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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 7 of 43)

December 11, 2008

Colloquial Warming

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

It is my contention that a man has the right to drop an F-bomb in the privacy of his own Bluetooth as long as it is not: sexually suggestive or within 50 yards of an elementary school; in a restaurant within earshot of my wife before coffee and dessert have been served; or, if the suicide F-bomber himself is the Governor of an actual constitutional (not emotional) state and his cell phone has a federal wiretap warrant included in his original Friends and Family package. These are just a few of my personal demilitarized zones, mind you, and shouldn’t be assigned any politically incorrect weight other than already simply stated. No more, and certainly no less, please.

The emails and phone calls began flooding in shortly after the following career shattering announcement hit the national news wires early Tuesday morning: Ill Governor Blago Peddles Senate Seat For Mucho Dinero.  The first to ring me up was fellow midwest blogging Ambassador Chris Lengquist from BBQ Capital in KC who cut straight to the chase and bluntly asked, “Mr. Petro, are you now, or have you ever been, ‘Candidate Number Five’?”

“(Bleep) no,” I replied into my headset as I shredded my 2005, 6 and 7 tax returns. “And if I (bleeping) was, I wouldn’t admit it over a (bleeping) cell phone,” swallowing my SIM card sideways.

“Then you didn’t try to broker President-elect Obama’s vacant Illinois Senate seat to the highest bidder?”

“(Bleep) no,” said I, once again, while simultaneously jiggling loose a paper jam with my toe, slipping the Rolex off my wrist and into a carved-out hardback copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations, and formatting the hard drive of my laptop.  “I can’t even broker a furnished, junior one-bedroom in this heinous market much less a vacant seat of a junior Senator I’ve only met a handful of times…if at all….or ever…allegedly. Besides, downstate Illinois is not in my farming area. I’m a Chicago boy, for crissakes, not (bleeping) Deep Throat,” choking (and doth protesting too much, I suppose).

“So then, you are not trying to ‘parachute’ yourself into the vacant golden chair coveted by Read more

December 7, 2008

Death, Taxes and Real Estate 3.0

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

What do death, taxes and real estate all have in common?

Technology.

I’ve blogged on several occasions about Real Estate Web 2.0 and my belief that in the myriad of solutions that have been developed, deployed and adopted, there has yet to be a “real estate agent killer” app.

Not long ago, innovators wanted to develop technology solutions that unleashed the knowledge within the MLS – that is where the perceived value of the real estate transaction was hidden.  Enhanced property search and data analytics was the way to break the current commission based business model, drive down the cost of the transaction and essentially eliminate the middleman – the agent and/or broker.

I was often confused when I read comparisons between the real estate industry and the travel industry.  Again, technology innovators wanted to do to the real estate business what Expedia, Orbitz or Hotwire have done to the travel industry – put the consumer in the driver’s seat and eliminate the middleman – the travel agent.

Not to belittle the travel agent, but clearly much has been learned about the real estate transaction process to determine that real estate is not like the travel industry.  Unlocking the MLS and aggregating data alone does not address the complexity of the real estate transaction, nor does enhanced search engines that exploit mapping technologies.

Real estate is a knowledge-based business.  In creating true innovation, my question is why aren’t technology innovators drawing parallels to other professions that are knowledge-based?    I can’t help to think that there can be a significant disconnect between our current business model, i.e our compensation, and the knowledge and expertise that experienced agents have developed over time.

To better understand the disconnect is to understand how the Pareto principle applies to a real estate transaction.  Could a knowledge management solution address 80% of the process-related issues to buying and selling real estate, leaving the 20% of the really tough, unexpected issues and problems to be addressed and managed by a licensed real estate professional?

I have my business degree in accounting – I never practiced accounting, however, when it comes to tax time, I feel obligated Read more

December 4, 2008

Rustling up some Frontier Spirit in the old midwest

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

From The Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page: America Needs Its Frontier Spirit. Daniel Henninger spells it out. And quite nicely, I might add. An excerpt:

The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation — from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.

By “we” I mean the policy makers in Washington who will write the new rules of finance, our stunned bankers and businessmen, and the average Joes of Main Street who with reason have lost confidence. If all lose faith at once in the American idea of risk, refinding it when the recession ends may prove difficult.

This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier “fall lines”: the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.

Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, “old Europe.” “Here is a new product,” Turner wrote, “that is American.”

“From the conditions of frontier life,” Turner believed, “came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.” Read more

December 4, 2008

Stirred but not Shaken

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

There’s probably no pressing need to own up to this right now but I’m isolating in front of my laptop at 3 AM and anything but Facebook and internet Texas Hold ’em seems like a heart healthy idea. So I peck away into my imagination. There’s a dull pang of ungratefulness sticking in my side this holiday season. Wait… better make that a thorn. No, a twinge. A twinge of Fate. (Or should that be a twist?) A twist of Fate. No, that’s Dylan. Man, all the really good sayings are already taken. Anyway, here’s what I’m copping to; my short, snapped-off end of the turkey wishbone:

As a kid, I never daydreamed about growing up to be {whisper}… a Realtor. There, I said it—almost out loud. Scurrying about my parents’ postage stamp backyard from bush to tree and back again dressed in full army combat uniform, cowboy boots, football helmet, with Secret Agent Man attache case tucked safely away under the old National Geographics (and pictures of half-naked female Aborigines) in the work shed, I was always a little whimsical about which distant star I might hook my future prospects on to. I didn’t start daydreaming about growing up to be a Realtor until I’d already been in the Insurance business for 15 years and one dark day discovered myself scurrying about my own postage stamp backyard as a salesman with almost nothing tucked away except some nickel and dime house equity and no naked ladies of any kind to be found. And an insurance salesman, no less. A life insurance salesman…(I think I’ll stop there.)

I wanted a career where I could ditch the suit and wear boots everyday if I cared to. And shave my already mostly bald head. And stay at home whenever I pleased. And never have to say “God forbid” unless I really meant it. It pretty much boiled down to those few requirements plus, of course, the potential to make some decent dough and drive a Mercedes. And when choosing a path to comfortable living based on such thin orders, symptoms like Read more

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

November 27, 2008

The Thanksgiving Day scenius at BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier and Eric Blackwell get up early in a time zone two hours earlier than mine. Cheryl Johnson lives an hour later than me, but I don’t think she ever sleeps. Anyway, this morning I woke up to Teri, Eric and Cheryl gnawing on a bunch of insanely great ideas by email.

That’s a scenius, y’all: Smart, focused people concentrating on well-understood problems, looking for innovative solutions.

I chipped in a little here and a little there, and then, just like that, we landed on a brand new way of thinking about community building with hyper-local weblogs.

My piece of the puzzle was new software, but what we’re doing is not a tool but a praxis, a working procedure. As a consequence, I’m not going to teach this until BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ll show you how to use your weblog to make better connections with other local — non-real estate — blogs, even as you both improve your SEO and maximize the SEO benefits of weblogging. This is killer stuff, literally the hammer-tap in just the right spot, a cornucopia of benefits for a minimal effort.

But: It involves theory, preparation and a certain amount of software hacking, so we’re going to do it when we can do it all together, side-by-side and step-by-step in Phoenix.

I know money is tight. Pinch your pennies and bring them to Phoenix. We’re going to make it worth your while…

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November 25, 2008

What’s Mu? Pulling unforeseen results out of BloodhoundBlog.net

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We launched BloodhoundBlog.net just a week and a day ago, and already WordPress-MultiUser is changing my approach to everything in the weblogging world.

First, just as a caveat: It’s a bear to set up. Because of BloodhoundBlog, we have an enormous amount of server horsepower, but I think it matters a great deal that we live on a dedicated server. We can customize the host to live the way we need it to live, and we command a lot of tech support attention from Hostgator.com — which has been invaluable.

But as with the discussion of FeedWordPress, living in the Mu universe leads to different ways of thinking.

An example: We’re wrestling with domain mapping right now, but, once we get it working, we will be able to put our affiliated vendors into their own blogs, running under their own domain names, in two wags of a BloodPuppy’s tail. If you think about the agony of setting up unique WordPress.org blogs, the upfront effort of getting WP-Mu to run will be handsomely repaid.

Likewise, both WordPress (dot org) and WP-Mu were upgraded to version 2.6.5 tonight. I already upgraded the BloodhoundBlog.net weblogs. And sometime between now and Sunday, I will get to upgrade a solid dozen WP.org blogs. Between now and the new year, most or all of those will be moving to a new WP-Mu installation.

Here’s the best bet: The ability to set up clone weblogs on demand will permit a very granular kind of hyper-local weblogging. This suggests to me one or two more WP-Mu installations, strictly for real estate purposes.

And here’s a great big what’s more: Give me another week with this software and let’s see what else I can come up with…

November 24, 2008

Something new under the sun: Sim and the future of human interaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I saw this commercial over the weekend and it’s been making me nuts:

This is fascinating to me. This is Game Console 2.0, the participatory gaming experience. Okay, that much is not new, going back to the Dreamscape, anyway. Ubiquitous at broadband speeds since the original Xbox.

What’s cool here is that the interaction is, first, among adults, and, second, has nothing to do with the game play. This is remote schmoozing through a game console, a phone call conducted from within a sim. SecondLifeLite, as it were.

I’m wondering if Nintendo got viraled on this, if a cadre of moms figured out how to use the software this way during naptime, and Nintendo is marketing to grow a niche that erupted spontaneously.

There’s way more. Simulation is emerging as a fourth branch of science. Computing grows year by year in its accretion of power. A model is not reality, a map is not the territory, but a sim of, for example, the life cycle of a star, could teach us as much in ten minutes as we have managed to learn in the last 10,000 years.

Now combine the two. Take ordinary people with better and better user-interface devices and let them work and play together by simulation in the cloud. The two phenomena are not the same, but, even so, at this incredibly cheap end-user level, we are all avidly nurturing and cultivating precisely the intellectual capital we will need going forward.

It’s daunting to stand at the threshold of what may be a calamitous economic disaster and, yet, to recognize that we are also at the threshold of an unimaginable increase in human mental prowess.

 
Further notice: Apparently, Nintendo has pursued an Alpha Moms astroturfing strategy for the Wii since its introduction. I don’t know if this use of this software is something they have encouraged, but presumably it is. Doesn’t matter to me. Better questions: Are moms meeting through this game? Are they strangers until they discover each other in the game — much as we discover one another through weblogs? More interesting: Are the children for whom this game is actually designed meeting Read more

November 24, 2008

My BloodhoundBlog wish list as we embark on the SplendorQuest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.

I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.

I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.

What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more

November 22, 2008

Saving Face(book)

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I find it worth mentioning that the first Facebook event invitation I accepted and actually attended was a funeral. I responded ‘Will Attend’ via my iPhone before realizing that the fellow who had sadly passed on was not the person I originally thought he was. Same first name, similar last name, entirely different demons come to find out. All the same, I kept my virtual promise and wore my black suit to the office on Thursday. All day long people kept asking me, “Where are you going?….to a funeral?”

It was a wake, actually. And not the kind of wake that existed before Web 2.0. This wake included an eclectic playlist from the dead man’s iPod, a digital mixed media presentation on a flat screen of his life up until the previous Monday, and no casket anywhere in site. The funeral home was a funeral home though and there was no mistaking it, we were all gathered in a parlor. Parlor D to be exact.

It turned out that I did happen to know this fellow in passing but was, more specifically, a friend of a friend of his on Facebook–you know, that six degrees of separation social network that everyone and his uncle’s friend (including Uncle Geno) belongs to these days. I looked around Parlor D and semi-recognized several of the less stoic faces. Although I’ve exchanged some Wall-to-Wall comments with a few of them in recent weeks no words were spoken on this eve. Perhaps because none of us really look like the best face we chose to make public and just didn’t recognize each other. I, for one, am no where near as cool in real life as my profile picture implies—especially in a funeral parlor, D or otherwise.

I spotted a couple mourners secretly texting and reading emails beneath scarves and winter coats, their backs and bodies turned deliberately askew, diffusing any direct sight lines from the landlined elders–those old school survivors that always roam the rooms at such gatherings. Several others were braving the lake effect Chicago chill, conducting the most pressing voice-to-voice Read more

November 20, 2008

Estately.com grows by more than 50%, adding Chicagoland and Long Island, NY, to it on-line inventory of homes for sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seattle-based web search start-up Estately.com adds 120,000 new listings to it inventory today, expanding from the west coast to Chicago and Long Island. The upgrade brings Estately’s inventory to over 300,000 MLS-listed homes. Also a part of today’s announcement, the search-bot will show extended listing histories on homes, a move also recently taken by Redfn.com.

You can play with the Chicago listings by clicking this link. I have a link for the Long Island listings, but I’m not sure it’s working right.

As a matter of disclosure: Estately.com founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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November 19, 2008

Creating an Online Policy and Procedure Manual

by

Real Estate Broker, Investor

Author website

A question for other small independent brokerage owners and managers:

I have almost completed the online version policy and procedure manual for my smallish, independent brokerage office.  It’s been a lot of work.  Who knew?  I ended up using a WordPress platform, since I didn’t have the energy to learn all the ins and outs of designing around the wiki format.

Here’s the question:  Can the online version completely replace a printed version?  Do you add a paragraph to your agent’s contracts stating they have read the online manual (yeah, right) and they agree to comply with the policies and procedures?

Creating a printed version kinda defeats the purpose, though I suppose I could install one of those “Turn-Your-Blog-into-a-Book” plugins.

Thoughts, suggestions, anyone?

