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Archives (page 265 of 372)

August 17, 2007

Is opportunity knocking in the real estate market?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I tell people we live in the last affordable ghetto in North Central Phoenix. We live right on the edge of the neighborhood, the place where $400,000 makes its leap to $750,000 on the way to a million. We moved here knowing what the neighborhood had to do, and, so far, it has not disappointed us.

This morning, I’ve been drooling over this listing. The comp value of this home in turn-key condition should be around $600,000, maybe more. Sad for the sellers, and I could kick them for letting the house go to hell, but this is a sweet opportunity that will bear fruit right about the time Persephone comes back from Hades.

This is my friend and client, investor Richard Nikoley, writing yesterday:

Probably not what everyone is thinking, right now, but if I’m going to keep my head about me and keep a market perspective on the market, then I have to consider that when some people sell out of fear, panic, to preserve diminishing profits, or to stop losses, there’s always someone on the other side of that trade. So the question arises — and one should always, always try to discern the motivations behind each side of a transaction — why are an equal number of people buying, right now, what so many are selling, right now? Could it be because others are selling at cheaper and cheaper prices and those buying are seeing bargain-basement prices? If you had to guess, who would you suspect is likely getting the advantage?

For some reason, people don’t tend to think of the stock market like they do most other things. In other areas, it’s called a sale. There’s always someone, somewhere, wanting to get out of an asset — for whatever reason — and depending on their motivation, they’ll take less and less for it. Others lie in wait for such opportunities in order to accumulate assets at relatively low prices.

Everyone is welcome to their doomsday, economic collapse, chickens-coming-home-to-roost scenario, or whatever. But do keep in mind that what is going on is essentially and mostly an exercise in total freedom and Read more

August 17, 2007

Growing pains: BloodhoundBlog is moving to a more-robust server

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You will have noticed outages over the past few weeks. What’s happening is that our MySQL server is getting hammered at peak hours by too many connections at once. The cause is almost always our RSS feeds, so, most often, our mail server is going down also. HTTP and FTP are working fine during these outages, but you would never know that, since BloodhoundBlog itself, and our other weblogs, can’t work without MySQL.

In any case, after doing everything we could think of to try to alleviate the problem, we have elected to move up to a more-robust file server. We will be moving into a fully-dedicated dual-core Xeon machine. We’ll pick up five times the storage space, five times the bandwidth and, we hope, ten times the MySQL power. This is something we would have done in due course, anyway, if only because we’ll be serving more and more video.

Right now, I don’t know when for sure the move will happen. When it does, we may lose some data. I’ll tell the contributors to stand down, but some comments may not make the shift. The transfer is in-house at HostGator.com, but there will be a delay between the time that our files are copied to the new server and the IP address for BloodhoundRealty.com is propagated through the DNS system.

I’ll post a note before and after the transition. Thanks for hanging with us through the recent outages. Cross your paws, shortly they’ll be a part of our history.

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August 16, 2007

If your wife doesn’t nag you enough, sign up for PingMe!

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

pingme-reminder-service.pngDon’t worry, my husband doesn’t need this service; I’ve got it covered! PingMe.com is a free reminder system that reminds me of an advancement on the Outlook calendar function. I typically set up Outlook “reminders” for everything ranging from “follow up on Lakeline listing” to “email April” but get irritated that I can’t direct it to my phone or to my Yahoo account.

So, if you don’t get nagged enough from your wife (or children if you are the wife), here’s how PingMe works:

1. Create a ping/ name your task. For example, “Clip Toenails.” Whatever, you know you forget. You’ll also note if this is a recurring task or not.

2. Determine the pestering function. This is how often you would like to ping yourself until you’ve told PingMe you’ve completed the task. “Clip Toenails” is important, but I would probably set the pester to go off every 30 minutes in case we’re on a date or something… I’ll get to it.

Come to think of it, this could be a great “oh I have to go” interrupter making your phone ring mid-meeting… just act important and walk away from the encyclopedia salesperson (you’ve got an important pretend call to tend to)!

3. Select a target. You can assign places for your reminder to go- your work email, your cell phone, wherever. For my reminder to “clip toenails,” I would probably have it remind my phone; it’s a pretty important task.

3. Assign a Tag. Like in blogging, this organization will help you to sort through your to do reminders in an orderly fashion.

