BloodhoundBlog

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Category: Egoism in Action (page 16 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

August 10, 2009

The National Association of Realtors, in perfecting the idea of Rotarian Socialism, not only sanctified the criminal violation of the property rights of innocent people, it also robbed us of the highest and best uses we might have achieved with our real property…

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Kicking this back up to the top because it fits so well with the recent posts from Al Lorenz and Doug Quance. –GSS

 
I’ve understood since I was 18 or so how real estate develops organically, in a truly free market, so I have known all my adult life how horribly the real estate market has been disrupted by the idiotic intrusions of Rotarian Socialism. It’s all about who can steal a few bucks by strong-arming his neighbors, and no one ever stops to wonder what gets mucked up in the process.

So: I said:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

And Brian Brady said, in a comment to that post:

When it’s a 1-4 unit property, held for investment purposes.

Ten words. What am I missing?

What he’s missing is the definition of commercial real estate. If Brian owned 1-4 rental tuxedoes, should he call that his personal wardrobe? Just because the tax laws engender dumb distinctions, we don’t have to ignore reality, do we? Rental property — including a solitary rental house — is commercial real estate. It is owned in pursuit of profit, not as the residence of the owner.

So again:

tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.

The answer is that it should not. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are going to suffer because — at the bidding of the National Association of Realtors — they took their eye off the ball. There is nothing rare about a tract home. If it gains in value ahead of other consumer goods, there has to be a cause — usually one that originates in the criminal use of force against people innocent of all wrong-doing.

As we have discussed, the precipitating cause of the real estate boom in the southwest was criminal land-use restrictions in the costal metroplex of Southern California. The land there is not inherently scarce, but governments made its development difficult or impossible, driving prices up faster than they would have gone otherwise. Investors falsely believed Read more

August 9, 2009

From The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell: Who is Socrates, Now That We Need Him?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Quoted from Mark Alexander’s wonderful Richard Mitchell web site:

 
When Benjamin Franklin was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decided to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he chose Jesus and Socrates. One of his self-assigned rules for daily behavior was nothing more than this: "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

I suspect that few would disagree. Even most militant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, of course, that they admire him for the right reasons. Even those who have no philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although exactly why, they can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young Franklin that he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for instance, or Francis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be imitators, although they do seem to disagree among themselves as to how he ought to be imitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any there be, are hard to find. For one thing, if they are more or less accurately imitating him, they will not organize themselves into Socrates clubs and pronounce their views. If we want to talk with them, we will have to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves become, to some degree at least, imitators of Socrates, we will not know enough to want to seek them out. Indeed, unless we are sufficiently his imitators, we might only know enough not to want to seek him out, for some of those who sought Socrates out found reason to wish that they hadn’t. Unlike Jesus, or, to be more accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine, Socrates often brought not the Good News, but the Bad.

Nevertheless, people do from time to time come to know enough about Socrates to be drawn into his company, and to agree, with rare exceptions, that it would indeed be a good thing to imitate him. The stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche was one of those exceptions, for he believed, and quite correctly, that reasonable discourse was the weapon with which the weak might defeat the strong, but most of us often do think of ourselves as weak Read more

August 5, 2009

Prometheus without forethought: Using the Bloodhound meme to bring clients around to a conversation about quality in real estate

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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My mind is alive with themes for BloodhoundBlog posts that I’m not writing — the Principle of the Yes Man and the Elephant on the Balcony and Prometheus the Mind-Giver. I’d write more, except my having written so much over the past three years is paying off in spades — in diamonds, as it were.

But in the comments to Chuck Marunde’s marvelous post on the ubiquity of the part-time Realtor, the idea of improving the quality of practitioners came up again.

We’ve been through all of this many times before, and a search of the archives on the terms “licensing” should prove enlightening. But this is the Cliff’s Notes on my own position on the topic: Licensing laws serve only to enshrine mediocrity by implying that minimum standards are adequate and sufficient. To the contrary, a higher standard of care among real estate professionals will be achieved not by stricter licensing laws, and not by the National Association of Realtors, but by the persistent application of market-borne pressure. In other words, a higher quality of service among real estate professionals will come about when superior practitioners raise the bar — and tell the world they have done so.

To which sentiment I will amend this addendum: Ahem!

