BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Archives (page 125 of 372)

May 28, 2009

If Not Us, Who?

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

I’m in a lousy mood today and I need your help.

The crooks are resurfacing.

If you thought the bad guys have been flushed out of the system, I’ve got some bad news for ya.  We spend an inordinate amount of time debating who and what caused the mortgage meltdown.  We spend very little time debating how we make sure it never happens again.  The key word I want to emphasize here is “we”.

It’s not up to the government to fix this mess.  It’s not up to NAMB, or NAR or Ghostbusters.  It’s up to US – the folks in the field and on the street that see the dishonesty and suck in the stench seven steps before it gets packaged into mortgage backed securities.

I wrote an article entitled The Code:  How the Mortgage Industry Could Self Regulate a few days ago.  Alas, my baby blog is a PR2 and I doubt too many people saw it.  I think it’s an important concept and I am grateful for a venue like Bloodhound Blog to facilitate the conversation.

If you leave it up to your government, you get lame-brain ideas like HVCC.  I’m telling y’all right now, right here that I’m going to do my little part to protect the general public from the bad guys.  We need to clean up our own industry.  Brian Brady has it right in my book:  you do wrong and he’s gonna “come down on you like a ton of bricks”.  People look to us as fiduciaries, and I do believe in buyer beware.  But unfortunately the doofus who doesn’t do his homework and gets himself ripped off just lowered the property values of every smart guy on his block.

So here’s the question I want to pose to the Bloodhound Community:

I know a bad guy, a predatory lender who ripped off hundreds of borrowers.  He went away for a while and now he’s back.  What can I do about it?  How do we take our industry back?

May 28, 2009

Truzilla IDX = N/A R.Com?

by

Retechulous...

Author website

When I was looking into whether or not Realtor.com was publishing scrapable rss feeds based on searches a few weeks ago, I also took a look to see if Trulia was doing the same thing.

Sure enough, they are, but of course the quality and the diversity of the types of feeds they’re offering are way juicier than Realtor.Com’s. Not surprising.. absent a Move/NAR type hook up, these guys actually have to innovate, right…

So, with all this fuss over local boards and NAR trying to control the “misappropriation” of property data by regulating idx feeds, I’ve been wondering if one couldn’t just turn Trulia into a personal, free idx solution using the same method I used to tap R.com…

The ingredients?

  • Lotsa fresh goog juicy dynamic content.
  • Not all, but enough mls info to make your visitors at least hang around for a little while.
  • Sales Transaction, REO, Pre-foreclosure data and any other information not available in local idx data either because of local
    board regulations or limitations in the fields available in the mls software.
  • And more…

In short, you could probably “scrape” your way to a more informative site then your competitors have without the need to wrestle with the threat of an absurd Mibor type situation.

[An Example Start Here For The Curious]

But It’s A Half Measure…

Sure…that could work, sorta. But Trulia’s info isn’t all that comprehensive to begin with and you’d be offering your visitors a half-assed hacked up version of true idx. So we’re back pretty much to square one, with some extra dynamic content but no free idx via Trulia.

[Aside: Shouldn’t these guys do the right thing and disclose to their visitors that their’s isn’t a comprehensive “search engine?” I’d buy ads on trulia in a minute if they could say something like: “Yo, we don’t have all the listings, but we’re real good at roping you in, so why don’t you click this guy’s Read more

May 28, 2009

Lower June, 2009 Mortgage Rates Rely On Central Bank Action

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

May Day in the mortgage rates market is over.  The market got spooked by triangulated opinions about the viability of the US Treasury as a going concern.  In response, mortgage traders sold off mortgage-backed securities, some 3-4%, in 4 days, to drive mortgage rates from 4.75%  to the 5.375% current level.

Tom Vanderwell thinks mortgage rates could bounce as high as 5.75%, in the next 30 days unless there is MASSIVE intervention by the Fed.

