BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: April 2011 (page 2 of 2)

April 14, 2011

Approbation Junkies

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I wonder, with regard to an addiction to things, if there isn’t a deeper cause… maybe a hole that needs filling. I ascribe most of our eventual attacks on ego to a lack of continuity we create within ourselves, and our inability to either align our external actions or accept our internal truth.

Sean Purcell commented here, not long ago.  Good stuff.  I wanted to bring it to the forefront.

Here’s the thing: needing approbation from others has made me weaker than anything else.  It’s made me a pawn of a dilettante, a hustler for a buck and it’s made me do all of the smarmy, seedy things I’ve ever done.   The root cause has been making someone like me.

Think of this: when you’ve gone to a store with a big ticket item, and you get an ingratiating, smarmy salesperson there.  His goal in life is to make you like him.  Is there anything more repulsive?   You see a car salesperson that wants you to seem like a friend.  Is anyone fooled by the saccharine compliments?  Anyone?

And if they convince you that you need to approve of them, you leave with a bad taste in your mouth, not unlike bile.  I’ve been that guy, on both sides of the counter.  I know.

It’s like going into a gentleman’s club, as if some dude in his late 40’s is gentrified by ogling daddy issue girls in their early 20’s.

Approbation is carbon monoxide.  Seeking it in lieu of achievement means a death of a million cuts.

The Oatmeal has it right.

Jesus, also, has it right:

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  (Matthew 6:2)

And what a reward.  Seriously.  What a reward to have dirtbags approve of you.

We clamor for it…the approval of strangers….(or in the case of Real Estate conferences, strangers that cheat on their wives.)  A standing ovation devoid of meaning?  We haven’t achieved jack, but we want the adulation anyway.  We do so much pandering.

To Read more

April 12, 2011

Two old soldiers in the wired world of real estate — Jott.com and the Flip video cameras — are shuffling off to the hi-tech graveyard.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve loved Jott.com since it was introduced. I use it every day — mainly to send reminders to myself, but also as my primary interface into Google Calendar. No more. Jott ends five years of gamely trying to get people to understand its value on May 3rd.

A lesser cause for mourning, Cisco flipped the switch on the Flip video camera line today. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for this for a while. The best idea Flip had was easy integration into YouTube — a feature your phone has by now, I should expect. Meanwhile, we switched almost all of our video to our Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot cameras as soon as we got them.

The first BloodhoundBlog Unchained was clip-documented via Flip cameras, so I am not indifferent to see it go. Just to put extra icing on the Flip’s farewell cupcake, Cisco paid — wait for it — $590 million for the company in 2009.

Ultimately, I won’t weep, though. I can’t remember the last time we used the Flip for anything. Jott, on the other hand, is going to leave a big hole in my workday.

April 12, 2011

Thomas Sowell’s budget-cutting idea: Cut welfare for billionaires.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So Republicans got hustled on their paltry budget cuts. What a surprise. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is busy fixing what’s wrong with America by tinkering with abortion rules and gun control laws.

This is an excellent way to blow a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It seems obvious to me that what needs to be cut is not spending but regulation. If the Feds dumped OSHA, for example, that would not only not only cut the budget by all those staff lines, it would result in an “economic miracle” of new productivity. The same would be true at the state and municipal level. Less government means more wealth twice: Fewer “broken windows” and the added productivity that results from investing the money that would otherwise have been wasted on regulatory broken windows.

This is something Realtors and other real estate professionals can be doing in this unprecedented moment: Teaching the Tea Partiers what matters in an emergency and what can wait for calmer seas. Quoted below is economist Thomas Sowell with an excellent idea: Get America’s billionaire tax-vampires off our necks:

Trying to reduce the deficit by cutting spending runs into an old familiar counterattack. There will be all kinds of claims by politicians and sad stories in the media about how these cuts will cause the poor to go hungry, the sick to be left to die, etc.

My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires. Many, if not most, people are probably unaware that the government is handing out the taxpayers’ money to billionaires. But agricultural subsidies go to a number of billionaires. Very little goes to the ordinary farmer.

Big corporations also get big bucks from the government, not only in agricultural subsidies but also in the name of “green” policies, in the name of “alternative energy” policies, and in the name of whatever else will rationalize shoveling the taxpayers’ money out the door to whomever the administration designates — for its own political reasons.

The usual political counterattacks against spending cuts will not work against this new kind of spending-cut approach. How many heart-rending stories can the media run about billionaires Read more

April 11, 2011

How To Be a Coward: Part 10.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Greg likes Michelle Pfeifer. I can dig it.

This is more my speed. Look, there’s always – always a justification to surrender, give up liberty, give up more. There’s always – always some call to pretend that everything is OK.

And we surrender in our selves first, because we become addicted to things. We become addicted to stuff. That stuff owns us.

Then we become addicted to making nice. Because if we’re not nice, someone might not let us have stuff.

Screw that. Take back your dignity and only tolerate excellence.

Hard to do.

April 10, 2011

Do you want to undo the damage the NAR has done to the American economy? If you’re not a criminal — if you’re not a predator — stop lending your moral and financial power to people who are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a fun little exercise for your brain:

Suppose I sneak up behind you, throw a burlap bag over your head, tie you up and then lock you in my basement. Would you regard that as a crime?

I don’t mean just a call-the-cops crime or a phone-your-lawyer crime. I don’t mean simply a violation of some arcane statute law. Even if we were on a desert island, with no written law of any sort, would you still regard my actions as a crime against your person and your liberty?

I know I’m asking you to think for yourself, all by your lonesome, with no hints or signals from the mob and no helpful pre-printed guide to clue you in to the “right” answers. Poor you. So I’ll cut you a break: You can feel free to quit this tiring exercise at the very first instance that you are able to truthfully answer, “No, I would not regard that as a crime.”

So let’s do another one:

Instead of locking you in the basement, let’s say I let you work all day in the sunshine and fresh air, tilling and tending to my fields? You are still my prisoner, but you’re not tied up or locked up. Would you still regard that as a crime?

And, hey, we all know that forcing people to work for free is slavery, so what if I pay you a nice wage for your efforts? You’re still my prisoner, and you still have to do the work I tell you to do, but now you’re being paid handsomely. Would you regard even that little trifle as a crime?

So how about this? Suppose I set you free? Manumission! Just like you pictured it! There’s only one catch. Whenever you buy or sell food, you have to do it through me, like a feudal serf. There are other people who could trade with you, perhaps leaving you with quite a bit more profit than I will, but you are forbidden from doing business with any of those people. You must go through me, paying my price. Would you regard that as a crime?

Clarify Read more

April 8, 2011

Friday morning motivation: Computers is dead, kitsch leads to cannibalism — and none of this says anything about you.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde

Like the kitschy “antique” phones at Restoration Hardware, this is decadence.

Nothing but a coy little pomo trick of the mind, but this is how it starts: You have no reason to prefer our product over any other, so we’ll tease you with nostalgia and cool-geek chic, instead. There’s a laptop that praises itself on the strength of its Unique Selling Proposition: Interchangeable “skins.”

You heard it here first: Computers is dead.

But despair you nothing: Particle physicists have caught a glimpse of an unseen aspect of our world, unthought of just a year ago. These are the first days of understanding mass as subatomic physics. Very cool.

The implication? Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to my right. But that says nothing about where I can take myself. The human race is Fortune’s treasured pet, obviously, and with luck we will continue to outrun outright predation, the terminal stage of cultural decadence.

Which side are you on? Are you just another gelatinous face in the mob, grasping for some way to trick people into doing business with you? Or do you have the character to bring real value to the marketplace?

April 6, 2011

The Realtor Party, Part II: The Implied Accusation, and Other (Missed?) Opportunities

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

While Greg Swann takes on the big thinker issues behind the proposed Realtor Party Political Survival Initiative, I’m pondering a more microscopic view- how might this affect the relationship between my clients and me. Maybe not at all. I have no reason to believe that the public will think much about it, at least for a few years, and they may even like it. So what’s the harm?

