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September 28, 2007

An open letter to the owners of ActiveRain: Show us the contracts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Messrs. Heaton and Washburn, owners of ActiveRain,

My take on your having released your lawsuit against Move, Inc., and their response is that you know with a high degree of confidence that you cannot prevail in court. I read your original lawsuit as an attempt to extract something from Move, Inc., even though there is no chance they will proceed with the planned acquisition of ActiveRain. When that initial foray failed, my thinking is that you released your petition and their response because you hope to pressure Move, Inc., in the court of public opinion.

All that’s as may be. Those two documents don’t interest me nearly as much as whatever acquisition agreements were executed between ActiveRain and Move, Inc. Those documents will detail specifically what information you had agreed to disclose, and what Move, Inc., had pledged to do — and not do — in its turn.

Attorney’s briefs are full of bluster and bravado, but, in fact, it is these acquisition agreements that will be dispositive in any formal hearing of your allegations.

Ergo, I ask that you release those documents for public scrutiny. When we have had an opportunity to determine what was actually agreed to, in writing, we can better judge the validity of your complaints.

I know that your knee jerk response will be to insist that those documents are too vital to your court case to be disclosed. But, if that were true, the corollary proposition would be that the documents you have made public — your initial petition and Move, Inc.’s response — are not vital to your court case — are not actually of any importance at all. This I am completely prepared to believe.

In fact, it’s one or the other. Keeping one’s private business to oneself is everyone’s right, but partial transparency is necessarily deception. If your goal is to proclaim to the world that you have been badly used, you must show us the violated terms of the contracts by which you were so cruelly violated.

If you will not do this, I will regard your having released your petition and Move, Inc.’s response as nothing but Read more

September 27, 2007

ActiveRain.com v. Move.com: The Nagging Question

by

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

Author website

I can’t seem to get this out of my head. Call it the Dustin effect.

If Dustin was hired by Move.com as the Director of Interactive Marketing, and was teaching Realtors how to blog way back in early 2007, why are the Active Rain boys surprised that Move.com was developing a blog platform? What made them think that Move.com wouldn’t proceed with that product if they didn’t purchase Active Rain?

and yet…

Dustin was openly critical of Active Rain when he first joined (December, 2006) . Why would Move.com make an offer for Active Rain when its Director of Interactive Marketing had little good to say about the platform?
< ?PHP include("ActiveRainMoveSaga.php"); ?>

September 27, 2007

Active Rain Wuz Robbed

by

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

Author website

There are so many ways to play the puns here.  Who Moved my Rain?  Move before you get Rained Upon.  It’s Rainin’ Moves.  All pretty goofy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m biased but so is Greg Swann.  Greg calls Active Rain stoopid technology, I call it useful,  Again, my interest in Active Rain’s success is financial; I write to and market to the Realtor channel.

Move’s shuck and jive play for Active Rain is indefensible.  If Move were a home buyer, they would be entitled to material information in the interest of full disclosure.  Real estate agents call this the inspection or contingency period.  In the corporate finance/M&A world, it is referred to as the due diligence period.  Move had every right to reverse it’s offer to purchase Active Rain if it discovered something during the due diligence period.

Here’s where Move screwed up; they started a competing business while fleecing the boys of their member roster and competitive points system plan.  That is referred to in the lawsuit as the “confidential information”.  They placed contingencies upon the purchase:  Active Rain was instructed to cease all merger and acquisition opportunities, revenue opportunities, and financing plans.  Those very actions, combined with a simultaneous push to present a competing product, suggest that Move perceived  Active Rain as a competitive threat.  It used the carrot of its deep pockets as a tool to paralyze the industry leader while developing a competing product.

Are the boys at Active Rain insane to think that the platform is worth $33 million?  I think so but I’m no investment banker (and I clearly have no experience in valuations of tech start-ups).  The figure, however, was set by the perpetrator of this scheme.  Move played the old Nigerian e-mail scam on Active Rain.  Naivete doesn’t make the victim any less injured nor does it make the scam artist any less culpable.  That means you can’t say “What are they stupid to think we’d pay them that much? ” as your defense.

