There’s always something to howl about.
From Reason.TV:
It’s worth thinking about as statists strive to destroy innovation in medicine (via Obamacare) and industry and transportation (via environmentalism). If it gratifies you to weep about how bad things are, compare the America of your youth to the police states of Communist Europe in that same epoch. Whatever complaints you might have with liberty, things could be — and will be — a lot worse when you have unleashed the leviathan state on every aspect of your life.
I don’t really do anything with my Facebook fan page other than to have my blog content automatically streamed to it, but a little Brady-esque follow up every time a new “friend” touches my “Fan Box Badge” is proving to have quite a nice effect on my sales effort, so I figured I’d share.
The protocol:
Then the fun starts…
You visit your own site and see a new face in your sidebar. It’s go time! Send your new fan a personal fb message, or even better, google them up for a phone number and do a little follow up. Maybe something like:
“Hi. Just noticed your face on my website in my Facebook page widget. Thanks for becoming a fan. Just curious, how’d you find me? …. ”
I originally tried to embed the actual Fan page box here, but didn’t seem to want to take the script… so, the sneaky image link… 🙂
From Politics Daily, the you-just-can’t-make-this-shit-up section:
Four-year-olds are adorable, trustworthy, and, having never owned a home before, fully eligible for the first-time homebuyer tax credit that Congress passed in 2008.
As a result of that loophole and numerous faulty reporting mechanisms, a House panel learned Thursday of tens of thousands of cases of fraud in the tax credit program, including more than 500 instances of people using their children — including a four-year-old — to apply for the credit to get around income caps and a requirement that the purchaser has never owned a home.
Together, fake or faulty claims for the $8,000 refundable tax credit may have cost the government up to half a billion dollars so far, investigators told the Ways and Means subcommittee.
Russell George, an inspector general with the Treasury Department, told the subcommittee about the most brazen instances of bogus claims that he had come across since the IRS created a filtering system last May to weed out suspicious applications.
George said he had found nearly 20,000 returns for people who may not have actually purchased homes; thousands for people who already owned homes; 3,200 taxpayers who could not prove they were in the country legally; and an unspecified number of IRS employees wrongly applying for the credit.
It is completely implausible to me that anyone could expect anything other than disaster from government-run anything. I like to say that governments are only good at one thing — killing people — but even that isn’t true of the U.S. government: The Army expends 20,000 rounds of ammunition for every confirmed kill. No worries, though:
This week Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) began a push to expand the credit to all homebuyers and extend the deadline, now set for Nov. 30th, to July 2010.
Good plan…
The worst thing that ever happened to me was November of 2003. I made, as a Realtor $57,000 in closings (without a team) in one month. In early December, I added another $19,000 to that pile of money. Because of my phone banging good times, I didn’t have expenses or marketing that created it, my willingness to endure rejection, and a booming economy created that opportunity.
I remember that number, those numbers because I added them and re added them. It made me a big dude. I was happy and proud about a $76,000 run in about 20 days. Proved that banging the phones works, validated me as a person. I was king of the world, at 27. Hot wife, money in the bank, Acura RL in the driveway. What’s not to dig? (Heh).
Well, the fact that you read your own press. See, I took most of December off. “I earned this break.” I said as we went to Oregon. Bought a new house on a stated deal, pissing $40k on a down payment (Because you know, I now make $60,000 a month, you know?). Didn’t work in January because I had myself convinced that I was earning $60,000 a month. I was that good, I could turn it on. Get it? I rounded up to a number I only did once, and didn’t worry because that’s who I was. (In my head).
Payments came due, and my money was gone, mostly on BS and needless luxuries, and maintenance for the rentals we’d bought. But I didn’t worry, because … wait for it… I made $60,000 a month.
It was true. I made nearly $60,000 a month…ONCE. The rest of the year was just over 5 figures per month, with two months that were less than $3,000. But my ego declared that I was a heavy hitter, banging the phones and making $60,000 a month. It wasn’t till late February, only 1 closing on the year that I began to worry. I had 3 crap listings, no buyers, and my customer service had become rake like.
But, a little Read more
Get tactical. Everyone wants some “grand strategy” or “new initiative. But mastering tactics at the battlefield level is how 90% of us can earn money faster than the government steal it. It’s all about Tactics, not Strategy. Mastering tactics means that you are doing something towards a goal. Something, anything that’s reasonable is better than fine tuning a meticulous plan. I fell into the planning trap. Loads of people have. Doing something right now, fast, and done is the way to win.
Since making the switch from Stephen Covey to David Allen, I’ve paid off most of my IRS debt, I’ve built a business that works, and I’ve become better at living life on earth. Stephen Covey principles work, no doubt, but rejiggering some life plan isn’t meaningful until you can make the pile of paperwork on your desk your bitch. That is practical, real and doable.
When Phil said “I hate coaching,” what I really hate is some notion of a program that isn’t held accountable to specific results. Buying a marketing widget that “costs less than a closing?” Everything you do has to be held accountable to a result. When Greg talked about A/B Testing, that was the expression of an idea: observe stuff with your own eyes. Create an OODA loop.
Getting on the path to be an automatically improving being required that I go grab some knowledge.
1.) Getting Things Done, David Allen: The most important book on this list, by far. Read, pracitce, understand fully GTD principles. Make the papers and endles op
2.) On War: Von Clausewitz: Great book about going all in when you find yourself in conflict. There are no half measures, if you don’t have passion behind the stuff you’re doing, simply don’t do it.
3.) Tested advertising methods: John Caples/etc. This is about writing copy that works, that isn’t necessarily “clever” and that performs. The book is solid and you can see that people don’t follow it much. Copy that tells you what to expect and produces no “WTF” type responses is the goal. And it’s easier to write than the nuanced cleverness that people go Read more
I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.
As a species, that is.
Through all of human history.
Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”
That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded, as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.
But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.
But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.
[Continue reading here, if you like. This project is way off topic even for a blog as topically-liberated as BloodhoundBlog, so if you want to follow along at home, the main action will be at SplendorQuest.com.]
Over at Agent Genius, Amy Chorew has a post up entitled “How One Company Conquered Video”. The post was obviously a nice plug for one of the principles of Coldwell Banker premier in Berlin Connecticut and a local video company, but it somehow set me off a bit.
Here was my comment on the post:
Conquered Video?
The local CB’s approach, while more progressive than most was likely a wasted effort. Fred’s right, these are lame. And Bob’s right. How is anyone gonna see these things?
What Coldwell Banker should do is this:
1. Work out a deal with Flip or Vado so that their agents can buy cameras at a discount.
2. Help each of their agents set up a Youtube account and understand how to upload videos from their cameras and do some very basic editing using Youtube’s built in features.
3. Assign each agent a theme to video around. Examples: Neighborhood Driving Videos, Interviews With Home Sellers, Interviews With Home Buyers, Featured Businesses, etc.
4. Give each company agent a Video Blog page (on a larger company Video Site) featuring a youtube gallery similar to the approach on display over at PropertunityKnocks.Com.
5. Make sure effective lead capture elements are built into these video blog pages.
6. Promote the overall video blog site to the public via a massive Facebook ads campaign.
The result?
Coldwell Banker does something that would accomplish a lot more for their agents (and the company as a whole) then working out some sleazy affiliate relationship with a vendor and taking a little something more from their agents.
Sorry for being skeptical here. But doesn’t it seem more like CB conquered their agents wallets here a little more effectively than they did video?
(I feel a little bad about that last part because I wrote it before my first cup of coffee. While it’s possible the local broker had an affiliate relationship with the local broker, it’s not fair to assume they did. Instead I wish I’d congradulated that broker for at least trying instead of being so grumpy. But oh well…)
The point is this. It’s now more possible for large Brokers to “conquer video” than Read more
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):
When I was a kid, my Uncle Jack, my mother’s oldest brother, told me a story I’ve never forgotten. He was at a little county fair way out in corn country. Nothing special, just beauty contests for hogs, cheesy little rides and sticky, sugared confections.
Late in the day, the ice cream vendor decided to pack it in, announcing that he was giving away what was left of his inventory. People elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, so eager were they to get something for nothing. They walked away with the ice cream piled into their bare hands, rushing off to their cars, leaving a trail of melted drips behind them.
The lesson I took from my uncle’s story was that those folks didn’t really want ice cream. They were willing to get themselves dirty, and to get their vehicles dirty, just to have something for free. Most of them probably didn’t even eat the ice cream, and they certainly couldn’t have enjoyed it. Imagine trying to inhale a glutton’s quantity of chocolate-fudge-swirl before it melts all over your clothes.
Could that be what’s going on right now with the $8,000 first-time home-buyer’s tax credit? I happen to be carrying three listings that are undeniably “investor’s specials” — which means they’re a good buy, but they need a lot of work. Even so, my phone is ringing off the hook with agents trying to sell those houses to owner-occupants — folks with very little cash trying to get an FHA loan so they can buy a house, thus to get $8,000 in “free” money.
Do those buyers really want homes, or do they just want that free money? What will happen to the properties when the $8,000 is spent? Should we dial the clock back to 2006 to see if anything looks familiar?
Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors is campaigning for even more “free” money to bribe even more otherwise-unmotivated buyers. The only thing that could make the deal sweeter would be a double hand-full of “free” ice cream.
Spread the word: Click here Read more
[This is me, from 09/10/2006. –GSS]
Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999. I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex. I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.
Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.
I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and best can be. I don’t believe in heaven, but when I think of what was done that day, I pray there is an everlasting torment for the men who did it…
Technorati Tags: 9/11
This came in for a trackback on my NAR tax-credit video post:
http://hottopics.blogs.realtor.org/2009/09/08/ my-nar-tax-credit-video-“tell-the-natio/
The link resolves to an https address — in other words, a secret inner-sanctum blog. They won’t stand up for themselves in the clean, clear light of day, but they’ll piss and moan to each other in private.
It’s not that they’re gutless, mind you — or not merely gutless. So much the worse, they know they’re wrong — and they still won’t do the right thing.
How horrifying to spend your whole life thinking you’re one of the good guys only to discover that you are every bit as corrupt as Charlie Rangel, immersed snout-deep in the corporate welfare trough, turning a million mostly-innocent entrepreneurs into cheerleaders and lobbyists for even more legislative piggishness, turning three hundred million innocent Americans into cannibal’s fodder for your million-vampire-feast.
Who killed liberty in America, the last best hope for freedom on this Earth?
Was it Alexander Hamilton and the Whig/Federalist/Republican party, the original champions of corporate welfare?
Was it Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party, who wanted freedom for everyone — so long as you’re not black, brown, red or yellow? Or was it Lyndon Johnson and the modern Democratic party, who want freedom for everyone — provided you’re not an American?
Or was it the National Association of Realtors, who helped to turn a nation of hard-working, hard-charging, fiercely independent people into a gaggle of sniveling beggars, who can no longer even imagine paying their own way in life, who spend all their time concocting new ways to despoil their neighbors.
With every passing day, we are that much closer to being a nation of vampires, and it was the National Association of Blood-Sucking Vampires who first taught us to attempt to live by plunder instead of production.
But as much as I despise what they have done, still I feel for them as people. So I’ll offer up this much as a salve for the scabs they can’t stop themselves from picking at:
Redemption is egoism in action.
When you discover you have behaved badly, either willfully or inadvertently, there are three things you must do:
1. Admit your error Read more
Preface: The year long retooling of my firm’s infrastructure is now well into its second year, mercifully nearing the finish line. To my great joy, I’ve rediscovered the Old School working definition of what an expert is. They not only know what they’re doing, they know why what they do works — producing, be still my heart, RESULTS. Or, in BawldSpeak, Skinned Cats. Expert recognition hint: Next time you’re talkin’ with somebody you suspect is an expert, pay attention to how many answers they supply to questions you never in a million years woulda known to ask. Then ask yourself in how many disciplines do you count yourself as an expert?
Ah, and there’s the rub.
When I first learned about the Lord’s game, baseball, the Dodgers and Giants had only been in California for a couple years. There was no Chavez Ravine — well, the ravine was there, but not much else. When a player was described as great, we all knew what it meant — he was, um, great. Now? Gimme a break. A shortstop up from the East Toilet Seat, Idaho AAA farm club makes a decent play on a sharply hit grounder two steps to his right and he’s the next Ozzie Smith — ‘What a great play that was!!’ Now, in baseball, as in all elite sports, the concept of greatness has no meaning whatsoever.
It’s like the Hall of Fame. Some of the players spoken of in the same sentence as the HOF are almost insulting to the Hall. It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of the Really, Really Good. Again, the concept of true greatness has been watered down to the quality of prison gruel. Willie Mays was a great player. Is there a center fielder today you’d mention in the same breath as Willie?
The same goes with the concept of experts directly or indirectly related to real estate.
These days the concept of expert is shown no respect. If a guy’s in a room with 30 people and is three chapters ahead of the others in the marketing ‘book’, Read more
Kicking this back up to the top because it fits so well with the recent posts from Al Lorenz and Doug Quance. –GSS
I’ve understood since I was 18 or so how real estate develops organically, in a truly free market, so I have known all my adult life how horribly the real estate market has been disrupted by the idiotic intrusions of Rotarian Socialism. It’s all about who can steal a few bucks by strong-arming his neighbors, and no one ever stops to wonder what gets mucked up in the process.
So: I said:
tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.
And Brian Brady said, in a comment to that post:
When it’s a 1-4 unit property, held for investment purposes.
Ten words. What am I missing?
