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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 37 of 81)

January 13, 2012

Update from 1 year ago. Page 32 of G till now.

by

Realtor, Guerilla Technologist

Author website

For those of my friends on here, who remember. In 2010 I relocated my small real estate business to South Florida from Wisconsin. Everything was fine and dandy until I remembered that my position in Google will be starting over from page 1 to page 32. It is nearly one year ago (01-16-11) that I wrote a post on Bloodhound asking for some sympathy from fellow friends. To be frank about it, I was really struggling, with the move, life in general, a new baby, and trying to make it by selling real estate in a South Florida market. Although many agents are making bank, I have to watch every penny.

I am pleased to announce for the term “Boynton Beach Real Estate” I am now on the middle of page 2, and sometimes as high as the bottom of page 1. I want to personally thank all of you, for helping me in a time of need. Although I haven’t yet found the financial freedom I am looking for, I am least paying the bills…barely, but at least paying the bills. You know, looking back it’s the friends that I’ve made on Bloodhound that have really helped me out the most over the last two years blogging on here.

To cap off the year 2011, Russell Shaw commented on a blog I made on BHB! I thought that was so cool. What I’ve learned over the last year the most, is that, bills come and go, but memories are forever. In 2012 I’m going to put my focus on my family and 2 kids, and not my real estate business. Yes of course, I have to make a living for my family, but that’s not what it’s all about. I don’t know when the good Lord will call me home, but when he does, I want my family to be able to say, “you know, dad (me) worked hard for us, but he always put the family first no matter what kind of bills piled up”. Read more

January 12, 2012

Paging Sarah: “If there is a lesson in this story, it is to make sure your cell phone is off when attending a concert.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Suppressing your phone’s ringer at the symphony is a Sarah job.

If we start with the presumption that a smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop operating system, ideally, exists in a sort of client/server symbiosis with servers in the cloud — and hence with all servers in the cloud, by concatenation (that is, by XMLation) — then your phone should be aware of appropriate phone protocol wherever and whenever it might find itself. You should not ever have to tell it not to ring in a concert hall.

I’ll get to Constance when I can, but I don’t think anyone here is all that interested. How do I know? Because the paragraph just above this one describes a revolutionary computing paradigm, one that exists nowhere right now. More fool I. It’s raining soup and not one of us has a spoon.

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January 9, 2012

CNBC: “In the name of supporting home prices, the Obama administration will likely put in place a system under which investors make private profits while the taxpayers subsidize the risk.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Is housing the next Solyndra? Looks like it. The Obama administration is getting ready to transfer billions of dollars worth of foreclosed homes to campaign donors. If you think still more Rotarian Socialism sucks, wait until the house up the block from yours goes Section 8. Looters never tire of loot, so rent money they don’t have to earn will turn out to be the perfect garnish for real property they won’t have to pay for.

We are living in Part Three of Atlas Shrugged…

January 3, 2012

Product (category) idea: Antoinette the anticipator.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I first thought of the idea of an anticipator as hardware, I kid you not. The early 1980s? Software was dear in those days, but early computer-on-a-chip chips were cheap and abundant. There still would have been a software component to an anticipator, of course, but not much.

Here’s what I thought about then: Anything that could be monitored by signal processing — as, for example, the communication between a micro-computer and its peripheral devices — could have an anticipator in-line, monitoring all the signal traffic back and fourth. By maintaining a probabilistic database of past events, the anticipator could, over time, evolve strategies for anticipating resources likely to be called for in the near future, and, using otherwise dead time on the computer’s data bus, cache that data in advance, eliminating time lost on fetch requests made in real time.

Wow! How kludgey our world used to be! In the bad old days, there were pre-fetch routines built into operating systems, but they were a brute-force solution to a vast array of very small, fussy problems. An anticipator would strive to be optimally efficient and mission critical by dealing only with the specific data most likely to be requested.

An example? If a font required for a document is not stored on your printer, the printer must fetch the outline data from your hard disk. It’s a small job, on its own, but you could maximize your productivity from the printer if those fetch calls in real-time were ameliorated by intelligent pre-fetching. The anticipator could both maintain the most-often used outlines in the printer’s memory as well as anticipating exceptions to the everyday rules — for example, by keeping the boss’s favorite Christmas font on the printer from Thanksgiving through Christmas. That implies real secretarial smarts, but it’s simply probabilistic database mining being perfected over time.

