Geno Petro has passed away. He was one of the best writers to work with us here over the years – and I have the proof.
Cura ut valeas, frater. Requiescat in pacem.
Category: Blogging (page 1 of 84)
You know how it is. The NAR had to get itself sued to death first. Inasmuch as nothing is actually changing – adamantly, nothing – that works out to be a decent deal. Rotting giants fall hard, but sic semper tyrannosauris, as we have said all along.
Here’s what’s what: Starting in 2006 or so, BloodhoundBlog started debating ways to make the contradictions of our convoluted commission scheme more transparent and fairer to both buyers and sellers.
I ended up arguing for an idea I called The Divorced Real Estate Commission. If you click the link, you can read an eBook I wrote on the subject. Or you could just read the news from FannieMae and FreddieMac, who are this week implementing the idea I came up with seventeen years ago.
Seventeen years… And how many billions will the NAR have pissed away fighting a rear-guard action to get to where BloodhoundBlog was seventeen years ago…?
This amounts to a brag on BloodhoundBlog’s part. Out of seventy-ish contributors, only Brian Brady and I have written here lately – not very much and not very lately. Our whole server gets hammered when I blog here too frequently. But the blog of the dawgs endures, as witness. Because there is ALWAYS something to howl about.
“Who is intimidated by a stuffed Dobermann?”
I told you in July of 2019 why this must be so: A retailer without a discount rack must discount all the goods in lockstep, ultimately creating a market-wide slashscade. Zillow is at least stanching its exsanguination. The other big iBuyers still have their noses wide open.
Nothing will save them when the market turns: The insuperable pitfall in flipping is owning the property for too long. The carrying costs already eat up every other iBuyer inflow, and this will only get worse when prices decline and Days-on-Market surges.
But here’s a way around the discount rack problem, at least: Do as they do with cars and guitars: Rebrand. For example, if OfferPad – voted the iBuyer most likely to master arithmetic someday – has an overpriced turkey it needs to unload, it could relist it with its alter-ego brokerage, MakeItGoAway.com. They’ll still be losing money on every sale, but the big loser won’t be pulling down all the mini-losers.
All of this is stupid, of course. There is no business here, other than the business of gulling Wall Street investors. If they’re happy, god help ’em, but I see zero evidence that Wall Street-funded tech ventures have made any difference to the real estate business at all. Zillow put the freebie supermarket magazines out of business, but life in the trenches goes on as before.
Am I mistaken?
In other news:
Brad Polumbo: St. Paul Just Implemented the Nation’s Strictest Rent Control Law. It’s Already Backfiring Tremendously.
Andrea Widburg: Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorneys allege that the prosecution hid evidence.
City Journal: Cold Comfort: Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s appeals to “systemic racism” don’t do much for Chicagoans in high-crime neighborhoods.
Steven Malanga: Free-Speech Entrepreneurs: Growing tech censorship continues to spark rapid gains at alternative platforms.
Daniel Greenfield: Democrats are Destroying Public Schools. Republicans Should Help Them.
Michael Walsh: COVID Panic Will Only End Through Civil Disobedience and Mockery.
“Go ahead. Fool around with my food. Find out what happens.”
Meanwhile, the only actual real estate news I have to offer this morning is my own scoop: Zillow and OpenDoor are chiseling Buyer’s Agents in their Phoenix listings. Totally not bleeding themselves out.
The Verge: Bond was the last straw: Regal and Cineworld will reportedly close all theaters in US and UK next week. The contractions we are seeing in commercial real estate categories were happening already, anyway. This year is simply accelerating in-motion efficiencies, with the result that 2020 could end up serving up the benefits of a full-on recession – in Trump time.
Science Alert: 35 Years of Research Into Coronavirus Infections Show Long-Term Immunity Is Unlikely.
The Post Millennial: Mathematics association declares math is racist. Not racist, anti-Grasshopper. Everything that makes Grasshoppers feel inadequate is trayf. Totally not a cult.