What he’s missing is the definition of commercial real estate. If Brian owned 1-4 rental tuxedoes, should he call that his personal wardrobe? Just because the tax laws engender dumb distinctions, we don’t have to ignore reality, do we? Rental property — including a solitary rental house — is commercial real estate. It is owned in pursuit of profit, not as the residence of the owner.
So again:
tell me in twenty-five words or fewer why relatively fungible non-commercial real estate should ever be thought of as an investment.
The answer is that it should not. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are going to suffer because — at the bidding of the National Association of Realtors — they took their eye off the ball. There is nothing rare about a tract home. If it gains in value ahead of other consumer goods, there has to be a cause — usually one that originates in the criminal use of force against people innocent of all wrong-doing.
As we have discussed, the precipitating cause of the real estate boom in the southwest was criminal land-use restrictions in the costal metroplex of Southern California. The land there is not inherently scarce, but governments made its development difficult or impossible, driving prices up faster than they would have gone otherwise. Investors falsely believed Read more
After seeing all the fuss over Doug Quance’s post about A Governmental Takeover of Real Estate Brokerages, I thought a more thorough answer from my perspective to his question might be appropriate. Last week, a couple of sentences from a superb article by Yaron Brook at the Ayn Rand Center literally twisted at my thoughts. The sentences are:
- Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.
- The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.
Those sentences are basic premises of the Constitution, of human dignity and of what freedom and liberty are based on.
But apply those thoughts to the current maelstrom swirling about health care, and one’s “right” to health care has a wholly different meaning. In Mr. Brook’s own eloquence:
The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.
You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services–no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a “right” to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.
Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care. – http://www.aynrand.org
Our entire national debate Read more
Quoted from Mark Alexander’s wonderful Richard Mitchell web site:
When Benjamin Franklin was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decided to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he chose Jesus and Socrates. One of his self-assigned rules for daily behavior was nothing more than this: "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."
I suspect that few would disagree. Even most militant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, of course, that they admire him for the right reasons. Even those who have no philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although exactly why, they can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young Franklin that he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for instance, or Francis Bacon.
Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be imitators, although they do seem to disagree among themselves as to how he ought to be imitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any there be, are hard to find. For one thing, if they are more or less accurately imitating him, they will not organize themselves into Socrates clubs and pronounce their views. If we want to talk with them, we will have to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves become, to some degree at least, imitators of Socrates, we will not know enough to want to seek them out. Indeed, unless we are sufficiently his imitators, we might only know enough not to want to seek him out, for some of those who sought Socrates out found reason to wish that they hadn’t. Unlike Jesus, or, to be more accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine, Socrates often brought not the Good News, but the Bad.
Nevertheless, people do from time to time come to know enough about Socrates to be drawn into his company, and to agree, with rare exceptions, that it would indeed be a good thing to imitate him. The stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche was one of those exceptions, for he believed, and quite correctly, that reasonable discourse was the weapon with which the weak might defeat the strong, but most of us often do think of ourselves as weak Read more
My mind is alive with themes for BloodhoundBlog posts that I’m not writing — the Principle of the Yes Man and the Elephant on the Balcony and Prometheus the Mind-Giver. I’d write more, except my having written so much over the past three years is paying off in spades — in diamonds, as it were.
But in the comments to Chuck Marunde’s marvelous post on the ubiquity of the part-time Realtor, the idea of improving the quality of practitioners came up again.
We’ve been through all of this many times before, and a search of the archives on the terms “licensing” should prove enlightening. But this is the Cliff’s Notes on my own position on the topic: Licensing laws serve only to enshrine mediocrity by implying that minimum standards are adequate and sufficient. To the contrary, a higher standard of care among real estate professionals will be achieved not by stricter licensing laws, and not by the National Association of Realtors, but by the persistent application of market-borne pressure. In other words, a higher quality of service among real estate professionals will come about when superior practitioners raise the bar — and tell the world they have done so.
To which sentiment I will amend this addendum: Ahem!
This is the BloodhoundBlog mission, of course, and, at our third anniversary, I wrote about how proud I am that the word “Bloodhound” has become a de facto meme for quality in the practice of real estate.
And: Nothing exceeds like excess. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. So I’ve made a little button you can put on your web site or weblog, if you like, to spark a Bloodhound-like conversation. That much is the Elephant at the Dining Room Table: Your clients aren’t thinking about quality because the state and the NAR have schooled them to look for meaningless imprimaturs instead. If you want for your clients to be able to identify the better from the worse, you have to initiate the conversation with them. The buttons you see below can help you get that discussion started.
Witness:
160 pixels square:
