BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 8 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

July 4, 2011

What would Greg Swann do? Integrity, transparency and Web 2.0

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Kicking this back to the top in response to Chris Johnson’s post on bribe-offers from vendorsluts. — GSS

 
Hey, y’all! Are you in the mood for a truly incredible offer?

You’ve seen the kind of single-property web sites we do at BloodhoundRealty.com. Dozens of pages. Hundreds of photos. Maps, movies, PDFs, off-site links — the works!

What if I were to tell you that you could have a single-property web site just like ours — with your choice of style templates and your own domain, hosted for a year — all for just $99.

Or, for just $99 more, I’ll mimic your weblog’s theme. Your single property web site will look just like your weblog — to promote and protect your brand identity.

That’s actually not a bad business, and I already have everything I need to start it. The software we use to build our single property web sites is called engenu. I give it away for free, but no one uses it. If I built it to be forms-based with everything hosted on our servers, it would be easier — but much slower — for end-users, and I could make a ton of money milking Realtors by selling them the same thing over and over again.

Why not do it?

Because it’s a piece of everything I hate in the real estate industry as it is presently comprised. It’s the vendorslut syndrome in action. I write a piece of software, then sell it to you over and over again, taking a huge profit every time you pull out your credit card. You get pitches like this every day — with the difference being that our single-property web sites are a lot richer in content than the ones you can buy from sleazy vendors.

I’ve been wanting to write a post about leadership in the RE.net. I don’t like hierarchies, or none beyond the sort of adhocracy that works so well in the Web 2.0 world. We are thought leaders at BloodhoundBlog because we think wisely and well — and write wisely and well — about issues that most other people prefer to skirt.

But: I don’t kid myself: Read more

July 4, 2011

Happy Independent’s Day…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
Our wedding anniversary today. I’ve always thought that the best way to celebrate the things that really matter in life is to do the things that really matter in life, so I’m spending the afternoon and evening with my best-beloved, but I have a home inspection to attend to this morning. To work is to live, and, in Phoenix or in Las Vegas, we’ve always worked on our anniversary. On top of everything else, it’s a symbol of who we are together, why we work so well together.

Meanwhile, here is my favorite Independence Day clip, the fireworks scene from Moscow on the Hudson:

June 30, 2011

Unchained melodies: Melanie’s Babe Rainbow

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Art is the stuff that sticks with you. Art is the thing that makes a permanent change in who you are. This song has been with me since I was a teenager. It’s never been of me, but it’s something I’ve always understood — even more since I started selling real estate for a living. It might-could have that impact on you, too.

It’s a waltz, 6/8, cdfc. Couldn’t be simpler. And yet I have this song in my head — in my soul — all the time. This is Melanie exposing the universe through the lens of her own life, and by making her life so real, so raw, so painful and yet in the end still so palpably redeemed — this really works for me. This is what art is for…

June 28, 2011

My life as a dog: Five years of BloodhoundBlog.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of BloodhoundBlog. Here is where we started, with a question that haunts me to this very day:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

At the time that we launched, Zillow, Trulia and Redfin were new kids on the block, and traditional Realtors were casting a wary eye over their shoulders. It was an interesting time to write about real estate, even though some of what I wrote in those days seems comically stoopid to me by now.

(Caveat lector: Our archives always repay effort. I could wish that someone would comb through them and pull out the true gems — the category Enduring Interest is crying out for such a treatment. But even without that helpful handiwork, if you haven’t learned everything we have taught here, you could do worse than giving our posts over the past five years your regular attention.)

I love this place, and I love the work we have done here, but I can’t revisit the history of BloodhoundBlog without some sadness — and sadness is an emotion I’ve wanted for my whole life to know nothing about. But it remains that my most important goal for this weblog — unchained Realtors — remains unfulfilled.

Too much the contrary. Most of the people who were writing in the RE.net when BloodhoundBlog was young are on the slave-master side of the table by now, either as vendorsluts, Judas goats — or both. It’s not hard for me to deplore this outcome, but none of it would be possible without the active participation of the slaves, who line up to be yoked with an ox-like complacency. Despite all the opportunities technology affords us to break free of the brokers, the NAR, the Inmannequins, et infinitely cetera, there is something about most Realtors that seems to crave dependency, subordination and the attendant exploitation.

In response to this outcome, I must admonish myself with the words I have deployed on so many other people over the years: Cultivate indifference. For five years and more, we have been just that close to smashing all the Read more

May 24, 2011

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Steve Jobs in Forbes. One of the most hateful precepts of socialism is the idea of existential equality. We are all equal politically, but in the things we do with our lives we are very different. The world we live in is much richer because Jobs is alive now, too. We will be poorer when he shuffles off this mortal coil. The best thing we can do — for ourselves, for our businesses and in tribute to the best the human mind can achieve — is to learn to think as Steve Jobs thinks.

