Would someone please tell Greg Swann, Russell Shaw, Kris Berg, Jeff Brown, et al? I’d hate to see them suffer the same humiliation as Cecilia Bartoli, who apparently didn’t get the word that Vivaldi’s been passé for over two hundred years.
Archives (page 261 of 372)
The voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open. The short list is not short — 24 entries — but it’s rich in quality writing.
Voting will run until Monday at 12 noon PDT/MST. The ballot form will permit you to read every article, but here are the links to the nominated posts:
- Dan Green, Professor J. Randall Woolridge Warned Me About This In Penn State Finance Classes
- Michael Wurzer, Can there be listing aggregation without cooperation?
- Jillayne Schlicke, FHA Secure: A Political Power Move Disguised as a Helping Hand to Those in Need
- Benjamin Bach, Is your portfolio ready to retire?
- Athol Kay, Realtor.com Blogs…. The Horror
- Lani Anglin, Craigslist- Buy A Home OR A Hooker
- Kris Berg, August Showers
- Rhonda Porter, What is your Mortgage Exit Strategy?
- Teresa Boardman, Has MAR forgotten who pays the bills?
- Morgan Brown, Taking advantage of convertible home equity lines of credit
- Jonathan Dalton, Since When Does NAR Care?
- Kris Berg, Ode to Summer and Labor Day Resolutions
- Dan Green, Is It Time For National Real Estate News To Go Away?
- Michael Price, Bright Ideas With Web 2.0 – 37 Signals
- Jay Thompson, Realtor.com — Blogging for the Masses?
- Robert Ashby, Are McMansions in Danger of Losing Their Tax Benefits?
- Greg Tracy, People Don’t Buy Homes Online
- Jason Mook, Why Touring Your Home Isn’t RE.net Compatible and Other RE Fallacies
- Sondra Johnson, HEY! Respect My ‘Housework’, PLEASE!
- Brian Brady, Active Rain Unleashes Impression Advertising
- Russell Shaw, What Should a New Agent Do? How About Paying Showing Agents by The Hour?
- Kris Berg, Individual success is not a collective endeavor
- Jeff Brown, Come On People — NAR Hasn’t Made A Hill Of Beans Difference Since I Was 18
- Michael Cook, The “Very Best” Alternative to the National Association of Realtors
The Odysseus Medal competition is a weekly carnival of the very best weblog posts in the RE.net. If you would like to compete — or to nominate someone else’s excellent work — this is the nomination form.
I’ll announce this week’s winners tomorrow early afternoon.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
There has been a lot of talk about how to fix the National Association of Realtors or even how to supplant the organization completely. As an outsider looking in, I have one simply question: Why are realtors paying good money to an organization that they hate? As an investor I cannot not think of a more egregious instance of throwing good money after bad money. I have said more than my fair share of bad things about the NAR and realtors, so I think it is my turn to be solution-oriented.
My solution is simple, instead of working from the bottom up, start top down. If the best realtors/agents formed their own group, they would instantly dominate whatever market they chose. Imagine, if you will, that the NAR was made up of only the top 10% of agents in the country. These agents have a proven sales track record, impeccable ethics, and strong client feedback. Additionally, the MLS is one of many marketing vehicles they understand and use regularly. Simply guessing, this group would probably have quicker close rates, achieve better prices for their clients, and have a much better pulse of the direction of the market.
Such a simple idea must have many flaws, so I will start naming a few obvious ones and propose solutions that would seem to work. Remember, I am on the outside looking in, so feel free to comment if these are way off. First, the most obvious problem is the MLS access issue. I think this problem actually solves itself. Consider how large the listing database would be if the top 10% of the real estate community decided to leave the MLS and start their own listing service. Additionally, many areas now have a public MLS or many other listing services in addition to the current NAR controlled MLS. Finally, imagine the hit the MLS would take if the top 10% of the real estate community chose to stop listing with them? That might open some eyes at the top.
Second, how do you get the top 10% of the real estate community to come to this Read more
OK, it looks like BloodhoundBlog is going to have a music section after all. Here is a link to Rufus Wainwright singing one of the most beautiful songs ever. There are a number of artists who do this song, I believe his version is even better than the one by Jeff Buckley.
My favorite artist, this lifetime, would have to be Leon Russell . Here is a video of one of his monster performances, singing the Stones classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” combined with The Coasters hit, “Youngblood”.
This was from the Concert For Bangladesh recorded and filmed in 1971.
Enjoy.
As often happens, I am inspired by Mr. Swann. When he posted a few youtube clips of some great music, I was immediately reminded of one of my absolute favorite artists, P J Harvey. I was struck by the preternatural mystery of these two lady’s similarities. It seems that maybe P J is the living incarnation of Patti Smith. Feels good to dig up beloved and forgotten passions.
I have more than too much work to do, including attending to all the controversy I’ve stirred up, but I pride myself on knowing when I need to stop, if only for a few hours. We’re kidless for the weekend, but we’re on the cusp of being infested by way too much family, so I’m going to grab for all the gusto I can, while I can.
Here’s Mark Knopfler, just blistering on what looks like a Paul Reed Smith FatStratClone (that is to say, a really kick-ass custom-made guitar):
For Teri Lussier’s daughter, Rian, here is an excruciating catharsis:
The examined life is having the courage to purge your own character of mediocrity, not punishing other people for having indulged their fears of greatness.
This is me, a memo from forever:
The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger — over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive — deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.
One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son and I were out riding our bikes and we rode to a CompUSA to see all the latest software. The store was packed. Middle managers poring over the PERT packages, programmers pawing through hefty manuals, yuppie couples testing eduware with their little yuppiekinder. Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence — and violence. And there in the CompUSA were the men and women of values. The people who know that to be more Read more
There’s been so much talk about what the National Association of Realtors (or Real – I – tors as often mispronounced) should be, is now, and/or should become, I finally couldn’t stay quiet any longer. This subject is as important to the industry, any particular agent or broker, or the public in general, as what color rag I use to check my car’s oil.
They’re surely an easy target with their latest, and some, (including me) would call their weakest PR moves. But who has ever taken them seriously? Pick a real estate related subject, any subject. What lasting or even temporarily lasting and meaningful change has emerged from the fruitless womb of NAR?
I would submit three — Nada, Zip, and None. The industry itself has made things happen from day one.
Whenever they’ve gone up directly against lobbies which actually wield real life political power, they lose far more than they win. And so many of their claimed wins were in the bag anyway. I know, as I’ve been forced to be a member since 1969.
Education? Are you on drugs? With exceptions that wouldn’t take up all the fingers on one hand, what they offer is embarrassing to thinking people. Want a for instance? Ask your cousin the Realtor about his blog, and watch the instantaneous RCA Dog look on his face. Want another one? The dropout rate of agents in any market, good or bad, is always high, as most of them couldn’t find their butts with two helpers, a map, and a GPS.
Having a discussion on which way the NAR should be going is almost, but not quite a waste of time. They’ve never stopped me from doing anything but using my Mac to access the MLS systems around the country. Why? Because they’re either to damn lazy to hire my 16 year old next door neighbor to make the changes, they’re apathetic, or they don’t want me using a Mac. It’s still a non-issue to me, as it’s just to easy to circumvent.
NAR has simply been a non-entity in my career.
I’ve taken one course Read more
The White House insists that this is not a bailout. What are your thoughts? What are the benefits or disadvantages of this temporary plan that aims to alleviate the pressure on the subprime drama?
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Comments are encouraged!
Cathy just made me think of this, bless her beautiful soul. Deadline for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. The People’s Choice voting is Sunday afternoon as usual, so take a break form your end of summer reveling to cast a ballot. But take care of those nominations now, before you forget. You can nominate yourself or any post you admire here or, more easily, here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
What’s the issue here, really? I am speaking of the anti-NAR revolution at hand, of course. Is it:
- The public’s poor perception of the profession and the professional? While some may argue that NAR, in their ongoing (and I will argue) oft-misguided yet well-intended attempts to be supportive of its members, has done more damage than good to our collective credibility, it is all too convenient to place blame entirely on their shoulders.
- The standards, ethics, and professionalism of many agents which we find substandard and a drag on our consumer’s perception of value? Guilty-by-association is certainly a concern, even a reality, yet this applies to any career class.
- Licensing standards which by their very nature serve not to limit entry to those who are competent but serve rather as an open invitation to anyone who can fog a peep hole? The tricky part here is that the skill sets which the truly great agents must possess are not testable; Entrepreneurship, moral and ethical resolve, devotion to hard work, business acumen, commitment to personal and professional evolution, a right-brain which not only coexists but works in harmony, with the left, and compassion for the client are all attributes which can only be demonstrated once given the opportunity to perform.
Lest I am accused of just having made a case for sending agent licensing requirements to the guillotine, let me assure you that this is not the case. I have had some pretty hideous plumbers in the past, and have even been to some really terrible doctors. While I will consequently not give my business to these poor performers again, I will still expect my next plumber or doctor to have met some minimum training standards. And I understand that these “credentials” are not a guarantee that they will be spectacular at what they do, but it is a starting point.
Ask not what your profession (or professional organization) can do for you. Maybe it’s time that each of us who has more than a casual concern for our reputation and our future survival ask instead what we can individually do for the profession. No cooperative of those claiming to be ethically, skillfully or attentively Read more
This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
What can sellers do differently to get their houses sold?
There are three houses for sale on my street. All three are comps to each other — around 2,000 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths. They’re priced within a thousand dollars of each other.
House number one is in excellent shape, a turn-key value. It isn’t selling. House number two is in decent shape, but it has a western exposure. It isn’t selling. House number three has been owned as a rental for years, a fact that is completely obvious at a glance. The lawn goes for weeks at a time without being mowed. Amazingly enough, this house isn’t selling either.
