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Category: the hustle (page 1 of 1)

December 20, 2022

I never lose.

by

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

Author website

It’s no secret that I am a Tom Brady fan. I admire him because of his commitment to excellence and because he competes hard. His off-field conditioning is maniacal but, at 45 years old, he has taught the next generation of NFL greats that self-care is what leads to longevity in the highly physical game of professional football.   Brady prepares the way he does to win, and Brady wins.

As much as Brady wins, like it or not, not winning is a part of competing.  He said as much yesterday, on his podcast:

“It’s interesting because you would think, ‘Oh, well, why is he still playing?’ Because all you want to do is win, and that’s all sports should be about is winning. And I agree it should be about winning, but it’s also, I’m looking at it like, no, what am I learning? What am I learning from putting a similar amount of energy in over the last couple years and not winning? What is that teaching me?” Brady said Monday on his SiriusXM podcast, “Let’s Go!”

This was the money line:

“You know, why should we feel like we’re just entitled to win all the time? We’re not. That’s not what life’s about.”

I know you have heard this Nelson Mandela quote, “I never lose; I either win or learn”.  It may be trite but it’s true.  Don’t use the word “lose”, ever again, when talking about business opportunities.

I have been self-employed or selling on commission since 1992.  I am not kidding when I say that, in the past 30 years, I have never received a biweekly or monthly paycheck.  I have been issued 1099 forms, each January, since 1997.  It hasn’t always been easy but I have paid health insurance, paid car insurance, sent my daughter to private schools from Kindergarten through her senior year in college, and maintained two houses:  one in San Diego and one in my present state of residence, Florida. I am bragging a bit but I am bragging to illustrate this point;

I don’t always win.

In fact, I win less engagements than I don’t win but, whether I win or Read more

August 25, 2014

Getting a San Diego Condo VA-Approved Adds Value To Service Members

by

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

Author website

Debra Brady and I are experts at VA-financing.  One of the things we do very well is secure a VA condo complex approval for condominiums which aren’t agency approved.  Some comments from a recent YELP review:

I started the home buying process while still on deployment, and Brian graciously worked with me across 13 time zones to begin explaining the ins and outs of home buying.

This is actually kind of fun for me.  With technology, deployed service members can communicate with me well in advance of buying.  Many times, when deployed,  they have free time with little to do.  They use Gchat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and email to communicate with me.  Sometimes it makes for some weird hours but I enjoy finally meeting them when they return to the States.

I googled VA home approval, and his was the first name to pop up.  Brian is an absolute master at working with the VA.

That’s what I love to hear–that we come up first on Google Search for this topic.

Brian took my wife and I out for cocktails to explain in person the different loan rates and explain the decision making process for each of them, and Debra worked like a fiend to make sure thinks were done WELL ahead of time.

This is how Debra and I work.  I spend most of my time “selling” real estate agents and educating clients and Debra gets the loan done.  When we’re clicking properly, I am “Mr. Outside” and she is “Mrs. Inside”.  Clients know that she is in the office, every day from 8AM until 230PM each day and available on the telephone.  This frees me up to: (a) find more business for us and (b) properly educate home buyers about the process.  We pride ourselves on “no surprises” during the loan process.

To any Servicemembers who are interested in using their VA loan option, look no further than Brian, he is THE expert who will get you into the place you want.

That’s what I hope to hear on every VA loan we close.  It doesn’t ALWAYS happen but, I’m proud to say, it does happen more Read more

January 11, 2013

There is no real estate inventory problem in Oceanside, CA

by

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

Author website

How often had you heard real estate agents complain about “the inventory problem” this past year?  I used to think their complaints were farcical until these past 3-4 months.  I have about a dozen pre-approved buyers out looking for homes.  Interest rates are low and the foreclosures are getting snapped up as soon as they hit the market.  Not one of those dozen has been able to get an accepted offer since Labor Day, 2012.

Clearly, there must be an inventory problem. 

It’s time to change gears real estate agents.  A few years back, I suggested that buyers would be controlling the market and the listings side of the business should be de-emphasized.  All the properties being offered were short sales or foreclosures.  Paperwork-intensive transactions didn’t sound so appealing to me and I recommended that agents focus all their efforts on finding buyers and getting them into contracts.  Those who followed such advice didn’t get rich but earned a darned good living these past few years.

