Category: Blogging (page 11 of 84)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dan Green is a great believer in the power of the media to promote a business, where I am quite a bit more skeptical. He asked me once about the commercial value of my column in the Arizona Republic. Quoting former Vice President John Nance Garner on the value of that elective office, I said, “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Dan loves the mot juste — and I will promise you that, in reality, Garner was more redolent in his retort. But: We just did the math lately and it turns out I’m wrong. The Republic column is worth $1,800 an hour — while I’m writing it.

The essence of good writing — the gist of the mot juste — is to sweep the reader along with you as you go. The corpus of writing is enshrouded in rules, but the rules don’t mean anything if the reader doesn’t care enough to participate. It’s a tragedy to be ignored entirely, but it seems to me still worse to be missed — to be skimmed and scanned and dismissed without ever having been read. I play the way I do, when I write — not as prose, not even as poetry, but as a kind of scat music where the sounds and the meanings of the words play off of each other like kittens and a butterfly on opposite sides of a window — I play this way both to reward attention and to penalize inattention. If you don’t read me with your whole mind, you won’t get it — and that’s the idea.

This is writing about writing, the most perfectly human action there is, and this is the one place you can turn to in the RE.net where the minds are serious enough to write about writing. Teri Lussier was talking about our archives, and I wish we had some organization to them. I wish I could send you off just to all of the many posts we have written about writing — some our own work, some extended quotations from giants of English literature.

There’s this, at least, Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This started out at a response to Jeff Brown in John Rowles’ “dinosaur” post, but it grew to take on a life of its own.

Jeff Brown:

Sellers, at least in my experience, have been excellent at discerning one thing — who produces results.

Oh, would this were so! I can take you through Phoenix, neighborhood by neighborhood, and show you in which neighborhoods the sellers are paying attention and in which they aren’t. We compete very aggressively in the neighborhoods where sellers are wide awake, but there are places we are called upon to go where the neighbors could not care less who sells what for how much in how long a time. It’s just not on their radar — nor is any tactic or technique for optimizing results. We only work with sellers who care, so it makes a huge difference to us.

The brokerage — not agent — we are most likely to lose business to has done an excellent job of promoting its long-standing reputation. For the most part the agents do nothing that we would consider exceptional, and their time on market and LP/SP ratios are horrible right now, but we can only penetrate that marketing veil if the seller is paying first-hand attention.

I had a surprise yesterday. The Arizona Republic column brings me a small number of deals, but they tend to be very interesting. We’re working one now, two listings and a purchase. One of the listings is in Sun City, a Del Webb original, unmolested, on the golf course. We listed it our way last Friday, because that’s what we do. Yesterday I was out there to deal with the sign and almost all of the flyers were gone. When our flyers seem to evaporate, it almost always means that the neighbors are interested — not in the house, but in us as listers. I’ll be interested to see if the sellers out there really are paying attention. The houses don’t sell for huge amounts, but if the sellers are willing to work our way, it might be worthwhile to pioneer a second niche out there.

Our timing Read more