There’s always something to howl about.
Rust Belt Realtor
In Orlando on Thursday evening with nothing to do? The Bloodhound Unchained pack will be hanging out at Uno’s Pizza from 5-7ish, and nothing, and I mean nothing, would make us happier than for you to join us. It’s a casual, come-as-you-are shindig that won’t break yer wallet, or have you reaching for the Bromo Seltzer in the morning, but will offer an opportunity to engage in the same lively conversation you know and love. No barking and no biting, but howling is encouraged- join us, won’t you?
Just because I write on Bloodhound, doesn’t mean I have a big mouth… Or does it? Either way, when I’m with clients I try to do more listening than talking. I can’t help them if I don’t know what they are thinking.
I enjoy working with young clients. I love the energy, the enthusiasm, the optimism. It doesn’t matter how experienced they are at buying property, it’s their youthfulness that is so fun to be around. We establish a rapport quickly, and my blog helps with that. I’m told by these clients that they read my blog, so they know they can trust me. Older clients don’t read my blog- they find me elsewhere- so the trust is slower in coming. The agent/client relationship is much more solid at a faster pace with blog readers.
Yesterday I spent a glorious fall day walking acreage with a young couple from out of town. We have been emailing and phone calling for about two months now. They were in town in September to look at property, but I was at BlogWorld. A colleague was kind enough to jump in and show them around, but the couple and I missed the chance to look each other in the eyes, shake hands, size each other up, all those physical things that happen in a face-to-face meeting.
They decided they wanted to look at acreage, farmland. They have some farming experience in Europe, and Mom farms and Mom will be spending time with them here. Mom wants a farm. They were coming to town this weekend and we found some properties that met their criteria, set up the appointments. Oh and by the way, Mom is here, so she’ll be coming.
This sometimes happens with young clients. Mom and Dad, my generation or older, have some experience with real estate, and real estate agents. They are in town, so either they are coming along to make sure their babies are not getting ripped off, or they are coming along to give real advice and a second opinion.
Always, I get prepped from the daughters: “My mom is coming along. I have Read more
My turn.
I feel compelled to try to make some sense of politics in public. Am I not a blogger? And this being a big bad ass blog on which I can write anything that tickles my fancy, and yes my fancy got tickled by this election, I’m going to give it a shot.
So okay then. Thanks for that.
I’m looking back at the year. I love a good political year, and in January I figured this would be a damn good one. The Republican nomination was up for grabs, I love it when that happens, and the Democrats had some history making candidates, but most importantly, my kids were paying attention, and for that I thank Barack Obama. He wasn’t a grumpy old man, he was young and energetic and hopeful and he knew how to give a rousing speech. I think hope is good. I think eloquence is good. I think both together are very good.
Then John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, and I thought it was interesting, if nothing else. History is being made and I’m living to see it. I was hopeful that Palin would bring something different to the table this time around. I had hope that this election, these candidates, this new media world, this go ’round, we might see an elevated campaign. A campaign that followed the high ground and brought the dignity and integrity that We the People deserve.
Alas, and alack, it’s not to be.
I’m uninspired by John McCain and anything I’ve heard him say. Palin is, ya know, Jane Six Pack. I worked with her, at least I think it was her, during elementary school PTO fundraisers, you betcha! She’s not without charm, and she’s a she, but mostly that ticket is kinda more of the same, only not, only yeah, it is the same.
Biden. Well I must admit that he’s not let me down because Joe’s been Joe since I was a sprout, and he’s definitely Joe now, only he’s not a Joe the Plumber kind of Joe. No, Biden is a Joe the Politician kind of Joe. Read more
Incubating, according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:
Etymology: Latin incubatus, past participle of incubare, from in- + cubare to lie
transitive verb
1 a: to sit on (eggs) so as to hatch by the warmth of the body b: to maintain (as an embryo or a chemically active system) under conditions favorable for hatching, development, or reaction
2: to cause or aid the development of intransitive verb
One of the sessions I went to at Blog World was “Taking Smart Risks with Your Online Personality”, with Alex Hillman and Jake McKee. Being on the Bloodhound Blog I figured it would come in handy, right?
The session went well, solidified some things I knew and clarified a few things I had an inkling about. I didn’t have any epiphanies during the session, but one phrase wormed it’s way into the deeper crevices of my brain and began to incubate: “It’s in the Google”.
Hillman, if I remember correctly, was quoting his father’s insights into the far reaches and lasting legacy of everything we do online. Everything we do online is “in the Google”. Everything. For better or worse, it’s all out there for someone to find. That’s obvious, you say. Perhaps, but “it’s in the Google” has been incubating in the warm gray matter ever since, and late last night I Googled myself. And then I Yahoo’d myself (no comments from the Peanut Gallery). And then, while I was sleeping, “it’s in the Google” bumped into Kelley Koehler’s advice to “Win the small battles. Go niche”, and then it shook hands with an unfortunate situation for a dear friend who is unable to comment on this blog because Akismet eats everything he writes, and when I woke up, those thoughts had joined forces.
What’s in the Google for me? Stuff, stuff, and more stuff- some good, some bad, some ugly. I’d like to do away with the bad and ugly, or at least bury it, but what if I made the good even better? I noticed that there are quite a few comments that are coughed up from the Google, and I’d like to do a better job of managing those. Read more
Blog World and companion conference, REBlog World, have ended. Kudos to Todd Carpenter and Jason Berman for putting REBlog World together, very nice to meet both of you. I completely agree with Eric Blackwell that the relationships matter. I agree with Inman Connect and NAR Convention goers that what happens in the halls is very important. I maintain my aversion to the vendor exhibits, bringing home zero sch-wag except for a crap pen from the hotel, the Palms, which has the Web 2.0 cluelessness to charge $2.00/page for printing. For that reason alone, I won’t be staying there again thanksverymuch, although the bathroom in our room was quite spectacular, and the bed was comfy enough to sleep in. No cockroaches, yet. Note to Palms staff- the room was a bit grungy under the window, and you shouldn’t neglect to clean the sides of the chairs. Ick.
Back to the conference. It was mostly geared toward starting a blog, but I did learn a thing or two, or three. Let me share some random notes.
If you are not paying attention to what the Housechick is doing, you are missing out on one of the sharpest minds in the RE.net. Her Vegas presentation on Pay Per Click marketing was, by all accounts, one of the best sessions of the entire weekend. Watch this space and learn how brilliant and unique marketing can create a kickass online presence. Some take aways that you can put to use whether or not you care to PPC “Win the small battles. Go niche.” Kelley’s focus for her ads is not for broad search terms like “Tucson real estate”, but in very well defined terms like “average sales price for homes in Tucson”, or even more narrow- down to neighborhoods. Then she writes posts to answer that question. She likes to focus on verbs “Buy a home in Tucson”, “Search for a Tucson home”. She’s using concise terms, with a clear benefit, and action words to create her ads. I think using those parameters as a basis for a post and post titles, is a wise idea. Write to Read more
Oz is calling. My aversion to conferences has been pushed aside, and in the middle of the night I’ll be boarding a plane for Blog World in Vegas– possible only with the help of Dramamine and Pepto Bismol. It means that Friday morning I will land in Las Vegas loopy and stoopid, with drool stains on my shirt, but I was assured that I’d fit in just fine.
Eric Blackwell says that relationships are at the heart of these things, so I’m embracing my inner warm and fuzzy person and plan on saying Howdy to quite a few RE.net peeps that I’ve never met. Well worth the trip. At Blog World there will be plenty of self-proclaimed gurus with which I can mix and mingle. Me, being the eternal optimistic cynic, am wary of anyone who willingly takes on the title of Social Media Guru, but I understand that it’s Blog World, so I’m bound to run into a few.