The City Journal: The Crypto State? How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other technologies could point the way to new systems of governance.
That sounds right to me. 😉 The waste is not their salaries but the financial havoc they wreak as the very-most-backseat of drivers. That is to say, iBuyers suck at real estate investment, and their hubris prevents any sort of improvement.
“Are YOU notorious? Have you ever BEEN notorious? Well, I have… Not necessarily wise – but compensated.”
But: It turns out Eric Blackwell knows where to poke the Pooh bear’s mincing minions.
My experiences with Rob Hahn have not been pleasant, and this and his other posts are tl;dr, even assuming he knows anything worth reading about, an assumption I do not make.
What’s funny is that Señor Notorious is right here, despite his snark: As soon as the market turns, all of those poindexter models collapse.
And note well: There is ALWAYS something to howl about at BloodhoundBlog.
Digging into a very graphic love poem to get a handle on active, imagic, metaphorically-rich writing
“Could it be me? Could it be me, baby? Could you be in there, too?”[This is me in August of 2007, and I am reposting rather than revising it because I am changed since then. I’m writing about storgic love here before I even knew its name, and rhapsodizing verbs before I had gotten around to cataloging them – a task I hope to return to, someday. And if you’ve been following my strange relationship with Thalia, there is a flagrant kiss-blowing incident right here. Even so, I have nothing to add to this argument. If anything, events are avenging me with heart-stopping acceleration – much, much more is the pity. And yet: There is hope: For if you can read this, then you yourself are the savior of the truly human life. –GSS]
It’s late and the kids are in bed — do make sure the kids are in bed — and I feel like digging a little deeper into the idea of writing. This is a love poem I wrote ten years ago:
let’s make love like velcro baby
it’s the best thing we can do
you stick to me like strapping tape
i’ll stick to you like gluei’ll cast my anchor in your harbor baby
thrust my shovel in your earth
cling by claws to your cavern walls
take me test my worth
love’s just a hint baby
love’s just a scent
just a sniggling squiggling clue
could it be me
could it be me baby
could you be in there too
let’s make love like velcro baby
let’s do it ’til we die
grab me grasp me clutch me clasp me
hook me with your eyes
This is fun, first, simply because it’s such a goofy idea. The word play itself is fun, but, even before that, it’s fun because it’s such a clumsy, clinical premise for a love poem, the polar opposite of the sunsets and silences and solitudes of the sonnets: Let’s make love like velcro, baby.
The poem is built from very simple stuff. English words, not stuffy Latinate polysyllables. Active verbs, along with nouns and adjectives rich in imagic particularity. This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to Read more
“Got content?”
Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.
We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.
Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.
So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.
Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.
But from our end of Read more
This site has 69 contributors, surely a propitious number. We got a lot of new software this week, including shortcodes and the Markdown markup language.
Markdown is an EZ way to get to formatted text, emulating in many ways longstanding Usenet markup conventions. Chances are, if you work in it, you will have to learn nothing of the underlying nuts-and-bolts. The list below was written simply with asterisks, typewriter style:
- Easy to use.
- Hard to confuse.
- Aaron Swartz, the inventor, was hounded to death by the Deep State. His productivity lives on in you.
Shortcodes are easy ways to effect big jobs. Witness Mister Jack White:
The code for that was precisely this:
The word ‘youtube’ in brackets with the link to the video. Easy-peasy, and the theme will manage every sort of screen size on its own – desktop, tablet, smartphone.
The link above summarizes all of the available shortcodes, but the docs that matter are here: Extending the Youtube shortcode.
So the first challenge to our contributors is simply to post. Could not be easier to post amazing content.
The second challenge is harder: Forecast the future. Pandemic, protests, politics: What are they doing where you are, and what portents will the future bring? Our contributors are all over the country. There is much they can teach us.
