BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 14 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

March 28, 2011

Slow Real Estate Market: I’m not going to take it anymore!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

I haven’t been posting much at Bloodhound lately, or really for awhile.  Professionally, I did not make the progress last year I usually do.  I went backwards and was simply distracted by other things.  By this time last year, I was a very sick boy and it took until nearly Christmas to be back to having much energy or vitality.  But, it wasn’t time wasted.  From a personal standpoint, it confirmed what I already know, and that’s to just do the things that I want to do.  Since that’s pretty much how I’ve always lived, I looked at my life and decided it was perfect.

So, about January, I had the energy to get back to speed on business.  My brokerage wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do.  It wasn’t doing much at all.  So, I decided to fix it.  I did some Ryan Hartman type of web marketing and got the leads flowing again.  In my market, a market that hasn’t seen over 150 homes sold annually since 2007, I was getting 2 to 5 real buyers per week asking to do business and sending me their contact information.  That was a good start.

But, that wasn’t enough.  I’m the rural hound in this crowd.  We have a group of brokers really happy with their own little MLS system that doesn’t track much data.  It would look pretty 1992 to the rest of you.  So, by digging into it and looking at what was actually selling, I noticed that foreclosure sales, bank owned and short sales, had gone from a handful of percentage of the market to at least 20%.  Even more instructive, the number was growing quickly.

While I had a bunch of buyers calling, I was having issues getting folks who could get loans and get deals done.  By dipping my toe in marketing foreclosures I found that most all of them were looking to spend cash.  And, in this resort market, most were wanting premium properties.  Awesome!  That solves the qualification problem

So, I found out that lakechelanforeclosures.com and chelanforeclosures.com were available.  In a matter of a few days I Read more

March 19, 2011

Is it just me…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Or is it getting interesting out there?

I showed to twelve different parties this week, and I put the ball through the basket four times — two of those with Property Management Agreements after COE. At least two leases, too, with other leases still in doubt. I’m working all day from my car, but that’s always been my favorite place to be.

Is it just me, or has the worm turned?

March 4, 2011

If you have any time to spare from catching all those paper fish on TwitBook, I have a no-fee referral for a Bloodhound in McKinney, Texas.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My tenth house for this year is closing today, and I may be leasing up my two vacant rental properties between now and five o’clock. I know, I know — I’m missing out on all those wonderful paper fish on TwitBook, but my experience is that paper-fish chowder doesn’t make for a fulfilling meal.

Oh, well. Each man to his own saints. But, unlike TwitBook, where spitballs cast at other Realtors come back a thousand fold, when I say the words “I have a no-fee referral,” what that means is pretty simple:

I have an opportunity for you to catch a real fish — and cash a real paycheck — and all you have to do is deliver the frolicking goods!

It’s not nearly as much fun as wasting time on line while you pretend you are doing work, but everything’s a trade-off, ain’t it?

Here are the notes from the seller:

I am a huge fan of your blog. And though I am not a real estate agent, I used many of your sites articles and initiative to help me locate and buy my current home. Unfortunately, I never came across an informed agent who understood the value of proper high tech research and the value I was bringing to the deal. Sadly, the agent that I settled with for the purchase was nothing more than a functional tool for me to direct. Much disappointment (though I worked a great 25% off market buy in the end!)

And as I now I am selling my previous house – I beg you assistance: How can a well prepared seller locate a forward-thinking agent?

I do want a energetic agent. I do want a marketing savvy realtor! I do want a custom yard sign that shows the price! I do want the listing to appear where the buyers are looking online. And on and on.

Get it? You have to be a Bloodhound. You’ve got to be prepared to do the work.

But if you are, I’ve got a deal for you, all tied up with a bow, and all you’ve got on TwitBook is a Read more

March 3, 2011

Catching a glimpse of Don Reedy’s vision: So far, so good.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Email from Don Reedy regarding his post-op appointment yesterday:

Exhausted.

But the news is good.

The last operation was successful….so far. The scar tissue that was of such concern was eliminated. I have my next appointment one week from today, a milestone that should determine if we are “likely” to have scar tissue problems from this event. I must remain in the facedown position 12-14 hours a day, BUT THIS MEANS THAT I CAN NOW READ, WRITE AND BE PRODUCTIVE THE OTHER 10-12 HOURS!!! I am so very thankful. There is a good prognosis for vision to return, the quality of which is yet to be determined….and yet again, I am thankful and optimistic.

