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Category: Technology (page 19 of 60)

January 4, 2009

Filters Aren’t Just for Coffee

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

As I take stock of 2008 and move into 2009, I’ve decided to  develop and implement a strategy for transforming my business moving forward.  I’ve settled on a theme for this year – creating, delivering and leveraging knowledge.

My goal for 2009 is to become a better filter.

I want to become an expert filter – more importantly, be recognized as an expert filter – transforming information into knowledge.  I had a very interesting conversation this morning with a client regarding the state of the current real estate market in Chicago.  After three attempts of getting several properties under contract, my client and I finally succeeded in getting a deal together.  We visited the unit again this morning.  After seeing the unit, I sensed his apprehension when talking about next steps.

He wants to renegotiate the price now after having the property under contract.  He’s been actively reading on the blogs that prices are continuing to fall in the US – he cited Case Shiller’s recent price decline of 18% as the reason why he should pay even less than our negotiated price.

This became a real example of why information is not knowledge.

I became a filter – he was not really aware that the indicator, often touted in daily news sound bites about the ailing US real estate market, was actually an aggregated statistic for 20 metro areas in the US – Chicago faring slightly better at alittle over 10% decline since the same period last year.  To drill even deeper, the indicator measures single family home prices, not condos .  The decline hasn’t impacted every neighborhood equally.  Perhaps more importantly, we have spent the past 5 months searching for properties in four different neighborhoods within the city.  The process was an eye-opening experience for him – he learned that while inventory was plentiful, there were only a handful of properties actually worth buying.

While I am not keen on resolutions, I have decided to spend less time listening to the 24 hour, continuous coverage of catastrophe that our news has become.   Without the proper context and filtering, consumers are simply mis-educated and misinformed regarding Read more

January 2, 2009

Kevin Kelly: A New Kind of Mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Technium:

Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.

While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

Read the whole thing.

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January 1, 2009

What Is a Good Scent Trail ?

by

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

Author website

Kelley “Klik Kween” Koehler, instructing from the ARE-TEC blog:

Users like to see words describing their goal on a site, it helps them have more confidence that the thing they’re looking for is indeed there to be found. It’s called a scent trail.

Which means that if I create a page on my site just for people looking at townhomes, then I need to very carefully optimize for those kinds of words, and then I need to restate those words plainly on the page.

Kelley taught us about scent trails at Unchained Orlando.  She explained her “long-tail search engine marketing strategy” and how she makes it easy for online shoppers to find exactly what they want.  Kelley told us to build a landing page with the exact same phrase as the web surfer searched.  

I’m using my BloodhoundBlog.net weblog for these experiments.  Greg Swann suggested that I use it to post mortgage rates.  I built a page on the weblog, titled “Current Mortgage Rates Report”. “Current Mortgage Rates” is a keyword search phrase that a plethora of consumers search.  If I start a PPC campaign, I’ll play in that keyword search phrase.  “Current Mortgage Rates” is the scent trail I’m trying to build.

I want to build it with a long-copy sales letter, with no links other than a “Contact Me Now” link (call to action) throughout the landing page.  I want to have that landing page present the proposition, air out (and hopefully answer) all of the potential objections, and ultimately weed out anybody who doesn’t have interest.  My goal is to have clicks that are consumers who have “flopped” and want a mortgage right now.

BUT…as Kelley states, I have to “title” and theme the page with the keyword search phrase that EXACTLY matches what the consumer wants.  I have to make it as simple as possible for them.

Who’s implementing what Kelley taught us?  How are you doing it?

PS:  I changed the title of this post from “Give them What They Want” To “What Is  A Good Scent Trail ?” to reaffirm what Kelley says.  When you click the links on this post,  you get Read more

December 31, 2008

Last call for end-of-the-year discounts on tickets for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, April 28 – May 1, 2009 — and catch us for free at Zillow’s offices in Seattle on February 12

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the front

and back

face of a door-hanger we have going out in high-equity neighborhoods starting January 3rd. In most of Phoenix, for now, listing is essentially limited to short sales and lender-owned homes, so most of our time this year will be devoted to buyers. But if this card — or variations on it — can pull the way we want it to, it should be worth around $3,000 a week, net of all expenses. The lord knows we can use it.

