Archives (page 93 of 372)

March 4, 2010

I attended Homegain Nation early this week. It was a fantastic time, giving me the opportunity to meet many great people I’ve known online for years. I decided to run a little experiment and bring my Ubuntu laptop, while leaving my windoze machine at home. So…Ubuntu performed extremely well, but MLS vendors performed very poorly. I was not able to get the following web apps to work properly on ubuntu:

MLXChange (obviously)
Docusign
Zipformonline
QuickbooksOnline

I planned to use VNC to access MLXChange from my windoze desktop I keep running (which does crash, and I then call Ali to restart so that I can access it,) but I was pretty shocked that the other 3 vendors aren’t truly cross browser compatible. So, for now, Ubuntu is my great “around town” OS, but it looks like I’ll have to use my windoze machine on road trips (until I get a mac.)

March 3, 2010

Computer “expert” insists, in 1995, that, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were Read more

March 2, 2010

SplendorQuest: Should we celebrate John Galt Day on June 1st?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I wrote this coming on four years ago, one of my last posts to PresenceOfMind.net, my philosophical/political/literary home on the web. The planned strike of our undocumented friends has come and gone, but the underlying idea — a strike against the looters on June 1st — still resonates with me. What say you? Is this something worth pursuing? –GSS

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will kill you with a blithe indifference if you make even one small mistake. If you have never been to the desert, you do not have a referent for solitude. Far more than the serenity that comes from a fundamental awareness of your own aloneness, true solitude must carry with it at least a tinge of fear. When you experience a silence so total that you can hear the footfalls of a tiny lizard fifty yards away, you also come to realize that no one, no one, no one will hear you if you shout for help. Twist an ankle and you die. Lose the path and you die. Misjudge the weather and you die. Set you hand where you should not — and you die.

And yet I can go to the desert on a lark, armed as a child of Cain with nothing but two bottles of water, a tank Read more

March 2, 2010

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

by Brian Brady

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

Information can be a glow in the darkness. Traditional higher education models are losing market share to cheaper education delivery systems. Young people now have the opportunity to learn the very same principles for free that are taught to the people they may eventually hire to run their businesses. I think this free market trend will eventually overtake the traditional post-secondary education models. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fully-funded college education available, competitive with some of the best traditional colleges, in the not-too-distant future.

I can see a future where the ultimate end-users of that education (private industry), see the benefit to developing accredited curricula, and offering them to current and potential employees, at a greatly reduced cost (maybe for free). I’m not just talking about an MBA from “Mutual of Omaha University“. Think “University of the American Way“, delivering bachelor’s degrees to the masses- graduates might receive checks from the alumni association rather than sending checks to it.

Education via extension isn’t a new idea. This ACC school has been granting degrees, to off-campus students, since the 1940s. Online education is now a pop culture phenomenon. If this educational delivery system grows like I think it will, how can the real estate brokerage or mortgage lending communities profit?

The idea that education can get cheaper (moving towards free) and more readily available will be an irreversible trend. No longer can we hide behind the phrase “proprietary information” or “specialized knowledge”. Consumers may educate themselves about how to get a VA condo complex approved and find that my “specific knowledge”, while helpful, doesn’t permit me to charge a one point premium to my lesser educated competitors. My specific expertise DOES drastically reduce my marketing costs, allowing me to retain more profit than my competitors.

Information can be exported inexpensively. Imagine holding a webinar online, explaining the benefits of owning a Costa Rican vacation property, to German pharmaceutical executives. Then, imagine holding a different webinar, to a group of retired Americans in Costa Rica, about investing in mortgages so that those Germans could borrow their money and buy from those properties. Would that add Read more

March 2, 2010

Agent Face Value Proposition?

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

Just for fun, sorta 🙂

February 28, 2010

Mark Steyn: “When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

National Review Online:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

February 27, 2010

Ubuntu is Ready for Prime Time

by Eric Bramlett

Real Estate

I’ve been missing my Bloodhounds! I reminded myself that arguing about politics is like arguing about religion, so logged in to push up a new post.

