…is up at the Homethinking Company Blog…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Month: May 2007 (page 3 of 7)
Greg mentioned in an email an “overture” and I thought he meant that he wanted to share the link love. It wasn’t in Latin, so I grazed right over it- I completely missed that he was inviting me to be a Bloodhound Blogger! My first response was telling my husband that Greg was making fun of me and using words that I should know (umm, I do have a B.A. in English, but I haven’t practiced in a while, so my fluency is fading…).
Upon realizing the gravity of the situation, I had to return ad fontes (as DuBellay would put it) to the other Bloodhound Bloggers’ first posts. That messed me up even more- I feel obligated to be intellectual (Greg Swann), comical (my hero- Kris Berg) and be able to tell a great story (Teri Lussier). Instead, I will carefully select a dog I most relate to; that seems logical, right? First, I had to wonder if I would relate to my American Eskimo, but I don’t shed quite as much as he does, and I don’t feel the need to constantly walk behind my Person with my nose on their back leg at all times (I mean all the time, never ever never ever stopping, even if my nose is wet). Instead, after further consideration, I’ve decided I’m a French bulldog.
I appointed myself as a French bulldog because I am small, I think I’m funny, I am playful and I make a great companion. My drawbacks are my big ears (not literally) and that I dig a lot. I really do dig- I am constantly absorbing hundreds of blogs, websites, newspapers, business journals and Fox News simultaneously- it’s a problem… I’m working on it. But, I’m potty trained, I don’t usually drink from the toilet, and I learn new tricks every day- I might just be the fresh addition BHB needs!
I am (purposely) not a licensed Real Estate Agent, nor am I a Realtor, but the only thing I’ve ever known is Real Estate. I confidently address issues and news in our Read more
Some developers apparently didn’t get the memo
The end of a nearly decade long march to the stratosphere of real estate prices has brought out the media predictions of all that is dire and painful. Though I said it another way in today’s post on my own blog, here’s what I think of this particular market correction. Compared to the early-mid ’90’s S & L crisis meltdown, this market is like the sudden realization that you’ve left the house wearing two different colored socks. Apparently there are some developers in Boise (Eagle to be exact.) who haven’t got the word. Yesterday, In a post written by Phil Hoover, he talks about an article in the local paper about the plans for — you can’t make this stuff up — 20,000 new homes in Eagle, Idaho. That would literally double Eagle’s current population. Don’t those builders know these projects are doomed to failure? Have they not heard of the doom that is real estate as we know it? Don’t they read the papers?
Buyers with stealthy agendas
Even though it was last week, I fear too many readers missed Kris Berg’s post “You hate me, don’t you?”. It’s the perfect illustration of the old saying, “You can’t make this #%$& up!” There is a new level of chutzpah on display in her story, that makes you wonder what new form of dope is being hawked these days. Kris makes Mother Theresa look like a hack. 🙂
Thinking of one special word
Going into the weekend the guys at Duct Tape Marketing published a very interesting piece wondering what ONE word describes what you do well. I still haven’t come up with just one word. Is that even possible? It must be because they did it for their own company. It opened my eyes as to how people reduce what we do best to a single thought. That could be incredibly cool, or a disaster.
A meeting in Paradise
Seems there’s a meeting in Del Mar, California the first Monday of June. Brian Brady is running the show, and has invited some local celebrities. He’s calling it Read more
Jim Duncan issues a battle cry for divorced commissions:
As a profession, we need to rid ourselves of Cooperative Compensation and the practice of the listing broker paying the Buyer’s Agent.
Cooperation between Brokers need not go away. In fact, without cooperative compensation, the practice of real estate representation will be enhanced, as the perceived collusion between Realtors will be mitigated significantly. What needs to disappear is the inherent conflict of interest that comes from the Listing Broker paying the Buyer’s Agent.
Jim argues for legislative changes, but my thinking is that lenders could effect this change overnight, without new laws.
How?
By refusing to honor the terms of the Listing Agreement.
If mortage underwriters disallow any commission over 3% or 3.5% from the seller, with all of that going to the Listing Broker, while simultaneously allowing a commission of up to 3% or 3.5% from the buyer, with all of that going to the Buyer’s Broker — what will happen? The brokers will immediately rewrite their employment agreements. We are always changing language to get it past the underwriter — and the smart ones among us write the language their way from then on.
The simple fact is, except for all-cash sales, we’re going to do what the lender tells us to do. No loan, no transaction. If lenders decide to divorce the commissions, they’re going to be divorced.
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Technorati Tags: blogging, compensation for buyer representation, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
We’re adding two new contributors today:
Lani Anglin is the Texas-proud provocateuse at the spunky Realtor Wives weblog. By day, she works as a rainmaker for Single Pointe Realty. With two kids, three cats, a dog and her husband, she finds a way to stay busy.
Jeff Kempe knows a thing or two about Nordstrom service, having sold for them and to them for many years. Jeff has been selling real estate in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, for the last three years.
Norma Newgent hasn’t had the time to give to BloodhoundBlog lately, so I’ve moved her off of the main rotation for now.
We’re heavy on Realtors, and I think this is a great strength. But we are necessarily at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the real estate market. When the market turns hard, we’re going to need a tire iron to pry extra hours out of the day.
In any case, Lani and Jeff are both very interesting writers, and I know they’ll bring new insights to us. Lani’s in a tough spot, though. Lexically, she lands above Kris Berg on the list of contributors, but my bet is that no one can eclipse Kris in the weblogger’s art.
When will BloodhoundBlog stop growing? When we run out of things to howl about…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I received the following via email and also as a comment to a post on BloodhoundBlog. It is from Bruce Hahn. Bruce claims to represent 75,000,000 people – and I think that at least 74,999,000 of those people have never even heard of him. He and his wife (along with some other unnamed person) are the American Homeowners Grassroots Alliance.
Bruce has a background as a lobbyist and has written several books. These days he seems to spend most of his time letting various government divisions (with loads of emphasis on the federal government) know “what is good for consumers”. He has a big heart, he just wants to help. He is quite secretive on who pays him. But he has come right out and said it is NOT Bank of America – so my guess on that is obviously wrong. I really don’t expect him to be forthcoming now – whoever does pay him doesn’t want anyone to know who they are.
Here are some links I found telling you more about this endlessly polite and highly articulate and prolific man who seems to have dedicated his life to making sure consumers aren’t taken advantage of by Realtors (or anyone else).
http://www.inmanwiki.com/Real-Estate/Bruce_Hahn
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=view&id=4047
http://www.theamericanconsumer.org/Bruce.htm
http://realtytimes.com/rtapages/20070221_grassroots.htm
http://justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/rewcom/212268.htm
http://realtytimes.com/rtapages/20041001_agencyerosion.htm
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/print/12_21/13695-1.html
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/workshops/rewcom/212268a.htm
_____
Russell
Thanks for the link to our website!
If you would have read some of our recent congressional testimony on subprime lending (which is on our web site and is very critical of the banking sector), you would understand why we are not getting any funding from Bank of America or other banks. And if you had gone back in our history to see some of our past Congressional testimony against the banking sector for its legislative efforts to hamstring Freddie and Fannie, you would have no doubts at all. We are opposed to “Rotarian Socialism”, as Gregg Swann so aptly described it in his outstanding February 13 Bloodhound post. In it he wisely noted that NAR’s “on-going legislative campaign against banks competing for real estate transactions is just more of the same: “Protecting” mediocrities from fair competition.” Our aforementioned testimony opposing banking practices in the mortgage lending sector simply reflects our opposition to Read more
I wrote this when BloodhoundBlog was very young, and I don’t think anyone got the joke at the time. There have been plenty of amazingly stoopid Web 2.0 product launches since then, but that doesn’t mean this is not still humor-for-one.
I was writing today, and I realized that spell checking, for all its added efficiencies, isn’t terribly smarter than it was on the dedicated text-processing systems of the 1980s. It made the jump to desktop machines, of course, a trusty sidekick of word-processing, the first true “killer app” of micro-computing. But both were quickly eclipsed by spreadsheet software, and text management tools have been a red-headed step-child on desktop systems ever since. Everyone needs them, and everyone hates them when they don’t work properly, but no one lays awake at night wondering what new computing paradigms might be expressed in future versions of their favorite word processor.
And spell checking has had it even worse. It’s the sidekick to the step-child, after all. If it had a more tangible form, it might be stuffed into a junk drawer, handy to have around but usually just in the way. Spell checking has missed virtually all of the internet revolution, of course. Many web development tools incorporate spell checking, as do some on-line web sites. But there was no formal presence for spell checking in the Web 1.0 paradigm. No spelling look-up servers. No advertiser-supported spelling portals. No spelling IPOs. In fact, not one single wide-eyed investor pissed away his retirement savings on a Web 1.0 spelling start-up.
Worse yet, it seems almost certain that spell checking will be passed by in the forth-coming Web 2.0 revolution. This would be unfortunate, since spell checking is in fact the perfect Web 2.0 application — er, platform. Note these criteria from Tim O’Reilly’s seminal paper on the characteristics of a Web 2.0 platform:
- The Long Tail
- Data is the Next Intel Inside
- Users Add Value
- Network Effects by Default
- Some Rights Reserved
- The Perpetual Beta
- Cooperate, Don’t Control
- Software Above the Level of a Single Device
If we envision a product — er, application — er, platform called SpellCheck 2.0, we can incorporate all that Read more
We’re about half-way through the RE.net waist-loss challenge, so it seems like a good time to pull out the scales and the tape measures. This was the plan I laid out for myself in March:
My goal: A 34-inch waist by August 1st.
My plan: A half-hour a day on the stationary bike, while reading nothing work-related. Eat half as much, twice as often — or less. Add real bicycling as the weather warms up. Add free-weights and crunches as appropriate.
No crunches at all yet (O, the pain!), but everything else proceeds apace. I got sick a little while ago, and I haven’t yet reintegrated the weights before bedtime. I finally got onto my mountain bike a couple of weeks ago. I hate anything like cold weather, so I won’t ride if the outside temperature isn’t what most people would think of as blistering. Anyway, I found out right away that the recumbent bike is a vigorous way of sitting down. By now I can do 45 very hard minutes on the bike, but I haven’t yet found myself tempted by any of the nearby mountains. Eating less and better has been no problem at all. Food has always bored me, but the weights and the bike lead me to a certain fascination with protein.
Consequences? I’m down 30 pounds from the start of the year, but that doesn’t really matter. I care a lot less about weight than about converting fat to muscle. That much seems to be working well. I’ve burned two inches off my belt, but that vast beach ball above my belt is much deflated. Riding a mountain bike is an excellent workout for every muscle from toes to glutes (plus some upper body stuff), so the biggest muscle groups in my body are getting substantially stronger. Plus which, while free weights are beyond excellent for building fat-burning muscle, working out with weights is blindingly boring, where riding the bike is always interesting.
Even so, there is a degree to which all exercise sucks. There is nothing quite as pleasant as laying down on the sofa and sinking into another fascinating Read more
Arizona, of course.
Want proof? Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy really is the phoenix real estate guy. I’m getting him in sixth place in Google organic results for that keyword, with nowhere to go but up.
John L. Wake at Arizona Real Estate Notebook takes us through the five stages of grief for months-on-market home-sellers.
Wally Neal of Metro Phoenix Real Estate (watch out, Jay) gives Redfin a nice filleting.
Down in Tucson, Dave Smith at the Real Estate Blog Lab drops a dime on the Clean Archives plug-in, which I immediately installed. Now you can visit our new Archives page to discover just how hyper-loquacious we really are.
Finally, honorary Arizonan Brian Brady is threatening to put together another convocation of Phoenix-area real estate webloggers. Let him know by email if you want to come along.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
This is me from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). (Nota bene: What you are seeing here is actually my own original draft text of this column.)
New real-estate licensing law fails consumers
My real estate license is up for renewal — just at the wrong time. Under current law, I am obliged to renew my license every two years, but under a new state law that is to take effect on July 1, 2007, I will only need to renew every four years.
The change will be convenient for me, the next time I renew. To qualify for renewal, I have to take eight three-hour continuing education classes, so my education requirement will go from twelve hours to six hours a year.
And the change will make things much easier down at the Arizona Department of Real Estate, where everyone always seems to be harried and frazzled.
But how does the consumer benefit?
The licensing requirement for real estate agents is a bad joke. Would-be licensees are required to take 90 hours of classroom instruction. There are real estate schools that will permit you to fulfill this obligation in ten consecutive days. The course material consists of tips and tricks for taking the state test, and the state test has almost nothing to do with succeeding — or even surviving — as a real estate agent.
How do we know this? Because more than 90% of new licensees do not renew their licenses. They fail within the first two years in business. Successful navigation of the licensing process is useless as an indicator of success as a real estate agent.
The state’s licensing procedure actually serves to deceive consumers. The implication is that a licensed practitioner is competent. Far too often, this is untrue.
What would work better? The free market. If competition for reputation were the only standard for judging agents, new entrants would have to get themselves hired by already-established big-name agents. Through a process akin to apprenticeship, they would learn how to work well and wisely in real estate — or they would get fired with dispatch.
And instead of depending on a useless talisman from the state, Read more
In all my spare time, I’ve been working over the past few days on a real estate porn movie. The film features pictures from hundreds of homes, with loads of juicy details. We took the photos over the course of years, so it’s entirely possible that some of those homes are listed for sale right now. In making the movie available to the public, will we be “advertising” those listings without the listing broker’s permission? I don’t think we will be, but I also don’t give a damn. We have a right to our work product, and we have a right to do as we choose with our work product, and I will joyfully fight for my rights down to my last dime.
Let’s be obvious, at least for a moment. An appraisal is something you contract to have done and pay a substantial fee to obtain. Any state attorney general, even Arizona State Attorney General Terry Goddard, should be able to comprehend such a simple fact. In the same way, advertising is something you pay for. Quibblers will insist that paying web site hosting fees is alike unto paying publication line rates or broadcast fees. To this “argument,” the only reasonable retort is a Bronx cheer. When a word means almost anything, it means almost nothing.
The obvious fact is that MLS rules against advertising other broker’s listings without permission are devised to prevent Broker Paul from placing paid ads representing Broker Peter’s listings as his own. In fact, the motivating premise behind the rule is that Broker Paul, even while giving a false impression about his prowess as a lister, would nevertheless be promoting the homes in a positive light.
So why would Broker Peter object to free advertising of his listings? In other words, why does this MLS rule exist in the first place?
Too obvious, isn’t it? It’s because of the double dip. If Broker Paul advertises Broker Peter’s listings as his own, then Broker Peter might lose out on some opportunities to collect commissions from both sides of his transactions.
Real estate brokers implemented Buyer Agency not because they wanted to Read more
I don’t like Redfin.com. Its “business” model consists of quietly diverting its agency responsibilities to listing agents while loudly rebating its largely unearned commissions to buyers. My experience of the president of the company, Glenn Kelman, is that he is an oily liar who will say anything to draw the fawning attentions of a gullible mainstream media. I don’t care about discount real estate brokerages in general — let the market sort them out — but Redfin’s modus vivendi is to exploit defects in the real estate industry — that it cannot get along without — while decrying those same defects in its tendentious and mendacious PR.
However: I believe in liberty before everything. Although Redfin will never enter most real estate markets — this being forbidden by a cost-structure that loses money on even the priciest of homes — it nevertheless has a valid complaint when it draws attention to anti-rebating and minimum-service real estate laws. The National Association of Realtors is an anti-capitalist cartel, as are state and local Realtors’ associations and local MLS systems. They are liars just like Kelman, loudly proclaiming their protection of the consumer’s interests while quietly enacting every Rotarian Socialist scheme they can think up.
The Northwest Multiple Listing Service has fined Redfin $50,000 and asked them to stop publishing a popular blog in which contractors for the online real estate brokerage posted reviews of Seattle area homes.
Redfin is appealing the fine, though it took steps this week to shut down the reviews on its “Sweet Digs” blog. With about 3,000 e-mail and online subscribers, the blog was written by 15 freelance reviewers who over the past five months posted reviews on about 1,000 homes in Seattle and San Francisco. The company says it plans to maintain the blog as a source of information on pricing trends and recently sold homes.
Redfin Chief Executive Glenn Kelman said he had no choice but to comply, noting that the NWMLS had threatened to Read more
Russell posted a note about a forthcoming Tom Ferry seminar. It would seem to be the seminar season, so I signed up for that one and two others, purely for the thrill of the chase: Identify the scam, marvel at the upsells, listen for the fall-back sale, all that cheesy crap.
Today was the Craig Proctor seminar. I’ve been getting spam from this guy for years, so I was interested to see what the pitch was. Craig’s ideas are every bit as new as the Claude Hopkins classic, Scientific Advertising, as you can see from the advertorials he puts in Realtor magazine.
There is probably more to the Quantum Leap System than I’m giving it credit for, but the essence of the thing is the long-standing teaser-ad strategy, as exemplified by the headline of this post. That much is covered in a very thorough and much more economical “system” in the form of the two Gooder Group Real Estate Rainmaker books. Ergo, here is my two step system for saving a ton of money by not buying into the Craig Proctor hype:
Step 1. Real Estate Rainmaker: Successful Strategies for Real Estate Marketing.
Step 2. Real Estate Rainmaker: Guide to Online Marketing
But remember, the short statement of the Craig Proctor philosophy is “Frustrate them with a problem then offer a solution.” You might just resolve instead to work with people you actually respect.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Just you wait until Brad Inman sees THIS! You know how he likes Realtors to charge less – well I’m prepared to cut my fee until Bradley says,”YES”.
Eat their exhaust for only $300. Fifty photos at $300 a pop is $15,000 — America on $500 a day — not counting the vendor sponsorships. Good thing it’s all for charity. Otherwise, it might start to smell…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing