Making the pack: How to break your way into BloodhoundBlog

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lately, I’m getting two or three requests a day to write with us. They come from sweet, smart, earnest people, and, while I look at everything they send to me, I usually don’t have time to write back and decline their requests. That’s the one part of this job I really hate, because I’ve always hated being on the receiving end of that kind of transaction. On the other hand, I know from experience that the attention of readers is not something I give, nor something you get, but, rather, something that the writer seizes, takes by the irrepressible force of sheer talent. I’m in the unique position of being able to share this rostrum we have built with other people. But I can’t make anyone listen — not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

I had email yesterday from John Rowles, and, on the strength of that one email, without looking at anything else he had written, I invited him to join us. John’s letter was simply riveting. I read every work, all the way to the end, but I knew by the fifth paragraph that he would be writing with us. I can think of a dozen things I might think about, if I am deliberating about a potential contributor, and I will sometimes appeal to Brian or Teri or Cathleen for advice. But when a writer knocks my socks off — knocks them all the way across the room — there is nothing to think about.

I owe formal introductions for John, and for all the wonderful writers we added last week. For now, here is John’s email in its entirety:

Hi Greg:

1995-6: I was 26 and four years out from earning my BA in journalism when Web 1.0 happened. I spent those four years tending bar and working in ski shops while I started to build a portfolio of feature-length articles. My girlfriend  managed an apartment complex, and I met Bill while hanging out in her office. Bill had a computer setup straight out of the movie War Games, complete with a voice modulator (“Hello, Bill. Would you like to play a game?”). He was a civilian Navy IT Engineer, and he ran a BBS out of his apartment.

Bill overheard me bitching about the cost of getting my articles printed and bound in a way that was supposed to impress editors. Often, it would cost more to get portfolios printed and sent than I was paid to write the article I was adding to it, and most of them never came back. The one that did return had a nice fat coffee ring through the first four pages.

So Bill suggested that I “…learn HTML and put up a Web page.”

“How?”

“Go buy an HTML book and figure it out.”

At the time, HTML books were not stocked and there was no Amazon, so I ordered one. I got the book, put together my first site (I used the sky with clouds background and rainbow horizontal separators. In my defense, I did not use animated GIFs or the <blink> tag), and went looking for Bill. This was two weeks after he suggested I build a Web site.

In the meantime, Bill and his BBS had been bought. An investor was starting an ISP and Bill and all his gear were moving into a new facility.  I walked in, ducking the  hanging wires and found Bill standing on top of a step ladder, head in the ceiling, swearing at the wires. I offered him the 3 1/2 inch diskette that held the fruits of my labor. He grunted something, reached down and stuffed it in his pocket. I figured that was the last I’d see or hear of it. I was wrong.

A day later, the phone behind my bar rang. The fourth line to the pub rang direct to the bar and a few of the bartenders used it as a contact point (no one could afford a cell phone — we were basically “Vandaly Industries” from Seinfeld), and we took messages for each other. The guy who bought Bill was on the line, and he asked if I wanted to build web sites for him.

I told him, “That’s the first one I’ve done.”

“That’s one more than anyone else we know around here.”

This was the end of the summer in Newport. I had some lean months coming up (until December when the ski shop picked up), and I was looking at another Autumn of eating beans out of a Frisbee with a shoe horn over my kitchen sink. The deal was I had to sell what I built, but I could keep whatever I could get for building the site. The ISP wanted the hosting and I got a spiff if I sold a dial up account. I decided to see if selling Web pages was easier than selling articles.

I still told girls at the bar I was a “writer”.

Selling Web pages was easier than getting published. Making them DO anything for my customers was harder. I went to my boss and explained that we needed to start helping people get found in something called “Yahoo”. He told me that if I wanted to be an advertising agency, go for it, he would host my stuff, but he didn’t have the time or interest. As far as he was concerned, he was the phone company of the Internet and Web pages were Yellow Page ads.

So I started “X-Presso Internet Group”, which morphed into X-Presso eCommerce two years later when I talked a group of investors looking to get into “Dot-Com” into forking over a couple million, then that blew up along with everything but Google in 2000 (leading to my first appearance in USA Today as the poster boy for selling too much equity to investors who then pull the rug out), which was followed by a brief stint as the Web Marketing Director at a Providence Ad agency (and  my second USA Today appearance, this time as an “ebay vigilante” who used SEO tactics to locate fellow victims of an ebay scammer so I could feed him to the Feds) and then I went back into business for myself as an eCommerce Consultant.

That’s when I decided to sell our house based on the ridiculous sums people around us were getting, and a Real Estate Broker came to put a price on it. My laptop was out, Dave saw it and asked what I did. He asked me to look at his Web site. Not thinking that this guy was a potential client, I laughed in his face. It was terrible and I told him so. To his credit, he asked me if I was willing to put his money where my mouth was.

Two and half years latter, here I sit in the remains of another bubble. Apparently, I am a needle.

My claim to Real Estate fame is building an IDX search engine that uses Google’s own technology in the form of the Google Search Appliance (Google did a case study on us). Since I can get Google technology, and Google itself cannot get IDX data, our Web sites are the only place people can google the complete MLS listings in the markets we serve.

Since both our Google and Big Google are meritocracies when it comes to search results, we have adapted eCommerce Best Practices and provide our agents with the tools they need to enhance their listings beyond what the MLS spits out in the IDX feed. In theory, this gives our agents an advantage since our search engine, like Big Google, will reward content and return the relevant listings with the most content first. In practice, we get maybe 15% of the agents to sign up and take some training, and maybe 2% of them follow up and keep at it.

And we have no choice but to go after the agents because the Brokers flat out refuse to pay for the platform themselves, even though it is designed to give them a competitive advantage in their market by emulating the most successful company on the Web. This puts us in the company of plenty of carny barkers.

It is depressing. A columnist on Inman recently pointed out that the barriers to entry for the Real Estate “profession” “…include ownership of a #2 pencil and an opposable thumb.” The whining is unbelievable. It makes me wonder if it all went wrong the day Bill told me about HTML, and I should have stuck with writing.

So I have recently begun to comment on Inman more frequently (which is how I came across your name), and I am making an effort to add entries to my own Blog more often, and I take whatever chance I have to write instead of work on the business, including the hour I have spent putting this email together, to see if I still “got it”.

The fact is I don’t have something interesting to say every day, and I will never be a prolific blogger. But I would love to post semi-frequently on a Blog like yours. At least somebody might read it, and that would help fix my writing jones so I can get back to figuring out how I am going to prevent this venture from following my last one down the crapper. I’d hate to be 0 or 2 in my entrepreneurial at bats.

Thanks for taking the time to read this incredibly long email.

John Rowles

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