MOTIVE: It helps to understand that Ben Bernanke is a disciple of financial activism as a means to combat a potential economic depression.  Aware of his activist philosophy, scrutiny of the April, 2009 FOMC minutes would lead you to believe that the Fed is targeting retail mortgage rates to be under 5%.  Mortgage rates north of that number are counter-productive to the fiscal policy designed to deleverage the average American.

MEANS: The Fed has another $700 billion at the ready to stabilize the mortgage-backed securities market and artificially lower retail mortgage rates to under 5%.

METHOD: The Fed would have you believe that not only are they going to purchase those MBS for the consumers but for the viability of the Central Bank (this is spin, plain and simple).  In short, the Fed is saying  “the financial institutions are so healthy that we must direct our attention to the consumer if WE are to remain a going concern”.  I’m exaggerating a tad but that’s the Fed “spin” to justify the massive intervention I expect.

My opinion about the Fed’s actions are irrelevent to the near-term home buyer and mortgage shopper; my analysis is not.  Expect the Fed to drive mortgage rates lower into June.

May 27, 2009

When a Bloodhound loses the scent, uptime can be a dawg’s life

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.

First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.

But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.

I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.

But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.

Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.

And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.

May 27, 2009

What Happened, What Does it Mean, and Where Do We Go From Here?

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

Wow!  What a day in the mortgage and bond markets today.   I think it’s a good thing to say that while a lot of us saw this coming, very few of us expected that it would happen today.    Let’s walk through what happened, what it means and where we go from here.

What happened? A couple of things happened that caused the bond market to go into a free fall (okay more than a couple):

  • Several analysts and rating agencies have raised significant questions about whether both the United Kingdom and the United States will be able to continue to pay their debts as the staggering amounts that they are borrowing to keep their financial systems afloat are well, truly staggering.
  • As GM inches/races/inches (depending on the moment) towards bankruptcy, it is becoming obvious that the US Government is going to have to shell out a LOT more money to keep GM somewhat afloat (another approximately $50,000,000,000 – but who’s counting?)
  • Although the headline number looks good, as we discussed earlier, the existing home sales for April were less than spectacular.
  • Case Shiller came out with their housing price value reports and they showed a pretty nasty case of the housing price drops.   That means that the collateral for mortgage backed securities is dropping in value making them less desirable.
  • A number of reports have come out recently that showed that the performance of mortgage backed securities is continuing to suffer and mortgage delinquencies are continuing to rise.   We talked about one of those reports here, and another one of them here.
  • Oil prices have been going up and the people in OPEC who control a lot of that are talking $75 to $80 a barrel while we’re only at $63 right now.   Increasing the risk of inflation puts pressure on rates.
  • The Federal government, through their manipulation of the long term Treasury and mortgage backed securities markets (also known as buying the market), had been keeping mortgage rates artificially lower than what the economic, financial and mortgage portfolio conditions would typically warrant.
  • Oh and there’s this little thing called North Korea firing test missiles and Iran running ships in Read more
May 27, 2009

Some listings are extra FUN!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Sometimes, out here in more rural America, we have properties to sell that you can’t just drive up to in the Lexus and click off the security system to show.  I usually have a property or two a year that are a bit more challenging and immensely more fun to work with and show.

Saturday, I took a several hours to view a new listing.  In that time, I only saw bits of it.  This particular property is pretty big,  1 mile by ½ mile for 346 acres.  It has 16 individual tax parcels and is mostly undeveloped.  It is surrounded by forest and has over 2000 feet of elevation change across it.  It does have power, a well and amenities.  Access to part of it is via a dirt road.  Other parts also have dirt roads that go near or into the property.  While this property is spectacular wilderness, it only takes 20 minutes to get to the edge of it from town or my own home.  This is a fun property!

