Category: Blog Carnivals (page 4 of 11)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s talk about real estate weblogging, shall we? By an accident of synchronicity, that seems to be what bubbled up to the top this week. The Odysseus Medal goes to Gary Elwood for Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog:

In a nutshell, blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with your market. Better than postcards, email newsletters, flyers, magazine articles, weekly radio shows.

How are blogs better than these communication channels?

There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel.

1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. In addition, each posting is instantly available worldwide.

2. Searchable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.

3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.

4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.

6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

Of course you can find each of these elements elsewhere. And none is, in itself, all that remarkable.

But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.

However, bloggers and sophisticated readers of blogs will sniff you out as a fake if you lie, hide, withhold or micromanage information.

Successful blogging is about being off-the-cuff, transparent and off-the-record so to speak. Even if you sin.

SEOBook has a tutorial on SEO for webloggers up today, and this is a rockin’ thing — in context. Real estate weblogging is relationship-based Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Twenty-five nominees. I confess that it’s faster for me on Sunday if I’m not too picky, but this week saw a surplus of very good posts.

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

Please don’t spam the voting. I accept that there can be differing moral standards on scamming social media, but only one of those standards applies here. If you email 300 of your closest friends, telling them to vote for you, I will ignore all your votes. We’re interested in what is popular among people who participate here, not how popular you are with your buddies. That doesn’t even seem to me to be a complicated idea, but I’m explicating it nevertheless.

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:

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“Todd Carpenter — Interest rates MBS, 10 year notes, the long bond, and why I couldn’t care less“,
“Benjamin Bach — Follow-up How to add $150,000 in gross commissions to your bottom line“,
“Geno Petro — Racoons Racoons in the Trash“,
“Steve Belt — Trulia Voices From Trulia Voices: Is central Phoenix an African American area of town?“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Trulia Voices What Did My Mom Say About Cows Giving Away Milk?“,
“Jeff Brown — Brian Brady The Difference a Lender Can Make — Real Estate Investment Savvy“,
“Eileen Tefft — Thanksgiving A Thanksgiving Real Estate Story“,
“Dan Melson — Housing mess How to Avoid A Repeat of the Housing Market Mess“,
“Jay Thompson — Business card Experimental Business Card #1“,
“Rhonda Porter — LO compensation Let’s Do Away with Loan Origination Compensation“,
“Gary Elwood — RE blogging Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog“,
“Kris Berg — Lake Arrowhead WTF – The Lake Arrowhead Home Blog“,
“Morgan Brown — Option ARM An Open Eulogy to the Option ARM“,
“Krista Baker — Targeted messages Reader Q&A: How To Write Your Message from Your Prospect’s Perspective“,
“Dan Green — Mortgage rates Pre-Qualify Your Loan Officer By Asking: \”Where Do Mortgage Rates Come From?\”“,
“Dan Green — Bloggers video Oh, The Bloggers You’ll Meet, The People You’ll Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My thought is that Michael Wurzer of the FBS blog doesn’t do anything badly. Certainly his weblog is ripe with first-rate content. Michael is this week’s winner of The Odysseus Medal with Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem:

You see, whether it’s in an MLS or a social network, the value is in having the data together or aggregated. Yet, once you aggregate the data, in an MLS system or Facebook or wherever, the immediate question is how you can get it back out to be used elsewhere, by other applications, because choice is desired and the aggregation stifles choice.

This is a non-trivial problem. The ideal answer is in the web itself. As Tim O’Reilly puts it, “Small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the web, in its current form, doesn’t address all the concerns, because yet to be defined are permission or privacy or identity schemes. In other words, who owns the data, who can access it, and what can they do with it when they do access it? The answers to these questions so far have been defined by silos, like MLS systems and social networks, but we’re now seeing that isn’t the long-term answer, rather standards are.

In the real estate space, one part of the solution is to have a broad and deep agreement (standard) on the minimum data necessary to constitute a listing. This is close to reality with the RETS payloads. Equally necessary, however, is a standard for defining who can access the listing and the terms of use for doing so. The first attempts at some terms of use in the real estate space led to the lawsuit against the NAR by the DOJ, which necessarily but unfortunately has caused the conversation to grind to a halt as the status quo is sought to be preserved. But the work on these terms of use needs to continue, either to resolve the litigation or end-run it.

Ideally, the terms of use should be dictated by the owner of the data on an individual basis. Again, “small pieces loosely joined.” Yet the challenge is gaining broad enough Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Eighteen nominees this week. I had a bunch of posts from Active Rain, and, while I didn’t pick any this week for the short list, I’d like to encourage y’all to continue to enter. There is some good stuff over there that I would not see otherwise.

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:

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“Michael Wurzer — Data portability Data Portability Ain’t Just A Real Estate Problem“,
“Joel Burslem — NAR Reflections on NAR“,
“Robert Ashby — YSP Is Yield Spread Premium Good or Bad for Consumers?“,
“Steve and Kris Berg — Six months The Six Month Solution – Our New Deal“,
“Morgan Brown — Credit mess Top 10 Ways to Navigate the Credit Mess“,
“Brian Brady — Compensation How to Pay Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals For Their Advice“,
“Todd Carpenter — Keyword SEO Key word SEO is at best, a hedged bet.“,
“Doug Quance — Stay home We Can Just Stay Home And Go Broke“,
“Jay Thompson — Short sale The Short Sale From Hell“,
“Justin Smith — Active Rain How I Sold My ActiveRain Profile for $6,750.00“,
“Todd Carpenter — YSP Forget YSP, let’s just do away with Mortgage Brokers“,
“Tim Kane — YSP Let Brokers charge what they want. Do away with YSP.“,
“Kris Berg — Vista A New Operating Environment“,
“Geno Petro — Feng Shui Feng Shui… It’s All Chinese Math To Me“,
“Jeff Kempe — Bossy visionaries Bossy Visionaries, Portland, and how to ram “Green” down the throat of an uncooperative market“,
“Brian Brady — Federal banks HR 3915: Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass“,
“Jim Duncan — NAR Working from within the NAR”
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by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here are the Odysseus Medal winners, finally. My apologies for being two days late, but my little hop to Las Vegas put me way behind on everything.

I run with a fast crowd here, but I don’t cut them any slack. I am never nice for the sake of being nice, and I don’t ever hesitate to tell what I believe to be the complete truth. Even so, I don’t love it when one of our wins the Odysseus Medal, because I don’t want anyone to even suspect that I might be swayed by personal considerations. But great work is where you find it, even if you find it at home. So this week’s Odysseus Medal goes to BloodhoundBlog’s own Brian Brady for HR 3915: Open Letter to Senator Dodd from a Veteran Mortgage Originator:

Dear Chairman Dodd:

Soon, HR 3915 will be endorsed by the House of Representatives and most likely referred to the Senate. The committee you chair, will have an opportunity to read, discuss, debate, and amend this bill before recommending it to the general Senate for vote. I am a 20 year veteran of consumer financial services with the last 14 years in mortgage lending. I have helped over 700 families finance their homes and closed some 1700 loan transactions. I humbly submit my expert opinion to you for consideration.

The Libertarian in me begs you to do absolutely nothing; it’s the borrowers’ cavalier attitude towards financial planning that caused this mess. While my statement is true, it is but a component of the underlying malaise in the residential real estate industry; we adopted an even more cavalier approach to loan approvals and that irresponsibility is being felt by the investors who trusted us to perform adequate due diligence. Failure is a costly but cogent instructor; to discourage failure on both the borrower and investing lender sides of the equation might be more costly in the long run.

I oppose individual originator licensing in its proposed form. It doesn’t demonstrate true expertise and might induce a false sense of security to the consumer. Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m getting ready for the BloggerCon event at the NAR Convention and I’ve run myself out of time. I’ll post the judging for The Odysseus Medal tomorrow morning. I’ll leave the voting open for The People’s Choice Award until I’m ready to post.

In the mean time, although I’ve shown this before, Cathy thought I should post it again. This is going on all around you, and, if, like certain hide-bound centenarians, you want to pretend you can avoid this fate — think again.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Fifteen nominees this week, although ten are from BloodhoundBlog contributors, writing either at BHB or at their home weblogs. I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t think I’m being biased. The one thing I could suggest is that y’all nominate more posts from a broader range of sources.

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:

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“Kris Berg — Boomerang Warning: Boomerang may cause injury to others“,
“Geno Petro — Big, hungry beast Big, Hungry Beast“,
“Kris Berg — Trulia Make checks payable to Trulia.com“,
“Jim Watkins — True equity True Equity – In the Real Estate Sense“,
“Joel Burslem — Facebook Advertising Your Real Estate Business on Facebook“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — HR 3915 Mortgage Brokers and Loan Originators Should Support HR3915“,
“Steve Leung — Reverse offer Considering the Reverse Offer“,
“Kevin Boer — Curbed Curbed.com = HomeGain Redux; Is History Repeating Itself? Will Curbed.com Start Selling Leads?“,
“Sean Broderick — Rubik’s Cube Reasons Come First“,
“Brian Brady — HR 3915 HR 3915: Open Letter to Senator Dodd from a Veteran Mortgage Originator“,
“Kris Berg — SEO Chasing My Long Tail – My Truth About SEO“,
“Geno Petro — First in, last out First In, Last Out“,
“Jim Duncan — Green building Green building will soon be invisible“,
“Kris Berg — Snowboarding I may see you on the way down”
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by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am buried. I have five houses in play and Cathy is on compulsory bed rest — on pain of hospitalization. I have a zillion little jobs that need doing around here, and I keep coming up with new ideas. For instance, I think it would be cool to promote the long list of Odysseus Medal nominees as a feed, as they come in, so that people can see what others are nominating. I say “sufficient unto the day” all the time, but, for now, I have to really mean it, because I can’t afford to get sick.

Here’s a classic joke:

Q: How do you get a professional poker player off your porch?

A: Pay him for the pizza, cheapskate!

I’ve never been a big booster of the idea of real estate as a profession because I tend to associate the word “professional” with people who lie about what they do for a living and live in Uncle Bob’s basement. Real estate is a business, on its best days, and someday it might grow to be an industry — if it ever dares to wean itself from Big Mother’s teat.

Bill Leider from Real Estate Shows has a different take on the matter, and he deploys it to take this week’s Odysseus Medal with What Is A Professional?:

When we shift the focus of the term professional from what we do to how we are perceived and treated, the definition and the entire concept of the designation “professional” changes.

In that context of status and respect, what exactly is a professional? I believe that a “professional” is someone who takes what they do, whatever that happens to be, and transforms it into an art form. They make the mundane look magnificent. They make seemingly impossible things look drop-dead easy. They cover all the details, all the time. They master the subtleties. They silently acknowledge that they have a gift for what they do and they give that gift to the people in their world respectfully and compassionately. They know that they have never “arrived.”

They are never content with their present body of knowledge. They live with a Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A dozen-and-a-half nominees, but seven of them are from BloodhoundBlog. We had a great week; there were five more that I had to wince hard and cut.

A lot from the news, as usual, plus tools, tips, tricks and techniques and the kind of deep thinking that makes this competition what it is.

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:

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“Kris Berg — The green room The Green Room“,
“Jim Cronin — RE weblogging The 7 Reasons Why Your (Future) Clients Should Care That You Are a Real Estate Blogger“,
“Jim Duncan — Martyr yourself? Are you willing to martyr yourself to the industry?“,
“Dan Green — Investors in ARMs Falling Prices And Adjusting ARMs: Real Estate Investors Have A Way Out“,
“Jay Thompson — Prize money? A Commission is Prize Money (?!?)“,
“Richard Warren — Trickle down The Economic Trickle Down Effect“,
“Rhonda Porter — Mortgage witch hunt The Mortgage Witch Hunt“,
“Steve Belt — Trulia Voices Opting out of Trulia Voices“,
“Brian Brady — Hiring a Realtor Hire A Realtor Like You Would Sign a Top NFL Draft Pick“,
“Bill Leider — What is a professional? What Is A Professional?“,
“Geno Petro — La spinster? Mademoiselle? Oui. La Spinster?…ZUT!“,
“Kris Berg — Gas guzzler My Hybrid is a Gas Guzzler“,
“Michael Cook — Perfect storm Real Estate Perfect Storm Warning: Do Not Miss This Window of Opportunity“,
“Brian Brady — HR 3915 HR 3915 Is Dangerous“,
“Teri Lussier — Twittering Twittering on a wing and a prayer“,
“Geno Petro — Search or sell Search Or Sell, Young Man“,
“Kris Berg — Genoa Petrol You, ma’am, are no Genoa Petrol!”
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by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cut-off is today at 12 Noon MST, which means that folks on the left coast, particularly, need to adjust their thinking. In any case, if you know of something that reeks of pith (does that sound right?), your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now before you have to wonder what time it is in Phoenix.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the thing: I am a complete sucker for good writing. I like big ideas, I like radical ideas (ya think?), I especially like profoundly and transparently ethical ideas. But if you can write entrancingly about just about anything — I am duly entranced. We live and learn by telling stories, and all of the arts, at their best, are most fundamentally literary. The burnished word is the reflection of humanity’s godhead, the breath of the sublime made manifest in speech, in poetry, in prose, in the drama, even in the cacophonous news of our everyday lives. We are animals, and so we sleep and scratch and snuffle. But we are a spectacular genetic accident, a thing of nature that cannot exist except as an artifact, a man-made thing. By dint of our conceptualization, given form in speech and in abstract notation systems, we are a thing apart from nature, the god-like consciousness that gives nature meaning beyond mere randomness. In our words, in the works of our unprecedented minds, we celebrate all we are and all we can become. And so it would not be wrong to say that I am continuously in the thrall of human life well celebrated.

Hence: This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Geno Petro for Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar:

I won’t promise ‘lightning in a bottle’ to a potential client but I will pledge to use my resources (spend my own money) in the most efficient manner I see fit. Let’s face it, the Listing Agent is in the hole the minute he walks out the door with the Exclusive and only collects when the property actually sells–correction: …when the property actually sells under his watch. Phone calls from Vegas are never good under any circumstance, I’ve found.

I’ll try not to promise the Moon no matter how much I allow myself to be manipulated by the situation (potential paycheck). And that is why we do it, you know. We Realtors are ironically, the easiest people to manipulate because we count the money before it’s printed. We may say we don’t but most of us secretly Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A dozen nominees again, which is boiling down to one entry out of five. Already you’re looking at what I view as the cream of this week’s crop.

We are slaves to the news, of course. This week’s fires in Southern California dominated our attention. Congress seems desperate to do something ruinous to the mortgage industry. Microstoopid spent way too much to buy a small piece of a big fad that will be gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe three years from now. I ignored almost everything about this. Likewise for Zillow’s announcement that their ERA deal makes them Trulia player in the on-line listings game. RE/Max has a national real estate listings portal. The Realty.bots have PR departments, at least so far. The RE.net is temporary, like all news, but I try to filter for what is actually important and not just noisome.

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:

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“Michael Wurzer — Living history Living History“,
“Jay Thompson — Negative news As a fellow Realtor I am disappointed that you post such negative news“,
“Kris Berg — Healing Healing“,
“Dan Melson — Lending reform \”Fixes\” for the Mortgage Meltdown – You Can’t Keep A Bad Idea Down“,
“Morgan Brown — Lending reform Barney Frank – Broker’s Worst Nightmare“,
“Kevin Boer — Move/Active Rain What The Microsoft-Facebook Deal Means For Real Estate — Part 2: Revisiting Move.com Vs. ActiveRain“,
“Krista Baker — Negotiating buyer’s commissions Negotiating Commissions with Buyers“,
“Gary Elwood — Credibility The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You“,
“Brian Boreo — Real estate weblogging Waking from my blog reverie“,
“Jeff Brown — San Diego Fires San Diego Fire Update — It’s Now Approaching Historical — 10% of Population Evacuated“,
“Jeff Kempe — Socratic dialogue Socratic Dialogue, Deductive Reasoning, BHB and the State of Real Estate.”

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by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m a busy boy. We’re busy with money work, but Cathleen has been sick, sicker, pneumoniated. The good news is, you don’t have to cut off your ear to take great pictures, you just have to hack like Selma on the Simpsons. I’m picking up the slack, plus I have a great new idea for BloodhoundBlog that we’ll be rolling out shortly. In any case, I might seem abrupt here, but that is no stain on the quality of today’s winning posts.

Jim Duncan was one of the first real estate webloggers I became aware of when we started BloodhoundBlog. We discovered the power of the long tail together in posts about dual agency. He is always to be found on the side of righteousness in real estate — ethics, education, putting the client first with first-rate service. He’s a great blogger, too, as he demonstrates with this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, Wither false blame?, an extended riposte to a particularly lame lamentation about imaginary offenses by the sub-agents who no longer exist in most states:

The author and professors make one accurate argument accidentally – until the real estate industry, mortgage industry, HUD, etc. embrace divorced commissions, we have a long way to go. Divorced commissions means simply that the buyer pays the buyer’s agent and the seller pays the seller’s agent. Until this is fixed, the perception will exist amongst those who don’t know any better – whether by unfamiliarity or neglect (as would seem to be the case in the Wharton professors’ cases) – that true representation does not exist.

I come not to condemn the professors (I have read the Mortgage Professor site for years), but to enlighten them to the wonderful world known as the 21st century and Buyer Brokerage. While the seller may pay my commission now, the loyalty and trust I am earning is the buyers’.

Here’s a proposal – First, apologize and clarify. Second, invite a guest speaker write a guest post on your blog and to explain to your classes what real estate agency and buyer/seller representation are. Explain how much the profession has changed in Read more