BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 31 of 81)

September 2, 2020

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

September 2, 2020

Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Got content?”

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of Read more

September 1, 2020

Unchained Melody: Whose heart is breaking in “Seven Year Ache”…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve always loved this song, and I finally figured out why: The narrator is actually male – just as the actual narrator of “Angry All The Time” is female. This is not Roseanne bitching out Rodney for his adultery, this is the lamentations of the cheated-on guy.

Big duh, right? Who writes poetry? Why?

Listen for the games of the tempters, referenced repeatedly. Those are men pulling proto-PUA stunts. This is a beta-boy bitching about the sad consequences of marrying a hot-crazy woman.

I recast the lyrics to swap the sexes, and it makes sense to me. My guess is that this was a trunk song – written by Rodney Crowell to some degree of completion much earlier, then pulled out of the trunk later and polished for Roseanne Cash. An argument in support of that contention is the extreme simplicity of the chord structure, Texas Doo Wop.

I would love to see a slow, yearning cover of this by a male country singer. The story hangs together better, IMO, and the pain is more convincing. Built-in market, too, composed of all the people who love the original.

Seven Year Ache (as adapted)

You act like you were just born tonight
Face down in a memory but feeling all right
So who does your past belong to today?
Baby, you don’t say nothing when you’re feeling this way

The boys in the bars try to capture your eye
But you don’t say nothing when they’re telling you lies
You look so careless when they’re shooting that bull
Don’t you know heartaches are heroes when their pockets are full?

You tell me you’re trying to cure a seven-year ache
See what else your old heart can take
The girls say, “When is she gonna give us some room?”
The boys say, “God, I hope she comes back soon”

Everybody’s talking, but you don’t hear a thing
You’re still uptown on your downhill swing
The boulevard’s empty, why don’t you come around?
Baby, what is so great about sleeping downtown?

There’s plenty of dives to be someone you’re not
Just say you’re looking for something you might’ve forgot
Don’t bother calling to say you’re leaving alone
’Cause there’s a fool on every corner when you’re trying to Read more

August 31, 2020

Unchained Melody: Telling the brutal truth about “Take It Down.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It has been claimed that John Hiatt wrote this song about cancelling the Confederate flag – but that’s plainly bullshit. This is a brutal divorce song, excruciatingly simple.

It’s amazing, anyway. I play it on the guitar, sometimes for hours, late at night. The lyrics work, and that’s why the song works so well, but the music works – brutally – just by itself.

Here’s a sweeter take from Patty Griffin:

And this is my favorite cover, from The Wailin’ Jennys:

We’ve always talked about music here, but I don’t intend for every Unchained Melody to be a tussle with a lying poet. But it’s amazing that anyone could miss the ugly divorce being dissected here.

Take It Down, by John Hiatt

Take everything that we have
Take it and burn it to the ground
Some things were never meant to last

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

I’m still married to it all
That ain’t no place to hang around
My love is 50 feet tall

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

I’ve grown accustomed to the way
You hurled us into space
I’ll never make that trip
Tears all rusted on my face
And I’m just an empty place
Where your love used to fit

South Carolina where are you?
We were once lost and now we’re found
The war is over, the battle’s through

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

Take it down, down, down
Take it down
Take it down, down, down
Take it down

August 30, 2020

Torn from today’s headlines? Here there be monsters – everywhere! – but why?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy. Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.”

I swear I have sound reasons for talking about Nine Empathies – specifically the idea of an empathy for the transaction, which could not be closer to any closer’s heart. But today I read Chapter 8 – Empathy for the monster – and it whispered to me in ominous tones. I’ve documented the origins of human character, but this as close as I have come to explicating the monstrous malice we are seeing everywhere just now.

tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:

The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.

This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.

Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:

Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is Read more

August 29, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Sisters of Mercy” – because Leonard Cohen deserves better than this.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So: Leonard Cohen wrote a song called “Hallelujah.” People hear what they want to hear, so they think it’s a religious song, when in fact it is a distant and self-absolving lamentation of a broken relationship. Cohen later rewrote the song as a much sexier despairing of what would seem to be an ongoing divorce. Arousing gonad references in the second act, but no religion. The version of the song you are probably familiar with is a mashup of the two, associated with Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and many others: A more mature fatalism about all sexual relationships, but still no religion.

So you hear it everywhere as if it were a hymn: Church and funerals, of course, but anywhere people want to be solemn together. (Heads-up, y’all: “If It Be Your Will.”) Just this week, we heard it as a part of the opera performances bookending Donald Trump’s acceptance of the GOP nomination Thursday night.

Opera!

I love Leonard Cohen, and I love every version of that song – especially the juicy ones. But: No religion. And literally for heaven’s sake, please: No opera.

It gets worse.

While Leonard Cohen was an unfailingly kind man – wry and fatalistic but gentle and loving with everyone – the crypt-keepers who presume to speak for him from beyond the grave are made of different stuff.

The Daily Mail:

The estate of Leonard Cohen said on Friday it was considering legal action over the use of the Canadian singer’s ‘Hallelujah’ at the Republican National Convention, calling it a brazen attempt to politicize the song.

First, I’m sure the Trump campaign is on sound legal footing. All of these commercialized artists bitch about the generic-whore contracts they sign with ASCAP/BMI, but they are nevertheless generic whores, open-for-business to all paying customers. If you don’t want your content licensed, don’t license it.

Second, there is no advantage to Leonard Cohen’s cashiers to pissing off half his audience. I see zero upside to these futile displays.

The laid back Tom Petty turns out to be pretty bitchy in death, too, and Neil Young didn’t even have to die to manifest his inner harridan. But it Read more

August 28, 2020

Why would Zillow abandon the all-time perfect real estate marketing tagline?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to hear my most perfect real estate marketing image? I’ve never seen this anywhere, except in my mind’s eye. It goes like this:

A little girl and her golden retriever are racing out the front door of their home. Why? Because “Daddy’s home!” – that’s why.

That’s it: Kid, dog, dad, with mom smiling proudly from the doorway. That’s The American Dream, circa 1955, but that is still the idyll we imagine when we think of home. It’s not simply a structure, not even merely a domicile. It’s Christmas and Independence Day, new babies and new puppies, tire swings and bedtime stories. Home is hope, the place where everything we love can thrive.

So tell me, if you can, what gives with Zillow?

Current tagline: “Home has never been more important.” That’s COVID FUD, I guess. The image is of a split-ranch home inhabited by vaguely visible people living widely-separated lives. I doubt anyone thinks that’s selling anything.

Recent tagline: “Reimagine home.” Say what? That dollop of word salad was intended to explain The Incumbent’s iBuyer business – by which Zillow reimagined profitability with a flame-thrower. The word “reimagine” itself has creepy Marxist connotations: As we have learned of late, “reimagine policing” turns out to mean “shut up or else!” Even leaving college-acquired SJW-ism aside, what needs to be “reimagined” about home?

So what did they have before that?

“Find your way home.”

And that would be simply perfect.

I Googled up old images with that tagline, and the photos are all pretty generic. But the tagline itself is beyond improvement: The aspirational quest is the literal function of the website. You simply cannot do better than that.

Why would they walk away from that? And why don’t they do a better job of selling that idea with images?

My takeaways? Billionaires are boobs. And marketing is for guerillas.

August 28, 2020

Unchained Melody: Why deny the obvious in “The Obvious Child”?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sure no one cares but me, but this song has always bugged me – art is the stuff that won’t turn you loose. I can give you a video montage for which a less-raucous rendition could make the soundtrack:

A 4 AM monologue/soliloquy/lullabye sung by a grandfather to his fussing grandson. “The cross is in the ballpark” is repeated in a way that suggests the theme is an attainable redemption, a message aimed most at Sonny, the narrator’s son. The instrumentation crowds the poetry, but I like it as a redemption hymn.

The second repetition of “Why deny the obvious, child?” seems explicitly religious to me:

Some people say the sky is just the sky
But I say, “Why deny the obvious, child?”

That’s proof by assertion, but it seems to argue that the whole song is a mildly-enthusiastic pomo paean to the redemptive power of faith. That much is just fun for me, and I like my reading better than any other I’ve seen.

And that’s just the song. If you take on the back-story that leads to my montage above, there’s a three-act reconciliation rom-com in there, with a sweet sidebar on fatherhood.

What’s the vitally important obvious fact being denied? What broke up Sonny’s marriage? And how do the three men in the song go about fixing it?

I wrote that much in February (you remember – huggy, schmoozy, long-forgotten February) on Facebook. Yesterday, I looked at the original video for this song and guess what I saw? Keep in mind that Paul Simon has said “The cross is in the ballpark” refers to the Pope’s visit to Yankee Stadium.

If you don’t see it, you haven’t been to Mass lately.

I have no dog in this hunt, although I am always interested in the lies poets tell about their work. But there is a sweet story here about how fathers and sons can fix themselves, buried under all that instrumental camouflage.

Here’s a cleaner take. It’s made by Swedes, so you can understand the words.

What’s this song really about? Why deny the obvious?

August 27, 2020

Influence is when people actually listen to you. Realtors and lenders can help save the world right now just by evangelizing the middle class.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am as Cassandra, and it pains me. I know what is wrong with Western Civilization, at the root, and how to fix it so it will never need fixing again. So much good does this do me – or anyone else, for that matter.

Instead we are here, agog as the world we thought we knew crumbles around us, aghast that no one rises to its defense.

Whose job IS that, anyway?

I’m looking at you, thumbsucker…

It is beyond all doubt unconscionably rude to hector your clients about politics. And yet: We are at a place where the free real estate market itself it at peril. Absurd? Who saw the country in flames a year ago? And the private and widely-distributed ownership of the land we live, work and play on is the freedom that undergirds all our other freedoms. The enemies of human splendor will destroy it – if they can.

Me, eleven Independence Days’ ago:

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 all seem to own our homes only by sufferance, none of us will have anything left to defend.

So what can you do about all this?

I think you have to talk to your clients, those who trust you enough to listen to you – and this doubled-periled epoch is one of those rare moments in the lives of adults when minds are open to Read more

August 27, 2020

“Price drops are surging” in San Francisco? No, down is not up, it’s just comeuppance.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Going down?”

Is it bad form to make fun of sea-sick writing?

Whatever. Redfin:

A quarter (24.5%) of San Francisco-area home sellers cut their list prices during the four weeks ending Aug. 16, the highest share since at least 2015, when Redfin began recording this data. That’s more than double the rate from a year earlier, marking the largest annual increase in the share of active listings with price drops among the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas.

San Francisco’s price-drop rate has held steady at above 24% in late summer, clocking in at 24.1% during the most recent period in our data—the four weeks ending Aug. 23.

It’s not just San Francisco, it’s every big city Democrats have ruined:

San Francisco was one of just 11 of the top 50 metros that experienced an increase in the share of listings that cut prices, rising to 24.1% from 11.4% a year earlier. Chicago, Philadelphia and New York were among the 10 other places where the rate of price drops rose from the prior year during the four weeks ending Aug. 23.

Will San Francisco recover? Seattle? Portland? Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? Why should they? Grasshoppers need Ants, but Ants don’t need Grasshoppers – and Ants can live anywhere now.

Manhattan is easier to get a grip on, perhaps: What made it Fun City was a secondary consequence of everything that made it Gotham City. No more Gotham, no more Fun.

August 25, 2020

Horror stories wanted: How has real estate’s Vendorslut Mafia preyed upon you?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Results? Any day now, for sure. Meanwhile, this month’s payment is due.” Photo by Ian on Unsplash

I don’t pay for leads. Never have, never will. I pay referral fees to other agents from time to time, this as a matter of expected courtesy, but I don’t collect fees for referrals – not alone to escape the burden of policing them.

Not such big news, regardless: I don’t make a lot of money. We haven’t marketed for new business in ten years, and I make my meager living on repeats and referrals from my existing clients. I’ve never craved money – it shows, I swear – and I am not as much in love with collecting pelts as I once was. When BloodhoundBlog was young, I said we were a boutique brokerage. I am by now my sole licensee, and I think of myself as a lab-rat broker.

I am mainly interested in listing for sale as though I were practicing free-throws on the basketball court. My goal is to perfect my listing praxis and then to hew to it with perfect performance. My numbers bear me out – but I don’t spend much on advertising, either.

My curiosity runs the other way just now: How have you been hurt as an agent or lender by your engagements with the sleazy folks we have always referred to as The Vendorslut Mafia?

Are there no happy stories? Surely there are. Deeper pockets going in may see happier outcomes going forward. But when you’re tap-dancing with your kid’s orthodontist so you can fork over cash you don’t have for “leads” that won’t pan out…

Kinda sucks, don’t it…?

I would love to hear about your experience. Who you paid. How much you paid. How things paid off.

I’m not shaming salesmaniacs, and I know it’s easy to click “Submit” before you know what you’re submitting to. And you can tell yourself that 65% of something is better than 100% of nothing – with luck missing out on the news that you’re paying some gonoph for coming between you and your client – typically with your own listings. 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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