There’s always something to howl about.

Real estate links and how to enact a Hollywood Western . . .

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 said, “The fighting’s commenced! Get to shooting or get away!” Nothing could be easier in the world of weblogs: If you don’t like a particular post, skip to the next one. I don’t relish a fight like that, but I don’t shrink from it, either. My guess is that we are all safer because I beat Foghorn Leghorn back into his chicken coop, but that doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t do it for your sake but for my own…

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