BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: The Odysseus Medal (page 7 of 7)

August 22, 2007

Easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I built a quick and easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal competition. You can continue to use the BlogCarnivals entry form, but I put this together to make it easier to nominate posts written by other people.

The form lives at the top of The Odysseus Medal information page, which is overdue for a rewrite. If you want an even quicker solution, go here and drag that URL into your toolbar. Copy the URL of the page you want to nominate and click on that link. Autofill then paste then submit. Duck soup.

Technorati Tags: , ,

August 20, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: A challenge to the mind and a challenge to the-way-things-have-always-been-done

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a lot of truly great posts this week. I’m not the kind to pick three posts for first place and six for second place, but I do understand the temptation. Steven Groves, for instance, has much to teach us with MLS2.0 – What is the future of real estate listings? Is the market turning? There are good reasons to say no, but what if it is? Then Patrick Kapowich has news for you with Deja Vu ~ Many Qualified Buyers Sit Out the “Sweet Spot” of a Buyer’s Market, Then Enter The Market in Droves, When the Scales Tip. There are other truly outstanding posts in the short list of entries, and the truth is, I could go on about them all day.

But: There can only be one best. This week, that honor and The Odysseus Medal go to Michael Cook with Does the Real Estate Industry Need Realtors? I know many Realtors reading here disagree with Michael’s argument. That’s fine. The question is, what are you doing about it? It were well if you were able to defend your value proposition well enough to best Michael in a fair debate, but you don’t have to set the bar the high. Here is what you do need to do, though, and what you need to get better and better at doing: You have to create and be able to defend your value proposition with your own clients. What is it that you are bringing to your transactions that exceeds your cost in sales commission? If Michael’s post — and others like it — lead you to internal turmoil, that’s a good thing. Pain is nature’s gentle way of letting you know there is a flaw in your thinking. Ruminating on the challenges a thoughtful man like Michael Cook puts before you will make you better at what you do — and better able to defend your value to your clients.

And if that’s not unsettling enough to our sensibilities, The Black Pearl this week goes to Carl Drews with How real estate commissions work. Drews is not a professional, he’s Read more

August 19, 2007

The People’s Choice Award: Pick the best of this week’s real estate writing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here is the (not very) short list of this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal. You can vote for one of these posts for the People’s Choice Award.

These are this week’s entires:

Voting ends Monday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. We have file permissions issues with the new server, so you definitely can vote more than once, and I definitely will catch you. So don’t.

Technorati Tags: , ,

August 15, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Some rule changes, and a clickable button

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.

Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.

This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.

So: The rules are changed to this:

The Rules (few and fair):

  1. The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
  2. The entrant need not be the author of the post
  3. More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
  4. More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
  5. No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies

Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.

I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:

You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:

That image links back to the information page for the competition.

We’re Read more

August 13, 2007

The Odysseus Medal Awards, week #1: An exposition of excellence in real estate weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you will have seen from yesterday’s short-list of entries, we had a lot of very high-quality posts among our contestants. This seems to augur well for the future of the contest. If you didn’t make the cut, soldier on. For the most part, even the posts that didn’t make it to the People’s Choice competition were very, very good.

But: It’s plausible to me that you’re reading this post to hear about winners, so let’s talk about those:

The People’s Choice Award, the winner of the popular voting yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning, goes to Michael Cook, with Realtors, Wake Up and Start Helping Consumers.

The Black Pearl is awarded to the entry that presents the best practical, technical or marketing idea of the week. This week that award goes to Benn Rosales for Mortgage drama, real estate bubble, tech crash, dotcom disaster. Here’s the winning idea:

So now that we know it’s coming, what shall we all do about it?  I’m doing a few things like; creating a shortsale team to assist sellers, offering move-down programs to those who aren’t so much in a bad way-yet, talking about it with sellers that call, offering advise on when to get out, and when to stay, talking to lenders about refinance options for those who might not need to move if we can do something now before they begin missing payments (not charging for that by the way, just guiding),  calling past clients to see how they are, and that they’re okay.

And the first Odysseus Medal in this new competition, the overall best post of the week in my opinion, goes to Kevin Boer with The Innovator’s Dilemma In Real Estate: Beware Of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You. I’m a Grand Opera kind of writer, and Kevin is a just-the-facts kind of guy, but the journey he took us on in this post is simply extraordinary.

