BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Innovation (page 5 of 8)

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

December 14, 2010

The global history of health and wealth over the past 200 years — expressed visually in four minutes.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is amazing, but what’s more astounding to me is to think of how much more dramatic this presentation could have been without the taxes, restraints and wars foisted upon us by the state. Health and wealth are found first and most in free countries, last and worst in slave states. The inference to be drawn is obvious: The less government there is, the greater the longevity and prosperity of ordinary people.

September 13, 2010

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sorry if I seem to be neglecting folks here, but I’m sure you can guess why. Plus which, at Day 13 of our goal-questing, I’m five for five most days, and days without appointments are the only holes on the calendar. But I’m done for the day, and I’m bound for bed, and I lay me down with a will. Meanwhile, I’m having lots of ideas as I work — ideas both global and granular. This is one I’m gnawing on pretty hard:

Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say.

That’s working two ways for me, but the second — call it Actions Sell Louder Than Salespitches — I can think of a zillion ways to work with an idea like that.

September 5, 2010

“Hi, My Name Is Jeff, and I’m a TechTard” – “Hi Jeff!”

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Back in the day I was in a perpetual state of frustration when it came to pretty much anything hi-tech. Not only because I couldn’t use it, or that it almost always failed to deliver anything close to the multiple miracles promised, but because I simply couldn’t understand — at almost any level. Outside of the computer in general, obviously the all-time best hi-tech tool for real estate agents, most of the so-called technological breakthroughs have been anything but.

I first used a computer effectively on the job back in 1987 or so. Leased an IBM 286 with a proprietary program installed. It allowed me to download property files via DataQuik using a phone connection. The only other task for which it had any value whatsoever was writing, and printing for mass direct mailings. The printer was a tractor feed. More fun than a hayride. 🙂

Lookin’ back, that piece a crap ‘puter was the best bang for the buck with which technology ever blessed me ’till about a decade later. You know the chronology after that.

What’s really happened though in the last 15 years or so? Sure, a buncha software has made our jobs incrementally easier. Don’t mistake that last sentence to mean I’m downplaying the value of a lotta those ‘incremental’ timesavers — I’m not. But real bona fide breakthroughs? Show me.

Agreed, getting leads online at the astounding rate some do, is indeed magnificent.

I guess what I’m tryin’ to say, and poorly at that, is if we look back at technology’s so-called breakthroughs, they pretty much, with the obviously rare exceptions, mimic the invention of the backhoe. Shovels could be engineered to the nth degree. Digging techniques could be honed to efficient perfection. Backhoes did the work of many men, more quickly, and uniformly. Though the backhoe isn’t nearly as versatile as the computer, you get the idea.

Here’s a technological game changer for me. My first set of hearing aids, bought five or six years ago, were digital, and pretty much state of the art back then. They reopened a world I’d almost forgotten. It was Read more

September 3, 2010

Dear Steve Jobs: Stop jerking everyone around with a goofy set-top box. Give us a real Apple TV — a TV engineered by Apple.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

iOS 4 can go there, no doubt. And the lame-ass “web-enabled” HD-TVs shipping now are no competition for what Apple can do. The iPad may be the actual future of video content, but there will be room in the home for big screens for a long time. An Apple TV becomes the ideal blackboard, too, and the ideal game machine. Integrated with nearby iPhones and iPads, it can become everything we ever hoped to find in a package marked “entertainment center.” Really, truly, the television — the lowly, despised television — is the computer for the rest of us. This is a reinvention that Apple could do better than anyone…

September 2, 2010

Celebrating Praxis: “And my heaven will be a big heaven. And I will walk through the front door.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this in a comment a couple of weeks ago:

Everything we’re doing on-line emerges from the points of this star:

* engenu — rapid web site development
* encartus — elaborate custom Google maps
* Scenius — dynamic blogs-within-blogs
* ScentTrail — CRMishness with transaction management
* FlexMLS and the FlexMLS API — very robust MLS search

There is now a sixth point in our star: Praxis. I had an appointment cancel today, and I wrote the whole thing in just under five hours — while juggling all my usual eggs.

Although there is less editorial control than with engenu, now anyone we might add to our staff can create very professional looking web pages on the fly, with essentially no knowledge of how a web page goes together. Supplemented with other software (e.g., ScentTrail), I have the ability to create whatever I want with virtually no effort.

We hosted BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix twice, two years in a row. For both years, my local competitors made a big point of insisting that I have nothing to teach them. Perhaps they’re right. The only regular user of engenu I know of is Teri Lussier. Scenius has one fan, Cheryl Johnson. And only Cathleen and I are using encartus.

This seems a shame to me, but I’m the real estate business, not the software business. My belief is that the software I have written makes us much, much stronger as Realtors. We have tremendous marketing leverage for just two people.

But Praxis compounds that leverage a thousand-fold. I can do anything I want. I think I can take on anyone, including the Realty.bots. I’m convinced I can take whatever turf I want in Metropolitan Phoenix.

I don’t know when or where we’re going to do Unchained the next time. But I won’t be teaching Praxis, in any case. Even so, I have an idea that my local competitors may come to regret not having studied what I have to teach when they had the chance.

August 16, 2010

The End Product of Appeasing the Collective: Chris Pearson, GPL and Matt Mullenweg

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

This post contains a Bawld Guy axiom, some tech wank, and more.

For those people that do what I do (what is it that I do–if anything?  I often wonder), there was kind of a big debate this past month.  It involved WordPress–open source GPL software–Thesis, formerly proprietary software that capitulated to no avail.  Matt Mullenweg, an unstable genius that seems hell bent on harming his community (more on that in a moment), Chris Pearson, a narcissistic genius that seems hell bent on blowing a hole in his leg because you can’t tell him what to do.

The gist: the Thesis theme (a theme that I deliver something like 60% of my sites in) was not GPL.  Despite the fact the only lawyers that claimed that it needed to be worked for a free software foundation, AutoMATTic was pursuing them to become GPL.  Ma.tt started calling Chris out on Twitter, not suing, no, just acting like a goon.  There was a delightful Mixergy where Chris Pearson and @@photomatt fought amongst themselves.

I love me some good wank as much as the next guy, so I had to chime in.   I didn’t add much new–the whole situation was utterly ugly all around and very unfortunate, but some of the WP types dropped in to comment (and I love posterous for its simplicity.  But I digress.)

Our dear friend WP Tutorial god Ben Cook summarizes it better than I do for those of us  that love a nerd war.

The Point, If I have One: Don’t Comply With The Hive, They Never Stop.

So after a lot of wrangling–and even a Mashable write up, Copyblogger Brian Clark (who dissolved his partnership shortly after this incident) got Pearson to stop it already and adopt GPL–and probably that should have been done to begin  with for practical reasons.  Note: I hate when people try and force my hand.  Huzzah for Harmony, and Ma.tt was initially thrilled.

But not so fast, last week (meant to post this a while ago, left Macbook in Seattle)  opened another salvo against a compliant opponent, and like France in WWI, Matt is  demanding reparations.   This Read more

August 15, 2010

Me and Claudia and PHP: Using internet real estate marketing to — you know — sell real estate…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So, the Arizona Republic ran an article yesterday on on-line real estate marketing and you will never in a million years guess who they did not call. I never get called for any of those kinds of things — the RaiseTheBarTab kinds of events — even though we’re doing cooler stuff than anyone I know of. I’m not weeping. I’m always very forthcoming with everything I know, but if there is going to be a cadre of Realtors dead set against learning how to do the work I do, I’m more than happy to have them working in my own market.

And I’m not bragging, either. We’re going to have a banner year, for us, in terms of volume of transactions, and we’re kicking the asses of all the canned-software Twitter-fidgets named in the article. But we are digging our way out of a deep hole, and we’re a long way from where I want us to be. I like to brag that we spend almost nothing on marketing, but the fact is that we almost never have any money to spend on marketing. I will put every Realtor in Phoenix on notice: When we have money and staff, we are going to be a force to contend with.

So, even though I don’t issue any Twitter spasms, at least not non-robotically, of late I am putting paid to a lot of new and interesting real estate marketing ideas.

What’s changed? Cathleen is giving me some Claudia time. Claudia Couts is the housekeeper I made Cathleen hire last year. She’s with us for two hours a day, six days a week. She keeps the house down to a manageable level of chaos and takes care of all the pet-maintenance duties. The idea was to open up the time that Cathleen was spending on those chores, and this has been a win-win all around.

Lately I’ve been buried in paperwork, at which I’m horrible, and I had marketing ideas that required small amounts of rote labor — at which I’m also horrible. I thought we might hire a virtual assistant, but Cathleen suggested giving Claudia a Read more

August 14, 2010

Innovation now: I’ve stopped taking buyer’s checks for earnest money, but now I want to stop worrying about wire transfers, too.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m living much of my time right now with my nose pressed right up against one tool or another — listings, DocuSign, the steering wheel, et endlessly cetera. That’s cool, we need the dough, and we can’t make it rain hard enough, fast enough. But by this point I have no idea if something I’m doing is an innovation or not. I’m just dancing as fast as I can.

This topic just came up, and I’m passing it along because I haven’t done that here yet. I know this because I hadn’t done it with my wife and business partner until just now.

