BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: November 2006 (page 8 of 8)

November 4, 2006

Thank you, thank you, and thank you!

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Thank you, thank you, and thank you! What a welcome. Just goes to show what a difference having an audience makes when it comes to doing a show. I had tried blogging before, but the only people reading it were friends of mine (who weren’t Realtors). Strange, I know – as the past few years you could almost ask anyone you met if they were a Realtor yet. If the United States has finally achieved the level of 300 million people and 1.2 million of them are Realtors (members of NAR) it would look like there is one licensed agent member of NAR for every 250 people in the U.S. This includes children.

If we excluded children and only figure the probable number of people who maybe could buy or sell a house is around 175 people for every Realtor. If the average turnover rate of the average neighborhood is about 8% and all sales were done through Realtors (they aren’t) this would be about 14 possible sales a year per Realtor. Coldwell Banker for example has national averages of about 10.5 homes per year per agent (same numbers for John Hall & Associates). Take the average sales price and what might be an average commission, less the splits to the broker and you this isn’t a lot of money per agent – as they all have business costs (car, gas, board dues, and advertising) to come out of that.

The average net income of an agent really isn’t very much money. For the most part, selling houses isn’t what would be called “creative selling” – which is to say that almost all of the sales would occur or not regardless of who is in the real estate business in any particular area – it isn’t the agent who is causing the sale to occur. That buyer or seller already had a need and decided to hire someone. So almost every time an agent makes a sale (listing or selling side) they “took” that sale away from some other agent. This is true even if the client never spoke to any other Read more

November 3, 2006

EmuBlog: An image in search of a reality . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Doug Quance sent me a very nice makeover of the photo of Odysseus seen above. He went after it at some length with PhotoShop’s sharpening tools. He did a very nice job, effecting an undeniable improvement. I elected not to use it — Odysseus, for all his many virtues, really isn’t all that sharp — but perhaps I can pay the effort forward.

Larry Cragun at RealEstateUndressed posted a gorgeous Emu photo, and I have adapated it here for use in someone’s weblog:


Technorati Tags: ,

November 3, 2006

The Zillow.com shake-down: At last a discouraging word about NCRC . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All right, it might be a little naive, but it’s something. From the Square Feet Blog at the San Jose Mercury News:

So why has the NCRC decided to announce that Zillow is putting the American Dream in peril? What do you think? Genuine concern for consumers, or or just pining for some publicity? Perhaps a little of both, but my instincts go with the latter explanation.

Publicity is the means. Lucre is the end, I remain convinced.

But: Here’s another chance for someone with access to a Lexis/Nexis database to investigate NCRC.

Here is the pattern I see in NCRC news stories:

1. “Scandalous” situation announced, some sort of formal action initiated.

2. Parties meet.

3. Settlement announced with NCRC getting funds from formerly “scandalous” party, now cleansed/absolved by affiliation with NCRC.

It would be a wonderful thing for Zillow.com and the entire dot.com world if a reporter would look beyond the words “non-profit” to find out how NCRC is funded…

Our story so far:

Technorati Tags: , ,

November 3, 2006

How do you sneak up on a Freeway . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting upon today’s Arizona Republic column, here is a story I’ve been sitting on all week:

Work is under way to build a bridge on Cotton Lane and expand the road from Maricopa County 85 to Estrella Parkway.

The project will produce a half-mile, six-lane bridge over the Gila River complete with bike lanes and sidewalks.

The Maricopa County Department of Transportation has partnered with Goodyear and developers to coordinate and pay for the $59 million project.

With Estrella Mountain Ranch and the planned King Ranch communities expanding or sprouting, the project becomes necessary to serve the area’s new residents, said Bill Hahn, a project manager with the county transportation department.

A six-lane bridge…

Lose the sidewalks and bike path and it could be converted to an eight-lane bridge…

This is not the emptiest land in Arizona, but it is close — for now. The trouble is, Estrella Mountain Ranch is maybe five percent built, with plans for 30,000 more homes. There are other huge projects planned for the immediate area, and The Sprawl Machine is going to start growing northward from Casa Grande and Gila Bend, as well.

I think this enormous bridge is de facto stake-driving for the unplanned, unannounced, unwhispered-about extension of the SR-303 Freeway south to the Interstate 8 Freeway.