Brian and I keep getting mail from people wondering why we’re going to be teaching weblogging at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. We’re not. All we ever teach is marketing — on-line, on paper and face-to-face. There is a piece to this door-hanger that you’re not seeing that should more than double its response rate. That’s marketing — and there is no one else in the real estate industry who teaches the kinds of marketing that Brian and I cover as a matter of course.

You can catch a preview of our marketing curriculum in Seattle on February 12th. We’ll be doing a free Unchained preview at Zillow HQ, 999 Third Avenue, Seattle, WA, on Thursday, February 12th from 1pm to 5pm. Scott Cowan is organizing the event with help from Drew Meyers and David Gibbons from Zillow. Marlow Harris will be joining us, along with some other Seattle blogging luminaries. The grand finale will be a debate between Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman and BloodhoundBlog iconoclast Greg Swann, moderated by Brian Brady, American Real Estate’s Number One Marketing Maven.

I gotta go. I’m showing this morning. But I wanted to remind y’all that today is the last day for a couple of big discounts on Unchained tickets. The Early-Bird price — $100 off — goes away altogether today. And the Unchained Alumnus discount will drop from $200 to $100 at midnight tonight. That’s $100 in savings, either way, for acting today.

Click the appropriate button below to sign up now.

CyberProfessionals: $397


















Unchained Alumnus: $497 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















Early-Bird Price: $597 (you must act on this offer before 01/01/09)


















The full price Read more

December 30, 2008

The return counter — Looking AG’s Trojan Horse in the mouth: MyMarketWare works hard for the money, almost hard enough…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Continuing with my discussion of the bribe/gifts proffered to the contributors to Agent Blunderbuss, here’s a quick look at MyMarketWare.com.

I looked at this product when it was introduced and was not all that impressed. I like it better on second glance.

What is it? YASPWSS: Yet Another Single Property Web Site Solution. Like many of these services, the offering is pretty light-weight. And like seemingly all of them, it inflicts treacly music upon the end user. But, to be fair, the price for a site, hosted for a year, ain’t bad.

Keep in mind, as you read, that my frame of reference is our own engenu sites. I can do anything I want, to any level of detail or depth that I want, and I can reorganize an entire, huge web site on a whim. There is no YASPWSS on the market that is going to impress me.

MyMarketWare works to one level deep. That is, from a site’s “home” page, you go one level down, no deeper. Given that architecture, I would have loved to have seen at least the on-site links done within an iframe on the index page — pseudo AJAX.

You can link to off-site pages, which is a bonus, since it makes the sites effectively infinitely extensible.

The pages of the sites themselves are built in ASP, with a huge block of obfuscated code near the top of each one. Positioning on the pages is effected with both CSS and HTML tables, which seemed odd to me. MyMarketWare promises decent SEO from these pages, but they seemed very verbose, to my eyes.

I personally want a lot more photos than MyMarketWare makes available, and I want to be able to sort and organize them by category. The slide show software, apparently available on one page only, was fairly robust.

There are decent contact and scheduling forms, and MyMarketWare promises to feed your site’s details to various Realty.bots — which is probably also being done by other vendors you are using.

My overall rating of MyMarketWare’s demo single-property web site was “eh” but not inadequate. It does a decent job at what it does, but Read more

December 29, 2008

The return counter — Looking AG’s Trojan Horse in the mouth: No mere API-ing ape, Dwellicious is a true dead-pool mash-up

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
        –Robert Burns, To a Louse

In a comment on AG’s bribe/gift extravaganza, I said:

And, yes, the Dwellicious campaign stunk to high heaven. It’s headed straight for the dead pool, once it actually launches. The same dumbass “idea” has already failed several times. To say anything else is absurd.

That remark turns out to be grossly unfair. Dwellicious is not all-on-its-own to the dead-pool destined, it is a mash-up and mash-note-like send-up of a vast host of future dead-pool denizens.

Here’s the pitch. People will shop at lots of different Realty.bots, see? So Dwellicious gives them an easy way to organize all the houses they are finding on these various sites. It has social-networking tools built in, since, apparently, social-networking-type homebuyers can’t even go to the bathroom without permission from their TwitterButtBuddies. Not only that, but Dwellicious taps into every available Realty.bot and social-networking API, which will possibly prove to be astounding if anyone ever accidentally uses this silly site.

I watched the Dwellicious PR campaign a few weeks ago, assuming that it had to be astroturf, but today is the first time I have paid even one second’s attention to the product itself.

It’s actually quite an instructive clusterfrolic, if there are web entrepreneurs out there who want to learn how to get just about everything wrong.

Here’s the straight dope: Dwellicious seems to have been developed by paying devout attention to the TwitWit echo chamber — without one second or one dollar being devoted to actual market research.

Premise: People will shop at lots of different Realty.bots.

This is almost certainly false. Homebuyers window-shop at sites like Trulia and Zillow. When they get serious, they move to a particular, robust and — important concepts ahead — complete and non-redundant IDX or VOW search engine.

(A subsidiary premise of the entire dead-pool-bound Realty.bot movement is the idea that some strange imaginary people might want to purchase a residence in more than one major Read more

December 26, 2008

How Much Does Knowledge Cost?

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”  quoted by John Naisbitt.

As RE Web 2.0 has evolved, there has been so much emphasis on the data, yet as we sit and evaluate the present solutions, consumers are still unclear how to interpret the information.

“Information is not knowledge.”  quoted by Albert Einstein.

Buying and selling real estate isn’t all about the data – it’s about knowledge and expertise.

If knowledge is not information, what is knowledge?

According to Merriam-Webster online, knowledge is defined as the following:

Knowledge:  (1): the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association (2): acquaintance with or understanding of a science, art, or technique b (1): the fact or condition of being aware of something (2): the range of one’s information or understanding <answered to the best of my knowledge> c: the circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning : cognition d: the fact or condition of having information or of being learned <a person of unusual knowledge>
If consumers are to gain value from technology in the real estate arena, the solutions must be focused on the interpretation of the information.  Interpretation of information is knowledge.
Who possesses knowledge in the real estate arena?  Experienced Realtors, brokers, mortgage professionals, attorneys, title/escrow agents, property inspectors, experienced investors and others involved in the transaction.  Experience gained over time, after executing a number of transactions.
The prevalent mindset is to reduce the cost of the transaction by reducing the commission paid to the real estate agent because technology delivers information more openly to the consumer – but what value has been created?  Has true value been really created if more information has become available?
Reduced fee business models often focus on reducing the most value aspect of the transaction – the knowledge and expertise of the real estate professional.  Granted, if the knowledge and expertise is not readily identifiable, it makes sense to pay less.  I believe reduced fee models address the barrier to entry for new agents who may lack Read more
December 24, 2008

By publishing enough of the right information, Mom and Pop teams can triumph over Redfin, VOWs, Realty.bots or big-name brokers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’d like to introduce you to some really nice folks. Take a look:

The couple on the left are the Anybodys, Jeff and Janice. Jeff is a middle-manager for GE. Unless he owns a Pizza Hut. Unless he’s a Civil Engineer for the county health department. Janice is a schoolteacher — or a stay-at-home mom — or the assistant manager of the parts department at the Saturn dealership.

On the right is their real estate agent — real live real estate agent Allie Howard.

This is good real estate marketing, profoundly effective in all kinds of ways. Virtually anybody can see themselves as the Anybodys. They are exceptional examples of everything that is unexceptional in American middle-class life. And Allie is just geeky enough, just semi-hip enough, just po-mo enough and just down-to-business enough to connect with the Anybodys in the intense but decisively temporary marriage that is a home search.

Everything in this photo is perfect. The clothing is casual but expensive — in just the right colors. That hand-written type face is an homage to the “Hello!” of the original Macintosh. Everything about this image is devised to make you feel comfortable about proceeding with a real estate transaction with Allie.

So who is responsible for this inspired piece of marketing?

Redfin.com, that’s who.

That’s right, the home of the geeks is working very hard to become the just-geeky-enough place for Janice — not Jeff — to shop for a home.

