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

A dozen nominees again, which is boiling down to one entry out of five. Already you’re looking at what I view as the cream of this week’s crop.

We are slaves to the news, of course. This week’s fires in Southern California dominated our attention. Congress seems desperate to do something ruinous to the mortgage industry. Microstoopid spent way too much to buy a small piece of a big fad that will be gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe three years from now. I ignored almost everything about this. Likewise for Zillow’s announcement that their ERA deal makes them Trulia player in the on-line listings game. RE/Max has a national real estate listings portal. The Realty.bots have PR departments, at least so far. The RE.net is temporary, like all news, but I try to filter for what is actually important and not just noisome.

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 ( "Geno Petro -- Lightning in a bottle Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar”,
“Michael Wurzer — Living history
Living History“,
“Jay Thompson — Negative news As a fellow Realtor I am disappointed that you post such negative news“,
“Kris Berg — Healing Healing“,
“Dan Melson — Lending reform \”Fixes\” for the Mortgage Meltdown – You Can’t Keep A Bad Idea Down“,
“Morgan Brown — Lending reform Barney Frank – Broker’s Worst Nightmare“,
“Kevin Boer — Move/Active Rain What The Microsoft-Facebook Deal Means For Real Estate — Part 2: Revisiting Move.com Vs. ActiveRain“,
“Krista Baker — Negotiating buyer’s commissions Negotiating Commissions with Buyers“,
“Gary Elwood — Credibility The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You“,
“Brian Boreo — Real estate weblogging Waking from my blog reverie“,
“Jeff Brown — San Diego Fires San Diego Fire Update — It’s Now Approaching Historical — 10% of Population Evacuated“,
“Jeff Kempe — Socratic dialogue Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.

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    echo Read more

  • Hands off those clocks! Daylight Savings Time doesn’t start until next week — but there’s still time to make Odysseus Medal nominations

    Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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    The disintermediation of Torquemada the Inquisitor: Do we dare interrogate ourselves about the future of real estate representation? And: What fate awaits all dinosaurs?

    In 1991, I was approached by Garry Fairbairn (he must have been a beautiful baby) of the Western Producer in Saskatoon (or maybe it was Regina), Saskatchewan, Canada to write a simple batch global search and replace utility that the paper could use to translate American wire service copy to King’s English spellings — color to colour, favor to favour, etc.

    That was the birth of Torquemada the Inquisitor. Ultimately it came to be much more powerful, but, in the beginning, it did nothing but search for and replace string literals. I was developing a reputation as a Macintosh software developer who was interested in big text-processing problems. There was a good reason for this: I had big text-processing problems and I wrote software to solve them. Torquemada used the then-new drag-‘n’-drop technology in the Mac OS to permit users to run an unlimited number of pre-saved search sets on an unlimited number of text files. If you could write well-defined, error-trapped searches, you could automate a big chunk of your workflow.

    Subsequent versions added wildcard searches, type-casting, wild strings, case-conversion, etc. Torquemada was pattern matching along the lines of the Unix GREP utility, but it was optimized for repetitive tasks common to text-processing, word-processing and typography. It was very useful in the early days of web-page creation, as well.

    I named it Torquemada because I had already written a utility called XP8 (expiate, get it?). This was built to correct a huge number of defects common to word processing files in those days. In addition, it would pre-code text to be imported into QuarkXPress — then and now high-end Macintosh desktop publishing software — with many typographic refinements coded into the text on the fly. XP8 would remove the excess white space from around the numeral “1,” for instance, intelligently ignoring the lining figures in tables. It did quote-conversion better than any software before or since.

    These two utilities had fairly similar objectives, and both were built expecting to do huge batch jobs by drag-‘n’-drop. XP8 was a brute-force front-end to Quark, though, where Torquemada was a general purpose text revisionist. In practice, for Read more

    NAR BloggerCon: I am like so there…

    Daniel Rothamel has managed to set up an event called NAR BloggerCon. I can’t figure out who’s getting conned, but I’m eager to find out.

    Cathy and I are flying in and out for the event — my favorite way of going anywhere.

    Date and Time: Monday, November 12th, 2007 @ 5:30pm.

    Place: The NAR Bloggers’ Lounge – Venetian Hotel, 4th Floor, Room 4605

    Be there if you can. If not, I predict there will be video…

    Technorati Tags: , ,

    San Diego Fire Update: I… Wanna Hear… From a Chargers Fan

    Nick Canepa, of the San Diego Union Tribune, wrote that the game must go on this weekend and that it must be held at Qualcomm Stadium:

    San Diego deserves this football game. It needs it. The event may not house or clothe anybody or do much to dramatically change even one life, but Chargers-Texans is this city’s game, and if it can be played here – and it can be – it should be. It belongs where it was intended.

