuously for 72 hours. Our world is changing so fast that we felt we had to work that hard, just to learn everything we need to know.
What’s all this to you? BloodhoundBlog is all about promoting excellence in every conceivable way. We do everything we can think of to train Realtors and lenders to provide a better-quality experience by every means attainable.
My objective, expressed baldly, is to chase the bums out of our business. Licensing purports to do this, but it has not. Trade organizations like the National Association of Realtors should do this, but they don’t. But if we can educate consumers to demand better service, better information, better representation, then the bums and the crooks will go get jobs. That’s the way free markets work, when they’re working properly.
Meanwhile, real estate professionals are just catching on to the idea that consumers can see everything we do. Drop in on BloodhoundBlog and keep an eye on us.
On April 27th, ironically the day before BloodhoundBlog Unchained commenced, IndyMac Bank posted a Notice of Trustee’s Sale against our home. I didn’t know about this until this week, although I had known it was a possibility.
This is really nobody’s business. But as a matter of steadfast policy, I have never let anyone make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself. I know I tend to excite the most evil sentiments in people with evil minds, so they may want to take this opportunity to further their self-destruction. This matters to me not at all. I live my life well to the right of the zero on the number line, and the only people I deal with or care about do the same. People who pursue disvalues are of no value to themselves, nor to anyone.
But so as not to introduce this topic and then leave it unexplained, here’s what happened: For the past three years, our outflow has exceeded our inflow. This is not an unusual story in the real estate business, and we have been lucky to have enough high-paying work to at least keep us within reach of profitability. During this same time, as you have seen here, we have completely reengineered everything we think about marketing, with the ultimate test of those ideas beginning only now.
But our debt load became severe enough last year that we had to make some hard choices. I elected to take a chance on our mortgage payments, since there was a plausible threat that we might lose the house anyway. Our choice was to keep the doors open at the risk of those doors themselves. I could see an upswing in our business activity, to the extent that I expected to catch up on the mortgage by the second quarter of 2009, and to catch up on everything by the fourth quarter.
I still expect this to be the case. My one mistake was that I didn’t think IndyMac would pull the trigger this soon. I played chicken and I lost, so now, in addition to buying back Read more