I’ll be making the three ‘badges’ shown here available to the winners as ornaments to be used with their winning posts or on their sidebars. (And if a real artist wants to volunteer to make better versions, Read more

August 12, 2007

Vote for The People’s Choice Award — Nominees on-line now

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, the live version of the People’s Choice Award voting interface is on-line. My short-list isn’t all that short, alas — 18 entries total, including seven from BloodhoundBlog. I’ll do a better job of eliminating posts in the future.

The selections are shown in random order in the voting interface, this because being at the top or the bottom of a list like this is a decided advantage.

These are the posts, in no special order, except the BloodhoundBlog entries are shown last:

Go here to view the entries and to vote. I’ll accumulate votes until 12 Noon PDT Monday. I’ll post the winners of The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl and The People’s Choice Award Monday afternoon.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

August 12, 2007

Feel like playing? The People’s Choice voting interface is live

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a dummy version of the People’s Choice voting interface for the Odysseus Medal competition up and running. I used five of my recent posts for examples, since I’m excluded from the competition. Play with it, if you’re of a mind to. See if it makes sense to you. See if you can get it to break. The live version will go up later today.

Technorati Tags: , ,

August 10, 2007

How do you win The Odysseus Medal? Write your heart out — and follow the rules . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve posted the rules for The Odysseus Medal competition, but there aren’t so many that I can’t also show them here:

The Rules (few and fair):

  • The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
  • The entrant must be the author of the post
  • More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
  • More than one entry from the same person is also fine, provided that you have multiple personality disorder
  • No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies

The Prizes:

Three awards will be given weekly:

  • The Odysseus Medal, for the overall best post of the week
  • The Black Pearl, for the best practical, technical or marketing idea of the week
  • The People’s Choice Award, selected by popular voting on Sunday evenings

The Deadline: Sunday at 12 Noon MST — which is 12 Noon PDT, 3 pm EDT, etc.

Entry form: It’s here.

No doubt this will change somewhat with time, but probably not by much. I really don’t like rules, making them or, especially, complying with them. Entries that I’ve already received will be grandfathered, of course. Fair is fair.

Anyway, get crackin’. Either Cameron or I will build a voting bot for the People’s Choice Award, and I’ll put together graphic trophies for the winners. I want for this to be an enduring tribute to quality weblogging. But the truth is, I’ve got the easy job. You’re the one whose going to have to do the hard work…

Technorati Tags: , ,

August 6, 2007

Vale, carne vale: Recasting The Odysseus Medal as a carnival of real estate weblogging excellence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m pretty fed up with the Carnival of Real Estate. It is what it is, and there have been times over the past year when it has blown tender kisses toward the sublime. But much too often it has chosen to rut around in the mud, and, in any case, it is much too much of everything to be anything at all.

This is not good.

There is a Carnival of Real Estate Investing and a Consumer-Focused Real Estate Carnival, both of which seem to do a decent job of staying on-topic. The Carnival of Real Estate should be devoted to excellence in real estate weblogging, broadly defined. Instead it has become a Carnival of Solipsism, a space where the inherent subjectivity of judging has given way to an overarching, overreaching subjectivism: The universe is whatever that week’s judge says it is. An entry that would have been judged the best by any rational standard can get buried beneath the judge’s whim, the testy assertion of a right to supplant enduring standards of excellence with a momentary fit of pique.

In rebuttal, one word: Bah!

For a first thing, I am done with the Carnival of Real Estate. I have supported it since its birthing. BloodhoundBlog has entered a post for every new edition, winning, despite everything, more than any other weblog. No more. I will no longer submit posts from BloodhoundBlog to the CoRE. If individual contributors wish to enter their posts, that’s their business, but I will no longer make an official entry from BloodhoundBlog, nor will I enter any of my own posts.

Second, I have recast The Odysseus Medal as a new carnival of real estate weblogging. This is the description of the new carnival from its home page:

A weekly carnival for real estate, mortgage, real property investing and housing weblogs — very broadly defined. The Odysseus Medal is awarded to the highest quality writing in real estate weblogging.

The Odysseus Medal competition will be hosted at BloodhoundBlog every week, and it will be judged by me alone. That is arrogance personified, but by doing things this way webloggers will be assured of Read more

February 26, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Inman’s real estate weblogging coverage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

(I was going to award The Cheez-Whiz Prize to Google’s applications suite, but I decided not to bother. I do think it’s silly to go from centralized processing to distributed processing and then back to centralized processing, but I can understand why people might do just about anything to get away from Microsoft.)

