BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 16 of 30)

February 13, 2010

The epistemology of Splendor: Apprehending the memes that move me.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a great week.

That’s not something I get to say all the time — rarely more than fifty times a year.

The truth is, most of the time I feel like an undocumented refugee from a forgotten country known as A Different Way Of Thinking. I don’t feel any huge bond of commonality with most of the people I know about, and, when I do, that just by itself is a cause for celebration.

What’s different? I could say “I love myself” or “I love my life,” but those sentiments are too vague to be useful. It seems easier to me to define what I’m talking about by negatives, rather than in affirmative statements.

So, for example, it never occurs to me to start a sentence with the words “With my luck…” or “Knowing me…” These are very common expressions, and it’s plausible to me that the humble attitude being expressed by those phrases is faked — that the speaker doesn’t actually feel the — to me — humiliating self-degradation implied by the words. But it doesn’t occur to me to express humility in the first place, not even faked humility.

To the contrary, if I could paint a picture of my own idealized self-image, it might be something like a conquering Viking, sword held proudly aloft, or a virtuoso pianist in that eternal instant of silence when the last note of the concerto has faded into the ether but somehow still rings on in the mind’s ear. I don’t actually see myself that way, but that’s a way of imagining what my life looks like to me from the inside.

And just that much is boundlessly funny to me, since, if it were measured by any presumably-objective standard, my life has been a colossal failure. I’m not rich, not even close. My personal relationships have mostly been disasters, to the extent that I am very careful about letting people get close to me. What little fame I might claim amounts to notoriety — and I have complete contempt for other people’s opinions anyway.

And yet inside my own mind, none of that matters. I love Read more

February 12, 2010

#RTB (raising the bar) is #ROT (restraint of trade). If you want to do something that will actually benefit consumers and will run the bums out of the real estate business, #STFU (stop being a tweetard) and #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods) already!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’d have more to say about this, but everything I have to say is encapsulated in a single URL: BloodhoundBlog.com.

I was mildly interested in this #RTB (raising the bar) nonsense until I figured out that it’s just more Rotarian Socialism: Make it harder for punters to get a real estate license so that the few who make the cut can make more money with less competition. Nice.

Meanwhile, an email correspondent sent me to Twitter to search on a particular #hashmark. There were more than 30 tweets in a span of 20 minutes, from perhaps a dozen tweetards — all of them theoretically real estate professionals.

Why theoretically? Because if you’re pissing away your day on Twitter, you’re not selling real estate, underwriting loans or doing anything else productive.

And all of those clients you claim to have cultivated via social media? They can see what a goof-off you are, just as much as I can. If I were steaming by the phone, waiting for you to return my call, I would just love to watch you kibitzing with your butt-buddies around the virtual water cooler. Now that’s service!

Here’s the only standard of value that matters to consumers: #DTFG (deliver the frolicking goods)! Your clients want for you to treat them the same way you yourself would want to be treated, were you in their place.

It’s easy to figure out what to do, harder to get the job done — harder still to get it done well. But that is all that matters. And if you’re not going to deliver the goods, then you, too, are one of the bums I want to see pushed out of this business.

Whether you’re a dinosaur pissing and moaning in the bullpen down at the brokerage office or a shiny new dino.bot giggling on-line with all the other shiny new dino.bots — you are the problem.

Until you are prepared to put your clients first — all the time — you have nothing to say about raising anything. Raise your frolicking standards! And if you don’t — if you won’t — hard-working dogs like me are going to help Read more

February 3, 2010

President Obama To Las Vegas Residents: “Screw You!”

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

President Obama told a New Hampshire town hall meeting:

“When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices and it’s time your government did the same.”

Amazing, I wonder how Obama talks about Vegas when he’s not on TV?

Maybe this is why HUD Dissed Las Vegas In The Housing Stimulus Lottery, or Florida got their high speed Disney World Train and Las Vegas didn’t.

Either way, at least we know exactly what Las Vegas can expect when the President speaks about “Jobs” being his top priority in 2010.

And the Mayor’s reaction:

Speaking of blowing a bunch of money on trips….

February 2, 2010

iPad observation #9: I went digging through the heap of festering garbage that is the Vook and came home with an education.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an Read more

January 23, 2010

Why Stop With the Bath Water When You Can Throw Out the Baby At No Additional Charge?

by

Database Marketing Expert

Author website

Full disclosure: I’m neither Democrat nor Republican. I’m neither Mortgage Broker nor Mortgage Banker. I am a consumer – just like you.

I haven’t been over here to play as often as I’d like because of some other projects I’ve been passionately pursuing.  My bad, because this is still the place to be for people with a take.  And I’ve got a take:

What the American public doesn’t know is what makes them the American public, alright?

– Dan Akroyd as Ray Zalinsky in the movie “Tommy Boy”

For the rest of this article to make sense, I’d ask that you take 2 minutes to read this letter authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke dated Dec. 24, 2009.

Here’s the cliff’s notes version the way I read it:

  1. Mortgage brokers are crooks.
  2. The subprime debacle happened because consumers were “tricked” into loans they couldn’t afford to repay.
  3. Eliminating the Yield Spread Premium (YSP) will fix our problems.

To support his argument to kill YSP, Merkley cites a NY Times editorial piece painting the mortgage broker as unethical and the root of the subprime debacle.  Here are a few questions I’d like to pose to the pound for thought and discussion:

  1. YSP existed in its current form up until Jan 1, 2010 – when the new Good Faith Estimate and RESPA rules took effect .  By the way, is there still such a thing as a “subprime loan”?  What banks are writing “subprime loans” today?  Six months ago?  A year ago?
  2. Did it EVER make any sense that a bank would knowingly extend a loan to a borrower who had demonstrated a propensity to default and thus would be more likely than normal to default on their mortgage?  Where is the mention of the “stated income” loans in Merkley’s letter.  Certainly THAT didn’t contribute to the subprime mess, right?
  3. FACT:  today, the mortgage broker CANNOT earn YSP.  YSP belongs to the borrower and may only be rebated to the borrower.

I’m going to repeat that for effect.

  1. Senator Merkley, less than one month ago
  2. Authored a letter (co-signed by approximately 20 other Senators)
  3. In the guise of consumer protection
  4. Calling for the elimination of Read more
January 19, 2010

Vendorsluts, Foundations And Articles Of Faith

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Why are we in business?  Why are we doing anything.  A company that is just in business to make a buck is as compelling as a man that’s just alive to eat his next meal.  I heard horror stories–from the guy that paid $20,000 for a web design only to find that the designer retained copyright–to a guy that was unable to cancel a monthly fee after months of trying.   When I started getting beyond “helping people sell stuff,” and getting to the big damn “why” question, I found myself carving a different spot from other folks.  I want to be better (not just different).

BloodHound s have a meme.  There are lots of parts to it, and I don’t know ’em all (and probably don’t agree with everything, either).

So, together with Ian, we came up with a meme.  My company is called Flat Rate Web Jobs, and we are Flatties.

What flatties believe:

We believe in accountability.  Everything we provide has a 100% money back, “no dirty looks” guarantee.

We believe you are in charge of everything.  You own the copyright on all of the work we do for you, and you can use our work however you see fit.

We believe you must measure ROI in social media.  Everything we offer helps you increase your return.

We believe in adding to everything we touch.
We believe you should understand exactly what you’re buying, what your benefits are, and when to next steps will take place.

We believe in small businesses, salespeople and professionals.  It is our honor to serve you.

We believe it’s our duty to put our customer’s interests first.

We don’t believe in fads.  We don’t try to make a quick buck on buzz.

We believe in including more than you thought you paid for, every time.

We believe independent thinkers create the best work.

—

So, that’s my company.  We currently have a decent array of products we sell.  The point is the “we’ve got your back,” ethos that I love.

The point is that we’re different.  All people are invited to come figure out why–I’m doing a free “hands on” webinar on how you can make boss google around and Read more

January 17, 2010

What does “information wants to be free” really mean? It doesn’t matter how long you spent making that mudpie, it’s worth nothing to me.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting on Jeff Brown’s post on economics, which in turn referenced an argument by Malcolm Galdwell, I made a short movie explicating the meme “information wants to be free.”

Cliff’s Notes: When a market good is so redundantly abundant as to be, essentially, ubiquitous and unavoidable, its market price will tend to plummet to zero. It doesn’t matter what the sellers of those goods might want to earn. All that matters, in this context, is what buyers are willing to pay. If the discounted probability of procuring an acceptable alternative is very high, then the price will tend to be very low.

Ordinary information is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and, therefore, the market price it can command is effectively zero. What the sellers or anyone else thinks about that is irrelevant. I have no reason to pay even a penny to you if I can get “just as good” next door for free.

That in turn references the very first post I wrote for BloodhoundBlog:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

The answer? Almost always zero.

In the clip I talk about the difference in the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Ironically enough, there comes news this morning that the Times plans to finish off its slow suicide with yet another tilt at a paywall. Much good may it do them.

Here’s the video:

December 31, 2009

You know what? Despite everything: Happy New Year!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this last night in a comment to a post:

The United States is being run as a kleptocracy, but instead of plundering the treasury and the accumulated wealth of the nation in behalf of a small criminal conspiracy, we rob from a rapidly-diminishing productive sector in behalf of a vast and ever-burgeoning population of moochers — at all strata of society.

