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November 23, 2007

California Sub-Prime Bailout: Rewarding the Feckless

by

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

Author website

Governor Schwarzenneger brokered a bailout for California sub-prime borrowers with four major servicers:

Countrywide, GMAC, Litton and HomeEq – which collectively service more than one quarter of subprime loans to people with poor credit – agreed to maintain the initial, lower interest rate for some subprime borrowers whose rates are scheduled to jump significantly higher. To qualify, borrowers must occupy their homes, have made their payments on time and prove they cannot afford payments with the higher interest rate.

You had to see it coming. California is a mess right now with foreclosures. An argument could be made that sub-prime borrowers weren’t charged enough for the risk lenders took on them. Did the Governor, in fact, reward the feckless few who blindly bought into an inflated market? Does the measure penalize the responsible who waited for realistic prices and saved their sheckles for a down payment?

Two stipulations of the bailout are:

(a)- the borrower must be making timely payments, and

(b) the borrower must demonstrate an inability to service the higher payment.

While sub-prime loans are traditionally earmarked for the credit challenged, lenders extended these loans to good credit borrowers. Those borrowers bought a home that they couldn’t afford, with no money down. This program may very well reward people who lied to get a “smokin’ deal” and who now cry foul when that subsidized deal is taken away. The only exit strategy these borrowers had was to refinance out of the loan. That strategy was predicated upon a continual rise in property values. I know this; I work in the eye of the hurricane.

So, does Gena Reide. She’s a real estate broker in Sacramento, a community that has been hit hard by the meteoric rise in prices and subsequent drop back down to reality. Her ebullient report about this measure suggests that it is an idea that is long overdue.

Many have said that the homeowners in foreclosure should take responsibility and not receive any bail-out help Federally. It’s time that everyone realize that this doesn’t just effect those homeowners losing their homes, it effects Read more

November 21, 2007

Dancing With Who Brung Me

by

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

Author website

The first rule of organizations; he who speaks, volunteers. Actually, that’s the first rule of small, nimble organizations…guerilla units…we read Sun-Tzu and pounce on opportunities.

I’m jazzed, stoked, amped-up and psyched about the Guerilla Web Marketing Conference in May. We’re talking about Web 2.0 or for real estate agents and mortgage originators. Now, how do I promote it so that this place looks like this, in 2010?

First Campaign: Facebook.

Viral. That’s the gal who brung me to the dance.

November 21, 2007

Click the button one more time as an expression of Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s Thanksgiving, a fact of the calendar that sneaks up on me every year. By Friday, the Salvation Army Santas will be setting up their buckets outside stores, since no one has told the Salvation Army that Americans switched to debit cards in 1995. It’s all one to me. Cathy loves to give money away, but I despise indiscriminate charity. I’m all but certain we’re subsidizing vice, and I have zero doubt that we’re dulling the edge of husbandry. Of all the problems we might name in the modern world, a shortage of indolence is not one of them.

But I do believe in putting out fires, pulling drowning kids out of the drink, even rescuing trapped kittens. Life is a beautiful rose festooned with a few thorns, and stanching the flow of blood, when someone gets stung, is a job we each need to do for each other.

In a week or a month, all of the buttons we put up for Aaron Anglin’s family will come down.

Before they do, we should hit that “donate” button one more time. It’s not enough. There will never be enough we can do. They’ve lost more than we can ever imagine, and, in the long-run, they’ll have to get along without our help. Life goes on. This is but the first Christmas Aleisha and her girls will have to live without Aaron. But if, as an expression of our own productivity and prosperity, we can help to make their Christmas a little easier, that seems like a good way of expressing thanks for all we have.

November 20, 2007

Ex Post Facto

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

“I purposely did not go to law school because I purposely did not want to become a lawyer.” I say this a lot to people, usually when they ask me if I’m an attorney, which is more often than you might think. I actually had to mutter those very words last Sunday but I’ll address that particular exchange in a moment.