About a year ago, I posted that the Android OS was going to free me from Windows (and Office.) Unfortunately, the g1 was a gigantic POS, so that didn’t happen. However, in the meantime something fortunate did happen:

I dumped a giant glass of iced tea on my laptop.

During the two weeks of my PC repair, I was forced to move off Outlook and start using the powerful tools that Google provides (free) in their apps products. End of two weeks, and I was off Outlook entirely.

Zoom forward a few months from that point and I’m bored out of my mind (funny how that happens in a real estate broker’s life during the Nov-Dec months.) Out of this sheer boredom, I decided to install Ubuntu (linux) on an old PC laptop we had sitting around.

I’m writing this blog post on that machine. Ubuntu is incredible. This 5 year old laptop with 512kb of RAM runs faster than my 1.5 year old PC w/ 3gb of RAM and lightning fast processor. I can’t wait to replace buggy Vista with Ubuntu on my fast machine!

So…I put it to you: Find an old laptop in your house, download Ubuntu, install it, and give it 2 weeks. Ubuntu is ready for prime time. You belong in the cloud, and there’s no reason to be bound to an OS.

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone/everyone willing to give Ubuntu two weeks1!

February 27, 2010

Dawn In America Part Two

by Brian Brady

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

The American People will take Socialism but they won’t take the label –Upton Sinclair

I believe that the American people will want the label of “unfettered capitalism” but will not necessarily adopt the economic system. Americans like government in small doses but they like (and mostly trust) their government. The morality of the argument for voluntaryism, while sound, will be difficult to adopt. Those of you, who believe that government is the problem rather than the solution, should never stop saying “I told you so” when Statist policies fail but you would do well to remain aware to the fact that Americans like a little bit of government. That is how we can thrive amidst chaos.

Let’s talk about how we might prepare ourselves for the next 20 years:

I don’t believe we’re in a depression nor even a recession nor do think the 1930’s were a depression. Rather, I believe we’re in the middle of a huge economic shift like the one we experienced in the early part of the 20th century. The economic decline of the 30s and the current economic decline was a fallout from a shift in technology. The economic decline of the 1930s was some 25 years after the implementation of the assembly line at Ford Motor Company. It took that long for the economy to absorb the shift from a mostly agrarian society to a manufacturing society. It was no easy shift, either.

Critics in the 20’s and 30’s claimed that we couldn’t eat machines but crop yields increased “spectacularly” in the twentieth century. Domestic food production was so efficient that, despite what Willie Nelson said 25 years ago, American farmers were quite prosperous. The market rewarded those who improved our lives by moving us along roads, on top of the water, and through the air…faster and cheaper. Americans wanted to travel because we were already well-fed.

Is it any surprise that the current economic decline happened some 25 years after IBM’s introduction of the PC? Is this really a “failure of capitalism”, as Van Jones might have you believe, or an unexpected response to the Fed trying to prop Read more

February 26, 2010

Bleg: What kind of Direct Mail letter works best?

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Short bleg to all you BHBers out there. When I was in non-profit fundraising, one of the cardinal rules was that long letters – 12 to 18 page letters – perform better than short fundraising letters.

But I wonder whether the same principle holds true for direct mail letters where you’re selling a service. I send out direct mail letters for my law practice to people who’ve recently been arrested for various alleged offenses. Wonder if I should be sending out longer letters. Right now my letter is two pages…

Any thoughts?

February 25, 2010

Meet the Third Thing…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

[This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail — just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think — though I am by now less lean-look’d a prophet. It’s just that no one wants to hear it… –GSS]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic Read more

February 25, 2010

Dawn In America- Part One

by Brian Brady

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

Anyone who has read this satirical piece knows that my writing turned macabre this past year. One weekend, one book, one article, and one website dramatically changed the way I look at the world and it inhabitants. It has been painful to watch my political party regress from Bob Taft to Teddy Roosevelt in less than 25 years. It is crushing to watch REALTORs and mortgage originators cheer for professional slavery rather than to muster up the courage associated with the rugged individualism that made this country great.

It has been said that it’s always darkest before dawn so while it was pitch black this past summer, I remained confident that Morning in America was nigh. Rick Santelli fired the outburst heard ’round the continent and glimmers of light came by way of tea parties and election upsets. As the economy sputtered, the previous and current administration acted like looters amidst a blackout but people have caught on to their theft- and they don’t like it.

It’s gonna get a lot darker before the dawn and I’ve never been so optimistic in my life. Here’s why- collectivism is a failed philosophy. For all its noble efforts, the unintended consequences of collectivism stifle the indomitable American spirit of reward for creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. We saw collectivism fail here, here, and most recently here. Now, the average guy in the street knows it, too.

Remember the Stockdale Paradox and you’ll remain optimistic with a keen eye to the circumstances as they unfold. Now, hold on to your hat because…

It’s gonna get uglier so be prepared. I think great opportunities will go to the prepared. The day that emerges from the dawn will be so bright you’ll swear that global warming isn’t a hoax. Here’s how I see the next cuppla years playing out:

Real estate may decline, even more. While the lower end of the market has already declined to utilitarian value, the affordable housing organizations will (finally) attack that which artificially inflates markets; zoning regulations. Rather than convert old military bases to detention FEMA camps, the impending currency crisis will force the Federal government to Read more

February 25, 2010

Various thoughts on small business tools

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

1. Google Voice

I know there’s been some sporadic discussion here about Google Voice: whether it’s useful/wise to use as a business phone number, and about the quality of its transcriptions.

I’ve been very pleased with it in terms of the call routing functionality, and the integration with my Droid and Google Contacts.

The transcriptions, true, are sometimes hit or miss. Lately they’ve been more “hits”. I practice in Raleigh, NC, with its share of both southern and other accents. Yes, certain voicemails turn out to be gibberish when transcribed. Frankly, I don’t know that I’d be much better if I were personally transcribing the voicemail myself, let alone leaving it to the warm embrace of Google’s computer systems!

But here are four of the most recent voicemails I’ve gotten, unedited except for the removal of certain identifying information:

Voicemail 1: My name is [name]. My number is [accurate!]. Once I have a question regarding a limited driving privilege. If you can give me a call back. I’d appreciate it. Thank you.

Voicemail 2: Hey, This Is [name]. I’ll talk to my probation officer and he wants me to give you the number is that you can call him as name is [name]. His number is [accurate!] thanks bye.

Voicemail 3: Hi Damon, Damon, this is [NAME] I was just calling to get a confirmation that you had indeed received my [BADLY TRANSCRIBED NAME OF A FORM] from my insurance agent. If you could please return my call. At [NAME]. Thank you.

Obviously the names are not even transcribed properly, but the rest of it is pretty good. These are short voicemails. Longer voicemails where the subject matter is more complicated tend to be less accurate. But usually Google is able to accurately transcribe the name of the offense/crime the person is calling about. This is a big help in my line of work when you’re sitting in court and wondering whether you need to run out to return the call! A speeding ticket can probably wait. A drug trafficking case… that requires an immediately reply.

2. 1-800 numbers and Read more

February 25, 2010

A Future By Halves vs. A Future of Have-Nots

by Sean Purcell

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Voluntaryism vs Social Democracy

Two quick polls: First, all those who enjoy belonging to a society that provides some minimal safety net for the least among us, please raise your hands… Ahh, I see some hands going up. Very good. Second, all those who occasionally enjoy being forced to do something against their will by threat of a gun, please raise your hands… Right, masochists aside I see no hands raised. Very good. The problem is, you cannot have one without the other. Thus spoke the Voluntaryists.

On Monday night I was invited by fellow Bloodhound Brian Brady to attend a debate entitled Voluntaryism/Market Anarchy vs. Democratic-Socialism held in a little hot bed of thought and cafe called Cafe Libertalia. It was an engaging evening spent listening to the point / counter-point discussion on the very legitimacy of government itself. You can gain a more detailed understanding of Voluntaryism here and of Social Democracy here. (Although if you’re a regular reader of BHB you’ve no doubt gained quite a bit of free-market, Voluntaryism philosophy from our Greek emeritus: Greg Swann.)

