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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Dirty Laundry (page 6 of 9)

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April 13, 2009

“Let’s just say that Jim and Dustin are going to be working on a secret project…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…and it’s called “Dining on your dime.”…

Eighty-two comments as I write this, and not one Active Rainier can enunciate the obvious: The emperor is naked.

My take, for what it’s worth: The new hires are charged with the duty of lining up yet another sucker to buy Active Rain. It could work, too. There is no better time to buy tech companies than when they’re going broke. Dandle ’em long enough and you can buy whatever value remains for pennies on the dollar. There won’t be much to pick over among the bones, but there comes a point in life when dinner is a daily dilemma.

Now if you feel an urge to post a snippy comment about how cruel this all is, take a moment to reflect that I told you exactly what was going on with Active Rain when everyone else was lying to you. The world works the way it works no matter how much you’d rather it did not. When Inman or Trulia or Active Rain buy up big-name real estate webloggers, what they’re actually buying is you.

Breathe deep. There’s a clue in the air. If you get lucky, you just might catch it…

April 8, 2009

The Inman Prayer: “Deliver us not into deliberation and tempt us not into leadership, for ass-licking for lucre is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever, amen…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You just can’t make this stuff up:

Inman News is launching a new feature: Real Estate Product Reviews.

Would you like to be part of a team of real estate professionals that reviews and rates new real estate technologies, tools and services?

We want to hear from you.

I’ll just bet you do…

I loved this bit of reptilian reciprocity:

Imagine if the digital/virtual book (Vook) knew at what point you stopped reading, and then starting sending you Tweets from characters in the story up until that point, or giving you a tease of what’s coming up next. I can riff a bunch of ideas off this but my head is going to explode!

Amazingly enough, this harshly critical review of vacuous vaporware comes from a vacuous vaporware vendor who has suffered equally harsh treatment from Inman “News” — call it quid pro lizard.

Our whole world is out of joint by now, so much has the word “supportive” come to mean “promotional.” Drew Meyers is a sweet, sweet man, but this article is nothing but vendor-pimping. The vendor might well deserve the accolades, but, if so, why bury the lead? The post is not about SEO nor about a well-optimized web site. It’s about the vendor who built that attestedly well-optimized site. Hiding that fact reeks, in my opinion.

And it wouldn’t do to forget the best little PR3 weblog in Texas. Agent Shortbus is not a whore, and don’t you dare say it is! It’s more like a big-hearted, big-haired, round-heeled gal who just happens to like a Prime Rib before and a Blue Agave Margarita after. What’s so bad about that?!?

Diogenes might as well be Cassandra, I do understand that. But we are too much at risk of becoming entirely enmired in bullshit, to the extent that we can’t even smell it any longer. When Inman News, the high temple of the vendorslut religion, can pretend to do product reviews — that seems like a good time to tune into Radio Cassandra.

We have this thing, and maybe none but few of us have understood from the first how unusual it is for real estate professionals to live Read more

April 2, 2009

Should Blogs Enjoy the Same First Amendment Rights as Traditional Press?

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

Aaron Krowne, Founder of the Mortgage Lender Implode-o-Meter, posted the following article yesterday.

New Hampshire Judge Orders ML-Implode To Divulge Identities of Anonymous Posters

Questions:

1)  Should blogs/consumer advocacy websites enjoy the same First Amendment protections as traditional press?

2)  Does Justice McHugh’s decision disturb you as much as it disturbs me?

3)  On the other hand, how is a company like The Mortgage Specialists  (innocent until proven otherwise) protected against an insider leaking confidential documents, the validity of which is yet to be substantiated?

I am a proponent of the ML-Implode-O-Meter and a believer in Aaron Krowne.  So I’m afraid I could be biased here.  However, if you share my opinion regarding the sanctity of the First Amendment:

a)  Aaron has created a few advocacy groups on Facebook so please look him up if interested.

b)  Here’s a list of volunteers helping Aaron.

Perhaps Aaron himself puts it best:

“If the order stands, a flood of similar lawsuits filed by corporations against ‘whistleblower’ and consumer advocacy web sites could appear across the country”

More negative coverage of “The Mortgage Specialists” can be found here.  I actually called them prior to publishing this article – fully expecting for the phones to be disconnected.  Instead, my call was taken on the first ring.  During our 2-minute conversation, the TMS employee told me that “all that had been taken care of”, it was a “compliance issue, not fraud”, and that the guilty parties were no longer with the company.

March 20, 2009

The Financial Post: “Aging self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Is this the end of America? Canada’s Financial Post:

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.

Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues, but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U.S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations Read more

March 16, 2009

“What do you mean, stop the party? We haven’t ripped off the new neighbors yet!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the fun devices in Part III of Atlas Shrugged is something author Ayn Rand called “the policy of the microsecond.” Despite the high-flown philosophical claims of the looters, their actual motivation was never anything other than “the expediency of the moment” — one absurd rationalization after the next, justifying theft and visiting the consequences of that theft upon its victims.

Just about a month ago, as a comical palliative for the housing mess, I wrote this as a joke:

[I]t would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

That’s the logic of the policy of the microsecond. We don’t want to stop stealing wealth from innocent people. We don’t want to amend our ways and do better going forward. We don’t want to undo the awful damage occasioned by centuries of accelerating criminal government. No. All we want to do is find a way to get through this crisis. We’ll worry about the crisis caused by this “solution” — the crisis of the microsecond after this one — later on.

So guess what happens? I might have been joking, but we live in a world beyond satire. From the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration should seriously consider granting resident status to foreigners who buy surplus houses in this country. This makes more sense than the president’s $275 billion housing bailout plan, which Americans greeted with a Bronx cheer.

The federal bailout forces taxpayers to subsidize overextended homeowners who bet on ever-rising house prices and used their abodes as ATMs, and it doesn’t get to the basic problem — the huge inventory of excess houses. We estimate that 2.4 million houses over and above normal working inventories are left over from the 1996-2005 housing bubble. That’s a lot, considering the long-term average annual construction of 1.5 million single- and multi-family units.

Excess inventory is the mortal enemy of house prices, which have already fallen 27% since the peak in early 2006. We predict another 14% drop through the end of 2010 if nothing is done to eliminate Read more

March 13, 2009

That’s the night the lights went out in Pike County Georgia

by

Free Market Cowgirl

Author website

lightswentoutpike

The Pike County Chamber of Commerce has decided not to host the annual Fourth of July fireworks this year because of the current state of the economy. You can read the whole story here: C.O.C. decides not to host July 4th event

No fireworks? No Celebrating our Independence? Are you kidding me?

There isn’t any doubt that times are hard. All we have to do is cut on the news, and gloom and doom is broadcast 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. Turn on the radio: Whenever they stop playing songs, the announcer is battering us with how bad things are, with how we’re living in fear and hopelessness. All we have to do is look at our neighbors and see them losing their homes to foreclosure. We all pray quietly that we won’t be next…

Next to lose our home. Next to lose our car. Next to lose our job. Next to lose a person that we love.

There is darkness everywhere.

That’s EXACTLY why we shouldn’t cancel the fireworks. That’s exactly why we need to celebrate our Nation’s Independence. That’s exactly why we need to go boldly into the night.

Fireworks. They are a reminder of a time when royalty tried to tax our people to death with an iron-fist from across the Atlantic. They are a reminder of the brave men and women who laid down their lives to fight for our Independence. They are a reminder of the men who signed their names on a piece of paper – even though many believed they were signing their own death warrants. They are a reminder of the soldiers that have died in days of old and in the most recent days of new. Some of those soldiers lived here in Pike County. Went to school here. Have families here. How can we dare insult their memory by not honoring their service?

Fireworks. They are reminders that we are a people that call ourselves Americans and we don’t all have to agree to get along. We come in many shapes. Many colors. Many sizes. We’re all unique. We’re all beautiful in our Read more

March 11, 2009

Ave atque vale: Bidding farewell to conversations past

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Notice a drag in the action lately? Have you been getting the database error a little too often? Time-outs? Memory overloads?

Everything associated with Bloodhound Realty runs on a dual-core Xeon box. All by itself, no shared users. We have the whole server to ourselves. Two processors, two big disk drives, gigahertz ’til it hurts.

And we’re maxing it out in peak hours.

BloodhoundBlog has thousands of RSS subscribers, and we serve our own feeds. In the long run I might have to bite the bullet and sign up for a third party feed service like everyone else.

But there is another big problem that I’m making an effort to cure today:

BloodhoundBlog gets hit with spam comments around 5,000 times a day. Almost all of these are caught by Akismet, but each one is a strain on the MySQL database — the very chokepoint that’s getting maxed out.

So effective now, I’ve cut off all comments for posts over two weeks old. I hate having to do this, because sometimes pure gold turns up in a comment on an older post — and our archives are ripe with gold in any case. But the spammers are looking for juice, and older posts are where the juice is to be found.

I hate having to do this, but swatting at flies only gets you so far. Eventually you have to rob them of their food supply.