I had breakfast this morning with Mr. Oceanside, Don Reedy.  We discussed the local market and “the inventory problem” when it hit me; there is no shortage of homes.  In Oceanside alone, there are thousands of home owners, with equity, who can sell their properties to ready and willing home buyers.  This offers the ambitious real estate agent a great opportunity.  Too often, real estate agents (and loan originators) forget that we are paid to add value to transactions.  If we’re simply acting as gatekeepers, we are no different from everyone else.  We need to “create personal inventory”–find sellers for the buyers who want their homes.

Here is my ten- step plan for real estate agents, for a great 2013…with PLENTY of “personal” inventory:

  1. Attend your local caravan meeting each week.  Pay close attention to the agents who speak during the “buyers’ needs” segment.
    Call a dozen local agents weekly who work with buyers.  Find out where the inventory problem is.  At this point, you will see a glaring opportunity in your town/market area.  If you know that those agents have 2-3 buyers, for a certain price range, in a certain Read more
February 8, 2012

Wow… And you thought the gonophs at ReMax were mercenary…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Spam today from RealtyExecutives, which really used to matter in Phoenix:

I love the monthly fee with the huge, larcenous split. RealtyExecs actually invented the 100% commission plan. It was that idea that Dave Liniger spirited away to Denver, where he founded ReMax. He discovered right away that a 100% brokerage is a giant cash sink — for the broker — but, luckily, his minions in Canada figured out how to combine the 100% claim with a hidden 5% split. Liniger flies in a private jet today because his 100% commission brokerages are all actually split shops.

Still, $95 a month plus a 15% split is a little steep. HomeSmart will do you a monthly deal for twenty-five bucks plus E&O. But before its ignominious bankruptcy, RealtyExecutives was charging on the order of $750 a month — nine grand a year! — whether you closed anything or not. In the interim, a whole lot of Big Names have moved from RealtyExecs to HomeSmart.

I love the rest of the ad, though: 78% of RealtyExecutives’ agents made less than six figures in 2011. And if the average agent closed 12 deals, that suggests that a whole bunch of those agents sold five houses or fewer last year.

And to think: You could be an “executive” too!

March 10, 2011

Sane People Don’t Comment on Real Estate Blogs, You Don’t Need 1,000 Facebook Friends & Other Valuable Lessons Learned From 3 Years Slinging Stuff Online

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

The real thing that pissed me off about the well intentioned jackals at Agent ReBoot was not what was explicitly taught: it was what was implied.  Somehow you need oodles of traffic to be successful.  Somehow, you need oodles of Facebook Likes.  That somehow all being able to be at the center a tepid and tense noisy murmur was what it takes to be Real Successful in Real Estate.

And I’ve made the mistake too.  For a long time, I thought it was simple math: converting a tiny percentage of mostly indifferent people would scale.  You would LinkIn a bunch of people on MyTwitFace and voila! Winning!

So you take every friend request you can, and you add the pople you connect with, as force of habit.  If someone has 6-7 friends in common, you add them too.  Winning.

You fire up a blogpost or two,pass it along and your new friends and strangers dutifly comment something often indistinguishable from the stuff that winds up on the wrong side of your akismet filter.

“Nice post, you laid it on me.”  they dutifly say. And you in turn go through the WP dashboard to their sites.  “You make nice post to, I love to hear you on this topic! ” It’s all about the dofollow, baby.  Getcher linkbacks here, and on to the next one.

Winning.  You have a metric to measure: friends, contacts, twitbacks, clicks and raw traffic.  Woot.  Winning. You’re winning that game, the war for comments.  You’re marching your army of 12,000 Twitter Bots, 2100 indifferent Facebookers, and another few hundered people that are still shuffling around the empty halls on LinkedSpace.  Duh, winning!

Bad contacts- just  like bad money –drive out good contacts.  You had a Facebook full of300 friends, coworkers and neighbors.  You were connected to these people.  You were warmed when you saw the pictures they posted.  Now?   You have 300 of your friends.  But now your Facebook had been “improved” by the 700 Realtors from across the country, the 200 vendors that follow them, and just recently a herd of zebra showed up.  Now, instead of the people you love and know, Read more

February 15, 2011

Joe Biden Was In Philly To Pitch High-Speed Rail

by

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

Author website

…and I swear, before he finished his speech, he channeled his inner Harold Hill, just to convince the rubes in the vernacular:

Seventy-six small towns on the big rail line
Over a hundred and ten miles of track, to nowhere
They were followed by recyclable trash cans, dotted all across
the Land, the cream of the climate changin’ scare

Seventy-six rail cars caught the mornin’ sun.
With a hundred and ten passengers lounged within.
There were more than a thousand engineers
Watching all the gears
With a horn, signalin’ the big green train was near!

