Category: Blog Carnivals (page 3 of 11)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This week’s winners of The Odysseus Medal Competition are all vendors, which is a lucky chance, because I’ve been wanting to talk about vendor involvement in our world, the RE.net.

I’ve written this much before: Why do we trust Michael Wurzer of FBS Systems? Because he’s one of us. He lives in the Web 2.0 world, the Cluetrain world. We believe — on faith, in some respects — that he wants to deliver his product in the same way, with the same commitment to integrity and transparency, that he expects other vendors to deliver their products to him. Why do we have this outsized faith in him? Because we know him — because he’s a part of the conversation.

The same goes for Michael Price of mlbroadcast. We know where he stands on a host of issues, and we know he stands with us on the issues that matter to us. If I have any question about Mike or his business, I know I can shoot him an email and he’ll get right back to me, usually with more information than I thought to ask for.

By contrast, Krista Baker of Realty Business Coach is just getting her toe in the water. Her approach so far has been more a matter of broadcasting information than engaging in the meta-debate.

Another marketing coach taking that same broadcast approach is Gary Elwood of the Real Estate Marketing Blog. A few weeks ago I took him to task in a comment, saying, “You don’t link. You’re inaudible to the conversation.” Gary took me to mean that he wasn’t linking as a matter of footnoting his posts, but what I meant, as I’m sure most people reading this understand, is that linking is how we talk to each other, how the larger conversation is carried out.

Now consider that I beat the snot out of a vendor just last week. I wasn’t being mean, I was just calling bullshit by its true name. Krista and Gary are coming along, but there are a bunch of preening would-be experts who presume to lecture us on this praxis we are perfecting, even Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A total of 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 55 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Todd Kaufman The Todd Kaufman Problem Is Your Problem, Too”,
“Dan Green — Mortgage economics High Unemployment Rates Are Good For A Lot Of People“,
“Dan Green — Political Calamity How Real Estate Markets Respond To Political Calamity Around The World“,
“Dustin Luther — Zillow RE Auction I may have found the Tellar in Zillow’s Cellar!“,
“Jay Thompson — Bureaucrats Gone Wild Todd Kaufman, Loudoun County Assessor — Starring in \”Bureaucrats Gone Wild\”“,
“Jay Thompson — Free the MLS! Free the MLS! Another Board Forbids the Use of the Term \”MLS\”“,
“Jay Thompson — Keyword Stuffing Keyword Jammed Posts are Polluting the \”RE.net\”“,
“Jay Thompson — RSS Feeds RSS Feeds – The Full vs. Partial Conundrum“,
“Kris Berg — Alphabet Soup Alphabet Soup“,
“Krista Baker — 5 Steps 5 Steps for Planning any Marketing Campaign“,
“Michael Wurzer — Open Letter Open Letter To Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow, Encouraging Data Standards“,
“Mike Price — Armchair Quarterbacking Armchair Quarterbacking Real Estate 2.0“,
“Morgan Brown — 2008 Musings 2008 Musings – It’s going to suck a little less, depending who you are.“,
“Russell Shaw — Todd Kaufman Can Loudoun County Assessor Todd Kaufman tell me what to say and not to say?“,
“Troy W. Garris — Dodd Exits Presidential Race Dodd Exits Presidential Race; Focus Turns to Lenders“,
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m usually not awake when I post at this hour, but I am today.

I built a new widget last night that will link to each new Odysseus Medal nominee as it comes in. This is something I’ve been planning to do for a while, but I took care of it last night in response to a goad from Drew Meyers at Zillow.

You can find it live in the sidebar to the right, but this is what the little toy looks like:

Each new nominee will be reflected in this list, posting blog-style, most recent nominee on top. I’ll have to moderate the entries for spam and porn, but I’ve built tools to enable me to amend the list by means of clickable links from my email — the power of PHP. This week’s list is semi-sorta randomized, because I didn’t have the standing nominations sorted by their date and time of entry.

