BloodhoundBlog

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July 23, 2007

Missing links? Playing idea-tag leads to a Web 2.0-ish way of improving BloodhoundBlog posts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, start here. I had an idea for an organic method of collecting arguments, pro and con, about divorcing real estate commissions. Using a PHP form, I could collect user-submitted links to apposite articles, then show them all in an “included” PHP file in each post about divorced commissions. That PHP file would be available to be included on other sites, as well, although I don’t think anyone has done this.

I’ve manually built this kind of file before, for ongoing news stories and for breaking news stories we cover in multiple posts. The difference here was eliciting contributions from readers in a semi-automated fashion.

Last night in a comment, Barrett Niehus of 4MySales – Real Estate Investment and Marketing commended me for having added a Wiki to BloodhoundBlog.

Except I hadn’t done that. I wasn’t even sure what Barrett was talking about. By email, I asked for clarification, and this was his response:

The Wiki comment just relates to the Bloodhound’s ability to add posted links from your online form to the list that you are creating on your blog post. For your readers (me included) this adds another way for them to participate in your blog. I think it is a great feature that few other bloggers use which makes your blog even more unique.

For a one-off post, it made a certain kind of sense. But imagine the same idea expressed globally, for every post. Now that’s an insanely great idea.

I planted a seed, really just a way of seeking something like permanence in the evanescent world of weblog posts. Barrett saw more than I did, a little bit of that Web 2.0-ishness, and his email led me back to see a tiny sprout springing up from the earth. Tonight I’ve nurtured it into a little sapling. I honestly don’t know if people will use something like this, but it seems to me to be a fantastic way to make BloodhoundBlog’s posts more comprehensive and informative.

What am I talking about? New code that will permit you to amend any post on BHB with supplemental links. If you look at Lani’s post from earlier Read more

July 23, 2007

Uh Oh… Apple’s iPhone Caught With Its Pants Down

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

apple-iphone.jpgSo, some of you camped out for your new toy, others ordered it online. Many of you devoted much time covering the gadget until you were blue in the face. Look- the iPhone is undoubtedly cool… I’m all for shiny toys that make noise. But for all of you Mac Hipsters who have made fun of my loyalty to the PC (you know who you are), guess what- your iPhone is has been caught with its pants down…

The Independent Security Evaluators out of Maryland has exposed the “serious problems with the design and implementation of security on the iPhone“. Multiple separate hacks were made. First, ISE used an unmodified iPhone to “surf to a malicious HTML document they had created. When this page was viewed, the payload forced the iPhone to make an outbound connection to a server that the researchers controlled. The compromised iPhone then sent personal data including SMS text messages, contact information, call history and voicemail information over the connection.” Uh oh- I see London, I see France…

The second vulnerability found was the ability of the hackers to “perform so-called ‘physical actions’ on the iPhone. Using their iPhone to visit a second malicious web page, they forced the device to ‘vibrate for a second’.”

Other hacks:
*because apps run with admin priviledges, “a compromise of any application gives an attacker full access to the device”
*“premium-rate rogue-dialler fraud”
*transforms an iPhone into a bugging device
*wirless Internet used to hack and store dialed numbers, texts etc. for later use

So, what’s next? Well, for me, I’m sticking with my ol’ Sprint phone. ISE shows that I can hack admin priviledges to your iPhone and use your e-Key to enter homes when that function becomes available (remember, it’s a sleeper hack… I can come back whenever I want to access your iPhone). Or, if I’m a jerk competitor, I can text your buyers telling them the house is no longer available and they smell like garlic and you refuse to work with them, or when I get bored, I can call your wife and tell her that I caught you with Read more

July 23, 2007

What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from last Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price

I looked at houses with a long-time client last week. We shopped ten houses, of which two were actually in turn-key condition. Two others were fix-ups in every way but price. Three of the homes had front-yard landscaping so overgrown they were virtually inaccessible. And the prices were all over the map.