May 14, 2011

The bad news? The NAR’s #rppsi scam passed, despite overwhelming opposition. The good news? The NAR is now a labor union, complete with forced political speech. Let the Right-to-Work lawsuits begin!

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The National Association of Realtors’ bloodsuckers’ survival initiative (#rppsi) passed this morning, even though only the bloodsucking Babbitts themselves are in favor if it.

Now the NAR will have even more money to “protect homeownership” with bloodsucking legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, the Government Sponsored Entities laws, the first-time home-buyer tax credit, etc.

The NAR plans to “protect homeownership” until every last one of us is living in a cardboard box.

That’s a bad thing — bad for the people who voted for it, since crime is always self-destructive. But bad for us, too, since we now have that much more to apologize for.

Here’s the silver lining: The NAR is now arguably a labor union. Membership is forced for most Realtors to gain access to the MLS. And #rppsi is beyond all doubt forced political speech: You will have no control over the $40 a year that is to be extracted from you. If you don’t despise Barney Franks, there’s something wrong with you, but your money will be going to that petulant thug like it or don’t.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the 22 Right-to-Work states, you may have recourse in the courts. Here are some apposite links from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation:

The NAR has been a vampire latched onto the neck of the American body politic since its founding. It does not exist to “protect homeownership.” Its sole reason for existence is to despoil American consumers to the benefit of real estate brokers: To steal money from the people who earned it, diverting it to a conspiracy of bloodsucking vampires. Today’s vote was the first step in the process of eliminating this pestilence from our lives forever.

May 13, 2011

Senator Rand Paul: The claim of a “right” to health care implies a belief in slavery.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Say what you will about the Tea Party, it’s a small victory just to have words like these enunciated on the floor of Congress:

This is Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged making the same argument:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the Read more

May 2, 2011

Pieces of April for a morning in May: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I nailed down a house this morning at 6:50 am. It’s a hard dance to get the right house at the right price, but the world of email permits miracles to happen at any hour of the day or night.

We had a totally rockin’ April, more than three times our monthly nut. But the first check in April didn’t hit the bank until the 15th of the month, and, until this morning, we had zero dollars on the board for May. Even so, I told Cathleen that April 15th was our last day of poverty. We’ll see if that’s a prognostication I can defend.

Here’s a goal-getting calendar for May.

This is a simple procedure: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month. It works. So get on it.

April 22, 2011

Splendor is where you find it…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A rose is a rose, but the desert has a beauty all it own…

No matter how busy I get, I always want to make time in my life for beauty — wherever I might find it. I spied these lovely cactus flowers in the front lawn of a hugely distressed foreclosed home. Sad stories abound. Bad news is the only news people can be bothered with. But every day is a new beginning, a brand new shot at grace. If you quarry the good within you, then splendor is everywhere you go…

April 10, 2011

Do you want to undo the damage the NAR has done to the American economy? If you’re not a criminal — if you’re not a predator — stop lending your moral and financial power to people who are.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a fun little exercise for your brain:

Suppose I sneak up behind you, throw a burlap bag over your head, tie you up and then lock you in my basement. Would you regard that as a crime?

I don’t mean just a call-the-cops crime or a phone-your-lawyer crime. I don’t mean simply a violation of some arcane statute law. Even if we were on a desert island, with no written law of any sort, would you still regard my actions as a crime against your person and your liberty?

I know I’m asking you to think for yourself, all by your lonesome, with no hints or signals from the mob and no helpful pre-printed guide to clue you in to the “right” answers. Poor you. So I’ll cut you a break: You can feel free to quit this tiring exercise at the very first instance that you are able to truthfully answer, “No, I would not regard that as a crime.”

So let’s do another one:

Instead of locking you in the basement, let’s say I let you work all day in the sunshine and fresh air, tilling and tending to my fields? You are still my prisoner, but you’re not tied up or locked up. Would you still regard that as a crime?

And, hey, we all know that forcing people to work for free is slavery, so what if I pay you a nice wage for your efforts? You’re still my prisoner, and you still have to do the work I tell you to do, but now you’re being paid handsomely. Would you regard even that little trifle as a crime?

So how about this? Suppose I set you free? Manumission! Just like you pictured it! There’s only one catch. Whenever you buy or sell food, you have to do it through me, like a feudal serf. There are other people who could trade with you, perhaps leaving you with quite a bit more profit than I will, but you are forbidden from doing business with any of those people. You must go through me, paying my price. Would you regard that as a crime?

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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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