BloodhoundBlog is the house: Dan Green is speaking, Brad Coy is speaking, Bawld Guy is marking territory on a dance floor somewhere. There is a gross of squirt guns winging their way to a Vegas pool party and, as if that wasn’t enough, someone has promised to wear a kilt and pull a mooning, a la Braveheart. See what you miss if you aren’t Twittering?
That’s fun! But still. The not so warm and fuzzy part of my brain keeps reminding me that I paid good money for this and I’m taking time away from income producing work. Friday is REBlogWorld, and Saturday and Sunday is the BlogWorld conference. I’m going to go and soak up the atmosphere, the information, the guruliciousness and hopefully learn a couple hundred dollars worth of bloggy goodness.
How do I do that? I’m suspending my disbelief, but I’m clueless. If you were going to BlogWorld, what would be the one don’t miss ticket for you? What would you want to see and why? I’m going, I want to learn, but I’ve not yet made any plans to hear anything specific. I was thinking of going where the wind takes me, but Read more
“I wonder who was your intended audience?”
A question from my inbox, and one I hear occasionally. I’m always pulled up short by questions like this, or this, because they tend to come unexpectedly and in this case, it greeted me first thing in the morning, and the writer, who shall remain nameless but knows who he is (and is, I’m sure, laughing right now) was by his own admission, a bit grumpy when he asked this question. So Good Morning to you too!
Actually, this question, or variations of it, has been on my mind lately because I forgot this intended audience for awhile, and the post to which this writer was referring was my way of going back to the beginning of my blogging days, when I was writing to the very same people to whom I wrote this post- local bloggers. How did I lose my way? Quite honestly, I think it was Twitter, but that’s another story for another time. Let’s return to my blogging roots.
Possibly the first piece of advice Greg gave me when I started blogging on The Brick Ranch was to find other local blogs and connect with them. Notice he didn’t say other real estate blogs, but local blogs. A Google search, and Google alerts, turned up only a handful of blogs back then- March 2007. Seriously, I think there were about five non-political blogs, and most had only been at it for a few months, which is a cool thing as I’ll explain shortly. At first I simply left comments on their blogs without a return blog url, because I wanted to be there as a participant, not as a spamming Realtor- there is an implied accusation when visiting local blogs, am I really there to sell them a house? Um, no. I’m really there because I like talking with people, throwing ideas back and forth, and I know that most bloggers like comments, so leaving a thoughtful comment, using my name, not “TimbuktuHomesForYou” in that tiny little blogiverse where everything was shiny and new, was an easy way to say “Hello! Nice to meet you.” It was about Read more
Ah yes, it’s an election year. How do I know for certain? As Jeff Brown, who’s married to a native Ohioan- smart guy- recently twittered to me: “Ohioans’re gonna be very popular in the next 9 weeks. As usual, you guys are the babe at the prom without a date.”
Every four years we are courted and kissed by those same folks who forget we are here the rest of the time. I don’t welcome or enjoy the attention. I wish the federal government would forget we are here completely. I don’t want to be trotted out as an example of what went wrong with this or that administration. Don’t use Dayton to push your agenda and don’t use Dayton to make yourself feel good. Don’t do me any favors.
Dayton native Emily Langer wrote an article, Excuse Me, But I’m From Ohio, in the Washington Post today, accurately describing the strange political position in which Ohio, and the Midwest, finds itself every four years. In part:
Presidential candidates, in their efforts to look like regular folks, are among the chief purveyors of one of the most destructive stereotypes of Midwesterners: the working stiff who can’t work, thanks to the Rust Belt hemorrhaging all those jobs. During a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio, 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry set up shop outside a boarded-up building so that photos and television footage would show the city’s “ugly rump,” as the New York Times wrote, rather than the new office building across the street. No hard feelings, senator. The voters of Youngstown understood: It was easier for you to show that Ohioans needed your help if you pretended that they couldn’t help themselves.
Reporters do their part as well, stocking their dispatches from the Midwest with caricatures of down-at-the-heels factory workers and embittered waitresses. If you read enough of that prattle, you might start to wonder: Don’t these people have anything better to do than sit around carping about NAFTA? Don’t they know that McCain was just being honest when he said that some of Michigan’s vanished jobs won’t reappear? And by the way, don’t they Read more
I know when my life is out of whack when I lose things. I’m a great organizer, but not on a day-to-day basis. Daily, things pile up: Paperwork, bags of unloved clothes for Goodwill, the experiments in microbiology that grow in my refrigerator. Day by day, things are no longer where they should be and I’m misplacing those pesky emergency medical forms for school, or a magazine article I wanted to blog about, or a receipt for a lamp that I want to return. Then, quite suddenly, or so it seems to me, I’m losing big things: My camera! A credit card! A potential client! Danger! Danger! Now it’s time to stop and regroup, and so I’ve gone to ground for a few weeks.
I love the term “gone to ground”. It’s usually in reference to the hunted burrowing into their holes to avoid being killed, and that seems appropriate to my situation. I wonder what rabbits do when they go to ground. Do they tidy up a bit? Take a nap? Make more rabbits? I was spinning my wheels, overwhelmed by unproductive minutiae and unable to accomplish meaningful (income producing) work, so I took some time to refocus my attention. The bad news is that my staycation lasted much longer that I thought it would. The good news is that I accomplished much more that I thought I would.
All refrigerated biology experiments have been duly noted and concluded. We now have a remodeled bathroom, and our household files have been purged and tidied up. Both kid’s bedrooms have been cleaned and sanitized. One high schooler started the year uneventfully, and one has finally finished high school (we hope) with an indifference that is matched only by my frustration with his public school experience. Closure. Moving on.
Brad Coy felt stuck. I was spinning my wheels in unproductive navel gazing but didn’t realize it until things disappeared and I got buried. I needed to take the time to focus on a lot of little things which piled up to a really big thing which was standing in the way of me getting anything Read more
It’s humbling to blog. You want to share your thoughts and ideas, so you do, but what sometimes happens, in my case anyway, is that eventually either experience or someone with more experience comes along, shows you the error of your ways, and suddenly you are faced with a public record of a half-baked idea. So it is with my Bloodhound Twitter posts, which now read like a high school romance.
Oh! I had such a mad crush on Twitter. It was so much fun to be around, but when Twitter experienced sudden ginormous growth, my Twitter gated community lost power, literally, and then it got looted, literally, and I had to lock the gates on my darkened community to keep out the riff-raff.
With the huge growth of Twitter came a lot of “followers”, and perhaps it’s semantics, but I don’t want to follow people. I wanted to converse, discuss, have that big family table experience, but without the family dynamics. I was looking at a Twitter stream full of a lot of followers, a few leaders I didn’t want to follow, and damn, that’s when it hit me: Twitter- I’m just not that into you.
Twitter, I still want to be friends. You rock for the fastest way to get news, but I’m finding that here in Dayton Ohio, I don’t need news that quickly, it doesn’t add to my life in any meaningful way. I still adore my local Twitterpals, and I’m becoming their go-to real estate pro. We tweet-up when we can, so I do check into Twitter for that reason.
Twitter, I like you, but not in that way, ya know? I just don’t feel the excitement any more. We’ve settled into a routine- an understanding- if you will. I don’t need to tweet, and you don’t miss me when I’m gone.
Via email, Greg Swann recently declared Twitter a cesspit of groupthink. Hey! That’s not nice, and that’s not true. Well, okay, it’s half true- the groupthink part is on point. In fact, one of the ways you can use Twitter is to gauge groupthink. You can follow Twitter discussion Read more
My family’s heritage is German/Austrian on one side and Irish on the other, and I like to romantize that mix by thinking it’s a perfect blend that makes us both strong and passionate. Some of my favorite memories are of family get togethers over dinner. We talk through the dinner, we clear the dishes and spend an hour or more talking, sharing, discussing, arguing, laughing, loving, enjoying each other for the different views and voices we bring to the table. Everyone is welcomed and encouraged to take up a position and defend it strongly; the devil’s advocate is a frequent guest- fence sitters garner no respect. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Yes, in that respect Bloodhound Blog is like family to me.