I don’t even think it’s a horrible idea, stipulating that they’re going to build the Freeway anyway. Better to build the bridge right, even by sleight-of-hand, than to have to replace it later.

But: It’s sleazy to build a Freeway bridge without telling the tax-payers that they just signed up to build the whole Freeway.

And: The tax-payers shouldn’t build the damn Freeway in the first place…

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

November 3, 2006

Government needs to stay out to stop sprawl . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Presumably, there’s nothing here to annoy Realtors or brokers, so I can have a Friday free of vitriolic anonymous phone calls. We’re back to money again next week, though, so my relief will be short-lived.

 
Government needs to stay out to stop sprawl

It seems reasonable to suppose that someday, the Sun Valley Parkway will be called the Loop 404 freeway.

By then, Loop 303 might stretch south all the way to Interstate 8 and east all the way to Fountain Hills, and from there all the way south to Apache Junction and Coolidge.

Already, people are talking about turning Northern Avenue into a freeway connecting Loop 101 and Loop 303.

All of this is simply the inexorable logic of the “Sprawl Machine” in action.

How does the Sprawl Machine work?

First, developers put up houses on remote farmland, where the land is cheap. There are no roads, schools, libraries, fire stations, etc., but the developers know that the new residents will clamor for those things as soon as they move in.

Politicians, scared to death of negative opinion, build all these missing amenities, adding value to all the remaining unbuilt homes and undeveloped land.

The politicians finally get wise and impose “impact fees,” taxes assessed in advance to pay for the amenities that will be built as the new homes rise.

The developers argue that this makes the homes less affordable, which is true. The politicians argue that the new residents are bearing the costs of the new burdens they occasion, which is also at least somewhat true.

But here are two more true statements that you will seldom hear uttered aloud:

In our current mixed economy, if the politicians said, “Sorry, folks, you moved where you shouldn’t have,” eventually developers would stop trying to build in places where municipalities don’t provide services.

In a truly free market, developers would build all the amenities we’re talking about (and then some) at a particular project, or they wouldn’t build the project at all.

The current mess is occasioned by government intrusion into real estate.

On the one hand, developers build where they shouldn’t. On the other, Read more

November 3, 2006

What word needs to get out?

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Thank you, Greg! That was such a flattering (and nice) introduction – now I have to eventually write something useful or at least interesting or I’ve let you down. I really appreciate you making room for me like this here on your blog – that is very generous of you and it is my intention to have you glad you did this.

I originally wound up looking at your blog due to an article I read on Inman News about Zillow. What you had to say regarding Zillow was more insightful and relevant than just about anything I had ever seen on the subject. So I am a fan of yours.

It is my hope that I can provide that same level of insight to your readers on the subjects I write about here. I have been interested in writing a blog ever since reading the wonderful book, “Blog”, by Hugh Hewitt. I was particularly impressed when I read that blogs made it impossible for the Main Stream Media (MSM) to continue to control what was to be considered “news”. Owning a printing press and buying ink by the barrel was no longer a requirement for getting the word out.

What word needs to get out?

Several: For example there are many functions that the National Association of Realtors (and the various state and local associations) do a wonderful job of handling. There are other areas where the “handling” is awful or simply non-existent. Any real estate media I’ve ever seen (Inman News, RIS Media, Realty Times, etc) all have deals with or sell advertising to the very people they maybe should be “reporting on” – or like Inman, have such a specific agenda (I can’t really call it hidden) that for the most part they are either bought and paid for or are nothing less than enemies of working Realtors.

All of the various companies, individuals, programs, lead generation services, lead generation websites, coaching services, seminars for Realtors, etc. that all seem to be saying to every agent in existence, “sign up for “brand X” and achieve unlimited success. Are they all really telling the Read more

November 2, 2006

Introducing Russell Shaw . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We built BloodhoundBlog to be a brokerage weblog. Obviously, we’re in love with Rain City Guide, and, even though we have thought at times about asking people to join us, we had never planned for this to be a group blog. Our plans haven’t changed, but we’re making space for Russell Shaw to join us.

If you live in the Phoenix-area, you know who Russell is. His “no hassle listing” is a staple of Valley television and radio stations. Russell’s team sells over 400 homes a year, and he consistently ranks in the top 30 of NAR members nationwide. Think about that: 1.2 million of us and he is among the first 30 in the line.

Russell’s Associate Broker’s license is with John Hall and Associates, an 800-agent local brokerage. The work he does here will redound to Bloodhound’s credit, of course, but I don’t think there is any threat that we’ll be stealing business from him.

What we can do is help him get his feet wet as a real estate weblogger and make a name for himself in national blogging circles, in anticipation of his going out on his own. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, Russell is a living, breathing exponent of the kind of business-oriented ideas I advocate. And second, he will be the first mega-producer real estate weblogger.

Now keeping in mind that this is a man who could write a blank check for Xanadu, what might you suppose is his motivation for weblogging? He has a good-humored disdain for much of real estate training, and he wants to share what he has learned in his almost 30 years as a mega-producing Realtor. We should be thanking him already!

Anyway, he will begin posting shortly. He’s learning how to do this, and it’s not an easy praxis to master, so help him out as you can. Someday very soon, we’ll all be saying, “I knew him when…”

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

November 2, 2006

Defending Zillow.com . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Picture yourself living in Boston, Massachusetts, where the climate is six months of drizzle and mud followed by six months of deep snow and permafrost. Let’s say it comes to your mind to bid a final farewell to all things wintery and shuffle off to the endless, boundless, soul-enriching sunny skies of Phoenix, Arizona.

This is a rare adventure that only happens about 200,000 times a year, so you’ll want to do some preparation. So you put on your long underwear and your clothes, your overclothes and your overcoat, your socks, oversocks, shoes, overshoes and snow-boots, your gloves, your overgloves, your hat and your overhat, and you grab your umbrella and layer on a scarf or two for good measure and then you trundle out into the permafrost to face the day.

You waddle your way over to Out Of Town Books in Harvard Square and buy a copy of Phoenix Magazine. The photos are astounding — mountains, deserts, golf, tennis, spectacular sunny skies and stunning women in skimpy sun-dresses. If you’re looking for everything Boston isn’t, you’ll find it in the pages of Phoenix Magazine.

But: Is this adequate preparation for a transcontinental relocation? I really like Phoenix Magazine, and I have a client who is an Associate Editor there, so I have even more reason to like it. But there is a big difference between thumbing through one issue of Phoenix Magazine and making detailed plans to move from Boston to Phoenix.

Who could doubt this?

I’m being very serious. Even if someone could be so impulsive as to move from Boston to Phoenix on a whim, goaded by a photograph in a magazine, would even that will-o’-the-wisp conflate impulse with planning?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

This is how we can know with a certainty colder than the wrought iron railings of Beacon Hill in Olde Boston Towne that the complaint brought against Zillow.com by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is completely specious.

Do you see why? There is no possible way that any thoughtful person could confuse a number regurgitated by a piece of software with a responsible evaluation of a home. NCRC Read more

November 1, 2006

The Zillow.com shake-down: The piling on begins — and Spencer Tracy is nowhere to be found . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow news since the New York Times story broke:

These are all mainstream news sources, not weblogs, and I omitted the (many, many) duplicates. The Times article was picked up by Reuters and echoed far and wide. The AP article, shown here from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will have run in hundreds of newspapers and will have been broadcast in abbreviated form on hundreds more television and radio stations.

Devotees of old black-and-white movies may be thinking that Zillow.com will prevail in court. I invite you to reread those headlines. None of this will ever get to a courtroom, and Zillow.com has already lost in the court of public opinion — the only court this “issue” was ever intended to reach.

Apparently, the company’s plan now is to have the meeting with NCRC “in two weeks.” Presumably, Zillow.com thinks it is going to prepare itself in that time for a honest, civilized debate. What will happen instead is that the NCRC will leak a few very damaging sound-bites every day, vilifying Zillow.com for a pervasive white-glove racism in its algorithms. It’s the death by a thousand cuts. By the time the meeting occurs — which I would expect to be quite a bit sooner than “in two weeks” — Zillow.com will be willing to pay anything to stop the loss of blood.

Entrepreneurs can afford to fight this kind of battle — even to the edge of doom. Any business with third-party investors will eventually cave to the will of those investors. Zillow.com might still win this if it comes out hard on the attack, demonstrating by a preponderance of widely-publicized evidence that NCRC is nothing but a shake-down outfit. I would love to see that happen, but I don’t expect it.

Instead, Zillow.com will dither, as it is doing now, thinking 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