Archives (page 100 of 372)

January 8, 2010

RPR™ Demo Provides a First Look at the Future of Online Real Estate. Or maybe not.

by Teri Lussier

Rust Belt Realtor

To date, I’ve not paid a lot of attention to RPR™, the REALTORS Property Resource^TM, because so far it’s just a big roll-out hoo-ha PR wingding, which I try to ignore, so the pros and cons and discussions about this being a game changer or not and how are brokers and local MLS going to respond, are online, you can read those yourself.

If you haven’t seen the RPR™ demo yet, go grab a cup of coffee and take a look. At 30 minutes, it’s a nice overview of some of the best features the RPR™ has to offer, and I’m sure there is other stuff for us to discover. Features are nice: Market stats, the ability to keep private and public property notes online, the ability to add layers of information- like a sidewiki- about property, neighborhoods, etc. It’s rich with data, and invites sharing more data and information with other professionals, as well as with our clients. That’s powerful, and empowering if you stop to think about it. All this real estate information that we compile in our heads could be shared with each other online.

But, I’m a simple girl with simple needs. What I want to know right now is this: Does RPR™ offer anything of value for me to share with clients? And the short answer is, yes, it does appear that way. You’ve been doing this for awhile- researching information, compiling that information, presenting that information, and what RPR™ does it make it super simple to research, gather, present, and share property, neighborhood, and market information with our clients, in a very professional, complete, concise manner. In a matter of moments I can compile a professional report to either email or pdf for my clients that includes market stats, neighborhood info, property info, a glossary… Informed clients make the best clients. This is good for consumers.

I know, I know, the path ahead is rife with uncertainty. All that transparency is both liberating and chafing at the same time. Should the NAR mess with this at all? Are there turf wars involved? Why is this information still behind Read more

January 7, 2010

OK to Good Enough to Great to Amazing to Oh My Freakin’ God!

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Books on marketing and service — gotta love ’em. Most, at least in my view are best utilized after shredding — they’re so fulla crap they make stellar fertilizer. ‘Course I say that fully cognizant of the reality I’m pretty much BawldClueless when it comes to effective marketing, so I guess that review should be taken with a boatload of salt. I could spend a year studying it and still not know what real marketers have forgotten. Truth be told, most folks using the moniker, marketing specialist would be Von’s checkers if it wasn’t for the greater sucker theory working so well.

Do I sound bitter? 🙂 I was for a few days, but I’m over it.

I’ll confess to more than my share of marketing blunders, and openly acknowledge I’ve wasted more money on marketing over the last few years than even I can fathom. A few days ago I was lamenting this sorry fact with a friend, who made the oh so witty observation that if that cash had been kept under the mattress I’d now be able to buy several free and clear homes in the Phoenix area. A recent accounting shows just over $250K down the drain — and only in the last five years!

When first seeing that number, I began staring in the mirror while chanting “Learning curve…learning curve…learning curve…”

Do I still hire folks to, gulp, market for me? Yep. I’m not a DIY guy, nor do I kid myself that by reading books, posts, and watchin’ videos that somehow the marketing light will suddenly show me the way. Many can make that work, I’m not one of ’em.

I’m not blessed with the love of what I do for a living. Don’t get me wrong, I love much about it, just not the whole. I love the process of talkin’ with new prospects — diggin’ into their particular circumstances, mining for problems, then creating solutions. It’s like heroin to me. I need regular fixes or I tend to get cranky. I love seeing and hearing folks as they first begin to see the light at Read more

January 6, 2010

DISCerning my ideal real estate team: Which personality profiles will work best in which position?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about a foreclosure caravan in South Florida. It was the usual NYT sob story, but what popped out at me was the real estate agent. All through the piece he is arm-twisting his victims, and in several places his is plainly guilty of unsolicited — and very likely ill-advised — financial planning.

This morning on ActiveRain I read a post from an agent essentially boasting that he blacklists certain agents listings, keeping them from his buyer clients so that he won’t have to deal with practitioners of whom he disapproves.

I’ve been a real estate broker since October of 2005. If you’ve ever wondered why we don’t have agents, those two examples are perfectly illustrative. Presumably both of these Realtors are acceptable to their own brokers, but I would sever both of them in a heartbeat. They are each one of them a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I could not be rid of either one of them quickly enough.

Except that I will probably never have this problem, because, even when we do start to recruit agents, I will never have anything to do with people who would even think of putting their own interests ahead of the client’s.

You may at this point want to protest that I am being too harsh, but my belief is that Caesar’s wife must be above reproach. Never-been-sued is not a mark of pride. What we want is to achieve a level of rigor and candor in the work we do such that there is no room in our clients’ mind for even an implied accusation. We will have done our jobs the way I want them done when there is no possibility of even a hint of a doubt that we would ever serve our own interests at the expense of the interests of the people we work for.

People here and elsewhere have written a lot about the ideal post-Web-2.0 real estate brokerage. I’ve not participated in those discussions, because it’s not something I’m interested in. I don’t care how someone is going to make a brokerage of Read more

January 5, 2010

Are the uninformed chatterboxes in your area insisting that the real estate market has recovered? You may want to defer the celebration. Even so, this could be the golden moment for investors in Phoenix.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I’ve known for six months or more that there was a sweet spot on the horizon for investors and other highly-solvent buyers. That event was delayed by the first-time home-buyer’s tax credit. Today’s news about declines in the number of pending purchase contracts is a symptom of the market returning to an unstimulated level of demand. I watched the dropoff reflected in today’s news as it happened last fall. Lenders cut off new applications for first-timers and, just like that, price pressure eased, available inventories started to rise and it came to be a lot easier to get a house under contract.

We’re all waiting for the other shoe — the shadow inventory — to drop, but the supply of the homes I want most for my investors has almost doubled since mid-October, from around 350 units then to just over 600 today.

Here’s even better news for buyers (not for banks): Prices are going down.

This is the Cliff’s Notes for the last four months, as reflected in the BloodhoundRealty.com Market Basket of Homes:

September: +3.15%
October: +2.14%
November: +2.22%
December: -8.03%

That’s a huge drop for December — giving back almost everything we’ve gained since April, 2009. But, interestingly enough, the ratio of sales price to list price was positive. In other words, there is still competition for listed homes, but list prices are dropping.

I don’t know how it is by you, but this is the perfect storm for investors in Metropolitan Phoenix. The homes are in much better condition than they were this time last year, and the prices are at hovering just above the 2009 low.

Are we at the bottom? Feels like it — but we’re going to be here for a while. Positive cash flow is easy, but cash flow is all there is right now. If you’re not a buy-and-hold investor, Phoenix is not for you. I’m sure that’s true in most rental markets.

But if you’re thinking of buying a rental home anywhere in the South or Southwest, reflect on this: This could be the coldest winter in 25 years. Whether they can afford to or not, people are going to move. When Read more

January 4, 2010

Bright spots…

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

For all the doom and gloom about the economy etc., it’s important to remember that the productive talents of human beings can create better lives for all of us.

Technology is one sector of the economy that, broadly speaking, has witnessed tremendous innovation over the past 30 years. Nearly the whole panoply of consumer electronics – cell phones, smartphones, computers, digital recorders, the Intertubes, digital cameras – did not exist in 1980, or existed in such a rudimentary form (I remember playing on my Uncle’s 48k – or was it 16k? – Apple II+) that they were novelties.

In fact, real wages have stagnated or declined since 1970, such that any improvements in the day-to-day American life are attributable through the human inventive power. Some people make better stuff for the rest of us to consume and enjoy, and, of course, to use in our work.

Pretty cool.

Now, this might just be a bunch of marketing puffery, but this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may be the best ever:

“In my 28 years of attending the CES and participating in it and being a part of it and running it for most of that time, I can honestly say there will be more innovation at this show than any one in history,” Gary Shapiro [president and CEO of the CEA] said.

If you’re like me, this will set your heart aflutter: “rumors are flying that Apple will unveil a touch-screen tablet computer January 26.”

January 2, 2010

New York Times on the Loan Modification Program

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

The New York Times is reporting what everyone at Bloodhound Blog has known for a long time about the Federal Government’s attempt to encourage loan modifications:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

If you’re a fan of Peter Schiff, then you heard him say in the fall of 2008 that the government’s cure to a bursting asset bubble would be worse than the underlying problem itself. He was right, but the logic of politics does not care about the long term economic health of the country.