I was reminded of a conversation at Unchained one evening about good real estate agent cars.  While I can often use a sedan, maneuvering around boulders on a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff just isn’t what a Lexus is made for!  Things are a bit less civilized on a listing like this!  I’ve used SUVs, pickups,  jeeps, ORVs and even snowmobiles to show my most fun listings.  No worries though, I’ve never seen nor heard dueling banjos at any of these remote properties.

joe-creek-northwest-from-top-of-parcel-p

Part of the fun in selling one of these ranch or acreage types of properties is to figure out the best way to show it to clients and explain how to show it to other agents.  I also like to be able to talk to clients before a showing and make sure they have an expectation on what we’ll be doing.  If they have height concerns, I might avoid a narrow path cut into a cliff and just show that part from the bottom of the hill.  If we’re hiking, I try to make Read more

May 27, 2009

Who is the NAR Advertising Helping?

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

Wow, crazy spending in our government should cause rising interest rates in the future.  Government incentives, mandates, moratoriums and Fed manipulation of the housing market, which got us here in the first place, are running amok right now.  The unintended consequences of all these actions are yet to be seen.  The NAR is advertising NOW as a great time to buy, just like they did in 2006 and 2007.

I get buyers and sellers asking me what I think will happen, as I had this weekend.  I can tell them with certainty that I expect that things will change from where we are today.  Do I tell them the NAR line that it’s a great time to buy a house?  No.

I don’t think it is necessarily a bad time to buy a house, and may even be a pretty good time to buy a house, depending on somebody’s particular situation.  On the other hand, if the person who is thinking of buying isn’t sure they’re going to stay put, with the cash flow to pay for their home for a pretty good while, it may be a really poor time to buy a house for that person.

How about selling?  I’ve sold two homes that I personally owned in the last six months.  Is it a great time to sell?  It was for me.  And sell them I did, in about 1/5 the typical time on market in the area.  Could I get more for them in the future?  Maybe but I can’t tell you how far into the future that might be.  I tell clients that this may, or may not, be a good time for them to sell depending on their situation.

So, the NAR advertising line irritates me.  I don’t find it helpful at all.  It undermines the credibility of real estate professionals to simple mind numbing “it’s time to buy” repeated over and over.  That’s the kind of help I can do without.  While my crystal ball on the future is no better than anyone else’s, I just want to be there help my clients and friends through actions that Read more

May 25, 2009

Kipling on the land we live on and the land we love

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am reputed by Macleans magazine to be well-versed in verse, so, in concert with my soul’s sister, Teri, I will lend my ear to the muses in the celebration of glorious land:

Sussex

by Rudyard Kipling

God gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
    Yea, Sussex by the sea!

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
    No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
    But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
    And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
    Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
    Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
    As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
    At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
    The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
    All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
    The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
    And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
    Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
    Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
    Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
    Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
    Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days
    The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
    The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
    And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
    Dreams, as she dwells, apart. Read more

May 25, 2009

Under all is the land: Celebrating property rights wherever you live

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I think about this every now and then. Under all is the land- real estate not as business, but as a sort of philosophy, a big idea. Greg wrote an incredible piece about this in his usual big thinker style. I can’t take this on from the place Greg’s at, but I can see this from the street level- from where I’m working.

My transactions with first time buyers and with HUD owned homes are teaching me a few things. You may not deal in that market. It’s very gritty. Not everyone wants to get their hands that dirty, or do that much work for a couple hundred dollars, and believe me when I tell you that there are times I understand that completely. But le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, so against the best advice of some of the best brains in the business, I’m working with the people who do not take home ownership for granted, they didn’t grow up assuming they will ever own a home. And in spite of all this collective intelligence pointing me elsewhere, I love working with people who are excited about owning property. Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Think about how incredible that statement is: Owning property. Land. Something that can’t get moved, can’t be taken away. I know eminent domain exists. Forget that for just a moment and think about the history of man. Property ownership equals freedom. The right to own property? That’s extraordinary! So while I understand I could make more money with less work if I worked at real estate differently, I get a huge kick out of helping people who see what I see when they buy a home.