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Matt Carter of Inman News for his four-part series on real estate weblogging.

Part I appears today, with the other three parts appearing later this week. The articles will go behind Inman’s pay wall, so if you want to see them for free, hop to it.

Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide writes about the series, also, along with details about a Blogger’s Connect later this year at Inman Connect.

Carter’s series explores real estate weblogging at amazing depth, and I would say so even if he hadn’t given BloodhoundBlog a big write-up. The articles explore work being done by many of the better-known names in the RE.net, including BloodhoundBlog contributors Kris Berg and Dan Green.

For my own part, my hat is off to everyone who got to be a part of this series, and to the RE.net as a whole. And most especially to Matt Carter, who has given us a lovely portrait of where we are now…

Technorati Tags: , ,

February 17, 2007

Hugg a house or hug your Realtor? Discerning motivation in the pursuit of residential bliss . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have a searchBot running in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service to find our next home. We’re not actively searching, with a burning urge to move. But we know what we want, and, should it turn up, we may take the leap.

This is not terribly likely. We are professionals, after all. This means, first, that we have a very tightly refined set of criteria for the next home we will move into. And, second, it means that our next home will have to be a better-fit than our current home for our professional needs — a high hurdle to leap. Still, the bot manages to scare up a house or two a week, and we end up taking a closer look at maybe one out of twenty.

We are not unique as move-up buyers. We work with quite a few people who are pursuing this same strategy indirectly, through us. Sooner or later they will move-up to homes selling from $500,000 to $1,000,000 — when the right home comes on the market.

That’s traditional real estate in the age of the computerized MLS system.

Now let’s do the same thing without professional representation. We can go to Trulia.com and PropSmart.com and Zillow.com and ZipRealty.com and look at what may be four different inventories of homes or may be essentially the same homes — with the degree of overlap unknown. Still worse, some of those home will have been off the market for months, since, with some exceptions, there is no penalty for lax housekeeping in the databases. The contact information is what it is, and, obviously, there is no built-in provision for arranging showings.

The idea that the secret power of Realtors is control of the MLS is funny, but funnier still — for now at least — are these goofy alleged alternatives to the Realtor’s way of identifying candidate homes for buyers.

Enter the folks from Incredible Agent with a solution. What if, every time you ran across some dubious candidate home at some dubious Realty.bot, you were to race over to HomeHugg.com to leave that home a Hugg, which is analogous to a Read more

February 10, 2007

Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman: “What if the parasites had to eat the parasites?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been a Redfin week for us. Kris Berg recorded her podcast with Glenn Kelman last week and I spent much of my spare time this week dealing with it. Allen Butler dealt with the audio quality, and then Cathleen and I went through the recording, pulling out apposite quotes for my own post.

I think we did the BloodhoundBlog idea credit, though: Kris demonstrated that an informed insider can ask much more pertinent questions, digging much deeper, than can mainstream journalists.

I’d like to cite another Redfin post as the first-ever recipient of the Odysseus Medal. Marlow Harris of 360 Digest gave us “Thank you, Mr. Kelman” yesterday, and I think it is a particularly good example of the real estate weblogger’s art.

Marlow has been on top of Redfin from the very beginning. Some of my first links from BloodhoundBlog were to Marlow’s Redfin posts. But all that notwithstanding, yesterday’s post was excellent irrespective of content: Rich in detail, peppered with links, written in an engaging, can’t put it down style. This is a level of quality unsurpassed on the RE.net.

And the winner of this week’s Cheez-Whiz Prize is… Redfin.com. I have never bought Kelman’s charm offensive, and events since Kris Berg’s interview seem to bear me out. (As a side note, Cynthia Pang, Redfin’s PR maven, was nothing but sweet and painstakingly efficient throughout this process.)

First, to claim to have reformed is easy, it’s the actual reforming that’s hard. We are what we do, not what we say we do. A common dodge of recidivist miscreants is the insistence that their behavior is not bad, it is your own misunderstanding of the good intentions motivating that behavior that is at fault. If you listen to the podcast, you will hear Kelman resort to that defense again and again.

Can you hear Eric Burden singing? “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” The song is about a wife-beater. It’s worth your while to remember that style of rationalization for egregious behavior.

Abandoning whatever hope he might have had to extend an olive branch to the Read more

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