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September 18, 2007

World Cup Real Estate

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Time for blogging is often hard to find. Most posts are begun on one day and finished some other, and usually it’s for the best. I started this post yesterday, and it got a bit gummed up. Nineteen hours and one Kris Berg post later, and I’m good to go. And there are important things happening in real estate, but sorry Greg, there are no big thoughts in this post. This is simply my entry for the Dumbest Post of the Week category. 

Kris uses chicken soup, my unlikely source of inspiration and motivation comes from rugby. Yes rugby. That is the sport of kings, isn’t it? Well then, it’s the sport of titans.

I discovered rugby last Sunday and now that I know the truth, and I’ll step up and say it- rugby is the greatest sport invented. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know the terminology. I don’t know the teams or the players, but sitting in front of the big plasma TV, none of that matters one bit. Here’s what I see: Two teams of grown men completely driven to play a sport that is both brutal and strategic, physical and mental, dependent on both teamwork and individual skills, and requiring both tactical knowledge and gut instincts. And it is beautiful to watch.

There is a ball, of sorts. It’s thrown, kicked, pitched, or carried toward a goal. Players get tackled and men often pile on top of the ball. In a football game that would be where the play ends. In rugby? I don’t know what happens. Sometimes the play ends but often, just when you think it’s over, you are waiting to hear a whistle. You wait for a referee. You wait for the players to unpile themselves and…It doesn’t happen. Seconds pass. What is going on in that pile? Where’s the whistle? Where’s the ball? You are waiting, willing something to happen. Then, from the bottom of the mound of players, the ball comes flying forth to be kicked or pitched or carried forward once more! It’s such thrilling madness! Who would play such a sport? What would motivate grown men to participate in such an intense spectacle of sheer Read more

September 18, 2007

Federal funds rate cut by a half-point

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here:

The Federal Open Market Committee cut its benchmark federal funds rate by a half percentage point to 4.75%. In an effort to ease the credit crunch, the Federal Reserve also reduced its discount rate in lockstep to 5.25%. This is the first cut in the federal funds rate since June 2003. In a statement, the FOMC said the action “was necessary to forestall some of the adverse effects on the broad economy that might otherwise arise from the disruptions in financial markets and to promote moderate growth over time.” The Fed said that some inflation risks remain. It said the credit crunch could hurt the economy.

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September 18, 2007

Chicken Soup for Your Business

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

chicken-soup.jpg

April Groves shared her thoughts on how mundane tasks often tend to produce seemingly unrelated benefits. I love this post – Whether, as April suggests, it is the ordinary act of house cleaning (okay, not so ordinary in my house) which inspires healthy eating or the simple ritual of applying make-up which increases productivity, random tasks can work to produce surprising results. (I can’t leave this last “make-up thing” without warning April that when her odometer nears a significant roll-over milestone as mine is, the task of “putting on one’s face” becomes about as simple as engineering a space station).

April is right, though – We needn’t surrender our lives and our work to a constant state of entropy. And yes, you naysayers, there is a real estate connection in all of this. I think it is safe to say that we all from time to time find ourselves either on a low boil or losing steam. We all periodically risk burn-out.  Let’s call it Business Block, and sometimes the answer isn’t to do more of what got you into this place, but to recognize your motivating triggers. I have my own mechanisms for harnessing the energy to refocus.  I make chicken soup – Using the Suzuki method. No defined recipe, but just a lot of seemingly unrelated stuff from the pantry which sounds good and I intuitively know will make me hungry again.

Dress for Success

I remember my elementary school dress code. Skirts or dresses for the girls were required. The argument was that we would be more inclined to learn if we dressed the part; sloppy appearances would translate to sloppy attitudes and shorter attention spans. Today, many light years later, this is just silly. Blue jeans don’t symbolize a day off – Ask any Microsoft employee. For me, they symbolize “no appointments” and therefore a “back office day”. My most productive back office days come courtesy of Abercrombie and Fitch. Unfortunately, Steve’s “back office day” uniform involves a pair of hideous day-glo orange shorts which, ironically, work the same magic for me. They send me running for the office.

Blogging

Some days there is just no wind in Read more

September 18, 2007

New Times likes the present: Smarmy, tendentious blather wants to be free!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then, and, in that spirit, The New York Times has discovered that cowering behind a paywall is a profitless pursuit of irrelevance. More from TechCrunch:

The history of paid content goes back to the collapse of the Web 1.0 bubble, a time before content monetization was a sure bet through programs such as Google Adsense and others. There was a backlash against free content for a while, and a number of companies launched pay-to-view programs. The New York Times was one of the last to maintain this model.