    I’m going to agree with him on this.  Anyone who doubts the healing power of Sport wasn’t at Game 1 of the 2001 World Series.  I stood in Bank One Ballpark, with tears streaming down my face, and sang “God Bless America” with NYC firefighters and EMS workers.  We hugged, bought each other beer, jeered each other’s teams, and celebrated the fact that our country was not only standing but ready to rise from the rubble.

    I knew the damn game was meaningless.  I secretly wanted the Yanks to win so that The Big Apple would have a shot in the arm but they lost the Series in what could be described as on of the top five World Series in history.  The Diamondbacks won the only way it could be won; in seven games, right through the best team in baseball.

    For 10-12 days, America healed.  We threw our arms around each other and diverted our eyes from that obscene smoking hole in Lower Manhattan.  We vowed to build higher, dream bigger, and soar like our national bird.

    The Knights of Columbus in Solana Beach is holding its annual Spooky Knights party for the kids, as planned, on Saturday evening.  We’ll pray for the families affected, talk about how to help each other, and try to start the healing process.  If you’re anywhere near Solana Beach, stop in on Saturday; the first cold one is on me.

    Qualcomm Stadium, the preferred Brady address last Monday, is clearing outWe are going to have this football game…HERE...in San Diego.  This game is meaningless but this event is monumental.

    Show me your lightning bolt!

     

    More updates on the San Diego County Read more

    Phoenix has it’s problems, but they’re small compared to those in other cities

    This is my column this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). I’m not grave-robbing San Diego, but every big-news disaster turns out to be good news in the long run for the Phoenix real estate market. This was written on Tuesday, so the specific details are a little dated.

     
    Phoenix has it’s problems, but they’re small compared to those in other cities

    At BloodhoundBlog.com, we’re tracking the fires in San Diego County. Business is business, but a world-class disaster commands attention. Three of our fifteen contributors are in the fire zone. Two of the three have already been evacuated as I write this. Our hearts and prayers and donations go out to the victims of the blaze, even as we know that whatever we can do can never be enough.

    But at the same time, we in the Valley of the Sun should take a moment to count our blessings.

    As you approach Phoenix from California, you see them, one after another, vast warehouses, acres in extent. The space should really be measured in cubic feet, but the numbers would quickly become astronomical.

    Why are they there? Because Phoenix is the perfect place in North America to build trans-shipment warehouses. No winter, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no mudslides, no uncontrolled fires. We do have a brutal summer heat, but that’s just so much hot air.

    For these same reasons, Phoenix is an increasingly popular destination for server farms and colocation facilities. Critical commercial data must be stored or mirrored in places where it won’t be lost to acts of god or other freak events. Phoenix has a talented workforce, great air and ground transportation, a first-rate communications infrastructure and a tremendous surplus of electrical power. Major companies and major airlines park their data and their airplanes here because they know they’ll be safe.

    Plus which, Phoenix is sunny all the time and it’s a great place to raise kids. We don’t necessarily think about everything when picking a place to live, but, as life expectancies increase, what we might call the marginal futility of death by accident soars. Your kids could live a lot longer than you Read more

    The soul of a bigger Bloodhound: Anticipating BloodhoundBlog.TV

    We’re about to grow to be a much bigger dog. We’re a media play to begin with — news and views, not sales and service. People lecture us all the time that we don’t get real estate weblogging, a point we might dispute. Weblogging about the real estate business, on the other hand, we do better than anyone.

    What we have coming is a new idea on a new domain, BloodhoundBlog.TV. (There’s nothing there yet; we’re too busy building the underlying technology.)

    Yawn! Yet another claque of clamorous real estate videos?

    Not on your life.

    We’re going at this BloodhoundBlog way, as webloggers: Serious about important ideas, always, but never stuffy or stilted — and never in anyone’s thrall. We’re going to do the same kinds of things we do here — in streaming, iPod-ready video.

    Here are some kinds of content we might take on:

    • The Talking Head, like Andy Rooney or Bill O’Reilly. This is akin to a weblog post, but it’s harder to do well than to imagine having done well. It works best from a well-rehearsed script, but some of the best YouTube videos we have linked to fall into this category.
    • How-To/Spot News/Actuality. This is like HGTV or a news broadcast. Plenty of room for creativity here: multiple locations, multiple interviews, music, still images or film clips.
    • Interviews. This is what we think of right now when we think of a general interest real estate video podcast. With a camcorder or a decent webcam, we can do this anywhere. Connecting through the Studio BHB set-up (about which more below), we can make a fairly tightly edited two-shot remote interview on the fly.
    • Group Discussions. This depends on Studio BHB. A group of us, contributors or guests, can come together in a video-conference, which we can store as a video. I’ve worked out a way to edit this kind of conference to make a visually compelling presentation on the fly.