The resale market is not as dire as it is portrayed to be, but it’s not great, either. There are a lot more homes for sale than there are qualified buyers. For a home to sell in this market, it has to be priced right, perfectly prepared and properly presented to the marketplace. Miss on any one of those factors — especially price — and the buyers will take the home up the street instead.

Consider the Terracina floorplan at Ashton Ranch in Surprise. I’ve sold several these, and I really like them. They’re bright and spacious, with wide-open sightlines. Without pools, there are seven of these available right now. Two are priced at $199,000, then they shoot up all the way to $231,900.

The two lower priced homes will probably sell first, even if the others have better landscaping and better interior amenities. Only one of these models sold in June, for $200,000.

A few miles east, at the Sundial subdivision in El Mirage, there are 25 units of the 1,238sf Zocalo floorplan available. Prices run from $166,900 to $213,900, a huge spread.

Three of these homes sold in June, and it would be reasonable to argue that the market value of this model is $185,000. The problem with that is that ten of the 25 listings are offered below that price — and they’re still not selling.

In any subdivision, I would have to look at the listings house-by-house to tell you which ones will sell soonest, and for how much. But it’s a certainty that if a home is not marketed properly, is not cleaned and repaired to show-room condition, and, especially, is not priced aggressively to the current market, it will not Read more

July 23, 2007

Real Estate Investing vs. Stock Market Investing- Is there a Clear Winner?

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Real estate enthusiasts have been sounding their trumpet during the latest run in the real estate market. Many real estate focused investors truly believe real estate outperforms every other investment by a wide margin and even go as far as to wonder why investors would choose any other investment vehicle. Our own Jeff Brown even took quite a swing at the stock market in his post, My 4% will Beat Your 10 Any Day — Stocks vs. Real Estate. In the other corner stock market aficionados contend that in the long run stock market returns dominate. As an investor in both I am here to definitively say neither dominates.

Starting with the facts: Long run real estate investment returns average about 3%. This is simply a year over year long run appreciation average (cnn.com report data), while the average long run stock market return hovers around 10%. It is important to note that anyone can point to specific year, or even five year, period that one asset class has outperformed the other. This is not relevant because long term investing is the focus of this discussion.

Many stock market champions simply stop their analysis right there. That is wrong, plain and simple. Of course, as the analysis goes deeper, the water gets muddier and muddier. The starting point is leverage. Very few investors pay 100% of the purchase price when they buy an investment property. At most an investor will put the standard 20% down in a direct commercial real estate investment. This means that an investor could buy 5 times value of an investment. For example, if an investor has $100,000 to invest, they could buy $100,000 worth of stocks or $500,000 worth of real estate. Using some simple math, after 1 year the stocks would be worth $110,000, while the real estate investment would be worth $115,000 ($100,000 + $500,000 x .03).

Unfortunately many real estate investors stop their analysis here. This is also incorrect. Not only is it unfair to compare a leveraged real estate investment to an investment in the stock market that is not leveraged, but there are a Read more

July 23, 2007

Stuck in the middle – Real Estate Business Basics and Clearing the Cobwebs

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

To Do Post ItMy life is a series of Post It notes. They are stuck to my computer screen, they clutter my desk, and they litter my backyard when a light wind kicks up in the vicinity of my patio table. They can be found in the floor of my car, at the bottom of my purse and, more than occasionally, on the foreheads of my children.

My organizational skills are not so hideous that they would be the subject of the next Lifetime family movie, but my life (we will call it my “back office”) is certainly, at this point in time, in a state of disarray.

I could read a book about organization and time management, but I simply don’t have the time. I think I will make a note to do that tomorrow. In the meantime, I will come to my own defense – It’s not my fault!

Lani’s Internet which has become such an essential part of our lives, Greg’s Internet which is well on its way to replacing the paper book, and our collective Internet which births eighty-seven more ways each day to make our lives easier has simply made me numb.

My frying pan runneth over with fish. Jeff Brown turned me on to Jott awhile ago, thinking it would be useful to a girl on the go. Call the toll free number, speak your message, and the next morning you will be emailed a transcript. A virtual To Do list. Now, I have to remember to Jott.