My apologies. But: Let’s hope this speeds up the action on the live conversations.

March 6, 2009

Don’t miss Part II of Matt Carter’s gripping series on AR vs Move

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I didn’t want to let this pass without remarking on it:

The second part of Matt Carter’s gripping series on the abortive takeover of Active Rain by Move, Inc. is up today.

I thought AR’s lawsuit against Move was a joke from the first, and there is nothing in the text to lead me to change my views.

But, man! The drama of it all! Matt Carter has the skeleton of a good book, a cautionary tale about what happens when the wide-eyed world of Web 2.0 comes up against a crew of grizzled Wall Street-trained veterans. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.

Here’s the moral, if you’re the skip-ahead kind of reader: Verbal agreements are not worth the paper they’re printed on.

Fascinating reading, both parts. Well worth your time.

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March 3, 2009

Tell Todd Carpenter to stand down. “The Social Media Marketing Institute” is how the RE.net will be sold to the NAR.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As Monsignor Cecil used to say: Oh, my sweet, suffering Jesus… And in echoing that exhortation, I am doing something none of these “experts” can do in return: Giving them a link from a PR5 weblog.

I would eviscerate the writing style on the web site, but it’s too painful to look at. Okay, just a taste, but you asked for it:

The designation course is the first of its type with relevant content-rich material and cutting edge techniques utilized by these Social Media pioneers.

They left out all the relevant content-poor material, along with the stuff that was content-rich but irrelevant, thus to leave more time for utilizing cutting edge techniques.

Evidently commas are not on the cutting edge, but they wouldn’t help, anyway. As we have discussed before, “Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.” People who write badly think badly. You permit them to enter your mind at your own risk.

I don’t mind these self-made mediocrities — all of them, not just this crew — chasing people away from here. It works to our benefit: We end up talking only to people who can keep up with us, a boon for everyone. But I can only foresee two futures for a stunt like this:

First, they will milk the punters with a second-rate curriculum. This by itself is hardly rare.

And, second, they will sell this lipstick-slathered pig to the NAR, where it will ossify — which is not to imply that it is, even at present, timely or relevant — or worthwhile. Given some of the people involved — and the recommendation to buy a Kindle! — I would expect the opposite.

But disappointing people don’t disappoint us — when we have our minds properly inverted. Consider this, from the “Affiliate Links” section:

In some cases, we have also negotiated a “commission” to SMMI as well.

Yours is not to ponder oughts, yours is to be sold and bought.

Drop me a line when you get sick of being the entree at the Feast of the Vendorsluts.

February 27, 2009

Dual Agency Debated Outside of the Echo Chamber

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Google News plopped a link to a Blog post on SFGate.com (The San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site) about dual agency in front of me today.

It’s always interesting to see a discussion about what Greg calls “…the insane way we compensate buyer’s agents in the residential real estate market” in the MSM, even if the arc of the dialog is predictable (“Agents are whores and criminals!”, “No we’re not”, “The traditional Real Estate model is dead!”, “No it isn’t!”, ad nauseum)

Discussions in the Real Estate blogosphere on this topic have a certain navel-gazing quality to them. That is not the case when regular people, many of whom have been involved in a recent transaction have their say. My favorite comment from the thread:

No conflict here. Just get the highest price for a seller and the lowest for the buyer at the same time. This is great!

The way the Realtors, some of whom identify themselves and some of whom just embarrass themselves by shilling for the status quo in such an obvious manner that their identity is transparent, jump all over these discussions just adds fuel to the fire.

The Realtors doth protest too much, methinks.

February 27, 2009

How does a success like REBarCamp avoid the shoe pinch of growing pains?

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Rob Hahn is at it again. He likes to instigate, but since he’s so charming, I fall for it. However, unlike our Fred v Gene cage fight, this time I’m serious.

Rob thinks a clearinghouse for national sponsorships for Real Estate Bar Camps is a fine idea, and suggests BHG, or Trulia could step up to the plate.

I don’t think it should become the organizer, or start putting rules and such into place (except the obvious unavoidable ones, like “don’t run off with the money”). But it would be helpful for those of us interested in sponsoring REBC’s.

I vote eek.

I like the idea of BarCamp- loose, free, perfect fit for my brain. And I like that it’s organized by passionate people. I have years of volunteer experience under my belt- big, national organizations, and little local organizations. I can appreciate and respect the time and talent that goes into creating a successful event. My concern with Rob’s suggestion is the fact that sponsors do get preferential treatment. Often this type of arrangement is benign, as in local businesses contribute $20.00 worth of coupons to help fill out a PTO raffle, but we are not talking about that. Although, as an aside, if REBC organizers are not looking at the local businesses- local inspectors, local lenders, local photographers as participants (and maybe they do?) then they might be missing some extraordinary partnering possibilities. Looking at the REBarCamp/Seattle site, it’s all national sponsors. Getting local companies involved would truly be in the BarCamp philosophy, wouldn’t it?

Back to the point. Here’s the thing: Corporations don’t give to organizations, or un-organizations, out of the kindness of their hearts. They just don’t. They give because they expect something in return. Always. Their name here or there, their “presentation”, their branded junk, their “let us help you use our product” panel. BarCamps are free flowing and loose, the sponsor is twittering away with us, and golly darn-it, they are super nice! They bought us drinks at that other wingding- don’t you remember? What can it hurt if they become the go-to guys?

It hurts because you can’t speak out Read more

February 26, 2009

We know sheep will follow a Judas goat to their slaughter, as will cattle. Now the NAR is testing the idea on lemmings…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter becomes one with the Borg and the charming little lemmings elbow each other out of the way to dive off the cliff head first.

One of two things will happen: Todd will discover he’s made a terrible mistake and will quit this job with dispatch — I hope very loudly. Or: Todd will deliver us to our slaughter.

Anyone who expects anything other than evil from the National Association of Realtors has either not been paying attention, or, much worse, embraces that evil.

In any case, this is not something to be celebrated, not even to affect to be “nice” in chorus with the rest of the lemmings.

The NAR may want to infest our world in order to destroy it. More likely, they want to take it over.

What they certainly do not want is to approach the public as we do — openly, authentically, concealing nothing. The entire edifice of residential real estate is founded on secrets and lies, and, as long as it is, the NAR will be nothing but a cesspit of tyrannical motives and vendorslut con games.

And — more is the pity — Todd Carpenter cannot take their money without being their shill and their Judas goat — or worse.

I’m saddened by this, because of all the gutless big-name real estate webloggers, Todd has more guts than most. But nothing good for us will come of this, and the only good that can come of it for Todd is for him to escape with his scruples intact as quickly as he can.

February 19, 2009

Max vs. The 1000-Pound Gorilla

by

Free Market Cowgirl

Author website

Meet Max. He’s the cute little mascot for Homegain.com

Meet The 1000-Pound Gorilla (Hint: It ain’t really move.com Those are really fists, codename: Thunder and Lightning)

This is Max telling me about the advantages of Homegain.com over on my Active Rain blog.

(about the fourth comment down: Louis Cammarosano)

This is a link to the winner of the competition.

His account was suspended for violation of AR’s Terms of Service (advertising in the comments of another blogger).

Yeah right. Looks like somebody went a bit Ape Sh*t over a major competitor talking to a friend (me) about the value of their company on my blog.

February 9, 2009

Some ugly questions about that $15,000 home-buyers tax credit…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I let the hoopla over the $15,000 tax credit for home-buyers of all incomes slide last week. There’s way too much sick-making news coming out of Washington right now, and, somehow, Republicans dancing in triumph because they had managed to squeeze out a little theft for the rich — and for the NAR — was more than I wanted to try to digest.

Actually, my pet bette noir last week was the ridiculous idea of a compulsory 4% mortgage rate. What this economy really needs is a mandatory 720 FICO score!

Pinocchio — the NAR — is a vampire, a dead thing that feeds on the living, we all know that. But I was writing about that $15,000 gift from the taxpayers to the NAR this morning, and some ugly question came to me.

For one thing, this is a direct transfer of funds from the Federal budget to the housing industry. Normally I love the idea of starving the government, but the net effect of this tax credit is that we will artificially buttress home prices, delaying but not avoiding the ultimate price decline that we have to go through to achieve a true recovery.

Am I wrong? I read the tax credit as being a net reduction in taxes paid. If you owe $15,000 in taxes, but if you bought a primary residence, you pay no taxes.

I can’t see lenders resisting a bait like that. They will find a way to lend you the dough now, and you pay it off over the next 12 — or 24 or 36 or 360 — months. Your $15,000 can pay for up to 10% of the purchase price of the home, and your net tax liability will be reduced by $15,000 next April. If you have another $15,000 in cash — set aside for taxes, perhaps? — you’ve got an 80/20 loan on a $150,000 home with no PMI.

Let’s go once better: $15,000 down on an FHA loan gets you to a $428,571 purchase price — in excess of the jumbo limits in Phoenix. Have you been craving that $400K house up the block. It Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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