Bloodhound News:
House broken...

More than two years ago, when we were putting together the Bloodhound business plan, Richard Riccelli, our longtime friend and colleague, was helping us get things right--an honor he accords us to this very day. Richard sits well above the salt in the pantheon of marketing gods, so we are much enriched by his good advice--doubly so because he doesn't charge us for it! How big a deal is this? For one major thing, Richard had a decisive influence on the Bloodhound logo. Near the end of that particular process, he was playing with possible taglines. We had settled early on 'Devoted, Dedicated, Determined', but Richard was arguing for other options, possibly a rotating series of taglines. He sent us an Adobe Illustrator file with our logo shown with a half-a-dozen possible tags. One of them was 'House Broken'--simply delightful.

We toasted with that admonition--'House Broken!'--on Friday, October 7, 2005. On that day did we become a brokerage, after all this time working toward that goal. We are of Prestige Realty no longer. The name of our business entity is BloodhoundRealty.com, LLC. That corporation is licensed as an Arizona brokerage, and Greg Swann is licensed as its Designated Broker. Cathleen Collins is the first licensed sales representative for our brokerage, BloodhoundRealty.com, subject to all manner of onerous exploitation. Odysseus the Spokesmodel Bloodhound, without whom none of this, was predictably phlegmatic.

A very big day for us, but our plan is to make this a very big change for our clients, as well. We built this not just to be another business--not just another income for another family, nothing of any particular moment. We want to make radical changes to the way this business is done, to change utterly the ethic of real estate representation, and--god help us!--ultimately to change the awful reputation of Realtors. We love real estate and we love being Realtors--not because of the way things have been done but because of the way they can be done.

Nothing fundamental has changed for us. We've always worked from our own space, with our own equipment--because we've always had better space and better equipment than our erstwhile broker. But in truth everything has changed--because now we can grow our business our way. We have set very high standards for the agents we'll add to our brokerage, when we do. We will never work with people who don't share our commitment to honesty, integrity, creativity and on-going education.

How big can we get? That remains to be seen. We're happy enough to be just we two if that's as large as we can grow while still providing excellent service to every one of our clients. But we believe that we can grow--our way--to be a force in the Phoenix market. And from there--if we can franchise these radical ideas--the world is ours...

For now we are 'House Broken' at last. A brokerage--broke and persistently broker as every dollar that comes in the door turns into two more dollars invested in the business. We will grow as big as our ideas envision and our energies commit--as big as we deserve to be. It's been a great run so far, and we're only just now getting to the good part.

Almost famous...

All this happened just in time. Starting this Wednesday, October 12th, The Arizona Republic is going to feature Greg in a small real estate column to be published in the West Valley sections of the paper. He has made a nuisance of himself with the paper, emailing observations about real estate news to the reporters who cover that beat, and this is starting to yield results. In June he was quoted in a story about the heat of the market in the West Valley. Just lately, he was quoted in a story about the recent resurgence of open houses. The weekly column will give us the opportunity to discuss issues that we think are important to buyers and sellers.

The hottest city
for entrepreneurs:
How cool is that?

If you read the local alternative media, it won't take long for you to learn that that Phoenix is not cool, that it suffers from an inferiority complex. We endure an inexplicable shortage of unemployable bearded poets, and, while we seem to have a surplus of visually-impaired visual artists, evidently they are incapable of inducing the trendiest kinds of reflexive nausea. O!, the ignominy.

The local punditocracy has become intoxicated with the ideas of Richard Florida, an academic who studies decaying cities to try to figure our what makes them appealing to decadents. The immediate goal is to attract more decadents to Phoenix. The constant lament is that there are never enough. And, true enough, if you look around Phoenix, around the central city and especially around the suburbs, it's hard to envision an unemployable poet feeling himself at home.

The homeowners feel very much at home, of course, as do their children. We do not have to subsidize child-birth, as some of the cities Florida admires are doing, cities that are so cool that they drive away everyone who is not decadent--or too poor to escape.

But don't despair. You can always read out-of-town media to discover how wonderful the Phoenix-area really is. The fact that the Valley of the Sun is growing at a mad pace while Bohemia's best-beloved burgs are shrinking is revealing enough, of course. But you can also turn to Entrepreneur Magazine, which rates the Valley as number one of its "Hot Cities For Entrepreneurs."

Very few entrepreneurs produce nauseating art, blessedly enough, but they do make money and create jobs, throwing off wealth as casually as a true inner-city sophisticate throws off profane epithets--and unsavory odors. And that suggests another potential tagline for BloodhoundRealty.com: "The Valley of the Sun--Loved by hard-working dogs, hated by fleas..."

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