4. Save, creating a sticky note. PingMe will email to your designated location your desired task reminder. But hey PingMe, just because I say you should remind me of something doesn’t make you the boss of me. Got it?

So, consider this your reminder to go sign up for PingMe. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. >Ping complete.

August 16, 2007

The extinction of the pterosaur – If your goal is long-term profitability, skimming the surface can kill you.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

From the San Diego Union Tribune, dateline August 16, 2007:

Paleontologists studying pterosaurs had theorized that some the extinct flying reptiles fed by skimming along the water with their mouths open. However, a new analysis by British scientists indicates pterosaurs were too large and would have created too much drag to feed in this way.

And this is precisely why I see the traditional real estate agent not only surviving but thriving. Many predict the demise of the likes of me. They predict a future where I have been stripped of my MLS, at least in the proprietary sense, and where I have been stripped of my paycheck, rendering me crippled and ineffective chum.

Good, successful traditional agents find their sustenance in a much deeper ocean, while this point seems to be lost on the new fisherman, the alternative for-fee, for-less business models, and even the fish.

360-Marlow wrote last week about how Lennox Scott of John L. Scott Realty, speaking at the recent Inman Connect conference, “seemed unable to articulate why a commissioned sales person may be preferable to one paid on salary”. Well, let me give it a shot.

  • The salaried employee is not required to front their own money (in my case, thousands of dollars per month per assignment) on the promise (not to be confused with “guarantee”) of some future paycheck.
  • The salaried employee does not run the risk that, having worked on their employer’s behalf for months (and months and months), their employer will “change their mind”.
  • The salaried employee does not bear the burden of their employer’s overhead.
  • If the salaried employee’s employer is unsuccessful in selling their product to the end user, the salaried employee will still be paid for their time expended.
  • The salaried employee wakes up each morning knowing they have a job, a job secured by a single interview, where their commission-based counterpart must attend job interviews on a daily basis. (Job interviews take time and money; let’s, just for fun, call them “non-billable hours”).
  • The salaried employee is assured lunch breaks and days off. The salaried employee clocks out at the end of the shift.
  • The salaried employee’s job description does Read more
August 15, 2007

The Countrywide Federal Bailout Act of 2008

by

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

Author website

Have you ever felt your stomach drop?

I received an e-mail, from reader Robert Kerr today, asking if I had seen Merrill Lynch’s downgrade of Countrywide Financial. Merrill Lynch believes that Countrywide might face bankruptcy. Make no mistake about it, a collapse of Countrywide Financial will give everybody in the real estate and mortgage industry a case of the “awshits”.

The Secret be damned! I said this was plausible back on April 1, 2007:

Here are some warning signs the painfullly paranoid (like me) might feed upon:

1- Countrywide Announces Change in Board Of Directors

2- Fitch Ratings Agency Downgrades 33% of Countrywide Loan Pools; particularly their “expanded criteria” guidelines which include Pay Option ARMs

3- Methinks he doth protesteth too much; Chairman and Founder Angelo Mozilo sold $140 million worth of stock last year while literally screaming that Countrywide should not be penalized by stock traders because of the subprime meltdown.

Negative amortization loans are an excellent financial planning tool. Countrywide has long been a favorite of originators because of their adaptability and innovative lending products. This time, I think they may have overreached. I’m raising our readiness condition to DefCon-4.

I’ve been getting a lot of traffic on my home weblog. The reason is simple; I’ve been writing a lot about Countrwide lately. If you Google, “Countrywide In Trouble”, I’m close to the top. This is not a pat on the back for my SEO technique, it’s a realization of how severe the reach of a Countrywide collapse may be.

Two weeks ago, I questioned why Angelo Mozilo wasn’t owning up to the severity of the problem and getting the bad loans off of the books so we could move on with our lives. More traffic on the weblog. That’s a bad sign. I followed up and wrote a little joke about a federal bailout of Countrywide by President Fred Thompson in 2009 and likened Countrywide to Chrysler. I played with fuzzy numbers and determined that Countrywide’s net worth could conceivably drop some 70% from defaulted loans. Huge traffic on the weblog! Google finance and Yahoo finance picked it up. I think I struck a nerve.

