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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 2 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

September 13, 2020

A note to our rental-home investors: Influx just lacks majesty, but it’s the upside of an exodus.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Welcome to life off the lead, puppy.”

Me today to our buy-and-hold rental property investors:

It’s not well-reported, except in the form of secondary evidence like U-Haul rates and MLS listings and closings, but very-vertical cities are emptying themselves to the benefit of very-horizontal communities. Congratulate yourself again for investing in Phoenix, the world’s largest suburb.

At the moment, we are on fire, and that is unlikely to abate quickly. Demand far exceeds available supply, and the builders are better at writing contracts than erecting structures, for now. Rental demand is strong, too.

Prices have been strongly upward since the first wave of the exodus, surging with the second wave. The absolute strongest marketing characteristic for a home in Metro Phoenix right now is availability.

That’s good, but will it last? The big short-run fear would be whiplash from mortgage forebearances. Foreclosures or sales in lieu of foreclosure could be enough to cool our overheated demand. On the other hand, late-adopter first-time home-buyers are scooping up suburban parcels, too, as a part of the urban exodus.

We were nearing the top of this market in March, and the top is out there still. There is now nothing like a national real estate market, and it could be that 10%-20% of the nation’s housing stock is being abandoned. What seems certain is more rather than less volatility.

Every one of our investors is sitting on a huge amount of accrued equity. That creates a tax problem, if you sell, unless you can effect a 1031 exchange into another real estate investment. But: If you can, now or sometime soon might be the time to think about banking a riskier win into a safer refuge.

Meanwhile: Excelsior!

September 12, 2020

Unchained Melody: Stumblin’ onto “The Heart of Saturday Night.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen and I went on a great big outing today. Big for the Coronavirus-infested world, anyway: We went to the Home Depot in Laveen – 30 treacherous miles from our home, along a fairly new freeway spur. In other words, duck soup in January but somehow a fairly big deal in September.

But what made it an outing was this stupid pandemic, so we made the most of it. Cathleen wore a dress, for goodness sakes. And it put me in mind of this song – as sappy as Tom Waits ever got, but iso granular, so particular, that I feel like we’re right there.

September 12, 2020

Divorcing couples need togetherness on sale the sale of their house.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If I can tell that the sellers are divorcing, they are costing themselves money.

We plant the seed of love and it takes root and grows toward the sun, a straight, proud, sturdy tree.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Sometimes, alas, the sapling of love withers and dies. Pulling it up by the roots can occasion no end of problems, but the real-estate problem may be the one of greatest financial consequence.

Consider this: I walk into a home, escorting buyers. In the living room there are two pieces of furniture: a big-screen television and a lawn chair.

The bedrooms are empty, except for the master bedroom, where there is a bare mattress. In the kitchen, there are dirty dishes in the sink and half-empty takeout containers and beer in the fridge.

It’s a divorce, of course. Mom and the kids are gone. Dad got custody of the TV.

It would be funny if it weren’t so nakedly tragic.

I get paid to hear the stories that empty houses whisper. This house tells me not just about the divorce, but that the divorce isn’t a relatively smooth one. It hints that the house is in pre-foreclosure or is for sale by a judge’s orders.

It confides in the certitude of silence that my buyers can steal it for tens of thousands of dollars less than market value.

Together, the sellers own a valuable asset. But neither wants to see the other prosper from their past together. So, out of spite, they are deliberately sabotaging the sale of their home.

“I might lose out,” he growls at the big-screen TV, “but at least she won’t win!”

“He can go to hell with that TV!” she seethes from her new apartment.

This is a mistake.

Frankly, both of them should move out, leaving the home vacant. If one is to stay, then they should agree to leave the furniture behind – and clothes in the closets. I should not be able to tell that the sellers are divorcing.

It’s sad the marriage didn’t work out. But properly staging the home for sale can at least help to pay for a happier divorce.

September 12, 2020

Overnight News: Take that, doubters! All #iBuyers ever needed to succeed was a pandemic, rioting and a buyer feeding-frenzy! Totally sustainable!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Ya think it’s easy?”

Redfin: Everything about the iBuyers is funny, especially their Special Olympics approach to self-congratulation. Whose listings sell last and worst? But who is delighted to have had a national feeding frenzy to clear their overpriced inventories? iBuyer Activity Ground to a Halt in the Second Quarter, With Market Share Plummeting to 0.1%.

Forbes: Bubbles happen how? Mortgage Interest Rates Reach Another Record Low, Making Buyers Willing To Borrow More.

Redfin: We noted this yesterday: Who can spot the riots in recent closings? Who can anticipate the looming disaster of all the other listings, unreported here, that did not close? Home Prices Up 13%, Biggest Increase Since 2013.

CNBC: Commercial real estate community comes back from Summer vaycay to find its assets incinerated. Real estate CEO: NYC mayor must make streets safer, cleaner so people will want to return.

HousingWire: NAR: 31% of Realtors say they feel unsafe at open houses.

Reason: Who knew? There Is No Defense for Looting.

PJ Media: Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers Suggests the Civil War Has Already Begun.

And because the reincarnation of every sixties wraith is not quite 2020 enough:

BizPacReview: Killer mosquito clouds rise from swamp, descend on Louisiana livestock and drain their blood.

September 11, 2020

My 9/11 prayer…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is me – Greg – fourteen years ago, when this blog was still a mewling baby. It astounds me to think that the children who were pre-conceptual on 9/11 – aged 0 to 5 – are now the jihadis attempting to destroy Western Civilization from within. We need to do a lot better…]
 

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 Read more

September 10, 2020

Overnight News: If your houses aren’t evaporating, your taxpayers are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“What’s new, nu?”

Hoover Institution: California Businesses Leave The State By The Thousands.

Housing Wire: U.S. mortgage rates fall to all-time lows this week.

CNBC: The CDC banned evictions, but some renters are still vulnerable.

Forbes: What It Might Mean If We All Work From Home?

City Journal: What the Trump Eviction Ban Gets Wrong.

City Journal: New York City at the precipice: A Tale of Two Cities, Indeed.

CNBC: Manhattan rental market plunges, leaving 15,000 empty apartments in August.

And for hard-working grunts on the ground who have found a praxis that pays…

UPI: Virginia man buys 20 lottery tickets, wins 20 times.

September 8, 2020

Unchained Melody: The DISC of “Darling Be Home Soon.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The original is pure Di, as are the lyrics: Busy musician home briefly imposes ardent deadlines. It’s truly great that way, an abrupt and demanding lust, and the sheer urgency rends fabric. Artie Schroeck did the original arrangements – and he’s there in all the covers.

Joe Cocker takes and remakes the song – just like always – turning it into the Si viscera of wide-open yearning.

Susan Tedeschi delivers the Joe Cocker vocal performance, but it is Derek Trucks who shows us how Cs the love in that lyric can be.

September 8, 2020

“We are easy prey” – Propositions Three and Seven by Richard Mitchell

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell

 
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It’s only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called “education.“

Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures, institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival, Read more

September 7, 2020

What’s the secret real estate pricing trick that makes homes sell faster, for more money? Honesty.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Guile creates rancor and delay, ignoring the financial consequences, where an honest broker is a lifeboat in a sea of lies.”

Our story so far:

There are a zillion other things we do for sellers, but we are getting at the essence of what makes a listing move faster and for more money than its competition.

So: Every choice we make maximizes the seller’s interests, but for that reason every choice maximizes transparency and, for lack of better term, velocity of decision-making.

Translation: I make it as easy as possible for the buyer to commit to my listing.

How, specifically?

No guile.

Disclose everything, of course, but not in any way that’s tricky or cagey or coy. Every buyer’s fear in every transaction is getting taken. Obviously, I want to do everything I can to take that fear away, but even before that I want to make sure that I have done nothing to amplify that fear.

And what might you suppose is the fastest, easiest way to make a buyer wary of me and my new listing?

How about the listing price?

Oh, yes! The price is the most important, most powerful statement on your listing, and if it’s a lie, the whole listing is suspect and the house is one-down – at a minimum – before it even shows.

So what does a lying listing price look like?

Just like this: $299,900.

Is the house worth $300,000? Or $295,000? How to tell? Liar’s Poker: Offer $295,000 and see where they come back.

That back-and-forth takes time, even if you insist it does not cost the seller money. Worse, we start with mistrust and slap-box our way to bad will. That will make the repair negotiations fun.

I think that’s dumb. I despise guile, anyway, but its further fruits are even more rancid that the soul-sacrifice required by deception in the first place. You make an ugly first move and then Read more

September 7, 2020

Splendor on – and in spite of – Labor Day.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence – and violence. Photo by: Karen Horton

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there was years before that. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now – more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own – to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger – over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded Read more

September 6, 2020

My take on fintech? Who doesn’t love a better pen? But: No rainmakers, no rain.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Click to embiggen.