This is the BloodhoundBlog mission, of course, and, at our third anniversary, I wrote about how proud I am that the word “Bloodhound” has become a de facto meme for quality in the practice of real estate.

And: Nothing exceeds like excess. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. So I’ve made a little button you can put on your web site or weblog, if you like, to spark a Bloodhound-like conversation. That much is the Elephant at the Dining Room Table: Your clients aren’t thinking about quality because the state and the NAR have schooled them to look for meaningless imprimaturs instead. If you want for your clients to be able to identify the better from the worse, you have to initiate the conversation with them. The buttons you see below can help you get that discussion started.

Witness:

160 pixels square:

We're Bloodhounds. We teach our clients to demand better service from real estate professionals.

July 16, 2009

For those of you following the lurid drama of our lives…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We bought our house out of hock today. All it took was a tiny little pawn ticket and a great big check. Our small feat of redemption was actually paid for by June’s receipts, but I got myself into this mess by surfing the payables, and I got myself out the same way. We retired the outstanding debt eleven days early, and it’s been a while since we’ve been that early on anything.

That notwithstanding, we are very far from being out of debt. But June was great, July is good, and August and September promise to be two of our best months ever. If the fourth quarter lives up to its promise, 2009 could end up being our best year so far. By this time next year, we could owe nothing but the mortgage — which is good, because our credit will take a while to recover from these past three years.

There is none of this that is anybody’s business, actually — except that people choose to affect to make my business their own because of who I am and how I behave. That’s fine, even if it sometimes seems to me to be simultaneously voyeuristic and masturbatory. I have a job that pays pretty well when it pays anything at all. When we got slow three years ago, we made a very big bet on internet marketing, which we were already pretty good at back then. By now we kill, and we’re getting better by leaps and bounds every single day. If you think our financial troubles prove our marketing ideas wrong — you just keep thinking that way. By the time you understand what it is we’re doing, we will have leapt into a completely different orbit.

Meanwhile: For all the good-hearted folks who wished us well in all of this: Thank you. I’d rather not have done this in public, but I couldn’t have picked a nicer bunch of people to do it with.

Now switch off this insipid soap opera and go do something productive with your life!

July 2, 2009

Rotarian Socialism in action: Taking lessons from the NAR and the NAMB, Wal-Mart is using compulsory health insurance as a weapon to destroy its smaller competitors

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Today is July the Second, the date of the actual drafting of the Declaration of Independence. By now the United States is just another National Socialist oligarchy, a savage jungle of predatory pressure groups, each one looking to plunder the national treasury at the expense of all the others, each one hiding behind an elaborate camouflage of high-blown rhetoric.

Whatever the putative purpose of some piece of legislation, the actual purpose is to advantage some pressure groups to the disadvantage of others. The putative purpose and the high-blown rhetoric are for the children — for the dumb-ass voters, that is — while the legislators and the lobbyists know that its all a matter of getting in enough snout-time at the public trough.

Freedom means freedom from government — nothing else. We trade our freedom away a drop at a time, like a never ending blood transfusion, never pausing to think that the pigs at the trough might not stop at just a little blood, might not stop at the replacement rate, might not stop until every drop of blood, every dollar of excess production and every last liberty of the American people are completely exsanguinated.

The American patriots bellowed, “No taxation without representation!” We have since learned that this actually means, “We yearn to be fools and jackals in our own behalf!” And the cackle we deliver up to black humor is a premonitory death rattle. For it is obvious that the man being taxed is not represented, and the man with his snout in the taxpayer’s trough is represented in ways you know nothing about.

Consider this atrocity of Wal-Mart’s, a company once deserving of great respect, brought to us by Cato @ Liberty:

A couple of years ago, I shared a cab to the airport with a Wal-Mart lobbyist, who told me that Wal-Mart supports an “employer mandate.”  An employer mandate is a legal requirement that employers provide a government-defined package of health benefits to their workers.  Only Hawaii and Massachusetts have enacted such a law.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  Wal-Mart is a capitalist success story.  At the time of our conversation, Read more

June 29, 2009

Building the perfect Bloodhound, three years into the job

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Cathleen took most of my client contact off my hands Sunday so that I could have time free to play with a new API the FlexMLS folks are getting ready to release to their client MLS systems. I love FlexMLS, and I haven’t said nearly enough good things about it here, but let this stand as endorsement enough: If your MLS is on the cusp of its vendor contract, get FlexMLS. It’s plausible to me that other companies might have cool stuff, but other companies don’t listen to geeks like me. FBS is wicked smart to begin with, but they’re smart enough to know that nobody knows everything. By listening to the user base, they’re able to grow their product in ways that will matter a great deal to all of us going forward.