This is Read more

August 15, 2007

Where can a good girl go to meet a skeezy divorced high school drop-out who works part-time at the public library?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Central Phoenix, of course, but your boy doesn’t actually work at the library, he just hangs out there from 9 am to 9 pm. This is from Zillow.com:

Central City residents are distinct from people in surrounding areas because:

  • A larger number did not complete high school.
  • A higher proportion of them are divorced males.
  • There’s a higher percentage of people who work in education, training, or library occupations.

Sorry, Zillovians, I just can’t get enough of this astute counter-marketing. Surprisingly enough, there have been no contributions to the neighborhood discussion fora. Maybe if Zillow offered free cigarettes — or booze — in exchange for real estate questions.

Here are some listings from this creepy neighborhood acrawl with divorced winos. The resident high school drop-outs can barely even get to six multiples of the median home value.

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August 15, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Some rule changes, and a clickable button

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.

Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.

This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.

So: The rules are changed to this:

The Rules (few and fair):

  1. The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
  2. The entrant need not be the author of the post
  3. More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
  4. More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
  5. No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies

Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.

I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:

You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:

That image links back to the information page for the competition.

We’re Read more

August 15, 2007

The Official Start of the Specific Mentoring

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Here is an hour long interview I did today. It was a conference call that had about 200 agents listening and sending in questions. I received many emails from the agents saying it was a needed lift for them.

Curtis Johnson sent me the questions that were not answered due to not enough time and I will start posting video (and audio) responses to each of those questions by the end of the week. The external mic I needed to have decent sound quality for the video will be here in a day or two.

Achieving stable success in this business is at least 90% mental (as opposed to specific “techniques”) and that is what I will concentrate on delivering.

August 14, 2007

What’s love got to do with it? Shopping for a commodity instead of a home.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

In the days of yore (one yore = 5 years on the metric conversion chart), open houses were much different. I almost enjoyed my Sunday afternoons. They were spent with people sincerely looking for a home, a home that fit their personal needs on both a functional and emotional level. The event went something like this: Agent makes home available for showing as a courtesy to the seller who wants to sell and the buyer who wants to buy, potential buyer tours home and makes assessment as to whether the home fits his needs, interested buyer asks questions to learn about features of said home and neighborhood, interested buyer compares recent sales to establish fair price and, having made his decision to purchase, enters meaningful negotiations.

These days, our open house experiences are very different. As an agent, I am a soldier being called to active duty. I am the enemy, and donning pith helmet, medieval shield and evil death ray deflector, I enter battle.

Steve and I both got the open house nod this weekend, and it was so painful as to be funny in hindsight. We enjoyed the usual Happy Hour debriefing, and our experiences were woefully the same.

“How long has it been on the market?” “Why are they moving?” That’s it. That is all anyone wanted to know, and these questions were generally flying as one run-on sentence before they had passed the threshold. Steve suggested that it was time for a little open house strategic planning, a preemptive strike if you will. Post it on the front door, or better yet, adopt Greg’s policy of using those nifty custom yard signs and display the vital statistics there. Even better, include the information in the open house ads we tirelessly run each weekend. No need to have anyone to driving across town when I can save them the trouble.

Keep in mind that we aren’t talking about the hobbyists, or the neighbors, or even the world-weary, sincerely-seeking-a-home contingents. We still get a smattering of these at our open houses. Steve related to me the story of a couple in the latter Read more

August 14, 2007

It’s Scary Outside of the Box…

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

mark-cuban.jpgRecently, Realtor Genius was called naive for suggesting that actual solutions be provided for the small portion of the market that we call “sub prime.” So, I’ve had my ears/eyes perked for solutions to the sub prime mess that I could share with everyone here…

Yesterday, I read on Mark Cuban’s blog (he’s the Dallas Maverick’s owner, genius business man, billiionaire of Broadcast.com, Web 2.0 savvy, worked at DQ for one day, and is NOT a Realtor) about his idea for how to break the “Boom Bust” cycle of Real Estate. I’m not a Realtor, but I really want to hear everyone’s take on this inventive idea… to me, it’s scary outside of the box!

—–

Why can’t home owners sell some percentage of equity in their homes on a listed exchange ? Why can’t I “Take My House Public?”

Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes ?

