Are you looking for a mission statement? Here’s a bold thrust in that general direction:
BloodhoundBlog is everything you wish were in Realtor magazine — but isn’t.
That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or The Specialist — would ever take on. We have lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, weblogged or printed.
Okayfine. Here’s a second shot at mission-statement glory:
You will know when BloodhoundBlog has attained its goals when there is no more carney-barker jive to be found anywhere in real estate.
That’s much better. That’s a dagger thrust into real estate’s heart of darkness, along with a nice expression of the garage-band attitude that got us here.
But this might be our full and final mission statement:
- We — we here at BloodhoundBlog — are inventing Real Estate 2.0 — the confluence of Social Media Marketing, Direct Marketing and belly-to-belly selling. Other people at other places are involved, but we push the game so much farther, so much faster that, without us, there is no game — just more and more sleazoid vendors milking you with Inmanospheric pressure.
- We here at BloodhoundBlog are bringing the Good News of Real Estate 2.0 to the mostly unwired majority of real estate professionals.
- We here at BloodhoundBlog are going to set the standards for quality of care so high that the bums and the crooks will run away from real estate screaming, seeking relief from the awful burden of excellence.
We seek, each of us in our own way, to break every chain that binds real estate professionals.
The back-story
BloodhoundBlog began as a Phoenix-area brokerage-oriented real estate weblog. We became a sort of hybrid group-blog when we added mega-producing Phoenix-area Realtor Russell Shaw. We stuck another paw in the water when we invited San Diego-based investment broker Jeff Brown to come play with us in the Dual Agency Smack-Down. And that went so well that we decided to grow BloodhoundBlog into a true group-blog.
We’ve always been national in the scope of our interests, but now we are truly national in our reach. Moreover, the webloggers working here will continue the BloodhoundBlog tradition of rigorous real estate analysis — thoughtful without being dour, informative without being pedantic, disagreeing, where we must, without being disagreeable.
These are our contributors, past and present:
Lani Anglin is the Texas-proud provocateuse at the spunky Realtor Wives weblog. By day, she works as a rainmaker for Single Pointe Realty. With two kids, three cats, a dog and her husband, she finds a way to stay busy.
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.
Eric Blackwell is Director of Technology for a RE/Max franchise in Louisville, KY. He is active in the real estate webmasters community and consults on Search Engine Optimization and Marketing for select clients.
Eric Bramlett is the broker and co-owner of One Source Realty in Austin, TX. An active voice in the RE.net, he has also written for Broker Agent News. His interests include SEO/SEM, blogging and web design.
Brian Brady is a San Diego-based mortgage broker. Working with his wife, Debra, Brian deploys six years of experience on Wall Street to make sure the loans he underwrites fit his clients’ overall financial plans.
Sean Broderick is a real estate developer and a practicing commercial real estate broker, holding the coveted CCIM designation. His career has taken him from Florida to California, with a stint in minor league baseball.
Jeff Brown is a San Diego-based real estate investments broker. He makes millionaires of his ordinary-investor clients. If that’s not enough to make you smile, his sage, folksy wit should do the job.
Morgan Brown is a mortgage banker and broker in Irvine, CA. He enjoys reading and blogging, and he is on a personal mission to change the public perception of the mortgage industry through honesty — even if it kills him.
Allen Butler is a Phoenix-based Realtor and real estate team leader. In his spare time, Allen maintains a professional-quality recording studio, which he deploys to bring a semblance of audibility to our sometimes crude podcasts.
Cathleen Collins is a Phoenix-area Realtor. With a background in hi-tech project-management and a deft hand in customer service, she is building a respectable listing practice in the Historic Districts of Downtown Phoenix.
Partnering with his wife, Michael Cook is a commercial real estate investor who complicates his life as an MBA student at The S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
What’s that big, booming voice, piling comedy upon careful calculation? It’s Real Estate Radio USA’s Barry Cunningham, who with co-host Barry Johnson teaches a daily master class on real estate and investing.
Ronan Doyle lives in Boston and works as an advertising agency creative executive. He loves distinctive homes and is building his wealth house by house: Search, buy, improve, enjoy, sell — then repeat the process.
Jim Duncan is a third-generation Realtor, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a long-time real estate weblogger. He is active within the NAR, and has made a name for himself as an ethical lodestone in real estate.
The mythic city of Savannah is home to Mike Farmer, a commercial and residential real estate broker. Mike puts an emphasis on buyer agency, but there is a part of the man that lives simply to write.
Tony Fredericks is a San Francisco-area roofing contractor who is using his surplus income to build a real estate investment empire. Tony is a wine aficionado who brings a fine discrimination to everything he does.
Dan Green is Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist working out of Chicago. In an industry too well known for its churn and burn methods, Dan and his team take a thoughtful, deliberative approach to mortgage lending.
James Hsu is a Realtor and Real Estate Investor working in suburban Seattle. From math to computer science to medicine to web development, James may be the whole Realtor 2.0 package personified.
Cheryl Johnson lives in a “how-to” world. Never satisfied with the off-the-shelf solution, she fine-tunes her tools — then teaches the “how-to” of what she’s done. This real estate broker and investor calls Los Angeles her home.
Chris Johnson calls the tiny town of Westerville, Ohio, home — a challenge for a loan officer. A prolific weblogger and an incipient father, Chris is a tireless advocate of continuous self-improvement.
CEO Glenn Kelman has been a lightning rod for controversy since the founding of Redfin.com. What we have all failed to notice is that he owns a gentle soul, a thoughtful mind and a prodigious writing talent.
