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Category: Enduring Interest (page 8 of 10)

January 7, 2007

HARD MONEY: Life as a Legal Loan Shark

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Loan broking in the private mortgage marketplace can be the most rewarding sector of the lending. I have helped families who faced foreclosure due to unforeseen negative events. I’ve watched a businesswoman land a huge contract because she could access quick capital. I’ve beamed with pride as a property investor turned around a dilapidated multi-family complex and provided quality housing for 20 families.

None of these positive events came to fruition with out the loan shark. The “loan shark” is a pejorative term accorded to participants in this industry. The loan broker charges relatively high points or fees and the private investor (or lender) charges high rates. I offer you an explanation for the expensive terms these loans offer:

1- This market is diminutive when compared to the amount of capital available in the secondary mortgage markets. The loan broker has a finite amount of capital available to him because these loans are held for investment by the private lender and not securitized. The economic principle of scarcity of supply applies in this market. A loan broker who specializes in this market may only have five to ten million dollars available each year to lend. Origination fees of 3% to 6% are not uncommon because of the scarcity of capital.

2- The private mortgage lender has many other investment options available to her. Investing in a mortgage-backed securities pool, guaranteed by a government agency (like a Ginnie Mae pass-through security) is going to yield approximately 6% in today’s environment. There is no risk of default to that investor because an agency of the US Government guarantees those loans . If we start with 6% as a baseline (and zero default rate), it becomes apparent why yields of 10-14% are not uncommon for the risk the private lender takes (default rate for private mortgage loans can be as high as 8-10%). Default brings unwanted complications for the private mortgage investor: temporary loss of income, legal action, and eventual disposal of the collateral.

Responsibility in the underwriting of these loans becomes more important because a loan broker is dealing with an individual investor’s nest egg, not an Read more

January 6, 2007

Think globally, blog locally: If you want local leads from your real estate weblog, pursue local interests . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog tends very strongly to cover news and views of interest to real estate professionals nationwide. And — guess what? — our audience, by an overwhelming majority, consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Here’s the bad news: If you have a real estate weblog, the chances are excellent that your objective is to attract interest from buyers and sellers in your local market. But — guess what? — your audience, by an overwhelming majority, very probably consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Why should this be so?

There are three reasons:

First, the permanent audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals all over the country — all over the Anglosphere, really, those countries most strongly influenced by the English language, its customs and traditions.

Second, to the extent that consumers are finding your real estate weblog by long tail search terms, they are evanescent — fleeting. For one thing, their interest in buying or selling a home has a limited time window; when they’re done, most of them are done for a long while. And, for another, they’re flitting in and out from Google just as you do, when you’re searching for something on-line.

But third, and most importantly, you don’t have a local audience because you are not cultivating a local audience.

This year portends to be the Year of the Locality in real estate weblogs. Active Rain is starting a new site call Localism.com, which is to be devoted to engendering very high long tail organic search engine rankings for locality and neighborhood-level keywords. MyHouseKey.org, to debut this week, is pursuing the same strategy.

These are not awful ideas, but they’re not great, either. As with your current conundrum, a long tail searcher is apt to be ephemeral, landing on and lasting at your weblog only an instant.

The better plan, I think, is to get local consumers to come and stay, to come and come back, to favorite your weblog, to — O, holy of holies! — blogroll your real estate weblog.

I have two ideas on how to do this, one great and one insanely great. I’ll share the great one, but my Read more

January 4, 2007

What Isaac Newton Knew About Mortgage Lending

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

I recently wrote about sub-prime loans for the first time in a long while because the sector should start taking more headlines in the papers.

I’d hate for you to be unready for it, of course. Sub-prime loans are a big part of mortgage lending.

“Sub-prime” is a broad-sweeping term for the large percentage of loans that won’t get bought by the quasi-government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The opposite of “sub-prime” is “conforming”, as in: these loans conform to the guidelines set forth by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be eligible for purchase.

Typically, the credit profile of a sub-prime borrower includes one or more of the following characteristics:

  • Low credit scores
  • History of derogatory credit (i.e. bankruptcy, foreclosure)
  • Currently delinquent on their home loan
  • Lack of credit history or credit depth
  • Low asset levels
  • Low income levels or non-verifiable income levels
  • High loan-to-value combined with low income versus debt
  • Contains “random” circumstance that introduces risk

Just because a person exhibits one or more of these traits, however, doesn’t mean that he is automatically a sub-prime borrower. This set of guidelines is very general.