What Drew was interested in is something like TechMeme for the RE.net. I don’t think we’re big enough to justify something like that, or for it to make much sense even if someone were to do it. But the Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees is already a fairly comprehensive list of important posts in real estate weblogging. The Short List is selected by me, but the Long List is inherently democratic: Anyone can nominate anything. This widget will provide an added incentive to nominate good posts.

The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to deploy the widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:

<?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you know if you’ve been paying attention, Todd Carpenter exposed himself revealed himself to be the real Fake Greg Swann last night. I confess myself to have been totally sussed by the prank, despite Todd’s having hidden several Easter eggs along his trail that, had I not been completely clueless, I might have used to solve the mystery of his secret identity. In any case, it was a lot of fun, and Todd got to make his point in a gentle and even-handed way.

I think Todd was surprised by the venom of some of the reactions his alter ego got, citing one commenter in particular as being particularly vile. Welcome to the world of the real Greg Swann. People say the dumbest stuff about me and about BloodhoundBlog as a whole, and it means nothing at all to me — one of Todd’s clues to me was echoing back my own self-description as an armadillo. If you demonstrate to me that I’ve made an error, I’m in your debt. If you rant about something I already know is correct, you will have induced me to question your mind, your character — or both. If you expect me to be emotionally involved with you, you had better be my wife — and you should try to catch me when I’m not too busy.

But: The bogus claim itself is interesting, first because it’s really stoopid, and second because thinking about why it is so stoopid leads us to a better understanding of how to be wise instead. Angry bullshit piles up everywhere, but, if you’re willing to use your mind, it can make for good fertilizer.

So this is the claim from the comment on the Fake Greg Swann site:

greg swan’s playbook

[….]

Generate Traffic to your Site in 24hrs or less

[….]

Linkbaiting

[….]

Awards

I have five arguments to make against a strategy like this.

1. We don’t behave this way. I don’t give a rat’s ass about traffic. What I care about is telling the truth as beautifully as possible — saying what we want in the way that we want. If we’re right, we’ll attract people who Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Only seven entries on the short list this week, but the long list was barely 25 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Jillayne Schlicke -- Mortgage fraud Recent Mortgage Fraud Developments and Future Outlook”,
“Tom Royce — Property taxes Making the Seniors Work To Pay Off Property Taxes – Your Bloodsucking Government in Action“,
“Dustin Luther — Year in review A trip down the memory super-highway…“,
“Kris Berg — Happy holidays Happy Holidays!“,
“Todd Carpenter — Zillow mortgage Zillow Mortgage Prediction“,
“Dan Melson — Short sale Getting Another Mortgage Loan After A Short Sale“,
“Jeff Brown — Expert results Do Others Think Of You As An Expert? You Must Be Getting Results”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The story of the year is the lending crisis, so it’s no accident that this week’s Odysseus Medal should go to Morgan Brown for Struggling in Quicksand – Why the Government Continues to Exacerbate the Problem:

So here’s the rub – all of these “do gooders” are making the situation exponentially worse. Their rash actions are actually making it HARDER to get financing. Witness the spreads in jumbo vs. conforming loan amounts. Witness the restriction of loan programs. Witness the increase in underwriting stipulations. Witness the interbank rates compared to the Fed. The fact is that all of these bail out programs (which they all are in one form or another) have added MORE uncertainty to the system. They have not improved the psyche of the people with the money. And those are the people that count right now. If the people who hold the cash don’t want to lend it because their return is unclear we’ll never see the calming of the mortgage market.

The idea is not to make Fannie and Freddie buy everything in sight; the idea is to make the mortgage market a transparent and friendly investing environment so that cash returns to the secondary markets (and debt markets in general). Will that take time to work out? Absolutely. Are any of these rash knee-jerk reactions improving the situation? Not at all. We shouldn’t be worrying about how to bail out responsible people. We should be looking at how to fix the credit and debt markets to provide transparency for investors. Transparency builds credibility. Credibility builds confidence. Confidence drives investment. Investment drives down costs of borrowing, increases program expansion and makes markets healthy.