I wrote a snarky little post on ActiveRain about point whoring- leaving insipid comments for the points. I wrote a more thoughtful companion post as well, but the snarky post got some link love from Maureen McCabe and her post sparked more discussion (both Maureen’s post and the snarky post are member’s only). The nature of AR is that members get points for leaving comments on other posts. Okay. Fine. Whatever. While this encourages comments, it doesn’t encourage actually reading a post, and does nothing to encourage thoughtful comments.
I love comments, but I don’t love all comments. I love the give-and-take of conversation that is created in a good comment thread. I love discourse and discussion and yes, even disagreements. I’m not fond of the “Great post, thanks for sharing” comments that are so ubiquitous on ActiveRain, and I’ve since created an abbreviation, GPTFS, that I think point whores and lazy commenters should use. If you use GPTFS, then I’ll know that you are commenting for points or because you want to leave a link, but not because you really give a damn about my post.
Apparently I’m in the minority about this on ActiveRain and the question came up “Would you rather have no comments…?” and my answer is yes. Yes I would rather you didn’t use my time, my blog, my thoughtfulness, as a place to deposit your big signature, your spam, your point whoring… But forget Read more
Here today; gone tomorrow? I have no clue what happened to the original post and the once dead link, but it did make me think about the importance of a blog archive.
One of the first things I noticed about BloodhoundBlog was the tremendous amount of useful information in the archives. It’s very possible that back then I spent more time poking through old stuff then keeping up with the first page, and still today, if I need to jump start my brain with an idea about marketing or I’m looking for an example of how to tackle a complex real estate issue, BHB is the first place I look because of it’s extensive archive.
TheBrickRanch archive is always in the back of my mind when I write for my blog. I want to build a complete real estate-pedia for the Dayton area on TBR, so I try to make the work there vital and useful enough to provide content for the future. I sit down and write with one person in mind, but I want to write for the person I don’t know; the person who will find this a year from now, or two or three years from now. Is the information timeless? I understand that not everything we write can be pertinent to the future, and sometimes I just want to have fun, but when someone uses the search box, please, I hope there is some there, there.
Blogs are an ever evolving medium- organic, fluctuating, there’s an ebb and flow to blogging that lends itself to change. I’ve changed a few things on TBR lately, and some of the posts I wrote last year needed to be updated accordingly. As I’ve grown, both as a blogger, and as a real estate agent, I’ve gone back into my archives and changed posts to make them stronger, added pingbacks from one post to another to make each post more relevant and provide more information. It’s general blog maintenance that encourages a more dynamic and beneficial use of the blog.
I want my posts to converse and link with each other, just like a conversation. When we Read more
Yes folks, it’s the question that never goes away: Why don’t you post more images? Short answer: I don’t like to read posts with images. Unless we are talking about specific property, images rarely add to the writing, and to me, they almost always take away from the writing.
When discussing property, you do need photos, and I do post images- now I post them in engenu. I take a lot of photos, I post a lot of photos of real estate, however, since they are used for buyers and I’m not the listing agent, they don’t always get posted on my blog. But this email wasn’t refering to real estate photos, the writer was lamenting my lack of just, ya know, images in general.
Here’s the thing: Real estate bloggers ask me about my lack of photos, but other bloggers never ask me this question, and I don’t see a lot of images in the blogs I read. So the way I see it is that since I’m not writing to other real estate bloggers, I’m writing to consumers, some of whom are in fact, non real estate bloggers, and they aren’t bothered by my Walls of Text, why do something that doesn’t make any sense to me?
I’ve been accused, and am occasionally guilty, of being stubborn, I suppose there is the tiniest, itty bitty chance that I’m wrong so I’m willing to listen to reason. I’ve heard and heard and heard some more from the RE.net about this, but I’d love to hear from the anyone outside the industry- are images a help or a hindrance to reading a blog?
And, because I love a good compromise and I love multi-tasking, I’m sharing a video- an image! The sentiment of this song is for Vance Shutes and Tom Vanderwell. We have begun sharing ideas about living a full life in the Rust Belt. And I suppose this song could be considered another Unchained Melody. But mostly, it’s here because it’s a very clever compromise between text and image. I’ve been told that a picture is worth a thousand words. Read more
The Bloodhound Blog has puppies!
This is a frisky and fearless litter of pure-bred Bloodhounds, each with their own unique goals, skills, voice, and talents. They are being added to the contributor’s panel to blend their own howling to the symphony that makes Bloodhound the remarkable place it is. I prefer to let them tell you their own stories in their own words, but I’ll give you a little glimpse into the breadth and wisdom of this amazing group that we’ve assembled.
What I think you will find so intriguing about this group is that the focus of their blogs varies quite a bit. During Project Blogger, we were all real estate bloggers with a local focus. That is so-o-o 2007. This is 2008, and this is Project Bloodhound. This is a lender, and a true hyperlocal blog, and a green multi-user blog, and this a few city-wide real estate blogs of different price points and markets.
Project Blogger was mentors and newbies. Not Project Bloodhound. We have a true pup, just starting to cut her teeth in the Web 2.0 world; we have experienced bloggers who are hunting for a more engaging writing style; a long time blogger who is on the scent of the SEO secrets for dominating his market. There are a few pups who are gnawing on the dashboard of their WordPress platforms, and bloggers who are happily chewing Blogger and RSSpieces blogs, thank you very much.
Who are these pups?
Christine Beaur-Mortezaie: VoilaLongBeach
Brad Coy: SanFranciscoRealEstateServices
Michelle DeRepentingy: AllAboutAthensGA
Stephanie Edwards-Musa: TurningHoustonGreen
Hunter Jackson: ColumbiaSCRealEstateHomes
Tom Vanderwell: StraightTalkAboutMortgages
How is Project Bloodhound going to work? Briefly, the pups are going to post here, and we- we being anyone- are going to take those posts as a starting point and continue the conversation in comment threads, on our own blogs, and here on BHB posts. This is your opportunity to share your knowledge, but also your chance to ask your own questions and pick the brains of the best bloggers out there.
One short year later, it is a real joy to pay my own experience forward and I hope you will welcome this new litter of Bloodhounds with Read more
I’m a fifteen year cancer survivor- does that make you feel pity? Don’t you dare- not even for a moment! I am not telling you this to manipulate your feelings or thoughts, and I don’t want or need your warm fuzzies. I’m telling you this because surviving cancer makes you a believer in the power of truth. When I was told I had cancer, it came on the heels of a 3 year stretch where my husband Jamie and I changed jobs, had 2 kids, and lost 5 close friends and family members to various diseases and sudden or accidental deaths. Jamie had just finished fighting a serious health problem of his own and at that point in our lives, we were in full battle mode. Hearing the diagnosis of cancer is immediately clarifying. If there is any doubt about what is important in your life, cancer will instantly put those priorities in order. There is extraordinary power in that truth. You are told the truth about the disease, the truth about your options, the truth about your prognosis. A cancer diagnosis is not an easy thing to hear, but once you hear all the facts, and only once you hear the facts, can you begin to fight.
At the time of diagnosis, your first thought might be that your life is completely out of your control- but it isn’t. Once you understand that you do have some control, now you can map out a battle plan. There were times when it was tempting to boo hoo to people, and I’m sure I gave that a try. Who doesn’t want some strokes when they are feeling sorry for themself? I was fortunate enough to have family and friends around me that refused to hear it.
Chris Johnson’s post made me think. I’ve never been entirely comfortable spending much time in the RE.net, but lately it seems that a big reason for being online for many of us is simply to get validation from other real estate professionals. Have we become addicted to posting pablum for the warm fuzzies? Have Realtors, not one of Read more