Nothing’s ever over in the world of medicine. The good news comes in the form of fewer and fewer appointments.

Don Reedy has a beautiful soul. He will never be robbed of the light of human goodness, regardless of how this turns out. And it takes nothing to note that our heroic battles against the relentless forces of entropy are but temporary, and, for now at least, are ultimately doomed to failure. But we are human, and to be human is to wish, to hope, to pray — and to press on regardless. In the end, what matters is not what you lose, but what you refuse to lose.

March 2, 2011

To say the truth, my plan was to say nothing about the iPad 2…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but that was before I saw the new Smart Covers…

Minor upgrade to the product. Major upgrade to the experience. The video samples Extraordinary Machine, and that’s just exactly right.

This is egoism in action: Steve Jobs is a spectacular genius at satisfying himself. Not everyone loves what he loves, but he never releases a product that is not perfect in his estimation. Bill Gates and all of the CEOs of the kleptocracy can say that about not one thing they do in their whole benighted lives…

February 28, 2011

My goal for March? Satisfied clients and a satisfied mind.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I changed the back of my business card. This is the new copy:

I agree with Jeff that giving good service while failing to achieve the main objective is a useless vanity. The Bawldguy champions results, but I would offer the further caveat that the goal of any business should be to achieve full customer satisfaction. That’s something that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, but I’ve been kind of tied up with, you know, actually doing it — and getting better at it, I hope.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is the first day of the last month of the first quarter of 2011. If your numbers so far are not all you’d hoped for, here is a March calendar to help you get started tracking your goals.

February 28, 2011

The Food Is Terrible, But Wow! The Service Is Out Of This World

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Ever had a friend rave about a newly found restaurant who said the service was literally the best he’s ever seen? The question hangin’ in the air of course, is — How was the food? Ever heard a friend reply, “Oh, the food? Average at best. But the service was so off the charts, we’re goin’ back every week.” I’m bettin’ not.

Let’s lay out a few examples of the above.

Did attendance at Chargers games drop last season cuz they didn’t always wear their wildly popular throwback uniforms? OR, cuz they stopped winning?

Would you rather have the rude, gruff, but world class doctor? OR, the dime a dozen physician who serves homemade cookies in the waiting room, and makes you feel really good about yourself?

Is your best friend your best friend cuz they don’t tell ya the shirt you’re plannin’ to wear on that first date makes you look like a 1958 Sears appliance salesman? OR, cuz when you call them at 3 AM on a rainy Wednesday morning, they’re there in 10 minutes?

The Chargers’ win/loss record isn’t in any way connected to their uniform’s design.

Your doctor’s manners are irrelevant to his ability/inability to treat you.

Your best friend pisses your wife off regularly, yet he’s still the guy you go to when it MATTERS.

You’re in the real estate business. There’s only one thing you do that’s guaranteed, every time it’s tried, to put a smile on your client’s face.

Produce the result you were hired to produce.

Results speak more loudly than anything else you do, including your so-called world class service.

Those who spend the bulk of their time and money enabling them to produce those results for more people, faster, are the smart kids in the room.

Clients don’t pay us five figures for HappyTalk. They pay us for results.

It’s pretty easy to discern who, and who does not get that in any given market.

However, as Grandpa replied to me once, when, as a 12 year old I said painting pictures of landscapes/seascapes was hard, “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Testimonials may speak of the Read more

February 19, 2011

The Blindsided Realtor

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

On January 31st I had a catastrohic retinal detachment in my left eye that rendered me blind (black, nada) for two days.  Two days later I had retinal surgery to repair the detachment.  This included injecting and filling my eye with silicone oil to keep the retina in place and the intraocular pressures where they needed to be.   In a followup visit four days later I had additional laser surgery to tack down the areas of the retina that needed it.  I was told during this time to lie face down 24 hours a day to keep the silicone oil pressing against the back of the eye.