Don’t be misled by the mug shot in the sidebar. Beneath the Kangol and behind the shades (a vacation shot in Cannes btw, and not my everyday accoutre) exists a living, if not waning, example of the state college system of Pennsylvania; Slippery Rock to be precise. And I can safely go on record to state (since most of them have probably passed on by now) that some of the very brightest alcoholic, if not academic, minds were tenured there during my own concurrent, seven year run; Over 60% of our department’s predominantly male faculty had Ivy League credentials, most of whoms wives could drink the average shore leave sailor under the table. And much like a sanctimonious nonsmoker exiting a smoke filled room, the residual, if not secondary animus, still lingers–even decades later. That, and a knee jerk tendency to counter-respond with a quip when the right moment calls for it.

That era, if you recall, was a big, political, mid-1970s mess and the fact that Nixon was out, the Vietnam War had just ended, and the GI Bill was in full swing, only deepened the already exisitng social chasm on campus. Having not been in the military myself, I had never, up to that point in time, even imagined what it might take (mentally) to annihilate an entire village, (which sadly wasn’t the case with a few of the gentlemen I shared a house with) much less be awarded an all expense paid, four year educational ride, with a VA housing rider to boot. (This however, was the case with everyone in the joint but me.)

And by the way, that is how my veteran housemates all referred to our ramshackle residence; ‘The Joint.’ One frat boy’s Animal House is but another Viet Vet’s joint and we proved as much by renting the basement out to the TKEs for a barrel of beer a month until the town eventually condemned the joint and padlocked the front Read more

November 20, 2007

BloodhoundBlog Marketing Conference interest list

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve build an interest-list sign-up form for the BloodhoundBlog Marketing Conference I wrote about this morning.

Here are two things you can do:

  1. If you’re interested in coming to or teaching at or sponsoring the conference, fill out the form so we can keep you updated by email.
  2. While you’re there, give this dog a name. Clearly we love the Bloodhound idea. I’m also enamored of the idea of the guerrilla — the little warrior in Spanish. Tell us the overarching metaphor that encapsulates everything we’re talking about.

A boatload of interest so far, including happy noises from folks who want to sponsor and exhibit. And Brian is trying hard to take us all to a Diamondbacks game. There ain’t nothing like a Corona Bomber and a couple of Diamond Dogs. Plus which, we can check out the facilities for the 2010 Conference. 😉

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November 20, 2007

Transparency – Too Much Is Too Much

by

CEO of Real Estate Shows

Author website

Where is it written that video is the only media capable of telling the unvarnished truth?

To listen to the techie-babblers, video has arrived to save us all from the seductive slime of deceptive sales presentations. Video, they argue, is the best and by some accounts the only way to present a home in sufficient detail to show viewers the flaws along with the features. Video can give a viewer sooo much information that the viewer can say, “Wow, I’ve learned so much about that home that I’m no longer interested in it. I don’t need or want to see it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for saving me all that time.” And because video can do that, it must do that. It’s a sacred calling. All hail.

Not so fast.

In their zealous rush to saviordom, the video geeks have conveniently ignored most of the spectrum of human behavior: the role of emotions in decision making; the normal process of how people want and need to connect, be attracted to, interact and form relationships with other people and with significant possessions (like homes).

In the TB (techie-babbler) world, information (visual, audio, written, whatever) is all that matters. Context means nothing. Holistic models and processes are rubbish. Emotions are to be ignored or suppressed. And some genius found the perfect gift-wrapping to convey this TB notion to the world in one magic word – transparency. God I wish I’d thought of that.

I don’t categorically favor any one medium over all others. They all have their place and time. I’m for competence. I’m against ineptitude. Good still photography used in a compelling presentation is far better than a mediocre video or virtual tour. Well-written, evocative titles and descriptive content beats bad voice-overs. And all media are equally capable of delivering transparency. It’s up to the creators.