We know that REALTORs rank along side used car salesmen, lawyers, politicians, and Stuff You Scrap Off Your Shoe when it comes to public opinion polls. As an industry, we are not trusted. At this point in time, our industry is widely considered a necessary evil. Why should that be? We have a Code of Ethics. Doesn’t that make us all, I don’t know, ethical? Our image problem is so pervasive and institutionalized that millions of dollars go toward advertising to get the word out that we are professionals. So how does the Realtor Party solve that? It doesn’t. In fact, it makes things worse. The reason (as in one reason) given for the RPPSI is that as an industry we need to compete with other self-interests. This benefits our image how?

So, I’m thinking… What if? What if we turned away from that? What if we stopped wrestling with pigs and the dirty business of politics? What if instead of more politics, we opened our eyes to the extraordinary opportunity in front of us?

This site is a treasure trove and one of my favorite posts is, The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude… It’s not over dramatizing to say that this post changed the way I communicate with clients. In fact, I’ve printed parts of it to give to my clients, who also love it. In part:

The Implied Accusation is the underground river flowing through every unhappy relationship. To address good and evil, all you have to do is bring things out into the Read more

April 5, 2011

What might have happened if the NAR had not caused this economic downturn? We don’t know. What we know is that the National Association of Realtors was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This post is grown from a comment left by Brian Summerfield, editor of Realtor magazine. Before I begin, I want to commend Brian for daring to show up here to debate this topic. I think he’s wrong, but the man has more guts than the people who pay him.

Now then: I said:

Doesn’t mean that banksters would not have come up with other flavors of larceny.

To which Brian replied:

Greg, you toss this off as an afterthought, but I see it as a key point. You say the sine qua non of the Great Recession was NAR, but it was in fact systemic flaws in the global financial system. Without collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps, there would have been no Great Recession. And NAR had nothing, nothing, to do with the creation of those “innovations” of finance.

As you, the reader, may have noted, there are people writing and commenting here who are more than unusually interested in philosophy — as a map of the universe and as a discipline of the mind. Brian’s argument turns on what normal people call “hypotheticals.” Jim Klein calls them contra-factuals, where I am apt to rave on about subjunctivity. In all three cases, we are talking about the same thing: We are making what we hope are logical claims about imaginary worlds, worlds not in evidence.

The universe outside our minds has an independent and prior existence, and the objects and events that comprise that universe are real and factual existents. When I make a statement about the real world — the universe of real things — my statement is subject to independent verification. The object I claim to see is either present or it is absent. The event I claim is happening is either occurring or it is not. Disputes about statements like these are possible only to the insane or to philosophy professors — but I repeat myself.

So: These things really happened:

1. The National Association of Realtors either wrote or lobbied for a great host of Rotarian Socialist laws devised to churn the residential real estate market for the benefit of real estate brokers Read more

April 1, 2011

What does it mean that the NAR won’t defend itself from the charge that it was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I threw down the gauntlet — and not for the first time:

It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.

The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.

We know they’re spying on us. And we know their PR pimp demonstrated that he got bilked when he paid for his law degree, so poorly does he argue.

So: Why doesn’t the brave National Association of Realtors — the largest, richest, most-powerful Rotarian Socialist corporate-welfare-tit-sucking political pressure group in the land — why won’t it stand up on its hind legs and defend itself?

For a first reason: Because it can’t. Better than any of us, the grand poohbah blood-sucking vampires of the NAR know beyond all room for doubt that it was their legislative initiatives that were the seeds, stems, stalks, branches, trees and forests that caused the housing boom, the housing bust and the Great Recession.

And for a second reason: Because they are actively plotting to do still more, still worse damage to the American economy. They will not stop sucking until they have sucked the body politic dry.

How do we know all of this true? Cum taces, clamas. When you say nothing, you shout.

They don’t defend themselves because they can’t. They know they are criminals. They pray, every sleepless night, that you do not know it.

In fact, the silence of your putative “leaders” does not prove me right. That would require an argument — an argument only I am happy to make. But the fact that the National Association of Realtors does not challenge my arguments is potent evidence that they themselves believe I am correct.

Are you waiting for the NAR to argue that someone else is responsible for the Great Recession — for the ruin of your own finances and for the devastation to be delivered to your children and grandchildren?

Don’t hold your breath. They know they’re at fault. And so do you.

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