So for Act one, I worked out how to build radius searches from any valid street address. By software, I mean. I want to be able to work from street addresses to build searches on the fly.

Act two was just brute force API programming, building semi-custom searches into 11,000 or so unique pages. (I’ve mentioned that Realtors have a publishing problem, but I’ll bet you weren’t thinking in the thousands of pages.)

Act three was a quick-search form. A lot of folks already have stuff like this from their IDX vendors. The difference is that I can build as many as I want, as elaborately as I want, using the most common or the most arcane fields in the MLS system. As an example, imagine a weblog post about central vacuum systems coupled with a quick search form featuring homes with central vac. Can your IDX system do that?

That’s innovation, y’all, and there is a point at which it is nothing more for me than ars gratia artis — art for art’s sake. I play with new ideas not to make money or to skin elephants, but because I love new things, and I love to wring every last drop of implication out of anything I lay my hands on. I can find the marketing — and, one hopes, Read more

June 24, 2009

A little bit of honey cake for Desdemona as she makes her last escape

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’re going to lose Desdemona, our English Coon Hound, tonight. She’s been with us for more than ten years, and she was an adult when we adopted her. A long life for a big dog.

Desi is by far the smartest dog we’ve ever known, the most willful, the cleverest escape artist, the most vociferous howler. She is maybe six brain cells short of writing angry poetry and howling on stage like the canine version of Tori Amos. There is nothing about this dog that is not astonishing.

This is Desdemona with my son Cameron, a long time ago:

Here’s an encomium Cathleen wrote to Desdemona’s intelligence in September of 2001:

Desdemona’s going to have a sweet year

Because our coon hound, Desdemona, runs away so easily and so tenaciously, we let her stay in the house when we aren’t home. This acknowledges that Desdemona has won the war. Well, of course she has… she won every battle. You’ll recall, she escapes over our 6′ block fence, even after we added an electric wire to the top; even when we strapped her into a full body harness and tethered her; even when we tethered her at both her collar and her harness and attached the two together; even when we put her into a kennel and tethered her at both her harness and collar and ran the two cables out of separate sides of the kennel; even when we drugged her.

The only thing she couldn’t escape from was a $200 solid plastic shell of a kennel, but after a few times in that box she learned how to splay herself so that anyone who tried to stuff her into the kennel came out of the box bloody and Desi, of course, never came close to going in. So, after spending about $600 on gadgets guaranteed to keep dogs where they’re supposed to be, Desdemona won the war and now gets to stay in the house when we’re not at home.

The spoils of war include more than the simple luxury of staying indoors. They include staying indoors unsupervised! Which means we’ve had to make changes in how Read more

June 18, 2009

Hectoring Rian from the iPhone 3G 3.0

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Yesterday I upgraded my iPhone to version 3.0 of the operating system software. So far, a pretty big yawn. Typing is plausibly easier, though still not easy. Cut and paste were not on my list of must-haves. Zillow upgraded its app to allow push notification, so your phone can tell you if one of your saved searches has popped up a new candidate. Okay…

I wasn’t unhappy with the iPhone before — quite the contrary! — but I don’t think I have any new reasons to be happier from this upgrade. Safari 4, by contrast, is totally killer, and I could not be more pleased with suddenly-faster-everything on my iMac.

One thing I played with right away on the iPhone was the new voice recording app. Not that impressive. It records losslessly at 44khz, which means the saved files are huge. They can be transferred only by email or hard-wired sync — no BlueTooth, no WiFi — and almost everything is too big to move by email. This is the kind of dumb, useless software I expect from Microsoft, not Apple, so one may hope it will get better in future versions.

Anyway, as a test, this morning I made a short little audio greeting card for Rian Lussier, who is about to undergo surgery. The file is a monstrous 25 megabytes, and it took over an hour to sync to my iMac (no hope of emailing a file that large).

Even so, the recording quality is not awful (there’s a buzz in places from me speaking too loudly), and the sentiments are what they are.