Transparency for the sake of transparency, without regard to the setting and purpose of the message, without giving consideration to how people want and need to be communicated with and without taking into account where you are in the relationship and how it will continue to develop – is Read more

November 20, 2007

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re adding another Bloodhound to the pound today, and this one is a real treat, Bill Leider of Real Estate Shows:

Bill Leider is the CEO of Real Estate Shows, a hosted virtual-tour solution. His background is in corporate and business management in publicly-traded and privately-owned mid-size companies.

Bill has won The Odysseus Medal and The People’s Choice Award, and Jeff Turner told me why when we met at the NAR Convention: The man simply will not stop trying to perfect his message.

I tell the contributors that there are no rules at BloodhoundBlog, but there actually is one rule: We’re not selling our products here. We throw off a lot of traffic to contributor’s sites, and I think that great thing. I want for people to prosper as a result of their work here. But the work we do here is about improving our minds — yours, ours, everyone’s.

I’m saying this because Bill is in the business of selling virtual tours, and I know he has strong feelings on what does and does not work in real life. If he touches on these subjects — and I think he might with his first post — understand that he is writing from his experience, not trolling for your business.

More announcements to come, believe it or don’t.

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November 20, 2007

Want to stay ahead of the pack in your marketing? Come to Phoenix next May and master The Art of the Bloodhound

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are five current and former Bloodhounds — so far — on the faculty of Inman’s imminent Blogger’s Connect. That’s about fifteen Bloodhounds too few, but that’s not the only flaw I can think of. I told Joel Burslem when he was in Phoenix that the keynote address should be mine, but of course it won’t be. That would make entirely too much sense. Beyond that, the critical defect of the event is that the curriculum is established by people who aren’t doing this stuff. That’s why it’s a Blogger’s Connect, because it’s all about last year’s war.

Brian Brady had a better idea, a BloodhoundBlog Conference about truly contemporary guerrilla real estate marketing, the tactics real grunts on the ground are using right now in the jungles we find ourselves in. Two days in Phoenix, for a start, with intensive classes on how to make the stuff that really works really work for you right now.

David Gibbons, bless his eager mind, came up with this in a comment last week:

My primary takeaway from NAR was that the social media marketing opportunity in RE is misunderstood and largely ignored. Yet, I’m more convinced than ever that SMM can revolutionize real estate. I actually had a fleeting thought yesterday as I walked the expo floor that it would have been cool to have a booth dedicated to Real Estate Weblogging 101 and that “Bloodhound” might well become a premier REALTOR (or agent?) designation/qualification.

I don’t like it as a designation. Our world moves too fast. To say, “I have arrived,” is to announce that you have volunteered to be left behind. But an annual Bloodhound badge to put on your web site would be a potent testament to your valor as a guerrilla marketer.

We’re thinking Sunday, May 18, and Monday, May 19, 2008. After that, things get nebulous. But: All work and no play makes for a boring Bloodhound, so we’ll do something fun Saturday night, May 17, if you fly in early. Then maybe a networking/cocktail party Sunday night. There will be time for a round of golf on Monday morning. We might Read more

November 19, 2007

ActiveRain.com: Members Own Content But Can’t Profit From It

by

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

Author website

Do members REALLY own the content on Active Rain?

I asked that question some 13-14 months ago, wondering whether the hours I invested would be worthwhile. I was satisfied with the explanation that the content was, indeed, the members’ property.

Move.com attempted to buy Active Rain, it balked, and conversations about a future revenue model led the idea of syndicating the user content to the mainstream media. Again, the question of who owns the content arose- the answer was identical to the 2006 answer; the members own their content.

Justin Smith (aka Damion Foxworthy) wrote a satirical post, which won the People’s Choice Award, in the Odysseus Medal competition, about “selling” his Active Rain profile. Justin, through diligent weblogging and contribution to the community, has amassed some 100,000 points on Active Rain. The entry was cross-posted on Active Rain and generated an overwhelming response from the membership in the comments section. As usual, I “read too much into” this comment from Top Rainmaker, Jon Washburn:

Great post Justin,

I sat reading it thinking, “Great, how should I handle this. I probably have to zero out the points on this profile now. But man, whoever bought Justin’s blog is going to be pissed.”