There are two challenges to making a blog work: Content and conversations. The latter are caused by the former.
“‘I usually work alone…’”
What’s the point? Why bother?
I have a number of reasons: The boys have been muttering about it here and there, and I want a place where I can talk about real estate. That much was a problem, since our antiquated theme (installed with version 1.19 of WordPress) had lost its editing power with recent software upgrades.
Even more important is this: We can’t rely on social media. I am at this moment banned from Twitter, for weeks now, for praising Forest Whitaker as an actor. I wish I were making that up. My sad experience with every sort of content-contribution site is that eventually I get thrown off the island, with all of my contributions deleted. To hell with that…
So in with the new, by way of the Hoffman theme. No Odysseus picture for the header, yet, because I’m not sure I’m done. I grew very fond of the block editor on LinkedIn, and I want it with this upgrade – and I have not yet worked out how to get it. We’re working from the “classic” editor for now, which is adequate but not ideal. But we are working, or we are at least fully-functional and ready to work.
If you had posting privileges on BloodhoundBlog, you still do. Log in from this link, and reset your password if necessary. Write what you want. Write what you honestly believe. Above all, write about the ideas that might get you banned or shunned elsewhere. That would be my plan, anyway.
I had BHB stats yesterday, for the first time in years, and this post popped up, to my thinking a choice expression of what BloodhoundBlog does best: Dancing joyously while holding up a mirror to hypocrisy. Don’t even get me started on “Gin and Juice.”
So: Link, promote, subscribe. We can have a conversation away from the censorship of Big Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Here’s a preview of what I have in my mind :
1- Facebook ads (as an agent)
2- Value-added services for real estate agents (as a lender)
3- Non-distressed auctions for real estate brokerages (as a vendor)
I have posted a few things since the content slow down on Bloodhound Blog but a lot has happened since 2012-ish. The market has recovered nicely and most of the contributors are probably too busy listing, showing or financing property to write. Bloodhound Blog was on the cutting edge of the RE.net: provocative, hard-hitting, curious, and innovative.
Let’s start howling again
Who’s got something to howl about? Could it be you?
I always have real estate news, just not a hell of a lot of it. I’m a lot less about marketing and a lot more about fundmanentals, these days, but I’m listing more as game theory than as a job, anyway.
Too weird for words, right? Wrong. Nothing is in my world.
The boys say they want to play, and I’m game even if I might not be all that verbose. I do have ideas on marketing – that is, the fundamentals. And I have a Zillow pot-boiler aboiling. And there are meta-issues out there, so far successfully ignored.
But: At the same time: Even at this very moment I am not writing a Willie story that could easily be a movie but could also be a one-set play on its way to proving that it could be a movie but which has to be finished, first, before it can be anything else.
So: Dudes, we’re open for business. Decade-old PHP still works the way I wrote it, and I’ve upgraded WordPress and the plug-ins. We might do some housekeeping later, but for now it’s nice for me to see that big dog’s nose.
Have at it.
A while back, I wrote a post on BloodhoundBlog about using pocket-sized video cameras to record and propagate video testimonials. That kind of job is now better done by smartphone video cameras, but you can still buy a Flip camera
Any way you capture the video, here is the procedure I talked about then:
1. Capture the video. Because you’re doing an interview, you can guide the testimonial to elicit the information you want to convey to other clients.
2. Post the video on your YouTube page.
3. Embed the YouTube video on your testimonials page. (I have code that will place a randomly-selected miniaturized-video, as pictured above, in your weblog’s sidebar, so that your clients see a different testimonial every time they come to visit.)
Here is the big duh I left out of that original post:
4. Share the link to the YouTube video with the subject of the testimonial.
When you made the film, you told your clients that you wanted for them to share the news of their good experience with their friends, colleagues and family members. How much easier can you make it for them to follow through than to give them access to their own video-recorded testimonial?