And I have to remember to blog and comment and trackback and linkback, to be a Trulia Voice and a Zillow neighborhood specialist, to log onto Meebo when I am “in” and off when I am “away”, and to download and study my Altos charts. The list goes on. With each of these exciting opportunities comes an email reminder, and each of these “to dos” involves a brave new world of email inbox populating never before seen. So much so, that I find myself “saving” these messages for another time, a time that often never comes. So large is my inbox, that it has lost Read more

July 22, 2007

Top Buyer Agents Unite To Put Themselves Out of Business – Russell Shaw Tries to Save Them

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

The missing word in the title above is, “completely”. Top Buyer Agents Unite to Put Themselves Completely Out of Business. Also, based on my schedule boardwalk-coastal-wetland_AJM5A2and the (so far, at least) almost total unwillingness of Top Buyer Agents to even listen to this vital message, there may not be much reason to keep saying it. These Top Buyer Agents don’t seem to understand that they are not like most buyer agents. They are quite different. These Top Buyer Agents take their duties to their clients so seriously that they actually DO put the client’s interests above their own. Every time, in every way. These Top Buyer Agents have figured out that the current system of the listing agent paying them, with the seller’s money (of all possible pay plans in the universe) isn’t the most optimum pay plan possible.

But it IS a pay plan. You do get paid. Your buyers do get real representation.

In many well written, thoughtful and sincere posts here on BloodhoundBlog there has been a strong case made for divorcing the buyer agent commissions completely from the seller and the listing agent. Most of the points made are valid. There has been even more to think about in the back and forth in the comments section of those posts. Some very bright people saying some very bright things.

I won’t try to appeal to your self interests here, but to your interest in caring for your future clients. The current “system” offers you the best opportunity you will ever have to help the most people with your counsel. Should the commissions become “divorced” (and yes, this could happen due to some decision in a federal court room or even the Supreme Court) you will be out of business. O – U – T, out. The perfect transaction (each side having splendid and fabulous representation) will occur so rarely that anyone who worked on bringing it about will have lots of time to reflect on how great it could have been. The funny part is that you already know what will bring about your demise. It has been commented on Read more

July 20, 2007

Muggles Would Die Without The WWW

by

Real Estate Rainmaker

Author website

World Wide Web Internet Crash Fatal ErrorBear with me as I add this up…

Internet meltdown at Fry’s
+ Dalton’s print media article
+ Greg’s article about books
+ An Onion video parody
 = We muggles (in honor of midnight’s Harry Potter release) are overly dependent on the Internet!

So first, I must note that while at Fry’s Electronics yesterday, we waited in a line that dwarfed the lines on December 24th. The holdup? The Internet was down and they couldn’t process any payments. Seriously. Of course even checks have to be scanned and Lord knows no one in a tech store has cash! So, we waited for nearly 45 minutes.

While in line, we started talking to the guy behind us about what the hell we would do in our own lives if we didn’t have the Internet…

What if your PDA/Treo/iPhone/Blackberry wouldn’t turn on in the morning? Do you know anyone’s numbers? I don’t even know my mom’s number!!! Would you know what appointments you were supposed to make that day?

How would you use the MLS? How would you know inventory? How would you effectively get your news? There is no “real estate channel.” How would you suddenly market to an audience used to clicking on Google an average 127.2 times a day?

What happens if you don’t know the definition of a word? How could you possibly explain to your children that before dictionary.com they actually published a print format containing definitions and they’ll have to dust off the book printed by dinosaurs and quit asking me what “vociferous” means.

Would you be able to live without texting? I know my kids would scratch their eyes out if they didn’t have their cell phones, MySpace, Facebook or email. Would you be able to go without a blog? Who would know about your thoughts, beliefs, rants or LOL Cats?

What if The Internet crashed? Who would restore The Internet? Is there a Ctrl + Alt + Delete (or a paper clip to the reset button if you’re a MacHipster) for The Internet?