So what about now?

Antoinette the anticipator harkens back to Heidi and Sarah, and to Constance, which I haven’t gotten to yet.

Imagine an anticipator function in Sarah that, when Sarah figures out that you are going to be late for a meeting, sends out all the appropriate notices, all Read more

January 3, 2012

Product idea: Sarah, Heidi’s helper in the real world.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The big buzz in the mobile computing biz is augmented reality, your phone or tablet takes in a scene and then echoes back to you what it can infer from an image and its GPS coordinates, compass direction, etc. This may be cool, or it may be cool like a QR-code, an idea whose time will never come.

Augmented reality will be that much cooler when it’s like Arnold-the-Terminator’s eyes, but that illustrates the key defects of the idea, as it is currently implemented:

Augmented reality is not done continuously but only on demand, and only in static and affected ways.

And, in consequence, it’s not doing anything terribly useful, except possibly in vertical market applications.

But reflect that an iPad can run continuously for 10 hours without recharging. Next year’s models may double that number. Soon you will get reminders to plug in, or your devices will find ways to provide for themselves while you’re asleep.

So instead of a truly amazing augmented reality presentation on the Black Hills of Dakota, how about a piece of software that watches you and your life all the time, and augments your activities however it can.

This harkens back to an idea I’ve brought up before, a hypothetical self-maintaining CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as we can from the email. With a name and an email address we can probably get the sender’s full contact information, and possibly a whole lot more.

Make that first contact a phone call instead. Caller ID is lame, but Google is not. From the phone number, can you get back to a name? A location? From those, can we effect the same kind of searches discussed above?

There’s more: Once your CRM knows a name, it should be watching for any changes in publicly-available databases that should be reflected in your private CRM database. That is to say, your CRM should be maintaining itself.

Sarah’s going to monitor every phone call, of course. She or Heidi should be doing all Read more

January 3, 2012

The Reformed Broker: “Five Reasons Facebook is Over”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s probably wrong for me to talk about Facebook at all, since I simply do not get it. I have been trading ideas on the nets since there was only one net, but I have never understood small talk in real life, much less in HTML with loosely-connected strangers.

Even so, I have been convinced all along that Facebook (and all purely-social media, for that matter) is a fad, the Pet Rock of the microsecond. Doesn’t matter to me, either way, since I will never get small talk. But I found this article on Facebook’s forthcoming IPO interesting:

Users lose interest in the faddish social games – The dirty secret of the early days of Web 1.0 is that pornography was the only revenue source that allowed companies to survive until real business models evolved. Social gaming has thus far provided the same service to Web 2.0. We are currently in an Air Pocket of Retardedness where kids and housewives have figured out how to submit their credit card information for utter stupidity like Farmville and Mafia Wars but haven’t yet realized how dumb they are for having done so. It is only a matter of time before the spell wears off and people realize how utterly ridiculous it is to be buying virtual crops and power-ups with money that can otherwise be used in the physical world. Remember ringtones? How about The Sims? Or Garbage Pail Kids or Pogs or Pokemon or Texas Hold’em or Beanie Babies or any of the other “flush your money down the toilet” fads of the past 20 years? These things pass and we eventually laugh at ourselves. That moment is coming soon for social games that require continual charges on our credit cards.

I like this:

The initial appeal of creating a Facebook profile for the average person was that the ability to code or “understand” the web or HTML was completely unnecessary. Which was brilliant, it allowed users to generate a page with next to zero knowledge about the ways of the web. The problem is, as Read more

January 1, 2012

Me in 2012: Writing Splendor’s sound-track, among other things.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been living for years now with my daily calendar system of staying focused on my goals. Some months I do better, some I do worse, but having a regular agenda has proved fruitful for me.

These are my daily goals:

  • Work-out with free weights
  • Walk with Cathleen and the dogs
  • Write or update software
  • Blog or write essays or Willie stories
  • Practice the guitar

Software and writing came and went, strong and weak, in 2011, but the guitar got the benefit of end-of-day exhaustion almost every day: Mindless sitcoms on the TV, internet radio playing in my office, eye-candy on the iPad and “a Telecaster through a Vibralux turned up to ten.”

