From my email:
The bank has chosen 2 offers to move forward with. They are in the middle of the countering process. If something does happen with any of those, then I will place yours as backup along with the other 16 offers.
Emphasis added — alas.
Archives (page 103 of 372)
Just because you’ve found yourself in a position to quit your day job, and sail into the sunset, should you?
If we assume you’re financially set and your Purposeful Plan has found the cool end of the rainbow, what will you do? So many of us use artificial rest stops in our lives as an excuse to do one thing or another.
My dad sat down one weekend and set a business goal for himself with a 10 year time period for its accomplishment. Big problem. He was one of those guys born with only one gear — overdrive. For nearly five straight years he worked with less than a total (not counting a few sick days here and there) of 30 days off.
He was definitely a thinker, but once he believed he’d figured something out, either lead the way, follow, or get mowed down, ‘cuz he was gonna get to Point B. His motto was given to him by his sixth grade teacher when he pointed his finger at 11 year old Dad and said, “Don’t make excuses Brown, make good!” And he did. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and at least for Dad the problem was simple.
He never seemed to ask himself about life after achieving a goal. Like so many investors who read books and buy videos to learn how to buy investment property, he never asked a crucial question, much less come up with the answer.
Then what?
Just like buying real estate investments — anyone can buy something. Is it the right something? If so, and it rises in value — then what? Uh oh. Planning for retirement begs the ‘then what?’ question like a puppy happily wagging his tail who won’t go away. Figure out what your ‘then what?’ is and you’ll be way ahead of the game.
There was the story he told me about having some drinks after work one evening with some friends. They got to talking about business, as they all owned their own real estate firms. Before he knew what was happening, the conversation had veered sharply into Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
If you’ve wondered where that inflation was, you might start seeing signs of it today. Economic data released today are a great example of why inflation is a monetary consequence and not an economic one:
New York metro manufacturing activity slowed WAY less than expected:
Factories in the New York region unexpectedly expanded at the slowest pace in five months in December, indicating manufacturing may provide less of a thrust for the economy in coming months.
Wholesale prices jumped WAY more than expected:
The 1.8 percent increase in prices paid to factories, farmers and other producers was more than twice as large as anticipated and followed a 0.3 percent gain in October, according to Labor Department data released today in Washington. Excluding food and fuel, so-called core prices also exceeded the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
Industrial production rose a tad, mostly from exports which may be a consequence of a weaker dollar :
Manufacturers are benefiting from rising demand overseas as the global economy recovers from the worst slump since World War II. A 12 percent drop in the value of the dollar from a four- year high on March 3 against its major trading partners is making American goods more competitive. Exports have risen for six consecutive months since reaching a three-year low in April.
What’s this all mean? It could very well mean that all this cheap money is starting to work its way into the economy…from the producers’ side. If those producers can’t pass along the higher prices to the consumer, because of a paradigm shift in consumer demand, we’re going to see a lot more business failures. That could lead to higher unemployment.
OR…it could mean something much worse; it could mean the feared currency collapse is underway.
Art Laffer once suggested that America’s “great export is our monetary policy” (VIDEO). Since that utterance to Peter Schiff, Laffer’s written a book admonishing the Government for the very strategy he endorsed. Laffer’s lost credibility aside, it is instructional to note that we, as a Nation, have become overly reliant on foreign capital. It looks like that party could be over. If Read more
A couple of thoughts about this article from the New York Times:
- It’s true. Anecdotally, I’d have to say that depending on the day, anywhere from 30-50% of the people who I discuss refinancing with are either not able to do it because their income has fallen or because property values have dropped. Now wait, you’re probably thinking, “I thought that the government was allowing people to refinance even if their mortgage was over 100% of the value of their property. They are, but there are a couple of caveats to that:
- The loan has to be with either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and a substantial portion of the market isn’t with either one of those. If you want to find out whether your loan is with either one of them, check Fannie Mae Loans or check Freddie Mac Loans to find out.
- If you have a second mortgage/home equity line of credit on your house and the combined balance of the two loans exceeds 105% of the value of your home (but is less than 125%) then you can still refinance, but the pricing adjustments that Fannie and Freddie charge are so extensive that unless your interest rate is over 6%, it’s probably not worth refinancing.
- If you are like a LOT of people in today’s economy, your credit score isn’t quite as high as it used to be. It might be because you’ve had struggles to make some payments on time, it might be because you’ve had some of the credit lines cut on some of your credit cards (thereby lowering your credit scores because you’ve got too much of your available credit tied up), it might be a variety of reasons. But the end result is the same. In order to get the best possible rate, you need to have either:
- A 5% equity position in your house and no second mortgage or
- A first mortgage of no more than 80% of the Read more
So I’ve been building a criminal practice… I’ve now reached the point that I’m bringing in enough clients to make that self-sustaining in terms of paying the bills and generating some income. Criminal practice is fun, but limited in terms of compensation.
My intention has always been to add at least one, maybe two areas of practice onto that. I’ve been considering some kind of debt/bankruptcy law or equine law (or both). Of course, I don’t want to spread myself too thin. There’s a lot to learn in each area. Equine law is uncharted. There are a few practitioners, but none doing it the way I’d like it to be done. I’d need to invent a whole business model myself, test it, then innovate. In addition to that, I’d need to get acquainted with areas of the law for which there are few, if any, mentors. There’d be a lot of self-learning.
Debt/bankruptcy law is pretty well charted, although I have my own innovations I’d like to introduce, particularly on the business and marketing end. The good thing is that while I’d be able to innovate in certain respects, I wouldn’t have to develop a business model out of whole cloth. And there are tried and true litigation methods, and “Continuing Legal Education” classes that teach you those methods.
So I’m in a bit of a quandry. I’m leaning toward the debt/bankruptcy practice because it is proven and because I can anticipate returns in the first half of 2010. These returns are not insignificant. Equine law may be a time and money suck for a while before either failing or being a huge winner. The upside on equine law could be huge, much bigger than bankruptcy/debt law.
Here’s one additional consideration: If you’re a pessimist about this economy, you should expect bankruptcy and debt law to be a thriving area for years and years to come.
Any thoughts?
All right: So: Let’s start in the middle.
First, we have four cell phones among the two of us. We have the two spares in case we need to put a phone in the pocket of a subcontractor. We keep a close eye on the folks who work with us, but we don’t ever want for our people to be without a lifeline.
Even so, the phones we actually use are the iPhones. It seems plausible to me that I may add a Droid and a Pre in 2010, both of them to keep any eye on what else can be done. But the iPhone app universe is exploding like the universe of time, space, mass and energy, and it seems reasonable to me that that the iPhone will be driving cell phone/pocket computer/etc. innovation for the foreseeable future.
Just in recent days, the appworld has added live video streaming and real-time credit card processing, and my thinking is that there are a lot of as yet undisclosed tricks in the iPhone developers’ APIs. In other words, I suspect that Apple has been holding back on the iPhone’s feature set to kill competitive features as they’re aborning, nipping every supposed incipient iPhone-killer in the bud.
I realized last night that I want for my laptop (a MacBook Pro) and my desktop computer (an iMac) to be the same one computer. Does that make sense? I want for those two computers to be cloned and continuously-syncing instances of the same one database of files. And I want for my iPhone to be a moon of that doubled planetary system.
This is singularity thinking: One way that human beings could leap to the next level of our evolution is by moving into computing hardware. The philosophy of all this is brain-breaking: Hardware geeks insist that the human mind must be a finite-state machine, while everyone with an introspective consciousness acts reflexively upon a seemingly undoubted belief in free will.
That’s a problem we’ll have to deal with on the way to the singularity. Meanwhile, a software instance of “you” could be cloned to live on as many hardware devices Read more
Elizabeth Duke is on the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve and I think she hit the nail on the head……
Fed’s Duke Outlines New Mortgage Market : HousingWire || financial news for the mortgage market
“Some would argue that most of the really risky behavior is now out of the market,” Duke said. “But, unfortunately, the backlash has restricted a lot of perfectly responsible lending as well. Banks are reluctant to put any but the lowest possible risk loans in their portfolios.”
The Verizon versus AT&T debate has come up lately particularly with the introduction of the Droid. I don’t even use a smart-phone yet, but I am married to someone who has been an expert in the network side since before the first portable phones were brief case phones converted from car-phones.
So, I came across this article that has further thoughts on the AT&T / I-Phone versus Verizon / Droid for network performance and coverage. I think he may be on to something in that he supposes the I-Phone has created a higher expectation for AT&T. It sounds plausible to me.
I’m imagining U-Stream on 4G already…
I stumbled across an article today from Inman News about the NAR allowing the use of the Realtor Logo on headstones. Turns out the news was shared on Twitter!
If you would like to read the article you can find the story here.
If this was not so crazy I would not believe it. I know that many of you will be rushing out to take advantage of this change of policy =)
Okay, this is actually kind of funny.
Paul Volcker, the former Fed Chairman, the guy who maneuvered us through the inflation mess in the early ’80’s, made a speech on Tuesday to a group of higher level financial executives. These are the “power” people in the industry, the “who’s who” of the top financial firms.
What does he tell them? The best thing that they have done in the last 25 years was to invent the ATM machine.
That box where you put your debit card in and it spits cash back to you? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
What’s his point? That all of the “exotic” financial tools that have been developed, derivatives, CDO’s, CDS’s, MBS’s, TIPS, and a whole variety of other acronyms really haven’t done anything useful for the world’s economy.
Ouch, that’s a stinging rebuke…..
Tom Vanderwell
Ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker’s ‘telling’ words on derivatives industry – Telegraph
The former US Federal Reserve chairman told an audience that included some of the world’s most senior financiers that their industry’s “single most important” contribution in the last 25 years has been automatic telling machines, which he said had at least proved “useful”.
Technorati Tags: Paul Volcker, ATM Machine
Don’t let anyone tell you that I never say anything good about ActiveRain. I saw a passing note yesterday about Ustream.com’s new iPhone app, but I ignored it in the crush of business. But this morning there was a post about the Ustream client in ActiveRain’s daily spamletter, and that led me to download the app.
What does it do?
Live video streaming from any iPhone 3G or 3GS. No kidding. Ustream quality, of course, compounded by the cheesy little lens on the iPhone, all compounded by WiFi or 3G transmission speeds. But still…
Live video streaming from your phone…
Practical applications?
Well, for one thing, Rodney King now has nothing to fear. Abusive cops are a thing of the past, and I would love to see a Ustream/YouTube channel devoted to abusive government functionaries everywhere. Especially in Iran, by the way, and I can’t think of a better antidote to bad behavior everywhere than instantaneous, live, streaming video for all the world to see.
But what about real estate applications?
Don’t throw away that video camera. It’s still Ustream, after all. But when you’re doing a home inspection for an out-of-state buyer, a live video conference with the inspector may be just the ticket. With a second phone, the client and the inspector can talk as you are shooting live video of the repair issues. Is that more sizzle than steak? I say it’s good salesmanship.
Are there other uses you can think of in your day-to-day real estate work? I’m never a big booster of new-for-the-sake-of-being-new. Mission-critical is all that ever matters to me in judging a new tool or idea. But I’m thinking that live or easily-recorded lo-rez video might serve a host of mission-critical functions.
Two (bad) videos as examples, as I learn to play with this new tool:
First, a bad demo recorded to the phone, then uploaded to Ustream.
Second, a live stream saved directly from Ustream.
In both cases, the iPhone shut off on me. To make this software work, you will have to change your auto shut-off setting in the main iPhone preference app. Then you have to remember to switch it back — or Read more
I don’t really do anything with my Facebook fan page other than to have my blog content automatically streamed to it, but a little Brady-esque follow up every time a new “friend” touches my “Fan Box Badge” is proving to have quite a nice effect on my sales effort, so I figured I’d share.
The protocol:
- You create your fan page.
- You embed your box on your website.
- When people land on your website and see smiling faces, you look cool, perhaps even trusted.
- Your visitor is already addicted to facebook, so he/she can’t resist the temptation to “become a fan.” [After all, it’s only 1 click.]
Then the fun starts…
You visit your own site and see a new face in your sidebar. It’s go time! Send your new fan a personal fb message, or even better, google them up for a phone number and do a little follow up. Maybe something like:
“Hi. Just noticed your face on my website in my Facebook page widget. Thanks for becoming a fan. Just curious, how’d you find me? …. ”
I originally tried to embed the actual Fan page box here, but didn’t seem to want to take the script… so, the sneaky image link… 🙂
Yesterday in a marketing Mastermind Group with a half dozen agents, a bit of confusion arose over two of the primary principles I use when developing their marketing campaigns. The question was new to me and that means it might be new to some of the readers here at BHB.
Earlier, we had discussed the parameters of an effective drip campaign on those we already know: friends, family, past clients, past prospects, and so on. I call this group your S.O.I.L (Source of Income List) because we want to grow a very robust referral business from it. Gary Keller, in his outstanding book Millionaire Real Estate Agent, refers to this group as METs and suggests you touch them or drip on them 33x per year. I have “adopted” this philosophy wholesale and – as with most of the concepts in that book – find it applicable to agents no matter where they work.
A little later, I mentioned that statistically speaking, 80% of all business happens after the fifth contact. This is not real estate specific. It’s more of a universal rule borrowed from the direct marketing world. (You may notice I do a lot of “borrowing” and “adopting”… most great marketing is based on ideas stolen from another industry or product. Take a look around outside the world of real estate. You’ll be amazed how many great ideas you find.) While discussing this idea, one of the agents asked why we need to touch our sphere 33x when most of the business is going to happen after the fifth contact. Great question because it illuminates one of the basic misunderstandings in marketing.
When you drip on your sphere – touch them regularly – you are practicing Epiphany Marketing. This is very similar to branding but, in my opinion, more effective. It’s designed to generate referrals and is on the very edge of what we can accurately call “marketing”. On the other hand a true, honest-to-God marketing campaign revolves around a specific concept (hopefully a USP) and is designed to carry people along a well-lit path until they inevitably reach the decision to Read more