Month: November 2006 (page 1 of 8)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teresa Boardman guest blogs at The Real Estate Tomato with some excellent advice on honing our technology skills.

Free The Drones has more on the Google Sandbox.

Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets is raising a stink about smelly houses. This may be the perfect answer to the question, “Why preview?”

More counter-intuitive rising-home-value news from Hot Property at BusinessWeek. If there were as many different ways to count groceries, you’d never make it home with a dozen eggs.

Back home in San Diego, Kris Berg has an excellent cautionary tale on the peril of ignoring the preliminary title report.

Two words: Galen Ward. The man is a poet.

Geri Sonkin at All About Long Island has thoughts on discounting. My preliminary conclusion is still that buyers don’t care very much, but I’m still playing with the idea. Three of the houses I have closing in December I would not have had without the flat fee buyer’s agent’s commission, so that’s a counter-argument.

In a Hollywood Western, about a half-hour after the second-act gun-battle, a seeming rout for the bad guys, the respectable townsfolk start poking their heads out to see if it’s safe to come outdoors. Then they gather in the town square and cluck about how much they abhor violence. This is done as comic relief and to set up the expectation of peace, to be spectacularly defeated by the third-act gun-battle. (Can you imagine what fun it is to sit through a movie or a play with me while I pick it apart line by line?) Today some of the townspeople of the RE.net have decided my brief war with Keith at Housing Panic was unseemly. Oh well. Kris Berg brought home a nice post on Realtor bashing, and, of course, Jay Thompson was a combatant. Other remarks suggest that — alike unto the comments of the BubbleHeads — people still don’t understand the issue: When someone tries to extort away your right to say what you choose, that is when I will be eager to engage in a discussion of what is ugly or a waste of time. At the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp Read more

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Forgive the absence of links, although I may have to throw in a couple of unreferenced quotes for effect, but my intent is not to fuel a ridiculous “debate”, for lack of a better word (although there are many better words). Anyone who cares about the catalyst for my comments will have to do their own research.

“Antagonize” was a word my children learned at a very young age, as in “Stop antagonizing your sister.” It really is time to stop all of the silliness, and quit antagonizing one another. Like any good mother, there comes a time when you have to ground the children. Greg – Go to your room for using the “M” word. (And like any good mother, I will laugh hysterically when you leave the room, because I really found your wordplay raucously funny). Keith and all of your Housing Panic friends, I am sending you home for behaving badly as well. The term RealtWhore, while considered by you and your friends to be quite clever, is clearly a derogatory remark and very childish. We will do it again when everyone can play nice.

Obviously, what we have here are some very divergent opinions on the real estate market trends. What bothers me the most at this moment, however, is what seems to be the underlying theme: The utter lack of respect many (most) people seem to hold for our profession. And in a perhaps unprecedented blogging moment, I insist that you DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS POST. It’s not that I know and fear that many will disagree with my remarks, but only that I am not looking to pick another playground fight. Consider it my therapy session.

I am truly tired of the sport of Realtor bashing. Here are the promised, unreferenced remarks, all unfortunately real and recent quotes:

(Realtors have a) lack of class, lack of education, lack of intelligence.

I find (the) ‘profession’ and business vile and disgusting in that it pretends to act as a fiduciary for home buyers and is nothing of the sort.

Why do you put your picture on your Blog comments/business cards/bill boards (if Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

We’re adding another contributor this morning, Doug Quance of Broker’s First Realty in Atlanta:

Doug Quance is an Atlanta-based Realtor and Associate Broker. Backed by his team, Doug is in the vanguard of the Realtor 2.0 movement toward hi-tech, full-service real estate.

Doug managed to get good and sick over Thanksgiving, so it’s a particularly cruel injustice to do this to him today, but he insisted we proceed as planned.

Athol Kay at The Real Estate Guide calls us The Borghound Blog, which was a lot of fun. This much is true: We’re doing our best to recruit the very best real estate webloggers. But the last thing we want is that “one cut of face and figure,” “the prison-uniform” of some uniform school of thought. To the contrary. Our diversity is our strength. (Didn’t I get a badge from the NAR that says that?)

In any case, while we are not The Borg, today we are a nonet to be contended with…

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Today, Jeff Brown is a thorn among roses. We’re adding a new contributor, San Diego Realtor and super-blogger Kris Berg. With Cathleen Collins below the BawldGuy and Kris above, the median quantity of hair approaches the statistical mean.