    We are planning to do a weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast, combining the first three types of segments with a group discussion about those segments, about the real estate news of the week and about our particular favorites among Read more

    HR 3915: Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007

    Congressman Banker…err…Barney Frank co-authored legislation to “reform” the mortgage business on Monday.  You can view the 66-page text here.

    Bullet Points of the bill include:

    1- Prohibition of “yield spread premium” as compensation to originators.

    2- Mandatory licensing of mortgage originators by a Federal registry or state regulator.  This Bill does direct the Office of Thrift Supervision to establish a registry for bank employees who originate loans.

    3- Ability to repay the loan must be established.  Limits on cash-out refinances and a determination of a net tangible benefit to the borrower will apply.

    4- Mandatory “pre-funding counseling” for certain “high-cost” loans by a certified HUD counselor.

    You really must read this bill in its entirety.  Hidden among the bowels of the bill is language specifically limiting interest rates to 1.75% over the “published market rate” for conforming loans.  How can you determine a “market rate” if there are limits?  That’s just a paradox.

    All of these proposed measures will be more costly to the consumer and is a prime example of “Big Momma” acting as YOUR financial planner. 

    Yield spread premium is a very effective way to defray the up-front costs of a loan. 

    Mandatory licensing will cause consumers to place undue trust in the “government-approved” originator.  While I philosophically oppose any form of occupational licensing, I would support this mandatory licensing if it were unilaterally applied with testing of expertise.  If the government is going to create a class of “loan agents”, they had better be qualified to effectively counsel consumers about how to use their mortgage as a financial planning tool.

    Government regulated underwriting guidelines will contract the real estate market.

    Financial planning tips from a government agent?  Seriously, does anyone else notice the irony in this?
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    Bruce Hahn Writes Another Letter To Inman News

    Bruce HahnBruce Hahn writes another letter to Inman News. Of course it gets published, Bruce’s letters always get published on Inman News. I’ve posted about Bruce before, in this post and
    in this one. It is a big secret who pays Bruce. He likes to advance the idea that it doesn’t matter who pays him, only the viewpoint he is forwarding is what matters. I don’t buy it. Say what you will about NAR (I do:-) but how they get their funding isn’t a secret. What agenda they are pushing, or why, isn’t a secret either.

    I want there to be a record of Bruce’s letters. Some day it will eventually be obvious who has been paying Bruce to write these letters and paying him to not tell anyone who they are. In the meantime, here is his latest:

    Dear Editor:

    Given NAR’s concerns about the objectivity of the Justice Department’s competition and real estate Web site, I checked the consumer education section of NAR’s Web site to see how NAR’s descriptions of the features of the various real estate brokerage business models compared with those of DOJ. I couldn’t find any information at all on any of the real estate brokerage business models on the consumer education section of NAR’s site. This is curious since you would think educating home buyers and home sellers about the various types of real estate brokerage business models and their features would be a great fit for NAR.

    I think NAR should stop beefing about DOJ’s and FTC’s efforts to educate consumers about the various real estate business models until it has something superior to offer. NAR has among its membership traditional and minimum-service brokers, EBAs and many other business models. It should appoint task forces, with every segment equally represented, which would be asked to work together to develop objective consumer education materials on the various alternative brokerage models home buyers and sellers might wish to consider.

    For even greater balance NAR might also seek input from some of the other real estate brokerage associations and consumer organizations interested in this area. This would give NAR the opportunity to both Read more

    The Hyper-Local Farm II — My Ferrari Blows the Doors Off Your VW

    Prologue: My initial post on this subject, was widely read, and seemed to generate responses on one side or the other, not many in the middle. That makes sense. One commenter came at me full throttle, remaining civil, detailing why, a hyper-local farm not only wouldn’t work, but wouldn’t be any more productive than what he’s doing now, offline.

    We both, no doubt, think the other is partaking of herbs not meant for cooking. 🙂 In short, I think he’s a good guy, harboring an honest difference of opinion. The following is how we have disagreed.

    vw van ferrari

    I think I’d really like Spencer Barron. In fact, judging by our give and take in the comments of my most recent post, I like him and respect him. We have respectfully disagreed on the concept of the hyper-local farm site, but it’s been fun. He’s obviously a pretty smart guy.

    Can you feel the butter, Spencer? 🙂

    Spenser — The next time I’m in Denver, I’m buying. We gotta meet, cuz it’s always fun to talk with guys who disagree with me so much, yet so well, and stay so wrong. 🙂

    Your VW just passed me? To extend the metaphor, you’re driving a VW because your approach can’t generate enough money to acquire a Ferrari. 🙂

    Let’s count the ways you are, in my view, not only dead wrong, but worse, basing your thinking on absolutely false premises — a mistake that almost always proves fatal.

    You said — Since you will be continuously marketing them to go to your blog, why don’t you just tell them why they should use you. You could try to appeal directly to the people your trying to reach, home sellers. Why all the coy games?

    False Premise #1 — Wait a minute, let me write that one down. 🙂 You mean, I should actually tell them why I’m the best agent for them? Well I’ll be dogged.

    I’ll be continuously marketing them to go to my blog. All that will be done in the infancy of the site (blog? website? hybrid? who cares?) because that’s what’ll make it go. Read more

    San Diego Fire Update: Email from Jeff Brown

    On 10/24/07 10:44 AM, “Greg Swann” wrote:

    Are you okay? Talked to Brian and he indicated the danger now confronts you.

    Thanks — we’re not in danger, but the air quality sucks.  The fire is about 15 minutes or so mostly east and a bit south from us.

    It’s so bad, the Fire Captain said they were confident they could successfully have it surrounded on or before NOVEMBER 4TH!

    Not good.

    The fires in the north, as I said earlier, are now working, much of the time, in concert with each other.

    The wild card is the now fickle winds. We’re apparently transitioning from Santa Ana to normal weather. It makes it far more dangerous for the firefighters. An example in the last few minutes was a fire engine that had to back up at emergency speed from a home’s driveway, as several firemen jumped literally into a small brushfire threatening to trap and destroy the engine.

    The winds’ velocity has slowed, but are now unpredictable. Again, not good.

    Bottom line — looks like we won’t gain the upper hand on this thing for another week maybe.
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    Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.

    [I was just finishing this up when I read Greg’s terrific post.  Timing in life and all that…]

    My first jaunt into online polemics was in the early nineties, the topic animal rights.  The Animal Liberation Front was active in the Northwest – burning fur farms and research labs to prove the efficacy of their argument – and my (then) wife was involved with the breeding and showing of dogs, the kind of thing that worked a True Believer into lather.

    Then, of course, it wasn’t blogs, but  newsgroups – talk.politics.animals, as I recall – and it should come as no surprise that conversations tended to get a little, well, testy.  I actually took a moderator position for a short time, part of my job to write, every third post or so, a plea of the “Can’t we all just get along?” variety, which would settle things down, but never for much longer than twenty minutes.

    [One can tolerate only so much. A reader had logged in to pour out his heart: He was a teacher in a middle school that, for a fundraiser, had staged a pig kissing contest.  The kids loved it, but the teacher was traumatized by the humiliation caused the pigs; he’d gone home and cried himself to sleep.  What could he do to make others understand?  I was asked to step down due to the insensitivity of my reply.]

    Turning someone already steeped in the dogma is impossible, but there are tools available to convince the fence sitters:  The first thing I did was read the literature, then I downloaded and printed out – I still have the somewhat yellowed copy within arm’s length of where I type – a list of forty three logical fallacies.

    Dialogue requires order.

    ====

    Unfortunately, the web and blogs have managed to define discourse down even further.   And – who’d have thought? – it’s even beginning to infect RE blogs.  I think that’s why Rain City Guide’s Dustin Luther issued his preemptive admonition,  brilliant in its brevity:  Attack ideas, not people; no personal promotion. All’s well, and RCG continues to be one of the best in quality dialogue.

    Then Read more

    When all you have is a hammer — disintermediate the bums!

    I live in an amazing world, which is to say a world by which I am continuously amazed, without boundary or graduation.

    Here’s an example: I cannot for the life of me understand why National Association of Realtors President Pat Combs has not called me personally to ask me to come to Las Vegas for the convention to tell the NAR what it’s getting wrong.

    Now you may think that’s an amazing hubris on my part, but in fact I am the obvious candidate for the job. Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman is the only plausible alternative, but he is too much at odds with traditional real estate to qualify. I, on the other hand, am — on paper at least — the pot-bellied poster-child of the NAR — GRI, ABR, CRS the hard way. Add to that that I have spent many hundreds of hours detailing what’s wrong with the NAR, and have built a national platform from with to promulgate those arguments and, from my point of view — from Planet Cluetrain — the invitation should have been forthcoming months ago.

    But there my amazement does not end. For, upon receipt of such an invitation, I would have to decide what to do about it. It wouldn’t be an easy choice. I think I might love to do it — on my birthday, no less — particularly if the audience were very hostile. But I don’t see that there could be any enduring benefit to it. If Pat Combs had ever even heard of the Cluetrain, she wouldn’t have any need to hear from me.

    A nicer way, and I could do this easily enough, would be to go in and talk about the exciting world of Web 2.0 — and it seems likely to me that someone will be doing just that at some breakout session or another. And this will be just as stupid and pointless as the Inman BloggerDoggles, where earnest, well-intentioned people try to talk about community while a horde of congenital note-takers scribbles down tips on how to fake sincerity to snag more leads.

    “The world sorts itself out” is what Read more