Then, one week after the surgery I began to see a black shade covering my eye once again.  The retina had detached once more, and so for a few more days I was not just legally blind (the effect you get with silicone oil and the regular run of the mill retinal detachment surgery), but black, dark and very disturbingly blind.  It seems that the retina had not only detached, but there had been formation of retinal scar tissue in the wrong place.  This is a very serious condition called proliferative vitreal retinopathy (PVR), and if left uncorrected almost always results in permanent blindness.

Well, you’re saying, this is a real estate blog; not a Jerry Springer show or even an Oprah event.  And you all know that I’m writing this because I’ve had some sort of epiphany…right?

In truth, there hasn’t been an epiphany yet, and there might not be one.  I started off asking myself if there were any other “blind” Realtors functioning in America.  Turns out there’s a quite successful, totally blind, real estate agent in La Jolla.  So my hopes of being important because I couldn’t see just simply faded to grey like in a bad B-movie.  And any hopes I had for this being just a good story that I could share around the water cooler died this past week.

I was sent to USC Doheny Eye Center in Los Angeles by my surgeon here in La Jolla.  Was told his group was the Read more

February 15, 2011

“Let’s unleash the genius of free markets on the capital of the American people simply by refusing to load the dice in favor of housing.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

President Barrack Obama released his proposed 2012 budget yesterday. The jeers greeting this event, from all wavelengths of the political spectrum, suggest that, at long last, people have finally begun to take the measure of this pathetic little man-boy. Even so, there is at least one tax increase in the midst of the typically Obamaesque frenzy of insanely excessive “spandering” — spending in pursuit of political pandering.

Which tax? The mortgage interest tax deduction is on the chopping block at last — at least for the most prosperous Americans. This will be hugely beneficial to the rest of the economy, as CNBC points out:

If we eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, we can stop re-directing capital away from innovation. Working Americans will be free to spend, save, and invest according to their own perceptions of their needs and their sense of the future.

I expect that eliminating the government incentives for spending on housing would promote dramatic innovations, making Americans more productive and allowing the economy to grow with renewed vigor. Instead of building up a Ponzi-scheme illusion of bubble-dependent wealth, we can genuinely improve our lives by allowing wealth to flow to where individuals perceive it will be best used.

[….]

In short, let’s unleash the genius of free markets on the capital of the American people simply by refusing to load the dice in favor of housing. Isn’t time to at least give the market a chance?

This is not what we will hear from the National Association of Realtors, of course, nor from very wealthy crocodiles shedding very salty crocodile tears.

Oh, well. Here is the very best thing prosperous people can do for their country in this hour most dire:

Get you fat, pouty lips off the welfare tit!

If you want to be free, stop pointing a gun at your own head…

February 13, 2011

Time and a vector — these are the back-stories of our lives…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an extract from the novella I wrote at Christmas:

 
Christmas — the back-story.

“The name of the game is back-story.” I said that. I was sitting with Tigan and Chance at the food court at the Paradise Valley Mall. “The objective is to pick out people in the crowd, then come up with a plausible back-story for them.”

“Why?” Chance asked.

“Because it’s fun, mostly. But you can learn a lot about people if you think about how they got to where they are.”

We had been shopping, the three of us. I sent them off on their own to get gifts for their parents while I shopped alone for gifts for them. I had sent Adora off on an errand in the car, and we had all agreed to converge on the food court when we finished.

“Look at her,” I said, pointing to a chunky woman in scrubs barreling past us. “What’s her story?”

“Well,” Tigan said, “She’s a nurse.”

“Duh!” Chance said that.

“Why is she walking so fast?” I asked.

“Dood! It’s Christmas Eve!”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. Married or unmarried?”

“How could you know that?” Tigan asked.

“You can’t know, but you can guess. My guess would be unmarried. Kids or no kids?”

Chance scowled, glowered almost, but Tigan said, “…She has kids.”

“How do you know?”

“She came here straight from work. If she were unmarried with no kids, she would have changed clothes first. And brushed her hair and put on some make-up. Ms. Unmarried Nurse is available and wouldn’t waste an opportunity. Mrs. Married Nurse would have her husband and kids with her. Mrs. Single Working Mother has too much on her plate to worry about any of that.”

I said, “I like that story. So where are the kids? Home alone? Grandma’s house?”

“They’re with their father!” Chance enthused.