Until we start fixing what is really wrong we’ll continue to struggle in quicksand.

Krista Baker takes this week’s Black Pearl Award with How To Create Your 2008 Business and Marketing Plan:

Identify the gaps. Now that you’ve documented where you are and where you want to be, where are the gaps? For instance, if you made $50,000 in 2007 and want to make $100,000 in 2008, what does that mean? First, $50,000/12 = approx $4200. If you want Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are 36 entries on the short list this week. That’s a ton, but, even so, it’s less than half of what we started with. Given that it’s a holiday week, there was a lot of great stuff this week. We knew that going in, because both Jeff Kempe and Kris Berg hit home runs at the top of the week. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you wasn’t warned.

Voting this week will run through to 12 Noon MST Wednesday to leave time between all the Christmas stuff. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Dan Green -- Consumer confidence Showing How Consumer Confidence Surveys Lead Economists Astray”,
“Jeff Brown — Market correction The Truth — ‘They’ Don’t Have A Clue When This Correction Will End“,
“Teri Lussier — Selling vacant How to sell a vacant home this winter: Make like a Boy Scout“,
“Geno Petro — Bumper stickers How do I really feel about that, I wonder?“,
“Kris Berg — Prop 91 I’ve got a proposition for you.“,
“Jeff Brown — Bernanke Bernanke Goes To The Statue of Liberty Play — Bank System Scores“,
“Dan Melson — New Fed rules New Proposed Federal Reserve Rules: Is This Supposed to Be Helpful Regulation?“,
“Chris Lengquist — Credit problems Why We As A Nation Have Credit Problems“,
“Kris Berg — Next time There’s always a next time.“,
“Chris McKeever — Your way Your way, isn’t always the best way…“,
“Mike Farmer — Zillow Zillow — Microcosm of A Bigger Problem“,
“Trevor Smith — New Fed rules The One Law to Rule them All“,
“Morgan Brown — Struggling in quicksand Struggling in Quicksand – Why the Government Continues to Exacerbate the Problem“,
“Doug Quance — Musical chairs Musical Chairs With Brokerage Signs“,
“Glenn Kelman — TV tips Eyewitness “Today” Account + Twelve Live TV Tips“,
“Brian Boero — Redfin The school of Redfin, Part II“,
“Andrew Mattie Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a long-time investor client — he happens to be in town right now — who delivers his most effusive praise by exclaiming, “Outstanding!” I think this is a valuable exhortation of a valuable idea: It denotes appropriate enthusiasm for the most profound kind of excellence. When I selected the short list of Odysseus Medal nominations yesterday, I thought they were all very good. But when I looked them over this morning, there was nothing that made me want to shout, “Outstanding!” In consequence, I’m not awarding the Odysseus Medal this week. The posts are good, unassailably good, but nothing spoke to me of the sublime. Next week we’ll do better, I’m sure.

Gary Elwood wrote a post this week called The 3 Commandments of Online Marketing You Must Obey. I thought it was very good, but I think it was eclipsed by Bill Leider’s What Is A Brand?, winner of this week’s Black Pearl Award:

I believe your Brand is a widely held set of beliefs and expectations about what you deliver and how you deliver it. That applies whether you’re an individual or a multi-national organization. Your Brand is strengthened or weakened by every person in your organization and every function performed that directly or indirectly touches anyone. It embraces things like (and this is not an all-inclusive list):

• Name recognition
• Expectations held by the vast majority of people who will or might do business with you about what they can expect from you.
• The experience(s) that people have when they deal with you. Do those experiences exceed, meet or fall below their expectations.
• The consistency of many experiences.
• How you deal with people after the sale: customer service and how you solve problems.
• How and how well you maintain continuity of relationships with customers and potential customers.
• The perceived value received for the price paid.

Read both posts, though. They reinforce each other.

The People’s Choice Award this week goes to Chris McKeever for A [HAR]d Lesson:

We are in a period where listings are flying everywhere. You post a listing in one place, it appears on several others. Some you may not even realize you Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Some news first:

The first of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained lapel pins sold for $20.50. The second auction closes in about 24 hours.