Even though “sub-prime” has negative connotation to it, sub-prime loans serve a very important purpose. Sub-prime loans provide home financing to people who otherwise would not be approved for a loan at all. Remember: they don’t conform to the government guidelines!

Recently, sub-prime lenders have fallen into a world of hurt because the default risk that is inherent in every sub-prime loan is being realized with alarming frequency. Lest you think these defaults are surprising the markets, this is a problem two years in the making and industry insiders know it.

See, the one very important difference between conforming and sub-prime loans is that conforming loans are eventually bundled and sold on Wall Street as long-term bonds called mortgage-backed securities. Sub-prime loans, by contrast, are short-term. Conforming loans are overwhelmingly of the 30-year fixed variety, but sub-prime mortgages are of the 2-year ARM variety.

To understand why this matters, it’s important to review how adjustable rate mortgages work.

With all ARMs, the lender agrees to collect interest at a fixed rate for some period of time. When that period Read more

January 3, 2007

Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs: The BloodhoundBlog interview with Rain City Guide . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Beat out the Dustman with the Rain Dogs for I am a Rain Dog, too. A snippet:

Q: What are some of your favorite blogs (real estate or otherwise)?

A:

  • Greg Swann: Totally unfair question: I have over 160 weblogs in my feed reader. From the RE.net, you can bet we like the weblog if we’ve recruited its author as a BloodhoundBlog contributor. There are people we can’t approach (such as RCG’s very talented talent pool), and some we love — such as vendors — who would compromise either us or their employers by working with us. By now, a significant part of my attention, in reading real estate weblogs, is devoted to recruitment.

    Away from the RE.net, I read a lot of weblogging blogs, marketing blogs, SEO blogs, Macintosh-fanatic blogs and techno-geek blogs in general. Lately, TechMeme gets a lot of my time, simply because it links to such interesting content.

  • Brian Brady: Active Rain Real Estate Network. I’ve developed online friendships and a reader following there. I love Freakonomics Blog because of the off-beat hypotheses they formulate to otherwise explained problems.
  • Doug Quance: BloodhoundBlog, of course… and I have many others, but I wouldn’t want to offend those who, because of brevity, wouldn’t make the list.
  • Dan Green: My non-real estate blog list includes a strange mix of PopSugar, Olson’s Observations, Sabernomics, and Copyblogger.
  • Kris Berg: At the risk of sounding gratuitous, Rain City Guide was the first blog I encountered that really made sense to me. Since then, I have discovered many, many others that seem to strike the same, often elusive balance of having local and national appeal, of being instructional and entertaining, and of speaking to industry professionals and consumers. My first stops each morning include Sellsius, The Real Estate Tomato, 360 Digest, 3 Oceans, Bawldguy Talking, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Real Central VA, RealEstateUndressed, Blue Roof, and (of course) The San Diego Home Blog, to name but a few. My feed reader includes about forty blogs at the moment, which is far fewer than for a lot of bloggers I know of, but barely manageable for me. I have been slumming over Read more
December 26, 2006

A Realtor’s Guide to Alien Lenders

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website
“First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the ….”

-Tony Montana in the movie, Scarface

The professional Realtor has always helped a would be homebuyer by referring her to a credible financing source. That paradigm has shifted much in the past few years as lenders have positioned themselves as the first stop on the home buying highway. Our marketing message has basically been the aforementioned Tony Montana quote. That message has caused a new phenomenon for Realtors that I call “Alien Mortgage Originators”. The point of my post here is to temper the xenophobia that exists in Realtors’ hearts when dealing with Alien Mortgage Originators. These five tips will help Realtors identify which Alien Originators are credible and which are just a voice on the phone looking to scalp your buyer.

1- The first question to ask an Alien Originator is one you hear down South a lot. “Just who are your people?” Southerners, wary of carpetbaggers, find that question an effective way of finding common bonds. The internet is an inexpensive way to let Alien Originators broadcast who “our people” are so google them. Maybe the connection is a college tie, an old job, an old hometown, etc. When you ask me that question, it humanizes both you and me. Now… we both cheer for the Arizona Cardinals, or both dated Julie from Joliet, or both went to Big East colleges. It’s not much to both cheer for the Arizona Cardinals but I’m less likely to let you down knowing that small fact about you.