Just two weeks ago, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman was wondering among the Bloodhounds if hi-tech companies like his would crush all the Mom and Pop brokerages. But here we see that self-same Kelman working very hard to compete with Mom and Pop on their own turf.

Let me make two interstitial points, if I might.

First, do not underestimate Glenn Kelman. We’ve beat up on a lot of people in the last 30 months, but, as far as I can tell, Glenn Kelman is the only one among them who is actively trying to figure out what he’s getting wrong. That doesn’t mean we have been right, necessarily. But Kelman is going to keep testing and revising his Read more

December 21, 2008

John Kalinowski’s custom real estate signs — and his custom-made approach to everything at his new Cleveland real estate brokerage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Totally stunning email this morning from John Kalinowski of LiquidBlueRealty.com. John is a profile in courage, to my way of looking at things. He’s just launched a brand new brokerage. In this real estate market. In Cleveland. He’s being very sweet to the Bloodhounds in this note, but this is an amazing amount of work he has undertaken:

I finally had a minute to sit down and send you a note, to thank you for all the help you’ve provided me, even though you weren’t aware you were helping! I’ve been following your site for quite some time now, absorbing every little tidbit possible, and in the last two weeks left RE/MAX to start my own brokerage in the Cleveland Market, Liquid Blue Realty. I’m building the entire company around the custom sign idea, and so far the response has been incredible, to say the least!

I am eternally grateful to the Bloodhounds (and to Russell Shaw) for all the inspiration that has pushed me to make this move. I even built my own website, using WordPress and the Thesis template, even though I’ve never had a blog or built a site before. I probably wouldn’t know what WordPress was if I hadn’t started following your site.

Our signs are 24″x36″, just like yours, but are actually printed directly onto a sign material that is made of some sort of hard plastic with aluminum bonded to each side. Our printer owns what amounts to a giant inkjet printer that can basically print on anything that will fit inside (I’ve seen them print on a bedroom door!), and uses waterproof ink. They use the same process to print conventional signs for other agents, and the panels are about 1/8″ thick and weigh about 5 lbs, so these are serious signs.

Believe it or not, I create my sign files on a PC! I start with MS Publisher with a full-size 24×36 image, then print to a PDF using Acrobat Distiller at 300 DPI. I then jump between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to fix the CMYK values on the blue color, and to create the huge 350mb Read more

December 21, 2008

The Way of the Farmer, a video podcast from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008: Using the internet, social media and direct marketing to farm for listings

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here is both the best and the worst of BloodhoundBlog Unchained so far.

It’s the best, or a piece of the best, because it covers a great deal of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology in rapid-fire fashion.

It’s the worst, or of a piece with the worst, because it’s me delivering a lecture, rather than us doing the work I’m talking about.

There won’t be any lecturing at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, but there will be a whole lot of the doing of hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-headed nuts and bolts real estate sales technology.

This video represents just a slice of the content on the DVDs from BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, 2008. We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve learned a lot about how to share what we know, so what we really want is for you to come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix this year. But if you can’t do that, there’s a whole lot of great information covered on those DVDs. If you can’t be with us in April — or even if you can — the DVD set could be a great Christmas gift for your career.

We’re marketers, and because of that we know that sales increase when the barriers to commitment are low. So let’s commit, shall we?

Enroll now for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

If you’re ready to rock, all you have to do from here is click a PayPal button to reserve your place at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. The event runs from April 28th to May 1st, 2009. Many more details can be found at the BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix weblog.

Fair warning: This won’t be cheap. If you’re looking for the best possible deal, and if you qualify, joining the CyberProfessionals might be your best bet. And if you’ve entrusted us with your money before, either last May in Phoenix or in November in Orlando, we want to express our gratitude with a special Unchained Alumnus price. But whatever you end up paying, we’re going to make it worth your while and then some.

Here’s how the prices break out. Just click on the appropriate button Read more

December 20, 2008

Mariana Wagner’s custom real estate signs are slicker than a Colorado Springs sidewalk in December

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Look at these custom yard signs from Mariana Wagner’s iTeam real estate brokerage in Colorado Springs, Colorado:

Mariana reflects: “Not exactly how yours is set up, as our wind and freezing temps make the hanging sign a disaster, but these rock. (We have installed a 1-800# on the bottom of each sign, as well.)”