Surely, with the Wall Street Journal being acquired by News Corp, the WSJ pay-to-view program must now be on death row. Similarly, the Australian Financial Review’s paid AFR.com service has been rumored to be on its last legs for some time, and will shortly close.

Most importantly: this is a win for all of us. The notion of paying to access content is flawed in a connected online world where virtually everything is free, particularly content. Companies such as the NY Times can make money from providing content for free. The fall of the model for all publications is nigh.

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September 17, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Propagating better ideas in real estate by celebrating better ideas in real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is probably not much of a secret, but I really love ideas. I think the argument that smart people can improve the NAR cartel from the inside is absurd, but the instant form of the claim — that I could advance Realtors’ use of technology by wasting my time at committee meetings — is especially specious. It’s no goal of mine to change any life but my own, but, even so, the best technological benefit I can bring to Realtors, lenders, investors and thoughtful consumers is right here: Explicating our own new ideas and and drawing attention to other peoples’ innovations. Ideas are an attribute of active minds, and minds and meetings are sets with the tiniest of intersections.

Among all the other virtues I might claim for it, The Odysseus Medal competition is a celebration of great ideas in real estate. Here are this week’s winners:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Dan Melson for Should Lenders Be Permitted to Sell Real Estate?:

Let us ask about real estate which has become owned by the lender. Why should lenders lack an ability shared by every other citizen, resident, illegal alien, and even people who have never set foot in the country – the ability to sell their own property? There’s no requirement for anyone else to use an agent. It may be smart to use an agent, but everyone else has the legal right to go it on their own. Why not lenders?

I’ll tell you why. Because not only would lenders being able to get into the business threaten the interests of the major chains that control most real estate, but this requires lenders to pay those same firms money if they want to get the property from their bad loans sold – and they need to get the property sold.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly eager to compete with yet more big corporations with huge advertising budgets. It remains the right thing to do. Right for the industry, and right for the consumers. As I’ve said many times before, rent-seeking is repugnant, and that’s what NAR is doing – seeking Read more

September 17, 2007

Richard Epstein on zoning, Kelo and the “takings” clause

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dr. Richard Epstein is my favorite never-happen candidate for the Supreme Court. An expert on the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”), in the linked podcast, he

makes the case that many current zoning restrictions are essentially “takings” and property owners should receive compensation for the lost value of their land. He also discusses the Kelo case and the political economy of the regulation of land.

Click here for a direct link to the podcast.

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September 17, 2007

Nobody Behind the Curtain — Cookies and Milk — Judo — And NOT Repeating History

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

What went on with the speculation about the Fed Funds Rate all last week, and will surely intensify today and tomorrow, has been almost, but not quite analogous to the scene in The Wizard of Oz, when we discovered there was a man behind thehide in plain sight curtain. The characters were told to ignore him — by the guy behind the curtain.

Dr. Bernanke is not in any way analogous to that guy.

Bernanke has, in my opinion, played this whole melodrama out while hiding in plain sight, instead of behind a curtain. He’s using what I’m now calling Bernanke Judo. That is, he’s using the other guy’s energy against him, which keeps them off balance. Nobody is paying attention to what he’s really been doing the last few weeks, because he’s got everyone watching his interest rate hand. Meanwhile, he’s been free to play out his real agenda with the other hand.

The almost humorous part of his plan is how simple it’s been to execute — again — in plain sight.

First he treated all the whiners on Wall Street like petulant children by giving them all cookies and milk. It came in the form of a cut in the Fed Discount Rate. Everyone smiled, and the warm and milk and cookiesfuzzies returned to the land of bulls and bears. Confidence was bolstered.

Then they all took a nap — as he knew they would. He knew exactly how to manage their fears and frustrations. Sure, they kept complaining, but they kept it down to a low, manageable roar. They figured they’d finally thrown enough tantrums to get their way.

Bernanke also knew that beyond everything technical and debatable, the one thing he couldn’t let fall below the critical floor, was confidence in the economy as a whole. He cut the discount rate.

So, what’s he been doing you haven’t heard much if anything about the last few weeks? Making history, that’s what.

I can’t find a two week period in the last 40 years where the Fed has increased money supply by over $110Billion — can’t find it. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, but Read more

September 16, 2007

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a ton of very strong entries this week. I had to eliminate more than half to get to a short list of twenty nominees. If you didn’t make the cut, don’t despair. You’ll come back even stronger next week. Everything was terrific, a real treat for me going through them. These twenty survivors are must-reading.

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:

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 or, more easily, here.

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September 15, 2007

I invented a brand new social networking technology today, so, once somebody implements it, I want my iRadio for free

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. Even so, here’s a cool idea I had today.

First, art is selection. You have to stand back, because I can define art seven different ways in seven seconds. But one thing that art is is the selection of seemingly disparate elements into a pleasing whole. In this way, disc-jockeying can be seen as an art form.

Second, social networking can be viewed as communication by shared creation — collaboration.

So: Imagine an iPod-like device that allowed you to broadcast your music over, say, a 25 yard radius. You are now a DJ for anyone who wants to tune into your hyper-hyper-local radio show.

As an elaboration, imagine the each one of these iPod-like devices could work as either a sender or a receiver of hyper-hyper-local radio shows.

As a further elaboration, imagine that self-selected groups of people could create temporary networks of these iPod-like devices. In the receiving mode, each would retransmit music sent by the device in the transmitting mode, slightly expanding the transmission radius. The user of the transmitting device could elect to continue transmitting or could pass the baton of transmission along to another device in the network.

In this way, a group of people could DJ for each other, each sharing the best of their music collections with the others, each taking a turn as the creator of the collaborative artwork.

Picture a group of early-morning joggers or bike-riders. How about semi-sorta-suburban-strangers on a commuter train? Stuck at the airport? You can recruit volunteers to share in the misery.

iRadio? iBroadcast? iAmADJ? I think this could be a lot of fun.

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September 15, 2007

BlogRush: Viral weblog widget promotes for added traffic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I added a viral blog widget called BlogRush to the sidebar. In principal, it should draw attention to BloodhoundBlog posts at weblogs were folks might not know about us. It’s a rebuttable proposition, but one I’m willing to test. If it works, it should work for the entire RE.net. It’s a quasi-MLM, so if you click through from our link, we get brownie points.

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September 15, 2007

An open letter to the technological dinosaurs who presume to control our livelihoods

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To: Ron LaMee
VP Information Services
Arizona Association of Realtors

Ron:

Russell Shaw argues to me that I have been unfair to you, or at least unnecessarily rude. I don’t concede the point, but I am willing to elaborate on the issues at contest. In all honesty, I don’t expect anyone in my slice of the NAR cartel — the Phoenix Association of Realtors, the Arizona Association of Realtors, the National Association of Realtors, or the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service — to exhibit anything I would regard as an improvement, but it’s possible other, less-entrenched entities in other parts of the country can benefit from this discussion.

Before we get started in earnest, I want you to take a look at this map-based MLS search interface. Estately.com is my current pet, in no small measure because it integrates all kinds of neighborhood and transit information into its visual representation of MLS data. There are other cool tools out there: Windermere has a very sexy map-based search. RE/Max has a national MLS system, and Keller-Williams can’t be far behind in that regard. Even so, the market leaders for all of these very cool tools are third-party start-ups like Zillow.com and Trulia.com.

I realize that much of the software I’m talking about is outside your immediate purview. The point is that traditional Realtors are sinking fast, technologically, and you, Ron LaMee, are shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic while you try to hustle us into buying even more of the same obsolete crap we’re already drowning in.

Criticism stings while you’re getting it, but, in fact, it is by addressing the specifics of criticism that we substantially improve our performance. Most people take what they get uncritically — they take crap because they expect crap — but a sincere, informed critic is the best goad a person or organization can have to get rid of the crap in their product or service. Of course, most people and most organizations change nothing, preferring instead to resent the critic for exposing their crappy offerings to the light. In the free market, these problems are eventually corrected by auctioneers. It remains to Read more

September 14, 2007

Attorneys, Condescension, Immaculate Perception and the NAR

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

It’s always dangerous – and not a little misleading – to extrapolate a whole from a part.  One of the problems facing the real estate industry is a phantom stereotype – generally negative – applied to all agents, when anyone in the business knows that the range spans the genius to the inept, the scrupulously honest to the corrupt.  I’d argue high professionalism for most, but in three short years in the business I’ve run into the gamut.