These are people who may have grown up under circumstances that would not have precluded home ownership. They may have grown up in parts of the country that have become too exclusive for the average person and they have been shut out of a life they literally helped build. Perhaps they are not children of privilege but children of other circumstances. They Read more

May 24, 2009

Show Me “Paint the Fence”

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

I have a confession to make:  CRM isn’t as complicated as people tend to make it.  Take a look at an app like Salesforce and they purposely build the interface to look like you’re piloting a 747 jet when in reality all you’re looking to do is deepen a few hundred relationships and organize your life.  We CRM experts like to try and look a lot smarter than we actually are.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some easy action items that will make managing your database a snap.  WARNING: I’M FLORIDA EDUCATED SO I TEND TO KEEP THINGS AT A 7TH GRADE LEVEL.  GREG SWANN: INITIATE LOBOTOMY NOW.

Lesson #1:  Paint the Fence

Remember when Mr. Miyagi made poor Daniel Son paint the fence?  And wash the car?  And paint the fence again?  If we’re gonna make you a black belt database manager, you’re going to have to suck it up too.  One must not deliver kick to opponent family jewel without proper training.

The most common problem I notice when consulting with mortgage/real estate professionals:  the quality of your data sucks.

  1. Lazy Data Entry:  If you’re populating data from an internet form, expect respondents to take as little time as possible getting to the goodies you’re dangling.  No less than 50% of your data will come in with capitalization, punctuation and other grammatical errors.  There are some automated ways to help clean this data, and I’ll leave that for another day.  But in the meantime, I’m asking you to make a habit of cleaning data as you go.
  2. Incomplete Data:  For the belly-to-belly folks:  I have my salespeople take the extra 120 seconds to visit a new prospect’s website as they enter data into our CRM system.  When I find records with just a name and email address, I get pissed.  When you take the extra time to dig for granular data on a contact, you’re in essence learning more of their story in the process.  Did my prospect give me a fake phone number (easy to learn if the the phone number on their website is different than the one they gave you!)?  How Read more
May 22, 2009

The Secret to Success (part 372)

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Want to know the secret to becoming a wildly successful, top producing, charismatic, healthy and attractive real estate agent?  Want to feel ten pounds lighter and ten years younger?  Want the whole thing in one easy to swallow pill?  Me too.

I know all of us want to make money – some more than others.  But our ultimate goals: security for our family, a peaceful sense of happiness, a worry free future – they are much more than just money, aren’t they?

Earlier this week I was driving my two boys to school.  The older one piped up and asked what day it was.  “Wednesday” I replied.  He was ecstatic with that answer; bouncing on the back seat and just as excited as a nine year old can be on his way to school.  I asked him what made Wednesdays so special.  “On Wednesday we have PE,” he explained.  “That’s like an extra recess!  And on some days we play ‘anything-goes.’  Those are the best days ever!”

I started wondering: when was the last time any of us scheduled an extra recess?  Hell, when was the last time any of us scheduled a regular recess?  Can you remember the last time you found yourself enjoying a game of ‘anything-goes?’  May I suggest that when you finish reading this article you go directly to your calendar and schedule yourself an extra recess.  I’m not talking about some quiet time where you can get caught up on your paperwork!  I’m talking about a long lunch or a long walk.  Maybe going down to the beach or the park and bringing a picnic.  How about meeting your husband or wife at a hotel near their work for a romantic afternoon?

Schedule yourself an extra recess; preferably involving a little ‘anything-goes.’  I guarantee it will do wonders for your business.  You might even have “the best day ever.“

May 22, 2009

The End of No-Cost Mortgage Loans and Other HR 1728 Concerns

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

The H.R. 1728: Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act is a problem that all mortgage and real estate professionals need to pay attention to.

My first rule of blogging has always been to avoid political discussions, especially if I’m not an expert on every angle of the topic.

So, with my second post to the BHB, I’m breaking all of my rules…. I guess this means that I’m starting to get the hang of things around here.