Jeff Kempe knows a thing or two about Nordstrom service, having sold for them and to them for many years. Jeff has been selling real estate in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, for the last three years.
Bill Leider is the CEO of Real Estate Shows, a hosted virtual-tour solution. His background is in corporate and business management in publicly-traded and privately-owned mid-size companies.
Steven Leung has too many credentials to list: An MIT graduate, he has worked for Microsoft, Oracle and several internet start-ups. He brings that hi-tech experience to the hi-tech Silicon Valley real estate market.
Dayton, Ohio, is the life-long home and territory of Teri Lussier, the newly-minted Realtor become newly-minted real estate weblogger who is Greg Swann’s co-contestant in Active Rain’s Project Blogger.
Norma Newgent is a Realtor who lives and works in Tampa Bay, FL — and has never lived anywhere else. She has a degree in Public Relations, but prefers helping people buy and sell homes.
Geno Petro is the voice of Chicago on the RE.net. A top-producing listing agent, he has done leasing and has worked in his own behalf as an investor. On top of all that, he is a stunningly original writer.
Dave Phillips is the CEO of the Charlottesville (Virginia) Area Association of Realtors, a national pace-setter. He describes himself as “a writer, speaker, and facilitator on all things real estate.”
What happens when a Princeton psychology major goes to Wall Street? Sean Purcell came to his senses and moved to San Diego to train as an Ironman and establish himself as a Web 2.0 real estate success coach.
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.
Richard Riccelli is a Boston-based direct marketing guru. His advertising agency specializes in magazine circulation, but here Richard will deploy his vast expertise and rapier wit to real estate marketing issues.
Russell Shaw is a mega-producing Realtor working in Metropolitan Phoenix. He and his team close approximately 400 transactions a year, consistently putting Russell among the top 30 Realtors nationwide.
Cameron Swann is the son of Greg Swann and Cathleen Collins. He is a student at St. Mary’s High School and plans to become a software engineer. Cameron writes much of the software that drives BloodhoundBlog.
Greg Swann is a Phoenix-area Realtor and real estate broker. The most prolific of our contributors, Greg is not completely happy with anything until he has picked it apart and put it back together in his own way.
Want to find Jay Thompson? Just Google for “Phoenix real estate” — he’s above the fold. Jay is a legend among real estate webloggers, but he’s also an incipient broker, a confirmed desert rat and a committed family man.
Jeff Turner is the founder, president and COO of Real Estate Shows, which produces internet commercials from Realtor-supplied photos. A life-long successful entrepreneur, Jeff is also the proud father of six children.
Galen Ward is the co-founder of Estately.com, simultaneously the underdog and overachiever of map-based real estate search. He spends his time, reading, writing and coding for real estate from the heart of Seattle.
Room for one more? We are interested, now and always, in considering new contributors. If you can write with style, grace and good humor about some aspect of the real estate industry, and if you think your work belongs here, speak up. And if there is something we should be covering — or covering better — say so.
Our goal is to be daily must-reading for real estate professionals everywhere — Realtors, lenders, appraisers, investors, vendors and technologists. Never doubt it: There is always something to howl about. We hope you’ll come back every day to see how much noise a pack of big dogs can make…
Verbum sapienti: A word to the wise, that is. We are a real estate industry weblog, and much of our content concerns real estate marketing tools, technologies and techniques that real estate professionals might use in their own businesses. But: We are not appealing for business here. We are not selling real estate or loans or investments, and we are not walking on our tip-toes to avoid offending potential clients. If you are building or hope to build a lead-attracting real estate weblog, BloodhoundBlog is not a model for you to follow. Many of our contributors have client-focused weblogs, and those can be good models to work from. But BloodhoundBlog is written to be controversial, and we do not — and should not — care whose toes we might step on.
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Blanket demurrer regarding copyright violations: This is a group blog, produced by many contributors. It is possible that someone has used a copyrighted image or video without permission over the years. In all such cases, this will have been done with no malicious intent and without any profit-seeking motivations. This is not a profit-seeking website – more is the pity. If we have erred, we will amend any violations as soon as we are informed of them. But we are not interested in hearing shake-down threats from “artists” who artistry consists of extortion-by-email. We have fought much bigger dragons and won – and you can’t get blood from a stone, in any case.
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Privacy policy: Email addresses and any other contact information collected by BloodhoundBlog are kept in the strictest confidence. Contact information is never shared with third-party vendors, other web sites or telemarketers, nor will anyone from BloodhoundBlog solicit your business in any way. We hate spam more than you do.
Comments policy: Everyone disagrees with us about something, and we welcome this: It’s how we learn. We encourage a free and spirited debate about the issues we raise here. We police comments with a very light hand, deleting comments and banning commenters only for extreme obscenity, flaming or flame-baiting, plagiarism, spam, impersonation (sock-puppetry) or copyright infringement (a fair-use quotation with a link is fine). This warrants emphasis: We are all about ideas, and, because of that, we are very strict about bad behavior. If you get the notion that your fear or anger or rock-ribbed moral fire accords you the right to abuse or insult or brow-beat the other guests in our salon, you will be ejected with dispatch. Nota bene: When you’re done, you’re done. Anyone can make a mistake, but if your behavior is palpably malicious, you will be banned from BloodhoundBlog forever.
Policy on anonymous comments: If you don’t have the courage to stand behind your remarks with your own true name, don’t be surprised if contributors and visitors to BloodhoundBlog assume you are sniveling coward. This may not be the truth of your particular circumstances, but it fits our past experience to a fault. If you want to be taken seriously, comport yourself accordingly. If you don’t need to be told not to act like a jackass in public, we like you already.