There were union bosses, activists, and ne’er do wells.
Looting, looting,  all along the way.
Earmarks, tax credits, “Gee, ain’t it swell?””
Each politician,  having his big, fat say!

There were fifty miles of track in the far off desert.
Explorin’, explorin’ where noone had been before
An industry to subsidize
All voters get a free ride!
At last!  We’ll even up the score!

Seventy-six short years is the cost recoup
Over a hundred and ten agencies, will oversee
You’ll no longer see coughing, sputtering cars, dotted all across
the Land, just high speed rail, from sea to shinin’ sea!

I love a good musical so I’m looking forward to Robert Preston Joe Biden’s speech in Ioway.

January 7, 2011

Do You Know How To Network?

by

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

Author website

I used to hate networking meetings because they seemed like business card collecting contests.  I always feel cheapened by the “Wham.  Bam!  Thank you, Ma’am” Chamber of Commerce meetings, where the person of the moment looks over your shoulder, for someone more interesting, while you compliment her on the color of her blazer.  I usually have two too many drinks at these and wake up with a fistful of business cards and a craving for aspirin.  Often, when I call said peach-color blazered Amway rep, to follow up, she doesn’t remember me at all.

I’ll be damned if I’m not…memorable !

I still like meeting people so I started my own gig, a few years ago.  It’s been mostly successful because I’ve been at the center of the group and have blanket permission to call or email everyone who attends.  More importantly, they remember me when I call.

I’ve branched out on Meetup and started attending new networking mixers.  Here are a few tips I’ve picked up, which has increased my efficacy, and helped me develop more genuine connections with strangers:

  • I don’t try to meet everyone.  In fact, I often ask people where the real estate agents, attorneys, accountants, and wealth advisers are.
  • When I do meet someone, I use Michael Peak’s strategy of asking “What are you working on?” and then asking “How can I help?”  Those two questions reveal more about anyone’s business than the traditional “What do you do?” and “Who’s your best target client?”  Asking those two questions has opened some doors for me.  Ironically, although I reject the Chamber crowds, I met Michael at one of them.  It’s plain to see why he made an impression on me.
  • I set a goal of meeting three people and ask for permission to call or visit with them.

That’s my trick.  I know who I want to meet when I attend, ask those two questions, and try to make three new friends at each gig.  I reject the card collecting and try to go deeper with the conversations.  Oh, I almost forgot; I relax and have fun, too.

So…what are YOU working on?

January 3, 2011

A new year and the looting of the American people continues unabated.

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

BofA Settles GSE Buyback Requests for Pennies on the Dollar

According to this MND article, Obama appointee, FHFA acting director Edward DeMarco just handed Ally bank, formerly GMAC Bank and Bank of America potentially a total $300 billion windfall. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, wholly owned subsidiaries of the US Treasury Dept. are foregoing the opportunity to put hundreds of billions worth of  mortgage backed securities  back to these banks in return for $3 billion cash which, no doubt came from the TARP and shadow earnings as a result of regulatory forbearance. The mortgage backed securities have a refund clause by which the originator is obligated to repurchase the securities if there were specific deficiencies in the origination of the underlying mortgages. As we saw in “foreclosuregate”, even the chain of title for some of these securities is defective. I think we can safely assume that there is probably more than $3 billion of refunds to be had with aggressive defense of the taxpayers’ interests.  Why does this matter?  Bonuses, baby.  Every dime coughed up by Ally or Bank of America reduces profits which shrinks the bankster bonus pool.  Apparently the Administration cannot stand the idea of those nice banksters riding in last year’s Maybach.  Especially after they made all those generous campaign  donations.

Maybach Laundalet

Wells Fargo, CitiBank and Chase have yet to cut their pennies on the dollar deals with Mr. DeMarco.  As the article points out, there are many purchasers of these same mortgage backed securities such as public and private pension funds and insurance companies who will probably go to the mat for a lot more than a couple pennies on the dollar.  The pension trustees and the insurance companies have a fiduciary duty to recover as much as possible for their beneficiaries.  It is a trillion dollar shame  that the administration doesn’t take its obligation to the taxpayer as seriously.  It will be interesting to see if there will be any Congressional oversight forthcoming in the new Congress regarding the Obama Administration’s magnanimous gift to the banksters.

November 7, 2010

In which I find more focus and dump the hocus pocus

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Disclaimer: If your business is humming along, I doubt you will get much useful information from this post, however, please do feel free to share any productivity hints in the comment section. Thanks!