Todd Carpenter is hosting a contest for the funniest RE.net blog post for 2007. I am badly eclipsed in a contest like this — where’s the award for Exotic Quixotism? — but I expect a number of posts from BloodhoundBlog to make the short list. (Nominate yourselves, y’all; nothing ever makes if off my to-list.)

Now then: The Odysseus Medal nominees: A dozen entries on the short list this week, and, again, a lot of Deep Think stuff. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Kevin Boer -- Redfin The Lessons Of Redfin, Part I: The Marketing Value Of The Obvious”,
“Joel Burslem — Scripps Scripps Cracks Open the Door“,
“Kris Berg — Concurrent closings Newton’s Umpteenth Law – Concurrent Closings“,
“Dan Green — Foreclosures Why Healthy Bodies and Healthy Marriages May Be More Relevant To Slowing Foreclosures Than Interest Rate Adjustments“,
“Brian Boero — Blurred vision Blurred vision“,
“Krista Baker — Emotional needs Do You Address Your Clients’ Emotional Needs?“,
“Kris Berg — RESPA What’s my real estate license worth? More than a hundred bucks.“,
“Rhonda Porter — Closing procedures Major Proposed Changes for Residential Closings in 2008“,
“Gary Elwood — Online marketing The 3 Commandments of Online Marketing You Must Obey“,
“Chris McKeever — Listings portals A [HAR]d Lesson“,
“Bill Leider — What is a brand? What Is A Brand?“,
“Brian Brady — Sub-prime oil We’re All Sub-Prime Borrowers (Who Consume Oil)”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I love this thing that we’re doing — the Web 2.0 thing, the social media thing, but especially the weblogging thing. The world is awash in expertise, and we have wasted ten millennia, at least, trying to effect our concentration, our innovation, through filters — would-be gatekeepers on the human mind. The smartest of the bunch of them have torn down their gates and used the iron to build bridges. The rest stoutly defend what’s left of their ravaged redoubts in a world increasingly devoid of walls. How stupid is that?

Witness:

• On Friday I beat up Inman news for coughing up “news” that everyone who is paying attention had already known for a week
• Today Michael Wurzer counts coup, needling Inman for hiding behind a pay-wall
• The New York Times can’t figure out why people will pay for information they cannot get anywhere else and yet won’t pay for information they can get everywhere else
• Meanwhile, the Times tears down its own idiot paywall and — surprise! — traffic surges

I swear to god these dinks think their value comes from wearing Oxford shirts or trading secret fraternity handshakes.

Here’s a sniggling little clue: If you know something worth knowing and you can communicate it in a timely and useful fashion, you’re our friend. If you decide to sneer your way into our hearts and minds, things might not work out as you’ve planned.

In fact, there is work that professional journalists can do that we cannot do as well for ourselves. But if they’re not willing to actually do that work, then what good are they?

Take careful note: Jay Thompson has been all over the management crisis at Point2 Agent. Since Friday, he has been the nexus of communications on the subject, reporting what he could discover and eliciting amazing anonymous comments from surviving Point2 employees. If you read Jay’s posts and the comments threads, you’ll be more richly informed than you could ever be by a news account.