This was the conversation at Fry’s yesterday, then today we stumbled upon the Onion Video parody Read more

July 20, 2007

Prometheus unbound: Books are dead, but ideas are forevermore unchained from the tyranny and avarice of atoms

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth Godin:

Five hundred year old technology (books) is just too slow for the Net. The act of printing, storing and shipping millions of books takes too long for a secret to ever be in a book again.

More.

Books are souvenirs. No one is going to read Potter online, even if it’s free. Holding and owning the book, remembering when and how you got it… that’s what you’re paying for. Books are great at holding memories. They’re lousy at keeping secrets.

Someone recommended a book to me yesterday, and it was fun for me to watch my own revulsion at the idea. I grew up in the thrall of books, literally a worshipper.

More interesting than Harry Potter is the phenomenon of The Cult of the Amateur, whereby Ludditism becomes a Shaker cult, doomed not by the book’s (and the movement’s) effete idiocy but by its inability to engender new acolytes. Even so, the book should prove especially popular on library shelves and remainder racks, where the most passionate book worshippers are to be found.

In the planning stages for Real Estate Weblogging 101, I made an effort to find ways of connecting electronic publishing to paper publishing. But then I had an epiphany: The work of the mind is documented on the nets. Publishers desperately cling to the idea of holding ideas for ransom by chaining them to atoms, but the Djinn is already out of the bottle — to call to mind another cult desperately clinging to the past. Prometheus has broken his chains — to recall our own future-loving creed — and the gift of mind surges forth in pandemic pandemonium.

On the nets, a new idea is published instantaneously across the globe. It is accessible to billions, if they seek it, at a negligible carrying cost. It can be linked to every discoverable supporting and countervailing resource and vetted by the intense scrutiny of thousands of hypercritical experts. Net-based “books” are revisable and extensible at will, with no delay and no lingering inventories of obsolete stock.

Shed a tear at graveside, if you will, but facts are facts: Books are a dead letter.

Technorati Tags: Read more

July 19, 2007

In Defense of Buyers’ Agents

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

This came into the comments section of this post yesterday, from Joshua Ferris:

What type of services do you expect a buyer’s agent to offer in order to create a “real value”?

Thank you, Joshua, for the set up! Timing couldn’t be better; there seems to be a confluence of events. Redfin has apparently duped a new round of investors (“Honest! It’s the last time I’ll ever need funding!” is the fourth great lie); Redfin is capitalizing on what seems to be an emerging anti-realtor trend; and I had more conversations with local realtors yesterday who are getting “I’ll only deal with the listing agent!” sign calls.

I wondered if there was anything that was helping drive it, so I just Googled “How to buy a house” and found this site:

“Real Estate Agent” Is Just Another Name For “Salesperson”
Don’t ever lose sight of that fact. Their only mission is to sell, sell, sell to YOU. Don’t ever let on that you are in a desperate situation, or that you need to sell a house fast to pay for emergency bills, or that you are in a desperate crunch to buy this house now, because you are being transferred into town this week. It’s simply none of their business and as far as they are concerned, you are not in a rush to buy a house.

Excellent. What good could possibly come from telling your agent how quickly you need to buy or sell?

HouseBuyingTips.com Buyers Warning
One of the biggest mistakes many home buyers make is assuming that their “buyers agent” is working for them. They could not be more wrong. Also, never let a real estate agent choose your attorney. You must choose your own attorney, not one with a cushy relationship to the salesperson who is trying to sell you a home.

Punctuation is oversold, and non sequiturs simply don’t deserve that negative reputation…

If you are buying a house instead of selling a house, you really don’t need a real estate agent.

When the Carnival of Praetorian Cranks Posing as Something They’re Not is launched, this guy — Jeff Ostroff — will win every week. He’s apparently Read more

July 19, 2007

In Down Markets Realtors on Both Sides of the Transaction Need to Step Up for Their Clients

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

As the real estate market begins its tailspin, home buyers and sellers alike need to figure out how to play the real estate game. The time has passed for simply taking the lowest cost provider of real estate services. Realtors on both sides of the transaction must now prove their worth. In a down market, which many buyers and sellers now face, market knowledge and savvy negotiating skills champion the day.

The Sell Side

The most obvious need for good representation is on the sell side of real estate transactions. Realtors, who simply look at the MLS and price a home at the market average, will become serious liabilities to their clients. There is nothing worse for a seller than trailing a market decline.

When listing a home, there should not be a time where sellers are forced to reduce their price. This suggests either the seller had their sights set too high or that the real estate agent in charge of the listing was out of touch with the market. Regardless of the situation, every month a home stays on the market cost the seller pays holding costs. This could be additional mortgage payments, lower market demand, or simply the hassle of postponing moving plans.

Furthermore, in a declining market a faster sell means experiencing less of a price decline and a higher long run purchase price. When my wife and I wanted to exit our Detroit properties, we looked at the market and priced our house about 2.5% below the market average. This strategy was important because our house looked better than the market average. Initially, it looked like we could have gotten more, but it was clear that the market was declining fast. Even with our reduced price, our home languished on the market for almost two months. Luckily, we were able to get very close to our asking price when our first (and only) offer came in.

The flip side of that story is the numerous houses that stayed on the market for years! This is no exaggeration. There were houses that were still on the market a full two years Read more

July 19, 2007

Zillow.com’s wacky no-one-owns-a-wiki policy promotes no one’s name, brand or image — except its own

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Drew Meyers from Zillow commenting on a post last week:

Please note the real estate guide (which is a wiki) is VERY different than a blog. Since wikis are collaborative, no one person “owns” any of the content.

That turns out to be not quite true.

Zillow Blog featured two of my wiki contributions yesterday. Both had been clobbered, if that’s the past tense of collaboration. No mention of me in the idyllic land of wiki, even though both ideas are very good — and no one at Zillow came up with them. Even so, guess who was promoted in the wacky world of no-one-owns-a-wiki.

Oh, yes, Zillow.com happily promotes itself on the sweat of my labor. What genius! Who ever thought of such things? That Zillow, boy howdy!, you gotta get up purty damn early…

Nice. They stand on the shoulders of giants. They just bury them in dirt so it looks like a hilltop. To top it all off, guess who’s going to profit from the inbound links?

Here are the unmolested — er, un-wiki-perfected — original articles, if that matters:

I think this is a good example of how Zillow’s hoped for social networking scheme is self-defeating. It’s understandable that they would want to keep their pseudo-encyclopedia free of spamvertising. This they could achieve simply by accepting or rejecting submissions. But my only incentive for coming up with and sharing good real estate ideas is to promote my own name, brand and image. Why would I do that if I know that my hard work is going to be expropriated?

This is just dumb on Zillow’s part. I’ll have a lot more ideas. But I won’t be sharing them with Zillow.com and it’s sticky-fingered wiki. I think Wikipedia is an amazing accomplishment, but I don’t care what Jimbo Wales thinks a wiki should be like over there. I don’t write for Read more

July 19, 2007

Have another cookie? Targeting content to two different kinds of first-time visitors to a WordPress.org weblog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin had a post last night that made me rethink the ideas I posted the other day on using a cookie to modify a WordPress.org weblog’s default behavior for first-time visitors.

Clear as mud?

Starting with version 2.0, WordPress introduced the idea of an optional intro.php file that would be a sticky first post. In other words, the file, truly a pseudo-post, could be shown first to every reader who landed on the top-level page of the weblog. That way, you can do all your welcoming house-keeping with new users.

Too cool. What’s the problem? Most people showing up at your weblog are not new users, so you’re going to hammer that intro.php nail into their heads again and again.

And Dustin raised another problem: Many people arriving at your weblog for the first time will be coming in from search engines, from your RSS feed or from deep links on other sites. Those folks are never going to see intro.php, because they won’t enter the weblog from the top level.

The code I wrote the other day solved both of these problems, but with a one-size-fits-all solution. What if you want to issue a special introduction only to top-level first-time visitors? What if you want to address only those people coming in via deep links into your weblog? What if you want to say something different to each type of visitor?