I made a public commitment, and so I thought I share where I was and where I’m going. To Jeff Brown: I have yet to do one single 6 hour prospecting day. Haven’t done one. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do 3 hours most days of the work week, but even that isn’t consistent, so that’s still a goal, and I’m still committed to hitting that goal, and I will, but it’s a tough one for me. Which brings me to my first point: Real estate is not an instant gratification business. And the church says, “Duh!” Right. Old-timers are laughing their arses off right about now and I am too. I really like instant gratification, but unfortunately, I can’t use it to pay bills, so if you are seduced by that, as I often am, be careful. Don’t lie to yourself about what is “working”.

Working requires thoughtful planning and focus. If you want to brainstorm an idea, give me a call, drop me an email. I am very very good at brainstorming. Making a goal, making a commitment to that goal, doing the basics, this focus comes less naturally to me, but that’s where the money is so that’s what I’m learning to do.  Know thyself: Hands down, best thing I’ve done to help me focus was to secure a private office. I had been “working” out of a desk in our family room. Oh, I know, my broker supplies a desk at the office, I could use that but my stuff is at home. Unfortunately, so are our dogs, our cats, our kids, the laundry, food, you get the point. Here’s my solution: My broker owns our office building and this being the Rust Belt circa 2010, we have a few Read more

September 15, 2010

Door knocking my way to walking the walk

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

So now that it’s time to think big and act on those thoughts, I went door knocking. Oh yes I did. I have made a public commitment to prospecting, and no, I do not have an unbroken chain of red X’s, and no, I don’t feel good about that. Okay so now that we have that covered, let me tell you about door knocking.

Another Realtor and I have on occasion been partnering up for the past year. She’s just gone full time so I recently suggested that we go door knocking. Not only has she never done this, but when I suggested it, she was sure that: a) she’d hate it; b) she’d have people cuss her out and slam the door in her face; c) she’d promptly be kicked off this planet; or d) all of the above. What she didn’t count on, couldn’t believe, and was tickled to find out was, e) none of the above happened. Here’s what we learned about door knocking: The hardest part is getting started. No really. Once you set a time, drive to the neighborhood and get yo lazy booty out the car, the hard part is over, and once you knock on that first door, the rest is a cake walk down Primrose Lane.

We picked a practice neighborhood. A neighborhood that we have a listing in, giving us something to talk about, but we really wanted a neighborhood in which we wouldn’t be too horrified to make some mistakes. It’s a forgiving neighborhood that I’m familiar with. Hard-working, blue collar, friendly people who are used to door-to-door sales people. They will either open the door to be polite, or kindly tell us no thanks. Sorry BawldGuy, not one person told us to go to hell- not one! The houses are close together allowing us to quickly move on to the next house, and we went in the afternoon, 2pm, our thought being the only people home at that time are either retired or Read more

August 29, 2010

Tag Teaming Off Of Jeff Brown: Rescue Time

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Right now, there’s no real way to do business with me online.  This is not an accident–and I’ll get to the Jeff Brown section of the equation momentarily.  I’m redoing everything. We’ve not been marketing lately, because we’ve got to raise the standards of everything.

This won’t be interminable, we’ll be done with this at some point real soon.  Like this week.   I’ll be up on Tuesday or Wednesday (read Thursday or Friday) and this will certainly be the last ‘public iteration,’ that I ever go through.  I’ve got to end the “stay up all night and then roll the site back to how it was” school of doing things for myself.

A detail to peep at before it gets built into the shopping cart: what happens after people buy. This is one of many things that we’re rolling out, and it simply takes time. Making a sales channel that is tight, that makes and keeps promises and that is reasonably indifferent to the volume it handles.   I’m working back to front- from the customer experience in the first minute, day, 3 days 5 days.

Here’s the “thank you” page that most see the moment their credit card is processed.

http://flatratebiz.com/thank-you

There are a series of emails that go out in the first few days, and my illustrious customer service turk calls people within 2 business hours to restate the same stuff and welcome them to our team.  While I was waiting to get this done, I tore out my old shopping cart.  I am not sorry I did this because the project is moving faster.

Now: there is no way to do business with me but sales are not down.  Projects are getting done and delegated, my books are more or less kept (the bane of a small business for many reasons).   Revenue is coming in at the same clip it had been before.

Why?  Because I know what the hell I’m doing all the time.

As part of a fun & semiprivate project, a few of us wanted to get good at what we do for a living . I wanted to Read more

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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