So I understand the pitfalls of where I’m going with this, but I’m going anyway:

Do law schools really have a required Applied Condescension class; and why is it so many attorneys have a self regard inversely proportional to their actual worth?

I admit some of this is anecdotal and personal: the only attorney I’ve ever had to hire I also had to fire; what she’d failed to accomplish in six months I managed on my own in six days. Recommended by a friend, she overpromised, under delivered and grossly overcharged. When I told her on her last billing I wouldn’t pay until she provided an itemization – which she never provided – she tried the intimidation game.  Didn’t work.  Oh, my, it didn’t work.

But much more recently and pertinent: First, there was this – Buying without an agent – written by an attorney at Rain City Guide.  Entirely self serving, badly argued with serious errors of omission, it generated some pleasant acrimony in the comment section – numbering over 150 – as well as a follow up rebuttal.  I’m not going to parse the whole thing, but you get the tone from the last sentence:

Regardless, for hundreds of dollars, you can save 3% on the purchase price, while getting legal services from an attorney, not an agent.

This is just another verse in an emerging chapter:  Save money and get better representation by using an attorney instead of a real estate agent!  Why?  Hey, who cares about home values, sewer scopes, oil tank decommissioning or elevation certs when you have this argument: “I’m an attorney, you’re not!”

The straw came a couple days ago.  I was at a Read more

September 14, 2007

Deadline looms for Odysseus Medal competition: Act now or weep incessantly Sunday afternoon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are already a couple dozen nominees for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition. What are we missing? Only you know for sure. The deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something orbiting the skirts of perfection, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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September 14, 2007

If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me this week in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your home sold now?

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
    — William Shakespeare, Richard II

I am too familiar with my own ignorance to credit other people’s predictions for the real estate market. People who think they can foresee the consequences of billions of choices years in advance are fooling themselves — although probably not as completely as they are fooling their audiences.

Even so, a would-be home-seller listening to all the doom and gloom predictions on the news may by now be in deep despair, crying, like King Richard, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

I don’t believe any of this, but let’s stipulate it for argument’s sake. In reality, so far, resale prices for some of the hardest hit residential communities in the Valley are down around 16.4% from the December 2005 peak. This means those same homes are still up 54.1% in value from December 2003.

If we anticipate the worst — mass foreclosures, with lenders dumping properties for pennies on the dollar — what can you do now to escape ruin?

The answer? Price your property to sell.

If you live in an archetypical suburban Phoenix home, your house is worth today just about what it would have sold for in April or May of 2005. If you’re priced higher than that, you may be priced too high to sell.

Here’s another way of arriving at a reasonable price. Take the sales prices of truly comparable homes that sold last month in your neighborhood and subtract at least 3%.

This can’t be happy news, considering how much you might have gotten two years ago. But if there is worse news to come, this is the happiest news you may hear for Read more

September 13, 2007

Supplanting the NAR: Can we get to a better quality of real estate representation by way of the licensing laws?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Coming back to this, with my apologies for the delay. I realized I was never going to have time for the whole feast at one sitting, so I resolved to take it on one bite at a time.

I want to examine some of the ideas and objections people have raised with respect to supplanting the NAR with a more rigorous predictor of quality representation. And: I’m being as vague as I can because, while I think we’re all interested in hearing specific ideas — or caveats about those specific ideas — I don’t think we’re anywhere near ready to erect or enact anything. In construction terms, we are not building, drafting plans, designing or even site planning. At this stage, we are talking about whether or not to build anything at all.

For what it’s worth, my natural inclination is to do nothing. For more than a year I’ve been talking about the kinds of things we do to obviate our competition. We get better day by day and they’re all standing around with their thumbs… duly engaged. Our reputation grows with every home run we hit. In the market niche we farm, we don’t need a third-party imprimatur of quality. Res ipse loquitur.

However: If we argue that there are too many would-be real estate practitioners, that many of these folks have much too little training and experience, and that buyers and sellers would have a safer and more satisfying experience if they learned to seek out higher-quality practitioners, then there is an argument to be made for creating something like an Underwriters’ Laboratories rating organization for real estate agents.

One of the commenters to my original post on this subject wrote:

If we want to eliminate half the licensees just raise the barriers to entry…require an apprenticeship…or raise the licensing fee…or make the licensing test harder…or make the continuing education harder…or all of the above. These steps alone will raise the quality of service in the industry.

These are ideas we hear all the time, of course. So why are they never ratified in law?

The real estate licensing laws are controlled by the brokers, Read more

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