I think you all are right and we need to think through this issue and put some type of formal policy in place.

Did you catch that? He said that he would “probably have to zero out the profile”. This means that while Justin has ownership of the points, he has no right to transfer them. The points were a by-product of the contributed content. Ergo, the content is not really “owned” by the members, in the purest definition of the word ownership (the content can’t be transferred).

The policy being considered strips the most important right of “ownership” from the members and releases it to the Company. While the Company can lease the content to a third-party news source, for the implied quid pro quo of SEO, the only profiting that will be done will be by the Company.

I’m okay with that, too. I’m Read more

November 19, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: “Small pieces loosely joined”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My thought is that Michael Wurzer of the FBS blog doesn’t do anything badly. Certainly his weblog is ripe with first-rate content. Michael is this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal with Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem:

You see, whether it’s in an MLS or a social network, the value is in having the data together or aggregated. Yet, once you aggregate the data, in an MLS system or Facebook or wherever, the immediate question is how you can get it back out to be used elsewhere, by other applications, because choice is desired and the aggregation stifles choice.

This is a non-trivial problem. The ideal answer is in the web itself. As Tim O’Reilly puts it, “Small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the web, in its current form, doesn’t address all the concerns, because yet to be defined are permission or privacy or identity schemes. In other words, who owns the data, who can access it, and what can they do with it when they do access it? The answers to these questions so far have been defined by silos, like MLS systems and social networks, but we’re now seeing that isn’t the long-term answer, rather standards are.

In the real estate space, one part of the solution is to have a broad and deep agreement (standard) on the minimum data necessary to constitute a listing. This is close to reality with the RETS payloads. Equally necessary, however, is a standard for defining who can access the listing and the terms of use for doing so. The first attempts at some terms of use in the real estate space led to the lawsuit against the NAR by the DOJ, which necessarily but unfortunately has caused the conversation to grind to a halt as the status quo is sought to be preserved. But the work on these terms of use needs to continue, either to resolve the litigation or end-run it.

Ideally, the terms of use should be dictated by the owner of the data on an individual basis. Again, “small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the challenge is gaining broad enough Read more

November 19, 2007

I Didn’t Like The Question

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

A few weeks ago I was part of a “Surviving In This Market” panel. I have been a part of this sort of thing many times, locally and nationally. A few minutes into questionthe program I found myself irritated at the question being asked. I usually don’t even read the questions provided beforehand as I prefer my responses to be completely unscripted. I think I may have surprised everybody (even myself a little) with my answer to the question asked. There were four other panelists and I was seated at the end of the table, closest to the moderator. The other four panelists had answered the question and I said, “I’m not going to answer the question because I think the question is stupid.” The moderator was a bit shocked. Perhaps you can guess that I seldom concern myself with such concepts as, “If I say this will I be invited back?”. I’m a bit proud of the fact that no one will ever be able to accuse me of being hard to read.

I believe that asking the right question can lead to a correct and useful answer. I also believe that asking the wrong question can be destructive. Just asking a question can cause damage? Absolutely. For example, the question, “What is wrong with me” or any of it’s thousands of variations is never a good question. Never. That doesn’t stop millions of people from walking around and asking this of themselves on a daily basis. They may have varied the question but it is nevertheless that question in one of it’s many guises. How can I improve this situation? How can I make this area better? are not the same sort of question and I hope you can discern the difference. The problem of “What’s wrong with me?” (or any variation) is that one tends to start a list of possible items. Then they can indicate these various items to themselves. They may even “get help” from others who can also indicate their various wrongness to them. Just based on how much this “improvement technique” is practiced in the Read more

November 18, 2007

BloodhoundBlog.TV debuts: NAR Convention survivors hold forth on Web 2.0 marketing in a scripted, refrigerator-magnet world

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Clearly, this is a star-crossed enterprise. The audio worked fine tonight, so the video started capturing out of phase about 17 minutes in. The video is short, but the accompanying audio podcast contains our full discussion.

