BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 24 of 43)

August 26, 2007

“Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves—all this on a daily basis—they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Damn straight. And it is pure agony to get a horse shod, too.

The headline is quoted from a luddite’s lament in The Age — in Melbourne, Australia. Technology threatens the jobs of the farriers of our age, newspaper reporters, and there is nothing for it but to weep incessantly from — literally — halfway around the globe.

Suck it in, suck it up and move it on down the road. Such horses as there are needing shoes are shod, and — to the exact extent that anyone at all is interested — school board meetings are being overseen and documented. How much education do you have to have in order to fail persistently to understand that broadcasting was a low-tech economic compromise? In the world of narrowcasting, everyone gets exactly what he wants, nothing that he doesn’t, and no one is obliged to pay for school board notes in order to see the horse-racing results.

Reporters have always been demagogues in debate, masters at deploying the logical fallacies they never learned in school. Even now, when they want to scare their vanishing audiences with the bogeymen of the internet, they pick the weakest of straw men to pick on. In the case of the article I’m citing, the designated victim is Wikipedia, which, because it lacks editors, could at any moment deceive you into believing that Wednesday is a vegetable.

Do you want to see the future of professional journalism? My pet example is John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His “Venture Blog” is a beat blog: He covers venture-capital-funded start-ups as his beat and as the exclusive focus of his weblog. His work is also printed in the newspaper, but that’s anticlimactic — hours or even days late. Cook is a blogger who happens to work for a newspaper.

It seem unlikely to me that anyone is going to pay for weblogged coverage of school board meetings, but weblogging is the future of school board reporting. Content producers who want to get paid for their efforts will have to expend those efforts on content people are willing to pay for. Just about a century Read more

August 24, 2007

Oh, good grief, not another one! “Stealth” real estate start-up is long on promises, short on details

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If Groucho Marx were to come back to us as a hen, aghast but still sardonic, what would he (she?) do? Peck around in the dirt, no doubt.

Comes next a “stealth” start-up called roost.com, which promises “to fundamentally change how customers find & move into their next home.”

When words mean almost anything they mean almost nothing, but “fundamentally” ought to mean a lot. For this promise to come true, I’m thinking people will need to find their homes by divination and move into them by teleportation. Realty may yet disappoint.

But: Mortgage woes be damned, the world does seem to be crawling with doofuses with dough. If you’re facing foreclosure, come up with a scam by which millions of insomniacs will search for homes they can’t afford in towns they don’t live in while exposing themselves — no, not to children — nor even to aghast, sardonic hens — but to thousands of pay-per-impression ads. Where before you were a deadbeat, 90+ days late, now you can be a Web 2.0 real estate entrepreneur, a stylish flash in an already over-crowded pan.

Goofy logo? Check. Jaw-dropping offices? Check. Radical chic media cachet? Check. The only thing missing from the “real estate space” is practical experience selling houses…

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August 9, 2007

“They are conniving and con artists” – Redfin launches Southern California Sweet Digs

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

And for the record, Redfin, the title was a quote taken from one of your Southern California Forum posters, and it was directed at me, or rather my ilk. I started writing this with every intention of giving you the publicity you asked for, the “don’t promote yourself, let others do it, and it will become viral” marketing which has been your hallmark. I changed my mind.

This morning Redfin issued a press release announcing expansion of the “Online Magazine Formerly Known As”, well, something else.

SEATTLE — August 9, 2007: Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today launched its online real estate magazine, “Sweet Digs,” for Southern California. Home-buyers in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego neighborhoods can read daily, local real estate market information via the Sweet Digs blog or email newsletter.

The new Southern California Sweet Digs will offer as many as 40 candid, saucy and analytical write-ups each week of recent sales, price reductions, open houses and real estate trends in local areas, including Beverly Hills, Irvine, Newport Beach, Ocean Beach and Westwood. Southern California already boasts some of the top real estate blogs, and Sweet Digs complements them with its hyper-local, data-driven format written by real estate fanatics, not agents.

We are talking about real estate fanatics here, as in, people marked by extreme enthusiasm for real estate, not agents, since we all know real estate agents have little interest in real estate. Fanatics, as in people being paid to show extreme enthusiasm for that for which they were paid. One of my first jobs was at Bob’s Big Boy (during the Steel Age). I was fanatical about the Big Boy Combo, but this was in large part due to the fact that the Big Boy cut my paycheck.

Okay, in all fairness, I know what you were trying to say. The newsletter-blog thingy will be written by non-industry professionals. I get that, and I can see an appeal. And, in the name of fairness, I wouldn’t enlist contributors to my Blog who were Redfin disciples.

Sweet Digs launched December 2006 in Seattle and February 2007 in San Francisco to provide Read more

August 8, 2007

Sun Microsystems draws free pictures of the twenty-first century; to be shown to barbarians to illustrate the path to relevance

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s the opposite of an antiquated product in a useless form-factor being hoarded behind a paywall? Sun Microsystems has developed the world’s fastest microprocessor — and is making all of the design details available by Open Source:

To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, “Niagara 2” – named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community – whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

The economics of walls and safes and locks and chains is based in fear, hostility, suspicion, anger and doubt. Resources are presumed to be scarce, so if I don’t hoard them with an ugly vigilance, I’ll starve.

The economics of abundance is built on the opposite premises: Openness, candor, an effortless joy that flowers into pure splendor: The only true economic resource is human intelligence, a resource infinite in potential. By sharing with you everything I know, I will enrich us both: You will have the wealth I have created so far, and I will have the wealth you will create from that starting point.

These startling innovations are as new as Socrates, at least, so people can be forgiven for not having learned them after twenty-five centuries’ time. But there are two unhappy consequences to the economics of hoarding. The first is the tax on human dignity that comes from wresting treasure away with a thief’s cunning, hiding it and cowering over it, like the baubles in a raven’s nest, with a stingy, guarded greed. But the second is the vast riches that are foregone by this idea of wealth as trinkets to be withheld, rather than as ideas to be shared and cultivated.

We come back to Cain and Abel. Abel’s wealth is the raven’s wealth, gems and metals, portable and enduring but finite in quantity. Cain’s wealth is the fruit of Read more

August 7, 2007

Looking for a traditional listing agent when Redfin.com lets you down? 60 Minutes has got that covered, too!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Beau Betts in Seattle writing about the 60 Minutes commercial for Redfin.com:

60 Minutes also interviewed Deborah Arends from Re/Max and represented her as having the “old school” real estate mentality and didn’t really portray her in the most positive light.

Well, I just started laughing when I was browsing the mls just now looking for home for a client of mine and saw a house that I think could possibly be a good candidate for them. One thing that I noticed was that the home had been on the market for almost 100 days. Here’s the amusing part, the home was originally listed by Redfin back in late April and they just lost the listing to none other than Deborah Arends.

Arends took a beating by proxy for the rest of us. It’s good to see her getting a bit of her own back.

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August 7, 2007

New York Times discovers Earth: “Mr. Sulzberger, tear down that wall!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Says the New York Post, the New York Times is about to remove the paywall that conceals from public awareness its once-famous (even if smarmy and tendentious) op-ed columnists:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives – including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.

The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis would only say in an e-mailed statement, “We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com.”

While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.

I’m told there is something like this in real estate — news of dubious value jealously hoarded behind a paywall — but, since I don’t pay for ordinary information, I can’t say for sure.

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August 2, 2007

How do you define a neighborhood? You don’t. How do you obtain neighborhood expertise? Go to neighborhood expert.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment, but I’m pulling them out because it’s an interesting topic: How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise?

What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build.

The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

That’s what I said. This is me when Zillow 6 was released:

What does all this have to do with Zillow.com?

I think they’ve made a mistake in their approach to community building, a mistake that will prevent a true community from emerging from all their efforts.

As an example, what is a neighborhood? It’s not what Zillow says it is, and it’s not what some city council says it is. A neighborhood is what the neighbors say it is, and, as in my North Central Phoenix neighborhood, neighbors can differ about what the neighborhood really is.

So how should Zillow define the neighborhoods it hopes end-users will create content around?

It shouldn’t. It should let the users define the neighborhoods, and if there are different interpretations of what the neighborhood is, it should allow the proponents of those different ideas to create multiple competing neighborhood descriptions. When one starts to draw all the attention and the other fades away, Zillow can snuff the loser. Until then, the neighborhood advocates will have an investment in creating content for Zillow, and an avid interest in getting their friends to the site to show off what they have created.

In other words, they will have created a virtual analogue of their neighborhood as a means of defining and describing it. This is an atom-sized on-line community, an acorn from Read more

August 2, 2007

Inman Connect Grand Poobahthon: Stinton: ‘Freedom stinks worse than banks in real estate’; Singer: ‘The only trouble with the MLS is the MLS — and the agents’; Barton: ‘I have visions of gesticulating green-grocers, so that must be good for real estate’

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I can’t think of any argument against oral presentations better than the stuff that comes out of the mouths of the people making them.

From InmanBlog, NAR CEO Dale Stinton says:

“If there ever was a case study for banks staying out of real estate it’s the subprime market.” He also said that the subprime situation is an example of the “inevitability of an open society,” “of going too far, too fast,” and “of liquidity in the marketplaces.”

See, it was the lenders who caused these problems, not the sacrosanct tax giveaways to homeowners and real estate investors. And god spare us all from an “an open society” (that is to say, not a police state) and “liquidity in the marketplaces” (money, that is). I’m thinking Stinton had to borrow extra feet from Glenn Kelman to put in his mouth.

Joel Singer, “president of real estate business services for the California Association of Realtors,” was not to be outdone:

“The brokerage industry to a large degree has ceded too much power to the agents. Once you have entrenched power … more importantly, once you have entrenched economic power — the economics are that the MLSs actually have more funding than the organized real estate itself — it becomes very difficult to overcome that.”

I think that says that the obstacle to MLS reform is posed by the MLS systems themselves, which leads me to expect a radical legislative intervention. If you’re a real estate licensee but not an brokerage owner or designated broker, hide your wallet.

But: The prize would seem to go to Zillow.com founder Rich Barton, who summoned forth this vision:

“I see an old-style marketplace formed, a city market like Pike Place Market. I actually dug up an old photo — Pike Place Market at the turn of the last century. People were gesticulating. People were buying things. People were gossiping. Negotiations were happening. Big billboards were advertising things above the marketplace. That’s the picture I have in my head.”

I think this is meant to be poetry — except poetry rhymes, scans and makes sense.

I’m sure Stinton is not an actual Commissar, despite his derision of Read more

August 1, 2007

Quick notes on Inman’s Bloggers Connect

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m juggling eggs in negotiations on between $0 and $2.2 million in new listings, but I’ve been following Inman’s Bloggers Connect off and on by RSS feed and email.

Paul Chaney at the Blogging Systems Group Blog was going great guns this morning, but I think maybe his laptop battery died. His summaries of this morning’s events are very good, though.

Kris Berg emailed that Teri Lussier and I did not win the Project Blogger contest, but I would have been stunned if we had. If you’re going into a competition with the intention of doing everything your own damn way, your only chance of winning is if the judging is based on how well you do things your own damn way. In that regard, BloodhoundBlog should win the Inman Innovator award — but I won’t be stunned if we don’t. Doing things your own damn way is its own damn reward, after all.

Mail from Teri:

Well…
 
My apologies to Cathy and her indignant cats, and I hope I didn’t let you down. OTOH, I’m quite pleased with my blog.
 
I had an interesting comment on TBR last night that made me think that I must be doing something right with it. And this reader is a Daytonian, and not in real estate, and has little patience for Realtors.
 
I don’t know if I would have changed anything to do it again… Although. If I had put an idiot widget and a few goofy graphics in occasionally to bust up the dreaded “wall of text”, I suppose Cathy’s cats would be well fed tonight. But since I really hate those, I’d probably end up hating TBR as well.  ;)
 
I’ve enjoyed the journey enormously!

Indeed. Likewise. And that “Well…” is just too perfect. Eudora Welty lives on at The Brick Ranch.

Inman Blog reports that Redfin.com’s Glenn Kelman claims that I am sending them business:

“Greg has long been my antagonist, and of course he is our best friend,” Kelman said. “Everytime he writes about us, he brings us business.”

I find that difficult to believe, but Kelman also said, of 60 Minutes Reporter Lesley Stahl:

“She kept saying I was full of s__t.”

This I find Read more

August 1, 2007

Someday soon, Coldwell Banker agents won’t even have to leave home to ignore hyper-local social media reporting tools

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As the first little bit of news to come out of Inman Connect (I ignored all the spam I got last week), Coldwell Banker announces that it is coming up with its very own hyper-local rate-a-rock social media web site. Called SpotIt, the technology is being developed with OnBoard, a hyper-local real estate data aggregator. Presumably, all the other no-sparrow-shall-fall web sites haven’t failed miserably enough.

Given that Coldwell Banker agents are already not populating neighborhood databases on Trulia.com, Zillow.com, StreetAdvisor.com (Breaking news: Now StreetAdvisor sucks even less!), etc., it makes complete sense to build an in-house system that they can ignore without even leaving the office intranet.