Here’s the scoop: I’ve all but stopped taking earnest checks. I’m having almost all of my buyers wire their earnest money deposits directly into title. I never touch anyone’s else’s money — the only known way a real estate broker can be assured of escaping imprisonment.

But that’s not my reason for coming to do things this way. I used to take the check, made out to Chicago or Fidelity or whatever, then schlep it around while I waited for the contract to be executed. Not fun but not onerous — just inefficient.

By now, I do a lot of REOs as rental home investments for out-of-state buyers. I don’t know the name of the title company when we write the contract, and the buyer is back home by the time we need to deposit the funds.

I don’t even talk about checks any longer. I tell the buyer how things work and that I will have title email wiring instructions when we’re ready to rock. Totally transparent, totally arm’s-length, and no one involved in the process says boo.

If the lister is a little too adamant about receiving a PDF of a fax of a scan of a photocopy of a useless check, I will add language like this: “Seller is aware that Buyer will deposit Earnest Money by wire transfer into Title Company, to be determined by Seller, within one business day after Seller’s final acceptance of this Purchase Contract and any incorporated addenda.” (Reminder: I am not your broker.)

It’s the perfect Read more

August 2, 2010

Are you using QR codes on your flyers or signs?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vide:

That says: “Text HOUND9 to 88000.” If you snap a picture of it with a QR-code-reading client on your smart-phone, it should, in three steps or fewer, take you to a DriveBuy Technologies page for one of Cathleen’s short sale listings.

If you like good design, QR codes are plug ugly. But we’re going to start using them on our signs, commencing with the next listing. We often put the DriveBuy copy on a rider, so we’ll add the QR code there — on the order fo five inches square to make for an easy target.

Is anyone else playing with this technology?

July 3, 2010

PACE Solar Program Slows Chances of Economic Recovery

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Residential real estate finance is ill and getting worse.  I cautioned that the elixir that got us into this mess should be removed for a robust private market solution but the mix makers upped the dosage.  It’s gonna make us even more sick.

Last year, I saw an opportunity to finance energy efficient improvements, specifically solar panels.  My motives weren’t a political demonstration but rooted in financial analysis.  Often, an investment in a solar panels installation returns as much as 15% annually through cost savings.  Prescient building contractors reworked business plans to meet the expected demand. The global warming religion heightened awareness to self-produced energy systems and California consumers want in.  The challenge is that little if any home improvement capital exists in the mortgage market; that spelled opportunity for me.

I taught some of these contractors how to structure, price, and make junior loans, to finance their work.  Armed with my database of investors, I started a small secondary market for these “solar loans”.  The contractor would make a loan, hire me to sell that loan to an investor, and pay me a  fee for arranging that sale from the proceeds.  The loan was cross-collateralized by the subject property and an assignation of tax credits to the lender. The loans averaged $25,000 and I intended to build up a servicing portfolio, earning a fee to collect payments and remit them to the investors.

What I didn’t realize was that I had a competitor, a competitor that had a lot more money and influence than I did.  This competitor is able rewrite laws to its advantage, so that it had a first lien position, which is assumable by a purchasing homeowner.  My loans were junior liens with a due-on-sale clause.  That competitor is the PACE program, armed with $150 million of Federal money and the borrowing power of states and municipalities.

That’s a formidable foe for a small-town mortgage broker and his retired golf-buddy investors.  Needless to say, I abandoned the idea last month.  Today, there’s hope for my little venture.  The PACE program forgot that the existing secondary mortgage market doesn’t take kindly to Read more

June 25, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.5: It’s raining soup and all you can do is piss and moan that Big Mother hasn’t given you a free bowl.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack:

Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead:

This is the power of (relatively) free markets. Not only can you buy more stuff, better stuff, stuff that was completely unobtainable in 1964, at the same time very smart people have figured out how to make you much more productive than you would have been in 1964.

Chances are you had almost nothing to do with this incredible productive miracle. If you are like most Americans, your major exports are half-digested junk food and bitter lamentations about the unseemly unfairness of everything for everyone, everywhen and everywhere. But this simple example, provided by The Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute, illustrates what has really been going on in your life, while you have been so busy complaining about how horrible everything is.

We are puerile as a race, about which I will have much more to say later. But even if you are thoroughly grown up in your own thinking, it’s good odds that you have spent your entire life looking at the world upside down, concentrating with a dour dread on everything that does not matter while blithely ignoring everything that does.

Do you want a very good reason to be cheerful? The world outside your mind is all but entirely wonderful, a thing of beauty and infinite splendor. It’s only that world inside your mind that is a mess. I’m thinking it’s time you cleaned house. How about you?

< ?php include "cheerful.php"; ?>

June 22, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.

The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.

This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.

Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…

The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts