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Category: Blog Carnivals (page 6 of 11)

September 16, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a ton of very strong entries this week. I had to eliminate more than half to get to a short list of twenty nominees. If you didn’t make the cut, don’t despair. You’ll come back even stronger next week. Everything was terrific, a real treat for me going through them. These twenty survivors are must-reading.

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 PDT/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:

Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here or, more easily, here.

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September 14, 2007

Deadline looms for Odysseus Medal competition: Act now or weep incessantly Sunday afternoon

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There are already a couple dozen nominees for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition. What are we missing? Only you know for sure. The deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something orbiting the skirts of perfection, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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September 10, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: “Superior taste, no overdone sugar coating which only masks the real product, and no nuts”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It is my honor and privilege to work with some of the best writers in the RE.net. There are other folks I deeply admire but whom it would be unseemly for one reason or another to recruit. But the people who write for BloodhoundBlog are first among the first rank, whether they are writing here or at their home weblogs. The Odysseus Medal competition gives me a chance to savor great writing from other great writers, so I am not twice-blessed but dozens-blessed every week — as are you.

Here are the winners of this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Kris Berg for News You Can Use – Real Estate is a Business:

Any new agent who steps foot in the Broker’s door without basic technology skills or a strong desire to learn and embrace technology, should ahead of anything else be given a 2.0 crash course. A canned, unmanned page on your Broker’s site is not good enough; yourname@aol.com is not good enough. What they need to teach and you need to possess is a commitment to continuing education and an aching hunger to understand as much as you possibly can about the countless technological tools at your disposal in the big, wide world out there. Your business depends on it. Eighty-six your planned recipe card mailer, and reallocate that money and time to establishing and growing an online, relevant presence.

This post is a string of stunning Black Pearls all on its own.

But: This week’s Black Pearl Award belongs to Jonathan Dalton for Sell Your Phoenix Real Estate in Two Weeks. Not as local as the title makes it sound:

Take your home’s value back in November 2004 before the run began. Compute what your home’s value would be based on 5% annual appreciation. Then take the last sales price (or prices for currently active homes) and find the midpoint between that price and your adjusted home value.

For example: your home was worth $200,000 in 2004. Assuming 5% annual appreciation, your home would be worth roughly $231,000 now. If currently active homes are selling at $270,000, split the difference – $250,000.

Congratulations. You Read more

September 9, 2007

Voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vote here.

The short list just keeps getting longer. I’d apologize, but I’m cutting ruthlessly. We’re just getting a lot of truly excellent entrants.

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

Here is this week’s short list of nominees.

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September 9, 2007

Last call for Odysseus Medal nominees

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I changed the graphic at the top of the page for the better part of last week, an homage to Kris Berg’s excellent post, but I don’t think anyone noticed.

We have a bunch of great entries for The Odysseus Medal, but only you know what we’re missing out on. Deadline is 12 Noon PDT/MST, so make your nominations now.

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September 7, 2007

You can use the No-Hassle iPhone to hang up on the NAR, but first attend to those Odysseus Medal nominations

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Wanna hear something amazing? Twenty-one months into the downturn, and the NAR is still adding new members. Not much growth, mind you — not cancerous growth — but growth is growth.

I want to get back to the idea of alternatives to the NAR, but I’ve been busy — that’s because the real estate market is bad.

Dan Green and Tom Royce are all over the idea, but, among other things, I’ve been busy selling a Russell Shaw listing. Definitely no-hassle on my end. His team members are as sweet and thoroughgoing as the man himself.

Meanwhile, Apple’s stock price is down for three days running, so Robert X. Cringely hints that it’s time to buy. What did he miss? The show-stopper at the end of the Leopard product release is going to be a 16GB iPhone for $499. You heard it here first.

Why would you need that much memory in a mobile phone? So you can watch the Compleat Russell Shaw on the flight home from Christmas at Grandma’s, of course.

But: Until then, there is an Odysseus Medal competition to consider. Deadline for nominations is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but if you know of something insanely great, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.

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September 3, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: “Government was never intended to bail out corporations”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was at a party Saturday night, and everyone kept telling that it’s a great time to buy. I’ve been showing all weekend, so, who knows?, maybe it’s true. In any case, I’m short on minutes, so we’ll do this week’s awards on horseback.

The Minnesota Association of Realtors has a peculiar talent for inviting scorn and ridicule. This year’s fun-fest, the winner of our People’s Choice Award, was kicked off by Teresa Boardman, with Has MAR forgotten who pays the bills?

I would love it if half of the agents in the twin cities quit. That would mean more money and more business for me. It just doesn’t work that way and it never will. When it gets easy everyone wants to do it, and they do. When the going gets rough they quit.

Glen, your letter is just another example of how an industry in turmoil has started eating it’s young to protect old business models instead of innovating to better serve the consumer. Real estate is a self eliminating market driven profession. It works on the principals of supply and demand, as does the housing market.  When agents can’t make ends meet they will seek employment outside the industry and maybe they will sell a few homes too. We call our economic system capitalism and I just love the almost endless opportunities the system brings. Anyone can start their own business, how cool is that? 

You don’t get to decide who will stay and who will go based on earnings and years in the business. Each of us will make that decision on our own.

The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Morgan Brown’s Taking advantage of convertible home equity lines of credit, which teaches us how to encumber a Jumbo-priced property without a Jumbo loan:

Instead of taking the whole loan balance as a 1st position HELOC, take a conforming 1st mortgage up to $417,000 and then take the remaining as a convertible HELOC. Once you sign the loan documents you can convert the HELOC to a fixed rate and achieve a blended interest rate (the effective interest rate of Read more

September 2, 2007

The People’s Choice Award voting is open: Vote for your choice of the best RE.net posts this week

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open. The short list is not short — 24 entries — but it’s rich in quality writing.

Voting will run until Monday at 12 noon PDT/MST. The ballot form will permit you to read every article, but here are the links to the nominated posts:

The Odysseus Medal competition is a weekly carnival of the very best weblog posts in the RE.net. If you would like to compete — or to nominate someone else’s excellent work — this is the nomination form.

I’ll announce this week’s winners tomorrow early afternoon.

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August 31, 2007

Have a great Labor Day, but don’t leave town without submitting your Odysseus Medal entries

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy just made me think of this, bless her beautiful soul. Deadline for this week’s Odysseus Medal competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. The People’s Choice voting is Sunday afternoon as usual, so take a break form your end of summer reveling to cast a ballot. But take care of those nominations now, before you forget. You can nominate yourself or any post you admire here or, more easily, here.

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August 27, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Keeping pace with a very fast crowd

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am in love with this idea, The Odysseus Medal competition.

We judged ordinary Carnivals several times, and I was persistently underwhelmed with the overall quality of the entries. We judged hard, so the winners were truly worthy of their honors. But too many of the also-ran entries were just link-bait, entered solely to get the link back from the judging weblog.

We have none of that. I cut pretty ruthlessly to get to the short list, but we get nothing that is wildly off-topic or trooly stoopid — or stolen from another site. Instead, we’re seeing some insanely great posts, and picking just one winner is proving to be a very welcome but very difficult task.

It’s that way for you folks, too. I can tell by the People’s Choice voting, which is always broad and deep.

Together as writers, readers and judges, we are building something that matters, something that calls enduring attention to works of the mind that might otherwise just scroll away. The winners are worthy of note, to be sure, but simply to make the short list in this competition is a mark of excellence. If you make it this far, you’re keeping pace with a very fast crowd, an achievement hard to match.

And with that, to the winners:

Jeff Turner wrote an excellent post on why real estate video is unlikely to supplant virtual tours. I agree with his take and then some, and it’s something I’ve been meaning to write more about. But there are other, better uses for video in real estate. I’ve discussed a couple — videotaping your first tour of a home at the listing appointment, or taping the final walkthrough as a gift to the buyers. Russell Shaw brings us another, using video as a real estate sales training tool. Russ is just getting his sea-legs in the oceans of do-it-yourself video podcasting, but his initial effort won him this week’s People’s Choice Award.

Who is not rapt paying attention to the world of mortgage lending? Yesterday at open house, seemingly, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. As the Times rundown on Countrywide makes Read more

August 26, 2007

Voting for this week’s People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Another not-very-short list of posts. We set out to attract the best, and we’re seeing it and then some.

Vote here.

These are this week’s nominees:

Voting will end Monday at noon, and I’ll announce the winners soon thereafter.

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August 22, 2007

Easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I built a quick and easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal competition. You can continue to use the BlogCarnivals entry form, but I put this together to make it easier to nominate posts written by other people.

The form lives at the top of The Odysseus Medal information page, which is overdue for a rewrite. If you want an even quicker solution, go here and drag that URL into your toolbar. Copy the URL of the page you want to nominate and click on that link. Autofill then paste then submit. Duck soup.

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August 20, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: A challenge to the mind and a challenge to the-way-things-have-always-been-done

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a lot of truly great posts this week. I’m not the kind to pick three posts for first place and six for second place, but I do understand the temptation. Steven Groves, for instance, has much to teach us with MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings? Is the market turning? There are good reasons to say no, but what if it is? Then Patrick Kapowich has news for you with Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip. There are other truly outstanding posts in the short list of entries, and the truth is, I could go on about them all day.

But: There can only be one best. This week, that honor and The Odysseus Medal go to Michael Cook with Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors? I know many Realtors reading here disagree with Michael’s argument. That’s fine. The question is, what are you doing about it? It were well if you were able to defend your value proposition well enough to best Michael in a fair debate, but you don’t have to set the bar the high. Here is what you do need to do, though, and what you need to get better and better at doing: You have to create and be able to defend your value proposition with your own clients. What is it that you are bringing to your transactions that exceeds your cost in sales commission? If Michael’s post — and others like it — lead you to internal turmoil, that’s a good thing. Pain is nature’s gentle way of letting you know there is a flaw in your thinking. Ruminating on the challenges a thoughtful man like Michael Cook puts before you will make you better at what you do — and better able to defend your value to your clients.

And if that’s not unsettling enough to our sensibilities, The Black Pearl this week goes to Carl Drews with How real estate commissions work. Drews is not a professional, he’s Read more

August 19, 2007

The People’s Choice Award: Pick the best of this week’s real estate writing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here is the (not very) short list of this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal. You can vote for one of these posts for the People’s Choice Award.

These are this week’s entires:

Voting ends Monday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. We have file permissions issues with the new server, so you definitely can vote more than once, and I definitely will catch you. So don’t.

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