Godspeed you well, Rian.

June 4, 2009

Why I read Ibsen

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left town the very next morning. My sister was in that same graduating class, but she has never felt herself to be anything but comfortably at home. She got as far away as the University of Illinois in Urbana, forty miles west, then came back to teach Shakespeare to the college-bound minority of Danville High School. She throws in one Ibsen play a year, and I wrote this essay as a hand-out for her classes. This is madly off-topic, of course, but it’s in keeping with what’s wrong with American education. Plus which, it’s been a while since we’ve had some refinements around this joint, and I’m hearing from clients that they like the deeper-reading bits. So: For the wandering professor, Don Reedy, and for my homebody sister, let’s go for a dip in the fjords. –GSS]

 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of amazing progress for the West. Average life-expectancy doubled. Infant mortality was halved. The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest of the poor — hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation of gaslight, precursor to Edison’s bulb, effectively extended human life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged, dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the clean, sweet air of liberty.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of joy and beauty and purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the West. Read more

May 30, 2009

Reds

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[Brian Brady asks for advice. This ain’t it. I wrote a book in 1988 about human civilization, a condition I believe human beings can but so far have not attained. I’m thinking of revisiting the topic, if only because I fear those kinds of ideas might have to transcend a dark age. I wrote the following essay seven years ago, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate — but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. –GSS]

 
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.

To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”

After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”

As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”

“HUH?!

And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.

They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims — unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.

But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.

When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists — or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans — heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.

But to listen carefully — and I am cursed with the skill of listening Read more

May 21, 2009

News from the right side of the number line: Graphene, a possible replacement for silicon in computer chips, and a DVD-sized storage device that can hold more than a thousand DVDs

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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One of the paths to the singularity, and the one that is mostly readily plausible given the current state of physics, is nanotechnology. Here are two new nano-entities ready to break out of the laboratory.

First, how would you like to store your entire movie collection on one DVD-sized disc?

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data. 

One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.

The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using ‘nano rods’ – tiny particles of gold too small to see – and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.

Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: ‘We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.’

A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.

Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.

But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes – or 10,000GB.

Of much greater moment, consider Graphene, a perfect carbon structure one atom thick.

Eight MIT researchers, along with colleagues at Harvard and Boston University, have just received a major U.S. Department of Defense grant for graphene research. With this five-year grant, Palacios says, MIT and its collaborators “would become one of the strongest multidisciplinary teams working on graphene in the world.”

Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon Read more

May 21, 2009

What would it take to reform the National Association of Realtors, to turn it from an anti-consumer cartel into a steadfast defender of the right of American citizens to own, use and enjoy real property?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Joe Loomer: > what could and should NAR do to dispell your views of it as a criminal enterprise?

In very broad outlines:

1. Stop writing and lobbying for legislation devised to churn the real estate markets.

2. Work tirelessly to eliminate all laws that serve to advance the interests real estate brokers at the expense of consumers in general as well as other people who might want to broker real estate for compensation.

3. Eliminate all coercive membership requirements.

4. Work with lenders and HUD to eliminate the co-brokerage fee so that buyers can obtain — and pay for — true, honest, untainted representation.

5. Work tirelessly to eliminate all laws impinging upon the right of each citizen to buy, own, use, enjoy, profit from and sell real property without interference.

For what it’s worth, I think number 5 is the greatest betrayal of the American people by the National Association of Realtors. Zoning? The NAR is for it. Eminent domain? The NAR is for it. Expropriation of ancillary rights such as water rights? The NAR is for it. At the national level, the grand poohbahs might issue a toothless snarl about Kelo, but at the local level, the Boards of Real Estate that make up the NAR are always working hand-in-pocket with governments and developers to rob ordinary citizens of their right to own their own property.

Soldiers are to be found everywhere in history, but freedom is won and held by citizen soldiers — which means a soldier who has his own land to return to when the fighting is done. By undermining the right to own real property, the NAR works — insidiously, corrosively — to undermine American liberty.

And, for what it’s worth, if the NAR were to apply itself and achieve item number 4 on my list, none of the rest would matter. More than anything else, the NAR and the MLS are made possible by the co-broke. Get rid of that and the rest of this ugly mess will crumble to dust in due course.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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