BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 12 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

July 25, 2011

Do you want to know how cool ARMLS could be? Sell it as a business and see what someone who is working for money can do with it.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of life: Not-for-profit “businesses” suck. Don’t believe me? We’ll discuss it after you get back from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

To be fair, I’m willing to regard the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service (ARMLS) as something of an exception, at least as administered by Bob Bemis. Under the last guy, it was run like the Mayberry Jail. This was not entirely a bad thing for me at the time, but it was nothing at all like a business. And the Bemis ARMLS is no business, even now, even if it is significantly more efficient — which is not entirely a good thing for me now, alas.

But: ARMLS is a sleepy not-for-profit fiefdom that has been thrust by fate into the data-processing business. As an MLS, it’s not awful. But as a data-processing business — it sucks!

Why? For the same reason every other not-for-profit “business” sucks: Profits and losses are the guideposts to customer satisfaction in business. Without them, a not-for-profit “business” cannot ever hope to achieve customer satisfaction — which is not to imply that most of them are even trying.

Here’s the news, by way of Inman: ARMLS, now owned by four Phoenix-area Realtor associations, is to be sold for $4.75 million to the Arizona Association of Realtors instead.

First, metropolitan Phoenix Realtors will be robbed of an extremely valuable asset, and then all the other Realtors in the state will subsidize us hotshots in Phoenix, but that’s all just good old-fashioned Rotarian Socialism, to be expected from any crime syndicate with “Association of Realtors” as a part of its name.

And, as you might guess, the grand plan is to create a statewide Arizona MLS, so every neck can be conveniently strangled with one noose. ARMLS über alles.

But that’s all just the garden variety stupidity we expect from any not-for-profit “business”. We know from organizational theory that every sort of “service” organization comes to be a force of evil deployed against its own supposed “masters”. Do you disagree? Clearly you’re not spending enough time trying to renew your driver’s license.

I like Bob Bemis, along with the people I Read more

July 22, 2011

From sunny Phoenix, a love letter to the summer heat…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this four years ago at DistinctivePhoenix.com. Given all the pissing and moaning going on nationwide about — get this — summer weather, I thought I’d give you a taste of what real heat feels like. –GSS

We’re in negotiations to list a house in the Coronado Historic District of Downtown Phoenix. The temperature hit 110 this week, and the seller has determined he would rather live elsewhere.

If you live anywhere but in the Desert Southwest, 100 degrees probably sounds unbearably hot to you. Eight-five degrees is hot. Ninety is a scorcher. Ninety-five is intolerable. One hundred degrees is the stuff of “you don’t know how lucky you kids have got it” family legends.

I have news for you. In Phoenix, we might see a 100 degree day as early as March. Once those temperatures arrive in earnest, we will go for 100 days with 100-degree-plus temperatures. How much plus? The hottest day on record was 122, but 115 and above is not uncommon.

How can we stand it?

Well, for one thing, you get used to it. If you live here for three years, your blood will thin out. Summer will seem much easier to bear than you remember. But Winter will be a bear, particularly if you go back home for the holidays.

But for another, the people who stay here by choice just like the heat. It’s not all that pleasant getting into the car when the interior is 160 and the steering wheel is even hotter than that. But to step outdoors in the late afternoon, when the heat is at its absolute worst, to feel those irrepressible waves of warmth flowing in on the Western breeze, to see forever by the light of an unrelenting sun…

If you hate it, you hate it, and, like our client, you can’t live here for long.

But if you love it…

I rode my bike today. I went out at 10:30 in the morning, so it was only about 93 degrees outside. Shorts, tee-shirt, sneakers and my iPod, all on a mountain bike. We live along the Arizona Canal in North Central Phoenix. The canals are Read more

July 13, 2011

Wired: “Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A fascinating story about open source programmers deploying Microsoft’s Kinect hardware in amazing off-label applications.

From Wired magazine:

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Read more

July 9, 2011

Being an Entrepreneur is Kind of Awesome

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

MSNBC ran a pretty cool article on me (and another lawyer) and about how an increasing number of young lawyers are starting their own practices.

In general, it was a good article. I hope I didn’t come off as too much of a braggart. People – at least anonymous commenters in the Intertubes – focused on my revenue claims, and not on my basic message which is: 1) anyone can do what I did and 2) State Bars should make it easier for people to do what I did by lowering the costs and barriers to entry.

It’s entirely absurd to me that someone should need to study three years in law school before being able to practice law. That’s not how it is in most other countries, including other countries that follow the common law tradition.

Lawyers in America have built up a frightful monopoly. An ABA executive pooh-poohed my suggestion. That’s fine. He’s part of the establishment. What else would he say?

What is sad to me is that so many other run-of-the-mill lawyers believe that these rules help them – the same rules that saddle them with enormous debt, that prevent them from marketing, the same rules that in the name of the Rules of “Ethics” privilege large firms.

I think people prefer to be secure, rather than free, even if that security is an enormous burden that prevents them from being rich, too.

The wonderful thing about the article is that I’ve been contacted by a couple of dozen entrepreneurial types across the country and am planning a free webinar. That’s pretty cool!

Anyway, thanks also for all the feedback on my website! I have randomly selected a winner who will receive a $100 gift certificate from Amazon. Since feedback was anonymous, I can’t disclose who won the certificate. But, trust me, someone received it. I’m a lawyer, after all!!

July 4, 2011

God Bless America

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

A few years ago I sold a very small condo to an Albanian family who came here having won the immigration visa lottery. They showed up in Texas with suitcases and two daughters. Both the father and the mother worked to provide for the family. The mother worked in the housekeeping department at a large Hilton Hotel. The father worked in the Deli department at Wal-Mart. The two girls enrolled in public school and started studying. The first thing the girls needed to do was learn to speak English as there are no Albanian bi-lingual programs at the Houston Independent School District. The oldest daughter started her American schooling as a 9th grader not speaking English in a very tough high school.

I met the family when this daughter was a rising Senior. She was in the top 10% of her class.

US Flag image: http://www.patrioticon.org


About a month ago, I received an email from this daughter, now married and with child on the way.

Long story short- Inspections for the oldest daughter and her husband’s home are next Saturday.

I love a job where you can serve your heroes. Happy Independence Day.

July 4, 2011

SplendorQuest: A real-estate professionals’ guide to anarchy in the USA

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. This is what independence means — independence from the tyrannical intrusions of government. You’ve been trained your whole life to recoil from ideas like this, but there has never been a better time than right now to ask yourself this question: How is the dispute resolution system you have in place now working out for you? — GSS

 
I thought about making a short movie addressing a host of common questions about the political philosophy we’ve been discussing, but I decided to undertake the task in text, instead. A video would be faster for me, but not so much for you. Plus, text is easy to search and easy to revisit, where video can be ungainly. So: FAQ-style:

What does this have to do with real estate?

Human liberty begins when you have a redoubt that is yours to defend from any would-be usurper. That’s real estate, and, as I write every year at Independence Day, the civilizations we associate with human freedom are those where ordinary people had the power to claim, own, use, enjoy, buy and sell the land. If you want for a real estate weblog to concern itself solely with surface-level bread-and-butter real estate news, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you want to learn how better to defend your liberties, including your power to buy, sell and broker real estate, stay tuned. None of this is easy, but it is fundamental for understanding real estate as philosophy.

Isn’t anarchy a creed of chaos and violence?

1. No, that would be socialism in its collapsing phase.

2. No, that is what you have been told by people who want you to volunteer to be their slaves and toadies.

3. No. Anarchism as I define it is the politics of egoism, which itself is the ethics of self-adoration. People actively pursuing self-adoration will tend to avoid chaos and violence except when chaos and violence are the only means of avoiding even worse fates. When might this be the case? When socialism undergoes its collapsing phase, for example.

So what is anarchism “as you define it”?

What Read more

July 4, 2011

Private ownership of the land is the source not just of our freedom but of our civility and of our humanity itself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

The “cap and trade” bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week contains within it the seeds of a national building code. It rarely rains in Phoenix and it rarely fails to rain in Portland, but both cities will build new structures according to the dictates of some Washington bureaucrat.

Drive along 19th Avenue in Phoenix and you’ll pass block after block of condemned houses. They were taken by the city for the planned light rail expansion, now delayed. The neighbors are left to fight off the kind of vermin vacant homes attract while they worry what that blight is doing to their home values.

In Glendale, the city government is doing everything it can to prevent the Tohono O’Odham tribe from developing its own sovereign land as a casino.

The essence of the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day is the free ownership of the land. The Hoplite Greeks fought and died to protect their own lands. The Roman Legionnaires fought and died because their farms were their own property. A Cincinnatus — or a George Washington — lays down his arms because being a dictator is nothing when you can instead be a freeholder in the land.

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we Read more

July 4, 2011

What would Greg Swann do? Integrity, transparency and Web 2.0

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top in response to Chris Johnson’s post on bribe-offers from vendorsluts. — GSS

 
Hey, y’all! Are you in the mood for a truly incredible offer?

You’ve seen the kind of single-property web sites we do at BloodhoundRealty.com. Dozens of pages. Hundreds of photos. Maps, movies, PDFs, off-site links — the works!

What if I were to tell you that you could have a single-property web site just like ours — with your choice of style templates and your own domain, hosted for a year — all for just $99.

Or, for just $99 more, I’ll mimic your weblog’s theme. Your single property web site will look just like your weblog — to promote and protect your brand identity.

That’s actually not a bad business, and I already have everything I need to start it. The software we use to build our single property web sites is called engenu. I give it away for free, but no one uses it. If I built it to be forms-based with everything hosted on our servers, it would be easier — but much slower — for end-users, and I could make a ton of money milking Realtors by selling them the same thing over and over again.

Why not do it?