You can’t flip on the television without running across a cipher for your own grandmother proudly announcing how some politically-connected vendor has taught her how to rape the taxpayers — which is to say you and your kids, her own great-grandchildren — in her own behalf. This will be the real triumph of Obamacare — to turn every last resident of this once-proud nation into sniveling beggars, each one trying to snap up more benefits than his neighbor.

We don’t have to eat each others’ flesh to be cannibals, and it seems plausible to me that we will not be suffered to live a life of freedom and independence, in the very near future. The entitlement mentality is such a shameful thing that the people who use it as a means of enslaving each other will not suffer the contradiction of an objective renunciation of their creed. In any case, once you’ve eaten a meal taken by theft, you’re not as apt to make noises about law and order, property rights, all that sanctimonious nonsense. Who am I do judge, once I’ve drunk my neighbor’s blood?

That’s dour, but I’m afraid it’s much too exact. Yes, I know that things are always worse than they seem, that the doppler effect of the noise that is the news makes the onrushing crisis sound more ominous even as receding events seem to race away harmlessly. But I fear we are at a tipping point, a place where the grasshoppers so far outnumber the ants that there really is no hope, going forward, for a life based on self-reliance, on philosophical egoism, political individualism and economic free enterprise. The United States has resolved to resolve the contradiction of chattel slavery by making slaves of Read more

December 30, 2009

Unchained Melodies: A sublime mash-up of William Shatner’s cover version of Common People

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have time to write software today for the first time in a while — which is well because we need it. While I was working, Radio Paradise (commercial-free semi-hip music for middle-aged white people) played William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, and it made me so nuts I had to go out and find a clip.

Glad I did, because this mash-up is just perfect. I grew up in a grimy industrial town in downstate Illinois, way over on the wrong side of the tracks. I was lucky to have school teachers who were old enough to have pre-dated the unionization of compulsory illiteracy — but that just means I know how to tell you to go have safe sex with yourself in all the best dead languages. If you’ve never bought a steak without weighing the cost, this song is for you.

December 30, 2009

Why are people in New York and Connecticut unhappy, while the folks in Louisiana and Tennessee are more satisfied with their lives? The obvious answer is the true one: Taxes and spending.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from The Wall Street Journal: People in high-tax states are less satisfied with their lives than those in low-tax states.

Who knew?

That’s not a fair question. Everyone who can do math already knew this. But what’s interesting is that it points the way forward for all states, especially the ones currently losing their high-earning tax-slaves to less onerous tax-plantations: Cut taxes. Cut spending. Get rid of your kleptocratic union laws.

Or: In the words of John Galt, “Get the hell out of my way!”

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason — ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

In states with high property, income, and sales taxes like New York, people have less money to spend on other things that make them happy. They have less money to spend on vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care. Another problem may be that people receive a low return on their tax dollars. The study’s authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don’t provide Read more

December 30, 2009

Making New Year’s resolutions is easy. It’s keeping them that’s hard. How people are getting year ’round results from their year-end goals.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The Wall Street Journal comes more than resolutions. More, even, than sheer resolve. A set of specific tactics and techniques to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions enduringly.

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

My resolution is to read the whole thing.

December 24, 2009

Howling for the hard-working dogs: “We interrupt this Christmas Season for the following brief commercial transactions.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Rich full day today, lots of variety. Working Christmas Eve with me were home inspector Mike Elsberry (two houses), wood inspector Joe Letourneau (two houses) and our handyman, Mark Deermer (one house). We had a plumber working at one of our listings, as well. I could tell by the (lack of) traffic on the streets that a lot of people took the day off, but I am delighted that so many of the people that I work with were working today.

I’m going to work quite a bit tomorrow, Christmas Day. Mail, of course. But I’m also going to service a listing and take a look at half-a-dozen vacant REOs. Nothing terribly time-consuming, more like errands than anything else. But it’s work I want and need to get done, and I don’t want to put it off.

I think this is all part of the revolution incited by these devices — alike unto the idea that privacy is an artifact of inefficiency. I don’t take time off as a binary state event, and it kind of drives me crazy when other people do.

I think it’s insane that too much of the commercial world comes to a complete standstill on special days. But at least we are not insane enough to be consistent. No one preaching the virtue of sacred pretend-poverty wants for the power plant or the hospital emergency room to shut down from now until the Feast of the Epiphany.

Even so, it is simultaneously plausible to me that I might have something to prove: I’m going to celebrate my Christmas, and I am not going to interrupt anyone else’s. But I can do valuable work for my clients tomorrow, and it is important to me to get it done. And, at a minimum, my clients will be ahead of the game and my workload Saturday will be lighter. Everybody wins.

But here’s the thing: I think you’re going to work tomorrow, too, even it’s only to deal with your client email. And I think this is something to be celebrated, not condemned. We work in the pursuit of happiness, as Jefferson had it Read more

December 22, 2009

Looking for the beacon of progress for American cities? Forget Portland. Forget Houston. The road we’re on leads to Detroit.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From PJTV.com, a bone-chilling exposition of how the entitlement mentality killed one of the great American cities:

There but for the grace of god? Not quite. Detroit is just the leading edge of a wave of entitlement thinking that is engulfing what was once the beacon of human liberty for the whole world.

We scorn philosophy at our peril. For more than a century and a half, Americans have been asking profoundly important philosophical questions — and giving the wrong answers.

“What do the rights of the individual matter when people are starving?”

“How can you worry about private property rights when people are homeless?”

“Health care is a collective responsibility. Why should you be free to escape it even if you can pay your own way?”

“How dare you claim a right to personal autonomy when your personal autonomy is destroying the planet!?!”

Don’t bother to ask yourself what America will look like when the concept of individual rights has finally been eradicated from our philosophy. We already know the answer to that question. It will look like Detroit.

December 18, 2009

Unchained melodies: Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Apparently I have been voted onto the Inman “News” list of Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online. I have no direct evidence of this, just a bunch of tweeted twaddle that Tom Johnson turned me onto last night. Needless to say, I don’t plan to spend $80 to feed my already quite corpulent vanity.

This is my third or fourth year on the receiving end of this evolving “honor,” and, with some exceptions, Inman’s list is comprised of a company I am less and less comfortable keeping. BloodhoundBlog has always been about the consumer for me, and about practitioners who know how to put the consumer first. Alas, the RE.net by now just looks like more of the same — more sleazoids looking for ways to sucker broke-ass agents into paying three bucks a pop for rotten eggs. Deadwood was a fun TV show, but I don’t want my name soiled by the real estate equivalents of Al Swearengen.

I do want to take a moment to apologize to Brad Inman, though. I have offered up what I thought was sound business advice to the man — coated, to be sure, in what might seem to be a bitter pill. But I had assumed that Inman was a grown-up, and, as a demi-billionaire, presumably capable of dealing with a certain amount of acerbic wit. It turns out though — as certain lyrical twitterbirds have pointed out to me — that Brad Inman is in fact an infantile encephalic retarded paraplegic with a harelip — and thus my jibes aimed at him were not sporting. This, at least, is the only conclusion one can draw from the plaintive tweeted bleatings about my criticisms of Big Bad Brad that have emerged from other names on Inman’s list of Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online.

Which is, just by itself, a good reason to say to hell with the whole magilla.

Meanwhile I can think of only one tune so perfectly suited to the occasion, Big in Japan by Tom Waits:

If you want to do right by your clients, you have no need to lean on me as Read more

December 17, 2009

Next year we’re going to splurge — maybe — starting with the twenty-first thousand dollars for the month

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my favorite Christmas card this year:

I helped Stephen and Suzanne Kranick buy that house in the weeks before Thanksgiving. I think it’s cool that they love it so much that they made it the star of their holiday card.

I put two houses into escrow today. I’ve done that before, but Cathleen and I are both packing transactions into January at a nice pace. I’m still holding out hopes for one more all-cash deal in December, but the calendar is turning on me day-by-day.

But here’s the thing: The pace we’re on right now puts us at $20,000 gross commission income a month for 2010. I’m sure that sounds like a lot of money to anyone who is not in the real estate business, but it ain’t. But our marketing costs are where they’ve always been — very low — so we’re right on the cusp of proving the claim I’ve been making here for coming on four years: It is possible to do this job without spending fifty cents on the dollar for client acquisition and without feeding a vast cadre of useless eaters.

It’s plausible to me that we could be at $40,000 a month by the third quarter, and from there it’s not a huge jump to seven figures, GCI, per annum.

But: Meanwhile: We are cheap bastards. We never hesitate to spend whatever it takes on mission critical tools, and that will always be the case. But we have been very tight on every discretionary expenditure for a long, long time. And as much as business has sucked over the past four years, it is being tight that has gotten us through the worst of it. A lot of Realtors didn’t make it, as we all know.

So: Cathy just had her birthday, and from me she got a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for her iMac. So romantic…

But, even so, we can foresee that we are going to have a little money for luxuries in the coming year, and the question plaguing me has been how to manage that kind of spending without going crazy on the upside, as it were.

Here’s 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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