I must be honest in admitting that I know quite a bit less about Social Democracy philosophy than I do Voluntaryism, and the debate was of little help. The team on the Social Democracy side presented a less than cogent argument for a society wherein free markets and democracy exist in ever changing ratios, as dictated by the people themselves. When asked, the speakers could not name a single society where this system currently exists. When pressed, they admitted that the countries currently attempting it are abysmal failures. But this did not dissuade them from the idea that it could exist. Their logic – such as it was – stemmed from the idea of pure democracy (one man, one vote) and concluded that the majority would decide which means of production should be left to the free markets and which to the nurturing womb of centralized government. “How can you be against that?” they asked. “We’re not advocating government take-over; we’re saying Read more

February 24, 2010

Swanepoel’s Trends Report is not useless. It makes a dandy prop!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Cathy’s listing Friday, a classic North Central Phoenix luxury home. I was shooting interiors for her today, and saw this as a part of her staging:

Building the single-property web site for the home, tonight, I realized that in six months or fewer, I’ll be repurposing content for single-property iPhone/iPad apps, as well. I doubt you will have read anything like that in any repackaged regurgitant from self-styled real estate experts, but it’s where we’re all headed.

February 23, 2010

CFORMS->Heap + Aweber = Finally, The Perfect Real Estate CRM Smashup?

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

Heap CRM’s recent announcement that you can now fire off Event templates from an email got me jizzing a little.

Here’s why:

I’ve played a lot with the CForms wordpress plugin and knew that it allowed for 2 interesting things to happen after a form submission.

1. Cforms will show a custom thank you message directly after form submission and this message will take html.
2. Cforms will fire off a custom message to any admin email address of your choosing.

So, starting with the latter…

Knowing that Heap allows a series of events to be scheduled based on some code inserted into an email, I created a CFORM and got to tweaking a custom email message that would be sent to my heap dropbox address for creating a new lead.

You’ll see in the example below that the Subject of the admin email is configured to display the “Name” field entered by the visitor. And the body of the email is configured to include Heap’s code for firing off an event template (along with some other variables, of which there are delightfully many to choose from!)

So in this example, a new lead is created in Heap and a follow up series of events that I’ve pre-configured is kicked off, along with the scheduling of any number of email messages.

The lead could have also been auto assigned to a teammate based on the short code, which might be a nice feature for any broker considering building a multi agent contributor, multi niche focused blogsite. (Imagine embedding a different agent branded cform for on pages created for each neighborhood in your market area. Then consider reaching out to a prospective recruit and promising them that all leads from that page will be routed into the custom CRM solution you’re going to be giving them. [at the whopping cost of an additional $5/month!]

And Then… the Lead Gets Subscribed to an RSS Based Blog Broadcast!

At this point there were already excitement streaks in my undies, but then I realized that I’d also want all of these “leads” to be subscribed to Read more

BloodhoundBlog

Archives (page 93 of 372)

Traveling Without Windows

by Eric Bramlett

Computer “expert” insists, in 1995, that, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

by Greg Swann

SplendorQuest: Should we celebrate John Galt Day on June 1st?

by Greg Swann

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

by Brian Brady

Agent Face Value Proposition?

by Ryan Hartman

Mark Steyn: “When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay”

by Greg Swann

Ubuntu is Ready for Prime Time

by Eric Bramlett

Dawn In America Part Two

by Brian Brady

Bleg: What kind of Direct Mail letter works best?

by Damon Chetson

Meet the Third Thing…

by Greg Swann

Dawn In America- Part One

by Brian Brady

Various thoughts on small business tools

by Damon Chetson

A Future By Halves vs. A Future of Have-Nots

by Sean Purcell

Swanepoel’s Trends Report is not useless. It makes a dandy prop!

by Greg Swann

CFORMS->Heap + Aweber = Finally, The Perfect Real Estate CRM Smashup?

by Ryan Hartman

And Then… the Lead Gets Subscribed to an RSS Based Blog Broadcast!

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