But rich, luxurious, full-bodied hair — or none at all — is no measure of the prowess of a BloodhoundBlog weblogger. And, of course, no one can be encapsulated by a capsule biography, but it falls to me to write one anyway:

Kris Berg is a San Diego Realtor and Associate Broker who is avidly building a business with her husband, Steve, while raising a family, maintaining a home and writing cleverly original real estate commentary.

If you haven’t read Kris at The San Diego Home Blog, you’re missing out on one of the great treats of the RE.net. She writes pertinent real estate commentary with a style all her own — sometimes raucously funny, always precisely on target. I can’t wait to see what she’ll write here…

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Well.

That was underwhelming.

First, I make a brutally funny, completely accurate joke about that risible demagogue, Keith at Housing Panic.

Then Keith offers to sell out his weblog and his entire constituency of mouth-breathing morons to escape the ridicule that is his just desserts, his one indisputable claim on the wonders of the universe.

His “offer” is essentially extortionate. The “or else”?:

A war with the thousands of HP’ers so harsh and loud your practice and reputation in Arizona likely wouldn’t survive (beyond the damage you’re doing yourself)

Now anyone who is paying any attention here — a company that excludes Generalissimo Foghorn Leghorn — could have predicted with perfect precision what I would do in the face of something like this: Make it public, of course, in spades.

So: Keith puts on a predictable pantomime of outsized outrage, heavy on the high-moral dudgeon. And the mouth-breathing morons zoom in to BloodhoundBlog to poke around at random and issue inane comments — heavy on the profanity, light on the grammar.

This much is a big yawn. There are thoughtful, intelligent people among the BubbleHeads, but I can’t imagine that any of them is so lacking in self-respect that he would take “orders” from a detestable thug like Generalissimo Leghorn.

That’s as may be. The thuglets who do shake a leg the Leghorn way gave another perfect demonstration of why I have referred to them as Brown Shirts and Flying Monkeys. One Junior G-Man dug up and published my address (ahem — it’s on our web site) here and on Housing Panic. An amazingly drunk man in Connecticut left 23 very long incoherent voicemails on my cell phone. A cadre of relatively literate BubbleHeads tried to figure our how to censor me by means of Arizona Association of Realtors or Arizona Department of Real Estate complaints. It might occur to you to wonder if they have not heard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — but of course they have. Thuggery and principle are moral opposites, never doubt it.

There’s more, but it’s all nothing. I told Keith in advance that it would come to nothing. The original Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen Collins, Richard Riccelli and Jeff Brown: I’m hopelessly out-classed three times in one day. And we’re adding another first-class real estate weblogger tomorrow. Nothing for it but to turn outward to the vast riches of the RE.net. Here’s some stuff that has caught my eye:

Would you like to know my secret shame? My own mother is a Luddite. Every year we talk about getting her a Macintosh with broadband for Christmas, and every year we put it off another year. All she really needs is email and the web — and she has a natural motivation in the form of a burgeoning herd of grandchildren. But she will not hear of it. Programming her VCR is as far up the technology ladder as she is willing to climb. So this little gizmo, cited on TechCrunch, is actually of interest to me. My mom has never forgiven us for ditching the film cameras — double prints! — and it’s a rare day when I think to print out and snail-mail digital photos. This might be just the thing…

Kris Berg is back, and in top form. Make time to savor her writing.

Oops! BusinessWeek says property values are up, this per Zillow.com’s Q3 Zindices and other sources. Who knows if it’s true or not, and I have no ability to weigh any but the most local evidence. But the article does highlight the essential weakness of measuring market activity by median prices.

Todd Tarson sends thoughtful notes in our general direction. In the second link he is raving about Richard Riccelli’s single-property web site for his own home in Boston, which raves I heartily endorse. This is a gorgeous expression of the single-property web site idea. Be sure to take a look at how it is put together.

Russ Cofano at Realty Objectives on a ruling an NAR motion to dismiss the DOJ anti-trust suit:

So what does this mean? As I said earlier, I believe this case will go to trial unless the parties reach compromise. NAR has been, to date, staunch in its belief that it will not settle this case if settlement means a Read more