The rules could be very eimple
1. The house is appraised by a company approved by the exchange that lists the houses.
2. “Shares” are set with a Par Value of 10pct of the appraised value. For a 100k dollar house, there are 10 shares potentially available. However at no point in time can more than 40pct of the “shares” in a home be sold. We dont want the opportunity for “hostile takeovers”
3. The price of the shares will of course be set by the market. In a hot market it will be set above par, in a tough market like today, it will sell below Par.
4. All Proceeds from the sale of shares MUST be used to pay down any debt on the home.

This is the key element of this approach. By selling equity in a home, the buyer gets an asset based security that will move up and down with the market. If this market is big enough, there should be enough liquidity to move in and out of positions.

The seller receives cash that can be used to pay down the debt and thereby reduce his/her monthly payments. The seller loses a part of the upside if the market Read more

August 14, 2007

Pimp My Posts (with Word Press Plugins)

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

Okay, so I wanted to say “pimp my blog” but that doesn’t make for an alliteration within a title…

I recently found an awesome resource regarding Word Press plugins which should be helpful to a great majority of RE.net bloggers. The following information is from a July article on Mashable.com. Enjoy!

———-

404 Notifier – Gives you a log of all your 404 errors so you can see why your readers are ending up on broken pages.

Admin Dropdown Menus – Make your crowded admin panel menus neat and orderly by turning them into dropdown menus.

Admin Panel Comment Reply – Adds a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of the admin area.

Ajax Spell Checker – Uses a combination of dictionaries to check your posts.

Auto-hyperlink URLs – Gives you several options for having URLs automatically turn in to hyperlinks.

AWSOM Pixgallery – Designed to allow artists and webcomic creators to create a portfolio of their artwork.

Batch Categories – Adds a page to the category management, showing all the posts that belong to a category making it easier to add to another category, or when using an import tool from another blog.

Custom Admin Menu – Gives you the power to rename, hide or move just about anything you want in the admin area.

Custom Write Panel – Allows you to customize the “Write” panel of WordPress. Hide things you don’t need such as “Post Password” and add things you feel you may need.

Dashbar – Let admins have admin access while working in the frontend of the blog without having multiple windows open.

Dashboard Editor – Ever wanted to change the Dashboard to be more useful? This is the plugin you need.

DashNote – Adds a post-it note feature to the dashboard to jot down notes to yourself.

Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.

    Domain Mirror

Domain Mirror – Will allow one WordPress install to be accessed from multiple domains and will even change the name and URLs based on the address people access it with.

Download Counter – Counts and tracks the downloads of all Read more

August 14, 2007

Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors?

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Inspired by the glut of controversial posts appearing here lately, I thought I would add one more to the fire. In my recent browsing I stumbled upon a blog that asked a simple question, “Do we need Realtors?” That’s all. That was the whole post. While the questioned seemed relatively simple, the 1000+ (literally) comments made me think a bit harder about this question.

First, let me say that the comments came down on both sides. Many people screamed Yes and No for a variety of reasons, some valid and some simply ludicrous, but the most interesting point that came to my mind was what if someone asked do we need investment bankers? My immediate reaction would be outrage at the attack on my profession. After a bit more consideration, I would ask the more complex question, what has caused that question to be asked? What am I not doing to make my services indispensable to my client?

As an outside observer, I would like to turn this around to suggest what I need and then take a look at how well consumers view realtors meet their needs. Obviously, there will be generalizations here, so if they don’t apply to you, don’t take offense to them.

First, as a consumer I want a realtor to relentlessly try to get me the best deal possible. If I am buying a property, I would like a realtor to help me get the lowest price and if I am selling I would like the opposite. In order to assess this, I need a realtor that knows the market beyond printing out a set of comparable transactions. I would like to know the best blocks to buy and why my house should be valued differently than the house next door.

Realtors fall all over the map in this area; however, on the buyer side they really don’t cut the mustard. To start, the commission structure favors the seller. Most realtors will tout their ethics, but on more than one occasion I have heard and seen realtors take a price that was Read more

August 13, 2007

Congressional “leadership” on lending policies: What is “crisis-itis?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, which should be in your feed-reader — especially right now:

What is “crisis-itis?” It is my own diagnosis. It is a form of dementia where the inflicted believes his or her own self worth rises as the situation he monitors worsens. In all cases, the inflicted greatly exaggerates his or her control over events, as well as the size, duration, and impact of those events. In extreme cases, the inflicted seeks to worsen the crisis to inflate his or her self esteem.

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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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