The difference with this post is that I’m putting my self-consciousness and ego aside for a moment.  I believe that there is way too much at stake for me to wait around until I’m comfortable putting my neck on the line.  I’m taking Greg’s 70% approach and running with it

If I’m wrong or barking up the wrong tree, I humbly respect that the Hounds of this community will set me straight.  Matter of fact, I’ll do my best to encourage any type of discussion, rant, or other demonstration of disgust, as long as it helps us get closer to the truth behind HR 1728.

Here’s the deal, friends – HR 1728 has passed the House, which means it still has to go before the Senate and then pass Obamanomics before it becomes a law.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time reading, researching and writing about how mortgage originators can battleback against this new Mortgage Reform bill.

I’m either missing a beat, presenting the wrong info, or not yelling loud enough, because it doesn’t seem like there is much talk online about how this new Anti-Predatory Lending bill will impact our industry.

Obviously, HVCC is getting some reaction, probably because people are already feeling the pain in their wallets.

However, a lot of us may have to turn to online gaming and selling weed to make a living if H.R. 1728 makes it through the Senate without our voices being heard.

What are the main bullets of HR 1728 that I care about?

  • Mortgage brokers lose the ability to use their YSP (Yield Spread Premium) to offer No-Cost mortgage loans.  Banks, on the other hand, still don’t have to disclose their same (SRP).
May 22, 2009

Trulia – A search engine?

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Quote from Rudy Bachraty on REBarCamp Denver’s announcement that he will be speaking there: (my emphasis added)

“Trulia is a real estate search engine and online community where you can find homes for sale and detailed local real estate information.”

This is the second time in recent days that I have seen Trulia refer to itself as a search engine. In my opinion that is no accident. So time for me to offer some clarity.

Ummm…OK…calling yourself a search engine is a nice little attempt to muddy the water in our little blissfully ignorant vertical and blur the differences between a scraper (which your site started as–more references available upon request), a third party listing aggregator, and a search engine. There are huge differences between them. Google is not a scraper. They are a search engine. They index data that resides on other peoples servers. You, on the other hand, pull the listing data onto your own site for the purposes of monetizing it.

Let’s see, how can I explain this the easiest way…perhaps a video:

You see, Trulia? I know search engines.

Search engines are a friend of mine…

and Trulia?…

You’re no search engine.

May 22, 2009

Is NAR Criminal or Clueless? What difference does it make?

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I  read the give and take between Greg and Mike DiMella (full disclosure, Mike is a client) with interest, because I respect them both, and it is always interesting when smart people agree to disagree and do so with civility and eloquence and without resorting to the ad hominem.

When that single MIBOR director derailed a policy change that went against them, even though it was unanimously approved by the NAR’s own technology committee, we were all left to discern a motive.

Was this the result of a long-standing “criminal conspiracy” (Greg)? Is this an attempt by some local MLSs, who see Google’s handwriting on the wall, to remian relevant by competing with their own members (me)? Or was this a consequence of the realities of trying to pull coherent policy from the collective mind of a large membership organization in a timely fashion (Mike)?

Its an interesting question, but the answer, it seems to me,  is irrelevant in the discussion of what to do next.

One thing we all agree on, I think, is that the MIBOR director used his knowledge of  NAR parliamentary procedure to work the system to MIBOR’s benefit and to the detriment of brokers and agents.

The prima facie evidence is that, at least for the next 6 months, Paula Henry is still being forced to dis-allow Google from indexing her site.

That means the damage is real.

Yes, it is contained to Indianapolis for the moment, but will it stay that way? My guess is that MIBOR will be huddling with other MLSs who share their control fetish over the next 6 months, and our friend the objecting director from Indianapolis will have a quorum come November.

Now that NAR has proven itself to be subject to the whims of directors who are nostalgic for a paper-bound MLS that brokers kept behind their desks, modern brokers and agents need to aggressively defend their own interests because, clearly, the organization that is supposed to do that is not.

I see signs of this happening now, with people getting fed up enough to get involved with their boards at the local level, but is that enough?

Perhaps Read more

« 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