2- The second question would be to ask for referrals, preferably from Realtors within your town or franchise. Why the Realtor rather than the client? Realtors have inside intelligence about originators that a client wouldn’t. I love when I’m funding a purchase with a Keller Williams agent because I know so many of them. I understand their Belief System and can recite it for them. I know “their” rules. An Alien Originator wants to show off his stuff to a new Realtor relationship. If the Alien Originator has no common referral sources for Read more

December 21, 2006

Inside The Box – YES, NO and MAYBE

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. – Henry Ford

In an email, Adam wrote:

Russell-

I never got a chance to thank you for the Star Wars “Duel in the Desert.” I attended the event and very much appreciated your insight and humor. I have been doing Real Estate for over 6 years in CA and AZ. Although I have made over 100k one year, I have struggled through many others. I found this interesting in the sense that you mentioned doing this through the first part of your career (the ups and downs).

Somebody asked you a question and you mentioned to them about not being “all the way in the box.” You then mentioned something along the line of You finally getting this perspective yourself in your career and getting “all the way in the box.”

I want to get all the way in. How is this change made? How do/did you flip that switch? I’ve been waiting for years yet it hasn’t happened.

If this seems like a strange email, it’s because it is! I just valued your advice so much that you gave a couple of months back and thought you might be able to give me more insight.

Thanks,

Adam

The question I was responding to was from a lady asking about sending out postcards but she didn’t want to mail “ordinary” postcards to a farm area or a personal mailing list. She wanted something really unique – something outside the box. As I hear this sort of thing all the time (and recognize it as a destructive idea) I told her that her problem was not that she wasn’t outside the box with her thinking and her postcard program but that she wasn’t IN the box yet. Few agents are suffering from not being “outside the box”. They think they are but their real problem is they haven’t gotten “inside the box” yet.

There are certain fundamentals in any industry, profession or activity. There are correct ways of doing almost anything. The people at the top (of almost any activity) have Read more

December 12, 2006

Why The Fed Matters to Real Estate

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

Ben Bernanke HeadshotThe Federal Open Market Committee meets today and will keep the Fed Funds Rate unchanged at 5.250%. It is not what the Fed does, however, that should concern Americans. It’s what the Fed says.

First, a clarification. The Fed Funds Rate is directly tied to Prime rate which impacts lines of credit for businesses and homeowners. Ben Bernanke & Co. do not control mortgage interest rates which are determined by the mortgage-backed securities markets. This is another conversation for another time.

When the Fed adjourns this afternoon, it will issue a press release in which it will discuss the economy and inflation. The statement — not the interest rate — is the news worth watching because inflation can unravel markets and push mortgage rates back to their highest levels of the year.

The chain of events is pretty logical:

  • If inflation is growing at a faster clip than the Fed wants, it will tell the markets
  • If it tells the markets, markets will know that the United States Federal Reserve expects the dollar to lose value over time
  • If the U.S. dollar is expected to lose value over time, the U.S. dollar will be “worth less” to foreign nations
  • If the U.S. dollar is “worth less” to foreign nations, foreign nations will buy fewer U.S.-denominated securities because the relative returns will be less, too
  • If foreign nations buy fewer U.S.-denominated securities because the relative returns is less, the demand for mortgage-backed bonds will drop
  • If the demand for mortgage-backed bonds drop, the price of mortgage-backed bonds will drop
  • If the price of mortgage-backed bonds drops, the yield of mortgage-backed bonds will increase
  • If the yield of mortgage-backed bonds increases, then mortgage rates go up for Americans

It’s a long road to get to the conclusion, but this is the manner in which the Fed impacts real estate and mortgage lending. So when your local daily shows the headline “Fed Leaves Rates Unchanged”, don’t think the coast is clear. Read the article and dig a little deeper — it’s not what they did, it’s what they said.

December 9, 2006

Zillow.com versus Realtor.com: Nothing grows in the shade of great tree . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think part of the problem, in understanding the radical nature of what Zillow.com did this week, is that we are conflating unlike things. As an example, when I speak of a National MLS, I am not talking about local MLS systems.

For one thing, the sine qua non purpose of a local MLS system is to advertise the co-broke commission to other agents, keeping it secret from consumers. This objective is not even on the radar of home searchers, whether they are looking at local IDX listings or a national site like Realtor.com.

Kevin Boer posted an excellent analysis of why Zillow will not replace local MLS systems. I agree, for now, but that’s not really the issue. In the second place, if we were to split the buyer’s agent’s commission from the listing agent’s commission, the entire rationale for exclusive local MLS systems goes away.

But in the first place, home searchers are not going to any listings systems to find out about commissions. To the extent that a local MLS system corresponds to a market as Kevin sees it, to that extent a national home listings service is an entirely different type of market. If the one facilitates the essential activities of real estate brokerage, the other exists to introduce home searchers to the real estate market, to particular real estate products and to real estate vendors.

They are not the same market, so conflating the two is an error. If you want, we can call the idea of a National MLS system something else: National Property Listings Service — NeoPoLiS, “new town” in Greek.

The point is that harping that Zillow can’t do this and Zillow can’t do that is completely true and completely pointless: Zillow isn’t doing those things, nor could it, nor should it. What Zillow might be doing, and only time will tell if it can pull it off, is creating a national clearinghouse for listed homes — which will be brokered by off-site — and normally local — means.

In comments to one of my posts, Dustin Luther raises some plausible objections to my arguments. His counter is that Read more

December 8, 2006

In the trenches with Zillow.com: A working Realtor’s first-hand experience listing a home . . .

by

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

Zillow has had Greg’s attention for a long time, going back to an Odysseus post from last February, when we were blogging for our own entertainment. Greg has debunked Zillow, he’s defended Zillow, but till this week I’ve been indifferent. Zillow has held as much relevance for me as Ragnarok Online. Both have inspired a lot of buzz among their audiences, but neither made my life better, easier, happier, so I’ve not wasted time on them.

But this past Monday, when David Gibbons told us about Zillow’s plans to add the For Sale and Make Me Move tools to their comprehensive database, he gave me a reason to care. When someone hires me to sell her house, one of my jobs is to let as many prospective buyers as possible know that this house is for sale. Zillow will help me find an audience that I might not already be getting through buyers’ brokers, drive-bys, Realtor.com, open houses… So now Zillow has made my life better, easier, happier, by giving me a tool to bring my client’s house to more potential buyers.

To get to know this new tool, I claimed our own house on My Zillow. Here I got to experience first hand the problem with using Zillow for an accurate estimation of a house’s value. We live on a wonderfully eclectic street of ranch, bi-level and split-level 1960’s houses in the North Central Phoenix subdivision, Terry Terrace. Lots are all around 8000 square feet, but the houses range between 1400 to 2850 square feet. At 1993 square feet, ours is about average. The people who remodeled the house before we bought it did some wonderful things — enclosing the carport to make a 2-car garage and landscaping were minor compared to the the major improvement of raising the ceiling and removing the labyrinth of walls common in 1962, to open up the living area side of the house into two huge, very livable and very workable rooms. Then they added requisite granite, 18″ tile, designer cabinets and upgraded appliances. And, since we’ve moved in we’ve upgraded the bathrooms and all the Read more

December 8, 2006

Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

Louis Vuitton and the French Revolution. That is what my daughter told me she would be learning about in her high school European History class. Right war, wrong Louis.

On the morning after the Zillow news, I had my own knee-jerk reaction. I subsequently took it upon myself to contact a preeminent real estate reporter for my local rag, the San Diego Union Tribune. I referred him to the many on-line discussions that were taking place, and suggested there might be a story here. Also, in an enlightened moment of shameless self-promotion, I suggested that on his next slow news day, he might investigate the real estate blogging phenomenon and perhaps even the surprising dearth of serious San Diego-based blogs. (Jeff, yours is an exception, of course).

Regarding the Zillow debate, and I will paraphrase, he indicated that they would not be pursuing the story at this time. Message being, no news here. Funny, I thought, as yesterday morning’s business section included the following headlines: Aeromexico begins nonstop flights from S.D. to Mexico City; Food is family’s matter (Chick-fil-A founder’s grandson opens a new local restaurant); and Yahoo! reshuffles top management. Okay, I’ll give them that last one. But, Zillow isn’t news? It took me an embarrassingly long time (one coffee refill) to grasp the underlying reason for his reluctance to acknowledge and address my issue.

The Sunday Homes section is gasping for breath. Newer, less experienced agents can’t afford it, and the more experienced, knowledgeable agents have all but value-engineered it out of the marketing equation. Print media no longer provides the results, the return on investment, that can justify this as a significant marketing dollar investment. In-line classified ads have become a component of our advertising arsenal only as they serve to placate our home selling clients, utilized almost entirely to “buy” our listings. The newspapers have their on-line counterparts, of course, in an attempt to compete in the IT revolution, but an announcement such as the one by Zillow yesterday serves as a painful reminder that they can’t.

I expect and hope that there will always be a place for the printed Read more

December 7, 2006

Zillow redux: A post-diluvian retrospective . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Drew Meyers is doing an excellent job of cataloging the Zillow coverage. My plan is to ponder issues arising in posts and comments, here and everywhere. No guarantee that I’m not missing something, so it would be a great favor if you would point out my lapses.

Zillow understands PR. They’ve had company bigfeet out doing media drop-ins for a while, and, for the weblogging community, David Gibbons separately briefed Ardell DellaLoggia, Cathleen and me, and a third weblogger in San Francisco, identity undisclosed. The point of all this was to spread advance news of the upgrade, but to have it embargoed until 10 PM last night. I’m sure the resulting blog-frenzy suited them just fine, but, even knowing what was going to happen once news broke, there was no way I was going to miss this show.

But: This is why I wanted to go at the thing in the greatest depth I could achieve, right from the beginning. The fact of the matter is, the center of gravity in the real estate world shifted last night — away from Chicago and toward Seattle. It was only a partial shift, and it might turn out to be only temporary, but the professional porcupine that is the National Association of Realtors lost a double-hand-full of quills last night. If it continues to lose more than it manages to grow back, soon enough it will be nothing more than a naked rat. Then what?

The person I was most interested in hearing from last night was Galen Ward, and I said so right away at Rain City Guide. He didn’t disappoint, delivering a trenchant analysis without the advance notice Ardell and I had:

Zillow has the best shot at getting the chicken or the egg (you need one to get the other). Most non-MLS sites (Trulia, Propsmart, ForSaleByOwner, etc.) have had the nasty problem of beginning with no listings and no searchers (no chickens or eggs). Each has tried a novel and somewhat successful way of getting searchers or listings – crawling sites for listings, offering free listings, pay-per click ads to lure searchers, etc. None Read more

December 6, 2006

2006 is the Year of Zillow: The 900 pound AVM has been upgraded to be a free listing platform and the presumptive national MLS system . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The News

An upgrade made tonight to Zillow.com‘s on-line home evaluation system will add the following new functionality:

  • Owners or listing agents for any of the 67 million homes in Zillow’s database will be able to list those homes for sale at no cost.
  • Owners of any Zestimable homes will be able to post a “Make Me Move” price on their homes, the price at which all objections to selling will have been overcome.
  • Zillow is creating a real estate wiki to serve as a sort of Wikipedia.org-like encyclopedia of real estate.

From the company’s press release:

Leading real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced a major upgrade, allowing homeowners and real estate agents to post homes for sale for free. Additionally, in redefining what it means for a house to be “For Sale,” Zillow? is enabling any homeowner to post a Make Me Move? price.

“To date Zillow has created a Web page for almost every home in the country – close to 70 million – on which we’ve placed public records data and our Zestimate? home valuations,” said Rich Barton, Zillow’s co-founder and CEO. “With today’s new release we are opening up every home’s Web page on Zillow.com for owners and their real estate agents to plant virtual ‘For Sale’ signs in their Zillow front yards for free.”

In addition, any homeowner can now post a Make Me Move price. “What number would it take for you to call the movers and hand over your keys?” asked Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s co-founder and president. “Make Me Move is our twist on the traditional ‘For Sale’ sign.” A homeowner can easily post a Make Me Move price without exposing any personal information. Zillow then enables interested buyers to contact the owner through an email “anonymizer.” There is no charge for the service.

All postings, be they “For Sale” or Make Me Move, provide free uploading of pictures, home descriptions including “what I love about my home,” and neighborhood commentary. Additionally, real estate agents who post homes they are representing for sale can publish their own contact information, link to listings on their own Web sites, and upload a photo Read more

November 30, 2006

The Millionaire Real Estate Agent

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

– Isaac Newton

First things first – WOW, what a fantastic collection of writers and contributers this blog has! I came to Blodhoundblog to quickly see what had already been written before I started to write my post. I wound up spending over 90 minutes reading every single post, going to each of the links (thank you SO much, Richard for http://www.psychotactics.com/). I am so pleased with Greg’s decision to change the direction of Bloodhoundblog – and I was already happy before the changes. I may not post everyday but I sure will read it every day.

What follows in this post may seem to some like Earl Nightingale meets Buddha – and maybe it is – but I think you are going to like it.

Last week Matt wrote:

I might have missed something in the post, but to say that all listings for the discounter were $299 is probably not correct. “58 X 299 = $17,342.”I see a lot of “Discounters” using low selling price as a tool to get people in the door, or on phone. $299 is usually a no support price…and then they tack on a-la-carte items to raise that price up. True, it will never be full commission, but I doubt all 58 sold for only $299. How would he still be in business only making $17K per quarter?Russell, How hard was it to get to the level you are at today? Many realtors never get to this level, because it is very, very hard. I would bet that it is a lot easier to throw up a bunch of ads, that say you will sell a home for $299, and get a ton on people in your office. It can’t be that hard…

I don’t know how much selling up occurs at his site. But assume he only sells half of the listings he takes and gets paid on twice as many as he closes and manages to up sell every possible option he has – I still don’t like the numbers. I Read more

November 28, 2006

Charmed, I’m sure

by

Marketing Provocateur

Author website

DC: A very charming Georgetown house in the very center of the east village…

CHICAGO: Very charming Gunderson style home located on great block…

SF: Sunnyvale charmer! Updated kitchen. Great neighborhood…

Let’s step past the navel-gazing** about why most real estate copy is so dreadfully banal, and step up to the question: What can you do in the next 10 minutes or so to make your listings more attention getting, more interesting, and most of all, more effective?

And let’s start by dispensing with the myth — if not mystique — that marketing and advertising is more difficult to understand than other professions.*** Doctor, lawyer, real estate agent: It’s all about problem solving.

“Doctor, I’m feeling pressure in my chest.”
“Counselor, I’ve been sued for divorce.”
“[Your name here], I want to sell my house.”

There is one key difference. Those professionals are looking for solutions to clear and present problems. You, however, start with the solution in hand — a property for sale. Your job is to find the problem. Advantage you, for therein lies the path to better copy.

You simply need to become a method writer. At your keyboard stop and think: “What problems do my listings solve? And for whom?” Write your answers in simple declarative sentences. One after another. Action verbs preferred. And go easy on the adjectives and adverbs — no matter how charming, elegant, and delightful you find them.

Here are two to get you started.

For that in-town condo:
The end of your two-hour commute — this is a country home in the city with the kind of kitchen that causes suburban envy.

Or that suburban ranch:
In the basement…your health club. In the master suite…your day spa. In the family room…day care. Out back…your florist. In this home…your new life.

While I can’t see your listings, I already know the kinds of problems for which you have solutions.

“I’m eating at the same three restaurants every weekend…”
“I never see my kids because I’m commuting hours each day…”
“I’m sick of taking my clothes to a laundromat…
“I’ll never meet a man living out here alone in the boonies…”
“Yada, yada, yada…”

The more specific the problems you describe, the better your copy Read more

November 14, 2006

Realty Reality: How Jake, Jurij and Tatiana Pawlenko wove their way into our hearts . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a shaggy dog story…

It begins with Jake, the world’s most playful Yellow Labrador Retriever, and Jake is a thread running all through this tapestry.

And that’s the way to think of it — as a tapestry. The clients we love best — and we love to love our clients — weave themselves into the tapestry of our lives. They are with us for years — for life we hope — and they show up again and again in all sorts of unexpected places. For, while this is a Jake story, it’s also a Ronan Doyle story and a Richard Riccelli story — it’s a story where many of the threads of the tapestry of our lives meet and merge in beautiful, unplanned designs.

But this is most fundamentally the story of the work we did with Jurij Pawlenko — himself a shaggy two-legged dog — and his lovely wife, Tatiana. And the thread of their story runs all through BloodhoundBlog, so much have they meant to us.

Begin at the beginning: Cathleen Collins was previewing houses for Robert and Lisa Pageler, and one that she looked at was 922 West Culver St, a 1936 Ranch-style home in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Downtown Phoenix. This was Jurij and Tatiana’s home at the time, and Jurij and Jake were home when Cathy arrived.

I like dogs. I’m indifferent to cats. Cathy loves any creature with fur. She and Jake hit it off immediately, especially since Jake loves to play so much. His favorite game is fetch, and he will play it forever. Cathy threw her arm out throwing grapefruit for Jake to fetch — thus endearing herself forever to Jurij.

This was the Summer of 2005, and Cathy wrote about this part of the story earlier this year.

In January of 2006, we listed Ronan Doyle’s home at 1102 West Culver St for sale. If you go to our About BloodhoundRealty.com page, you’ll see that our brokerage consists of Greg Swann, Cathleen Collins, Cameron Swann and Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound. That’s true day-to-day, but there are two other key players without whom none of 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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