(Just as a side note for the retards bright sparks building this crap: A zip code is enormous and is often very diverse in demographic characteristics. Real estate marketing should be designed to appeal to those people who are qualified to buy and sell real estate. Virtually every spot on the map in Phoenix, at least, looks like a slum in a zip-code-sized demographic. If you can’t work in carrier routes — at a maximum — go home.)

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July 22, 2007

Top Buyer Agents Unite To Put Themselves Out of Business – Russell Shaw Tries to Save Them

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

The missing word in the title above is, “completely”. Top Buyer Agents Unite to Put Themselves Completely Out of Business. Also, based on my schedule boardwalk-coastal-wetland_AJM5A2and the (so far, at least) almost total unwillingness of Top Buyer Agents to even listen to this vital message, there may not be much reason to keep saying it. These Top Buyer Agents don’t seem to understand that they are not like most buyer agents. They are quite different. These Top Buyer Agents take their duties to their clients so seriously that they actually DO put the client’s interests above their own. Every time, in every way. These Top Buyer Agents have figured out that the current system of the listing agent paying them, with the seller’s money (of all possible pay plans in the universe) isn’t the most optimum pay plan possible.

But it IS a pay plan. You do get paid. Your buyers do get real representation.

In many well written, thoughtful and sincere posts here on BloodhoundBlog there has been a strong case made for divorcing the buyer agent commissions completely from the seller and the listing agent. Most of the points made are valid. There has been even more to think about in the back and forth in the comments section of those posts. Some very bright people saying some very bright things.

I won’t try to appeal to your self interests here, but to your interest in caring for your future clients. The current “system” offers you the best opportunity you will ever have to help the most people with your counsel. Should the commissions become “divorced” (and yes, this could happen due to some decision in a federal court room or even the Supreme Court) you will be out of business. O – U – T, out. The perfect transaction (each side having splendid and fabulous representation) will occur so rarely that anyone who worked on bringing it about will have lots of time to reflect on how great it could have been. The funny part is that you already know what will bring about your demise. It has been commented on Read more

July 20, 2007

Prometheus unbound: Books are dead, but ideas are forevermore unchained from the tyranny and avarice of atoms

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth Godin:

Five hundred year old technology (books) is just too slow for the Net. The act of printing, storing and shipping millions of books takes too long for a secret to ever be in a book again.

More.

Books are souvenirs. No one is going to read Potter online, even if it’s free. Holding and owning the book, remembering when and how you got it… that’s what you’re paying for. Books are great at holding memories. They’re lousy at keeping secrets.

Someone recommended a book to me yesterday, and it was fun for me to watch my own revulsion at the idea. I grew up in the thrall of books, literally a worshipper.

More interesting than Harry Potter is the phenomenon of The Cult of the Amateur, whereby Ludditism becomes a Shaker cult, doomed not by the book’s (and the movement’s) effete idiocy but by its inability to engender new acolytes. Even so, the book should prove especially popular on library shelves and remainder racks, where the most passionate book worshippers are to be found.

In the planning stages for Real Estate Weblogging 101, I made an effort to find ways of connecting electronic publishing to paper publishing. But then I had an epiphany: The work of the mind is documented on the nets. Publishers desperately cling to the idea of holding ideas for ransom by chaining them to atoms, but the Djinn is already out of the bottle — to call to mind another cult desperately clinging to the past. Prometheus has broken his chains — to recall our own future-loving creed — and the gift of mind surges forth in pandemic pandemonium.

On the nets, a new idea is published instantaneously across the globe. It is accessible to billions, if they seek it, at a negligible carrying cost. It can be linked to every discoverable supporting and countervailing resource and vetted by the intense scrutiny of thousands of hypercritical experts. Net-based “books” are revisable and extensible at will, with no delay and no lingering inventories of obsolete stock.

Shed a tear at graveside, if you will, but facts are facts: Books are a dead letter.

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July 19, 2007

In Defense of Buyers’ Agents

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

This came into the comments section of this post yesterday, from Joshua Ferris:

What type of services do you expect a buyer’s agent to offer in order to create a “real value”?

Thank you, Joshua, for the set up! Timing couldn’t be better; there seems to be a confluence of events. Redfin has apparently duped a new round of investors (“Honest! It’s the last time I’ll ever need funding!” is the fourth great lie); Redfin is capitalizing on what seems to be an emerging anti-realtor trend; and I had more conversations with local realtors yesterday who are getting “I’ll only deal with the listing agent!” sign calls.

I wondered if there was anything that was helping drive it, so I just Googled “How to buy a house” and found this site:

“Real Estate Agent” Is Just Another Name For “Salesperson”
Don’t ever lose sight of that fact. Their only mission is to sell, sell, sell to YOU. Don’t ever let on that you are in a desperate situation, or that you need to sell a house fast to pay for emergency bills, or that you are in a desperate crunch to buy this house now, because you are being transferred into town this week. It’s simply none of their business and as far as they are concerned, you are not in a rush to buy a house.

Excellent. What good could possibly come from telling your agent how quickly you need to buy or sell?

HouseBuyingTips.com Buyers Warning
One of the biggest mistakes many home buyers make is assuming that their “buyers agent” is working for them. They could not be more wrong. Also, never let a real estate agent choose your attorney. You must choose your own attorney, not one with a cushy relationship to the salesperson who is trying to sell you a home.

Punctuation is oversold, and non sequiturs simply don’t deserve that negative reputation…

If you are buying a house instead of selling a house, you really don’t need a real estate agent.

When the Carnival of Praetorian Cranks Posing as Something They’re Not is launched, this guy — Jeff Ostroff — will win every week. He’s apparently Read more

July 19, 2007

Zillow.com’s wacky no-one-owns-a-wiki policy promotes no one’s name, brand or image — except its own

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Drew Meyers from Zillow commenting on a post last week:

Please note the real estate guide (which is a wiki) is VERY different than a blog. Since wikis are collaborative, no one person “owns” any of the content.

That turns out to be not quite true.

Zillow Blog featured two of my wiki contributions yesterday. Both had been clobbered, if that’s the past tense of collaboration. No mention of me in the idyllic land of wiki, even though both ideas are very good — and no one at Zillow came up with them. Even so, guess who was promoted in the wacky world of no-one-owns-a-wiki.

Oh, yes, Zillow.com happily promotes itself on the sweat of my labor. What genius! Who ever thought of such things? That Zillow, boy howdy!, you gotta get up purty damn early…

Nice. They stand on the shoulders of giants. They just bury them in dirt so it looks like a hilltop. To top it all off, guess who’s going to profit from the inbound links?

Here are the unmolested — er, un-wiki-perfected — original articles, if that matters:

I think this is a good example of how Zillow’s hoped for social networking scheme is self-defeating. It’s understandable that they would want to keep their pseudo-encyclopedia free of spamvertising. This they could achieve simply by accepting or rejecting submissions. But my only incentive for coming up with and sharing good real estate ideas is to promote my own name, brand and image. Why would I do that if I know that my hard work is going to be expropriated?

This is just dumb on Zillow’s part. I’ll have a lot more ideas. But I won’t be sharing them with Zillow.com and it’s sticky-fingered wiki. I think Wikipedia is an amazing accomplishment, but I don’t care what Jimbo Wales thinks a wiki should be like over there. I don’t write for Read more

July 18, 2007

Make no mistake, without the thoughtful, dispassionate accuracy of professional journalists, the world itself would crumble

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From VentureBeat:

For this, Redfin has been banned [false] from operating in Oregon [false], New Jersey [false] and now Tennessee [false]. Additionally, the site has been fined by the National Association of Realtors [false], which owns the Multiple Listing Service [false], a national database [false] of home listings.

That’s two sentences, seven errors of fact.

Redfin can operate all it wants in Oregon, New Jersey and Tennessee. Those states ban commission rebates, which is vicious and wrong, but that doesn’t forbid Redfin from working there. In general, you will not find Redfin in any market where homes are affordable, because its cost-structure can only work — if it can work at all — on high-priced homes.

The second sentence is so rife with errors, I’m not going to bother trying to fix it. If you want to know what really happened, it’s here: Defending Redfin: Sweet Digs weblog buried by inane MLS rules.

Nevertheless, I am so glad that there are fearless guardians of truth willing to take money for this level of ineptitude. It would be an awful curse if we had to depend for news on people who care about facts and are actually paying attention.

Jeesh!

So as not to be unrelentingly negative: Newspapers got some bad news this morning, but for-pay journalism is not dead. But if journalists hope to portray themselves as “trusted professionals,” they need to catch a clue. The audience in the aggregate may net out dumb enough to buy crap like this, but the audience in particular contains individuals who know a lot more than you do about whatever you happen to be writing about. In the past those people were silenced by circumstance. Now each one of them can stand at the narrow end of an international megaphone. Not coincidentally, the best of the for-pay journalists are becoming webloggers, like John Cook, who broke this story and who managed to get it right in the first place.

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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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