Because it’s a piece of everything I hate in the real estate industry as it is presently comprised. It’s the vendorslut syndrome in action. I write a piece of software, then sell it to you over and over again, taking a huge profit every time you pull out your credit card. You get pitches like this every day — with the difference being that our single-property web sites are a lot richer in content than the ones you can buy from sleazy vendors.

I’ve been wanting to write a post about leadership in the RE.net. I don’t like hierarchies, or none beyond the sort of adhocracy that works so well in the Web 2.0 world. We are thought leaders at BloodhoundBlog because we think wisely and well — and write wisely and well — about issues that most other people prefer to skirt.

But: I don’t kid myself: Read more

July 4, 2011

Happy Independent’s Day…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
Our wedding anniversary today. I’ve always thought that the best way to celebrate the things that really matter in life is to do the things that really matter in life, so I’m spending the afternoon and evening with my best-beloved, but I have a home inspection to attend to this morning. To work is to live, and, in Phoenix or in Las Vegas, we’ve always worked on our anniversary. On top of everything else, it’s a symbol of who we are together, why we work so well together.

Meanwhile, here is my favorite Independence Day clip, the fireworks scene from Moscow on the Hudson:

June 30, 2011

Unchained melodies: Melanie’s Babe Rainbow

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Art is the stuff that sticks with you. Art is the thing that makes a permanent change in who you are. This song has been with me since I was a teenager. It’s never been of me, but it’s something I’ve always understood — even more since I started selling real estate for a living. It might-could have that impact on you, too.

It’s a waltz, 6/8, cdfc. Couldn’t be simpler. And yet I have this song in my head — in my soul — all the time. This is Melanie exposing the universe through the lens of her own life, and by making her life so real, so raw, so painful and yet in the end still so palpably redeemed — this really works for me. This is what art is for…

June 28, 2011

My life as a dog: Five years of BloodhoundBlog.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of BloodhoundBlog. Here is where we started, with a question that haunts me to this very day:

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

At the time that we launched, Zillow, Trulia and Redfin were new kids on the block, and traditional Realtors were casting a wary eye over their shoulders. It was an interesting time to write about real estate, even though some of what I wrote in those days seems comically stoopid to me by now.

(Caveat lector: Our archives always repay effort. I could wish that someone would comb through them and pull out the true gems — the category Enduring Interest is crying out for such a treatment. But even without that helpful handiwork, if you haven’t learned everything we have taught here, you could do worse than giving our posts over the past five years your regular attention.)

I love this place, and I love the work we have done here, but I can’t revisit the history of BloodhoundBlog without some sadness — and sadness is an emotion I’ve wanted for my whole life to know nothing about. But it remains that my most important goal for this weblog — unchained Realtors — remains unfulfilled.

Too much the contrary. Most of the people who were writing in the RE.net when BloodhoundBlog was young are on the slave-master side of the table by now, either as vendorsluts, Judas goats — or both. It’s not hard for me to deplore this outcome, but none of it would be possible without the active participation of the slaves, who line up to be yoked with an ox-like complacency. Despite all the opportunities technology affords us to break free of the brokers, the NAR, the Inmannequins, et infinitely cetera, there is something about most Realtors that seems to crave dependency, subordination and the attendant exploitation.

In response to this outcome, I must admonish myself with the words I have deployed on so many other people over the years: Cultivate indifference. For five years and more, we have been just that close to smashing all the Read more

June 16, 2011

Book To Buy: The War of Art

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Today, you will need to buy this book.

Because it has been the one thing that’s been key to the run I’ve been on.  To understanding who I am.

To go pro.

Every idea I’ve implimented has come from this book – or from the Meditations (hays translation).

Anyway, even if you’re broke and mad at the world, go get this book.  I’ve read it 5 times, I think.  I could stand to read it 50 more.

June 11, 2011

MSNBC calling, and a new website design

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

MSNBC is planning to run a story next week on me, as part of a story about how lawyers are coping with a bad economy.

And I’ve been able to grow: I added my wife in January, who has been able to expand the firm’s business. We hired a new lawyer, a former prosecutor, who started in early May and is adding to our ability to expand into neighboring counties, as well as traffic law and bankruptcy law.

I’ve also started a redesign of my website. I’d appreciate your feedback. I recognize your time is valuable. In exchange for your feedback, I will randomly select someone to receive a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com.

It’s entirely anonymous – you’ll have to trust me that someone got the gift certificate – and confidential. No one but me will know you sent me feedback. And no one will know if you win the gift certificate.

My new front page is at www.chetson.com/home. Please only review that page. Don’t worry about clicking through to the rest of the site which has not yet been redesigned.

Because the prettiest designs don’t always work on every browser, or are confusing, I’d like your frank feedback:

  1. Does the page display properly
  2. What is your impression based on the page?
  3. Are you able to see the various slides, functions, etc?
  4. Do you understand what kind of law we practice and what kind of things we do?
  5. Would you pick up the phone and call?

Feel free to email me your feedback to dchetson@gmail.com. Anyone who emails me by Wednesday, June 15, is eligible for the $100 gift certificate.

Thanks for your help!

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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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