“I read it that way, too. Dad has the kids for Christmas Eve, and mom is rushing to get ready for Christmas Day. What do we actually know? Only what we can see — her person, her face, her clothes and the way she holds and moves her body. But we can draw some very strong inferences from those Read more

February 10, 2011

Good news, bad news, good news and more good news…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s some good news: Time magazine has discovered the Singularity. It’s a fan-boy article, but it covers a lot of interesting ground, anyway. What’s missing? Sim, massively large databases, signal processing, lots of cool stuff. The article devotes a lot of attention to Ray Kurzweil’s research on exponential curves in individual disciplines, but misses the big picture: The overall rate of change is not exponential but logarithmic. I say all the time, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.” We are fast approaching the day when it will no longer be possible even to attempt to enslave human intelligence.

Here’s some bad news: The current president of the National Association of Realtors is either a clueless dupe or a knowing villain — just like all the other grand poobahs of the NAR. I’ve invited him to come talk to us. Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to show up.

Here’s some good news from my house: I resumed lifting weights on Monday, two months after I cracked up my elbow. I could tell from other activity that I hadn’t lost much in strength, so I left the plates where I had had them. On Monday, I did ten repetitions of ten exercises. Fifteen reps on Tuesday, 20 on Wednesday, then 30 today. Not much pain in my elbow, and less every day. I’m at full extension, and maybe 98% of full compression. The only real pain is in the tendons of my left thumb — the guitar tendons. In a week, I’ll be back to 50 reps of each exercise, which is where I was before I fell.

And here’s the best news I saw today: The iPad 2 is coming soon, and the iPad 3 may not be far behind. I’m annoyed that the Verizon deal wasn’t for Verizon’s pretend 4g network, and I’m annoyed that there is no true 4g wireless service in Phoenix yet. But, as soon as I can afford to, I’m going to move all of my email to an iPad. I simply cannot be away from my email for hours at a time, and I’m Read more

February 7, 2011

“If government doesn’t steer capital into housing, the capital doesn’t disappear; it could fund other job-creating businesses.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Post:

Advertised as a way to stabilize the housing market, government-backed mortgage securitization ended up distorting and destabilizing it. The resulting misallocation of resources – evident not only in today’s massive bailout of Fannie and Freddie but also in the vast quantities of land, water and energy wasted on suburban sprawl from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale – is a true American tragedy. Today’s housing crisis is an opportunity to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

Damn straight. This is the Post, so the solution proposed is still WelfareLite, but any movement away from Rotarian Socialism is a move in the right direction.

January 29, 2011

Thoughts Worth Pondering?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

It’s pretty much become the mantra in real estate, that agents, most of ’em anyway, never stop searching for the Holy Grail — which is of course the MagicButton (MB). Just keep pressin’ it and business overwhelms them. They’re idiots of course. I can say that with a straight face cuz when it comes to MB hunts, I qualified for ExpertGuide status decades ago.

In point of fact, there are plenty of MBs around. They’re free or at least relatively cheap. Problem is, one of the key factors agents demand is that their effort is kept to a bare minimum. What I’m here to tell ya, as a charter member of MBA — MagicButtons Anonymous — is that there are two hard and fast ‘laws’ involved in any MB in the real estate brokerage business.

1. Seriously focused and slavishly consistent effort.

Don’t wanna burst anyone’s bubble with that one, but even a sit-down El Toro lawnmower must be running, in forward gear, and at least steered by a human operator to cut more grass than is directly under it when turned on.

2. If there are no results — defined as ever increasing bank deposits — then the only magic involved was the almost seamless transfer of money from the agent’s pockets to the marketer hawkin’ the MB.

What are some of the free MBS?

The one with the bestest cliché value is the leveraging of your sphere of influence. Though I’ve not liked the whole ‘sphere of influence’ approach much, it’s mainly due to how brokers use it to make a few bucks off their hopeless rookies before givin’ them the boot. In reality, most agents simply don’t have a sphere containing viable buyers/sellers. Still, if worked well and consistently it should, and probably will produce some results. Since you already know these people, the fear of rejection shouldn’t be a factor — or so the thinking goes.

Another one is farming. I’ve literally seen an idiot 23 year old succeed at this one. He had two cheap suits and a coupla sports coats, while driving a truly crappy lookin’ ’59 Ford 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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