I got a recruitment pitch from OfferPad the other day: Be an in-house listing agent for our fallback upsell team. This is not an honor, an oddity or an error; I’m in a database, that’s all. And: Fun for me to see, but not a temptation.

They’re fools to make agents 1040 employees, rather than 1099 independent contractors. For a second reason, 1040 employees are going to be the death of all corporate entities. But the first reason is in the headline: No rainmakers, no rain.

You can see they understand this simple fact: The pay plan is commission plus a draw, the scheme all corporate sales teams use to attract and retain dedicated plodders.

But straight commission sales separates closers from losers just like that, with zero management intervention. That’s why real estate brokers like it so much.

And I think that illuminates the folly of taking fintech seriously. Who doesn’t love a better pen – but who believes a better pen will make you a better persuader? Technology solves paperwork problems very well, and I would be more impressed with technology vendors if they put more attention there. (Hint: Title and escrow: Rich, ripe, ready.) Technology addresses people problems poorly – a fact it is perpetually incapable of discovering.

Brian Brady pointed out to me that lenders live on Realtor marketing. That’s not wrong, it’s reasonable. Title, escrow, inspectors, tradesmen and home-warrantors all depend on Realtor referrals, which they can farm out only because they have already surfaced the buyer, seller or investor. You can’t buy your date a cocktail until you have a date.

So it’s the other end of the food chain that concerns me – not fintech but leadgen. Realty.bots whose sole business is to get in front of your client before you can – so they can sell access to you – are not your friends.

For what it’s worth: Of the big-name iBuyers, Zillow’s solution to abandoned shopping carts seems best. Instead of using salaried and lawsuit-curious employees to upsell more lawsuit opportunities, pitch the now-useless “leads” to starving Realtors. For 35%! Who has the Read more

September 5, 2020

The sweet spot: Pricing real estate the guerrilla marketing way, to maximize the seller’s net – as soon as possible.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The sweet spot is the place on the bat that makes baseballs change zip codes.


I am a passionate lister, and I have argued forever that everything matters in the listing praxis – but nothing matters more than the listing price. And: As you may have noticed, I could go on forever about pricing, but there is one idea that matters to me above all others:

The sweet spot.

Deny me sports and gambling metaphors and I could not write, but metaphors inform by their manifestation: If you know your business – if you have a true empathy for the machine of your praxis – you know where the sweet spot is.

In real estate pricing, the sweet spot is here:

I arrive at a number that, when I see it, I say, “But of course.”

And at at the listing presentation, the seller says, “But of course.”

And on listing day, all the experienced Realtors working that area look at their hotsheets and say, “But of course.”

And the buyers who see that house on the first few days of the listing all say, “But of course.”

The sweet spot is the number that everyone knows is right-on-the-money, as soon as they see it.

What’s the benefit? A bird – or six – in the hand. If you hit the market in the sweet spot, your seller should have one or more excellent offers to work with right away. When you get the price just right, everyone knows they have to jump or miss out.

And the benefit of that is to surface the optimal offer. I believe that a well-represented home should incite multiple offers overs its first weekend on market. I list on Thursday early morning, just after midnite, to maximize my debut on saved searches – thus to invoke reactions like “Must see Saturday!” As I’ve noted, I disclose the state of play for cash, conventional and FHA offers in the Private Remarks (Realtor-only) section of the listing.

My objective is to identify the highest, safest, soonest offer. The FHA offers will all be higher, even allowing for the closing-cost contributions, but FHA borrowers often Read more

September 4, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Timing Is Everything” – except so is everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Garrett Hedlund, who played Patroclus in Troy, doing one of the gut-wrenching songs from Country Strong – which is free just now on IMBD.

I love the granularity and particularity of the images, but you get to see the song being improved in the movie:

They’re arriving at the lyrics used in the the Garrett Hedlund recording, which are a substantial improvement on the original:

I could cite a number of examples, but the one that stands out is Gwyneth’s turn:

Original: “I remember that day when we first met.”

Country Stronger: “I remember that day when our eyes first met.”

That’s how good poetry gets better, and that kind of focus on mission-critical improvements is how everything gets better.

September 3, 2020

Guerrilla real estate marketing for immediate results: How to be young, hungry – and compensated.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.

Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”

I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.

I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.

So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.

I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.

The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!

We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive 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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