I amended the code today to take account of these two different entry scenarios. Using this version you can have an intro.php file for people who enter your weblog for the first time through the front page. The cookie associated with that expires in 60 days, so that only people who have been away for a long while will see it more than once.

You can also have another file called singlePostIntro.php (or whatever) for people who come in via a hard click from a search engine, an RSS feed or another web site. That cookie lasts for two weeks. The point is to address infrequent visitors who come in via deep links differently, in the hopes of persuading them to become subscribers.

You can see this Read more

July 18, 2007

Make no mistake, without the thoughtful, dispassionate accuracy of professional journalists, the world itself would crumble

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From VentureBeat:

For this, Redfin has been banned [false] from operating in Oregon [false], New Jersey [false] and now Tennessee [false]. Additionally, the site has been fined by the National Association of Realtors [false], which owns the Multiple Listing Service [false], a national database [false] of home listings.

That’s two sentences, seven errors of fact.

Redfin can operate all it wants in Oregon, New Jersey and Tennessee. Those states ban commission rebates, which is vicious and wrong, but that doesn’t forbid Redfin from working there. In general, you will not find Redfin in any market where homes are affordable, because its cost-structure can only work — if it can work at all — on high-priced homes.

The second sentence is so rife with errors, I’m not going to bother trying to fix it. If you want to know what really happened, it’s here: Defending Redfin: Sweet Digs weblog buried by inane MLS rules.

Nevertheless, I am so glad that there are fearless guardians of truth willing to take money for this level of ineptitude. It would be an awful curse if we had to depend for news on people who care about facts and are actually paying attention.

Jeesh!

So as not to be unrelentingly negative: Newspapers got some bad news this morning, but for-pay journalism is not dead. But if journalists hope to portray themselves as “trusted professionals,” they need to catch a clue. The audience in the aggregate may net out dumb enough to buy crap like this, but the audience in particular contains individuals who know a lot more than you do about whatever you happen to be writing about. In the past those people were silenced by circumstance. Now each one of them can stand at the narrow end of an international megaphone. Not coincidentally, the best of the for-pay journalists are becoming webloggers, like John Cook, who broke this story and who managed to get it right in the first place.

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July 18, 2007

Why stop now? Tell Redfin that there’s more where that came from.

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Of course Greg scooped me. If you believe his 11:53 PM time stamp, he was analyzing and typing away while I was dreaming up another real estate vignette. At least now I know to check the blog first. Bloodhound has all but replaced my feed reader.

In any event, a routine 6:00 am review of my email box found the news from Redfin’s Cynthia Pang that they are the proud parents of a $12 million bundle of VC joy. This, they say, should do it. Said CEO Glenn Kelman:

We expect this to be our last round of venture financing, so we looked for a guide on the long journey ahead who could help us generate profits and lead our market.

One obvious reaction might be, “Who possessing a pulse would sink $12 million dollars into what to date has been a completely failed business venture?” One obvious answer would be – people with money and brains in inverse proportion.

This came to me a few days ago from “IDRIS”:

I am writing you this letter because I believe that you are capable of helping me. I am looking for a reputable business partner to invest a huge sum of money in lucrative businesses in your country.

A huge sum? Say, $12 million? A coincidence? I think not.

So, I say to Glenn, don’t stop now! I am here to tell you that there is plenty more where that came from, and I now realize that the $12 million dollars you secured was all but mine had I just read my emails closely and not been so distracted actually representing buyers and sellers in successful transactions.

Of course, I didn’t listen. Frederick Mugabe from Zimbabwe recently offered me $450,000 to help him handle the placement of $14,982,000 into a “profitable business investment”. And, just yesterday, I learned from bank officials in Amsterdam that my email address was attached to the “winning ticket”, entitling me to 2 million euros. On second thought, forget that one. The exchange rate isn’t favorable.

On the other hand, last week a nice God-fearing lady in Darfur who recently lost her husband and is now 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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