A jury trial will be a nightmare for Move, especially if that jury is in California.  Twelve reasonably hard-working men and Read more

September 27, 2007

ActiveRain discovers that the Code of Web 2.0 is the Code of the West: Do unto others before them others do it unto you

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Code of the West ain’t some words on a page
You just naturally know it when you come of age
You eat when you’re hungry, you drink when you’re dry
You look every man in the eye

In the nineteenth century, rogue investors like Jay Gould and Big Jim Fisk would buy up parcels of land parallel to a successful railroad. They would lay some track and invite reporters in, regaling them with tales of the new railroad they planned to build in direct competition with the going concern. The owners of the competing railroad would panic, racing to put together a buy-out package that would get the rogues to sell out — at many multiples of their initial outlay. Did they ever intend to build anything? No one ever put them to the test.

It’s the Code of the West when the boys talk of women
The Code of the West what you know you don’t tell
The Code of the West a man soaps his own saddle
Brands his own cattle and some of his neighbor’s as well

A century later on Wall Street, greenmailers like T. Boone Pickens would put together minor stakes in bloated corporations, then announce with great fanfare their intention to incite a proxy battle, thus to sell the company off piecemeal. The bloated boards of directors of the bloated corporations would race off to find a white knight investor, who would buy out the rogue investors at a handsome profit.

If you’re buildin’ fences then I ain’t for hire
You get me for nothin’ and I’ll bring the wire
You patch up my windows, I’ll plumb up your doors
If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours

In the world of Web 2.0, we have a similar scam, only by now the entrenched interest has the game figured out.

Let’s say you and two college buddies have built a Web 2.0 “platform” — which is to say something stoopid, goofy and — at least temporarily — viral and sticky.

Why did you do this? To build a business? To set an example? To leave a legacy in the world of hi-tech commerce?

No.

You built it to sell it to Google Read more

September 27, 2007

Updated information on the Anglin children

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jay Thompson has an update on the state of the Anglin children, along with a link to Aaron Anglin’s obituary in the Austin American-Statesman. Jay has set up a guest book so that you can express your condolences to the family.

The obituary includes this important information:

A trust fund has been set up for the children:
Guaranty Bank, Acct# 3805908914
Checks payable to James Johnson (grandfather)
ITF Eleanor & Mackenzie Anglin

We each of us are doing what we can, and I expect we’ve gone a long way toward covering Aaron’s burial expenses and the children’s hospital costs. But: That’s a band-aid. The real costs of raising children are huge and ever-accelerating.

I know there are big-money vendors reading this site. Your tax advisors can instruct you on what you need to do to expense a donation to a trust fund — or an annuity — as good will or whatever.

If we can put the arm on a few hundred people for a few hundred dollars each, that’s a good thing. But if someone can step up to put a few hundred dollars a month in the kitty for the next 18 or 20 years, that would be quite a bit better.

The fact is, these children are going to grow up without a father. I wish that were a rare circumstance, but it’s not. But here is a case we know about of children losing their patrimony, and a particularly brutal loss of patrimony at that.

We’re all doing what we can, but if you can do more than the rest of us, that would be a wonderful thing.

 
PS: Don’t be shy about emailing this post or a letter of your own to vendors with whom you have a working relationship. The secret to getting money is to ask for it.

September 26, 2007

Advertising to Ashley

by

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

Author website

Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of college students in a combination panel/ focus group about marketing to the Wired generation. The results are predictably astounding.

See the one hour video here.

Conversations are electronic– two users sent over 4000 text messages each month. From texting, they progress to mobile voice communication; nobody uses landlines anymore. Very few actually use the camera function of the mobile phone; they prefer digital cameras.

They use e-mail serially. Every panelist said that they can be reached via e-mail throughout the day.

Here’s the interesting part- they all use MySpace and Facebook and consider that to be the primary communication tool. When asked to explain the fascination, they all pointed to communication as the primary reason.

They read but don’t write blogs. Most read celebrity blogs and don’t comment (no surprise there). None of them knew what a RSS feed is. They rely on wikis to obtain information but are somewhat skeptical about the veracity of the information there. If they see a disclaimer from a moderator, they tune out immediately.

They rarely watch television and when they do, they use TiVo to block ads.. They watch YouTube and read magazines. Wired Magazine is on everyone’s reading list. When asked how they receive marketing communications, they pointed to celebrity users. Endorsements of a product, by a celebrity, hold a tremendous amount of value with them.

When questioned about their dream gadget, all of them requested a device that integrated an iPod, a cell phone, and a personal computer that had data safety if lost.

What does that mean to us, real estate marketers, in the next five years? These young adults will be the first time home buyers of 2010-2020. Certainly, their habits will change as they age but their commitment to communications technology and social networking will not.

Does this mean that the real estate weblog of the future will be written by Paris Hilton on Facebook? If you sell a home to Matt Leinart, you’ll want to make sure your Facebook profile publishes his video endorsement Read more

September 25, 2007

The purpose of civilization . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I make my living as a hard-headed, practical man, but I live in a very abstract world. Because of the Anglin children, I’ve been thinking about the idea of fatherlessness, a topic I’ve written about in the past:

I was doing that fatherstuff, to the extent I understand it, which amounts to teaching boys how to be men, and, in other circumstances, teaching girls how to relate to men. You can’t pick up a magazine without discovering what poor specimens of humanity men are. “Men make lousy women!” a woman’s magazine will reveal. “Husbands are not the best wives!” discloses a journal for married women. “Fathers are inadequate mothers!” a mother’s magazine proclaims. And the rejoinder to all those with a deathgrip on the obvious is: “Well, duh!”

A father is the provider, his most important job. If he neglects it in order to preen as an ersatz mommy, the children suffer. A father is the moral leader, obliged to take it on the chin again and again; that’s how children learn how to take it on the chin. A father is the defender, the one who confronts the burglar when mom and the kids are hiding under the bed. Fathers are everything we claim to admire when we use the word “manly” and everything we affect to despise when we use the word “male”, but, at bottom, fathers are not mothers. We need mothers to do what mothers do, and we need fathers to do what fathers do, and when children are denied one or the other, they suffer. You won’t read this in a women’s magazine, and you won’t read it in a men’s magazine unless it’s tattooed into a well-tanned navel. But it’s the truth.

But the main job of being a father is simply being around. I’m not congratulating myself for what I did with Xavier, because I knew it was temporary. He didn’t have a father all of a sudden, he just had a weak little prosthetic, and that only for a while. But I taught him what little I could of the manly art of manliness, what little Read more

September 24, 2007

Stand by for the real estate market shakeup

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

This is excerpted from today’s Inman News:

“RealUmbrella, a new site for home buyers and sellers that launches today in California, will not make many friends in the real estate brokerage industry, but it’s not supposed to.

At its Web site, the company states that brokers, Realtors and agents that exist today “are being re-purposed for tomorrow. Stand by for the real estate market shakeup.”

The company seeks to link for-sale-by-owner buyers and sellers directly in an online platform that features digital documents and electronic signatures for a flat fee.”

Here is the URL, www.realumbrella.com, so you can see for yourself the Big Giant Threat this particular we-do-nothing-for-less-in-fact-we’re-almost-like-a-real-Real-Umbrella-logocompany poses to Realtors. It might be good to note that there is NO company, proposal, idea or random thought ever, that attacks Realtors, that is too irrelevant for Inman to not select as “feature news”. It’s all good. I love the quote from some not-quite-bright dimwit, “brokers, Realtors and agents that exist today are being re-purposed for tomorrow. Stand by for the real estate market shakeup.”

I am standing by. Enjoying the hallucinatory thought process that would lead to making such a stupid statement. I’m thinking that Dave Liniger letting a fart over the weekend will have a greater effect than anything the RealUmbrella company will ever do.

__

NUMBER1EXPERTlogoOn the off chance that you did not receive an email from Best Image Marketing, I am giving a “webinar” on Wednesday morning (9 AM PT). Anyone can listen in, if they care to. Here is the link to register. There are some great past webinars there as well and I’m thinking that the one I do Wednesday will wind up there a day or so later, if Wednesday morning isn’t convenient for you.

September 24, 2007

Lani Anglin’s brother’s children lost their father yesterday. Here’s what you can do to help…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lani Anglin lost a brother yesterday, and his children lost their father. April Groves has the details at Lani’s site.

We can count the beads later, but now is the time for practical action.

Aaron Anglin is survived by a wife and two very young daughters. The way I’m reading things, he died without life insurance, which puts those three ladies on a very hard road.

If you can spare something for them, put it in the form of negotiable funds — cash, cashier’s check or money order — and overnight it to:

      Aleisha Anglin
      c/o Lani Anglin
      2719 Costa Azul Cove
      Leander, TX
      78641

April is working on setting up a donation account with Bank of America, and I’ll amend this post when that account becomes available. In the meantime, Jay Thompson has set up a donation system using PayPal.

But: I will promise you that there are people who will want to be paid now, and this young family will have immediate and ongoing needs. There was a time in your life when fate could have hit you this hard. Now is your chance to redeem that good fortune.