If you make a playlist of all your video testimonials, prospects referred by past clients may end up looking at more than one of your videos. Needless to say, each of those videos should link back to your main blogsite. But the big bonus of working this way is to make it very easy for your satisfied clients to share their satisfaction with their warm network.
How do I know this is a bug duh idea? Because it only took me four-and-a-half years to think of it!
My respect for Eric Blackwell is, well, simply beyond my ability to wordsmith. This guy is not only smart, but he’s fun (in a funny way), creative, and shaped in the mold of Jeff Brown’s cat skinners.
So when Eric penned a post recently on how one might be a Bloodhound if……and then showed us a superb video by a cool guy right up the road from me, I decided it would be appropriate to thrown down a glove in the challenge and see whether I win the prize (get the princess) or am sent to the guillotine.
You be the judge. Joe Post and I have worked together for a long time, and our goal is to create a video site where we are THE go to guys for finding info other than square footage and HOA fees. Enjoy…..cause I might be a Bloodhound if this makes you feel like you’d like to get to know us better.
Trustworthy people do not expect you to take them at their word.
The word transparency has a useful cachet in business, a condition where nothing of material importance in the transaction is concealed from the consumer. When I was a kid, I worked with a print broker who led his clients to believe that he owned his own composition house, his own pre-press facility and his own printing plant. In fact, he worked out of his car and, for all I know, he rented his shoes. Why would his clients really want to know that he was a broker, not an owner? Because it affected his ability to deliver on his promises — certainly a material concern.
In real estate, we hear about that kind of transparency, and we’re one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock. We absolutely hate it, for example, when the other agent in a cross sale fails to disclose a material fact — no doubt hoping against hope that the problem will go away if no one mentions it. But we rebel against the idea of what we might see as an intrusive transparency. As an example, where one agent might disclose to the penny how a listing commission is to be spent, another might feel that this is none of the seller’s damn business. The discussion then would turn on whether such a disclosure is a material fact.
The issue is clouded because the word transparency means something very different in the Web 2.0 world — and in the world of persuasive communication in general. The fear in any advertising or marketing presentation — your own fear, too — is that you are being tricked, sold a bill of goods. That by dishonest or technically-honest-but-non-obvious means, you think you are buying a rabbit when all you’re really getting is an empty hat. The purpose of transparency in this context is to take away that fear.
So in reply to my post last night about video testimonials, John Kalinowski notes that they could be Read more
Jimmy Klein and young Gavin M. George got my Sunday started right. I love Sunday despite the fact that I don’t believe anything I don’t have to, and most especially do I love to start my Sunday with the Sun God of my own idolatry: The blinding brilliance of a fully-conscious human smile. The world abounds in wonders of the mind, and all we can remark on are the travesties of mindlessness.
Me, too, make no doubt, and yet I am thankful this Sunday to President Barack Obama, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the Black Panther Party, the mainstream media and the entire TwitBook Mafia. I have never in my lifetime seen a racist lynch mob in action, and I am grateful to all the participants for showing me what menacing racial prejudice — judging by race in advance of determining the facts — looks like. If you are worrying about the fate of poor George Zimmerman — whose race, apparently, is white-enough-godammit! — console yourself: He can always avail himself of gay marriage. In the game of identity politics, gay men — born-that-way-godammit! — trump every other card. And that’s a consummation we all might as well be thankful for.
So I guess I should be thankful for Bill Maher, who argues that snarky-on-wry is about all any of us can bring to the show, most days. And I think he and I both should be grateful that no one expects us to be funny like South Park is funny. A demand for actual excellence could put just about anyone into another line of work.
And totally snarklessly, I am 1,500 words into what I hope will turn out to be the most practically useful philosophical essay I will ever write. When I’m done, will anyone read it, all the way through, all the way to the end? I will, again and again over the years, if I get it right. I don’t know that I have improved any life but my own. But I know that what my life is now is a direct consequence of the things I have Read more