How much more richly informed? At least 100%, since there haven’t been any news accounts about the Point2 diaspora. Where are the supposed “professionals”? Polishing their pince nez and Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Fifteen nominees this week, mostly about big ideas. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Jay Thompson -- Point2 Is Something Shaking at Point2 Agent?”,
“Michael Wurzer — MLS access The Nail In The Coffin?“,
“Kevin Boer — Real estate disclosures How Silly Real Estate Disclosures Get Created“,
“Wade Young — Sex sells Sex sells: how I use it to sell mortgages“,
“Bonnie Erickson — Let it snow! Snow in St. Paul“,
“Dan Melson — Buying unrepresented Buying Without An Agent – My Own Experience“,
“Kris Berg — December heroes December Heroes“,
“Diane Cipa — Title fees The consumer should pay the abstractor and/or notary signing agent when the transaction doesn’t close“,
“Alex Stenback — Foreclosure causes It Ain’t the ARM’s: What Really Causes Foreclosures“,
“Brian Boero — On-line farming Let’s call it Zulia“,
“Kris Berg — Niche marketing Niche Marketing – What a concept!“,
“Russell Shaw — Success More On Success“,
“Cathleen Collins — Social media Noodlin’ around with Social Media“,
“Eric Blackwell — SMM search Are Bloggers and Social Media getting too much credit in Search Engines?“,
“Brian Brady — Happy homeowners Happy Homeowners Act of 2008”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Actions have consequences. When we became a group weblog, I set my sights on the very best writers. We haven’t recruited actively until recently, but, even so, a lot of the most talented voices in the RE.net have ended up writing here. Three of this week’s short list of thirteen nominated posts came from BloodhoundBlog, and I cut mercilessly to get down to three. Worse (better!), four more of the thirteen were written by BloodhoundBlog contributors working from their home weblogs. And this week — for the first but probably not the last time — all three winners come from the Bloodhound kennel. I would apologize for that, except that would require me to apologize for having the wit to pick out good writers in the first place!

All that said, The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Brian Brady for 2008 Housing Market Outlook For U.S. Investors:

While astute investors will have a virtual plethora of homes to buy, in the first half of 2008, they shouldn’t be PAINFULLY picky. Investors should be judicious but painfully picky is a sure-fire way to ensure that no deal will ever make sense. The shift in housing next year will put an upward pressure on rents, over the next five years, as the percentage of home ownership declines from its national high. It is conceivable, in the transition markets of Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, that rents could rise as much as 20%, in the next five years, as those former homeowners lease homes. The long-term fundamentals of these markets still make sense. More people move to those locales than leave each year so steady population growth is on an investor’s side.

While the forecast for 2008 is grim, there are silver linings amidst this black cloud. Investors will have opportunities to own great properties if they understand that while we may not be touching the bottom, we can see the bottom through clearing water. Investors should analyze property investments and consider purchase offers with both economic and utilitarian values in mind. In the aforementioned Phoenix example, digging your heels in and proclaiming that "the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A baker’s dozen this week. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Marlow Harris -- Iggy's House Iggy’s House and B.S. Realty”,
“Jeff Brown — Lenders lend Lenders Clearing Deck To Blink, Uh, Lend — What Will They Think of Next?“,
“Robert Ashby — Credit crunch What Should be Done About the Continued Credit Crunch? How About Nothing?“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR speak Why use a realtor – decoding nar-speak“,
“Chris Johnson — 2011 Why 2011 might not even be the end“,
“Michael Wurzer — Advertising Everything Is Advertising“,
“Brian Brady — Market outlook 2008 Housing Market Outlook For U.S. Investors“,
“Kris Berg — Real estate blogging The Real Reason Your Agent Should be Blogging“,
“Jim Watkins — Foreclosure Sad Story of a Family in Foreclosure: Some things You Hate to See“,
“Mariana Wagner — RE agent You know you’re a real estate agent if…“,
“Geno Petro — Serendipity Serendipity, straight up“,
“Jay Thompson — NAR COE 7,373 Words – The NAR Code of Ethics“,
“Cathleen Colins — Memories Memories of my Dad in the house he never got to see”
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The F.Q. Story Historic District Home Tour is tomorrow, so I’m going to be out for much of the day. In consequence, I’m moving the deadline for Odysseus Medal nominations to 9 am, to give me time to put together the short list.

Between church and the hangover brunch, there aren’t a lot of nominations on Sunday mornings, anyway. But if you had plans in that direction, amend them. Anything that comes in after 9 will be kicked into next week.

I can’t predict my time tomorrow, so my thought for BHB.TV was do do a piece on BHB.TV — how it’s done. If you have other topic ideas, speak up.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing