There’s always something to howl about.
Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST, but next week we’re going to switch to 12 Noon MST because I can’t figure out what time it will be in sunny hazy smoky fabulous California. In any case, if you know of something worthy of celebration, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’m a busy boy. We’re busy with money work, but Cathleen has been sick, sicker, pneumoniated. The good news is, you don’t have to cut off your ear to take great pictures, you just have to hack like Selma on the Simpsons. I’m picking up the slack, plus I have a great new idea for BloodhoundBlog that we’ll be rolling out shortly. In any case, I might seem abrupt here, but that is no stain on the quality of today’s winning posts.
Jim Duncan was one of the first real estate webloggers I became aware of when we started BloodhoundBlog. We discovered the power of the long tail together in posts about dual agency. He is always to be found on the side of righteousness in real estate — ethics, education, putting the client first with first-rate service. He’s a great blogger, too, as he demonstrates with this week’s Odysseus Medal winner, Wither false blame?, an extended riposte to a particularly lame lamentation about imaginary offenses by the sub-agents who no longer exist in most states:
The author and professors make one accurate argument accidentally – until the real estate industry, mortgage industry, HUD, etc. embrace divorced commissions, we have a long way to go. Divorced commissions means simply that the buyer pays the buyer’s agent and the seller pays the seller’s agent. Until this is fixed, the perception will exist amongst those who don’t know any better – whether by unfamiliarity or neglect (as would seem to be the case in the Wharton professors’ cases) – that true representation does not exist.
I come not to condemn the professors (I have read the Mortgage Professor site for years), but to enlighten them to the wonderful world known as the 21st century and Buyer Brokerage. While the seller may pay my commission now, the loyalty and trust I am earning is the buyers’.
Here’s a proposal – First, apologize and clarify. Second, invite a guest speaker write a guest post on your blog and to explain to your classes what real estate agency and buyer/seller representation are. Explain how much the profession has changed in Read more
A dozen nominees again. It’s a workable number, and it gets us down to nothing but very serious posts. There are three from BloodhoundBlog here, but there’s nothing for it. Two of the three dominated the debate this week. If anything, I’m less fair to our contributors in the final judging, to make sure I’m being fair to everyone else.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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"Morgan Brown -- FHA secure Qualifying for FHASecure and Refinancing in a Changed Mortgage World”,
“Jim Cronin — Blogging for buyers Looking For Ready To Act Buyers? Blog These Proven To Succeed Real Estate Topics“,
“Dan Green — Housing starts Why The Terrible Housing Starts Number Could Be A Signal Of The Housing Market’s Recovery“,
“Jeff Brown — Social Security First Baby Boomer Applies For Social Security — Let The Games Begin“,
“Kris Berg — Paper trained Paper Trained“,
“Jim Duncan — Wharton calumnies Whither false blame?“,
“Dan Melson — Going vertical Economics of Home Ownership in High Density Areas“,
“Morgan Brown — Wholesaling DOA? Dead Man Walking – Wholesale Lending is Marching Towards Extinction“,
“Benn Rosales — Despised Realtor Realtor most despised – an open letter“,
“Brian Brady — Blog compliance Disingenuous Diatribe: Compliance is Crap-It’s About the Cash“,
“Kris Berg — Face time Face Time or Facebook?“,
“Jeff Brown — Hyperlocal blogging House Agents — Wanna Start the New Year Kickin’ Ass? Here’s How”
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
…but you still have time. Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
What is your broker doing when he’s not milking you for overpriced business cards and overpriced letterhead with overpriced envelopes? He’s milking your buyers for overpriced loans, overpriced title services, overprices inspections, home warranties and hazard insurance policies. For some brokerages, there is never enough money to be squeezed out of a transaction. This is white shoe corruption — technically lawfully but oozing sleaze. Someday there will be a successful class action suit and it will all go away just like that.
Until then, heed the advice of attorney Joshua Marks, who wins this week’s Odysseus Medal with Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!:
A recent class-action lawsuit filed in the state of Minnesota is bringing to light a long-standing issue that affects buyers of residential real estate throughout the country—alleged steering of home buyers to affiliated title, settlement and mortgage companies by large realty brokers. This widely utilized practice often leads to consumers incurring a considerable amount of extra fees and costs when compared with fees and services offered by non-affiliated competitors.
Many real estate brokerages rely on the income generated by clients using mortgage and title companies that are affiliated with them. Brokerages often attempt to maximize their “capture rates” – the percentage of all home-sale transactions that use the affiliates’ services. A consumer typically ends up paying more fees than if he/she selected a non-affiliated competitor. The brokerages justify the additional expense to consumers by claiming that even if the affiliates’ fees or mortgage rates are not the lowest available, the quality and dependability of the affiliates’ services more than compensate for any price differences.
Over the past several years, many cases involving financial relationships between brokerages and their affiliates have withstood legal challenges. So long as the financial arrangement was properly structured to comply with federal anti-steering and anti-kickback rules, the Courts have been reluctant to intervene in these arrangements.
In the Minnesota lawsuit, two buyers filed claims against Coldwell Banker Burnet Realty Inc., one of the largest realty firms in the state. The Plaintiffs Read more
I had been doing a short list of 20 nominees, but I had the idea that that was an overwhelming number. (It was for me.) This week I cut the short list to 12, and it’s not only more manageable, it seemed to be easier to distinguish the exemplary posts from the many notable entries that had been nominated.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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"Daniel Rothamel -- Social media How your business can benefit from social media right now”,
“Sean Broderick — Google Basewide Google Basewide? One Step Away in California“,
“Brian Boero — On-line real estate Online real estate: It’s anybody’s ballgame“,
“Jim Cronin — Pay-per-click Kick the Pay Per Click Habit: 7 Reasons Why Real Estate Blogging Is Better For Your Business“,
“Joshua Marks — Broker affiliations Buyer Beware: You Don’t Have to Use the Mortgage and Title Companies Affiliated with your Real Estate Broker. Make Sure You Shop Around!“,
“John Cook — Pete Flint A Q&A with Trulia CEO Pete Flint“,
“Jay Thompson — Zolve Zolve – One Agent’s Perspective“,
“Eric Blackwell — Realtor.com How to Stop getting hosed by REALTOR.com…“,
“Michael Price — Secret sauce Mmmmm…..Secret Sauce“,
“Teri Lussier — Viral marketing Web 2.0: Catching a virus at the local dance“,
“Cathleen Collins — Columbus Christopher Columbus… a top producer for the ages!“,
“Brian Brady — Professionalization Trim The Fat…No, Throw Away the Meat and Get a New Cow”
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
…but you still have time. Cut-off is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Meet Dr. Glenn, CEO of a radically different venture-capital-funded real estate start-up. He’s charming, witty, self-deprecating, baldly transparent about his means, ends and motives. The people who saw him speak at Inman Connect were amazed at how engaging he could be.
Why amazed? Because his reputation has suffered from the verbal savageries of his alter-ego, the coarse and flippant Mr. Kelman, a vulgarian who cannot come within shouting distance of a mainstream media maven without shoving one or more of his plentiful feet into his vast, cavernous mouth.
It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup, in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:
Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.
We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.
When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.
Say what you want about the cretinous Mr. Kelman — I know I do — this article is a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate few of us Read more
Redfin’s financial underbelly, the top-bazillion-bloggers and leftovers from last week’s ActiveRain thunderstorm. These are just some of the topics addressed in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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"Pat Kitano -- Active Rain What Active Rain should do now”,
“Kris Berg — Soledad Mountain “They made such a beautiful home.”“,
“Dan Green — Jobs Report Measuring The Statistical Insignificance Of The Monthly Jobs Report (October 2007 Edition)“,
“Jim Watkins — Lenders When Lenders Mess Up, Everyone Suffers!“,
“Dan Melson — Foreclosure Scam The \”We’ll Keep You In Your Property\” Scam“,
“Jay Thompson — WordPress 2.3 Upgrading to WordPress 2.3“,
“Jonathn Dalton — Weblog Comments Why Do We Allow Comments?“,
“Sandy Kaduce — Redfin Financials Dr. Kelman–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redfin“,
“Michael Seguin — Central v. Distributed Central vs Distributed – a familiar cycle“,
“Kevin Boer — Redfin Financials How Come Redfin’s P&L Looks Distinctly Unlike That Of A Traditional Real Estate Brokerage? Because Redfin Is Actually A Brokerage, Not A Landlord!“,
“Brian Boero — Online Marketing Online real estate marketing made simple“,
“Alex Mather — NAR REALTOR This, REALTOR That, An Open Letter to the NAR“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — FHA Reform FHA: A Siren Who Just Might Break Your Heart“,
“Michale Wurzer — Phoenix MLS Big News“,
“Glenn Kelman — Redfin Financials Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup“,
“Lani Anlgin — Aaron Anglin “Thank You” is not enough“,
“Kris Berg — The Inman 25 The Honor is All Mine!“,
“Greg Perry — Buyer Turnoffs The TOP 10 Most Offensive Buyer Turn-Offs“,
“Greg Tracey — Real Estate Market Things I Like About the Current Market“,
“Kris Berg — Birthday Brass in Pocket”
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I’m sitting on a long list of over 60 nominations, so there probably won’t be a detailing of the long list this week, at least not this morning. But there’s still time to make the short list: Deadline is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while you’re thinking about it.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
BloodhoundBlog is addressed to real estate professionals. We won’t reject anyone who wants to come and play, but we made a conscious decision very early on that we would be talking to Realtors, lenders, investors and other professionals, with a special emphasis on real estate webloggers. In that respect, we’re probably a pretty bad example for real estate webloggers to follow. We write about things that are of interest to you, but they aren’t likely to be interesting to ordinary people.
We’re leading into a discussion of last week’s ActiveRain fiasco, so here are two items that I think are very important to real estate webloggers — meaning webloggers who are not writing for the benefit of real estate professionals.
First, the MyBlogLog recent readers widget is not your friend. It visually convinces you that you are writing for the amusement of your real estate weblogging buddies, when in fact you should be writing for your target market, the people who can put money in your pocket.
Second, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not be your primary traffic-building strategy. Search engines will bring you unique visitors, which can be useful for advertising monetization business models. But search engine traffic comes with a truly gargantuan bounce rate: They land, they see that what they hit wasn’t what they wanted and they’re gone. Search engines can bring you visitors who will come and stay, some of whom might do business with you. But other traffic generating strategies — better targeted and much more viral — will make you a lot more money in the long run. I know I’m shouting down a well because everyone wants to believe SEO is a magic bullet, but facts are facts.
What does this have to do with ActiveRain? The sweet folks at ActiveRain have managed to convince themselves that talking about inside baseball to their good-time buddies will result in SEO traffic that will turn into money for them. This might actually be true, but it seems certain to me that, erg for erg, their energies could have been much better spent. ActiveRain argues that its search results prove it Read more
This was a great week. It wasn’t easy getting to a short list of twenty nominees, and I think it’s going to be particularly tough to pick an ultimate winner. I can’t imagine it will be any easier for you to vote for the People’s Choice Award.
What gets a weblog entry onto this list? Good writing, serious content — and especially both. There’s always room for something light-hearted if it’s very well written, but if you’re taking on a matter of true moment, I’m pretty forgiving about the niceties. My admitted bias is toward a deeper understanding of this thing we’re doing, real estate in the twenty-first century.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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"Dan Melson -- Sellers pays commissions Why the Real Estate Buyers Agent’s Commission is Paid by the Seller”,
“Brian Brady — Advertising to Ashley Advertising to Ashley“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Real estate 2.0 Real Estate 2.0 and the Phoenix Real Estate Consumer“,
“Dustin Luther — Make an impact 7 Ways to Make an Impact“,
“Jay Thompson — Aaron Anglin Tragedy Begets Triumph: Why I Love this Community“,
“Jay Thompson — Refrigerator service How to Save $94 on Refrigerator Service“,
“Joel Burslem — ActiveRain/Move Move.com Tried to Buy ActiveRain“,
“Michael Wurzer — Standards and monopolies Good Standards Break Monopolies, Not Make Them“,
“Daniel Rothamel — Facebook Why Your Answer to, “Are You on Facebook?” Will Determine the Fate of Your Business in 10 Years or Sooner“,
“Jim Watkins — Down market? Down Sales Market? Think Outside the Box“,
“Bill Leider — Opportunity costs Internet Marketing And Opportunity Cost – Connecting The Dots“,
“Steve Leung — Hidden factors Hidden Factors When Calculating a Home’s Value“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — Deceptive advertising Deceptive Radio Advertising in Mortgage Lending“,
“Patrick Kapowich — Realtor licensing Inside the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors’ Convention. Buyer beware? No. It’s Licensees Beware.“,
“Jeff Brown — Double-edged sword Double-Edged Sword — OR — Planning & Discipline — What Does Your Retirement Look Like?“,
“Dan Green — Data is granular Why Real Estate Data Is Read more
We had a lot of news this week, some tragic, some comical. All of it and then some is represented here. This is “the long list” — the total list of nominees that made the cut to be considered for the short list, the nominees available for voting for The People’s Choice Award.
What gets cut from this list? Posts that are too short, too stoopid, too much local or too much other people’s work. Even so, making this list of entries is an achievement, as you’ll see as you read them. There are some very serious minds out there, and it’s a delight to be able to showcase them.
For Aaron Anglin, may he rest in peace, the Ave Maria:
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum,
benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus.
Sancta Maria mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen
And for all the ActiveRainers who may yet find themselves left out in the cold, here is a link to Roger Miller singing The Ballad of Waterhole #3 (The Code of the West).
With that, the long list:
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"Dan Melson -- Sellers pays commissions Why the Real Estate Buyers Agent’s Commission is Paid by the Seller”,
“Brian Brady — Debunking Guttentag Debunking Guttentag“,
“Dan Green — Fed Funds Rate How Setting The Fed Funds Rate Is Like Shooting Free Throws With Your Eyes Closed“,
“Kelly Roark — Agent 2.0 Agent 2.0: not-so-clever play on ‘Web 2.0’ or the future of real estate marketing?“,
“Brian Wilson — Redfin [Redfin] “I coulda been a contender…”“,
“Erik Hersman — RealUmbrella Creating the Ultimate Real Estate Disintermediator“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — Deceptive advertising Deceptive Radio Advertising in Mortgage Lending“,
“Ron Ares — Rent vs buy Addressing the Rent vs. Buy Conundrum“,
“Patrick Kapowich — Realtor licensing Inside the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors’ Convention. Buyer beware? No. It’s Licensees Beware.“,
“Jeff Brown — Double-edged sword Double-Edged Sword — OR — Planning & Discipline — What Does Your Retirement Look Like?“,
“Dan Green — Visa credit scoring How Visa USA Tried To Scare Us All Into Using Its Credit Scoring Web Site“,
“Morgan Brown — Housing glut Housing Glut, Lennar Revenue off 44%, Other Goodies“,
“Dustin Luther — Make an Read more
Jay Thompson fingered this comment from someone named Brandon writing at TechCrunch:
If “the good guys” succeed in “fixing the most screwed up industry in America”, their business model will collapse. Redfin’s success depends SOLELY on the real estate industry STAYING the most screwed up industry in America.
Without a co-broker fee of 2-3% to the buyer broker, Redfin will not have anything to refund to their buyers. Using the example on the Redfin home page, if the home is for sale by owner or listed with Redfin for $3000-$4000 flat fee, they have no way to refund the buyer the $10,000 they’re using in their “typical” example.
Go lookup Bloodhound Blog if you want really insightful info on the real estate industry (including how screwed up parts of it really are) and how Redfin’s model falls down. An no, I am not affiliated with Bloodhound in any way – just a loyal reader.
Ah, well, we have a lot of interesting ideas for changes in the real estate industry, but I can’t imagine that any of them will be implemented in the next couple of days. Even so, get your Odysseus Medal nominations in now. Deadline is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while it’s on your mind — and before the entire universe is upended.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. We had 20 posts on the short-list, but 24 more that were also very good.
Here are this week’s winners:
This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Peter Coy at BusinessWeek for Believe it or not, the ‘optimal’ mortgage is an option ARM:
If you had to name the most toxic, dangerous, foolhardy kind of mortgage loan that exists, you’d very likely pick a pay-option ARM, which lets borrowers get deeper into debt by paying less than the minimum interest they owe each month and adding the unpaid interest to the loan principal. Worse yet, you might say, would be a pay-option ARM with a very high penalty for prepayment so borrowers can’t get out of it easily once they’re in it. There’s a move afoot to ban these worst-of-the-worst loans.
Guess what? The worst is actually the best.
Yes, according to a new study by professors from Columbia and New York universities, the “optimal” mortgage in a perfect world is precisely that kind of loan—an adjustable-rate mortgage with an option for negative amortization and a ban (or at least severe restriction) on prepayment.
Crazy? Not as crazy as you might think. The key, according to professors Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia Business School and Alexei Tchistyi of New York University’s Stern School of Business, is that this kind of mortgage is optimal only in a perfect world—namely, one in which borrowers are fully rational and always do what’s in their own best interest.
ARMs are like the miracle drug that can’t get over its tabloid reputation. This post won’t rehabilitate them, either, but it’s a start.
The Black Pearl Award become the Snow Pea Award this week. The winner is another testament to the epicentricity of the epicenter of real estate weblogging, Tucson’s Dave Smith, who graces us with Growing Peas in a Day! Here’s the Black Pearl:
Stop ripping your blog apart.
- Pick a good theme
- Activate good plug-ins
- Use productive functional widgets
- Add content regularly
- Weed out the Spam and Eye Candy
Now give it time to grow. It takes time to grow and be found and produce fruit.You can’t be Read more