I love it, to say the truth, especially the sound of a solid-body electric amped up very loud but played very quietly. This is what made those Chicago blues gods such great underpants gnomes, and it’s the trick the British blues-rock gods missed when they doubled the tempo on all those old riffs and called it rock ‘n’ roll. I feel sorry for poor Cathleen, who by now has heard the I,IV,V blues played crudely in at least half of its infinite variations. But it works for me so well that sometimes I take pity on her and play through a headphone amp. This also promotes dancing — by me, that is, since I’m self-contained and free to move where I will.

But I’m wary of it, too, because the guitar gives me two benefits I must always find in my work: A creative outlet and something to do with my hands. I don’t want to give it up. To the contrary, I think I might take up the piano, as well, this year, as a looping and recording platform. My solution is to learn to write songs. I know I can do this, but by now it is possible to carry the song-writing process all the way through to a marketable demo — or even a release-ready recording. I have no desire to perform, but I would love to find an ambitious act to feed tunes to.

My other big blue-sky project for the year is to Read more

December 29, 2011

At FreeTheAnimal.com: Master something difficult in 2012.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My friend Richard Nikoley runs a popular paleo-living weblog called FreeTheAnimal.com. In anticipation of New Year’s Day and all its resolutions, I have a guest post up there on how to make 2012 a game-changing year in your life:

‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, and that’s a good thing. Join that book club. Remodel that kitchen. Lose that unwanted weight. But you can make this a landmark year of your life with just one resolution:

Resolve to master something difficult in 2012.

There is no shame in knowing how to say, “¿Dónde está el baño?,” but you are fluent in a foreign language when you can read and admire its poetry, when you get the jokes, when you can twist that language into clever witticisms. That’s mastery.

We are victims of Art Appreciation and Film Studies classes, glib-and-lazy time-wasters in which we learned nothing but how to pretend to know something. But there is no class called Geometry Appreciation. In the maths, you can either do the work or you can’t. This year you can pick up where you left off in math and push yourself as far as you can go.

And tell the truth: Every time you see a musician performing — popular music or classical — don’t you wish you could do that, too? The good news is, you can. All it takes is commitment and effort — and time.

Mastering a demanding new skill will take a while. The desire for instant results is how all New Year’s Resolutions get abandoned. But to learn a serious discipline will require your time every day — an hour or more a day of serious, dedicated effort. I like the idea of working every day, since, if you take no breaks from the work, you won’t have to resist the temptation to extend a break by one day and then another and another.

But the benefits to be realized are huge — far beyond anything you might be expecting. In Art Appreciation class, everyone participates in the group discussions, there are no right or wrong answers and the class is graded on the curve. That Read more

December 24, 2011

A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I got to the hospital after visiting hours, but the nurse led me to the room anyway. “There hasn’t been anyone,” she confided.

I pursed my lips in grim acknowledgment. “That’s why I’m here.”

Inside the room the patient looked like purple death. It was a critical-care room, bright and white and cheerfully clinical. The bed was surrounded by apparatus, with lines and leads and probes and IV tubes running to him. The only unbruised part of him that I could see were his eyes, and his eyes were more deeply wounded than anything.

I’ll tell you his story, but I won’t tell you his name. His name is yours. His name is mine. His name is legion…

I pulled up a chair and got as close to the bed as I could. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted him to see mine. His jaw was wired and he was breathing though a plastic tube mounted in his throat, which makes for a fairly one-sided conversation.

“I just came from the funeral,” I said. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen. The procession must have been two miles long. Kathleen Sullivan, mother of six, grandmother of two, with two more on the way, loving wife of Brian Sullivan – in the newspaper it’s just something that’s there, like the basketball scores or the stock tables. People die every day. People are born every day. It doesn’t seem to matter very much.”

I shrugged. “I think it does. I’ll tell you a story: About six months ago there was a woman driving down Endicott Avenue. Driving very safely, five miles an hour below the speed limit, doing everything just exactly right. There were some schoolboys riding their bikes on the sidewalk beside her, and, all at once, one of the boys decided to dart out into the street, right in front of her car. She stood on the brake pedal, but it was already too late. Screech, crunch, tragedy. The boy was killed instantly.

“She saw it, of course. His little schoolfriends saw it. Half a block away was the crossing guard, and she had Read more

December 12, 2011

Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie goes straight — to jail. Meanwhile, he has a new book of short stories out for Christmas.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

William F.X. O’Connell — that’s Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie to you — has been making a game effort to go straight over the past few years. This paid off in abundance this morning, when he finally managed to get himself arrested.

Meanwhile, just yesterday Willie published a collection of his outrageously brutal Christmas stories at Amazon.com. It’s Kindle-only, but every smartphone and tablet computer has a Kindle reader by now.

These are the stories, all of which have been published here in various versions over the years:

The season’s greetings
A dumpster diver’s Christmas
A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan
A future more vivid
A father for Christmas
Merry Christmas, Princess Peach
A Costco family Christmas
How to slay dragons
Courtney at the speed of life

Cathleen and I did the line-edits on the final manuscript, and it was interesting to me to see how well the thing holds together as a collection. Separately, the yarns are almost too brutal, but taken together they have that certain cathartic something that left me feeling cleansed — beat up, to be sure, but better for having endured the punishment.

Anyway, y’all could do a favor or three for our jailbird friend:

  1. Buy the book — or give it as a present. At around 20,000 words, it’s a lazy afternoon or a cross-country flight in length.
  2. Review the book. It would be nice for Willie if you have good things to say about the stories, but it will be better for everyone if you simply tell the truth.
  3. Tell your friends. Here is code you can link from:

Willie has an account at SplendorQuest.com, so we can hide and watch to see what has to say about being a fully-processed citizen of the U.S. at last. In the mean time his presence at Amazon.com puts him all the way into the establishment, like it or don’t.

December 12, 2011

Introducing Hank Miller, Atlanta Realtor and Appraiser

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re introducing a new dawg today, one who puts his bite where his bark is, Hank Miller of HoundDogRealEstate.com in Atlanta. Hank is an associate broker, leader of a team of Realtors, as well as an appraiser. Here’s his credo, which I like a lot:

My objective is to call bullshit where I see it and have a little fun doing it.

I also did some housekeeping this morning, trimming a dozen folks from our contributors list. No drama, just pruning folks who aren’t spending much time with us. We’ve never deleted an account, so if your name was ever in our sidebar, you’re always welcome here.

Meanwhile, I love seeing the stuff Brian Brady, Mark Madsen, Jeff Brown and others are doing. I spent a little time last week looking at what other weblogs in the RE.net are up to by now. For all of me, we’re the last stand against the vendorslut mafia. This is a resource to be treasured: BloodhoundBlog is the only place on the internet where real estate professionals can call bullshit — fearlessly and in undeniable detail.

When a Bloodhound howls, the rafters shake. That’s a sound I never tire of hearing…

December 5, 2011

Hey, California Realtors: Are you making minimum wage for your efforts? If not, your broker just went into cardiac arrest.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier pointed this out to me last week, and I’ve been waiting since then for someone to plumb the implications. Ah, well, when there’s constabulary work to be done…

Here’s the news: The state of California is making ZipRealty pay it agents minimum wage for their time.

That’s huge. It’s just the thin edge of the wedge, for now, but the implication is that the real estate broker’s “safe harbor” exclusion from employment laws is about to be flushed into the Pacific Ocean.

The “safe harbor” argument is that real estate salespeople are independent contractors, and that brokers are not obliged to pay them any wages, nor to provide any benefits.

This is why brokers pile on as many hopeless, helpless, hapless idiots as they can: Virtually everyone has at least one transaction in him, and the cost to the broker for the eventual failure of 85%+ of the new “hires” is nothing.

I don’t want to seem to praise employment laws, since their sole effect is to destroy jobs. But no other business would — or even could — be as wasteful of human capital as virtually every real estate brokerage is.

Could that be changing in California? Take note of this:

“Employers who previously were not concerned with minimum wage issues are now put on notice to ensure they are providing those basic protections to workers.”

And this:

After learning of the Bakersfield cases, California State Labor Commissioner Julie Su in September filed a $17 million lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court on behalf of hundreds of other ZipRealty employees statewide. That lawsuit is pending.

Brokerages like Zip (and Redfin, etc.) have a greater exposure, because they operate too much like real businesses. But I can’t imagine what the 25,000 or so starving California Realtors might be thinking just now.

But I think I have a fair idea what their brokers are thinking…

The National Association of Realtors is propped up on three flimsy stilts: The real estate licensing laws, the “co-broke” — the cooperating brokerage fee behind the MLS system — and the IRS-sanctioned independent contractor “safe-harbor.”

Unheralded by anyone who knows why it matters, the “safe-harbor” took the first 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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