I like the white space, especially, a vital design element I too often leave out. And I really like the way that Mariana and her team play with the Keller Williams color scheme without being imprisoned by it.

I’m dying to hear how they sell — the houses and the brokerage.

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December 17, 2008

Making a Scenius scene to make an impact on your target market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lender Bob says, “Hey, I’m a lender. I want to get Realtors to notice me. Hell, I want to get in front of them so often they can’t forget me. What can I do?”

Realtor Beth chimes in with, “He’s got the right idea. I’m a Realtor. I’ve got a blog and all, but I don’t feel like I’m talking to the people in my farm. How can I get my name and my ideas in front of them ever day?”

Vendor Bill adds, “I’ve got things once worse. I need to sell marketing ideas to Beth and Bob, both, but how can I break through the clutter?”

These are problems that can be solved by Scenius scenes. With the right scene, you can aggregate content and share it with people you want to do business with.

Watch:

Lender Bob can link to financial news and stories on factors that influence interest rates. He can make this scene available to Realtors in his market, who will have Bob’s free content available to share with their own readers. Florida Lender Kevin Sandridge is getting ready to do just this in his market.

Realtor Beth can link to local news stories and then echo that content to other weblogs in her market area. I’m doing this with Phoenix Area Headlines, but Beth could do other things as well. For example, she could do a “best of local blogs” scene to spread the link love around. Or, like Chicago Realtor Thomas Hall, she could do a scene on green real estate.

Vendor Bill has the easiest job of all, if he learns to think Scenius: He doesn’t need to cut through the clutter, he needs to slice it and dice it and serve it up in his own scene. I’m playing with this idea with Switched-On Marketing.

There’s more. Eric Blackwell is using a scene as a way of getting his 100+ agents to get on-board the social media marketing train. Cheryl Johnson and I are both using Scenius scenes to manage our listings on-line — but that’s an advanced-class topic.

The point of this: If you’re in the business of self-promotion, we’ve Read more

December 16, 2008

What matters more — Attitude or Aptitude? I had always put my money on Application, but I realized the best bet is all three

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked Read more

December 15, 2008

In Detroit, Idle is a Four Letter Word

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

In a prior life, before becoming a licensed real estate professional, I was responsible for implementing supply chain technology in the discrete manufacturing arena – more specifically – the auto industry.

Over a 7 month period, between 1998 and 1999, I made a temporary home in Sterling Heights, Michigan – 16 mile and Mound Road to be exact – home to Ford Motor Company’s largest real axle and transmission manufacturing and assembly facility – one million square feet of real estate, generating roughly $1.7B of product.  The plant was as vertical an operation as I have seen, short of a foundry.  From raw forged metal, UAW workers machined gears and assembled rear wheel drive transmissions for Ford’s cars and trucks – the Mustang, Lincoln Town Car, Explorer and the Ranger pickup – at the time, some of Ford’s hottest products – the Explorer was selling like crazy.

Before setting foot in Sterling Heights, I was tasked with creating a new sales methodology, tools and implementation plan that calculated the ROI of our supply chain technology solution once implemented.  The sales methodology walked a senior executive through the hard dollar, tangible savings and return to bottom-line profit contribution our technology solution would deliver.

Process created – tools developed – mission accomplished.

Or so I thought.  Now go prove that it actually works.

My first – and my team’s feat was to sell our solution to the VP of Operations.  We walked through the process and learned from our discussions that the VP of Operations was given the directive to reduce Work In Process inventory – WIP had grown disproportionately to end-unit assembled transmissions.  This particular problem was a no-brainer – our sweet spot.  Our solution optimized the flow of WIP and synchronized the flow of raw material to end-unit assembled transmissions via planning and scheduling algorithms.  Cake.

Unique to our solution was our commitment to reduce WIP over a 12 month period.  Our proposition – Ford would pay our travel expenses and small overhead expenses for our 12 month assignment – nothing more UNLESS we delivered results over and above the $20M goal.  Any additional savings above and Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and 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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