Meet the new dogs: Six new Bloodhounds to fill out the pack

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We added six new BloodhoundBlog contributors last Friday at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Actually, we added seven, but Dave Smith of the Real Estate Blog Lab has elected to take a pass for now to free up time for other projects.

It’s no accident that all of these folks are coming out of Unchained. A year ago, BloodhoundBlog Unchained was something that we did. By now, it’s something that we are. The blog and the events are conjoined, like a two-headed Cerberus, and each generates content and cultivates talent for the other.

One of the things we do here, one of the things we’ve always tried to do, is to make stars of our contributors. In a world without middle-men, the engaging expression of expertise should earn a writer a cachet of authority, and that authority should influence larger and larger audiences. We have built a big megaphone for talking to real estate professionals, and we want to make that megaphone available to the most creative and talented people we can find.

So: Here are the new dogs. I hope you’ll make them feel welcome.

It would be an understatement to say that Ira Serkes was the stand-out student at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. The man is a geyser of fascinating real estate marketing ideas, which he shares with an unrestrained delight. Ira and his wife Carol are Realtors in Berkeley, California. Ira co-authored “Get the Best Deal When Selling Your Home — SF Bay Area Edition” and Nolo Press’s best-selling book “How to Buy a House in California.”

Scott Cowan is a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog. He organized our invasion of Seattle in February, and, while we were there, he signed on to work as a staffer for BloodhoundBlog in Phoenix. That is, he and Brad Coy served admirably as the Vice Presidents in Charge of Everything Else. Scott sells classic homes in the Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and the Puyallup areas of Washington State. If you want to make his day, ask him about the $8,000 home-buyer credit.

Kerry Melcher may be the most unlikeliest contributor to a weblog that has always endeavored to bring you unlikely contributors. Kerry is in a constant state of evolving Grand Poohbahness at the Phoenix Association of Realtors, the Arizona Association of Realtors and the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. Not only that, but she lives in my neighborhood — North Central Phoenix — and we compete for some of the same buyers and sellers. Kerry came up with a brand new marketing plan at Unchained: Finding the joys of small-town living within a big city like Phoenix.

Brian Brady and I met Al Lorenz on our Seattle trip. He asked such great questions that we started asking him questions instead (which is how we learn). Al fascinated us with all the cool software stunts he is playing in the tiny town of Lake Chelan, Washington. He’s not just a dominant Realtor in his market, he’s also the town’s media mogul, with a web-based “newspaper” and a web-based “television station” to stay in touch with his clients.

Don Reedy is everything a big, beautiful dog would be, if it grew up to be a man: Stunningly attractive without any cloying prettiness, fiercely loyal, engaged and attentive but still proudly independent — smart, frisky and fun. A long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, Don works as a Realtor out of San Diego, California. His great passion is helping parents use equity-sharing to keep their kids (and grandkids) in California.

One of our objectives in the BloodhoundBlog universe is to develop a management structure. We all of us want more done than any of us can actually accomplish. Brian and I are both great delegators — and lousy managers. The Bloodhound way is for someone to step up and just take care of things. Mark Madsen did this in a huge way at Unchained. A number of students wanted to reinforce their knowledge of WordPress, so Mark worked with a room full of 20 people from 9 pm to well after midnight Thursday night, helping them flesh out their sidebars and working with them on content creation. Mark thrives as a lender in Las Vegas.

This is an amazing crew, and it was fun to write these little mini-biographies. One of my own private delights is that I get to work with talented, hard-working people like this. I’m a subversive, and I do nothing to hide this, but I’m a subversive like Harry Tuttle, the Underground Handyman in Brazil: I want to do everything I can to promote excellence in a world enmired in mediocrity. It’s friends and colleagues like these who make it plain to me that mine is a battle that can be won.