November 16, 2008

The House of Atreus

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I watch him, through the French terrace doors in the living room, as he ambles across the sidewalk and up the limestone steps of my still unsold 1.5 million dollar McMansion. He double parked his Escalade next to my X3 without bothering to put on his flashers, its mere shadow swallowing my embarrassingly sensible Bimmer. He’s wearing an Urlacher jersey, number 54, size XXL would be my guess. It’s tight. Squirrels scatter and birds empty the barren trees into the charcoal, cloudless drape that’s been hanging for a year over this soon to be expired listing. For some reason I immediately re-calculate my own net worth like I always do when this guy shows up. It only takes a few seconds.

“Still got this Moose?” he asks, smiling. Our inside joke. The ‘Talking Moose,’ my unsold 6 bedroom Behemoth jammed shoulder to shoulder into a block of Chicago brick bungalows.

“Last day,” I tell him. “If Jesus Christ doesn’t walk through the door in the next half hour the Builder is moving his family and all his in-laws in.”

He looks at me as if to ask ‘hey, what am I, chopped…?’ I’ve written about this guy before, a derivatives trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He calls me Dino. He thinks I’m Greek. He knows a lot of Greeks down at the Merc, he tells me again although I’m quite certain he’s probably never read one.

“So,” I begin. “A lot has gone apeshit since the last time we spoke.” And it has. In the past month the whole world economy has been thrown off its axis. This we all know.

“Body bags, dude,” he says. “Go long on body bags.” I know he’s kidding but I still ponder the notion as I imagine turning my Wachovia water into wildcat wine in one frenzied trading session. I think back over the last 500 days on this Open House assignment and wonder if he hasn’t been leaving me obtuse investment tips all along.

“I’m just a sniper,” he continues. “I’m a sniper in a grassy knoll…”

“Nice ride,” I say, motioning to his Escalade, changing the Read more

November 10, 2008

Links to the Unchained: How people attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando saw the event

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We lucked into WiFi in Orlando. I was convinced until my shoes hit the dirt on Thursday that we weren’t going to have it. But because people could connect, they did, working on social media sites in real time. A number of people also took exhaustive notes on their laptops, and here are some posts people have put up documenting their Unchained experience:

Eric Blackwell weighs in with My Top 10 Take Homes from BHB Unchained Orlando.

Greg Staker provides a nice summary of each of the presentations with How can my attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando help you buy or sell Florida real estate?

(I could be wrong, but I think Eric Blackwell may have had an influence on that headline. 😉 )

By far the most comprehensive note-taker was John Sabia, a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. His contribution to he discussion is called Unchained in Orlando.

If you have written up your Unchained experience hit me with the link and I will amend this post.

 
Further notice: Brian Brady at Active Rain: NAR Orlando: All Work and No Play Makes Brian A…, Daniel Rothamel at The Real Estate Zebra: I am not the audience, and what I plan to do about it.

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November 6, 2008

Offering more service to buyers for a bigger slice of the buyer’s agent’s commission, Redfin moves closer to traditional real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When I represent buyers, I see my biggest responsibility as taking the fear away. Yes, I need to find and show houses. Yes, I need to write contracts and supervise inspections. Yes, I need to husband everything through the lender and the title company. But the job of jobs is to serve as a security blanket for the buyers, to make them feel safe and comfortable throughout the process.

Whatever Redfin.com’s buyer pool might think they want from a buyer’s agent, in general they’re not that different from other buyers. They might like the idea of a very robust search tool for identifying homes. They might like the idea of a streamlined purchase process, Amazon-does-residential-real-estate. But when the dollars hit the dirt, they want to know that they are being marshalled through the home buying process by an experienced professional — someone who can do all the chores that need to be attended to, but also someone who can inspire the quiet confidence that permits buyers to sleep through the night in what might otherwise be a nightmarish experience.

Today Redfin.com moves that much closer to traditional real estate. Redfin buyers will be able to choose the agent they work with, and they will be able to look at an unlimited number of homes at no out-of-pocket cost. But the rebate to buyers will be 50% instead of 67%. The website has been retooled to reflect the higher degree of personal service.

Also today, Redfin will offer new search features on its web site, including tools to make it easier for buyers to investigate the history of distressed and foreclosure properties across multiple MLS listings.

By email, Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman offered this explanation:

A lot of this is the culmination of a long process of figuring out we’re a customer-service company, not just a web company or a real estate company, which means we’ve gotten a lot more practical about how we blend online and personal service; we’re trying to do more of both.

Redfin’s on-line search tool is so much more robust than anything else available to consumers, I think the company might be a 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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