Here’s The New York Times telling us that government-backed loan modifications are:

1. delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate,

2. [encouraging] desperate homeowners [to send] payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences,

3. [are allowing banks to use] temporary loan modifications under the Obama plan as justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books,

4. [are preventing] housing prices [from] drop[ping] to levels at which enough Americans can afford to buy,

5. delaying the return to work for carpenters, construction workers, and a whole sector of the American economy.

These numbers tell the story:

In 2008, more than 1.7 million homes were “lost” through foreclosures, short sales or deeds in lieu of foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Last year, more than two million homes were lost, and Economy.com expects that this year’s number will swell to 2.4 million.

Now, if in late 2008, the government had simply let foreclosures go forward without holding out hope for a loan modification program, it would’ve been an awful as opposed to merely bad 2009. But we would be seeing a recovery in the next 6 months. Instead, we’re just going to see more foreclosures for the next two years.

Update: The Washington Independent has a good Read more

January 2, 2010

Mortgage Market Year in Review

by Tom Vanderwell

Mortgage Officer

So Long 2009! (Note – I originally sent this out as part of my weekly e-mail series – Mortgage Market Week in Review – but the response was so positive that I thought I’d repost it here.)

Rather than doing my normal Mortgage Market Week in Review, I thought I’d send out something a bit different. I’m going to, instead, take a look back at what I think were the three biggest issues in the mortgage market in 2009. On Monday, I’m going to take a look at the top 5 issues that I believe we’ll be facing going forward in 2010.

Neither one of them is going to be an extremely pleasant list, but I can guarantee you that they’ll be honest lists!

Tom Vanderwell

E-mail Me

1. Without a doubt, the Read more

December 31, 2009

You know what? Despite everything: Happy New Year!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I wrote this last night in a comment to a post:

The United States is being run as a kleptocracy, but instead of plundering the treasury and the accumulated wealth of the nation in behalf of a small criminal conspiracy, we rob from a rapidly-diminishing productive sector in behalf of a vast and ever-burgeoning population of moochers — at all strata of society.

You can’t flip on the television without running across a cipher for your own grandmother proudly announcing how some politically-connected vendor has taught her how to rape the taxpayers — which is to say you and your kids, her own great-grandchildren — in her own behalf. This will be the real triumph of Obamacare — to turn every last resident of this once-proud nation into sniveling beggars, each one trying to snap up more benefits than his neighbor.

We don’t have to eat each others’ flesh to be cannibals, and it seems plausible to me that we will not be suffered to live a life of freedom and independence, in the very near future. The entitlement mentality is such a shameful thing that the people who use it as a means of enslaving each other will not suffer the contradiction of an objective renunciation of their creed. In any case, once you’ve eaten a meal taken by theft, you’re not as apt to make noises about law and order, property rights, all that sanctimonious nonsense. Who am I do judge, once I’ve drunk my neighbor’s blood?

That’s dour, but I’m afraid it’s much too exact. Yes, I know that things are always worse than they seem, that the doppler effect of the noise that is the news makes the onrushing crisis sound more ominous even as receding events seem to race away harmlessly. But I fear we are at a tipping point, a place where the grasshoppers so far outnumber the ants that there really is no hope, going forward, for a life based on self-reliance, on philosophical egoism, political individualism and economic free enterprise. The United States has resolved to resolve the contradiction of chattel slavery by making slaves of Read more

December 31, 2009

Stop The Presses! BawldGuy Agrees With Arianna Huffington?!

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Live long enough and you’ll pretty much see and hear everything. I’ve seen a pitcher strike out five — count ’em — five batters in one inning, standing right behind the catcher. I’ve seen a so-called conservative president actually increase the requested spending of a bill authored by Ted Kennedy. Hell, I’ve even seen, be still my heart, the Chargers in the Super Bowl and the Padres in two World Series.

I wonder what odds Las Vegas would lay on me agreeing with the Huffington Post that today is New Year’s Eve? Let’s just say she and I could save each other a buncha time on election days by not voting, since we cancel each other’s vote every time out on virtually every issue/office.

But then it happened. Huffington coauthored a post with Rob Johnson on the topic of what we, as regular folk, can do about the abusive conduct of most of the To Big To Fail banks. It’s both simple and brilliant. They even provide a pithy video and a link to a list of local banks in your community.

The idea? Let’s all take our money outa those thug-like banks and move it to local institutions. The money will still be equally insured. Imagine the message it’ll send to not only the TBTF’s but to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol HIll who, so far, have been the poster folks for clueless in D.C.

Anywho, thought it was worth sharing.

Happy New Year!!

December 31, 2009

And there’s a hand my trusty friend ! And give us a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.

by Teri Lussier

Rust Belt Realtor

2009 beat me up.

Oh sure, I’ve been beat up in other years, but this is different because I’m not able to look back and say, “Well, thank god that’s over,” and move on, because it’s not over. The body blows that 2009 delivered are coming along with us into 2010 and we will be dealing with them indefinitely, which isn’t what the New Year is supposed to look like, is it?

When I sit down to make resolutions and plans, something I love to do, I now have to factor in time for unknowns, time for emergency trips to hospitals, time for staying put and just… waiting. But really, how do you factor in unknowns? How do you schedule trips to the ER on your calendar? How do you plan for the unplanned-but-inevitable?

I’m not sure, truth be told, but I think it has to do with using your time wisely, something I can do, but typically don’t. It has to do with flexibility, something I do fairly easily, and it has to do with focus. Um, huh? Focus? What’s that? I twitter, remember? I’m an awesome friend to ask a question of because I’m the person who will drop everything and help you find an answer, because what can be more fun (key word) than finding new fun things to do, because who knows what new fun things will come from that discovery, leading to more new fun things… and well, it’s much more fun than it sounds.

Don’t judge. I have strengths and I have weaknesses just like you, I simply need to learn to work with them under the 2009 rules. I can do this.

I’m going to have to become more mobile. Mobility is flexibility is productivity for 2010. But bigger than that for me, and I suspect I’m not alone, is using time wisely. It’s not a hard thing to do, but for me, it can be difficult to master. Using time wisely in an unstable environment means I get to always ask myself the big question: What is the best use of my time right now?

And here’s the thing: Read more

December 31, 2009

Using the DISC system to understand the boys of Entourage

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I’ve talked about the DISC system of personality profiling in past. I’m talking about it again, now, because I want to use it to discuss how we are going to build our ideal real estate team. For now, I just want to talk about thinking in a DISC-like way, using on-the-fly DISC analysis to evaluate and respond to the people you come into contact with.

Here are the four DISC categories:

Dominance; Influence; Steadiness; Compliance

That’s less than useful. Here’s a better way of understand what DISC is measuring:

D’s are drivers. They’re all about getting things Done. A high-D (c’est moi) can be a prick to work for (yeah), but every successful boss will have a lot of D in his personality.

I’s are all about Image, about the way other people perceive them, their accomplishments and their stuff. Many successful salespeople are strong on I traits.

S’s are strongly associated with family life and social communities generally. If your office has a Secret Santa gift exchange, it’s being run by an S.

C’s are associated with calculation, computation and a comprehensive attention to detail. If the till comes up three cents short, a D will toss in some coins to get on with business, but a C will keep counting and counting until the cause of the discrepancy is uncovered.

Here are two more axes for understanding DISC profiling:

D’s and I’s are about telling, where S’s and C’s are about asking.

And D’s and C’s are about process, where I’s and S’s are about people.

It would be terribly convenient (at least for me) if people fell neatly into one DISC quadrant or another, but of course they don’t. Some people are chameleons, with just about the same amounts of each characteristic. More commonly, people will tend to have one strong trait and another that is fairly strong, with the other two coming in less strong.

So, for example, in my own idealized self-image, I am all D and nothing else. But in the reality of day-to-day life, I am a high D with relatively high I-like tendencies — which you could guess just by reading this post. I want Read more

December 30, 2009

The All Too Often Missing Ingredient

by Jeff Brown

Real Estate Investments Broker

Over the weekend I was reminded of an illustration of what true commitment is. The story was about breakfast, specifically ham and eggs. You’ve probably heard it. Grandma first told the story to me when I was in high school.