More: At GeekEstate Blog, Michael Price is auctioning a tricked-out 30GB iPod, with the proceeds going to the Anglin family.

Benn Rosales reflects on these tragic events, finding grounds for hope despite everything.

Jay Thompson has a rundown of today’s activity on the RE.net, including links to many other posts. I am always very proud when I have the privilege of setting my shoulder beside his to get something done. Jay is honor made manifest, and I am honored to know him.

Here is trust fund information:

A trust fund has been set up for the children:
Guaranty Bank, Acct# 3805908914
Checks payable to James Johnson (grandfather)
ITF Eleanor & Mackenzie Anglin

And: if you have the ability to donate a big chunk of money, here is a discussion of how you might make a huge and enduring difference in the lives of these children.

Here are a couple of buttons, large and small, that you can use on your own weblog/web site. These incorporate Jay’s PayPal donation interface, so your readers can make donations online by credit card. Copy Read more

September 24, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Getting ARMs back up on their own two feet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. We had 20 posts on the short-list, but 24 more that were also very good.

Here are this week’s winners:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Peter Coy at BusinessWeek for Believe it or not, the ‘optimal’ mortgage is an option ARM:

If you had to name the most toxic, dangerous, foolhardy kind of mortgage loan that exists, you’d very likely pick a pay-option ARM, which lets borrowers get deeper into debt by paying less than the minimum interest they owe each month and adding the unpaid interest to the loan principal. Worse yet, you might say, would be a pay-option ARM with a very high penalty for prepayment so borrowers can’t get out of it easily once they’re in it. There’s a move afoot to ban these worst-of-the-worst loans.

Guess what? The worst is actually the best.

Yes, according to a new study by professors from Columbia and New York universities, the “optimal” mortgage in a perfect world is precisely that kind of loan—an adjustable-rate mortgage with an option for negative amortization and a ban (or at least severe restriction) on prepayment.

Crazy? Not as crazy as you might think. The key, according to professors Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia Business School and Alexei Tchistyi of New York University’s Stern School of Business, is that this kind of mortgage is optimal only in a perfect world—namely, one in which borrowers are fully rational and always do what’s in their own best interest.

ARMs are like the miracle drug that can’t get over its tabloid reputation. This post won’t rehabilitate them, either, but it’s a start.

The Black Pearl Award become the Snow Pea Award this week. The winner is another testament to the epicentricity of the epicenter of real estate weblogging, Tucson’s Dave Smith, who graces us with Growing Peas in a Day! Here’s the Black Pearl:

Stop ripping your blog apart.

  • Pick a good theme
  • Activate good plug-ins
  • Use productive functional widgets
  • Add content regularly
  • Weed out the Spam and Eye Candy
    Now give it time to grow. It takes time to grow and be found and produce fruit.

You can’t be Read more

September 24, 2007

Prometheus abundant: Giving the gift of mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to fight a war on poverty? A war on terror? A war on the senseless waste of the sole source of capital, the human mind? Here’s your chance. For two weeks in November, you’ll be able to buy two XO laptops, the One-Laptop-Per-Child computer, with one coming to you and the other going to a hungry young mind overseas.

From the Boston Globe:

With orders for its rugged XO laptop falling short of its initial goal, the One Laptop Per Child project announced today that it would let consumers in the United States and Canada buy the cute computer for a limited time.

In an interview last week, Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT Media Lab director and founder of the so-called $100 laptop initiative, conceded that he had not locked in the 3 million orders that he once said were necessary to trigger mass production.

The new “Give 1, Get 1” initiative could be the antidote, he said, by helping to spread the project.

For a limited two-week span in November, people will be able to buy two laptops for $399, one for the buyer and one for a child in a developing country.

My take: Donate both, perhaps with one going to a child in your own home town. Even better:

Starting today, people who simply want to donate a laptop to a child in a developing country for $200 can do so online at XOgiving.org.

I think there must be three billion candidates for this machine, so I can’t imagine how most of them will get one before they are no longer children. But the bounty of the harvest is planted one seed at a time.

Prometheus literally means “foresight.” Because of the gift of mind, the uniquely Hellenic gift, I live in a world of vast abundance. I used to joke that Americans should “count their microprocessors instead of sheep,” but, by now, I can’t get an accurate count of the microprocessors sitting on my desk. When I think about some young Prometheus growing up chained to the stultification of ignorance, indolence and superstition, I could not be more grateful for this chance to Read more

September 23, 2007

Can the NAR Improve a Buyer’s Financing Experience?

by

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

Author website

Realtors have to stop complaining about the sorry status of the lending industry.