Ignore all that. I fixed it. The video shown below is complete, and it is also linked as the first video at BloodhoundBlog.TV. Dan Green’s audio is a little weak, mine is a little strong, Jay Thompson is a little out of focus, but we’ve gotten to a place we’ve never been before, a do-it-yourself multi-camera remote interview segment. Many more to come — with steadily increasing quality.

This is Daniel Rothamel, Dan Green and Jay Thompson discussing their experiences at the NAR Convention, carrying forth from there to a broad discussion about how the benefits of Web 2.0-style marketing might be communicated to the 1.3 million members of the NAR.

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November 18, 2007

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eighteen nominees this week. I had a bunch of posts from Active Rain, and, while I didn’t pick any this week for the short list, I’d like to encourage y’all to continue to enter. There is some good stuff over there that I would not see otherwise.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Michael Wurzer -- Distorted advertising Moving From Distorted Advertising to Useful Information in the MLS”,
“Michael Wurzer — Data portability Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem“,
“Joel Burslem — NAR Reflections on NAR“,
“Robert Ashby — YSP Is Yield Spread Premium Good or Bad for Consumers?“,
“Steve and Kris Berg — Six months The Six Month Solution – Our New Deal“,
“Morgan Brown — Credit mess Top 10 Ways to Navigate the Credit Mess“,
“Brian Brady — Compensation How to Pay Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals For Their Advice“,
“Todd Carpenter — Keyword SEO Key word SEO is at best, a hedged bet.“,
“Doug Quance — Stay home We Can Just Stay Home And Go Broke“,
“Jay Thompson — Short sale The Short Sale From Hell“,
“Justin Smith — Active Rain How I Sold My ActiveRain Profile for $6,750.00“,
“Todd Carpenter — YSP Forget YSP, let’s just do away with Mortgage Brokers“,
“Tim Kane — YSP Let Brokers charge what they want. Do away with YSP.“,
“Kris Berg — Vista A New Operating Environment“,
“Geno Petro — Feng Shui Feng Shui… It’s All Chinese Math To Me“,
“Jeff Kempe — Bossy visionaries Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market“,
“Brian Brady — Federal banks HR 3915: Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR Working from within the NAR”
);
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    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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    • November 18, 2007

    NAR Convention convocation: We live in a small world — for now

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    There are 1.3 million members of the National Association of Realtors. Of those, 30,000 descended on Las Vegas for last week’s NAR Convention.

    How many of those people, either the larger group or the smaller, know about our world, the world of Web 2.0, real estate weblogging, social networking — the world we think of as being “the conversation”?

    Almost none.

    BloodhoundBlog is big as real estate weblogs go, and we’re arguably the biggest of the blogs focused on real estate industry issues. We get around 1,200 unique visitors a day on weekdays, a steadily rising number. Many of those “hard clicks” are not Realtors, of course, but we have a large and growing population of RSS and email subscribers. I have no numbers for RSS subscriptions, but the email server demands kicked us from a shared-server account to a quarter-server to a full dual-core server in a little over a year. It would not seem unfair to me to estimate that we are talking to at least 1,200 dues-paying Realtors a day.

    It pays to do that math, doesn’t it. We are well-known, highly regarded, deemed influential — and we are talking to fewer than one in 1,000 members of the NAR on any given day. Not everyone reads everything on any given day, but, on the other hand, things get passed around. We might be seen by as many as 50,000 Realtors a month, perhaps as many as a quarter-million in a year’s time.

    But even then, for all but a few hundred Realtors, we are noise in the background. The others see what they see, with Debunking Zillow.com and What’s Wrong with zipRealty? being by far the two most popular hard clicks into the weblog.

    There is a over-arching message here and in other places we frequent, a message about our world, the world of Web 2.0, real estate weblogging, social networking — the world we think of as being “the conversation.” But who among the attendees of the NAR Convention — much less the NAR membership as a whole — knows anything about it?

    This was one of the points Jeff Turner raised in Read more

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    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.

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