It goes like this. The chicken is involved in the breakfast. She laid the eggs, and went about her business. The pig however is committed to that breakfast. A huge difference.

Think about any part of your life and ask yourself whether you’re the pig or the chicken. How about your business? Are you ‘involved’ like the chicken, or ‘committed’ like the pig?

I’ll only speak for myself here. When I take on a client, time is not an issue. Most of my clients will require many years to achieve their goals. Geography isn’t an issue. We’re already in several states, headed for more. Furthermore, I require the same piggish behavior from my clients. I simply will not work with a client who cares less than I do about their outcome. No exceptions.

You can, as I have, look at areas in your life and your level of commitment to them. How about your kids, your marriage, or your core beliefs. Put them to the test: Are you the pig or the chicken?

Maybe most importantly, why are you one or the other?

December 30, 2009

Unchained Melodies: A sublime mash-up of William Shatner’s cover version of Common People

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I have time to write software today for the first time in a while — which is well because we need it. While I was working, Radio Paradise (commercial-free semi-hip music for middle-aged white people) played William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, and it made me so nuts I had to go out and find a clip.

Glad I did, because this mash-up is just perfect. I grew up in a grimy industrial town in downstate Illinois, way over on the wrong side of the tracks. I was lucky to have school teachers who were old enough to have pre-dated the unionization of compulsory illiteracy — but that just means I know how to tell you to go have safe sex with yourself in all the best dead languages. If you’ve never bought a steak without weighing the cost, this song is for you.

December 30, 2009

Why are people in New York and Connecticut unhappy, while the folks in Louisiana and Tennessee are more satisfied with their lives? The obvious answer is the true one: Taxes and spending.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

More from The Wall Street Journal: People in high-tax states are less satisfied with their lives than those in low-tax states.

Who knew?

That’s not a fair question. Everyone who can do math already knew this. But what’s interesting is that it points the way forward for all states, especially the ones currently losing their high-earning tax-slaves to less onerous tax-plantations: Cut taxes. Cut spending. Get rid of your kleptocratic union laws.

Or: In the words of John Galt, “Get the hell out of my way!”

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason — ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

In states with high property, income, and sales taxes like New York, people have less money to spend on other things that make them happy. They have less money to spend on vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care. Another problem may be that people receive a low return on their tax dollars. The study’s authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don’t provide Read more

December 30, 2009

Making New Year’s resolutions is easy. It’s keeping them that’s hard. How people are getting year ’round results from their year-end goals.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

From The Wall Street Journal comes more than resolutions. More, even, than sheer resolve. A set of specific tactics and techniques to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions enduringly.

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

My resolution is to read the whole thing.

BloodhoundBlog

Archives (page 100 of 372)

RPR™ Demo Provides a First Look at the Future of Online Real Estate. Or maybe not.

by Teri Lussier

OK to Good Enough to Great to Amazing to Oh My Freakin’ God!

by Jeff Brown

DISCerning my ideal real estate team: Which personality profiles will work best in which position?

by Greg Swann

Are the uninformed chatterboxes in your area insisting that the real estate market has recovered? You may want to defer the celebration. Even so, this could be the golden moment for investors in Phoenix.

by Greg Swann

Bright spots…

by Damon Chetson

New York Times on the Loan Modification Program

by Damon Chetson

Mortgage Market Year in Review

by Tom Vanderwell

You know what? Despite everything: Happy New Year!

by Greg Swann

Stop The Presses! BawldGuy Agrees With Arianna Huffington?!

by Jeff Brown

And there’s a hand my trusty friend ! And give us a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.

by Teri Lussier

Using the DISC system to understand the boys of Entourage

by Greg Swann

The All Too Often Missing Ingredient

by Jeff Brown

Unchained Melodies: A sublime mash-up of William Shatner’s cover version of Common People

by Greg Swann

Why are people in New York and Connecticut unhappy, while the folks in Louisiana and Tennessee are more satisfied with their lives? The obvious answer is the true one: Taxes and spending.

by Greg Swann

Making New Year’s resolutions is easy. It’s keeping them that’s hard. How people are getting year ’round results from their year-end goals.

by Greg Swann

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