Why?

They have the power to make a difference but refuse to take action. I have often heard the Realtors’ cry for licensing of loan originators and a plea for lending advisers to adopt a fiduciary capacity when originating a mortgage loan. Steve Berg makes an excellent case on The San Diego Home Blog for abolishing dual capacity, licensing originators, and establishing a fiduciary capacity for loan originators. The problem? Realtors are waiting for the lending industry to do this. That just ain’t gonna happen.

Realtors assume a fiduciary capacity for buyers. With that capacity comes a responsibility to assure that the buyers is getting good loan advice. The challenge? It’s the money, stupid!

How can the NAR really protect the consumer from unscrupulous loan originators? Adopt a standard which closely aligns itself with what the NAR membership wants. NAR membership wants to deal with licensed originators. NAR membership wants an independent fiduciary duty imposed upon originators.

Here are three ways Realtors can adopt to truly align their buyers with the originators they want:

1- Stop referring loans to originators at federally chartered banks. These banks are exempt from licensing and are limited in their product selection. The only way a fiduciary relationship can be established for your buyer is to refer him/her to an independent mortgage broker who is able to shop ALL of the big banks and smaller mortgage companies.

2- Insist on loan commitments from originators who are General Mortgage Associates of the of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. To date, this is the only national organization that has stated that its membership must act in a fiduciary capacity to the borrower. In practice, the NAMB doesn’t give a damn but at least they state that they do.

3- Prohibit the membership from originating loans. That means that all affiliated business arrangements and common ownership of lending institutions and brokerages must be terminated. It further means that splits for individual Realtors (from employing brokers) will Read more

September 23, 2007

Voting for The People Choice Award: The long and short of short-listing Odysseus Medal nominations

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Week by week, I’m seeing more and more great Odysseus Medal nominations. To get to a short-list of twenty posts — which still may be too long — I’m having to cut some very good weblog entries. In consequence, this week I’m showing the rest of the long-list as well as the short-list of People’s Choice candidates.

In both lists, the posts are shown in random order. People will tend to favor the top or bottom of a list, so I’m trying flatten the curve of outbound clicks so everyone gets the exposure.

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 PDT/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:

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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 23, 2007

Is Greenspan to Blame for the Housing Crisis? And, if he is, is this entirely a bad thing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The second half of a US News dyscomium on Alan Greenspan’s Fed:

The global spread of capitalism has increased inflation-dampening competition throughout the world and allowed investors to accept lower yields when investing in bonds. What’s more, globalization has boosted incomes, in Asia and beyond. That has expanded the pool of savings that can flow into U.S. debt, forcing rates lower. The result, according to a 2006 paper by economist Tao Wu at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, is a “substantially weakened” Fed.

Then again, Greenspan might want to embrace his role in all this. Just as the Internet bubble left behind Google, eBay, and 90 million miles of fiber optic cable, the credit bubble upgraded America’s aging housing infrastructure and created a host of online services—Realtor.com, Zillow—that have permanently shifted the balance of power from real-estate agents to consumers. As Australian economist and bubble-ologist Jason Potts puts it, “A bubble is good for growth because it creates a low-cost environment for experimentation.” Even if it eventually pops.

It’s understood that unwarranted risk results in a voluntary transfer of wealth from the badly-advised to the better-advised. In real estate, professional investors are slavering at the sidelines waiting to pick up foreclosed homes.

For my own part, I find myself wondering why only a few price categories have risen substantially during what has been the ten years since the U.S. went of the Volckerized pseudo-gold-standard. I had thought the answer was in productivity increases owing to technology, but I hadn’t considered the impact of much cheaper imported goods, especially from China.

What Paul Volcker was doing, and what Greenspan was doing until 1997 or so, was surfing the price of gold as a guide for currency inflation. If the price of gold was relatively stable, then the Fed was inflating the currency at approximately the same rate that productivity was growing. Post hoc — irrational exuberance, dot.com bomb, Enron/Tyco/etc., 9/11, housing boom — the price of gold is up substantially, which argues that the money supply has increased far ahead of productivity. Except that prices for services and manufactured goods (excluding housing) have not risen accordingly. Ignoring Read more

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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.

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