Punch and Pie At This Week’s Carnival of Real Estate

by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

In my world, I need order, rules. This may be hard to believe when you consider I manage a household that includes thirteen rescue animals and a colony of about a dozen feral cats in our side yard. Ever hear of “herding cats”? This is something I try to effect every single day. I was the one, for example, who asked Greg to modify his open-forum policy on BHB comments, by removing extreme profanity. I understand that trash talk needs to be trashy or it loses its flavor, but sometimes comments on this site go beyond the pale. For a standard of what’s acceptable I like to use South Park. I realize this is a pretty low standard, but IMHO Matt Stone and Trey Parker are so spot on philosophically that I’ve learned to accept the verisimilitude of the vernacular of their eight-year old characters. If Comedy Central is up to it, then I suppose BloodhoundBlog can be, too.

All of this to get to why I would even care to paraphrase a quote from South Park – Bigger, Longer & Uncut. This is a very clever parody on, among other things, Les Miserables. Greg’s teenaged children have demonstrated to us that we’ve garbled the Eric Cartman quote, “people like pie,” but we remembered this quote by implication. There’s a scene in which the boys are trying to figure out how to get people to care about a meeting they’ve called to save the world, and Cartman suggests “more people will come if they think we have punch and pie!” Actually having punch and pie isn’t important… it’s only important that the people think there will be punch and pie, and people like pie (I still believe this must be an actual quote in one of the ten-seasons-worth of episodes), so give them what they want.

And it’s with this in mind, that I commend you to this week’s Carnival of Real Estate, which is up at ActiveRain, for some punch and pie.

More on me and rules… When BloodhoundBlog hosted CoRE this past October, we set up a system for ourselves to judge the entries, and recommended to the community of contributors and future hosts that they adopt some standards of judgement to avoid robbing the CoRE of relevance. The community responded with what I think was an improvement by agreeing to some structure. Then when BHB became a group blog made up of some of the finest contributors in the nation, we needed to come up with a way to make sure the best of the best from BHB was represented at the weekly carnivals. We came up with a nomination process among the contributors, with me being the ultimate judge of which essay would be submitted, and a democratic decision on which essay would be elevated to winner of the weekly Carnival of Bloodhound.

Privately, I explained BHB’s entry this week to our contributors:

There was a lot of meaty stuff published on BHB but I think the topic of most moment to the industry was Zillow’s news of posting houses for sale. Among the Zillow posts, I thought 2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive natonal MLS system… and Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of a great tree… best clarified what Zillow’s news means to the business of real estate transactions. The former was, I believe, the authoritive explanation in the entire “blogosphere,” and the latter did a fine job of fleshing that out. But my choice was all about authority this week, so I recommended 2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive natonal MLS system… to represent BHB at the CoRE this week.

The essay I nominated brought us a huge surge in traffic, of course. Before it was 24 hours old, it had risen to be the third most clicked-upon post in the history of BloodhoundBlog — a stiff competition. It was linked by dozens of other weblogs, including 38 weblogs that had never linked here before. That is, we went from 247 Technorati links to 285 in five days. It beat Britney Spears on Tailrank.com, for goodness sakes. But it didn’t win the Carnival of Real Estate. It didn’t even place in the top ten. It did have the distinction of losing two coin tosses, however, with the coin brought in as a substitute for — what? — you decide…

The worst of this is, BHB might have, maybe should have entered Kris Berg’s Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution. But I have veto power over Greg, who had nominated Kris’ essay, and Kris agreed with me that the Zillow news mattered most this week. Perhaps so, but Kris’ post rocked, and I’m afraid I cost her the spotlight. No Monday morning quarterbacking here — even yesterday, I advised the BHB contributors:

And now, for our own BHB Carnival, I cast my vote to Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution. As usual, Kris grabbed my attention with her humor, then she went on to make an important, substantive point. From now on, when I get annoyed at the poor reporting done by mainstream media, which most Americans still use for their news source, I’ll meditate for a moment on the image of Rousseau at Venice Beach buying a Louis Vuitton knock-off!

And indeed, this post of Kris’ won the Bloodhound Carnival, by getting a majority of our contributor’s votes.

I still believe the Zillow news mattered more than anything else this week, and as Kris noted in her Louis Vuitton essay, the RE.net simply blew away the mainstream media and even the tech press on this story. My own Carnival of Zillow News, omitting BloodhoundBlog posts: Galen Ward, Kevin Boer, and Drew Meyers’ chronicles. And the buzz continues here with Russell Shaw’s POV in Thank You, Mr. Barton, May I Have Another?.

We also entered Jeff Brown’s Retirement Lifestyle: 3 Quick Peeks Into Your Future in the Carnival or Real Estate Investing.

I think I can safely speak for everyone here in extending our heartiest congratulations to this week’s Carnival of Real Estate winners. If ActiveRain’s judge, Matt Heaton, has nothing brighter than a shiny coin in his possession, this takes nothing away from this week’s winners. And to Matt, I pass along the immortal words of Louie’s luckless bride Marie Callender, “Let them eat pie.”

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