Clearly, even the best of the three is overpriced for this market. How can we tell? Because it isn’t selling, even though it’s the pick of the litter.
What does that say about house number two? And what conclusion might the seller of dowdy, run-down house number three draw, if he were of a mind to draw conclusions?
Here’s a better question: What might the seller of house number three do differently, if he actually wants his house sold?
It’s satisfying, I suppose, to blame “the market.” Too many sellers. Too few buyers. The lenders are in turmoil. What can you do?
My answer: Whatever it takes.
Homes are being sold every day. There are fewer buyers than there were a year ago, a lot fewer than two years ago. But even though too many homes are on the market, some of them are selling.
Which ones? Those homes that offer the greatest perceived value to buyers.
And where is that value perceived? In the quality of the home or in a bargain price.
The seller of house number three can beat “the market” in one of two ways. He can refurbish the home to the quality of house number one, then undercut it on price by five or ten percent. Or he can leave the house the way it is — and cut the price by twenty percent.
Either way, “the market” is ready to make deals. All motivated sellers have to do Read more
I call it the Law of Somebody’s Dinner. Free market solutions to problems tend to work because entrepreneurs or investors won’t get to eat if they don’t. Government solutions tend not to work because government employees get paid the same — or even more — even if nothing works as advertised. Economists would call “Somebody’s Dinner” an incentive system, and predicting whether some proposed idea will work is a matter of evaluating the incentives — weighing the perceived attainable rewards against the anticipated costs.
This is why the existing reputation management sites for real estate agents tend not to work. The site itself has an incentive — traffic equals advertising dollars. The agents may perceive a reward in the form of a competitive advantage. But the actual end-users, consumers, do not perceive that they have anything to gain or lose, either from reporting agent activity or from perusing reports. In the case of reporting, the activity could only be seen as charity, doing good for others with no anticipated downstream return. Worse, consumers, especially buyers, are unlikely to make critical distinctions among real estate agents.
So why would I expect the kind of certification system we’re talking about to work so well that it could supplant the NAR in the minds of real estate consumers?
Because a very rigorous certification system would be a significant long-term marketing advantage to the certificants. Individual agents already try to market to the kinds of strengths certification would verify, but their efforts are too localized to have a significant impact upon public perceptions.
But if enough first-quality agents were to pursue certification, and if they were to market their certified status among their clients, we could achieve a critical mass that would eliminate uncertified agents from the mainstream of real estate transactions.
The incentive is the agent’s first, and only secondarily the client’s. In fact, consumers stand to realize great benefits by working with highly-skilled, scrupulously-ethical agents, but they only agree with that idea in the abstract, at most, for now.
But because certification brings agents a significant added marketing value, certified agents have a very strong incentive to promote the Read more
I’ll have more later, but of all the many reasons the NAR deserves to be disintermediated, perhaps the simplest and most obvious is that these congenital retards cannot catch the frolickin’ Cluetrain.
More viewpoints, pro and con, on supplanting the NAR:
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Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
The Minnesota Association of Realtors went on another foot-shooting expedition yesterday, again calling for paid-up members of the statewide trade group to quit the business so other paid-up members can earn more money. I made fun of them the last time they did this, and I could easily have another go at them tonight.
But: Here’s the thing: What good would it do? After money, criticism is the best gift you can have from the marketplace, but many people don’t know how to respect that kind of wealth. They suck at what they do and they intend to go on sucking, and if you point out what they’re doing wrong, they puff up into an outraged defensive posture and try to portray you as the bad guy.
Even worse, the NAR hierarchy seems to self-select for mental and moral midgets, mealy-mouthed morons, minds enmired in mush, utterly incapable of conceiving that the only emotion they inspire among the membership is a tepid sort of revulsion. There is no sport in making fun of them. It literally is like picking on actual retardates. It’s not funny, it’s cruel.
Plus which, criticism, even raucously funny criticism, is not what’s needed. Here is the full and final cure to the problem posed by the National Association of Realtors, along with every rancid state and local branch:
Supplantation.
Not replacement. We can’t get rid of it, no more than we can get rid of the cartel-creating real estate licensing laws the NAR foisted off on an unsuspecting public. We can’t kill this vampire, no matter how much blood-sucking havoc it wreaks. But we can rob it of all its power.
How? By supplanting it. Just as the NAR seeks to elevate Realtors — dues-paying members — above mere licensees, we can create another, higher organization to deprive mere Realtors of any valuable marketing cachet.
This is something the Council of Residential Specialists could have done, but it, like REBAC, is nothing more than a lap-dog of the NAR. The real estate broker’s level of licensing could have and should have meant something serious, but, if anything, it’s an even worse joke than Read more
I receive more comments on these than any other card I’ve ever seen.
Say what you will, this is the most ambitious card we’ve seen so far.
And do please say it with pictures.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing